Tag Archives: book-review

July 16, 2025 · 5:50 pm

The Ministry of Time: Such a great premise and yet

Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time promises to be such a great read from the plot description. It’s the near future and things are Not Good politically or environmentally, but Britain has discovered time travel. The appointed Ministry of Time is responsible for bringing back a sampling of historical figures as an experiment to see how they handle the journey through time (like does it destroy their bodies or minds?). Each figure is assigned a ‘bridge’ – a contemporary person who will be their translator for the present and who will live with them for the year helping them understand all the intervening years and discoveries since their historical time (as well as their own sense of self and identity displaced by centuries). Our protagonist is one such bridge, paired with a British naval officer from the lost Franklin expedition. Their romance is at once inevitable and a slow burn.

There are attempts to make the book political – with nods to contemporary crises of refugees, climate wars and deteriorating democracy. But most of this gets lost in the weave of trying to literally understand what is happening in the plot of the novel where the story gets muddled with explanation of time travel (or failed explanations), too much cloak and dagger spy missions where the reader is (I guess) meant to understand in the limited narration way of our protagonist but is – at least I was – just confused about what is going on and why. It culminates in a climax where I remain entirely unsure what happened in terms of basic plot points, nevermind if it was a satisfying ending for the affective threads that had been – at least at first – so carefully stitched.

So sure – if you happen to be very focused and willing to take notes and maybe to just give up on the idea that there’s understandable world building to be had then maybe it’s enjoyable? At the very least it’s an enjoyable first 70 pages as you’re absorbed in the novelty of the plot. And then it’s just… not.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

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March 11, 2025 · 4:56 pm

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus: Not Memorable, but Also Fine

I read Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus in nearly one sitting, which is a good thing because the characters are so pleasant as to be extremely forgettable, and the plot – which couched as mystery/romance/wealthy-people-doing-rich-things should have been captivating – was slow to engage.

(On the forgettable characters: the first 20 odd pages were almost impossible for me to sort out as characters get introduced every six sentences, each with something (apparently) unique for the reader to try to latch on to, but let me tell you, just telling me a character is ‘quirky’ does not a memorable character make. So either make yourself a little chart or trust me that it really doesn’t matter if you know who Fergus or Charlie are because they are both unimportant and underdeveloped).

Our protagonist, Pen, is tackling a few things: what happened that ruptured her parents’ marriage? Is sex really all that people say it is (and when should you have it? with who? for what reason?)? what ties families together if not only blood?

Mostly these questions turn out to have fairly straightforward and boring answers: parents marriage: infidelity (isn’t it always); sex: it depends and whatever you want to do or not do is great as long as you’re consenting and choosing; family: family can be about blood relationships, but that is always an insufficient condition for Family, and family doesn’t have to be about blood relationships. There’s a vehn diagram in there for chosen family for sure.

The fun parts are descriptions of the big Scottish estate where most of the plot unfolds. Lots of misty walks through overgrown gardens.

And the best part for me were the moments where friendship is (lightly) explored. Pen’s best friend Alice is with her and has been her best friend since forever. This kind of friendship is held up as some kind of unassailable fortress of knowing-and-being-known. As if the sheer length of time they have been friends is proof of the power of that trust. And here I quibble. I do dearly love the friends I have been friends with for a long, long time (I see you S. and C. and J. and J.) and yes, there’s something to be said for a person who has chosen you to be around for years and years (something quite different from a sibling who often has no choice or a partner who chooses you for a different kind of love and usually well after your identity has solidified). But Pen and Alice seem to think that length of friendship alone is sufficient justification for depth. And maybe that’s true? I don’t know, I’m not sure it is, but perhaps the real complaint is that the book makes no effort to complicate or question this – instead just: Old Friends Always Friends.

Anyway, I wouldn’t bother with this one, but you do you.

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January 26, 2025 · 2:09 am

The Rachel Incident: Friendship (and bodies)

I’ve never been a casual friend. Ask them and they’ll tell you I am a friend of intensity. If you are wondering what a friend of intensity is, I recommend you to Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident where you’ll follow Rachel and James (and then another James) through a period of Great Friendship Intensity. When Rachel and James meet it isn’t immediately obvious they will be lifelong friends, but then it happens they live together and the interweaving of lives takes over.

I think the heart of this book wants to be about reproductive rights (in Ireland, or wherever, maybe), power in relationships, secrecy and sexual identity, and bodies. But while the thematic heart might want to be that – maybe to be Big and Important – I think in the end this is a book about friendship. About how friendships may form through routine and proximity, but are made lasting through crisis or vulnerability or revelation. That you can maintain a not-so-intense friendship for decades just by playing on the same trivia team, but all it takes is one night of heart opening to make the person BFF (and yes, I’m aware this is the argument Brene Brown and her adherents are forever reminding me). Of course in The Rachel Incident this theory is tested by betrayal, by distance, by loss – and continues to make the argument that when you know someone and let yourself be known, these can all be overcome.

In the end it’s not a book that really sticks with me, and I didn’t find myself much moved by any of it, but it did remind me of all my forever friends and how they came to be that through the outrageous courage of saying here I am as all of me. Or sometimes through my relentless refusal to leave them alone. Perhaps there could be a rewrite of this one where vulnerability is replaced with persistence. Either way – it’s a gentle, light and engaging read, if not entirely memorable.

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