u/YakSlothLemon

I loved this book so much— it is brave, heartbreaking, unflinching, unapologetic and gorgeously written.

It opens with Jan living in a shack on the coast of Mexico, waiting for her 22-year-old husband John to come home, hoping that he’s caught some fish because otherwise they have nothing for dinner. She is eight months pregnant. She is fifteen years old.

From that opening the book divides into two alternating narratives. One is about her childhood and everything that led up to Mexico. Her mother was a fearless child of the ‘60s, entangled with the Beat poets, but women sometimes get pregnant, and men romanticizing being On The Road aren’t going to stick around for that. Jan grew up in true poverty, but loved deeply by a mother who worked hard to balance her own restlessness with her children’s needs. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.

The other narrative moves forward into the years after Mexico, becoming a coming-of-age story told from the road. You travel with Jan through the ‘70s, sampling hippie life on the West Coast, a dip into sex work in the Southwest, a journey back south into Central and then South America where she ends up with a man whom she truly believes is going to kill her, and from whom she must escape.

I don’t know how bleak I’m making this all sound, but the book doesn’t feel that way when you read it. Jan is utterly unapologetic and she also asks for no pity from you as a reader – in fact she actively refuses it. She has a sly feminist eye and does not miss the fact that exploitation always seems to end up in play with the men she gets involved with— as she says, “somehow I always ended up playing the servant”— but the next job, the next man, the next adventure is always just a bus ride away. She dips in and out of drugs and in and out of sex work, as she owns all of her choices. And the book is full of her joy in stolen moments— in fifth grade when her mother was a month late bringing her back to school from their beach vacation, and she was briefly queen of fifth grade and the envy of all the other kids there; the beauty of the birds surrounding her in Mexico as she sits and watches them for hours in the lush greenery; the friendships with women that she makes along the way- especially that.

This is a book about women in a way that only slowly becomes clear, as you move toward the book’s point, its revelation, and I don’t want to give that away. I will say it very much is a book about mothers and daughters.

This particular edition has an awful introduction. Do you ever read an introduction and think, “did you just read the same book I read?” I don’t think either the reviewer’s judgmental views on drug use nor her fascination with Jack Kerouac served her very well (Jan only met her famous father twice and even in that brief span she noticed his sexism). Jan didn’t write this about her father, she wrote this about her own journey.

It’s not just her story that haunts me now, a week after I finished it, but also some of the images and moments that she describes so beautifully that it’s as if you were there. At the same time, I don’t think I’ll see the Beat poets the same way: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” looks a lot grimmer from a woman’s point of view.

Such a powerful book. It’s an incredible ride.

I did a quick search and someone has already posted the pages where Connie stares critically at her body so I’ll skip that and go straight to our “weird female mind.” (Seems worth mentioning that this is one of the few times any woman has a mind at all, most of Connie’s thinking is done by her womb or bowels (at one point, worryingly, they “faint”)… the author sees us is somewhat atavistic, with our ancient knowledge and all.

I included the gamekeeper’s horrific rant about how disgusting women are when they are active participants in sex, how clitoral stimulation results in women forming a “hard beak” down there(!!!), and of course the comment that all women who get off by clitoral orgasm are Lesbians whom he wants to murder. (The next page continues that murder-the-Lesbians theme, but also has a racial comment that I don’t think we all need to look at, it’s that gross.)

And I know that’s the character talking, but

1. the character is absolutely a self-insert for Lawrence, right down to his cough, his sexual history, and the way he writes letters; and

2. what he is saying here is the point of the book. Here on page 262, obviously Lawrence is worried that you have not understood that the takeaway is that clitoral orgasms are BAD/immature and that you only become a “real woman” with vaginal orgasm— yes, Connie becomes a real woman because of the gamekeeper’s magic dick.

Before reading this, I had the impression it was about a woman claiming her own sexuality/becoming liberated. It’s really not. If you don’t know the damage that the myth of the vaginal orgasm did in the 20th century in the hands of Freud, it’s horrifying reading. And this book is the fiction version of it: women who get off from the clitoris are frigid (yes, even if they have orgasms) and need psychological help/penetrative sex with DH Lawrence, and of course, being with another woman qualifies you as mentally ill. 😒

I think I just wanted to rant about it a little, thank you if you read this. Anyone else deeply, deeply disappointed by this book?

