Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You (2014)
By Celeste Ng

There's a missing teenager, a nearby lake, a dodgy-looking boyfriend and a dysfunctional family with secrets - sounds like a fairly simple murder mystery, right? But Everything I Never Told You was Amazon's Best Book of 2014 for good reason and it's much more than you might initially
expect.

For starters, the mystery of the missing girl (lost? kidnapped? imprisoned? murdered?) is resolved pretty quickly - in fact, it's never really a mystery at all. The very first paragraph of the book reads "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast".

Missing girl Lydia Lee is her parents' favourite child - intelligent, ambitious and popular, she seems the least likely of teenagers to disappear. As we learn more about Lydia and her family though, the events of that May morning begin to make a bit more sense. The Lees are a bit of a novelty in 1970's small-town Ohio - mother Marilyn is blonde and beautiful, with crushed dreams of a career in medicine; father James is American-born Chinese, a history professor who specialises in the particularly American institution of Cowboys. Lydia's older brother and younger sister have both been relegated to minor roles in the family as their parents pour all of their hopes and dreams into blue-eyed Lydia. For her mother, she is a hard-working, focused scientist with an assured future at medical school. For her father, she is young, vivacious and popular, surrounded by giggling blonde American friends. In reality though, Lydia may not be any of these things at all. After her daughter's disappearance, Marilyn snoops through Lydia's diary to find clues, only to find that every single page is blank.

Everything I Never Told You is a book full of secrets, mysteries and misunderstandings. First and foremost is the mystery of Lydia's disappearance, but there are also secrets between Marilyn and James, the unexplained disappearance (and then re-appearance) of Marilyn from the family a few years earlier, the reason for the complete absence of grandparents from the children's lives, older brother Nathan's secretive ambitions and younger sister Hannah's secret stash of stolen objects. The narrative moves back and forward in time through the 1960s and 1970s, following various members of the family and adding layer upon layer of complexity to the characters and the relationships between them. Running beneath it all is an undercurrent of racism and misunderstanding - there are no other mixed-race families around and it's a time and place where it's still perfectly acceptable to refer to the Lee family as "Orientals". Following Lydia's disappearance, the local newspaper runs a story headed "Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place" and it seems to be widespread opinion that her disappearance is due to her unfortunate ethnic background.

America - not always particularly accepting of the "Orientals"

It's a beautifully-constructed portrait of a unique family, with characters so well-written and complex that they feel completely real. There are elements of suspense in Everything I Never Told You, as the story builds to the final revelation of exactly what happened to Lydia - but there's so much more to the book than that. Ultimately, all of the character development along the way means that you feel very strongly about and for the Lee family, so that ultimately the final twist has much more impact than it might otherwise have done. It is fantastically well done, and Amazon may well be right in choosing this as the Best Book of 2014; it would be hard to pick a better one.

10/10

Room

Room (2010)
By Emma Donoghue

Apparently inspired by the real-life case of Josef Fritzl, Room is the story of a woman, kidnapped at age 19 and then kept captive in a tiny shed for seven years. Imprisoned, emotionally abused and repeatedly raped, the woman gives birth to her kidnapper's child alone in her prison and is left to raise him on her own, in one small room. Her jailer punishes insubordination by turning cutting off the electricity or by leaving her without food for days at a time. He tells her "I don't think you appreciate how good you've got it here... Plenty girls would thank their lucky stars for a setup like this"
So, not exactly a feel-good book, right? It sounds like a horribly dark, depressing novel that nobody would voluntarily read. Except that Room is narrated by the woman's five-year-old son and through Jack's eyes, things don't seem quite so dark.

To Jack, the "Room" they're imprisoned in is his entire world and Ma is his family. They have comfortable, predictable routines - Phys Ed, Orchestra, Labyrinth, Bath, Hum - they watch TV (but only occasionally because "it rots our brains") and read books and play games. Jack has no idea that Ma is being held against her will; to Jack, imprisonment in Room is just unremarkable, everyday life.

