Saffron and Brimstone - Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand

America boasts no finer, more acclaimed or accomplished literary fantasist than Elizabeth Hand. Poetry, magic, and love intermingle as she tears down the walls that separate the mundane from faerie and fancy. In this stunning collection of eight “strange stories,” the multiple Nebula Award– and World Fantasy Award–winning author weaves spells that enrapture her readers, ranging freely from Greek mythology to the contemporary nightmares of AIDS and 9/11.

The celebrated chiller “Cleopatra Brimstone” chronicles the aftermath of a brutal rape and the bizarre transformation of a young entomology student into a vengeful angel of death. An emotionally unmoored tattoo artist discovers an unusual deck of tarot cards that enables her to profoundly alter bare skin and her personal reality in the mind-expanding masterwork “The Least Trumps.” An artist attempts to capture her wayward modern-day Odysseus in oils and otherwise; a woman tragically in love isolates herself from a catastrophe-prone world; the death of a dear friend inspires profound personal reflections and strange pagan rituals; and in the brilliant concluding story, an artifact from a lost world reveals the inescapable vulnerability of our own. Odd and touching, provocative and disturbing, the selections in this magnificent collection showcase a master of the fantastic at the very peak of her storytelling powers.

Goodreads description

This collection was first released in 2006 and has just been published by Open Road as an ebook. In doing so Open Road has again revived a gem for us magic realism fans. In my review of Hand's collection Last Summer on Mars Hill (also published by Open Road) I suggested that although the author is known as a writer of speculative fiction and horror a strong case could be made for her as a writer of magic realism. I think that case is even stronger with this later collection. The stories seem more realistic, the fantastical grounded in important issues. We see again the themes that appeared in her earlier work - reworking of Greek classical mythology, isolation and loneliness, alternative lifestyles - but the stories are even stronger.  

Cleopatra Brimstone is probably the most conventional horror story in the collection. It left me unnerved, not by the horror (although that is not my favourite genre) but by the psychology. Hand carefully draws the psychology of the two sides of the central character, but then introduces a secondary character whose motivation is not clear. As a feminist, I was not sure what to make of this and the resulting ending.  Nor am I sure about the decision to place this story first in the collection. It seems sufficiently out of keeping with the other stories as to make it an unsuitable introduction.

If I had doubts about the first story in the collection I loved Pavane for a Prince of the Air. An account of the sudden illness and rapid decline of a close friend and mentor rang so true (painfully so) to me. My instinct is that this story is based on true life. For the most part the story is totally realistic. Even if the dying man is a hippy and believer in various alternative faiths, the narrator is not, which makes the ending utterly magical.

The Least Trumps is a fascinating story that explores loneliness and creativity (especially the impact of children's fiction and its writers).  This story has a theme of links to place (literally as the central character is agrophically attached to her remote island home) which appears in several stories. Hand has great skill in her portrayal of place and her characters' relationship to it.

Wonderwall is an account of an alienated young student's descent into the wild side and smashing into the wonderwall. Will she come through this self-destructive stage in her life and will her friend? The account is superbly graphic and realistic. 

The second part of the book is entitled The Lost Domain and is made up of four shorter stories or story variations. All are variations on Greek mythology.  The first, Kronia, is the most experimental section in the book - a series of recollections by a man and a woman weaving in and out of each other, creating a collective and at times conflicting impression of memories. 

In the second variation, Calypso in Berlin, Odysseus's abandoned lover Calypso may be living in the twenty-first century but she is still being abandoned. This time she plots to keep her lover when he returns.  Again we see Hand's skill at portraying place, as well as the magic of art (Calypso is a painter). 

Echo is a superbly subtle post-apocalyptic piece. Like the character in The Least Trumps, Echo lives on an island and waits eagerly for the irregular correspondence of those she loves. But then some unspecified disaster happens on the mainland and her wait becomes almost unbearable. 

The final piece also touches on an apocalypse. The Saffron Gatherers of the title appear in a wall painting in Santorini. Santorini is a place that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption and at the same time its artwork was preserved by the volcanic ash. The central character is a journalist researching the story of Santorini, who appears just about to settle down with her long-term long-distance lover in San Francisco, but before she does, history repeats itself in a shocking conclusion. 

I have said before that magic realism has much in common with poetry, in particular how themes and images are woven together to create great depth. I have barely touched on the many themes and images in this collection nor the expert way Elizabeth Hand weaves them into her story.  It is not possible with the restrictions on space in this blog. You will have to read the collection yourself and I will have to read it again.

I received this book from the publisher in return for a fair review.

