Court of Lions is a rich novel, steeped in history and alternating between two time periods and two points of view. The first is Kate Fordham in the present day. On the run from an abusive and maniacally religious husband, she is living under an assumed identity in Granada as her twin sister keeps her son safe. She discovers a note tucked away in a wall, written in an old language, and her love of codes leads her to try to decipher what it says.

The note was written by Blessings, the other half of the story and a boy living in the palace of 1476 Granada as companion to the sultan’s son Momo. Momo has been prophesied to cause the downfall of his kingdom, and to anyone familiar with the history, it may be evident that the Spanish Inquisition is just around the corner.

Blessings’ half of the story is by far the stronger piece. I knew of the Inquisition and of Ferdinand and Isabella’s crusade to colonize the entire world and convert everyone to Christianity, so I very much enjoyed reading about this period in history from another perspective. Momo, who grew up to become Sultan Abu Abdullah Mohammed, in this book was a tender hearted man who couldn’t bear to see his people suffer and starve. Some may have considered his eventual capitulation weak, but Johnson presents him in a sympathetic light. Reluctant to engage with the brutality of the Spanish forces, Momo wants only to negotiate for his people to live in peace and free to worship as they choose. I wish we could’ve delved a bit deeper into his thought process. While we get a clear sense of Momo’s pain and regret as negotiations don’t go as planned, we don’t get as clear a sense of any kind of strategy on his part to defeat Spain, and while that may be part of his pacifist character, he’s often a passive figure in the battle. Part of that may be because we read this part of the story from Blessings’ perspective, and his main interest isn’t the political climate or the country’s welfare so much as it is his unrequited love for the prince. It’s a sympathetic tale and Blessings goes to great lengths for his love, even losing his leg at one point, but the broader political piece could’ve been explored deeper.

The present-day narrative just felt distracting. There is little to link Kate’s story to Blessings, other than the location and possibly a familial link to one of the characters she encounters. The mystery around the piece of paper she discovers leads to her meeting new friends, but the mystery is solved mostly off-page, and the primary focus is her escape from her husband. Thematically, her husband’s bigotry and religious fervour parallels that of Ferdinand and Isabella’s, but to make any further comparison of the storylines is tenuous at best, and insulting at worst. As a result, the two stories feel completely disconnected, and I felt that Kate’s story had enough going on in it to be an entire book. Things like self-harm and PTSD and told mostly in passing, and I know her fear only because she states it. Most of the major action (assault, a kidnapping) happens in flashback or off-page, and as a result, it loses some of its urgency. (One key exception is a rape scene, which was just creepy.)

Overall, this is a good read, and an interesting new perspective on the events in Granada during the Spanish Inquisition.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What an incredible, beautiful, captivating book this is! It’s the kind of book that begs to be read slowly, to have its words savoured as we dip in and out of Cyril Avery’s life and allow ourselves to be lost in John Boyne’s Ireland. This is one of my favourite books this year, and I cannot recommend it enough. In fact, I recommend you save it for a lazy weekend or your next staycation. It took me over a week to finish this (at 600 pages, probably no surprise), but it was a struggle each and every time to put it aside for real life. Going to work, running an errand and even going to sleep all interrupted my experience of this book, and I often wished I had saved it for a time when I wouldn’t have to take a break from reading quite so often.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a Dickensian epic, a coming of age story set in 20th century Ireland. Boyne dips into Cyril Avery’s life in seven year intervals, from his birth after World War II, through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and all the way into the legalization of marriage equality in this century. We meet the people in and around Cyril’s life — his birth mother who was chased out of town by her parish priest for having a child out of wedlock; his adoptive mother, a novelist whose greatest tragedy was that people loved her work; his adoptive father, a wealthy man who skirted tax laws and always reminded Cyril that he was “not an Avery”; his best friend and first love Julian, a handsome and charismatic young man; and Bastiaan, the warm and loving doctor whom he takes as a partner.

Boyne’s writing is beautiful and wry; he inserts biting commentaries about the violence of homophobia and hypocrisy of religious fundamentalism with such finesse that the humour feels gentle even as the observations are sharp. There’s a gentleness to the story overall, a subtle distance that keeps the reading comfortable even as Boyne tackles deeply troubling subjects. Much of that is due to the seven-year format. Just as a situation becomes too intense — a character is murdered, another character dies, a horribly hurtful decision is made — the section fades to black, and we revisit Cyril’s life seven years later when presumably the characters have moved on somewhat. We see the aftermath and the scars without having to deal for too long with fresh wounds. This is not to say that the story is easy; the novel is Dickensian not just in scope but also in tragedy. At times, the coincidences and the ill luck strain the edges of credulity, yet the story is so captivating and the characters so real that we’re more than happy to suspend disbelief.