Room starts with Jack's fifth birthday, when Ma tries to explain to him that there's a world outside of their Room. This is a fairly crazy idea to Jack, who struggles to wrap his mind around the idea of something more than his tiny prison home - "When I was a little kid, I thought like a little kid," he says, "but now I'm five I know everything".  So begins a whole new chain of events as Jack and Ma begin plotting their escape. 

The deeply creepy house of Josef Fritzl, inspiration for the room in Room

Jack's narration provides a unique perspective on events - he doesn't quite understand most of what's happening around him and he sometimes embroiders his stories so that things don't make a lot of sense and as a reader, you find yourself not quite understanding what's happening either. Throughout the story of Jack and Ma's imprisonment, Room builds a claustrophobic sense of paranoia and suspense right up to the heart-in-your-throat panic of the pair's escape attempts. Jack is insulated from the nastier aspects of his environment because he doesn't understand them and this helps the reader as well, insulating you from what could be a horrible, depressing novel and instead making it suspenseful, fascinating and very readable.

At times, Jack's narration verges on jarringly infantile - he seems to be pretty smart for five (he can read and write) but his language is that of a much younger child. For example, "We have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back on her saucer on Dresser... I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus". This isn't how most five-year-olds speak and it grated on me to start with, but when you stop and think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Jack has spent all of his five years in one small room, with one other person and a warped view of the world. It seems right that he should be a unique mixture of intellectually-advanced and developmentally-delayed at the same time. It should be annoying as all hell, but it actually works.

Room is a memorable, powerful novel that manages to transform an awful story into something exceptional. Highly recommended.

9/10

The Bees

The Bees (2014)
by Laline Paull

This book is completely different to anything I've ever read before. And I do read quite a lot.
Basically, The Bees is a story about, well, bees. It follows a year in the life of a bee hive and OH MY GOD I had no idea of the kind of crazy, brutal, terrifying Orwellian society that exists inside a beehive.

The protagonist, Flora 717 is born into the lowest class of worker bees (the sanitation caste) and narrowly avoids immediate execution due to her differences - she is "excessively large" and "obscenely ugly" and as the bee police say, "Deformity is evil. Deformity is not permitted". Flora is instead taken away by a priestess from the high-ranking Sage caste and put to work in the hive nursery, among other workers from higher castes, as part of a "private experiment". This is great news for Flora, as her lowly caste are normally not permitted in such important roles and instead spend their days cleaning up corpses and disinfecting areas where the (completely disgusting) male bees have been. Still, the future's not exactly bright for Flora, as the Sage sisters are constantly snooping over her shoulder and they are scary - cold, totalitarian and merciless.

All looks pretty innocent, right? IT'S NOT!

There are references throughout The Bees to concepts we all vaguely remember from school - worker bees, drones and the Queen; beeswax and honey and Royal Jelly; worker bees gathering food for the hive; bees "dancing" as a form of navigation - but I don't remember it all seeming quite so creepy before. The Bees reads like post-apocalyptic sci-fi about a crazed, classist, uber-religious society (very similar to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), but it's also clearly based on solid research, reflecting the true-life behaviours that really happen in beehives every day. My next-door neighbours have a beehive. I will never look at it in quite the same way again.

There are vicious beatings and beheadings on a regular basis. The "Fertility Police" roam the hive at will, spreading terror and tearing workers limb from limb whenever they choose. The hive is under constant threat from those they call "the Myriad" - predators including wasps, spiders, rodents and humans, all of whom will destroy the meticulously constructed hive to steal the bees' carefully guarded honey. There is thinly veiled tension between competing clan groups in the hive and there is constant irritation caused by the slobbish, uncouth male drones (who also provide a little comic relief in a novel that's otherwise fairly dark). Changes in the landscape around the hive mean that food is becoming scarce and to make matters worse, winter is just around the corner.
I honestly do not know how much of the detail in The Bees is scientifically correct and how much is author creation, but every detail that I googled (what? the workers eat the drones' penises?! surely not!) turned out to be disturbingly correct, so I'm assuming that the bulk of the detail in The Bees is true to life. It is quite literally keeping me awake at night to think that the little beehive next door is housing this kind of terrifying society.

