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Review | The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Rachel Joyce

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20890479I fell in love with Harold Fry in Rachel Joyce’s novel about his Unlikely Pilgrimage. How could I not? Here was a quiet, non-adventurous man setting off to walk the length of England to see his old friend Queenie Hennessy before she dies. I can never forget that scene: Harold on the phone to the nurse at Queenie’s hospice, saying “As long as I walk, she must live. Please tell her this time I won’t let her down.”

And now we get to see him through Queenie’s eyes. In this companion novel, Joyce tells us Queenie’s story, partly how she waits for Harold to arrive, and also partly how she lived before the whole pilgrimage began. Love Song is a wonderful novel, one that may make you tear up, and one that will make you fall more in love with Harold and Queenie than ever before. I read it in a weekend and though I didn’t cry like I thought I would, I did enjoy returning to Harold and Queenie’s world. I didn’t like it as much as Unlikely Pilgrimage, and I think it’s because this was a dose of reality that, for me, took out some of the charm of the earlier book.

One of the things I loved about Unlikely Pilgrimage is how Joyce refrained from the typical love story and kept the relationship between Harold and Queenie purely platonic. I was fascinated by the stocky, plain featured woman who’d made such an impact on a man’s life without any romantic feelings involved. In this book, we find out that Queenie was in love with Harold since they first met. They still are friends, and being in love does not make Queenie any weaker as a character, but the story just felt more traditional, and that disappointed me. I also wish she’d somehow moved on beyond Harold, not necessarily falling in love with anyone else, and again, there’s nothing wrong with being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, but it just made me feel sad.

Another thing that I was too caught up to think about while reading Unlikely Pilgrimage was how nonsensical Harold’s plan was. While walking with Harold, the idea of walking across England seemed romantic, a true giving of oneself. Now, with Love Song, reading as patient after patient dies while waiting alongside Queenie, I ended up asking myself multiple times why he didn’t just take a train. Harold’s pilgrimage inspires Queenie’s fellow patients, and several of them found waiting for him as a reason to go on living and celebrating. So it’s still a beautiful act. It’s just that, coupled with the harsh reality of people dying while they wait, the impracticalities of the plan kept coming into focus for me.

That being said, there are a lot of other things to love in this book. For example, we get to meet Harold and Maureen’s son. A focal point of tragedy in the first book, David becomes a more complex, well-rounded character in this one. There’s a lot going on with him that we never really get to fully explore, and a much richer, more complicated family life that we didn’t realize until now.

We also learn a bit more about Queenie’s life, and Joyce teases us with details of a complicated pre-Harold past. I wish I’d learned more about it — what kind of child was she, and who was this man who screwed up her life before she took the factory job and met Harold?

I also love the other patients in Queenie’s hospice. They are such a colourful cast of characters, and each death dims the story the slightest bit. I especially love the description of their drinks — nutrient-rich shakes that taste disgusting despite supposedly having flavours like vanilla and raspberry. I remember having to drink a concoction once for a medical procedure — it was supposed to taste like strawberry and it kinda did, but it was also like gulping down cement and was utterly disgusting overall. I’m sure their shakes were much more vile, but that concoction was what I was thinking of when I read about the patients raising their cups in a toast and celebrating Harold’s pilgrimage with a serving they deem extra delicious. Such scenes feel poignant, and just because of what I once had to drink, it was those party scenes that remain most memorable to me.

Queenie’s story is told through the conceit of a second, longer letter to Harold Fry, where she confesses everything — her feelings for him, her role in David’s life, the true story of how she and Harold first met, and so on. I have mixed feelings about the ending. On one hand, there was a twist that seemed unnecessary and confused me more than anything. What was the point of that? On the other hand, there’s an added touch of poignancy to that twist that I kinda really liked. So, quite fitting for a tale of such complex human emotions, I finished the book not knowing quite how I felt about it.

Overall though, I did enjoy the book. Joyce’s writing is as beautiful as ever, and her gift for making characters leap right off the page remains strong. If you love Harold Fry, do take a moment to see him through Queenie’s eyes.

