A Girl Named Tommi

THE GIRL WITH THE LOUDING VOICE – Abi Daré

“This flower be the brown of a wet leaf that suffer a stamping from the dirty feets of a man that forget the promise he make to his dead wife.”

Abi Daré’s debut The Girl with the Louding Voice (Dutton 2020) has been on my TBR for ages. I was admittedly a bit reluctant to read it because of the comparisons to Educated, which I disliked immensely. My concerns proved misplaced as this fictional novel sang with an authenticity and beauty that was woefully lacking in the comparison work.

The novel opens with Adunni learning she’s to be married off to Morufu because her family needs the money. Her mother had promised her she’d be able to continue her education and not be married, but her mother died, and promises were broken. Still a child herself, she will be the third wife to a man with a daughter her own age, and she will be expected to bear him sons.

When tragedy strikes, Adunni is able to escape. She finds herself taken to Lagos and given employment as a domestic. But life is not easy there, either. Big Madam is abusive, and the work is hard. Worse, Big Daddy has an insatiable desire for young girls. But Adunni is determined to continue her schooling and change her destiny, and this is just a hiccup in her plans.

Adunni is a light in the darkness. She brims with hope and happiness even in the darkest of situations. She also attracts the lightness in others, like Kofi at Big Madam’s house and Morufu’s second wife, Khadija, and she allows that light to protect and lead her.

Adunni’s determination to fulfill her dreams despite what appear insurmountable odds makes her one of my favorite protagonists, and the clarity and bravery in her voice, the songs tinged in joy, make this novel so impactful.

Read this book.

2023 Booker Prize Longlist Predictions

Booker season is officially upon us. With the longlist being announced on 8/1, I decided to try my hand at predicting this year’s possible selections. As a reminder, eligible books were published in the UK and Ireland between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023. After reviewing eligible books and information about the panel of judges, I narrowed my own Booker 13 longlist prediction. It’s heavy on repeat authors because Booker does like a repeat.

DEMON COPPERHEAD – Barbara Kingsolver

This is a no-brainer. It’s already won the Pulitzer and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. I’ve read and absolutely loved it. One of my favorite books. Ever.

2. VICTORY CITY – Salman Rushdie

Also a bit of a no-brainer as Rushdie is a Booker darling. He’s been nominated 7 times, and won for MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, which also won The Booker of Bookers in 1994 and the Best of the Booker in 2008.

3. THE WREN, THE WREN – Anne Enright

2007 winner and longlisted in 2015

4. BIRNAM WOOD – Eleanor Catton

2013 winner

5. THE EAST INDIAN – Brinda Charry

I loved this novel. The nod to Shakespeare and giving a voice to the first Indian to arrive in Colonial America makes me think this stands a chance.

6. THE NEW LIFE – Tom Crewe

Debut novel. Historical fiction, 1890s London. Oozes Booker type. I’ve read it.

7. CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Debut novel. This biting look at the penal system is a strong contender I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I think this panel will.

8. THE COVENANT OF WATER – Abraham Verghese

This book is just an exquisite example of storytelling. It’s well-deserving.

9. THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS – Claire Fuller

While she’s not been longlisted for the Booker Prize, Fuller is no stranger to the awards. And this is one unexpected and beautiful pandemic novel.

10. WANDERING SOULS – Cecile Pin

Debut. Long-listed for the Women’s Prize. Very bookery. (I read it and loved it.)

11. RIVER SING ME HOME – Eleanor Shearer

Debut. Very bookery. On my TBR.

12. THE MANIAC – Benjamin Labatut

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. Seems bookery.

13. LOSING THE PLOT – Derek Owusu

Just a feeling.

Honorable mentions on my prediction list

THE FRAUD – Zadie Smith

SOLDIER SAILOR – Claire Kilroy

THE PASSENGER – Cormac McCarthy

THE HOUSE OF DOORS – Tan Twan Eng (not sure if he’s eligible because he was a judge for the International Prize, so I’m leaving him here)

BANYAN MOON – Thao Thai

“He’s polish without substance, and I’ve hitched my wagon to nothing but a handful of glitter.”

“The living must trespass on the dead; everything left behind a gift, an inheritance, no matter how unintentional.”

