Plenty of Parentheses

I knew, before reading the blurb or thumbing through the pages, that I'd be leaving the library with this book. Anything on twins interests me. My dad is an identical twin and with the phenomenon often skipping generations, there is a slight increase in probability that I may have twins myself. I even made a set of twins my central characters in my final year creative writing project. And as someone who has often felt something of an outsider, I think I would have loved being a twin. But as Saskia Sarginson tells us in her debut novel The Twins, there too can be a need to escape all of that shared history.

It took me a few chapters to get into the book, even though it is of a similar style to the type of books I tend to opt for. I was determined to stick with it and remain wholeheartedly glad I did. By the time I was a third of the way through, I had slipped into a whole other world completely. It then took me a matter of hours to read the rest, scampering through the pages like a wild thing myself.

The book follows Viola and Isolte, identical twins born to an unsteady mother, Rose, who can never quite keep two feet firmly in the real world. For most of their early childhood, the three live in a commune in Wales, before moving to a forest in Suffolk where Viola and Isolte happen across another set of identical twins, boys this time. John and Michael are raw and wild, often suffering beatings from their father and skipping school. The two sets of twins quickly become intertwined and spend their hazy days together.

The novel jumps between Viola's point of view and then, on Isolte-driven chapters, it enters the third person narrative. This doesn't distance the reader from Isolte; at least, it didn't distance her from me as I felt closer to Isolte than I ever did to Viola. I thought it was clever the way the novel also jumped between past and present, slowly letting the reader in to the events that sought to separate the sisters. Clearly a carefully thought out plot, that I enjoyed from cover to cover.

I feel hesitant to give too much of the plot away, since it was such a enjoyable read, but I will say that although some predictability exists, the characterisation is so strong you almost don't mind being able to second guess some elements. Isolte's boyfriend was a welcome addition (and someone I quite fell in love with too!)

As is custom with my book reviews, largely because of my overwhelming to keep and hoard everything, I try and pick a quote that I particularly enjoyed. Again, I could have picked many as Sarginson's style is one that I find particularly favourable. Nevertheless, I narrowed it down to this which I admit makes little sense alone, but has great substance in the context of the novel. I also go crazy for alliteration, so this quote soothes me on several levels.

"The sea swallows things, she thinks, and the sea returns them."

(And if you ever needed written confirmation that I am, in fact, of the geekish nature, I would refer you to that there sentence! Soothes me.. what was I thinking!)

Jade x
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Not my usual novel, I'll admit that straight away. Based heavily in the Hasidic community - a way of life I have next to no knowledge of - this book was certainly illuminating. It was also very complex; the plot, the religious intonations, it all made for a challenging, rather than a passive, read.

I hunger for words, for literature I can commit to mind and memory, so when faced with a language I have never previously been exposed to, I quickly encountered cessations in my reading. Whilst the authenticity of the novel cannot ever be denied, for me, I found the process too halting to be enjoyable. The characters I liked, especially young Josef and his tortured life from childhood through to adulthood. All the women I found to be real, despite having few commonalities to the way I live my own life.

Starting with Zalman, the novel follows his life with Hannah (his wife), his children and the daughter he seemingly adopts as his own. Mila, a Jew that Zalman saves after her parents perish, quickly befriends Zalman's eldest daughter Atara but as they mature it is clear they are destined for different paths. Atara begins to question her religion in ways that Mila cannot understand, whilst Mila hopes for marriage and is happy to become betrothed to young Josef, a devoted studier of the Torah. Together they hope to have their own flourishing family, as Hannah and Zalman did before them. Though Mila tries hard - including enduring courses of fertility treatment - it turns out to be Josef who cannot conceive. Since it is an offence for a man to be tested for fertility as the act is "akin to murder", Josef is not medically diagnosed until it is too late; Mila seeks conception with another man but claims that God was on her lips as it happened.

A daughter - Rachel, named after Mila's mother - is born and Josef battles within himself to inform the rabbi of Rachels' true heritage. As the knowledge continues to haunt Josef, he begins fasting and becomes increasingly unwell. Much of the story follows Mila and Josef, though I longed more to hear of Atara, the daughter of Zalman who is destined to be forgotten. She is weaved back into the story when Judith, Mila's grandaughter, is set to marry one of Zalman's grandsons. Josef worries about the union and wrestles whether to tell Zalman the truth.