This is a photo of worker bees throwing a particularly useless drone to his death. This really does happen. I checked.

It is certainly unusual to find a novel based around a cast of non-human characters and I don't think I've ever read a book where the characters are all insects (outside of kids' picture books). Author Laline Paull handles this masterfully - somehow it never seems weird that Flora is a bee. She is relatable and likable as a character, and even her unusual motivations (Accept, obey, serve is the bees' mantra and Flora is utterly dedicated to serving her hive) are understandable in context of the very complex, rule-based society of the hive. The bees communicate largely through scent, vibrations and their antennae, with the Hive Mind playing a large role - these are all concepts that should be very odd and alien to human readers, but somehow this is all perfectly understandable. To be able to show your reader their world from the point of view of a completely different creature is a very impressive achievement.

Never gimmicky or cutesy, The Bees is a fantastic insight into the world of bees and a compulsive read. Absolutely outstanding.

9/10

All The Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See (2014)
By Anthony Doerr

While I'm not normally big on historical fiction (I've been trying to read The Luminaries for six months and am still on page 6...), I do have a bit of a soft spot for books set in World War 2. There's just something about that period that's fascinating and terrifying and so scarily recent - let's just say I have read an awful lot of these books. Some of them are fantastic (like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) but you'd think it would be getting a bit tricky by this point in time to find a unique spin on an era that's been written about so many times already. All The Light We Cannot See is a complex, absorbing novel set in World War 2, which manages to bring something different to the telling of a very well-known story.

The story follows two quite different characters. Marie-Laure is a young blind girl in Paris, who lives with her doting father: a locksmith who works at the Museum of Natural History and makes tiny models of the world so that Marie-Laure can learn to navigate by touch. The same age as Marie-Laure but far away in rural Germany, Werner is an impoverished orphan with a talent for repairing and building shortwave radios. As the story goes on, the war impacts both of their lives in quite different ways. Marie-Laure is relocated to the new, unfamiliar town of St-Malo where she can no longer confidently find her way around with the help of her father's models. Werner is snapped up by the Nazis for his engineering talents and sent to an elite military training academy. The two storylines follow quite different directions, but the two characters are linked through a series of coincidences (for example, a young Werner listens obsessively to a children's radio programme about science; the scientist who made this programme is Marie-Laure's grandfather) and eventually they are brought together in St-Malo in the final days on the German occupation.

Anthony Doerr's writing style in All The Light We Cannot See is unusually poetic - it's rich and descriptive and a little heavy at times. For example: "His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers" or "She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog." Some of it is quite beautifully worded, but there is a lot of it and it could get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. However, the book is quite cleverly structured with some very short chapters (often as short as one or two pages) interspersed among the longer ones. Breaking the narrative up in this way provides a bit of breathing space and means that the book is still very readable, despite its complexity and wordiness.

Anthony Doerr - he's pretty good with words. Probably why he won a Pulitzer Prize that time.

The narrative moves back and forward in time, with a number of different themes and additional storylines woven through the novel. The idea of light comes up again and again - the radio broadcasts that Werner is so fond of, speak at length about the way that waves of light move through space as well as human perception of those light waves and the way that the human brain can create light within darkness: ""The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children", says the voice. "It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with colour and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?""
This idea is applied obviously to Marie-Laure's world but also to the metaphorically dark times the characters are living in and the moments of hope and light that somehow survive... And this is just the start; there are a number of complicated themes brought to light (excuse the pun) in this novel, which should make it unreadably complex and overly literary but somehow it's still absorbing and interesting and very readable.

All The Light We Cannot See is beautifully written but it's also a stirring war story about two unique and likeable characters. It's really a great read and much more than just another WW2 historical novel.

