Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman

"God is dead. Meet the kids.

Fat Charlie Nancy's normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn't know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother.

Now brother Spider's on his doorstep -- about to make Fat Charlie's life more interesting... and a lot more dangerous."

Through the book we follow Fat Charlie as he becomes immersed into the world of the Gods, something he is inextricably linked to as the son of the trickster god Anansi- from discovering primitive magic to his secret brother. His life is quickly thrown into chaos. His fiancee leaves him, his brother swoops her up and Fat Charlie is set up to take the fall for a very terrible person. All the while, he has to deal with the fallout from his dad's embarrassing death.

I adore the humour in the book. This is easily the funniest Neil Gaiman book I read. I found my self laughing out loud and maniacally giggling with Gaiman's humorous observations on humanity. Everything was so real while still having this wonderful fantasy element. 

It was also great to read a fantasy using myths from Africa. It was a great idea and an unusual touch. I loved being introduced to the gods and found some of the writing really moving and thought provoking. Some lines I  had to just sit and reread. This book could definitely be read on two levels. One where is is just a really funny fantasy story full of giggle and mishaps. But there is another deeper level. One which explores the nature of humanity, how our trickiness makes us human and reduces our brutality. How fun gives meaning to life and gives another dimension to the act of merely surviving. 

While this book takes place in the same world as American Gods - there is hardly any overlap. This can easily be read as a standalone. My only gripe with this book it the pacing. The plot progressed at a glacial pace but once it started ramping up, I was hooked - there were so many side plots that were masterfully interwoven.

Overall another excellent book from Gaiman, employing his signature mix of exploration of humanity, mythology, humour and magic realism. Age Rating 13+ A murder takes place and there are some allusions to sex. 

The Help - Kathryn Stockett

"Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed."

I have very mixed feelings about this book. On one hand I think that the subject matter was handed with delicacy. The writing was subtle and at times very beautiful. I think Aibileen's chapters where beautiful and full of soul. A perfect cocktail of love and melancholy. She reminded me of maids I knew. You get a good idea of the atmosphere of the time and place, I really felt transported to Mississippi. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the character of Minny, she was sassy and more vocal in her anger. I think she and Aibileen contrasted each other well with their different attitudes. 

However, I was uncomfortable with the tone of the book; I felt that the author played to very stereotypical themes, and gave the characters (especially the African American ones) very obvious voices and structure in terms constructing their mental character. I understand that the author wrote much of this as a result of her experiences growing up in the south in the 1960's, and that it may seem authentic to her, and that she was even trying to be respectful of the people and the time; but, ultimately, I thought that it was written from a very narrow, idealised, almost childish perspective of race relations without a true appreciation of the humanity and soul of the characters. It had a nostalgic, feel good vibe that didn't sit well with me. 

As a white South African that grew up with maids my experience with the "help" was obviously very different to that of an American. However I am unsure that this book represented either side totally accurately. Stockett brushed over the true deep anger that I am sure that the Maids dealt with and shrunk it to the feeling of annoyance of picking up towels.

The structure of the book also focused more on the white characters and their struggles in their life and dealing with the first realisation that they might be in a racist world. So the ultimate theme & message (i.e. "why, we're all the same - there's no difference between us after all!") only reinforced my feeling that this is written from someone who has a very undeveloped or underdeveloped concept of race and race relations in the United States.

I applaud her effort and think it would be a great introduction to race relations in the South for someone new to the topic and might be a little hesitant to start. But it is very surface level without any real deep dive into the horrors inflicted during this period of time or the psyche of the people living on the other side of the train line. 

Age Rating 13+. Touches on some serious subjects such as domestic abuse but nothing very inappropriate. 

The Historian - Elisabeth Kostova

"To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night,

exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to all inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself--to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive."

Kostova writes The Historian in epistolary form, primarily through letters from a father historian to a daughter (presumably) historian. The greater part of the book, however, focused not on this father-daughter team’s desperate search  for Dracula, but on the obscure history of Vlad Tepes, the historical figure who inspired the legend of Dracula, and on the geography of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey during the Cold War. If the Travel Channel™ was ever looking for someone to host Istanbul on a Budget 1980 or Passport to Monasteries Behind the Iron Curtain, Kostova would be their woman. Whether the history and geography is true or not, the sheer volume of trivia padding this book and the work it had to have taken to put it all together is confounding. 

