October Wrap Up | 2018

hi everyone I'm here today to talk to you about what I read in October as usual all of the books that I mentioned will be linked in the description box down below so let's start with two books that I really didn't enjoy so the first one is a case of this wasn't for me and I sadly dnf'd it and that is Nevermore by Jessica Townsend this is a book that does not need me to love it there is a lot of love for this book out there it's about a young girl called Morgan Crowe who's told she's a cursed child and on her 11th birthday she expects that she's going to die but instead she is whisked away by someone called Jupiter North who takes her to a place where she is going to do some tests to hopefully end up in a place called the wonder Society everyone who's a member of the wonder Society has something that they're really really good at it's called a knack but she doesn't know what her neck is and she's trying to work out what that is the premise sounds really fun I think I just found this book a little bit too hectic I felt that it lacked a sense of direction and I thought there were big holes in the world building too so there are a lot of references well not even references but things that are similar to Harry Potter and sometimes that is inescapable with a book like this that's dealing with magic an eleven-year-old who is a chosen one etc but what I mean by saying that there are references is that there are things in here that are deliberately like Harry Potter so juniper knows for me is like a cross between Albus Dumbledore and guild were a la carte and for the past I can't remember how long but I think it's four years he's won the most snazziest man award and that's just like Gilderoy Lockhart and his his smiling award and there is a huge talking cat which is very Ghibli esque in fact I would love to see this turned into a Miyazaki type film because I think it would be really really beautiful and there are moments in this that just made me feel warm such as when Morrigan is sitting in a chair that shaped like an octopus and the legs come up and they hug her I decided to put this one down in favor of other things as I said lots of people love it which is great just not really one for me next I read liminal by B Lewis I had high hopes for this but was also rather nervous because the main character who is called esta is an amputee and it also deals with themes of fairy tale disfigurement and disability and fairy tale are themes that I love as someone with a disagreement who loves fairy tales so I was very excited to see how this book would pull those things together but also anxious because as I've spoken about on this channel before disfigurement and disability are not often handled that well in fiction Esther and her partner are moving to Scotland they're starting a new life and she starts to see things hear things that she's not sure are real and there are parts in this that did creeped me out so at one point she turns on the radio and there there is a play on on the radio and they have the same names that's her and her husband and they're talking about things that they've just spoken about and that really did give me a bit of a shiver I will say that as a reader I thought I assumed that she had had an accident where she lost her leg quite recently because of the way her partner talked to her about her condition and the way that she talked about it herself and when we as readers find out about a third of the way through but she had a car accident when she was 8 I found that very surprising and it made things feel slightly unbelievable for me but apart from that I thought that aspect of the book was dealt with quite well the rest of the book however just didn't work for me at all and the characters in particular felt very unrealistic to me the way that they communicated with each other the way they spoke to each other their emotions changed from line to line it was a very erratic I felt as if what they were saying was to suit wherever the plot needed to go next as opposed to being driven by the characters and that frustrated me the reveal towards the end I also found quite ridiculous this was a no from me and a sad know it that because as I said I had quite high hopes for it um two other things I read crudo by Olivia Lang this is her first novel she's written nonfiction before and I read this because I chaired an event with Olivia at the Chapman Book Festival this is fascinating there is so much to unpack in here and I'm going to talk about this more in an annotation video that gonna be doing in the next month or so a second part to the first part that I made quite a long time ago in this book olivia is writing from the point of view of kathy akka who was a real person she was a writer who plagiarized other people's voices so olivia is writing as Kathy who often wrote as other people it's quite meta it can make your head hurt if you think about it too much Kathy is also writing this herself it says Kathy or rather I was getting on a plane Kathy or rather I so you know that she's writing about herself in the third person you know that she's not a very reliable person Olivia wrote this in a seven week period where Kathy is herself recording all of the goings on in that seven week period and with regard to politics so talking about what Trump is tweeting talking about brexit it's also talking about climate change and within that Kathy is talking about her future marriage and she talks about the man that she's going to marry as her husband even though he's not actually her husband yet because she's trying to live in the future she thinks if she writes about the present very quickly as it's happening she can somehow escape time escape the present which is so chaotic get into the future so she can look back on the present which will then become the past and assemble all of this chaos into some kind of order when we live in the present and so many crazy political things are happening at once it's hard to work out what's important what will stick what will be looked back on later as something of significance so what's interesting about this is that now it's a year later olivia wrote this in 2017 and reading this a year on fiction and fact blend together so much because the things that we thought were important in a day a year ago have slipped and gone away so you read this in your thinking did that actually happen or is this part of a novel is this something that Olivia who's has made up and that's something that Olivia and I were talking about this is a novel that will become more fictitious as time passes and we forget this novel is all about the in-between spaces it's about accountability it's about social media it's about the way that we communicate or don't communicate with each other it's very immediate obviously and if you like Ali Smith's quartet autumn/winter etc then I think that you will really like this too next I want to mention this little pamphlet here by Charlotte I Claire it's called their lunar language the cover is absolutely stunning and I mentioned this when I hold it a few months ago and meant to speak about it that month and then forgot because it's so small and popped it back on my shelf but it needs to be talked about so this is a collection of poetry I was familiar with Charlotte's work before I read this because she'd taken part in a couple of my poetry workshops and also I have read through the manuscript when she was submitting it to publishers as well I really loved her