Ellie goes to Homa’s house after school. Ellie’s mother won’t have Homa in her house (I tell you this woman is awful).
Homa’s mother is lovely. Homa has a baby sister Sarah. They play hopscotch, jump rope and eat amazing pastries. Ellie wants Homa’s life, she is jealous of her.
Chapter Five – November 1950
Ellie and Homa become firm friends. Homa’s mother teaches them how to cook. At home Ellie’s mother is letting her do more cooking.
Ellie can’t understand how Homa’s family can afford so much food. It turns out that Homa’s father is the head waiter at a restaurant and he brings home the excess.
Chapter 6 May 1953
We’ve jumped in time (thankfully it was beginning to feel a bit slow). Both girls are doing well at school. They have skipped a grade.
Towards the end of the year Homa convinces Ellie to skip school. The go to the Grand Bazaar and eat ice cream and have nuts. They return for lunch at home.
Ellie’s mother knows she has skipped school – they were seen by one of the neighbours. There is a nasty argument about Homa.
[…] her father waits on people all day like a servant. Her mother is illiterate. They are vermin in the alley, my dear. They are nobodies who come from nobodies.
Ellie responds with
So the fact that you are his descendent [the qajar king] basically makes you the great-grand daughter of a whore.
Something is brewing. This chapter marks a turning point for the mother. She seems to have made a decision (is she going to marry Uncle Massoud?)
Ellie starts school. She walks herself to school following the directions of Uncle Massoud (is her mother depressed? sad? or just useless). She is hoping to meet an amazing girl who will become her best friend. She just meets an annoying girl.
Five weeks later, on a Wednesday, she is heading home for lunch (they get 2 hours!). Her mother makes her pick the stones and grit out of the rice (apparently the mother’s eyes don’t work very well from all of the crying). And then the mother is too tired to prepare anything else, so they have rice and yogurt. On the way back to school she meets the annoying girl, Homa, who, after calling her a donkey asks her to play – hopscotch, 5 stones. They race back to school (Ellie enjoys the running).
This is still a setting the scene chapter. Homa has just been introduced, any sympathy for the mother is declining and Uncle Massoud is taking at least minimal care of them.
It’s 1950, Ellie is 7 and her dad has just died from tuberculosis.
Her uncle (father’s brother) makes them move out of their mansion and into an apartment in the ‘slums’. There is an implication that this move is a punishment because Ellie’s mother has refused to marry him.
Ellie is going to start school and she is hoping to make friends.
We learn her mother is descended from Qajar royalty.
This was long listed for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction in 2024. I promptly bought it and I have just finished it.
Here’s the blurb …
The gripping story of three young women who came of age and into power in a world dominated by men.
Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to King Henry II of France, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary, Queen of Scots, who would become her daughter-in-law.
These years at the French court bound Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary to one another through blood and marriage, alliance and friendship, love and filial piety – bonds that were tested when they were forced to part and take on new roles in different kingdoms. As queens, they lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth century Europe; a time of expanding empires, religious discord and popular revolt. They would learn that to rule was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched attitudes of their time. A crown could exalt a young women equally it could destroy her.
This was fascinating. I already knew a bit about Mary, Queen of Scots, having read Embroidering Her Truth by Clare Hunter, and I had heard of Catherine de’Medici (and I have watched a bit of The Serpent Queen), but I had never even heard of Elizabeth de Valois.
This book has a nice easy style (conversational almost), not burdened by jargon. The writing is good and the events so compelling, and sometimes exciting, it’s like reading an historical fiction novel.
I reserved this at the library, it took about a year for it to be my turn, but once I got started, I knew I needed my own copy.
Here is the blurb …
Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and her least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people – but she is actually the only guest at the Cornwall Inn who isn’t here for the big event.
When the bride discovers her elaborate destination wedding could be ruined by a divorced and depressed stranger, she is furious. Lila has spent months accounting for every detail and every possible disaster – except for, well, Phoebe… Soon both women find their best laid plans derailed and an unlikely confidante in one another.
I have been trialing a new approach to reading – to ensure that I am actually taking things in – I have been writing chapter summaries (after reading each chapter twice) along with my thoughts and comments.
A snapshot of my summaries (I am using OneNote)
It did occur to me when I got to the end of this novel that I should have uploaded my summaries one at a time – or at least my thoughts on that chapter. Don’t worry, I am not going to inflict them all on you now.
This novel resonanted with me, the characters were incredibly life-like in all of their messy, kind and ordinary ways.
It was about honesty – being honest with ourselves and others. About having the confidence to choose the bigger life rather than drifting.
Phoebe is devasted by her divorce (to the point of suicide). She realises over the days of the wedding (yes days!) that her life has been contained – always trying to do the right thing, and to not be too much. When she no longer cares what people think she starts speaking her truth. I think many women would identify with this – trying to be good, all things to all people.
Lila wants the wedding to be perfect because then her life, and her marriage will be perfect.
And Gary? Well he’s just standing by letting Lila make all of the plans.
There are some funny moments and some very poignant ones.
All in all a very satisfying novel.
Some of my favourite quotes
Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversations with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal.
“I don’t know. It’s just what I believe,” Phoebe says. One of the few things Nietzsche wrote that she agreed with in graduate school. “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”
But that is how it happens, she realises. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realises she has spent her entire life just pretending to be great.
She doesn’t have to be anything, ever. Her husband is not watching. Her father is not watching. Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.
