Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the creation of the Church of England from the Catholic Church as a for Henry to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn. Mantel does a good job of recounting the history with plenty of humanity, so you feel immersed in that world. It’s always hard to tell how much the author embellishes the truth for me since I am not much of a history buff, but Mantel does a good job of explaining the motivations and machinations in a believable way. So interesting to see how the split in the Catholic Church helped pave the way for the Bible to be available to the common man. Also interesting to see how little power women had and yet so much depended on a woman to produce an heir, and how a woman could use that dependency to her advantage. Women used what means they had to have a voice. Loved it. (The adaptation on tv is slow and whoever plays Cromwell doesn’t portray the humor and cleverness I found in the book)

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Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an uneven collection of short stories. “The Husband Stitch” expands and riffs on the story of the woman with the black/green ribbon around her neck. It’s well done and the audience involvement is a genius touch, but it’s chilly tale is ultimately just a retelling. “Especially Heinious” is especially overlong, convoluted and unreadable. “Real Women Have Bodies” is the most original, with a tight storyline that comments on the sacrifices we willingly make as women to fit into society’s mold of fashion and conformity. It is probably the best of the bunch. Several more stories are simply forgettable. “The Resident” is haunting but confusing. And “Difficult at Parties” is simply unreadable. It’s always hard to find a solid collection of short stories but I would simply seek out “Real Women Have Bodies” in an anthology and call it good.

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Babies are heavier than you’d think.

 Her mouth is an endless cavern, into which light and thought and sound descend, never to return.

 Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence:

My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline wasevaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-click-clicking like a car slowly ascending a roller coaster’s first hill. And then I was just a hovering brain, and then a consciousness, floating and fragile as a bubble. And then I was nothing.

The receding bubbles leave strange white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A book about alternate realities...my favorite! Totally different spin on the idea of seeing where your life would go if you had made a different choice. Sweet love story...crazy plot twists...good enough ending. My main gripe is the one sentence paragraphs. Like a book written in serial on Twitter. Made it a fast read, I guess.

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The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book kept reminding me of The Terror by Dan Simmons. It has the same tone and both are about sea expeditions gone awry in the ice. Simmons was the better writer, but McGuire does a passable job. It’s also MUCH shorter and therefore much tighter. There is enough tension in the story to keep you turning the pages, and the ending is gratifying. Themes of redemption, fate, God, and morality against a backdrop of the crudeness and harshness of life on a whaling ship.

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The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?” “They come from our experience,” Sumner says, “from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.” Otto shakes his head. “If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards

The Lady of the Rivers

The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fine historical novel that follows Lady Rivers through her life. Lots of historical detail mixed in with a little mysticism. Lady Rivers and her husband always seem to be in favor of the “right” thing to do, or have a premonition of how things will work out. When history favors the queen, Lady Rivers and her husband support her, But when history shows that they lose, they seem to be the only people to have tried to talk the parties out of it. I don’t know enough about history to know how much is Gregory’s elaboration, but I didn’t like that only the Rivers’ seemed to see things from a larger view. Surely they were swept along just as much as the other characters? Still, English royalty is forever entertaining and this was no exception.

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Landmarks

Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Macfarlane takes on the mission of reintroducing the world to forgotten/rare words that describe the world around us. Or more specifically Great Britain. (From the list of words I’m thinking hedges make up a great deal more of the landscape there than it does here in America.). His main argument is that if we know more vocabulary about the outside world we will appreciate it more. He may be onto something. The other day when it was neither rainy nor misty but somewhere inbetween I thought “hey, it’s mizzling”and enjoyed it that much more. Macfarlane is an amazing writer and an even better reader, pointing out the intricacies of nature writers’ works that would have passed me by. I do admit that the book may have gotten a bit long, even though it’s not a long book to begin with.

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Remnant Chronicles

The Beauty of Darkness by Mary E. Pearson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Solid ending to a solid series. Even a “hidden” twist in the epigrams before the chapters (so don’t gloss over those). This was a fun summer read that I read with my daughter. Yes, it has a love triangle. Yes, there are swords, arrows, recoveries in caves, as well as twists you see coming. But there are twists you don’t see coming, and a nice character arch for all 3 of the main characters as they try to determine what loyalty, duty, love and trust looks like. Destinies are fulfilled in surprising ways and the ending is satisfactory. Definitely a YA series I could recommend to young women and one that was fun to read with my own YA.

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