Thao Thai’s debut Banyan Moon (Mariner Books 2023) is a heart hug of a family saga. From the 1960s Vietnam to present day swamplands of Florida, the novel gives us three strong-willed and fiercely independent women – Minh, her daughter Hurong, and Hurong’s daughter, Ann. Their love for each other is barbed, stinging themselves and those who dare get too close, but they are furiously loyal even if uncertain on how to hold each other without it hurting. The novel is a raw look at the hardships and realities of motherhood – the disconnection and attempts to reconnect – the generational trauma carried like whispered secrets in their blood.

Ann’s picture-perfect world far away from the chaos of her childhood home has started to tarnish, and she is faced with choices that will impact not only her, but her unborn child. With those choices still lingering, she receives the call that her beloved grandmother has died. The death and her grief allow her to hit pause on her relationship with Noah and the pregnancy – she goes home.

Hurong has always been jealous of Minh’s relationship with Ann. Ann received the best parts of Minh, and Minh received Ann’s love and loyalty; Hurong always felt like an outsider. But now Minh’s gone, and whatever glue she may have used to hold Hurong and Ann together, however fragile it was, is now gone. As adults, can they mend a decades old hurt?

Minh floats in and out of the novel, as an imposing grandmother, a shy teenager in love, a fierce woman who will do what it takes to get her children passage to America, an angry mother, keeper of secrets, a ghost trying to mend an inherited hurt.

While reading, I found myself reminded repeatedly of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magical – the comparison gave the novel a familiar scent, but the taste was salt on citrus. A more recent comparison would be The Fortunes of Jaded Women, but where that novelfailed, Banyan Moon, with its similar themes, soared.

Read this novel.

THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS – Claire Fuller

“This is grief, Neffy… It is awful and terrible, and it will never truly leave, but you will learn to live with it, and you have to let me help you.”

I didn’t anticipate having a pandemic book framed by a woman’s teetering-into-inappropriate relationship with an octopus as one of my top reads of the year – but here we are. Color me surprised. I picked Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals (Tin House 2023) as my Aardvark selection because of the cover, and because I wanted to add it to my literary science fiction catalog. (But it was mostly the cover.) It’s my most surprising read of the year. What follows will include spoilers. That’s the only warning I’m going to give.

Last chance.

Marine biologist Neffy has volunteered to be part of the first human trial of a vaccine for a virus that is decimating the world. Fuller wrote at least a portion of the novel while in lockdown, and much of that particularly early Covid fear glimmers in the pages. And while the pandemic is a constant throughout the novel and more than just a plot device, it’s not the heart of the novel or the main plot. This is a novel about memories, about family and love and choices and responsibilities to those we seek to love, to tame, to own.

The bulk of the novel takes place over a little more than two weeks. Neffy is sequestered from the other volunteers and well taken care of. She’s given the vaccine and then given the virus that no one has survived. Neffy becomes extremely ill. Someone is putting food and water in the room, but she realizes something isn’t right. When she wakes, another volunteer is in her room. He explains that the trial stopped following her reaction and all the staff fled along with some of the volunteers. There’s no internet, no cell service, and the electricity is only thanks to the generator. And they’re running out of food. With this virus-stricken and ghost town of a world as the backdrop, Neffy will be forced to make choices that impact not only herself but the survival of the other volunteers who did not receive the vaccine.

Neffy fills her days with writing letters to a wild-caught octopus she’d once cared for during its captivity – the octopus she released into the wild, was terminated for, and the reason she volunteered; she needed the money to pay the debt to the aquarium for the cost of the animal. Between these letters and the memory walking she does through a device developed by another volunteer called the Revisit, we meet Neffy not as the 27-year-old who volunteers, but as all the parts, the jagged and raw ones and the happy ones, that define her. Her memories show her continued guilt and grief over her beloved Baba. Neffy’s father died, and she couldn’t save him. He became sick before the virus. She volunteered to give him a kidney but learned she had only one. There were then discussions regarding using her womb to grow a kidney, an experimental procedure, but her father dies before she tells him she’s agreed to do it. Her grief and guilt tinges everything she does.