And it was perfect. It really was. But life is strange, always thinking this one thing is going to make you happy, because then you get it, and then maybe you’re not as happy as you imagined you would be, because every day is still just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big, you have no choice but to live inside of it, until you can no longer see it or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else – you want a child, and then the child is here, and that happiness is so big, it begins to feel like nothing. Like just the air around you.
You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now. You don’t kill yourself when you’re sad because one day you might not be sad, and you might want to go surfing with a man you really like?
To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head – Warsan Shire
I won this book and I wasn’t sure if I would like it, but I did.
Here’s the description
Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.
Mama, I made it out of your home, alive, raised by the voices in my head.
With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.
The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.
These poems are about the immigrant and refugee experience. Gender violence, child abuse, but also the strength gained through female friendships. The poems are beautiful and moving, and very meaningful but also frustrating (why are these terrible things still happening?)
Miss A got this from Dymocks as an advanced reader copy. It languished on my pile until a friend read it, and then I finally dug it out. I have read the first one, and I think it is better if you read the first one before this one.
Here’s the blurb …
To most of Regency high society, forty-two-year-old Lady Augusta Colebrook, or Gus, and her twin sister, Julia, are just unmarried ladies of a certain age—hardly worth a second glance. But the Colebrook twins are far from useless old maids. They are secretly protecting women and children ignored by society and the law.
When Lord Evan—a charming escaped convict who has won Gus’s heart—needs to hide his sister and her lover from their vindictive brother, Gus and Julia take the two women into their home. They know what it is like to have a powerful and overbearing brother. But Lord Evan’s complicated past puts them all in danger. Gus knows they must clear his name of murder if he is to survive the thieftakers who hunt him. But it is no easy task—the fatal duel was twenty years ago and a key witness is nowhere to be found.
In a deadly cat-and-mouse game, Gus, Julia, and Lord Evan must dodge their pursuers and investigate Lord Evan’s past. They will be thrust into the ugly underworld of Georgian gentlemen’s clubs, spies, and ruthless bounty hunters, not to mention the everyday threat of narrow-minded brothers. Will the truth be found in time, or will the dangerous secrets from the past destroy family bonds and rip new love and lives apart?
These novels are adventurous romps. They’re full of period detail, but the heroines and heroes have modern sensibilities (at least as to how they view women). The villains are despicable and evil, and then there are the men (and women) who have extremely conservative views (Lord Duffy for instance).
There is an occasional reference to Austen – one of the characters is reading Sense and Sensibility and another character is given the false name of Miss Dashwood.
He glared at me. “I do not take my leave of you, Augusta. You will not receive my courtesy until you behave in the manner of a gentle woman and a sister.”
Very Lady Catherine De Burgh.
These are lots of fun and the end sets up the next one.
Sarah Perry mentioned reading this book and I was intrigued. I studied physics (as part of my Maths degree), but I am not in any way an expert.
Here’s the blurb …
This playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly explains Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
There are seven chapters, lessons,
The Most Beautiful of Theories
Quanta
The Architecture of the Cosmos
Particles
Grains of Space
Probability, Time and Heat of Black Holes
Ourselves
It’s beautifully written and I think easy to understand even if you don’t have a science background. If you have ever wondered about the nature of time, Einstein’s theories, space or atoms, then this book will fascinate you. Rovelli manages to translate complicated physics ideas into simple understandable language.
I bought this book pretty much as soon as it was published, and then in languished in my pile (pile of death my daughter calls it), but my random number generator selected it, and do I read it. Of the 60 books I have read so far this year, only 22 have been from the pile – I would like it to be half.
Here’s the blurb …
I like this London life . . . the street-sauntering and square-haunting.Virginia Woolf, diary, 1925
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf. They each alighted there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently. Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
Of the five women I knew two, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers. I haven’t read any of Sayer’s work, but I have just started listening to Whose Body?, which I am very much enjoying.
The other three women were amazing, H. D (Hilda Doolittle), Jane Harrison, and Eileen Power were amazing and it’s appalling that they are so little known today. Eileen Power, in particular, was extremely prescient, discussing the East West divide and how dangerous it could be, and how divisive the dividing of the muslim countries by the allies after world was one would be.
These were liberated women trying to live independent lives – equal to men. They were interested in learning, and creating a better world, and believed that female involvement (collaboration and co-operation) was the way to do that.
I am not sure where I first heard about this novel. Possibly from one of the many book newsletters I receive. It took a while to track down, but in the end it was in the ‘Three for the price of Two’ section at Dymocks.
Here’s the blurb …
Charming, talky, wryly funny, poignant and original – Rise and Shine is a love story, yes, but it’s a love story that happens ten years into a marriage, when somebody wants out.
This is a story about marriage. It is also a story about life and love and happiness and the absence of happiness and what we need to do to find it again.
It’s a story about hope, baking, making music, lemon trees, painting, love, divorce, dogs, the families we create for ourselves, and the heat of the Brisbane sun.
It’s a story about August and Noah.
It begins at the end.
Rise and Shine is an utterly surprising delight, a break-up tale that is also a love story; endearing, astringent, talky, wry, wise, uplifting and so original.
First, I love that this novel is set in Australia.
It is a grown-up romance. The issues are real and no one is a villain. I loved all of the relationships – Noah and August, August and Regina, August and Jasper, Jasper and Noah, Noah and Adam, and Noah and Jeff. The writing is beautiful, there are poignant moments and funny moments.