The book climaxes in several ways; reunions occur, death makes an entrance and lives are lived. I think that perhaps my ignorance, or simply my lack of exposure to this religious community largely impeded my enjoyment of the novel. The literary construction is lovely; the chapters, the way the book is broken up, is well thought out. Nevertheless, I did struggle at times to enjoy the book despite how intelligent the text truly is.

Jade x
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It might not have been the most thrilling plot I have ever read but The Birdhouse wasn't exactly a great fit for my usual niche of high adrenaline page turners. It wasn't that the plot lacked substance or that the characters lacked dimension; I think it mostly comes down to taste and that perhaps my palette has been spoiled recently with some fantastic fiction. Like I said, it wasn't a bad book, it just wouldn't make my top ten. But feel free to disagree with me on that.

The novel itself jumps around chronologically, with the help of dated diary entries that central character Ann completes throughout her life. I thought the little comments on the types of bath and her choice of breakfast were great additions, both to the plot and to the sense of Ann's character. It takes a long time for the past to properly unfurl. We eventually find out that Ann's daughter Emma dies as a child, that Ann herself suffers from breast cancer and that her father isn't who she thinks he is, all of which add to the depth of secrecy this family has tried to shroud in the shadows. The lives of these people are tightly woven together and it's clear Simmons has given a great deal of thought into the way

There were still some serious strengths to this novel though. The maternal motif that essentially underpins the entire plot was masterful. Simmons really hit a stride with the varying mother-daughter relationships: Annie and Emma and Tinsley and Ellie especially. Simmons stretches the paradigm to encompass Tinsley and Ann too, and then again in the form of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship that flourishes between Ann and Ellie.

As much of the novel centres around the bonds between mothers and children, the chosen quote is unsurprisingly a summation of that topic. When remembering back to the death of her mother, Ann describes the pain she felt after seeing her mother for the final time.

"It connected us, that pain, like a string of Christmas lights, an electric current."

What The Birdhouse proves most undeniably then is that not every drama needs the world to be ending. Sometimes family secrets can be just as destructive.

Jade x

I've been losing whole days to books recently, and I do not regret a thing. It started with Film 4 airing My Sister's Keeper, a film I try not to watch too much (for obvious reasons) but this time I found myself wanting to know the story behind the screenplay. I couldn't imagine how it was written and my curiosity needed satisfying. Sitting next door to the book I was after, stood a title that immediately pulled me in. The Storyteller is a title I have long been using as a way of describing myself and I was already intrigued by the idea of fiction within fiction.

In this case, there's certainly fiction within the framework of fiction, but there are hard to swallow facts embedded in there too. Picoult straddles a number of words and a multitude of characters in this novel. It is unusual to be reading about the Holocaust and the Second World War in a book that is not primary concerned with belligerent countries and the bloodiest of battles. As a graduate of a degree in both English and History, the books plays up to my interests on almost every level. I was reminded about a seminar I - somewhat unwillingly - sat through, on the purposes of the curriculum and whether too much attention is given to Hitler and the Third Reich. It was an atrocity of unspeakable terms; events occurred that I cannot even begin to imagine because my stomach simply could not cope with them. But although the Holocaust was, in some ways, an isolated event, the genocide of humans has been performed throughout history, all over the world. The Storyteller addresses one side of this argument. It argues that we must never forget the Holocaust but that we should not harbour it either. Essentially, it's a complex background that this book feeds into and where your opinion lies is up to you and no one else.

Picoult uses words to great effect, a trait she shares with Minka, the young Jewish girl who speaks fluent German and somehow survives the horrors of the war. She is a storyteller in her own right, not speaking of the sufferering she endured until her final years but rather vocalising the story she started as a teenager, about a young girl called Ania and her love affair with an upir; a monster within a man. Men are often seen as monsters in this novel, of varying degree, but none more so than Reiner Hartmann.