So Far From God by Ana Castillo

Tome is a small, outwardly sleepy hamlet in central New Mexico. In Ana Castillo's hands, though, it stands wondrously revealed as a place of marvels, teeming with life and with all manner of collisions: the past with the present, the real with the supernatural, the comic with the horrific, the Native American with the Hispano with the Anglo, the women with the men. With the talkative, intimate voice and the stylistic and narrative freedom of a Southwestern Cervantes, the author relates the story of two crowded decades in the life of a Chicana family.

Publisher's description

On the face of it in this account of the lives of Sofi and her four extraordinary daughters magic realism meets tv soap opera. In chapter one the baby La Loka dies, rises from the dead and flies up to the church roof. Fe, another daughter is dumped by her boyfriend and screams for weeks. Caridad, daughter number three, is attacked, mutilated and left unconscious.  Esperenza, Sofi's eldest daughter, eventually breaks up with her boyfriend, who has got into Native American religion. Then at the end of the chapter Sofi's long-absent husband reappears and Caridad and Fe have miraculous recoveries. Beat that EastEnders!

The book continues like this. Each chapter is like a mini story, a fact reflected in the chapter headings: Chapter 1's was An Account of the First Astonishing Occurrence in the Lives of a Woman Named Sofia and her Four Fated Daughters; and the Equally Astonishing Return of her Wayward Husband. 

The tone of the writing reflects this rather folksy approach with Spanish words and phrases slipping in among the English, the regular use of double negatives and similar. This is meant to make you feel as though Ana Castillo is sitting with you and telling you the story. But I am afraid that the style at times confused this English woman. I found myself trying to work out what was being said (this was particularly true of the double negatives), which has the opposite effect to the one the author intended.

Soap opera is an interesting comparison for this book. The best soap operas (in the UK at least, I don't know about those in other countries) actually tackle complex and difficult subjects. This book certainly does just that. Feminism, environmental issues, big business exploiting poor communities, the worth of women's communes - all feature in the book. 

The magic realism in the book is on the face of it typical Latin American magic realism - La Loka flying through the air for example - delightful magic without obvious roots. But look closer and you will find roots in both Chicano myth and religious symbolism. The names of the key characters are chosen carefully: Fe - faith, Esperanza - Hope, Caridad - Charity. What happens to the daughters is that they have their faith, hope and charity abused. The book seems to have an ironic take on how Christianity is interpreted. Both Caridad and La Loka are regarded as saints by local believers and in the final chapter Sofi sets up and becomes the first president of an organization called Mothers of Martyrs and Saints. 

Despite the veneer of Christianity, the old religions and beliefs are still very present. La Loka regularly sees and communicates with a strange blue woman near the stream. Sofi identifies the woman as La Llorona: Who better but La Llorona could the spirit of Esperanza have found, come to think of it, if not a woman who had been given a bad rap by every generation of her people since the beginning of time and yet, to Esperanza's spirit-mind, La Llorona in the beginning (before men got in the way of it all) may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess.

This is a really interesting book to read alongside the Latin American magic realist classics and one which deals with themes that greatly interest me and I think will engage other readers too.

Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejide

Travel into the heart and mind of an extraordinary autistic boy in this deeply imaginative debut novel of a mother’s devotion, a father’s punishment, and the power of love.

Sephiri is an autistic boy who lives in a world of his own making, where he dwells among imagined sea creatures that help him process information in the “real world” in which he is forced to live. But lately he has been having dreams of a mysterious place, and he starts creating fantastical sketches of this strange, inner world.

Brenda, Sephiri’s mother, struggles with raising her challenged child alone. Her only wish is to connect with him—a smile on his face would be a triumph. Meanwhile, Sephiri’s father, Horus, is sentenced to life in prison, making life even lonelier for Brenda and Sephiri. Yet prison is still not enough to separate father and son. In the seventh year of his imprisonment and the height of his isolation, Horus develops supernatural mental abilities that allow him to reach his son. Memory and yearning carry him outside his body, and through the realities of their ordeals and dreamscape, Horus and Sephiri find each other—and find hope in ways never imagined.

Goodreads description

Wow, what a book! It is hard to believe that this is a debut novel from Morowa Yejide. It is so accomplished, working emotionally, visually and verbally. 

The book is about several themes. The first is imprisonment. Horus is literally imprisoned in an establishment that is closer to a Guantanamo than a regular prison, a place where the prisoners (or rats as they are called) have their spirits broken. There is meant to be no escape both physically and mentally. Sephiri is imprisoned by his autism and Brenda is imprisoned by her roles as mother to a child whose behaviour is at the severe end of the autistic spectrum and as the wife of a "cop killer". 

The second theme is communication. Clearly Brenda and Sephiri cannot communicate with each other verbally (Sephiri cannot speak or understand words) and there is no communication between Brenda and Horus, nor is there any real emotional communication between Brenda and other people, including Horus' emotionally damaged brother, Manden. 

