The Smell of Other People’s Houses – Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

The Smell of Other People's Houses - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

Can you picture flowers in a whisky bottle? I can; Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock did and this conjuring permeates the pages of this novel beautifully. It's her debut and my goodness....

Bird - Crystal Chan

Book Review: Bird by Crystal Chan

Review by M



...Bird, with a feather bookmark

Bird is a lovely and gently heartbreaking novel. It’s a fairly quick and easy read with big themes and a surprisingly pageturning plot.

Twelve year old Jewel was born on the day her brother, Bird, died by jump-flying off a cliff. It was all Grandad’s fault and he has never spoken since. Jewel is a good girl but try as she might, she feels unloved and unwanted by her family. And then she meets someone and things go a little topsy-turvy, secrets are revealed, ‘guppies’ are everywhere and tempers flare.

Woven through this solid story about grief are parallel threads about race, identity and spirituality. Jewel is mixed race/ethnicity (Jamaican-Mexican) and lives in a small town in Iowa, USA (whose population is not very Jamaican-Mexican). Her family have different religious beliefs, among themselves and in contrast to the local community. The novel gently explores questions of identity and belonging in both the familial and community contexts.

For anyone who has even fleetingly felt a little bit lonely (or unloved), Bird will resonate. And if you have never felt like this, it may help you empathise with others. Most of the characters get things wrong. Bird may appeal to David Almond fans.

I found it hard to put down and stayed up until the early hours to finish it. Tissues recommended.

I know they're more expensive and can be awkward to hold, but here are a few words in favour of the UK hardback: It’s nice to look at and lovely to touch. The hard cover is soft to touch and nice to stroke. It’s the ‘short’ size hardback which makes it easy to hold, easy to shelve and makes it look thicker than it really is. To my eye, this is charming and it’d probably be a good one for those newly confident readers who want to tackle a BIG THICK book.

Publication details: 30 January 2013, Tamarind, London, hardback

This copy: review copy from the publisher

Ghost Hawk - Susan Cooper

Ghost Hawk by Susan Cooper

Review by M

Ghost Hawk is an unusual, inspiring and sad story about two friends, a clash of cultures and ghosts. I loved it.

Little Hawk is a Pokanoket Indian. John is a British immigrant in America. They live different lives in different, and sometimes conflicting, cultures. A couple of chance encounters mark their friendship and seal both their fates. Coincidentally, at age eleven, they both go on different journeys. John’s journey becomes a story that he must keep secret or risk being branded a witch. The narrative combines both John and Little Hawk’s stories but is told just from Little Hawk’s point of view.

The friendship between Little Hawk and John is so vivid and beguiling, you can almost touch it. It is a fictional friendship that I will remember for a long time: in some ways, it gives the poignancy of Code Name Verity’s Maddie and Queenie’s relationship a run for its money.

A fantastical story about an unlikely and tricky friendship, Ghost Hawk is also a story about early British settlement in North America and how something as simple as living together – be you beast, human, or earth - can be so complicated and devastating. The novel is set in the mid 1650s around the time when the first British people started to settle in North America. It draws on a large amount of historical research and some of the subsidiary characters’ names are taken direct from history.

The first two sections of the novel are its strongest and my favourite. The first section is good and exciting and interesting and then – shockingly! - it changes. An anticipation for what is to come falls beautifully into place for the reader and the story starts to weave many strong threads together. The last few sections draw the stories to their necessary and neat closes.

Themes in the novel include the way we treat the earth: as a resource or as its own living entity; cultural clashes; colonialism; religion and beliefs; and friendship. There were plenty of lines in the novel that made me stop and think. Things like the need to extend warmth to those who live beyond the family. But, above all that, Ghost Hawk is glorious storytelling.

The tone of the novel is gentle and reminiscent of ThingsFall Apart. In many ways, it reads like a Things Fall Apart tale for current day children and pre-colonial America. The intertwined histories will also likely appeal to many fans of Nick Lake’s In Darkness. There is death and a few violent scenes (though not gratuitous or entertainingly enhanced) in Ghost Hawk but the graphic violence is not as vivid nor as sustained as In Darkness, making it more suitable for a younger audience too.