I had picked up, near the close of the novel, the variance of blood type. I knew therefore that the ending would be as I had imagined; Josef was in fact Franz, not Reiner. There was too strong a focus on siblings, on brothers, for it not to be the case. Knowing this did not diminish the ending because as the book so often attested to, something ending often meant something new would begin in its place. Franz had carried on the fictional tale Minka had begun. He too had weaved his own, a dizzying blend of the truth - horrors performed by his brother - which he marred into falsities. He wanted forgiveness for not saving his brother and sought it by becoming him. Not in reality, not in his image, but in memory. It was a clever plot twist which made for enjoyable reading.

Outside of the past we are invited into the present, mostly through Sage, a grieving, scarred baker. I loved her relationship with Leo (almost as much as I loved Leo's relationship with his mother) and Rocco, Sage's haiku-speaking colleague, was a breath of clean, fresh air in a book full of loss and loneliness. There were a number of passages that I could have picked for my quote collection but I have opted not to list any of them. Partially because I simply couldn't pick one, but mostly because I implore you to read the book and select one yourself.

Jade x

I read Child 44 a while ago, after picking it up from The Works on the off chance it would be a good read. Which it really was. But then I shelved it on my bookcase and thought little more of it, until this week just gone. I was browsing the shelves of my local library for something new to read on my commutes, after exhausting both Glamour Magazine and November's Vanity Fair (which was well worth a read and made me admire Jennifer Lawrence all the more.)

The Farm - a book by Tom Rob Smith who also penned Child 44 - promised thrilling drama and a whole host of crimes, all of which hinged around a family full of secrets. Set between London and Sweden, the book is enriching and very visually engaging thanks to Smith's use of language. There are of course, as is often expected with crime-inclusive narratives, some scenes which are hard to real. The troll motif that seems to underpin much of the story is certainly unsightly but the illusions to declining mental health and events of the summer of '63 which finally become uncovered, are the hardest to stomach.

I love stories that delve in the darkest parts of the human anatomy. The brain is such a fascinating organ to me; how it can be so powerful and yet so easily rendered into confusion. Smith tackles this well, never really letting on who we are supposed to believe and invest in. Stories sound true until proven otherwise and characters that appear one way are sometimes viewed so very differently through the eyes of another. Daniel, our driving point into the heart of the story, is moving through life shrouded in secrets. He is keeping one from his parents - the fact that he loves and lives with a man - but it never occurs to him that they could be keeping secrets from him too.The Farm is a book that travels forwards and backwards, in both time and place. Sweden and London are interchanged less than the past and the present but the novel seems to tirelessly promote a feeling of movement, of unease.

So much of the text correlates with other chapters that it became hard for me to separate a passage to add to my quote collection. In the end, I went for a small section early on in the book that would go on to have ramifications for the close of the novel, not that I knew it at the time of reading.

"There were glossier books about trolls, sanitised child-friendly stories, but this tatty old anthology, long out of print, found in a secondhand bookstore, was filled with gruesome stories. By far it was my mum's favourite book to read at bedtime, and I'd heard each of the stories many times."

At face value, the quote seems benign; boring, almost. But the revelations that follow impact these two sentences in ways I had not imagined...

Jade x

I popped into Sainsbury's on Monday for no other reason than to kill time before meeting my dad after work, yet ended up coming out the shop with a new Jo Nesbo book and a three for a pound bags of kids sweets. Peter Pan syndrome at its sweetest. As you can see, I've gathered quite a collection of Nesbo's translated work, yet I have still managed to read half of them in the wrong order. I also quickly became aware when I starting reading Police that I'd missed out another book in the process. A quick scan of the internet tells me that The Phantom is what, ideally, should have preceeded Police but what can I say? I'm off the chains, reading serial books out of sequence. Rock and bloody roll.

Police was still a brilliant read though. Despite that fact I had missed some major Oleg-based drama, there were enough other recurring characters such as Stale Aune and Beate Lonne that kept me feeling integrated in the series. As with all of Nesbo's books, Police is very plot heavy and we are woven into the lives of what feels like hundreds of different characters. There are also, as is often the case with Nesbo, a lot of red herrings involved. Every time I thought I had the outcome pegged, it was quickly established that my intellect was not serving me well in the slightest.