The last theme is the way emotional damage is carried from childhood and even passed down between generations. This is reflected in all the people who appear in the book, including a sadistic prison guard and the prison warden. Much of the book is about the unravelling of the back story - how and why Horus killed a man, understanding how Brenda turned from a pretty woman hopeful that she will be able to save her husband to a woman who is killing herself with overeating and why Manden reacts the way he does. 

All this could be too depressing, and indeed at times it is very painful to read, but Yejide offers a magical answer. Sephiri has an alternative world to the one that scares him. This world is not presented as an imagined or dream world but as an alternative reality. Horus too finds an alternative: a route out of his foul-smelling concrete cell, through the catacombs beneath the prison where extinct locusts are stirring to the shore of the sea on which his son is floating. Love finds a way.

This book has everything I look for in a novel: in-depth psychology, beautiful use of words and images, strong themes,  magic that is not about escaping serious issues, and an element of uplift. 

I received this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in return for a fair review.

St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. . . ); a Minotaur leads his family on the trail out West, and finally, in the collection's poignant and hilarious title story, fifteen girls raised by wolves are painstakingly re-civilised by nuns.

Amazon description

Karen Russell has gone on to write several more highly acclaimed books since this, her debut collection of short stories. "Outrageously imaginative and profoundly funny... surreal... impressive," announces one of four glowing reviews on the back cover. I therefore approached St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves with high expectations. And it is without doubt full of impressive, surreal stories. Karen Russell has an extraordinary imagination, rich vocabulary (which had me reaching for the dictionary on occasions, not always with success) and strong writing style.  But as for profoundly funny - I'm not sure I was reading the same book. There were some amusing descriptions but many of the stories left me feeling sad and one - The Star-Gazer's Log of Summer-Time Crime - I found so unsettling (partly for personal reasons) that I didn't finish it.

As is always the case there were some stories which worked better for me than others. My favourites were Haunting Olivia, in which two brothers search for their drowned sister, from Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration, an account by the son of a Minotaur, and St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. 

In these and in other stories Karen Russell presents a familiar but surreal version of small-town or rural America. Several of the stories are set in the same run-down Louisiana area, with characters and places reappearing.  The themes of her stories are very real. The title story might be seen as a fantasy account of the historical treatment of the children of aboriginal peoples in schools in which they were "tamed" and taught to despise the ways of their parents and ancestors. It is also a story of children or young people ganging up on others. One girl refuses or is unable to be tamed and the pack (including her own sisters) turn on her. Isolated or outcast children form a common motif throughout the collection and the conclusions of the stories aren't exactly happy ones.  That's if they have a conclusions. 

As I have noted elsewhere on this blog, magic realist short stories often seem to be inconclusive and in previous reviews I have said that this hasn't bothered me. On this occasion however the inconclusiveness was so great that it felt as though the stories were actually half-finished novellas or indeed novels. (What it must be like to have so many story ideas!) All of which suggests to me that I should read Russell's  novel Swamplandia which is set in the same run-down amusement park as the first story in this collection. I have no doubt after reading this book that I want to read more of Russell's work. I will be interested to see if she continues to portray the world through the eyes of young people, which she does brilliantly, or expands to include the adult point of view. (There is one story in the collection which has the POV of an elderly man).  And I would like to know what happens in the end.

Skellig by David Almond

When a move to a new house coincides with his baby sister's illness, Michael's world seems suddenly lonely and uncertain.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, he stumbles into the old, ramshackle garage of his new home, and finds something magical. A strange creature - part owl, part angel, a being who needs Michael's help if he is to survive. With his new friend Mina, Michael nourishes Skellig back to health, while his baby sister languishes in the hospital. 

But Skellig is far more than he at first appears, and as he helps Michael breathe life into his tiny sister, Michael's world changes for ever...

Amazon description

This book is generally seen as a children's or young adult's book, but it is a good example of the truth of Madeleine L'Engle's comment: If the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.  

The central character, young Michael, is beautifully drawn. Sometimes child characters are either too mature for their age or too naive. In this book I really felt Michael's confusion and pain at his sister's illness and liked his childlike ability to accept Skellig. Michael's William Blake-quoting young friend, Mina, reminds me of the central character in L'Engle's wonderful Wrinkle in Time.

This is a wonderful book for adult and child alike. I loved it. There are elements in it that I am sure I would have missed as a child, but as an adult I appreciate. I loved the references to mythology - Daedalus and Persephone, and to Blake's visions of angels. The flight imagery extends to the birds which appear throughout the book - the blackbirds and tawny owls that Mina is studying. 

This book was published long before the current fashion for angels and is much more interesting. What is Skellig? Is he an angel? If he is, he is a very strange one - eating Chinese takeaways and dead bluebottles, suffering from arthritis and living in a shed. 

"What are you?" I whispered.

He shrugged again.

"Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that."