I picked this wonderful book up at the library because I was in the mood for some historical fiction, and fell in love with it.

It’s a story within a story. Our narrator is a journalist covering Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, struggling to do her job and keep her marriage from collapsing completely. When she meets the elderly Miss Alice, an English missionary, she sees a chance for a quick human interest story, but finds herself pulled into the telling of a story that has haunted Alice for 60 years.

The heart of the book is Alice’s narrative, set at the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine in the 1920s. Brought there at 17 by her missionary father to teach school, she’s especially proud of her student Tareq, only to be mystified along with the other teachers when he graduates and chooses to become a traveling magician. Restless, brilliant, possibly carrying messages to the burgeoning resistance – possibly heading up the burgeoning resistance – Tareq comes to the attention of the ruthless head of the British secret police, Challis, who becomes obsessed with the handsome young Palestinian.

The book is simply full of memorable characters who come alive. There’s Alice’s father, even more oblivious to the nuances of the culture around him than his daughter, and the British journalist Egerton, who becomes fascinated by Tareq but whose faith in a free British press is unlikely to survive contact with Challis. There are also amazing Palestinian characters – my favorite was Buthaina, the spoiled favorite daughter of a wealthy landowner who is shocked to be married off at the age of 12 and sentenced to a life of dreary household labor in rural Palestine. Tough and intelligent, she adapts and adapts again as the British occupation and eventually British violence intrudes on her life – and as Challis closes in on her as well for having sheltered Tareq.

It’s so rich for a book that’s not even 200 pages long. Antonius writes gorgeous prose that brings Palestine to life, allowing you to see it through so many different eyes, at the same time that her anger at the British occupation is represented with sly wit and cutting humor. It’s deeply political at the same time that it is deeply human. I hadn’t known much about the British Mandate in the 1920s, so I’m sure there are things I missed, but I learned so much from this book and had no trouble following it. It was exactly what I want from historical fiction – it made me feel like I was there, and knew these people.

I adored this book.

Anyone up for a great exploration book? I had never heard of this expedition, but apparently it was the talk of Europe when it happened – and for good reason. This has everything I want in an exploration book – fascinating information about places and people, survival against the odds (or not…), and a protagonist worth cheering for.

Like all good exploration books, it also is full of catastrophic occurrences, many of them the fault of the expedition members themselves.

In the 1750s, the king of Denmark decided to send out an expedition to “Arabia Felix” – what we now called the Yemen – to study its natural history, map it, and confirm “facts” from the Old Testament. From the beginning, the expedition was fraught, riven by academic infighting and big personalities, leading to one farcical event after another.

For example… when they were finally ready to go in 1761, it was the wrong season, and every time their ship tried to leave Denmark it was blown north instead of heading south, at one point reaching Iceland. Christian Von Haven, who saw himself as the leader of the expedition, noped out early and went overland, leaving everyone else to spend months attempting to sail south. When they finally got to the Mediterranean and von Haven rejoined them, he was shocked to discover that the men had become close as a result of their terrible voyage, and weren’t particularly interested in allowing him to step in and be leader. Von Haven’s response: buying a suspiciously large amount of arsenic. Was he planning to do away with all of them? Other expedition members secretly wrote panicked letters back to Denmark…

All this before they even reached Egypt!

As they travelled south, tripping over each other and their own egos, a quiet hero began to emerge: Carsten Niebuhr, a peasant’s son, along as a surveyor. Genuinely interested in the Arabs and their lives, skillfully guarding the expedition’s finances from Von Haven, he rose above the chaos to create maps so accurate they can still be used today, became one of the first Europeans to live as an Arab for months and enter holy cities, and charted the ruins of Persepolis with such accuracy that cuneiform writing was deciphered as a result of his work.