To add to the dullness, the way that this books plot unfurls in mainly in the form of letter. Unbelievably detailed letters! Now I have read a number of great books that use the format of letter writing to convey the plot. But this? Ridiculous. Not only are these letters insanely long, but they are insanely detailed as well, creating yet another reason why the book and the characters are completely unbelievable. Nobody writes a letter like this, no one. If that's how the author wanted to write this, why did she do the letter thing at all? 

Even with the impressive research, this story lacks any punch. Dracula would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those pesky historians! Dracula and his henchman, the “evil librarian,”, I kid you not,  don’t plague society or cause panic or murder people in large quantities to drink their blood. Rather, they make appearances in goofy disguises in libraries and cafes to give books and other clues to especially promising young historians, inspiring the recipients to begin insatiable quests to find out more about this Dracula fellow. Then, Dracula inevitably shows up again to slap people around a little, so that the historians will be too afraid to continue their research. Once, after giving a historian a book to start him on his vampire studies, Dracula disguises himself as “a stranger” and buys that historian a drink called, “whimsically, amnesia.” Bet you can’t guess what that does - all that research down the tubes! Stop the mind games, Dracula! Not to be deterred by Dracula’s or the Evil Librarian’s threats, the historians continue to stalk their prey until the reader would pity Dracula (if he weren’t annoying), because he is ultimately only trying to build a book collection and a gang of faithful research assistants.

Psychological conflict adds complexity to most vampire stories, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Mina, formerly a protagonist, becomes bloodthirsty. Thirst is the most basic human experience, and all vampires started as humans. Theoretically, thirst (or, more broadly, desire) could create evil in anyone; and, therefore, of all monsters we most easily identify with are vampires. In The Historian, however, I am left with the impression that if those historians left poor Dracula alone, he would have just kept happily collecting books. It was ultimately the obsessive research and study, not Dracula himself, that took the historians away from their loved ones and almost destroyed them.

Finally, the ending. If you value your sanity, do not, I repeat DO NOT finish this book. Because if you are sane, you will get to the ending and go, 'What? What?? Are you f-n kidding me?? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!' No joke. The ending, especially after 600 pages, has got to be the biggest let down of any major novel in recent years. I won't spoil it here (however badly I want to vent about it), but I swear to you: it will cause you physical agony when you read it.

The only upside to this book are the stunning locations. Through the book your trip around Italy, France, Istanbul, England and Eastern Europe. All richly described and so wonderfully atmospheric. If you like the Dark Academia Aesthetic then you will enjoy that aspect of the book, which was to be honest, the only thing that kept me reading. 

Age Rating 13+. Nothing grizzly or dramatic. The reason for the age rating is the dullness of the writing which I wouldn't punish a child with. 

Vicious - V. E Schwab

"A masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers. Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?"

I am unsure of what I think about this book. On one hand I found the characters very compelling. Both Victor and Eli are complete Psychopaths that are inextricably drawn to each other. They act like cat and mouse, constantly circling each other, watching for weakness. I adored the complex friendship between the two men that hovered somewhere between admiration and bitter jealousy and how this developed as they grew and became more obsessed with power and their own warped view of right and wrong. The deeply understand each other but still despise each other. 

The dynamic is very clever and both characters where incredibly interesting. Schwab's use of language to navigate this was also very good. There are some very quotable lines. The writing was minimal, clean and beautiful. 

However I found the plot to be lacking. It was relatively simplistic and I was never felt shocked or surprised in the way the book was progressing. The ending was also a tad disappointing. All in all I think it would have been an amazing book if the plot had been more unique and slightly more hard hitting. 

Age Rating 14+. Torture, brutal violence and swearing. 

Crooked - Austin Grossman

"Award-winning novelist Austin Grossman re imagines the Cold War as an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American antihero: Richard Nixon.

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?

Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?

In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could re imagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerising character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller."

