Review of 'Ruth Hall; A Domestic Tale of the Present Time' by Fanny Fern

Although I love reading older novels, it can sometimes be really hard to relate to them. We no longer live in a world where we need chaperones to wander around, or where you can only travel by foot, horse or train, or where you have to send letters to contact people. But the issues involved in this book are things that I still come into contact with all the time. It was startling, but nice to finally be able to properly connect with a female protagonist of the 1800s.

The novel opens just before Ruth Ellet marries Harry Hall. She's lucky: they genuinely love each other, and the match is a good one. Her family have money, but are only too glad to get the only girl of the family off of their hands. The Halls are not as wealthy. After their marriage, Ruth and Harry make do with the little money they have and are happy. They have their first child, and she is a wonderful creature, but dies young. Ruth is devastated, and struggles to recover from her grief.

Behind the backdrop of this family unit, is a pair of overbreaing in-laws. Harry's mother criticises everything Ruth does; she insults her housekeeping, spies on her, critiques the way she brings up her children, and has no sympathy for the mother who has lost a child. 

Soon Ruth and Harry have another two girls, and the family is becoming more financially stable. Ruth is happy. Suddenly Harry is struck with an illness. His parents won't take it seriously, and by time the doctor is permitted to be called it is too late. Harry passes away and Ruth is left alone to look after their young girls. But what about the Halls who always wanted more involvement in the pairs' marriage? They don't think they ought to support the young widow - she's not their child after all. Despite being very well off, Ruth's father and brother considered her done with: they felt that as she had married into the Hall's family, she was not their concern anymore. The village that her and Harry lived in loved the little family so much that they raised money for the poor widow, but her brother took it, vowing he would give it to her himself, yet he never did.

Ruth is forced to live on a pittance that her father guilt trips her about endlessly. It's hard for a woman to find work and she goes into poverty stricken lodgings. Ruth tries a variety of forms of work, but she is too physically weak for manual labour: grief has hit her hard.

Soon, Ruth struggles to raise enough income to support both children, and reluctantly agrees to allow her eldest to live with the Halls. She is determined to improve her monetary situation and get her daughter back asap. Ruth finally turns to writing, and after a long and strenuous toil begins to achieve some success from it. Writing saves both her mind and body.

I loved this book so much. Overbearing in-laws are the bane of my life, and I felt like I knew exactly how frustrated Ruth felt. It was also fab to see a girl win her own place in the world, and prove everybody that tore her down wrong. If you want a feel-good classic that's not as long as a Dicensian novel, or as wordy as a Hardy, then I would 100% recommend giving this a go.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'I Was Here' by Gayle Forman

As soon as I found out that Zoella was doing a book club with WH Smith I knew I wanted to look into it more, I won't lie. I've now ended up with almost all of the range, and this is the first one I've read. It was the one I was most excited for, after looking a little into the plot of each of the eight novels in the book club. It feels like forever since I read a YA novel, and it was SO comforting to read one again.

I was completely obsessed with the plot of this book, and finished it in just over a day, which is something that never rarely happens anymore. It was a 'stop everything' kind of novel, that I just had to finish.

I Was Here is all about a girl named Cody, who's best friend Meg killed herself suddenly, and with no real explanation. Cody thought they told each other everything, but she didn't know that Meg was even struggling with life, let alone that she wanted it to end. 

Meg and Cody have been inseparable for years. Cody's mum works all hours to support the pair of them, and she's never met her dad, so Meg's family feels like her own. When Meg dies, Cody feels cut off from everything. She wants to go and see the Garcias, but it's not the same without her. When Meg's parents ask Cody to travel to Meg's university and pack up her things for them, Cody's only too glad to get out of the small town they live in. 

When Cody arrives at Meg's dorms, she realises that there's a LOT going on that she didn't know. Like the fact that Meg was harassing her ex-boyfriend. Or that she rescued two kittens. Soon Cody realises that her and Meg did fall out of touch in the few months before Meg took her life. Still though, Cody can't believe that Meg made the decision to die alone. What if she didn't? 