9/10

The Kind Worth Killing

The Kind Worth Killing (2015)
by Peter Swanson

Imagine that you're reading a book and everything is perfectly fine and reasonably entertaining but you're pretty comfortable that you know where things are going... Then out of nowhere, things change. And then they change again, and again, and the book is suddenly much more interesting than you thought it would be. The Kind Worth Killing is another in the recent run of dark thrillers with a domestic bent (think Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train and Her) but it offers a new and unique spin on the genre and it's really quite cleverly done.

Delayed at Heathrow airport on his way home to Boston, wealthy businessman Ted meets fellow American, Lily. After several drinks, the two get talking and Ted reveals he's recently discovered that his wife Miranda is cheating on him. After a few more drinks, Ted and Lily hatch a plan to kill Miranda. After all, as Lily puts it, "Truthfully, I don't think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing".

As it turns out, Lily is a little more complicated than she seems and she has a very unique take on life with a remorseless eye-for-an-eye attitude and an alarming capacity for violence. More details from Lily's past emerge as the story develops and her unexpected interest in killing Ted's wife starts to make more sense. Things between Ted and Miranda are also a bit less straightforward than you might expect, with further complications and twists cropping up (and the body count mounting) with every chapter.

I felt like we needed another picture, so here's author Peter Swanson.

With each chapter, the narrative switches between characters and includes multiple flash-backs to further colour the reader's understanding of the characters and the connections between them. Just when you start to get a good feel for the direction of the story, a new piece of information is revealed and the narrative changes direction again. Some of the plot twists are less subtle than others but some of them are fabulous and the overall effect is to create a gripping, suspenseful story where you're never quite sure who are the bad guys and who are the good guys.

Lily is a great character - she's intelligent and crafty and completely without mercy. She's basically an awful person, but somehow you find yourself sympathising with Lily and hoping that things turn out well for her. The other characters are less unique, however. Ted is a very straightforward, slightly dull husband who seems a little bit gormless for someone who's meant to be a successful businessman. Miranda is basically just Jessica Rabbit brought to life and her handyman boyfriend is big, dumb and not particularly memorable.

Miranda and her boyfriend are about as complex as these two.

Ultimately though, this is a fairly minor complaint. The Kind Worth Killing is a great read. It's clever, thrilling and very enjoyable.

8/10

Euphoria

Euphoria (2014)
By Lily King

I took an introductory anthrolopology class in my first year at university. To be honest, I wasn't particularly interested in any of it and have since forgotten pretty much everything we covered in that class. I do, however, have a vague memory of Margaret Mead. Controversial and pioneering, she published ground-breaking research following her time spent living amongst the tribes of the South Pacific. From memory, a lot of this was later discredited and her research fell out of favour as new methods of anthropological study were popularised.
So I did kind of know about Margaret Mead, but I can't claim to have had any particular interest in finding out more about her. Having read Lily King's novelisation of her relationships in Euphoria, however, I am now really, really keen to learn more.

In 1933, Margaret Mead was conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea with her second husband (fellow anthropologist Reo Fortune) when they came across, and then began working with a third anthrologist (and soon to become Mead's third husband) Gregory Bateson. Lily King takes this real-life situation as her inspiration in Euphoria, a novel about controversial American anthropologist Nell Stone and her fellow-anthropologist husband Fen, who are conducting fieldwork in Papua New Guinea when they come across and then begin working with a third anthropologist, Andrew Bankson. Clearly, there are some fairly strong similarities between Euphoria's setup and the real-world situation between Mead, Fortune and Bateson - even the names are similar. I don't know enough about Margaret Mead to say whether the similarities end there or whether there are further plot points inspired by real-life events, but taken on its own merits as a novel inspired by Margaret Mead's life, Euphoria is a fascinating read.

Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune & Gregory Bateson in 1933.

In Euphoria, Lily King creates a completely convincing world, pre-World War 2, when there are still huge areas of the world unexplored and new information to be learned every day about the new societies being discovered. Anthropology is a science in its infancy and Nell, Fen and Bankson are passionate researchers, exploring new frontiers. It's easy to be caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm of the time and place. The descriptions of the Tam people in Euphoria are equally compelling. I can only imagine the amount of research that went into this book, but the lifestyles, relationships and customs of the Tam and their idyllic tropical home; it's all so well-written and so detailed that it all feels very real.

