The Many Lives of Fitzwilliam Darcy - Beau North

September 16, 2016.

Three Stars

When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy’s marriage proposal, he goes to bed feeling devastated, with a plan to leave for London the following day to hide from his disgrace. However, unlike in Jane Austen’s original Pride and Prejudice, Darcy doesn’t wake up the next morning and carry on with his life, eventually clearing up the misunderstandings between himself and Elizabeth. Instead, he awakens to hear the maid singing the same song as they day before, and he soon realizes that he is reliving the previous day over again.

At first, Darcy is pleased because it is as if his proposal to Elizabeth never happened, so he can carry on without the embarrassment. He treats the day as a reprieve, and goes to bed happy – but when he wakes up, it is once again the same day. As the pattern repeats over many days, with the maid singing her song each morning, Darcy experiences the gamut of emotions, including a descent into madness and carelessness with his own life. He feels he is living a waking nightmare that he can never escape.

It is not until Darcy begins to think less of himself and more of fixing the problems he has created that he finds he may have hit on a solution to his recurring day. Selfish Darcy finally decides to take the initiative to make better choices and change for the better in his treatment of others, especially Elizabeth and the Bennet family, and he has infinite second chances to be the best man he can be.

The nuances of language and character are perfectly fitted to Austen’s original novel. This is good, solid fan fiction, but I don’t think it would succeed on its own. It relies too much on the original Pride and Prejudice source material to enforce the romantic aspects of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship – if you haven’t read the original, it is unlikely that you will recognize any spark of romance between the two of them here. This novel has very high ratings because it is so easy to transfer the fans’ love of the original onto this Darcy novel, but it cannot stand alone. However, judged as a companion novella, it is an interesting, clever idea and I think fans will love it.

I received this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

You Will Know Me - Megan Abbott

Little, Brown & Company, July 26, 2016.

Four Stars

Katie and Eric Knox have based their whole marriage on getting their talented gymnast daughter Devon into the Olympics. They have sacrificed their own careers, taken out a second mortgage on their home, and spent countless hours on the road, taking Devon to practices and competitions. It will all be worth it, because Devon is six weeks away from the competition that will make her an Elite gymnast, only steps away from the Olympic team. However, a sudden death could ruin all of Devon’s dreams.

Coach Teddy takes care of all the girls at his gym, including his wayward niece Hailey. When her boyfriend Ryan is killed in a hit and run car accident, Hailey suffers from a mental breakdown and begins harassing Devon. Katie, who thinks she knows everything about her daughter, can’t figure out what Devon has to do with it – but there are dark secrets swirling all around her. In the close-knit gymnastics community, rumours abound and loyalties are constantly shifting.

You Will Know Me is written from Katie’s perspective, which makes this different from Abbott’s other teen-centric novels. Her stories are about adolescents, but they are focused on very adult themes, so it is interesting to see this one told from a mother’s point of view. It is about the moments when a child leaves the shelter of home and becomes a separate person – a person that her mother does not even recognize. Katie always thinks the best of Devon, but even she isn’t sure what her daughter is capable of.

Katie was drawn to Ryan in life – his charismatic personality made her feel important in a way that she hadn’t since falling into the shadows of parenthood. After his death, Katie becomes almost obsessed with him – the crime itself, and how it has affected everyone around her. The microcosm of the gym shows the full desperation of desire and ambition, as embodied by young teenage girls. There is an overarching layer of dark foreshadowing, and creepy hints of what is to come.

Abbott is so fantastically manipulative, always providing new twists just when you think you have it all figured out. She makes you question how well you can know your own family – the people you are physically closest to, but who still hold so many secrets. Abbott’s genre has been called “girl-noir”, and it’s a fitting term – she is not as obvious as other suspense writers, making her novels a guilty pleasure with a measure of intelligence. She takes seemingly small, domestic situations and extrapolates them to the full extent of their darkness.

You Will Know Me was perfectly timed to coincide with the 2016 Rio Olympics – watching those powerful young gymnasts on tv gave me a mental image of what Devon and her peers were going through in this novel. It doesn’t even matter if you figure out who killed Ryan, because it is more about character and family dynamics. Once again, Abbott has used great writing to elevate a basic plot into perfection.

I received this book from Little, Brown & Company and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Lesser Bohemians - Eimear McBride

Hogarth – Crown Publishing, September 20, 2016.

Four Stars

McBride won the Baileys Women’s Prize for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and this novel is sure to be considered as well. The Lesser Bohemians is similar in theme and tone, but it is a fresh new story about a young girl finding her way in a big city for the first time. We are plunged immediately into the narrator’s mind, feeling her emotions on an instantly visceral level.

Eighteen-year-old Eily arrives in London for her first year as a drama student. She is filled with the usual hopes of fame and fortune, but she struggles to fit in with her peers. Finally, Eily starts to make friends and create a place for herself in the city, when she meets a much older man who turns everything upside down. Stephen, an established actor, is almost twice her age, but he is damaged in a way that resonates with Eily’s own past experiences. There is a darkness in both of them that provides them with an instant connection.

Stephen is handsome and charismatic, and there is a certain inevitability to their romantic relationship. They move quickly, and the innocence of Eily’s passion is in clear contrast to Stephen’s own sordid experiences – although she does not learn the full story until much later. This novel is most of all an examination of the forgiveness of love, in spite of the deeply flawed main characters.

McBride’s use of language is often difficult, as we are immersed inside Eily’s head. Her first person narration is made up almost entirely of Irish colloquial slang and odd, staccato punctuation. There are moments of clarity, but it is often way too much effort to read the quirky, slangy language. Eventually, I was able to get into the flow of words, and an almost poetic rhythm took over – but it took a long time to get there.

