cyphomandra

I am attempting to get these out of the way so I can devote more attention to some of the September reads that I want to spend more time on (having said that, this is not exactly short! arrgh).

The Animals at Lockwood Manor, Jane Healey. During WWII the natural history museum’s collection of mammals is evacuated to the titular manor, under the care of Hetty Cartwright, uptight and disregarded by her superiors and by the unpredictable and destructive Lord Lockwood. But she makes a connection with Lockwood’s fragile and haunted daughter, Lucy, that may be what they both need to escape… There’s a nice gothic atmosphere at the start, with the obligatory crumbling mansion, and I like the developing romance between Hetty & Lucy, but the pace is slow and both characters are oddly passive; the tension ebbs rather than builds. I was left feeling disappointed.

Passage Across the Mersey, Robert Bhatia. From age 10 or so I & my sister spent at least two afternoons a week at our city’s central library, waiting for our parents to finish work, and reading everything that looked even vaguely appealing. At some point I remember being in the YA section and choosing to pick up a volume from the biography section by Helen Forrester - I feel I might have started with the second (Minerva’s Stepchild, now called Liverpool Miss), but I tracked down the first one, Twopence to Cross the Mersey and read them both (and the sequels) in absorbed gulps. They’re very precise recreations not just of a specific time and place - working-class Liverpool, reeling from the Great Depression and heading into WWII - but of the equally specific anger and betrayal that Helen felt when her middle class parents threw themselves (and their seven children) headlong into bankruptcy and broke all ties with their previous comfortable middle class lives. As the eldest (and a girl), Helen, age 12, was forced to care for the others, and treated with a casual neglect that pulls all your sympathy as a reader, watching as her parents pawn her only good coat or refuse to let her attend school, and they’re a totally compelling read (obviously no one will be surprised to hear that I'm now two books into a re-read).

This is written by her son, and tells more of Helen’s (June’s) story, with some perspective from external sources; it’s also, as much as anything, the love story of June and Avadh Bhatia, the physicist Helen married after her first two fiancees died in WWII. This was the strand I found most interesting - Helen seeks to travelsto India to meet Avadh’s family for their approval, complicated just a fraction by the fact that he already has a wife and child - but it does involve a lot of quoting from letters. It did make me want to track down The Moneylenders of Shapur, her novel set in India.

The Feast, Margaret Kennedy. I read Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph entirely because I’d seen it mentioned in Antonia Forest’s Marlow series but did so on a ferry, and my memory of excellent prose is tinged with seasickness. This has a fantastic concept and is deftly executed, and now I want to read more of her stuff.
( More details about the concepts. )

Against All Odds, Craig Challen, Richard Harris. The subtitle to this is “The inside account of the Thai cave rescue and the courageous Australians at the heart of it”, which is a fairly comprehensive description. I picked this up after seeing the trailer & publicity for Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s take on this, and realising after checking the cast that it leaves out Challen entirely. Challen, a vet, and Harris, an anaesthetist, talk about their personal histories and how they got into cave diving, the lure of it as well as the dangers, and how they ended up in Thailand, faced with a nightmarish decision with the whole world watching. Harris is the one who must make the call to anaesthetise the boys to get them out, and work out how to do it, based on one human report of a British anaesthetist who put himself under anaesthesia in a wave pool in order to test an inflatable lifejacket and an anecdote about a seal on ketamine.

I find caving unnerving at the best of times ( for which I can blame reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen at the age of 9) . The narrowest space they had to get through was about 26 by 70 cm; curious, I set up some chairs and cushions to approximate this. Sure, I can get through, largely by pushing with my toes, but imagining doing this under water, in the dark, under hundreds of tonnes of rock, with an unconscious boy in tow, is terrifying.

The Ivy Years series, Sarina Bowen
(The Year We Fell Down
The Year We Hid Away
Blonde Date
The Shameless Hour
The Fifteenth Minute)

This is the Ivy Years series, set at a fictional US college and heavy on the hockey. I read them in this order because I started with the m/m one; the rest are all het. I did like the world - it actually feels like a college far more than some of these I’ve read - and the characters are reasonably engrossing, although as the series progresses my belief in the convenience of events does fray.

Fell Down has a paralysed (via hockey accident) heroine and a temporarily injured (hockey playing) hero, who meet in the campus’ limited accessible accommodation. Hid Away has the daughter of a man recently arrested for serial sexual abuse of the young hockey players he trained, who is hiding under an alias at the college while she tries to avoid her parents’ attempts to drag her into the court proceedings, and a hopelessly overcommitted hero who is hiding his younger sister at the college, having taken her away from their drug-addict mom. The Understatement of the Year is former teen boyfriends who split after a gay-bashing incident meet up again in college on the same hockey team, and I really liked how it showed how both of them had and hadn’t dealt with their trauma.

Blonde Date is a novella that hooks up two (het) side characters, The Shameless Hour has Belle, the hockey team’s manager, characterised in the previous books as the sex-positive PR manager for the hockey team, getting slut-shamed and bullied in a super disturbing frat sequence (after she gets an STI and notifies her last sexual partner, he spikes her drink, strips her, and gets the other frat boys to write all over her), and her relationship her downstairs neighbour, a sweet Dominican virgin who doesn’t do casual sex, which never really cohered for me, and then The Fifteenth Minute lost me entirely with its famous actress/computer hacker/expert gamer meets hockey game DJ who has been falsely accused of rape. In hindsight I’d say read the first three.

She Is Not Your Rehab, Matt Brown & Sarah Brown. Matt is a Samoan New Zealander who is a survivor of childhood family violence and sexual abuse; as an adult, he has painstakingly put himself back together from the damaging methods he used to cope with this, acknowledge his own vulnerability and address all the emotions he’d suppressed, and now he works as a barber, counselling men on how to do the same. It is aimed specifically at heterosexual men who are using the women in their lives to externalise work that they should be doing themselves; each chapter is a “She is not your” - mother, shame, saviour, hired help, punching bag etc and contains stories about himself, his clients, and his partner, Sarah, who is an integral part of the book. It’s a powerful book and it’s valuable work.