I added a ‘you should read this’ tag when I highly recommended this novel to Little M. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read for a long while. Whether you like history, epic adventure, great characters or light fantasy, this is an enthralling story whichever way you look at it.

 

Publication details: Bodley Head, 29 August 2013, London, hardback
This copy: received for review from the publisher

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Reviewed by M

I first read Things Fall Apart at university for African Literature. It was possibly the first novel I’d read that was written by a black African author. The novel recently reappeared on my bookshelves after bringing it back from my attic bookhaul earlier this year (some of you might recall this event!). What prompted me to read it now, however, was We Need New Names, a new and wonderful novel by NoViolet Bulawayo.

 

We Need New Names referred frequently to ‘things fall apart’and I was sure this was more than coincidence. Having read Things Fall Apart, I should have known....but I didn’t. So I reread it. Yes, it is more than coincidence.....

 

Things Fall Apart is a tragedy: a tragedy about an individual, a tragedy about a village and perhaps a tragedy about colonialism. Set in pre-colonial Nigeria, it tells the story of Okonkwo, a proud and successful member of his tribe. The novel describes the tribe’s way of life, their (almost) unflinching adherence to their religion and patriarchal values. However, the novel also introduces questions that cut right into how we perceive our own and other cultures. At the forefront of this are differences about individual will versus the will of the gods as well as group will, justice, and sorrow. What comes out most strongly in Things Fall Apart is the suggestion that without missionaries and further colonisation, the tribes, as any other group of people, would have developed in their own time and ways – who knows what our histories would look like if that had happened? Achebe makes it clear that individuals in Okonkwo’s village were starting to mumble about the ways some things were done: for example, killing people simply because the gods said so or abandoning twins. The novel makes an effort to point out that cultural interpretations vary even within countries and that what is an atrocity ‘here’ might not be considered an atrocity ‘there’.

 

It is a highly enjoyable and gently compelling re-read and I think I got much more out of it this time. The writing style is quiet and quite different to many contemporary novels and especially 'western' novels. Some people criticised Achebe for writing in English but I'm in the camp that thinks this was a far-reaching move and achievement for both literature and cultural thinking.

 

Comparatively then, how did I view Things Fall Apart and We Need New Names?

 

Things Fall Apart was first published in 1958 and is set in Nigeria just before colonial times (probably late nineteenth century), around the time that the first European missionaries moved in. We Need New Names was published in 2013 and is set in Zimbabwe and the USA post-2005. Both novels are written in English and their authors are both African by birth.

About halfway through Things Fall Apart, Ekwefi (one of Okonkwo’s wives) tells a story about a tortoise and the birds who have a feast in the sky. I think that NoViolet Bulawayo has borrowed from this little story and weaved it into We Need New Names. There are other scenes, images and thoughts in Things Fall Apart that make the two novels interesting for parallel reading most notably in how different groups of people (towns, tribes, nations, religions, races) respond to other cultures and about tolerating (or not!) their vastly different ways of life.

What both novels do well is to lay out the beautiful and the ugly nitty gritties that underpin the rules and regulations and daily functioning of specific communities and cultures. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is not the most sympathetic character and there are many views and actions that may grate on your personal worldview. And that’s the point. Covering a century of time, reading these two novels together is a wonderful experience. In some ways, it's a tragedy that  hundreds of years later, there are still so many overlaps.

A little heads up especially for younger readers: Susan Cooper’s Ghost Hawk is set in the USA and has many parallels with Things Fall Apart too. Adults who have an inclination towards comparative reading and discussion might want to check that out too.

 

Classics Club verdict

 

Things Fall Apart is also on our Classics Club challenge list. Little M and I have been drawing our own conclusions about what we think a 'literary' classic is. Of course, Things Fall Apart has its feet firmly planted in the African canon and has made tracks in European and American canons too. Our own 'canon' is more about whether we enjoyed some aspect of it enough to recommend it to readers from another generation. Things Fall Apart ticks the box for me.

 

My copy’s publication details: 1987, Heinemann African Writers Series, London, paperback