The writing starts to relax about halfway through, as if the author stopped trying so hard to make it difficult and clever. As we become immersed in Stephen’s story, I found myself increasingly caught up in the plot in a way that was lacking before. It was an interesting editorial choice to have Stephen tell his story to Eily over the course of one night – it’s risky because it might not have worked, but it was actually my favourite part of the novel, and it made Eily more sympathetic as well.

Stephen is clearly damaged and emotionally scarred. Eily’s childhood scars are not as clear, maybe because she has not fully dealt with them yet – that is likely why she is drawn to Stephen and his ability to accept his past. Stephen’s past is more obviously damaged and shocking – it is extreme, yet still believable. This novel is brutal and depressing, but it manages to find a sense of redemption in the end. Eily and Stephen experience the power of love to heal, and not just in a cheesy, Lifetime movie kind of way – their story is dark, gritty and passionately real.

I received this book from Hogarth – Crown Publishing and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Dhow House - Jean McNeil

Legend Press, September 15, 2016.

Four Stars

Rebecca is an English doctor, working at a field hospital in East Africa. She is a surgeon, treating Islamic extremists with the same care and respect as she does for the western soldiers. Because of the conflict in the region – and other circumstances we learn about later – Rebecca is forced to take time off from her work. She travels to her aunt and uncle’s house on the nearby Indian Ocean, where she will rest and recuperate with a family that she hardly knows.

After the stress of her post as a trauma surgeon in a war-torn region, Rebecca relaxes into the glamorous life of her family, enjoying cocktail parties and days on the beach. Her uncle is mostly away, busy with his financial career, and her aunt is distracted by her socialite circle. Rebecca spends much of her time with her enigmatic younger cousin Storm. He has grown up in the gilded expatriate lifestyle of his family, but they are suddenly threatened by the political climate. The white Africans living on the coast are in danger of increasing terror attacks, and Rebecca knows more about it than she is willing to admit to her family.

The novel removes at a slow pace, and it’s difficult to feel sympathy for Rebecca, regardless of everything she has been through. Her increasing intimacy with Storm is dark and dangerous, and even though she tries to protect her family, her very presence is a threat to them. Rebecca’s new friend Margaux grew up in east Africa, and her worldview is callous but truthful when she says, “There are fortunes to be made off poor people… [a]nd there are no rules here. Money makes the rules.” (Loc. 1370)

In her portrayal of the political climate, the author seems to be sympathetic to the white Africans, whose fortunes were made by exploiting others – as colonialism takes a downturn, they are losing their place in Africa. I don’t have a problem with her expressing her opinion, but I still would have liked to see other perspectives as well. Rebecca is a fairly strong character, but the others are pretty one-dimensional. I think this story had great potential, but it could have been expanded on further, especially some of the plot threads that were kind of abandoned. Overall, this was an intriguing, enjoyable novel that, despite of its flaws, was worth the read.

I received this book from Legend Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Conjoined - Jen Sookfong Lee

ECW Press, September 13, 2016.

Four Stars

Jessica has always admired her mother, Donna – she even became a social worker to follow in her footsteps, helping underprivileged and damaged children who are lost in the system. Now, Donna has just passed away, and Jessica and her father are struggling to clean out the cluttered house. Underneath the frostbitten packages of meat in the basement freezer, they make their most gruesome discovery – the bodies of two teenage girls, foster sisters who lived with the family and went missing in 1988.

Casey and Jamie Cheng were two troubled and wild girls from Vancouver’s Chinatown. Growing up in the city’s dangerous Downtown East Side, the girls struggled to cope with their overworked immigrant mother, their alcoholic father, and Casey’s affair with a much older man. After a violent crisis at home, the sisters are moved into Donna’s foster home, where they act maliciously and try to sabotage Donna’s efforts to help them.

Through flashbacks, we see Jamie and Casey’s upbringing, culminating in the reason they were taken from their home and placed in the foster system. Although their behaviour towards Donna is atrocious, it’s easy to see how it was caused by circumstances beyond their control. The girls’ loving mother was doing her best to raise them, but her struggle to put food on the table is the plight of many on the Downtown East Side. Donna’s good intentions are representative of a social system that swallows up girls like Casey and Jamie Cheng, without accounting for their differences.

Donna is of course the prime suspect for the deaths of the Cheng sisters, especially since she claimed that she never saw them again after they disappeared from her home. To clear her mother’s name, Jessica embarks on an investigation of the Cheng’s past, and she ends up getting romantically involved with the police detective, at the expense of her current relationship. This side plot is a bit superfluous, but it does speak to Jessica’s growth as she becomes more independent in the wake of her mother’s death.

The mystery of the girls’ disappearance propels the novel forward, but it is not its main focus. The Conjoined is more about the characters’ development as they are affected by topical social issues. It is also an exploration of our social systems and their effects on disenfranchised people such as the Chengs – for immigrant families, assimilation into foster care is not always a good solution. It is often ineffective, and sometimes even harmful to the children’s well-being. The Cheng sisters are removed from their mother’s care based on a generic checklist that did not work in their favour, and as Jessica investigates them through her work, she realizes that she is part of a broken system.

The Conjoined is dark and uncomfortable, and it forces us to confront a bleak chapter in Vancouver’s history – a time when women frequently went missing from the Downtown East Side. The novel ended suddenly at a climactic moment, which underlines the message that it doesn’t matter how the girls died – it matters why. Although this is a mystery, especially as the Cheng sisters’ childhood connects to Donna’s, it is most of all a well-crafted novel about people who feel real.

I received this book from ECW Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.