As we have observed elsewhere in this blog, a feature of magic realism is ambiguity and this book certainly has that. I am delighted to see this in a children's book. At the heart of the story is the question of who is helping who. What is the relationship between the baby's ill health and the apparently dying Skellig? Who is the angel? Skellig calls Mina and Michael his angels. 

David Almond's style is simple and poetic, which makes it at once easy to read and rich. It is a hard balance to achieve, but necessary given the age of the audience. If only more books had this discipline. I read the book in one sitting and I loved it. I regret that this book was not published when I was young. I would have loved thinking about Skellig and those questions. 

Things Invisible to See by Nancy Willard

Ben and Willie Harkissian are twin brothers (think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau) growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the eve of World War II. A baseball launched into the October sky sets in motion a series of events that transforms many lives. Ben leaves for the front and faces death—figuratively as well as literally. Left behind is Clare Bishop, who has been paralyzed from the waist down. But in exchange she receives some very special gifts. She can see the future, be at one with animals, and chat with Death. Willie Harkissian remains in Michigan as well, though his relationship with his brother will never be the same.

A love story interrupted by war, this is also a novel about discovering the ordinary in the extraordinary and finding the miraculous in everyday life.

Goodreads description

Sometimes when I receive a review copy from a publisher, I start reading with enthusiasm and after a while my heart sinks at the thought of writing a review..And sometimes the book is an absolute joy and makes reviewing those other books worthwhile. This is such a book and I will be recommending it to friends and family. 

This is magic realism at its best. A deceptively simple fable that works on all sorts of levels, it is a love story and a metaphysical novel. Nancy Willard is a wonderful craftswoman, weaving references into the story without allowing them to overwhelm the tale.

Willard is a poet and it shows.,She writes some beautiful prose, which is nevertheless simple and unflowery. Sometimes I think poets are particularly in tune with magic realism - understanding metaphor and the concept of "things invisible to see". The title is, by the way, a quote from John Donne's poem Go and Catch a Falling Star.

On one level you have the well-drawn world of a small American town in the late 1930s and the two families at the centre of the story and on another you have the universal. The book opens: In Paradise, on the banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe is playing ball with His archangels. Then it moves to the smallest of human worlds: In the damp night of the womb, when millions of chromosomes are gearing up for the game of life, the soul of Willie says to the soul of Ben, 'Listen, you can be firstborn and get out of this cave first if you'll give me everything else. Brains, charm, and good looks.'  The story then moves into the material world of the boys' parents: Their mother worked at the front desk of Goldberg's Cleaners and Tailors.

Despite this movement between worlds, the story arc works so well that I found it impossible to put the book down, finishing it in the early hours of the morning. I was genuinely interested in the love story between Ben and Clare, whether Ben will survive the Second World War and whether Clare would overcome her paralysis. For this book is about life and death as a game, but a very serious one. It culminates in a scene in which elderly mothers are playing baseball for the lives of their sons against a team chosen by Death. The referee is a childhood friend of Ben's who has already died in the War. I will not tell you the game's outcome.  

One of the things I loved about this book was that Nancy Willard does not hold back in presenting the world as she sees it. There is no writer's irony to hide behind, no fancy tricks, and some people will not like the book as a result. I loved it.

I am very grateful for the publishers Open Road Media for giving me my copy in return for a fair review. 

The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferre

Finalist for the National Book Award: A breathtaking saga from Puerto Rico’s greatest literary voice

This riveting, multigenerational epic tells the story of two families and the history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of Isabel Monfort and her husband, Quintín Mendizabal. Isabel attempts to immortalize their now-united families—and, by extension, their homeland—in a book. The tale that unfolds in her writing has layers upon layers, exploring the nature of love, marriage, family, and Puerto Rico itself.

Weaving the intimate with the expansive on a teeming stage, Ferré crafts a revealing self-portrait of a man and a woman, two fiercely independent people searching for meaning and identity. As Isabel declares: “Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through.”

A book about freeing oneself from societal and cultural constraints, The House on the Lagoon also grapples with bigger issues of life, death, poverty, and racism. Mythological in its breadth and scope, this is a masterwork from an extraordinary storyteller. 

Publishers description

This book will remind magic realist fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits. Not because of the prevalence of magic realism, but because of the themes. As in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book starts with the creation of a place, in this case a house (The House on the Lagoon), and follows the story of that house through its three incarnations and several generations of inhabitants. As in The House of the Spirits we follow three generations of a Hispanic well-to-do family through periods of political upheaval, with the third generation taking a radical political stance against a conservative father. 

