Review: LULLABY by Leïla Slimani

 

Lullaby by Leïla Slimani and translated by Sam Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris's upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint and is able to host enviable birthday parties.

The couple and nanny become more dependent on each other. But as jealousy, resentment and suspicions increase, Myriam and Paul's idyllic tableau is shattered...

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I really enjoyed this novel. It was recommended to me by thriller and crime-writer Sophie McKenzie as an example of a novel that begins with an omniscient narrator, and I just fell in love with the style.

We zoom in and out of characters' heads as we learn the story of an unreliable and murderous nanny. Ultimately, it's the plot of quite a lot of nanny thrillers--I can think of several others that follow this rough plot where the nanny is a danger to the kids--but the execution of this is phenomenal. The depth of characterisation is impressive.

And what really got me was how this novel is based on a specific real-life case too.

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Review: ANY OTHER FAMILY by Eleanor Brown

 

Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

he New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different women facing an impossible question: What makes a family?

They look just like any other family. But they aren't a family like any other – not quite. Instead, they are three sets of parents who adopted four biological siblings, committing to keeping the children connected after the death of their grandmother.



Tabitha, who adopted the twins, is the planner of the group, responsible for coordinating playdates and birthdays and Sunday night dinners, insistent that everything happens just so. Quiet and steady Ginger, single mother to the eldest daughter, resists the forced togetherness, her own unsettled childhood leaving her wary of trusting too much. And Elizabeth is still reeling from going directly from failed fertility treatments into adopting a newborn, terrified that her unhappiness means she was not meant to be a mother at all.

But when the three women receive a surprising call from their children’s birth mother, announcing she is pregnant again and wants them to help her find an adoptive family for this child too, the delicate bonds they are still struggling to form threaten to collapse. As tensions rise, the women reckon with their own feelings about what it means to be a mother and what they owe each other as a family.

Set across the span of a family vacation, one full of boisterous laughter and emotional upheaval, Any Other Family is a thought-provoking and poignant look at how families shift and evolve and a striking portrait of motherhood in all its forms.

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I don't normally read contemporary fiction like this, but I'm really glad I did. It has a slower pace to what I'm used to, but the character portraits in this are phenomenal. I honestly can't get over that. They're so, so good. Like, it's all close-third person, being narrated by the three main women, and each feels so distinct. I was particularly impressed with how different Elizabeth's narrative voice was. Because this takes skill.

I read this when I was having a miscarriage, and surprisingly, reading a book all about motherhood was actually really cathartic and soothing.

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Review: ME VS BRAIN by Hayley Morris

 

Me vs Brain: An Overthinker’s Guide to Life by Hayley Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brain: We left the oven on!
Me: No don't say that, I've not got time for this!
Brain: The house is probably on fire!
Me: Stop it, I need to write this book description.
Brain: But the blazing fire.
Me: We didn't even use the oven today.
Brain: But what if -
Me: No. We're not doing this, I'm finishing this description.

Hello there! Hayley Morris here. Or you might know me as the Brain Girl, and don't be fooled...it's not because I'm outrageously smart. Just an avid overthinker. I'm on a mission to prove once and for all that You. Are. Normal. Running through imaginary arguments whilst showering, hiding your knickers in the nurse's office before they look directly into your vagina, or not knowing how to be a normal human when you have the plumber over. I've spent the majority of my life saying and doing embarrassing things that wake me up in a cold sweat at 3am as my Brain reminds me of every minor detail.

In this book, I've overthought absolutely everything so you don't have to. I'll be talking about everything from dating to discharge, mental health to menstrual cups. I might not be able to banish your anxiety or make you feel 100% comfortable in your skin, but I hope I can at least give you a break from the constant brain chatter and we can rejoice and laugh at how similar we actually all are.

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I follow Hayley Morris on Instagram and think the videos she makes are wonderful, so I was interested in reading this as soon as it came out. And it's the first book I've read in a long time that I devoured in less than 24 hours.

This is a wonderful memoir-style book, and it's great for people like me who've got anxiety as it's reassuring. It's normalising so many symptoms of anxiety and saying it's okay to speak about them, it's okay to laugh about them, and it's okay to get help for them.

It's fun, and it's powerful, and it's sad at times too. You'll laugh and cry as you read this.

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Review: I'M THE GIRL by Courtney Summers

 

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The new groundbreaking queer thriller from New York Times bestselling and Edgar-award Winning author Courtney Summers.

When sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis discovers the dead body of thirteen-year-old Ashley James, she teams up with Ashley's older sister, Nora, to find and bring the killer to justice before he strikes again. But their investigation throws Georgia into a world of unimaginable privilege and wealth, without conscience or consequence, and as Ashley’s killer closes in, Georgia will discover when money, power and beauty rule, it might not be a matter of who is guilty—but who is guiltiest.

A spiritual successor to the 2018 breakout hit, Sadie, I'm the Girl is a masterfully written, bold, and unflinching account of how one young woman feels in her body as she struggles to navigate a deadly and predatory power structure while asking readers one question: if this is the way the world is, do you accept it?