I’ve read a lot of “disastrous expedition” books set in the Arctic or Antarctic, and honestly it was nice to read a disastrous expedition book where there actually was a point to the science. The book also has lovely illustrations, not just maps but all kinds of sketches produced by the members of the expedition (so many types of hats!)

My only caveat: a bit of a slow start. I was really hanging in there for a while until the expedition finally got underway. I understood why everyone needed to be introduced, and why we needed to get the background on the academic infighting between Sweden and Denmark, but if you should start this book and find it… discouragingly slow… you could always skip forward to part seven of the first chapter, “Despite These Evil Times,” meet everybody as they’re getting on the boat, and off you can go. Just saying.

I loved the writing style, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It was written in the early ‘60s and it has a very dry sense of humor. Once I really got into it, though, I couldn’t put it down. I laughed out loud a few times, I got so upset at one point that I had to put the book down and take a moment, and once I teared up. Carsten Niebuhr is an explorer for the ages.

I loved this book.

It’s 1920 in an unnamed colonial city somewhere on the African coast (reading it, it felt like Cape Town, but I don’t think the author wanted to be nailed down to a specific city). Soraya, a young Muslim woman, seems to have found the perfect housekeeping job. Her employer, Mrs Hattingh, lives alone in a beautiful but rundown house not far from the Quarter where Soraya’s parents live, and while Mrs Hattingh herself is profoundly racist (while thinking herself profoundly liberal) it’s easy enough work — and best of all there’s no man in the house.

But both the house and the employer are more than they seem. The house is troubled by spirits, including that of the prior housekeeper, Fatima, who visits Soraya at night, seemingly to warn her of some unknown threat. And as Mrs Hattingh begins to take more and more control over Soraya’s life, the lines between them begin to be dangerously blurred.

In particular, after Mrs Hattingh discovers that Soraya’s fiancé Noum is working on a distant farm, she offers to take down letters for him that Soraya dictates, and to read to Soraya any letters he sends back – but is what she writes exactly what Soraya says? And what’s really in his letters, that her employer will read to her but never let her see, never mind keep, for herself? Trapped together in the decaying mansion, the two women become locked in a battle for power.

I adored this book. It was so gripping that I read in one morning. It’s beautifully written in Soraya’s voice, and I’m not sure when I last hated a character as much as I hated Mrs Hattingh— I was so involved in this book! The author is South African from a Muslim community, and you can feel that deep knowledge and connection coming through the pages.

I highly recommend this one!

I hesitated over the tag, because it is technically science-fiction set in the ‘90s, but it’s also a mystery and a road-trip novel, with great female characters and an unexpected and satisfying resolution!

I could not put this book down!

The set-up: back in the early ‘70s, on a commune called the Homestead, Dr Joseph Bellanger created a medical miracle – parthenogenic pregnancy, little girls born to the women of the commune without biological fathers. Then a fundamentalist protester set fire to the Homestead, killing Bellanger, and his research was lost forever; eight mothers and their daughters survived, to live their lives as best they could.

Now: as the book opens in the 1990s, Josephine Morrow, a.k.a. Girl One, is in graduate school hoping to continue Bellanger’s research when a phone call upends her whole life: her mother’s house has been burned down and her mother is missing. Their relationship had been strained for years, partly because Josie has insisted on trying to learn the secrets of her own past, secrets that her mother guarded very closely. But when Josie finds out that her mother had contacted a reporter and had been seeking out the other mothers and girls from the Homestead, she finds herself retracing her mother’s steps, trying to unravel the mystery and find out where her mother is.

But Josie is being followed, and the man who set fire to her mother’s house is close on her heels.

As she reconnects with the other Girls, she will find allies and friends that she never expected, and together they will face the truth about what really happened at the Homestead twenty years earlier, and what is still happening to the mothers and daughters from the experiment.

Girl One was intriguing from the first moment and I loved all the twists and turns. Josie is a complex, flawed character, and watching her come to terms with the truth and allow herself to open up and become vulnerable to the other women was a great journey in itself. There’s a strong feminist subtext as well, as you might expect, but Murphy handles it beautifully, letting it emerge naturally as part of the story. I adored this book!