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

 

Blog Tour | Review: Gottika, Helaine Becker

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9781770863910Helaine Becker’s Gottika is a powerful retelling of an old Jewish legend about the golem, a magical humanoid being made from clay who is brought to life to protect Jewish towns from anti-semitic attacks. The world that Becker creates in Gottika bears many similarities to Panem and other contemporary YA dystopias, but the reference to Jewish legend turns the into an unsettling allegory for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Fifteen year old Dany is a Stoon, in Western Gottika where Stoons are treated as second class citizens and killed for no reason under the tyrannical rule of Count Pol. Unrest is brewing, and Dany’s father must decide if he must stop trying to keep a low profile and use the secret knowledge he possesses to bring clay to life and transform it into a weapon against Count Pol.

There’s a lot going on in Gottika, multiple plot threads that, though resolved, rarely ever take off. What’s the “staring sickness”, why do all the families in town only have one child each, why is Count Pol kidnapping teenage girls? The final question in particular does have a pretty big significance in the story, but the question feels so tangential, and buried beneath so many other plot points, throughout the story that the payoff feels disjointed.

More powerful are the encounters between Stoons and Count Pol’s soldiers. In one particularly memorable scene, Dany and his father are swimming when soldiers order them out of the water and castigate them for not wearing their hats. The casual injustice, coupled with Dany and his father’s powerlessness to resist, is difficult to read. In another scene, soldiers storm Dany’s house to confiscate his family’s books. The novel breaks from text narration then, switching over to graphics and demonstrating how some horrors are beyond just words.

While more of the main characters are male, I love that the female characters seem to have more complex motivations for their actions. While most teenage girls fear being kidnapped by Count Pol, Dany’s cousin Dalil welcomes it. She is attracted by Pol’s lifestyle, and manages to turn a blind eye to his faults. Later in the story, she is forced to face the truth of Pol’s tyranny, and becomes instrumental in the resistance against it. I love her character arc, how her desire for comfort initially outweighs her loyalty to her people, until she is forced to realize just how much she is condoning by her actions. Dany’s mother as well, quiet and unassuming at first, later reveals a dark secret she’s had to live with for many years. In contrast to Dany and his father’s more traditional heroic roles, I love the nuances and  questions raised by Dalil and Dany’s mother’s more problematic arcs.

The horrors of the Holocaust are difficult to discuss, particularly in fiction for children. Gottika isn’t exactly a simple allegory for that, but it does speak to the oppression experienced by certain groups of people. The story is futuristic, but the tone is that of a classic fairy tale. There’s a timelessness to Dany’s story, and despite the supernatural elements, the sense that there have been, and continue to be, far too many Count Pols throughout history.

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Thank you to Dancing Cat Books for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and for inviting me to take part in this blog tour.

Review | Hush Now, Don’t Explain, Dennis Must

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21528969This must be my season for jazz novels. Almost immediately after reading 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, I receive Dennis Must’s Hush Now, Don’t Explain for review. Unlike Cat’s Pajamas, Must’s novel takes a starkly realistic view of history — racism, sexism and class relations, all within the framework of jazz.

The story follows Honor, an orphan, at the end of Word War II, as she leaves her dead-end town of DeForest Junction on a quest to learn about her birth mother. With her is her friend Billy, a mixed-race boy looking for the man he believes is his birth father, and shanty store owner Augustus Willard.

There are some powerful moments in this book, such as when Billy gets attacked and branded on his chest for his skin colour and when one of the characters decides to turn back for love. I also like the cadence of Must’s writing, which draws the reader into how the characters speak.

Overall, however, there’s a lot going on in Hush Now and I don’t think it all necessarily came together. There’s a heavy-handedness to the story, a desire to explore so many different issues and make a strong statement about each one, that at times, it just felt crammed. At its heart are some very personal, individual conflicts — Honor and Billy’s search for their past, Augustus’ search for a certain kind of future — yet only Augustus’ story, and to a lesser extent Billy’s, has a satisfying payoff. Honor is the main character, but her story felt the least authentic. I like how she had to dress up as a man to stay safe, but given how easily some other characters saw through her facade, it seemed more a metaphorical gesture than anything else. Possibly because her story felt the most heavy handed, she never felt real, and when she experiences something horrific later on in the story, it lacked emotional impact.

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Thank you to Coffeetown Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.