Despite these similarities The House on the Lagoon approaches the subject matter from a very different angle.  It is worth repeating what the narrator Isabel says to her husband Quintin: Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through. That is the key to this book. The book is about a "novel", which Isabel is writing, which recounts the story of her marriage and the history of their two families. The House on the Lagoon is mainly made up of sections of that "novel" interspersed by short sections from Quintin's perspective. The sections by Isabel are written in the first person, Quintin's in the third, so the reader tends to have more sympathy with Isabel's account. Quintin claims to be a historian and is shocked and threatened as he reads more and more of Isabel's account, which he regards as full of falsehoods.  As a reader I didn't feel I ever really got to the "truth" of the story. But that surely is the point. 

And what about the magic realism? As you might expect given the ambiguity of the novel, one can't really be sure of the magic in the book. It is possible to read everything as realistic. Certainly the central characters don't do anything magical. But there is magic around the edges, just out of focus so to speak. It is the magic of the black servants and their beliefs. In particular it is in the character of the servant Petra, who controls the other servants (they are all related to her) and who Quintin regards as manipulating Isabel and other family members: Petra had entrenched herself in the cellar like a monstrous spider, and from there spun a web of malicious rumor which eventually enveloped the whole family. Petra uses traditional medicines and venerates the old gods and both Isabel and Quintin believe that she has some witch-like powers, but they are white outsiders and as we are seeing the story through their eyes we don't get close to Petra's magic. 

This book is skillfully written, winding the two strands of narration, and presenting not just a story of a family but also the story of Puerto Rico.  At times I found the style a bit dry, particularly at the beginning, as the writer tells rather than shows the historical setting. But as the book progressed, particularly as we moved away from the story of Quintin's and Isabel's parents to that of the couple themselves, I found myself more and more involved. 

I recommend this fascinating book, which leaves you thinking.

I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review.

The Unreal and the Real Vol 1 Where on Earth by Ursula le Guin

I probably should start this review by saying that Ursula le Guin is a hero of mine. I came to her writing embarrassingly late, having managed to miss Earthsea in my youth. I have to thank my son for introducing me to her work. He picked a copy of The Wizard of Earthsea that was lying unread on my bookshelf and, liking the 1970s style cover illustration, decided to read it to pass the time during his university vacation. When he reappeared from his room, he said, “Mum, you should read this. You will love it.” I did read it and I did love it.

What I love about Le Guin is that she doesn't shy away from serious issues in her work. There is a realism about politics and society in her most fantastical writings. The actions and decisions of her characters have consequences. Her writing cannot and should not be put into categories. To be sure she gets slotted into science fiction and fantasy more often than not, but she is above all a wonderful writer with huge literary merit. To my mind she is simply one of the best writers around and her books on writing are also some of the best you can buy.

This book is one of two collections of her short stories selected by the writer herself. It contains stories set on Earth or sort of set on Earth - the selection of Orsinian Tales that opens it are set in a fictional Eastern European country. The second volume explores other worlds.

I have been honoured that on a number of occasions reviewers have compared my work with that of Ursula Le Guin, especially to her Orsinian stories. I am immensely flattered by the comparison. It was on reading Le Guin that I realized that it was possible to create a “real” fantasy world. The collection opens with an introduction by the writer in which she describes Orsinia as the way, lying between actuality, which was supposed to be the sole subject of fiction and the limitless realms of the imagination. In other words the way of magic realism. I identified with Orsinia immediately. The latest Orsinian tale is featured in this book. Written in 1990, it is about the point at which communism fell in Orsinia. Its title, “Unlocking the Air”, refers to protesters waving their keys in the air to indicate it is time for their oppressors to hand over the keys. As a part-time inhabitant of the Czech Republic, I know the power of that very real image.

The collection includes realist tales and magic realist ones (and some which might even lie in between). I could say that I particularly enjoyed Ether, Or a tale set in a town that keeps moving locations, the well-known Buffalo Girls, Unlocking the Air, The Diary of the Rose, Gwilan's Harp and May's Lion. But to say this is in a way to belittle this collection, which has been put together with great care and which is far more than the some of its parts.

The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain

Dining alone in an elegant Parisian brasserie, accountant Daniel Mercier can hardly believe his eyes when President François Mitterrand sits down to eat at the table next to him.

Daniel’s thrill at being in such close proximity to the most powerful man in the land persists even after the presidential party has gone, which is when he discovers that Mitterrand’s black felt hat has been left behind.

After a few moments’ soul-searching, Daniel decides to keep the hat as a souvenir of an extraordinary evening. It’s a perfect fit, and as he leaves the restaurant Daniel begins to feel somehow … different.

Goodreads Description

I bought this little gem on impulse. It was one of those reduced price kindle offers and I thought I hadn't reviewed many French books on this blog (a couple I think), so I took a punt. 

