My Favourite Books of January

    I've started the new year strong with lots of 4 and 5-star reads, but not counting rereads, these were the ones that stood out as new favourites!

    This was as good as I expected it to be after reading two Juliet Marillier books last year, then deciding to go back to the beginning of her most popular series, first published in 1999. It's a fairy tale retelling, and has this lush, meandering, detailed, atmospheric feel that I adored, even though a lot of those things are not usually my thing. It's also very long, but just like the other Marillier books I've read, it doesn't feel like long and deserves the page count.

    Sorcha begins the book as a young girl in medieval-ish Ireland. She's the youngest in her family with six older brothers and a distant father who is always away defending his territory from the Britons. Her idyllic childhood ends when she uses her healing skills to help a young Briton soldier, and again when her father remarries a manipulative woman. From there it generally follows the fairy tale "The Six Swans," as Sorcha silently weaves coats for her brothers to turn them back into humans.

    This book takes place over several years and has pretty distinct parts, and I never quite knew which direction it was heading in. It took patience, and while I immediately loved the writing and setting, I also wasn't fully hooked for quite a while. Sorcha experiences tragedy after tragedy, and be aware that it is quite explicit, with on-page sexual assault, but she has a strength of character that shines through throughout. I loved the character work in this book, with so many distinct and believable characters. And while it's definitely not romantasy, it also has a gorgeous slow-burn romance plotline.

    This was my fourth Emily Austin book, who is one of my favourite Canadian authors. It was probably the most commercial, straightforward one so far, which made it probably the easiest to recommend and most enjoyable, but it was missing some of the bite that I enjoyed in her other books.        Darcy is a librarian coming back to her job after taking two months off due to a mental breakdown precipitated by the death of her ex-boyfriend. Ben was the last boyfriend she had for five years before realizing she was a lesbian, and feels extreme guilt because she felt like she ruined his life by breaking up with him. As she continues to work through her feelings about Ben's death, she deals with protestors and book banners at work.

    All of the stuff about the library was interesting, and obviously I love a library setting. This is very much about the realities of public city libraries, where most of the time she's dealing with difficult patrons, strange questions, and complaints about a man using the computers to watch porn, and not just thinking about and reading books. As someone who hears about book banning and related issues all the time, this book didn't really give me anything new or a different perspective on the issue (very much preaching to the choir), but it could be eye-opening for other readers, and I appreciated the realistic portrait of library work.

    I loved the way it explored this kind of complex grief over a man she hasn't talked to in a decade, but that she did care for for years, even if it wasn't in the way he'd wanted her to. Her ex was kind and loving, but also didn't let her be herself and was dating someone too young for him. She ruminates, by herself and with her therapist, on compulsory heterosexuality and the way it shaped her life and decisions. I found this the most fascinating part of the book. We also get lovely comparisons between her relationship with Ben and her current relationship with her wife, Joy, and a running theme is that she feels like she can be herself with Joy, with no sense of performance. 

“Now, what do you plan to do with yourself while I’m away?”

“I plan to study, Aunt. And foster a light heart.”

   

 I cannot deny that I have fallen completely for the Emma M. Lion series, despite not generally being a series fan and not wanting to get into such a long series. But their charm is undeniable! I can't share too much about the plot of this particular volume, since it's already the fourth one, but it features some delightful scenes of Emma just hanging out with a new and surprising gathering of friends that filled me with joy and also jealousy. 

    I really like how this series balances the dark with the light. Emma is grieving tragic events from her past, and there are days she wants to stay in bed and feels weighed down. But then she still has moments and days of joy when she's with her friends or gets a new book. Because this series is about her daily life over years, we see the ups and downs of someone's daily life, and I love it.

    Soraya is a maid working for a rich white woman in South Africa in the 1920s. At first her mistress seems like a kind, considerate woman, but soon she places more and more restrictions on her, isolating her from her family and fiance. Soraya pretends she reads less well than she can, and Mrs. Hattingh offers to write letters for her and reads them aloud to Soraya, but she soons discovers that she's changing the messages. There's also an element of magical realism, since Soraya can see the ghost of the previous maid and speak to the woman in a portrait.

    This book is described as a psychological gothic thriller, but I definitely think it's primarily a literary historical novel with some thriller undertones. For the most part it's just Soraya chafing under the discomfort of having to be a servant to a woman who is controlling and mentally unwell, all while thinking of herself as a kind mistress. The themes and messages of colonialism and racism are fairly overt and shown in ways I've seen done before, but I do still think they were well done here. We see the way Mrs. Hattingh talks about the local population, both to Soraya and her friends, and how the insidiousness of white saviourism and supremacy creeps into the beliefs of colonizers. 

    Overall I found it compelling throughout, and I loved the sense of tension that kept rising, since we knew Soraya wouldn't be able to last in that environment forever. Mrs. Hattingh was obviously losing it, and the ghosts in the house were acting up. It's an interesting portrayal of the complex relationship between mistress and maid, colonizer and colonized, and how that can't be anything but fraught.