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Review: Sisters by Daisy Johnson

The horror genre is one that I only recently became fascinated with. When I say horror, I don’t mean the whole jump scares and blood things (though sometimes that is okay), but I do mean the warping of normal, the psychological thriller, the dark books that leave you feeling a little bit cold, a little bit hollow, a little bit trying to figure out how someone could imagine something like the book you’ve just read.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson is one of those books. It is blissfully short and sharp. I haven’t read Johnson’s novel that was nominated for the Booker Prize, making her the youngest nominee ever, but this made me want to read Everything Under.

The book follows sisters, July and September, born just 10 months apart. The younger of the two, July, is our narrator, though their mother Sheela has her own parts.

”My sister is a black hole.
My sister is a tornado.
My sister is the end of the line my sister is the locked door
my sister is a shot in the dark.
My sister is waiting for me.
My sister is a falling tree.
My sister is a bricked-up window.
My sister is a wishbone my sister is the night train
my sister is the last packet of crisps my sister
is a long lie-in.
My sister is a forest on fire,
My sister is a sinking ship.
My sister is the last house on the street.”

This quote is essentially what starts the book. It is chilling. The sisters and their mother are moving into a family beach house following some incident that occurred in Oxford. The incident is revealed later on in the book but I won’t spoil it for you. The complexity of the sister dynamic is thrilling. July, subservient and ever the peace keeper, submits to the often casually cruel September. Their relationship with their mother and their peers is interesting too as it sometimes feels like the two girls exist in their own universe, apart from anyone else. The encroaching darkness feels more and more sinister the longer the book goes on and the plot twist is unmooring to say the least.

Definitely my favorite read of the year thus far. Also, this cover art is great, it really brilliantly conveys the fragmentation of self into which July herself descends throughout the novel.

Review- The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

As a devotee of Elena Ferrante, I eagerly purchased her latest release on the day it came out. My Brilliant Friend is still one of my favorite books of all time. Ferrante’s keen eye is unyielding in its honesty. Over quarantine, my mother (who I convinced to read MBF after I read it) and I watched the Italian-language HBO adaptation of MBF. We really enjoyed it. I’m currently finishing the fourth and final Neapolitan Novel, the Story of the Lost Child, but that is another review.

I enjoyed the Lying Life of Adults, but it wasn’t my favorite of Ferrante’s books. I cannot speak to her works like the Days of Abandonment or Troubling Love (though that title in particular is on my to-be-read list), but the Neapolitan Novels were breathtaking in their portrayal of female friendships.

The Lying Life of Adults, like My Brilliant Friend, is a coming-of-age novel. They also share the setting of Naples. But that is really where the similarities end. Giovanna is an adolescent in the 1990’s, the only child of academics. Her father’s infidelity is a crushing blow to the family, but even more so is the family that he has deprived Giovanna from knowing due to his own complicated rejection of his upbringing.

Giovanna is an astute observer, both perceptive and blind to the people around her. She is intelligent but snarky in the way teenagers are. Ferrante’s prose is, as always, surprising and visceral. There’s a certain repulsiveness to the coarse language and leering gazes of the men in this book. Ferrante never tries to make Gianni necessarily likeable. She doesn’t try and tint adolescence with a sickly sweet rose-colored sentimentality. Ferrante embraces the chaos of that age.

I am always astounded by the rich interior worlds that Ferrante constructs. This novel is no different in that regard and that richness imbues the story with a nuance that many fictions centering around adolescence tend to lack. The Marisa Tomei-Narrated audiobook was very well done and I highly recommend it.

Review- The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

I’d been meaning to read this one for awhile, as I had heard only good things. Ogawa’s story lived up to the hype. It’s actually not a new book, having been published in 1994. That being said, it was only recently translated into English.

Firstly, the premise of the novel is incredibly inventive. The main character, a young novelist, lives on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast where things just… disappear. Ribbons, candies, emeralds, etc. They simply vanish from the minds of the inhabitants and from the physical world. The memory police ensure that no one is holding on to anything that has disappeared. It is the surveillance state to an extreme.

Ogawa’s prose is quiet and subtle, basking in the subtext of what is left unsaid. I finished it in a single night, as I couldn’t put it down. The book is moody, atmospheric, and contemplative, but without getting ensnared in the melodramatic. It situates itself firmly in a dystopian realm of repression, but there is a novelty to the story that shirks the typical trappings of the genre.

People describe it as ‘orwellian’ but I have never been able to finish 1984. And trust me, I’ve tried on several occasions. This story felt more relatable than 1984. Perhaps because I imagined her to be close to my age, perhaps because of the dreaminess of the prose. The Memory Police has a subtlety that 1984 has always lacked for me.

Some recommend Ogawa for fans of Murakami’s work. In my mind, this feels like an odd comparison as all I can think of them having in common is the flair for magical realism and the fact that they are both Japanese. And don’t get me wrong, I love Murakami, I just don’t think that the two are comparable. The sensation of reading Murakami always feels to me massively disorienting, a little absurd, a little manic. But this was more subtle and gentler, yet still distinct in its own way. It still imparted that feeling of being a little mixed up, the taste of something bittersweet left long after its conclusion.

Review- A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

At first, I found myself disinterested in this book by virtue of its title. I generally don’t take an interest in anything remotely related to religion or Christianity, but after reading the premise of Millet’s book, I was intrigued.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects, to me, creative writer that I am, was the use of the first-person plural. It’s a tact that many don’t take and it is difficult to execute well, but its use, coupled with the premise of the story, is unrelentingly engaging.

Friends from college bring their children to a sprawling house by the sea for the summer, locking up the cell phones and tablets, and essentially leaving a group of eight-year-olds to seventeen-year-olds to their own devices whilst they carouse in drunken, drug-induced hedonism. The children, sleeping all together in the attic, find ways to pass the time and govern themselves, trying to avoid the adults as much as possible. The parents, negligent and vaguely aware of their children’s antics, proceed business as usual while their offspring find themselves increasingly horrified by their guardians’ behavior. And then, sh*t hits the fan. Enter apocalypse.

While the story sometimes drips with biblical imagery and allusion to its tales, I did not find it in the least off-putting. Millet approaches it with an ironic air of the bemused observer. Her jaded narrator, Eve, is pragmatic, mature and fiercely protective of her intrepid younger brother.

In the ways that art imitates life, our fiction begins to take on the climate crisis. Millet masterfully manipulates the end-of-the-world archetype into a pleasing and novel form, playing on the excess and contempt of the wealthy (or relatively so) and their children, left to clean up a mess they never asked for. Millet’s story at times borders on the absurd, yet remains amusing for the duration.

At the end of the day, this is a novel that never takes itself too seriously yet still grapples with the troubling themes. Eerily prophetic, it speaks to the anxiety of the times, another cautionary tale of the warming planet.