Today we are going to catch up. And by catch up I mean I am
going to talk about Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven
which I loved more than I have loved anything for a long long time
and also Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
which I should have read a long time ago and which freaked me the hell out and
the new book by Jennifer Niven which I have mixed feelings about. Get
comfortable lovelies.
I love Chris Cleave. Or at least I loved the only other book
of his I’ve read (The Other Hand) so I was super
excited to get my hands on a copy of Everyone Brave, and
the proof is so pretty too, all black cover and red pages and my copy has a signature. Lush.
It’s a really really beautiful book on the inside too this
one, it doesn’t just look good, it tastes good too, I’m not even kidding: ‘…a galaxy of seeds that crackled in his mouth like bereaved
punctuation.´ well, just seduce me with your pretty words why don’t
you Mr. Cleave.
And it’s such an incredible story. It’s set in WWII and
follows young socialite Mary, determined to make a difference, Zachary a little
boy who can’t be evacuated because he’s black
and nobody wants him and art restorer Alistair who finds himself in the
army and it hurts and it’s wonderful and it’s witty and hurty and so freaking smart. It’s just….it’s kind of mind-blowingly good, this
epic novel full of love and war and loss and bravery.
It’s SO GOOD. SO VERY GOOD.
The language is beautiful, the dialogue is so snappy, and
the characters like people you wind up feeling like you know (the
characterisation here is so powerful oh my God and some of these people are
messed up and make dubious choices but at the same time they all changed so
much, grew up, lost pretty much any and all sense of innocence and made you
fall in love with them. Hard.) The characters get under your skin and the
setting is so real you can taste it. It took me ages to
read partly because I wanted to savour every word and partly because I didn’t
ever want it to be over. I got to the end and I just wanted more. & I wanted to go back to the start and
read it all over again. Which, that very rarely happens.
It’s strikingly raw and honest and bittersweet. It’s so damn
powerful too, but not in an ‘in your kind of face’ kind of way you know. He’s a
master of subtlety this guy and this book is all about the slow build and you
don’t realise you’re feeling ALL THE THINGS until you wonder why your chest
hurts and realise it’s because you’ve been holding your breath or that actually
of course your face is wet - you’re
crying, damn it.
And how many books have been written about the war? SO MANY
BOOKS; do you know how refreshing it is to fine one that’s not at all the same,
that’s a step away from anything else you’ve read, ever? Let me tell you: so
refreshing. Malta for
starters, oh God, Malta. It’s always kind of surprised me, when I read a book like
this how there are the things I know about, and
then the things i just sort of know about you know. Like how there’s the things
you learn about and hear about repeatedly and in depth and then there’s the
other things, equally important that yet somehow you only really scratch the
surface of. Anyway. Another thought for another day, maybe.
Everyone Brave is also a really
interesting look at race, I thought so at least. I mean WWII was a war against
Hitler wasn’t it, and his plans for a master race – if we’re going to really
simplify it down I mean and I am totally aware that’s what I just did right
there so don’t yell please - and there
we were sending our men to fight against that, whilst here at home we’re
sending a little boy home from the country, back to the Blitz because his skin
is the wrong colour (or because he’s in a wheelchair or she had Down’s Syndrome
etc etc) I loved that juxtaposition. Loved it.
‘We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to
battle any evil but our own.’ BOOM. Also, how relevant please.
Let’s not even talk about current affairs.
This is a book about love and longing, about loss and
discovery, about life and it’s beautiful. This, actually, is the kind of book
you dream of reading. I bet I won’t read anything to match it this year.
And then I read Miss Peregrine’s Home for
Peculiar Children which is entirely different in every way. I wonder
actually if I’m the only person left not to have read these books. Am I? And
I’m not sure why it took me so long to be quite honest. I liked it a lot. It’s
kind of like a more realistic X-Men, if an abandoned orphanage and a time loop
and a load of children with extraordinary powers can be realistic.
It’s a clever book, a combination of prose and these hauntingly weird
photographs – which I loved, it’s such a clever and unique way of storytelling
and the fact that these are actual real life photos is just…it’s pretty cool.
And so mysterious. It gave me the creeps though, this book, in a major way.
That’s the downside of living in your house on your own alone I think, when you
have a pretty active imagination. This book creeped me out; I was too creeped
out to stop reading and too creeped out to go to sleep and was just sat in my
dark house by myself reading this creepy as hell book and then having to spend
half an hour scrolling through Twitter to try and fend off the bad dreams. And
I’m 33. Imagine if I’d read this when I was 16. Gracious. I was creeped out,
but I also figured out some pretty significant plot points way before I think I
was supposed to. Perhaps I’m just that smart *snorts* - although I do like to
think I’m adept at spotting a little bit of foreshadowing. Mostly though, I
really liked it. If you haven’t read it already and you’re looking for another
series to get drawn into then you wouldn’t go far wrong starting with this. My
copy is lush too, it feels so nice.