While the virus, memories of her father, and her relationships with marine life might seem disjointed to some, I found the novel snuggly held within the powerful and fragile arms of an octopus – the arms that feel, and taste and regrow. How Fuller weaves Neffy’s story is brilliant, and Neffy – the heartbroken girl who couldn’t save her father, and who maybe saved or maybe killed an octopus, finds the courage to save herself and quite possibly the world.

The novel jumps forward a couple of years before ending on year 54 following Neffy’s receipt of the vaccine. It ends with hope. And jazz. And memories.

Read this novel.

VANISHING MAPS – Cristina García

“Names were destiny, I said. So, why pick one with a history of suffering?”

“Our pasts were littered with heartbreak’s debris. Were our fates a family curse? Or were we lucky to have known passion at all?”

In 1992, Cristina García’s debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was published. The novel focused primarily on the del Pino women – Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, and Pilar and their fractured borders within a volatile Cuba – and it provided a crash course in the Cuban revolution while also translating any non-English words. It was a very polite novel for its readers, despite covering very harsh realities. Over 30 years and several novels later, García returns to the del Pino family with Vanishing Maps (Knopf 2023). The novel globe trots from Havana to the States, to Berlin, and to Moscow. This time, it’s a sink or swim approach for the reader – smatterings of Spanish, German and Russian are not translated, and the scars of the Revolution are loudly present but the impact and resulting diaspora are not really explained. I like the firm, chin up and steely eyes approach of the novel – the one that says, “you should know these things already.” I would recommend reading Dreaming in Cuban first to get a better understanding of these women, their scars, and the paths they choose.

Dreaming in Cuban opens with Celia scanning the ocean for adversaries. Twenty years have passed since we last saw this family, and Vanishing Maps opens with Celia’s grandson, Ivanito, performing as La Ivanita to her adoring fans in Berlin. It’s a different world, but much remains the same. Celia is still a staunch supporter of the Revolution and El Lider. Lourdes, now living in Miami, has involved herself in politics; involving herself in the matter of a young Cuban boy whose custody battle is modeled after that of Elián González. Pilar is in her 40s and a mom, but she’s still as angry and punk as she’d been in her youth – it’s just redirected; she’s still trying to find where she belongs.

The heart of this novel, however, is with Ivanito. As a young boy, Ivanito was whisked away from Cuba against Celia’s wishes – Cuba was going to eat him whole or his mother was going to kill him – she’d already tried once. His mother’s ghost is now haunting him, trying to convince him to join her in the afterlife – the smell of cigarettes and gardenias an assault on his senses as he wonders if her madness is now his. When Pilar arrives with Azul, it couldn’t have been at a better time. She saves him twice – once in her involvement in getting him out of Cuba and again in Berlin when the walls are closing in.

Vanishing Maps is a story of the children of the diaspora. Of Ivanito, Pilar, Luz, Milagro, Irina and Tereza. It’s a world where “the boys became men who lost their way while the women soldiered on.” And while we see Ivanito losing his way, we also see how La Ivanita soldiers on. It’s a story of family without borders, of motherhood, of loss, and of blood, separated by secrets and circumstance, becoming a found family.

Read this book.

* A huge thanks to Knopf for sending me this finished copy!

A DAY OF FALLEN NIGHT – Samantha Shannon

“We will all be stories one day, and I’d want someone to believe we existed. Wouldn’t you?”

When I found out Samantha Shannon was returning to the world of The Priory of the Orange Tree, I was already smitten; she is a special author to me because I’ve been along for the ride since the beginning when the first few of The Bone Season were sold at auction. And while I love Paige and the world she’s created in that series, The Roots of Chaos claimed my heart. A Day of Fallen Night (Bloomsbury 2023), set centuries before the events of The Priory of the Orange Tree, is a slow burn of an epic fantasy, with dazzling world-building and a large cast of characters that are so beautifully entwined and depicted, it never feels crowded. I loved every word of this 866-page novel. Every last one.

Tunuva is a sister of the Priory. She’s spent decades training to fight “wyrms” following the Mother’s defeat of The Nameless One. In her five decades of training, she’s never seen a wyrm. The sisters are mages, fed by a magical orange tree, and hidden away from the rest of the world. The women are the warriors, trained for battle, while the men perform the more traditionally female roles. Love and family come second to loyalty to the Order. Tunuva will find her loyalties to the Order and to her lover, a woman on track to be Prioress, tested when the Dreadmount erupts and wyrms begin to set the world ablaze.