The hat at the heart of the story passes from owner to new owner by a series of coincidences and each time the new owner changes his or her life, becoming more decisive and taking control of circumstances. Is this because of the hat? Daniel Mercier thinks so: his search for the hat he lost shortly after acquiring it ties the two ends of the novel together. But we are never told whether the hat has magical properties. Just as dressing up in your finest clothes makes you stand taller, it could simply be that the action of wearing this rather superior hat makes its recipients reach into themselves and find the resolve they have been lacking. 

The President's Hat is a positive, life-affirming read. Each of the hat's recipients has lost their way - one is a young woman in a relationship with a married man that is going nowhere, another is a perfume maker who has lost his creativity, and the last is a member of the conservative aristocracy who throws over his conservatism to become a patron of the arts. I suspect that there is some clever commentary on French society and the changes Mitterand wrought in it, but it was lost to me. The book is obviously very French and set in a time (the 1980s) which already seems very distant. 

The President's Hat is a short book with an easy-to-read style and so can be read in one session, but you will probably find yourself thinking about it afterwards. It raises some interesting philosophical questions - about how a chance occurrence can have big consequences, about power and its transfer and of course about how we can change our circumstances.

I will keep my eye on those kindle daily deals, if this book is anything to go by.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl,and a 100 year old turtle, in her father's ""museum"". She swims regularly in New York's Hudson River, and one night stumbles upon a striking young man alone in the woods photographing moon-lit trees. From that moment, Coralie knows her life will never be the same.

The dashing photographer Coralie spies is Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant who has run away from his father's Lower East Side Orthodox community. As Eddie photographs the devastation on the streets of New York following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he becomes embroiled in the mystery behind a young woman's disappearance and the dispute between factory owners and labourers. In the tumultuous times that characterized life in New York between the world wars, Coralie and Eddie's lives come crashing together in Alice Hoffman's mesmerizing, imaginative, and romantic new novel.

Publisher's Description 

This book is many things: a love story, a historical novel, and a mystery. It has much that I love in fiction and in magic realism. It is magical and at the same time dark, unafraid to tackle hard subjects: the abuse by unscrupulous employers of immigrant workers, the abuse of women in a patriarchal society, and the commercial exploitation of the "freaks" in the Professor's museum. In some hands these subjects could be too heavy, but Hoffman's magical and lyrical storytelling allows the reader to engage with the story. Nevertheless, unlike some of Hoffman's other work, this book is very much for adults. 

The writing structure is an interesting one - with the two first-person narratives (Eddie and Coralie)  being interspersed by that of  an anonymous third-person storyteller. At first this structure took a bit of getting used to, but I soon found that I liked the way the third-person narrator was used to bring an extra dimension to the story. The accounts of the historically true incidents which frame the story - the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the Dreamland Fire - are told in the third-person and are no less powerful for that. The image of the trapped factory workers jumping to their deaths will stay with you: At first, the falling girls had seemed like birds. Bright cardinals, bone-white doves, swooping blackbirds in velvet-collared coats. But when they hit the cement, the terrible truth of the matter was revealed.

Hoffman's use of themed imagery is on display here. The most obvious themes are fire and water, but there are others such as that of birds: a livery man with a dark past is shown to have changed through his love of birds; the hummingbirds in the Museum are tied to the cages on leashes of string; the imported starlings at first are seen as exotic and then despised by the people of New York. Some people might find such repeated imagery to be over-heavy, but I liked it.  

Hoffman is known for her use of magic realism. In this book there is usually an explanation for any perceived magic, indeed it is often shown as illusion, most obviously in the Professor's Museum. The Professor is a fraud, presenting as magically real that which is constructed in his cellar of horror. At the same time the freak-show performers are portrayed as very human and humane. We see them through Coralie's eyes.  The real monsters are the Professor and the people who come to gawp and abuse. And the true magic is that of human love.

I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review.

Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Cafe by M Henderson Ellis

Not long ago, John Shirting--quiet young Chicagoan, wizard of self-medication--held down a beloved job as a barista at Capo Coffee Family, a coffee chain and global business powerhouse. When he is deemed "too passionate" about his job, he is let go. Shirting makes it his mission to return to the frothy Capo's fold by singlehandedly breaking into a new market and making freshly postcommunist Prague safe for free-market capitalism. Unfortunately, his college nemesis, Theodore Mizen, a certified socialist, has also moved there, and is determined to reverse the Velvet Revolution, one folk song at a time. After Shirting experiences the loss of his sole "new-hire" -- a sad, arcade game-obsessed prostitute -- it is not long before his grasp on his mission and, indeed, his sanity, comes undone, leaving him at the mercy of two-bit Mafiosi, a pair of Golem trackers, and his own disgruntled phantom.
 
A dazzling combination of Everything is Illuminated and Don Quixote, with a jigger of Confederacy of Dunces, and Lord of the Barnyard, Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café is the first novel to so exquisitely capture the ambiance of expat Prague. Poised to be an underground classic, it asks: what does it mean to be sane in a fast-changing world?