And then, after that, I read Jenniver Niven’s Holding Up the Universe which…I didn’t hate it. Actually
that’s harsh. I liked it; I gave it 3 stars, but I was massively underwhelmed.
That’s better.
I haven’t read Niven’s stuff before, although I’ve heard ALL
THE GOOD THINGS. Like all the good things all the time everywhere. People have
been going nutso for this book, so, I was hoping to be blown away. I was not. I
mean, there’s good writing, Niven can certainly write and her narrative voices
are strong and this was an easy read, but it felt like YA romance paint by
numbers. Like here is a girl who has been ostracised by her peer group for
whatever reason (in this case, her weight) and here is a boy, good looking and
popular but with his own set of demons that nobody knows about (in this case
he’s face blind, which we’ll come back to, because it fascinated me) and here
are some other people that they know, some are nice and some are less so, and
now let’s throw the girl and the boy together and see what happens. Well, what
was going to happen was obvious from the very beginning. The boy and the girl
fall in love.
Is that a major spoiler? No, not so much. It is exactly what
you probably expect if you pick up this book. I guess it bugged me a little
bit, partly because the whole love story thing happened so fast and that whole
insta-love thing, it’s not my thing and
also I did feel a little bit like these characters, who are supposed to
represent real teens, were being used for the sake of a good old angsty love
story and that’s a little bit less than good. & I kept reading Libby Strout
as Libby Stout and that bugged me also.
I feel like….I feel like the issues that Niven hints at
addressing here, like fat shaming and body image and mental illness and
bullying and isolation are all so important and she’s on the perfect platform
to really get a really important message out there and instead she uses those
issues to help her tell her love story and the whole time I was just
aggravated. (& kind of wishing I was re-reading Eleanor & Park again
and I’m sorry I’m such a bitch) I felt like Libby’s weight and Jack’s cognitive
issues were massively dumbed down and that made me sad because I was so interested and I felt like Libby’s self validation came
down to whether or not she had a boyfriend and I felt like there could have
been so much more story than there was.
& Libby was so
self-righteous too. Although she dances a lot. Which I liked, mostly because –
have you seen Whitney: Fat Girl Dancing? The whole Libby dancing thing reminded
me of that. I also loved all the TKaM references. High five Jennifer Niven,
high five.
And there’s Jack. Jack hasn’t told his family he thinks he
is face blind. He’s spent his entire life not being able to recognise faces, he
doesn’t even recognise his own family and he hasn’t told a soul. A pretty big
part of me found that a little hard to believe, but also kind of sad and I feel
like if that were true, if that were what he had lived with for as long as he
could remember, well, there’d be more of a negative impact than there was. He’s
pretty well adjusted, all things considered.
Also I get that he can’t retain the knowledge, that if someone walks out
of a room and then walks in again its like he’s seeing them for the first time
and that he doesn’t even recognise his own family and that must be the worst
ever but there’s a whole lot of ‘the woman in the kitchen’ and ‘the man I
assume to be my father’ and WHO ELSE WOULD THE TWO ADULTS IN HIS HOUSE BE IF
NOT HIS PARENTS? I mean, I can be sitting in my parents lounge and hear my Dad
coming down the stairs and I don’t see him because there’s a wall in the way
but I know its him because THERE’S NO OTHER PERSON IT COULD BE. Hashtag minor
niggle.
I did like the whole face-blindness story though and I did
like Jack, I found it, and him, really interesting – 1 in 50 people are
affected by Prosopagnosia, and that’s a massively high number for
something that’s relatively unknown and
God it’s so frustrating when you run into someone and they start talking like
they know you and you just can’t place them
and how awful must it be if that’s your life, if you wake up in a morning and
the person next to you in bed is as unfamiliar as a stranger in the street, if
you don’t know you mum or your brother or your best friend. Horrible.
Anyway, this book is an okay book and probably loads of
people will love it – hell, take a look on Goodreads, loads of people do love it. It’s just perhaps not my cup of tea. I’ll be
giving All the Bright Places a go though.
So there you have it. Come back in a couple of days because
before All The Eye Problems I read an exciting new book by and exciting new
writer and I am excited to talk to you about it.