Dumai has been raised a godsinger, worshipping the dragons that terrify parts of the world. In her bones is an old light, a connection to the sleeping beasts that need to awaken. She’s also the secret heir to the Rainbow Throne, and secrets don’t always stay hidden. Her blood is from lines favored by the gods and her people need her in the battle against the wyrms. Dumai must come to terms with who she is and forge her own destiny, and she’ll do it on the back of a dragon.

Glorian, heir to the Queendom of Inys and rightful heir to Hroth, is a link in a chain. Her kingdom believes that her ancestor defeated The Nameless One and that the continuation of this line is the only thing keeping The Nameless One from returning. Each queen births a female daughter, only one, that is a carbon copy of herself. Generation to generation, they are born to breed more than lead as the link must not be broken. One of the powerful wyrms, hellbent on destruction, has his eyes set on breaking the link.

Wulf was found in the haithwood as a child and adopted. Rumors have swirled that he is a witch, but the King of Hroth, husband to Queen Sabran of Inys, has much respect for Wulf’s fathers and brings the boy under his wing, where he grows in his loyalty. As the world erupts in chaos, he finds himself forced to confront his own past and the fears that keep him awake at night.

The world Shannon has built is one that screams and sings in duality. Fire and ice. Dragon riders and dragon slayers. Siden and sterren. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, and it soars like the dragons when it centers on the relationships between women and in its many seasons of motherhood. It’s also cruel in its chaos, but it’s most certainly magic – the kind that leaves fire under your skin and stars in your eyes.

Read this book.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN – Molly Lynch

Molly Lynch’s The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult 2023) was an unsatisfying but thankfully quick read. Billed as an exploration of motherhood during an ecological collapse, I was expecting more of a developed and likable even if morally grey character in Ada. Unfortunately, I didn’t care what happened to her, why it happened to her, or if it was going to happen again. I also didn’t care about her son or her husband, or if her marriage would survive her breakdown/breakthrough. I was completely disassociated from the book, and much like the women and mothers of the novel were just walking away from their lives and disappearing, I was tempted to walk away from the novel.

While reading, it reminded me of two novels – The New Wilderness, which was also a miss for me, and When Women Were Dragons, which was a homerun. Much like Agnes in Cook’s novel, the women in The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman are becoming feral and motherhood is prominent. The plot is a lot like Barnhill’s beautiful novel, only it’s set in the present day instead of the 1950s, and instead of turning into dragons, the women are essentially walking away from motherhood to rejoin Mother Earth.

A big thanks to the publisher for sending this finished copy.

*A quick note on this review: this book isn’t my cup of tea, but it is well written and developed. I typically don’t enjoy ecological/psychological thrillers – and my preferences are just that, mine. If you loved The New Wilderness, you would likely enjoy this slimmer but similar tale.

THE LAST RUSSIAN DOLL – Kristen Loesch

“She stood, with her doll beneath her arm, and she walked, across the blood-red floor, over her blood-red siblings, through the blood-red door, out of the blood-red house, all the way to the blood-red river. She forgot to wash her blood-red hands.”

Spanning the period from 1916 to 1993, Kristen Loesch’s The Last Russian Doll (Berkley 2023) covers an intense Russian history, from the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, to the Great Purge and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, but that history takes a backseat to the romance between the dashing rebel and the married royal. It’s an epic love story, dressed up like a family saga.

Reminding me of Everything’s Illuminated, the novel tells two stories – the intense love affair between Valentin Andreyev and Antonina (Tonya) Nikolayevna, and that of Rosie – a young woman studying at Oxford who joins a professor in Moscow as a research assistant. Rosie has ulterior motives; she wants to find the man who killed her father and sister, forcing her and her mother to flee their homeland a decade prior. (The sections are uneven; and Rosie’s quest to find a murderer is short-changed.)

At the center of the novel are porcelain dolls. Rosie’s mother collects them, and they are one of the few things she fled Russia with. After her mother dies, Rosie realizes items have been placed inside the heads of the dolls: scraps of paper carrying stories from Russia into England. The stories, the fairytales that had fed her childhood, are just as important as the dolls. Dolls first show up in 1917, when Tonya’s husband, a man who treats her as little more than a pretty trinket, gifts her a beautiful and terrifying porcelain doll made in her image.