We follow Cody on a course to track down other people who may have had a hand in Meg's death, and it becomes a complete page-turner as we do.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'Forbidden Colours' by Yukio Mishima

I'm feeling really good about the number of non-English/American novels that I've read recently, and here's another that I've been wanting to read for so long. Forbidden Colours is an avant-garde Japanese novel that I was supposed to read on my uni course, but it was one that I only managed to get half-way through before we had to move on. I was gutted, but I finally found time to finish it off, although I did have to start from the beginning again to remind me of all the plot intricacies of the first half. 

Forbidden Colours is initially narrated by protagonist and author within the novel, Shunsuke. He has written a myriad of books, largely about relationships and happy marriages, but he hides his secret of hating women behind them. He detests them, and considers the vagina abhorrent. As such, he is on his third wife by time the novel starts. 

When Shunsuke goes away on a brief holiday, he sees a beautiful young woman, who is in love with an equally beautiful young man named Yuichi. Shunsuke feels a connection to this young man, and they grow close. He discovers a misogyny within Yuichi akin to his own, and they make a sordid agreement: Shunsuke will pay Yuichi 500 000 yen to marry the young woman and make her life completely miserable. 

Shunsuke has realised that Yuichi is a young homosexual, and becomes attracted to the beauty in him. Soon the narrative switches to be based around Yuichi. His beauty is a magnet that attracts men and women wherever he goes. He soon begins to frequent a cafe for homosexuals, and becomes entangled with many men there. He will only pick the most beautiful, and will never agree to sleep with a foreigner. 

Whilst this is happening, he still beds his wife at home and gets her pregnant. He is terrified about the birth, about her having a son who lives his lief like Yuichi does. This drives a wedge even further between them. His mother and wife assume he visits prostitutes, and he allows them to be kept in this deceit. 

'Forbidden Colours' is the English translation of the Japanese title, but the original title is also a euphemism for homosexuality. The story reminds me a little of a more explicit Dorian Gray. Yuichi struggles with the morality behind his actions, but is obsessed by his own beauty and cannot stop. 

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains' by Owen Wister

The 'Wild West' is something that's never really grabbed my fancy too much, and as such I don't think I've ever actually read a book based around it. But it's such a massive part of the American literary canon that I couldn't ignore it forever. The Virginian is the first fully-fledged Western ever published, so I think it was a pretty good place to start!

The Virginian is the unnamed protagonist of the novel. He is a ranch hand who has an unsavoury past, but stands up for justice throughout the novel. The Virginian gambles, drinks and is no virgin to killing, but the latter he has only done to criminals, in particular, cattle rustlers. 

The Virginian's morally dubious past makes everything a little tricky when he falls for the new school marm in his town, Miss Molly Wood. The Virginian isn't a man who stays in one place; as a ranch hand he must move from place to place, wherever his work takes him. Soon, he begins to miss the town he belongs to, and the woman that stays there.

Molly too sees the allure in the badass ranch hand. But, when she learns of sordid details in his past, she is stuck with a moral dilemma. Does she agree to court the man she loves, even though his past is not clean?

Back in her home town, Molly was destined to marry a pure man that she had known since childhood, but she simply had no feelings for him. She knows her family would be against her pursuing a relationship with the Viriginian, but she does so eventually, and soon finds out who her true supporters are.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'Station Eleven' by Emily St John Mandel

Every so often I find a book that I get obsessed with. And this is one of them. When I finished this, I spent a good couple of hours trawling the Internet to see if there's a sequel to the novel out yet. Spoiler alert: there isn't. I almost cried at the news.

Station Eleven is a novel that I really wasn't expecting much from. The blurb made it sound a little like The Walking Dead, which I love, but is honestly so repetitive. Thankfully, there was none of this in Station Eleven. 