Perhaps the crux of the story can be found near the end:

Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing. [p. 557]

Such is life, and such is this book. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a life writ large, intimate in scope yet expansive in the world it channels. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking, hopeful novel, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved this book. An ambitious young Congressional intern Aviva Grossman has an affair with her married boss. Like Monica Lewinsky, she is eventually found out and vilified by the public as the Congressman’s team rapidly launches into damage control PR. Aviva’s reputation suffers from the fallout, and she finds herself unable to land a job in either politics or communications. Fast forward a few years, and Aviva has reinvented herself as Jane Young, a wedding and events planner in small town Maine raising her daughter Ruby. This is where the novel begins.

Young Jane Young is told in multiple perspectives. I absolutely loved the first section, told by Aviva’s mom Rachel, who longs to reestablish a relationship with her estranged daughter. I thought her voice was the strongest of the sections, and while the other sections of the book eventually intersect and reconnect with Rachel, I still wish we had gotten a chance to revisit her story and her perspective later on. She had been a vocal opponent of Aviva’s relationship from the beginning, yet looking back, she realizes that her aggressive, overprotective response may not have been what Aviva needed. Her regret is palpable, as is her fierce love for her daughter, and for the longest time, I shared in her resentment for Aviva, at not listening to her mother and making such stupid decisions.

Jane’s section is next, and while the story itself — about a wedding she has to plan for a sweet and meek woman and an overbearing politician — is interesting, her voice didn’t grab me as immediately as Rachel’s did. There was also an annoying coyness at the beginning about Jane actually being Aviva, which I thought was unnecessary, given that this reveal is already made on the back cover and Goodreads summary. Still, this section sets the groundwork for what happens afterward, which is well worth the set up.

The bulk of the action in the novel takes place over the next two sections when Jane decides to run for mayor of her town and her daughter Ruby runs away from home to track down the man she believes is her father. Ruby’s precociousness and independence strain credulity, but I actually liked her character and especially her emails to her pen pal in Indonesia.

My main sympathy for these sections of the book lie mostly with Embeth, the congressman’s wife who is surviving cancer, supporting his reelection campaign, and surprised to learn that after all this time, she is still expected deal with a scandal she’d thought long buried in his past. I’m so glad we got a section from her perspective, and that we got to see her humanity, as people around her don’t often see past the cool facade. She definitely deserves much better than the Congressman and I hope her story after the events in this book leads her to some form of happily ever after.

I thought Zevin handled these sections well. Ruby’s running away is a melodramatic act, yet Zevin’s treatment of the story and the multiple perspectives keeps the characters grounded and their emotions real. I also like how each section keeps a tight focus on its own perspective, so that even when other characters re-enter the picture, we are privy only to what the narrator sees. For example, Rachel appears in Embeth’s section during the whole drama over Ruby’s running away, but we don’t really get a sense of how her presence at this time impacts her relationship with her daughter or granddaughter. While part of me wanted to know more, another part acknowledges that Embeth would likely not be involved at all in that, so her perspective has a different focus.

The final section takes us back in time and reliving Aviva’s affair through a Choose Your Own Adventure. Part of me thought this format was a bit cutesy, but I also like how it framed Aviva’s affair as a series of bad choices, and filtered through a more mature, knowing perspective that understood how alternative choices (e.g. leave the room instead of pulling the congressman in for a kiss) may have been better options.

Overall, I highly recommend Young Jane Young. Some sections are stronger than others and some plot threads are frustratingly left unresolved, but I liked seeing how a youthful mistake can lead to some long-lasting consequences for many people beyond just the individual. I also liked the realistic depiction of power dynamics (the Congressman is a dick for taking advantage of Aviva like that) and the unfairness of gender disparity (Aviva being labelled a slut and unable to escape this label). I remember growing up in the Clinton era. Then and now, I firmly sympathize with Hillary Clinton, who has faced the public fallout from the affair even longer than Bill has, which I think is ridiculously unfair. But looking back, I also realize now how unjustly I viewed Monica Lewinsky, and reading this book prompted me to think about what she must have gone through.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.