For me, the book could have been a few chapters shorter. By the close of the book, I wanted resolution more than I wanted to carry on reading; I had reached past the point of finding mirth in being misled. That's not to say I didn't like the ending - it was actually very fitting and I do, weirdly, look forward to a second reading knowing how the book now ends. In fear of ruining the plot, I have little comment on the content, other than some of the deceased characters will be surely missed. Another clever creation by Nesbo that I'm happy to add to my bookshelf. Nebso is always able to produce captivating reads and I love that itch that forces you to cram in one more chapter before bed and sneak a few more sentences during dinner. Another great Harry Hole novel, which I would definitely recommend.

I had two stand out quotes to add to my ever-growing quotes collection so I'm going to break my own rule and post both of them, because I simply couldn't pick. The first I just found interesting because the workings of the brain both fascinate and make me fearful.

"Like a scar, a limp. An echo. A reminder that nothing disappears in its entirety, everything leaves a trace in some way, somewhere. Like childhood. People you have known. Something you ate and couldn't tolerate. A passion you had. Cellular memory."

The second quote has to do with what I guess can most easily be broken down into the way we compartmentalise ourselves: our public and our privates selves.

"If she had been allowed to spend five seconds in his head, to see who he actually was, would she have run off screaming? Or are we all equally sick? Is the difference only who lets the monster loose and who doesn't?"

So after bandying around those heavy, philosophical quotes on a Sunday morning, I wish you a happy rest of the weekend!

Jade x

The Childhood of Jesus has to be one of the oddest books I think I have ever read. I picked it up because I've read and studied J. M. Coetzee's work in the past, and found it provoking. I assumed, perhaps naively, that this book would follow on somewhat similar lines.

It may be that I have simply not grasped the messages Coetzee sought to send out. Perhaps The Childhood of Jesus goes over my head and I do not possess a philosophical enough brain to understand it. The thing is, there is a lot I do not understand but that I can still gain enjoyment from. I sadly gained little enjoyment from reading this book. That is not to say it is not written well - I doubt Coetzee could produce anything that was written badly - it just did not provide enjoyment in the way I had imagined.

The plot is interesting. It starts with a man and a boy coming over to a seemingly socialist city. They have been assigned names - Simón and David - and ages, too. The society they reach is simple in a sense and Simón seems to be unable to fit in, with his fondness for the past. David, the boy, I found to be largely unlikable as a character, though many other reviewers have suggested that this in part a purposeful decision. For example one review I read suggested our difficulty in sympathising with David could be Coetzee asking us to take check of how easily and cooperatively we as human beings conform. Whatever the reason, it made the process of reading and reaching the end a more tedious process than I am used to.

Perhaps I am too easily pleased; a satisfactory, sympathetic main character, an illustrious romance and a few grisly murders are perhaps all I need to enjoy a good book. I like to think that I try and read books from various genres and a range of authors but it would be impossible for me to like every book my eyes wash over. I am not a fan of Wuthering Heights for example, but the book itself remains a classic. At the end of the day, it is a matter of personal taste and The Childhood of Jesus did not complement mine.

As is commonplace with my book reviews, I have selected a quote from the novel. I have selected a passage of speech between Eugenio and Simon, in one of their heated philosophical debates.

" There is silence. 'No one. Because history has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made up story.' "

I studied History and English at university so this challenge to history and its place in society certainly intrigued me. These types of loaded questions are what I have come to associate with Coetzee and the debates about philosophy were without a doubt my favourite parts of the book.

If you have read this book, or indeed anything else by Coetzee, let me know your thoughts. I'd love to know if anyone has had a similar experience!

Jade x

I first came across Kate Atkinson way back when I was in Year 13 and studying my English Lit A-Level. One of the texts we were assigned was Behind the Scenes at the Museum which I liked but never raved about. In comparison to The Color Purple it was an easy read, put it that way. Then I left for uni and never really thought much more about Atkinson until I stumbled across her book Started Early, Took my Dog which, I'll be honest, mostly appealed to me because I was writing my dissertation at the time and needed dog-related fiction.