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I am a massive fan of Courtney Summers, and this book is one I am also now a massive fan of.

It's dark, this one. And uncomfortable. Disturbing. Everything I 'like' from a dark contemporary YA read. But this one also hit differently. I'm normally fine reading disturbing content, but I was not fine after reading this. And that's how real this all felt.

Georgia's a great character. She's lost. She's angry. She's trying to work out why things are the way that they are. And she's looking for a mother figure as her mother recently passed away. And so when Cleo steps in, she wants to get close to her. Cleo and her husband run Aspera, and Georgia wants to be an 'Aspera girl'--a beautiful girl who works there--precisely because her mother said she wouldn't be one. Georgia is vain too, in an entirely normal teen girl way. Before the book begins she's had some nude photos taken by a 'professional' (who later turns out not to be a professional.)

And this is a story about grooming and child sexual abuse. We watch as Georgia becomes a victim of this, first being employed in small roles at Aspera, then seeing it turn more into what it actually is. There's graphic sexual content between Georgia (a sixteen-year-old) and Cleo's middle-aged husband Matthew. Cleo appears to be on board with this. And this all happens even though Georgia tells them she's a lesbian. She has in fact got a crush on Nora, who's the sister of Ashley--and the book starts with Georgia finding 13-year-old Ashley's body, so there is a lot packed in this.

It starts off as a murder mystery, but the actual murder mystery doesn't really control much of the plot. It's very much secondary to Georgia trying to become an Aspera girl.

One of the things I really liked was Georgia's relationship with Tyler, her brother. He's always looking out for her, and this, alongside Nora's relationship with Georgia, helped balance this book so it didn't feel like it was being devoured by all the slime. Because that's how I felt while reading a lot of this--slimy.

The language is also beautiful in this. So, so lyrical.

This is an important book to read. It's about beauty and appearance, privilege and wealth and poverty, truth and lies, policing and the cover-up of crimes by those with money.

Content warnings for: rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, grooming, murder, implied incest (though I don't think that actually happened and was just set up to look like it had, by one of the characters, to set someone else up for murder).

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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents’ ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can’t seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the “baby factory” of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe--answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.

Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.

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This was... weird

Weird. So weird.

I need to think about this one… a lot. It’s disturbing and creepy and… weird.

Content warnings for child sexual abuse.

Edited to add: Yesterday I finished Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and it’s one of the creepiest books that just gets more and more disturbing and weird as you read.

The plot is ridiculous, but it’s also dark, about child sexual abuse, and I’ve never seen that tackled in this way before. I also wasn't quite prepared for how dark this book was going to be as the marketing blurb doesn't really indicate that. I was expecting a semi-dark story about a woman whose best friend is her childhood toy and who believes she herself is an alien.

But this book is so much more than that, in a very dark and twisted way. Natsuki's sexually abused by a teacher as a child, which leads her to have sex with her cousin when she's eleven years old--she does this as a way to 'survive, no matter what', and the POV is so close to her as a child that you can kind of see why she'd think that.

This book is well written, there's no doubt about that. But then we have the rest of the plot. Natsuki's shunned for her actions with her cousin, and she's abused physically and verbally by her family. She murders her teacher, and eventually marries her husband in a marriage of convenience. He definitely seems to be ace-coded and they say multiple times how they're not friends. They're marrying to get their families off their backs.

And their families are so obsessed with them having children. Natsuki refers to this as 'the factory' and she wants to be an 'earthling' and want this, because she wants to fit in. But she doesn't--as she still thinks she's an alien... Yet marriage and babies are all society wants from Natsuki. And so the book also shines a light on acephobia too. There are so many conversations between characters that Natsuki witnesses/overhears/has directed at her that really focus around the acephobia, though it's never named as such.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the ace rep in the book either. Like, the term asexuality isn’t even used on page, but it’s in a lot of marketing copy, and just… I felt at times that celibacy was actually being looked at in relation to Natsuki... but then other times it did seem to be ace-coded. Yet if this is supposed to be ace rep then it’s problematic. —hello ace husband who at one point tries to commit actual incest to be normal, and likening an character to an alien/having the ace character be one of the three in the book who think they are aliens as they're not indoctorined into the family.

And, like, that ending—I have to talk about it. Natsuki, her husband, and her cousin can't fit into society so they live together outside of society. They talk about how they don't have sex but now don't mind nudity (before this was triggering for Natsuki and her husband). I thought the romantic attraction discourse was quite interesting, as I believe all three characters were also coded as aro too at the start of the part of the book where they choose to live together as their own platonic unit... But then we watch these three characters almost 'degenerate', becoming animalistic... They talk a lot about sexual attraction and how they either don't experience it or they do but don't feel any need to act on it. And then they turn into cannibals. ACTUAL CANNIBALS.

Is this what supposedly happens to all ace or aro people? Is it the factory/society that tries to keep ace-spec people on track? And when these people escape society, they turn into cannibals? If so, then that is so, so offensive.

But like, also, is any of the plot at the end even real?

This book has confused me a lot and I’ve got all these tangled thoughts about it.