I usually only do monthly wrap-ups but I thought since I’d read (or attempted to read) all the books on the women’s prize shortlist it would be nice to make a post with all of my reviews in one place. I think the shortlist was split half and half for me. I absolutely loved When I Hit You and Home Fire, I enjoyed Sing Unburried Sing (except for the ghost story) but the rest were kinda meh for me. In terms of a winner I think I’d personally pick When I Hit You but it’s definitely a close call between that one and Home Fire. So here’s the reviews ranked by preference for the books I finished and then the one I didn’t at the end:
When I Hit You
I read this book about two weeks ago and I’ve spent over 30 min trying to figure out how to review it and I’m still not quite sure how to. When I Hit You is the story of a woman who gets married to a university professor and “revolutionary”. At the start of the marriage she was under the impression that she would be able to continue writing and get a teaching job, keep in touch with friends and family and continue her professional and personal life alongside being married. Instead, her husband started slowly cutting out every single aspect of her life, every connection with the outside world, until it got to the point where she was afraid for her life and ran away. This is by no means an easy or enjoyable read but it was raw and vivid and beautifully written and I couldn’t stop thinking about it and worrying about the narrator. Alongside being a very good (and unfortunately based on the author’s life) portrayal of how quick abuse can progress and how easy the first signs are to dismiss as being due to ideology or cultural expectations rather than a sign of a more sinister issue it is a very in depth answer to the question of why people stay in abusive relationships, how it’s not as easy as telling people about it as both family and friends thought it was normal and she was in the wrong being upset and not trying hard enough. I’m definitely glad I picked this book up despite not being something I’d usually read, and after having read the entire Women’s Prize Shortlist I definitely hope this is the winner (though I won’t be too upset if Home Fire wins instead).
Home Fire
Home Fire is a family saga with lots of layers and complexities, I found it to be similar to A Place For Us in a lot of ways (multiple perspectives, multiple layers, emotionally charged, important themes) except the story has a much more straightforward point where things went wrong. The book covers lots of topics such as manipulation, loyalty, relationships, religion, politics, but in my opinion the most important topics it covers are radicalization and discrimination. What does it take to become radicalized? Why would someone become radicalized? What can we do to prevent it? How do we deal with the people we’ve failed to support who are now in that situation? Should we wash our hands or welcome them back home? What happens when you blame an entire demographic for someone? Why would you turn your back on your own people when you could be fighting the discrimination from inside the system? This one is definitely also going on high up on my all time favourites list and if it ends up winning the Women’s Prize I definitely won’t be upset or surprised.
Sing Unburried Sing
This book follows two families in Mississippi, one white, one black, joined both by events in their past and Michael’s marriage to Leonie, which his family disapproves of. Near the start of the book Leonie gets a call from Michael saying that he’s being released from jail. Against her parent’s wishes she decides to take her two children, Jojo and Kayla, with her on a 2 day road trip to pick him up. The book is more of a character story than a plot-driven novel, which I enjoyed. There’s two main points of view in the book, namely Jojo’s (probably one of my favourite narrators of all time, definitely my favourite child narrator) and Leonie’s, through which we learn about their complicated relationship, Leonie’s struggles with grief and drugs, Michael’s family’s hatred for Leonie and her children due to their race, Jojo’s attempts at being a parent for 3-year-old Kayla as well as Mam’s struggles with cancer and Pop’s complicated past. The only thing I didn’t like about the book is that towards the latter half of the book a ghost story unfolds, while I do like magical realism, I think the book would have been way more enjoyable for me without that element.
The Mermaid and Mrs Handcock
The Mermaid and Mrs Handcock follows Mr Handcock, who is a merchant, starting when the captain of his ship returns from a voyage telling him he sold his ship to buy a mermaid and Angelica Neal, whose husband passed away recently, forcing her to go back to working as a courtesan. I have mixed feelings about this one. I felt like the pace was painfully slow (which I don’t mind when the characters are really complex and I want to understand every single tiny thing about them, but that wasn’t the case with these characters until much later in the story), so much that I went through the best part of a month never feeling like reading anymore and considered not finishing the book several times which is unusual for me. However, once I was down to the last 30% or so I basically read it all in one go and loved it, hence the reason for my mixed feelings. I feel like had the book taken less time to really kick off it’d be one of my favourite reads of the past year, but since it didn’t I’m not quite sure where to place it.
The Idiot
I really really wish I had listened to my instinct to DNF this book but I kept ignoring it throughout thinking it would get better and then suddenly I’d start loving it but those moments were all short lived. The Idiot is a campus novel following a group of Harvard students in 1995. Selin, our narrator, is a linguistics student who seems to be aimlessly going through life and picking up a few friends on the way. Not much happens in the novel, both plotwise and character-development wise and I personally found the characters to all be incredibly annoying and unlikable which I sometimes enjoy (for example in White Oleander) except it kinda felt like that wasn’t the intention so either way it wasn’t done quite right. There is a lot of ranting and none of it made any sense to me, nor did I care enough to try to figure it out, and that includes the things about maths and I’m a maths major so I should be able to either understand or care about a multi page long rant about mathematics.
Sight
Unfortunately I chose to DNF this book at 40%. The book felt to me like a journey through the narrator’s mind, visiting old memories, grieving her mother and loosely connecting those memories and feelings to the life of Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered x-rays. The writing is beautiful and poetic, however, I felt there was a lot of distance between the narrator and the reader which made it really hard for me to truly dive into the story and care about it. If you enjoy books that don’t have much of a plot and read like a long reflective piece/monologue then this might be a great book for you but I personally need to really care about a character before reading something like this and I wasn’t able to forge that connection with the narrator.
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