 Goodreads Description

Over on the Magic Realism Books Facebook page we regularly get into discussions about what is magic realism. One of the strands in these discussions is that magic in some places, cultures and lives is a reality.  Some people argue that this is not the case in Western/European culture, but I have always begged to differ. In Easter 1990 I found myself wandering the streets of Prague, a city that was waking after the nightmare of communism. I was very much aware of the strange magic energy of the place. I now spend a lot of time in the Czech Republic and regularly visit Prague. I find that the magic is diminished but it's still there. It is therefore not surprising that having read the blurb (above) I leapt at the chance to read and review this book.  

Keeping Bedlam at Bay is set in the early 1990s when the former Eastern bloc countries were attracting oddballs, rampant capitalists, mobsters, psychics and hippies. At this time the Czech capital was very much like a wild west frontier town where anything was possible. We see this weird world through the eyes of naive man/boy, John Shirting, who bumbles along in his self-aggrandized, chemical-fuelled mission. The world that Shirting encounters is a darker one than I experienced. I suspect many readers would think much of what is described as comic fiction, and while there is a degree of elaboration much is nevertheless recognizable, for example: the babushkas: what is the collective of Babushkas? - Shirting, in his travel journal would humbly submit a scold of Babushkas; the alchemical references (black bile); and Czechs talking in all seriousness about hunting the Golem: conditions are right for the beast's return. Intergalactic alignment, extraterrestrial accord, crap like that. Historical shiftings, dangerous levels of antimatter. All of which makes me consider again that question of what is magic realism. What is real? What is magic? What is fiction? In a place like Prague the real can sometimes be more magical than fiction. 

But did I like this book? Did it live up to the blurb? The answer to the second question is no, but that is not surprising, given the hype. As for the first, not particularly. It was amusing at times, but not as original as it might perhaps appear to readers without my inside knowledge. But good comedy to my mind needs to have a humanity about it. The book does not attempt to understand the people of Prague, at one point a character says: You people are crazy... you Americans. You come to here and all you can say is how beautiful the city is but nobody ever stops to look at the people. This is partly because of the nature of the central character, who fails to understand himself and how others see him, let alone to understand or sympathize with the Czechs he encounters and whose language he never learns. In return I found myself becoming less sympathetic towards him. As the book doesn't have much in the way of a plot (it is just a series of episodes in Shirting's life) and the character does not have the ability to learn from what happens, I increasingly found it a rather depressing story for all the comic incidents. 

I was given this book by the publisher via Edelweiss in return for a fair review.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

The extraordinary journey of one unforgettable character - a story of friendship and betrayal, loyalty and redemption, love and loneliness and the inevitable march of time.

Harry August is on his deathbed. Again.

No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes.

Until now.

As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. 'I nearly missed you, Doctor August,' she says. 'I need to send a message.'

This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow

Goodreads description

Last year I reviewed the critically acclaimed and Booker short-listed Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – a novel in which the central character dies and then restarts their life repeatedly. Now along comes another book that is based on the same idea. What must Claire North and her publishers have thought when Kate Atkinson beat them to it? Or maybe Claire North is Kate Atkinson, having another take on the subject, which seems only appropriate in the circumstances. I am sure many writers would like to revisit a concept as strong as this. I can speculate like this because Claire North is a pseudonym for an acclaimed British author, or so the the note at the back of the book tells me. Whoever Claire North is, she has a very different approach to the concept.

Atkinson's novel is clearly literary fiction and the repeated lives are presented as a literary device. Claire North's novel is genre fiction – science fiction. There is a whole group of people who repeat their lives and even a secret society through which they help each other and protect the world from one of their kind abusing their knowledge. Of course the plot line concerns a message from the future that the world's end is being speeded up by a rogue xxxx. The book becomes a quest across Harry's fifteen lives to save the world. And a thoroughly good romp it is too, well plotted and with a strongly drawn and by no means perfect protagonist.

Whilst the heroine of Life After Life only vaguely remembers her previous lives, Harry August remembers everything. The advantage of this is that it allows Harry and us to consider the philosophical and logistical implications of the device. At times this debate can get a bit tedious, but it is thought-provoking. I'm not sure that I was entirely convinced by how the impact of alternative lives on world history was explained. But you have to accept the internal logic of such stories and get on with enjoying the action.

I read somewhere that science fiction cannot be magic realism and in this case I think that is probably true. Nevertheless I enjoyed this book.

I received this review from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review.

Incendiary Girls by Kodi Scheer

Incendiary Girls explores our baser instincts with vivid imagination and humor. In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In “Fundamental Laws of Nature,” a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach. In Scheer’s hands, empathy and attachment are illuminated by the absurdity of life. When our bodies betray us, when we begin to feel our minds slip, how much can we embrace without going insane? How much can we detach ourselves before losing our humanity? Scheer’s stories grapple with these questions in each throbbing, choking, heartbreaking moment.