The concept here is that when Nixon was an underhanded congressman trying to prove that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy he inadvertently stumbled across a hidden occult world of Lovecratfian style horrors. This discovery and his ambition paves the way for him to become a reluctant KGB spy which in turn helps him become vice-president. I won't go too much further about the plot as I don't want to give too much away but it is quite a ride. 

This book surprised me because I was thinking that it would be done in a tongue-in-cheek way that played off the idea of Richard Nixon being a hero after all, but in fact it’s the exact opposite. The portrayal of him here is still that of an insecure and bitter guy who seemed to lack the charisma and charm of a used car salesmen, but whose relentless drive and willingness to fight dirty enabled him to rise to power. This is more of a character study that just puts a supernatural coat of paint on the man rather than try to shine him up into something he wasn’t. It was very interesting and masterfully done. Truly great characterisation. 

But that leaves me not sure what exactly the point of all this was. The idea that all these weird occult happenings have links embedded in the foundation of American government was very very interesting, and it seems like there was the potential for a good story there. However, we see this through Nixon’s eyes, and he doesn’t really know the full scope of what’s going on until late in the game. Since this is an outsider telling us the story it seems like we’re only getting a glimpse of a secret history although some of the historical incidents have an interesting twist on them like the moon landing.

I wanted more however. More magic, more appalling spells and shadows, more politics and law of the other side. I wanted more backstory of the power of the President of the United States and the entanglement of the hidden and very real power of the Presidents. If this hidden word had been built on more, further investigated and fleshed out I think it would have been very good indeed. 

Unfortunately, I found myself a little let down. 

Age Rating 14+. Some creep scenes, allusions to torture and sex. 

The Seed Collectors - Scarlett Thomas

"Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander’s role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can’t stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love.

A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire, and family trees."

A deeply unusual and unexpected book. This offbeat novel about obsession, sex and inheritance is set in Kent in 2011 and stars an extended family of botanists. The concept of a family tree has a more than usually literal meaning here given the shared surname is Gardener and most members are named after plants. We have Great-Aunt Oleander, recently deceased; cousin Bryony and her children Holly and Ash; siblings Charlie and Clem (short for Clematis); and half-sister Fleur, who has taken over Oleander’s yoga centre, Namaste House. The generation in between was virtually lost, perhaps to a plant-based drug overdose, on a seed collecting expedition to the South Pacific. Oleander has left each motherless child one of these possibly deadly seed pods.

First, did I mention the book is saturated with sex? Incest, adultery, illegitimate children, S&M, Internet porn, you name it. But beyond that, the metaphorical language is highly sexualized – bursting with seeds, fertility and genital-like plants. I can’t think when I’ve encountered such oversexed vocabulary. It was unexpected and raw and quite shocking. 

I found the plot very loose. I would say it is my main disappointment. Nothing was really achieved or resolved. There was no momentum or push.  Not all the story lines are truly essential, so the book seems aimless for its final third as it doesn't really know what to do with itself. It definitely could have been shorter and tied together better, perhaps with some flashbacks to the previous generation’s experiences on the island to make the past feel more alive. The spiritual element also remains incredibly vague and a tad shoehorned in, I am still unsure if they where high, crazy or experiencing reality. Although it was a pleasant touch of magic realism along the way in the midst of the raw and brutal character studies. 

Finally on to the characters. They really are the driving point of this book, it really does feel like a long character study. Unfortunately all of these characters are complete unlikable for a variety of different reasons. They are obsessive, cold, angry, stupid, apathetic but all the time so uncomfortably real. I have read some reviews of people commenting that the characters are unrealistic and unlike anybody they know, well then I really envy you. Sure the characters could be said to be boiled down to their key traits but as someone from a large and highly dysfunctional family, the characters and their mannerisms where all too recognisable. 

Despite these reservations, I truly enjoyed Thomas’s unusual writing. She moves freely between characters’ perspectives but also inserts odd second-person asides asking philosophical questions about wasted time and what is truly important in life. I like the range of questions you’re left with as a reader: Is nature malicious? Can we overcome our addictions? How much of who we are is down to our parentage? Does life really just come down to sex? 

Age Rating 15+. Large amounts of sex, drugs, mental illness, alcohol addiction, realistic family dysfunction, abuse and suicide.