The novel has no main protagonist, but rather centres around a group of characters that are all in some way connected with an actor named Arthur Leander. We meet his best friend, a couple of ex-wives, and a girl who worked on stage with him when she was a child. Arthur Leander passed away just before the virus hit, but many people weren't so lucky.

The virus was always going to be a fad, right? Like bird flu or swine flu, or any of the other flus that get eradicated almost instantly. After weeks of panic of course. This virus however, should have been taken seriously, but it spread too quickly for many people to even get a chance to hear about it, let alone become concerned.

Who knows why the virus killed off the people it did, but within a few months 99% of the population of America was gone. We travel through most of the novel with a travelling symphony, who believe that 'survival is insufficient' (in the words of Star Trek). They live 20 years after the virus hit, and have learnt that even with hardly any people left, some are willing to kill for territory, food or sport. 

Society has lost its way, naturally. There's no electricity, no processed food, no laws, and no governing power. There's a divide between people who can remember the 'before' and people who can't.

Alongside this aspect of the novel, we follow the life of Arthur Leander in a disjointed manner, through the accounts of various people involved in his life. This gives the reader a jarring comparison between the 'now' and the 'before', and shows us how trivial concerns were before the flu.

I found the book utterly terrifying, and intensely gripping at the same time. It was so real that I had nightmares about our world being hit with the same kind of virus, and I spent so long daydreaming about how I would handle life if I survived. 

This has honestly been my favourite book I've read in months, and I'd definitely recommend that you all give it a go!

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'Coelebs in Search of a Wife' by Hannah More

It's a bit scary that some people still adhere to the beliefs within this statement, which was written over 200 years ago. As you can probably guess, I wasn't the greatest fan of the morals set out within this novel, but yet I wasn't the least fan of it either. It's set worlds apart from the modern day, and despite this quotation being largely negative, it was actually seen as a feminist novel in its heyday. 

It largely looks at how to parent young girls, which was a bit of a risky topic back then, as it is now. Coelebs is looking for a wife (as you may have guessed), but every woman he comes across is too 'something'; they're too religious, or too dowdy, or too loose in their morals, or spend too much time reading novels (whoops). 

Coelebs' dying father asks him to spend some time with an old friend, Mr Stanley, after he passes away. Coelebs does this and is struck with the wonderful way in which Stanley raises his children, in particular his eldest Lucilla. They are taught from a young age that, though they are a family of means, the girls must do charitable work for the goodness of doing it, not for any praise or reward. They raise their own garden together, and sell the flowers they produce to raise money for the infirm in their area, or give the flowers for the poor to sell themselves. They are taught all aspects of domestic life and come to love them, as well as being competent in other pursuits such as singing and instrument playing.

All in all, Coelebs begins to see them as ideal women. And he falls in love with the eldest Lucilla, but does not know how to reveal this to her father. When he does, Mr Stanley tells Coelebs a tale that shocks and thrills him (as well as the reader)!

Have you read it? What did you think?

Review of 'A Grain of Wheat' by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Do you remember when I promised you guys that I'd start doing more reviews of books written by authors from other parts of the globe, not just the UK or America? Well, I'm kick-starting it off with this one. This novel, written by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o is set in Kenya during its struggle for independence from Britain.

We move back and forwards in time throughout the back, and switch frequently between different characters' perspectives. In this way, we come at the resistance movement against British rule from a number of different areas, and discover how it gathered strength as well as weaknesses.

The main character is arguably Mugo. A man who seems to not want to get involved in the fight. But he's always stuck at the centre of it. Mugo attained fame for being a man who couldn't be broken in the detention camps for resistance fighters. He was sent there for saving a woman from being beaten. But whatever the guards did to him, he would not break down and submit to them.

Kenya is preparing for Uhuru, or their Independence Day, but Mugo is backing away from it because of his guilt. He doesn't want to be hailed as a hero of the movement, because he knows he's not. But why?

Have you read it? What did you think?