Goodreads description

Kodi Scheer combines her medical training and understanding with magic realism to form an original collection of short stories. 

In Fundamental Laws of Nature a woman doctor and cancer sufferer believes her daughter's horse is the reincarnation of her mother. 

Transplant - a story about a woman with a transplanted heart who becomes a convert to Islam; this is about a woman searching for hope.

Miss Universe - the contestants turn violently on Miss Afghanistan. 

Gross Anatomy - a medical student is visited by the cadaver she is dissecting.

When a Camel Breaks Your Heart opens with the line: Your lover hasn't always been a camel. Yesterday Mahir was human. But this isn't a simple surreal story, it is a sad painful portrait of a cross-cultural relationship.

No Monsters Here - a wife and mother with OCD starts finding body parts hidden in her home. These belong to her doctor husband who is on duty in Iraq.

Salt of the Earth - an account of an outbreak of a love virus in a small town. 

Modern Medicine - a nurse in a burns unit tries to cope with the trauma of her work by abusing drugs.

Primal Son - how do a couple cope when their much wanted baby is born an ape?

Ex-Utero - a medical student's experience on the ward.

Incendiary Girls - an account by an angel of death of a young woman's experience of the Armenian Genocide.  A shocking account of a terrible and forgotten event in twentieth century history. 

The author's medical insight is important to these short stories, not just in terms of her choice of subject matter but also in how she sees and portrays the world. In addition, in Transplant, Miss Universe, When a Camel Breaks Your Heart, No Monsters Here and Incendiary Girls there is a focus on war, genocide and intercultural relations. 

A fascinating collection.


I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair review.

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna Van Praag

When Alba Ashby, the youngest Ph.D. student at Cambridge University, suffers the Worst Event of Her Life, she finds herself at the door of 11 Hope Street. There, a beautiful older woman named Peggy invites Alba to stay on the house’s unusual conditions: she’ll have ninety-nine nights, and no more, to turn her life around. Once inside, Alba discovers that 11 Hope Street is no ordinary house. Past residents include Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, and Agatha Christie, who all stayed there at hopeless times in their lives and who still hang around—quite literally—in talking portraits on the walls. With their help Alba begins to piece her life back together and embarks on a journey that may save her life.

Filled with a colorful, unforgettable cast of literary figures, The House at the End of Hope Street is a wholly imaginative novel of feminine wisdom and second chances, with just the right dash of magic.

Goodreads description

I found this book to be an easy read - I read it in one evening. It has a feel-good story about a magical house and its residents and is almost fairytale-like. Indeed in the first paragraph the house is described thus: the house appears to be enchanted. As if Rapunzel lives in the tower and a hundred Sleeping Beauties lie in the beds. And throughout the first chapter there are references to many more fairytales, with Peggy, the house's octogenarian owner, a benevolent witch complete with ghost cat, Oscar.

I know that a lot of readers like to read this sort of book. The house was enchanting and enchanted. No surprise then that when Alba walks through the door away from the real world and its problems, suddenly she is surrounded by magic (at which she hardly bats an eye). Pictures on the wall talk to her, books rearrange themselves on shelves, notes of advice appear out of air. It is a veritable Hogwarts.  Outside the house, the world is an altogether colder, less charitable sort of place. One might say that it is the realism to the house's magic. But does it make this book magic realism? Or should the magic be within the real? 

Whatever the answer to that question, I did get into the story and yes I did care what happened to young Alba Ashley, Peggy, Greer and Carmen. I, like Alba, still love a fairytale. But (you could tell there was a but coming) it was like reading literary candy-floss. After I put the book down, I felt unsatisfied.

The author's plotting at times was predicable and at others managed to surprise me.  But when you read in the first chapter, This house may not give you what you want, but it will give you what you need. And the event that brought you here, the thing you think is the worst thing that's ever happened? When you leave, you'll realize it was the very best thing of all, you sort of know what the ending will look like. Was it necessary to foreshadow it like that? But maybe that doesn't matter, many readers want and expect a happy ending.

So what are my conclusions: this is a great book if you want something undemanding, if you want a modern fairytale, if you want something to curl up with. I enjoyed it at that level. I just wanted more. I suppose I like my fairytales with the darkness left in. There are some sad elements in The House at the End of Hope Street. Abuse, physical and mental cruelty, loss of a child, all feature in the residents' pasts and I suppose I wanted those brought out more. Just as I wanted more made of the famous women whose portraits line the walls and advise the current residents. So much could have been done to bring out the "feminine wisdom" of the blurb.

I received this book from the publishers via Netgalley in return for a fair review.