Each of the three main characters has a very clear personality and each has a different approach to their research. Nell is all-embracing, immersing herself completely in the local culture in an attempt to understand everything about the people. Fen is calculating and occasionally condescending, always with an eye on the prize in terms of digging out new, publishable findings (as well as more literal prizes at times). Bankson is fascinated but overwhelmed, with a suspicion that he is misunderstanding everything he observes. Each of the three also brings their own pre-conceived ideas to their research, with each looking to confirm their own theories about the people they're studying and quick to discredit anything that doesn't fit. It's a great illustration of the way that anthropological study must have worked at the time - despite the very best of intentions, it's not really possible to be a completely objective observer, particularly when you're living amongst the people you're studying.

Anthropology - actually pretty interesting.

There is a lot more to Euphoria though than anthrolopogy and history - the complex relationships between the three characters create a real tension that builds throughout the novel, with the conflict mirrored by events within the Tam tribe and within other groups in Papua New Guinea. The three anthropologists start out with the best of intentions, but then follows marital conflict, new romance, violence, inter-tribal conflict, death and the euphoria of the title. The storyline is anything but boring.

I did not expect to particularly enjoy a book about anthropology, but Euphoria was fabulous. It even made me rethink previously held opinions about the dullness of anthropology. Highly recommended.

9/10.

All My Puny Sorrows

All My Puny Sorrows (2014)
By Miriam Toews

Sometimes it's good to know absolutely nothing about a book before you read it. I'm pretty sure that I would've avoided this book like the plague if I'd realised what it was about - if you were to summarise the plot of All My Puny Sorrows, it wouldn't sound like a particularly entertaining read.

All My Puny Sorrows is the story of Yoli (a dishevelled, twice-divorced and financially struggling writer with two teenaged kids) and her sister Elfrieda (gorgeous and wealthy, a successful concert pianist in a happy and stable marriage). Having grown up as misfits in a conservative Mennonite community, Elf and Yoli may be dissimilar but they're close and become even closer as Yoli stands by her sister through Elf's consistent and repeated suicide attempts. You see, despite her fabulous life, Elf just wants to die and there seems to be nothing her family can say or do that will change her mind. Through suicide attempts including wrist-slashing, bleach-drinking, starvation and pills, Yoli refuses to give up and dedicates herself to trying to save Elf's life. This is not a cheery story. This is not something I would've chosen to read, but I'm so very glad that I did.

I wasn't exactly sure what a Mennonite was, so I googled it. Apparently these are Mennonites.

This book should be awful and dark and depressing. Elf wants nothing but to die - she is hopelessly depressed and Yoli cannot seem to help or to understand, despite her best efforts. As Yoli puts it, "Can't you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?". Yoli is desperate to save her sister and Elf is just desperate to die. It's an awful situation, made even worse when you learn that author Miriam Toews wrote All My Puny Sorrows as a deeply personal story following the suicides of her own father and sister. But somehow, All My Puny Sorrows is joyful.
It's sweet and likeable and even laugh-out-loud funny at times.

All My Puny Sorrows is incredibly well-written. Both Elf and Yoli (as well as the many and varied members of their family) are such wonderfully written characters that they're inherently believable and understandable. Miriam Toews writes about the relationship between the two sisters with such insight and sensitivity that you empathise with both of them - Yoli's desperation to show Elf that life is worthwhile, but also Elf's need to have Yoli understand her death wish. It's truly remarkable.

The title comes from a Coleridge poem: "I too a sister had, an only sister - she loved me dearly, and I doted on her! To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows"

At one point, the sisters' mother complains about a book she's reading: "Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!". This is exactly what makes All My Puny Sorrows so good - one of the main characters is irredeemably sad but the book itself isn't really about that. It's also about all the other aspects of the characters' lives and the intricacies and joys of their relationships.

It's a beautifully written story that raises some very deep questions with compassion and a light touch. Highly recommended.

9/10