So when I picked up Case Studies and found out it contained the same central character - Jackson Brodie - as Started Early, I knew two things. One, I'd probably enjoy it and two, I had most definitely read these books in the wrong order. Not that it mattered, really, and when have I ever been one to conform?

Atkinson is a stealthy writer, she drops plot bombs that knock you side wards but leaves just enough clues in her wake. Not that I usually pick up on them until my second reading of any of her books, but I like that. Nothing is worth doing if it comes so terribly easy. Or at least nothing worth talking about it. Case Studies, like much of Atkinson's work, has a historical feel to it. History and literature are two of my favourite things so I am never surprised when people suggest her work to me. There are so many characters I'd probably struggle to list them all but they all contribute with equal quality, if not quantity, and are so tangible in the surrealist sense.

I like Jackson Brodie and that always helps. Sometimes I love reading a character I dislike because it means the writing is good and having the desired effect. Brodie is, for the most part, a decent man and when the world can sometimes seem bereft of these, it's enjoyable to read one written so well. Brodie is, in a sense, the stone at the centre of the ripple. It is his services that are required by most and he some how knots everyone else together, in the most bizarre way. Case Studies is worth reading just to see how this impossible jigsaw even fits together.

I have started selecting and collecting my favourite lines or passages from everything I read. It was hard to pick just one from Atkinson's rich word count but I settled for a sentence packed of vividly visible description right near the start of the novel.

Amelia, dreamy and languid with heat, lay on her back on the scorched grass and fired earth of the lawn, staring up at the endless, cloudless blue, pierced only by the giant hollyhocks that grew like weeds in the garden.

It is a sentence that could be so easily overlooked but one which evoked great sentiment in me. I have spent many a summer day sprawled out on the grass, a book in one hand and a dog asking for its ears to be tickled occupying the other. I sometimes wonder if I've ever been happier.

Jade x

(Disclaimer: The quote in italics is all Kate Atkinson's work)

I've been itching to get my hands on any book by Housseini for the longest time. His work appeals to the history lover in me and satiates my disproportionate fanaticism for fiction, so I grabbed A Thousand Splendid Suns off the shelves at my local library the minute I set my eyes on it. Having been an author recommended to me often over recent years, I probably raced through the book a little too quickly. I am, for all intents and purposes, known to be a little impatient. Endlessly tolerant but a tad impatient. Which makes being a writer one of the worst suited jobs in the world - stories should never be rushed!

Nevertheless, revelling in each subsequent chapter was not necessarily a bad thing. I understood all that was contained between the front and back cover but there is no denying that any book given a second, slower reading can generate greater levels of appreciation. For me, Housseini flows from chapter to chapter as seamlessly as he does character to character. I was fortunate to study a History module on India and Pakistan in one of my final year semesters and having that foundation helped indisputably in the reading of this book. Not that such specific knowledge is necessary with the book largely being set in Afghanistan, and I believe my reaction to the novel would have been similar without out it. The main benefit, I feel, was in making these women and the horrors they underwent feel absolutely real to me.

Whilst at times the actions of too many different breeds of men caused my stomach to recoil, everything was believable. Which says a lot about the history of gender relations both at home and abroad. I absolutely loved Laila - one of the central characters - and her father whom she calls Babi. An intelligent man and a scholar, I saw (perhaps egotistically) a little of myself in him and his story is one of the most touching of the many moving stories Housseini intertwines into A Thousand Splendid Suns.

As something of a collector, I've started collecting - in the loosest sense - my favourite quotes or lines from everything I'm reading or watching. From this comes two sentences that stuck in my mind until the close of the novel.

That was when a voice behind Laila said, "Hey. Yellow Hair. Look here."

Laila turned around and was greeted by the barrel of a gun.

The simplicity of Housseini's language married with the specificity of the dialect is just pleasing to me and being placed at the end of a chapter absolutely certified my need to rapidly keep on reading. An absolutely fantastic and heartfelt read that I feel will stay with me for years to come.The passage of time is inherently important to the story, at least in my eyes, along with tough transitions from childhood into many precarious states of adulthood. It is a novel that tells many stories and teaches many lessons.

Jade x

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