I wish the history and some of the characters had been given more flesh; the romance is very large and defined, but that love story isn’t what’s carrying the plot, and when the plot graces the pages and the novel wraps up, it’s unsatisfying because it’s skeletal. Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It’s a perfectly okay book, especially for a debut, and better than a lot of what’s being published. But do I still wish for 150-200 more pages? Absolutely.

THE GARDEN OF SECOND CHANCES – Mona Alvarado Frazier

When SparkPress reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in receiving a copy of Mona Alvarado Frazier’s young adult debut The Garden of Second Chances (6/6/2023), I said “sure.” As a former immigration attorney who worked primarily with the undocumented in removal proceedings and in the cross-sections with criminal and family law, I was immediately interested in the story of an undocumented 17-year-old convicted of a crime she didn’t commit who is trying to retain custody of her infant child. As much as I wanted to love it, it wasn’t for me.

The novel is essentially Orange is the New Black, only with a younger cast of characters. The blurb misleads the reader into thinking a prison garden that Juana develops and cultivates plays a huge role in her deciding to fight the system and fight for custody of her daughter; spoiler, the garden is barely given a cursory role. The blurb also misleads the reader into thinking that this is going to be an appeal of a conviction of voluntary manslaughter; the conviction is not appealed despite clear grounds for such (she’s gaslit into thinking she cannot appeal because too much time has passed) and she’s not fighting for her innocence, she’s petitioning the board for a reduction in her sentence based on mitigated factors. (Her factors being her innocence.) Had the novel focused on her rising up, learning enough English in the library to craft her own legal argument and then being successful in court, this could have truly been a novel about the resilience of sunflowers. But her innocence, the custody dispute, and the garden are all under-developed and rushed in favor of the more dramatic OITNB-esque dynamics of the facility and the inmates.

It’s an easy to digest young adult novel, but I was expecting something more – something different. The voice of an undocumented teenage mother who is a domestic violence survivor and who is convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of her abuser and who is fighting her abuser’s mother for custody of her child – I want that story so bad.

THE COVENANT OF WATER – Abraham Verghese

“What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.”

“Yes, old man, yes, eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter.”

I’ve always loved a well-done epic family saga. (The Wakefields of Sweet Valley was my first taste of a family saga, and The Thornbirds was my second.) Epic family sagas, the chunkier the better, have a special place on my shelves and in my heart. Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water (Grove Press 2023), coming in at 715 pages, was everything I love and then some.

Set in what is now Kerala, India, a coastal state known for its network of waterways, The Covenant of Water spans from 1900 to 1977. The novel opens with the marriage of a 12-year-old girl to a 40-year-old widow with a son named JoJo. (It may be unsettling for readers in 2023, but it was the norm in 1900.) Her introduction to Parambil is delicately and passionately detailed – the land, the people, and the silent and strong man who is her husband are rendered with such love. She becomes Ammachi, “Little Mother” to JoJo long before she takes on the role of wife, and her husband does not even attempt any liberties or improprieties for years. (There are multiple age-gap love stories within the novel; theirs is but the first.)

Ammachi becomes the matriarch and heartbeat of Parambil, as well as of the story. Early on, she learns of the “Condition” that plagues her husband and his bloodlines; in a land where water is the lifeblood of the people, at least one person in every generation dies by drowning. The Condition is evident in those who have it as it reveals itself early with an extreme fear of water, even at bath time.

The Condition is a constant concern in a novel that is swollen with the waters that give and take. Even when the reader is carried away from Parambil, thoughts of the Condition still linger. The reader is quickly introduced to Digby, a Scottish doctor in Madras who is training to be a surgeon. Through him, the reader gets a different POV as it relates to medical knowledge, art, politics, and social commentary, but Digby is far more than just a vessel to carry the story.

With the delicate precision of a surgeon, Verghese intricately threads this story together. It flows like a body of water; at times it’s languid and glistening in the sun with a beauty so aching it hurts. Other times, it’s loud and chaotic – an uncontrollable force that destroys the landscape and threatens to take you under. From the monsoons to the canals, water is a living, breathing character in the novel, and it will take you home.

Read this book.