work I think if you like the kind of thing that I write then you will like her work too there is lots of folklore and anthropomorphic women and discussion on body this is the first stanza of a poem called what little girls are made of a green itch she pinches little wings then plucks a leg a glass bead grows in its place the way some weed she picks confessed white SAP more cluster around a rose she is making lines of limbless flies ants leave a trickle of red damp earth I I think it perfectly captures the innocence but also recklessness of childhood and the lack of consequence as well the shortest poem in here is only two lines and it's called a pheasant it says beside us copper tail cooked Aladdin's lamp and that is an image that I haven't been able to shake a pheasant that is an Aladdin's lamp because that's exactly what it looks like and I think it's brilliant the imagery Emmit imagery in here is stunning and if you're looking for a new poetry collection to pick up then definitely pick up this I will link it along with everything else in the description box down below next I read the way past winter by Kieran Millwood Hargrave this is her third middle grade book I read this along with Jessie Burton's new book which is down here and I'll speak about it in a minute because I was chairing Levent with both them in Oxford at the weekend and we were talking about feminism and fairy tales Karen's book is about a young girl called Mila whose brother Oscar has been taken her sister's thing that he has left them their parents have already left them but Milla is sure that he hasn't and she wants to go and rescue him she's not a chosen child she doesn't go off on her own for too long this really is about family and siblings bonding together even though sometimes they might hate each other and I really appreciated that in this book the amount of teamwork that's in here it has elements of fairytale in here the place where they live has been forever winter for a long time it has elements of Northern Lights and Kieran and I both love I think similar books as a child and Pullman kind of oozes out of these pages in in a very lovely way the restless girls by Jessie Burton is a retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses fairy tale that is where Kings wife dies and then he's worried there's 12 daughters are also going to die if he lets them out into the big bad world so he looks them in one room to save them from themselves and they discover a portal behind one of the portraits in that room every night they can go through it down and down and down and down into this dancing Kingdom and they can dance the night away the king and the servants don't know how all of the girls are getting holes in their shoes so the King puts out a call saying whoever in the land can discover the reason for this will be able to have their pick of my daughters to marry this foot is wonderful because it is rich in language and ideas but also because all of these 12 siblings celebrate different strengths and different things that can be deemed strong different things that can be deemed beautiful so one of the sisters loves gardening one of them is really good at arithmetic one of them isn't sure what she's good at but she's sure she's good at something all of these different things are celebrated and one person isn't picked out as the best one and I love that as with Karen's book it's a celebration of sibling relationships but also how women can be brilliant in so many different ways ways that are often not celebrated but should be when they go down in this portal to this of the world they have to get across a lake and one of the girls is really good at swimming so she goes across and brings back boats then they go through three different types of forests where they have dissolved logic and each of the girls takes it in terms to sync off the appropriate answers and I think I was sad I didn't have this book when I was younger because I would have absolutely adored it it's the kind of aching feeling I get when I read Katherine and Valenti's fairyland series just they're just the absolute warmth of it at one point the king in here says all you girls please just go to sleep so it is a reclaiming of the voices of women in fairy tales who are often silenced who are often asleep who don't get to tell their own story who don't get to shape their own destiny and it is an absolute joy so if you know any young girls in your life then please give this to them but also gift it to yourself too because you're allowed it finally I want to talk to you about bodies of light by Sara Moss which is the follow-up to her book night waking it's a loose sequel this is about Allie and May their two sisters in Victorian England Allie wants to become one of the first female doctors or at least her mother once had to become one and then she also wants to do that Allie and may not get on with their mother who's a very strict person who's often out of the house looking after children who are less well-off than they and because we introduced to Ali's mother first she is who opens this novel we have empathy the reader has empathy for their mother in a way that we never would have done if we hadn't been introduced to her before the children's voices came through because we would just see their mother as this other horrible person through their eyes so I really like that perspective that we were letting on to a side that the children didn't have this book mainly focuses on time time that is taken away from women time when they're expected to do the washing and the cleaning and the upkeep of the house these things I know take a very long time or took a very long time in Victorian times but I didn't realise just how much time they took because it is so accurate you completely lose yourself in the atmosphere of this Victorian house and completely believe everything that is going on Allie is trying to as I said study and she wants to become a doctor but her work is not valued in any sense of the word by people who love her by her dad he doesn't value her work at all he can't see why that is a problem there are many male characters like her father in this book who had deemed good characters by the characters that we loved in this book but whose attitudes are completely outrageous and who sometimes do things to these sisters which is completely unacceptable but these girls have no context for why it is unacceptable and it makes it very very uncomfortable to read the way that sera therefore plays around with perspective as I said how we can see the mother but the children can't and how we can see their male friends in a certain light but the children can't or at least can't articulate how they feel about the way that these men interact with them is very very unsettling it's a brilliant book and you do not have to read night waking to read this and I will be picking up signs for lost children which is the third and that loose trilogy at some point soon so those are all the books that I had to talk to you about today as I said I'm going to link them all in the description box down below have you read any of these and let me know or let me know if you think you might be picking any of these up if they piques your interest I hope you have a great week and I'll speak to you very soon bye [Music]

Channel: Jen Campbell

Views: 8,458

Rating: 4.9814386 out of 5

Keywords: #Booktube, #Jen Campbell, #ReadingWrapUp

Id: I5fL4UWlSoI

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2018