Tag Archives: Book Review

Review | Pride and Joy, by Louisa Onomé

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PrideAndJoy

SUCH a fantastic book!

Pride and Joy hooked me with its very first paragraph:

Mama Mary Okafor is turning seventy today, Good Friday, and at first, no one was happy about this. Simply put, if there’s anything anyone, including Mama’s daughter, Joy, knows about Mama, it’s that she would rather die than upstage God, and yet, here she is turning seventy on a holy day.

As someone who grew up in a devoutly Catholic country and with a devoutly Catholic mother, this opening made me laugh. With two simple sentences, Onomé has painted me a vivid picture of exactly who Mama Mary Okafor and her daughter Joy are, and how they relate to each other.

Onomé’s skill in writing vivid characters carries through as the story continues to unfold. Mama Mary then proceeds to die in her sleep, and before Joy can even figure out how to grieve, Mama Mary’s sister, Auntie Nancy, declares that she has had a premonition that Mama Mary will rise from the dead on Easter Sunday. The declaration is both comic (she got the insight from seeing a brown cow on the road) and tragic (beneath it all is very real grief that the sister she has followed her entire life is gone, and to a place she cannot follow), and it’s testament to Onomé’s skill that the author balances both emotions so masterfully.

As the story progresses, an ever-intensifying escalation into absurdity barely conceals the family’s ever-intensifying struggle to manage their grief. A reporter comes to film the resurrection, dozens of Nigerian Canadians show up on the lawn to hold vigil, and a cousin shows up live streaming the happenings to her social media followers. All at the same time, relationships — between siblings, between romantic partners, amongst cousins, and across generations — deepen, fracture, and heal in varying degrees. And the birthday party turned resurrection vigil gradually morphs into a beautifully moving, raw, and gut-wrenchingly real portrait of a family coming to terms with a heartbreaking moment in their living history.

The Okafors are Nigerian Canadian, and, with the caveat that I’m not myself of that culture, the book very much feels Nigerian. Characters speak Igbo, details like the cow in Auntie Nancy’s premonition feels culturally specific, and when they Zoom in Pastor Lazarus and his congregation from Nigeria, it’s both hilarious (“Lazarus” being the name of someone who was brought back from the dead in the Bible) and also very vividly brought to life.

The book also feels very Nigerian Canadian, specifically in Joy’s anxiety that her son Jamil has learned more about his Italian heritage from his father than about his Nigerian heritage from Joy. With Mama Mary gone, who will teach Jamil the language and all the traditions that Joy isn’t confident about knowing herself? It’s an anxiety that struck a chord in me as an immigrant; my mom was my strongest link to my Filipino heritage, and ever since her death, I’ve felt more pressure to remember and keep alive all the many traditions and practices that used to be such a naturally large part of my way of life.

Overall, I absolutely adore this book. The way characters come together in the end, how they’ve grown as individuals, and how their relationships have evolved over the course of Easter weekend… it’s all so masterfully done. I particularly felt my heart swell at a scene near the end where Joy and her brother Michael “do something dumb.” The song “Sweet Mother” isn’t familiar to me at all, but I imagine it’s as meaningful to some readers as it is to Joy and Michael. The scene is pure silliness, and a vivid reminder of how cathartic and full of love silliness can be.

Read this book. It’s fantastic.

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I won a copy of this book in an online giveaway, with no expectation of a review. I just loved it so much that I wanted to blog about it.

Review | Secret Sex: An Anthology, edited by Russell Smith

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SecretSex“New risky fiction — with no names attached.”

What happens when you take 24 of Canada’s most prominent authors, invite them to write sex scenes, and promise them you’ll never reveal which scene they actually wrote? From the cover design (brilliant, by the way), to the anthology title, to the masquerade book launch, the marketing for Secret Sex turns out to be much sexier than the stories themselves.

To be fair, the editor makes it clear in the foreword that this is not a collection of erotica. Rather, it is a collection of sex stories written by literary fiction authors. So the sexiness is more akin to, say, D.H. Lawrence or Marian Engel than Sierra Simone, Sylvia Day, or even Shonda Rhimes’ take on Bridgerton.

So as someone who usually prefers sexy genre romance to literary fiction, and novels to short stories, I was prepared to flip through a few pages of this, figure out it isn’t my thing, and call it a day. Imagine my surprise then when I not only loved the first story (“Sext”), but actually read this all the way through to the end.

Not all the stories were my cup of tea, of course. As with any anthology, there are some hits and misses, and as with any fiction, especially the kind that features sex, your mileage will vary. I will admit that as a reviewer, not knowing who wrote which story also brings a kind of freedom. I can judge each story without thinking of the writer involved, or other books of theirs I may have enjoyed. Which does make my response to each story more candid than usual.

For me, there was a stretch maybe two-thirds through where the stories started to bore me, and I wondered if maybe I should have stretched this out one story at a time rather than try to read it all in a few days. But then a story (“Content Farm Confidential,” about a content ghostwriter who gets with her finance bro boss) revived my interest with its smart commentary on the sometimes soulless nature of sex and love, and remaining two stories (the voyeuristic “Mirror, Mirror” and the vampire story with Henry James undertones “Portrait of a Lady”) held my attention to the end.

My personal favourites:

  • “Politics of Passion” – an Indigenous man and a white woman meet at a conference on treaty issues. I absolutely adore the incisive political commentary and subversion of stereotypes that come through in sly little bon mot descriptions through an otherwise lighthearted, flirty-sexy story. For example, the woman is “colour challenged. Pigment denied.” The man “has a smile that told of strange and desirable secrets. Therefore, he was Anishinaabe.” (The “therefore” in that last quote sticks the landing.) And finally, no spoilers but the last two lines are the perfect ending. Brilliant piece.
  • “Bite” – vampire BDSM erotica. Sexiest story in the collection, IMHO, and the story most like what I would have expected and hoped from the marketing.
  • “Restoration” – this one was probably the most literary amongst my favourites, but I really liked how the author managed to fit an entire novel’s worth of story arc within a few pages.
  • “Watching You Watching Me” – beautifully sad, about a woman dealing with divorce. I especially love this part: “All flings depend on this foundation of fantastic, the relationship with a phantom other who lives only in our head… But marriage is a fantasy too, the most elaborate one of all… The fantasy of knowing an other, of being known,of knowability itself.”
  • And finally, “Sext” (about two adults sexting, one with perhaps more feelings than the other) and “Cloudburst” (about raining cocks, literally) are both punchy and hilarious snippets of fun. Both are made extra special by their surprisingly emotional gut punch endings.

The rest for me ranged from “not bad” to “meh, had to skim.” The only other standouts for me are “Calliope” (about a disembodied brain jealous of its human friend’s human lover) for the originality of its concept, and “Patience” (a fairly straightforward love story and sex scene) for the way it revealed the narrator’s trans-ness through their description of sex: “She is sucking what I have so much, more than enough to be a cock. When I come, my throat reveals itself the way she revealed the cock I know I have…” The narrator of “Patience” had earlier expressed dislike at being called “beautiful,” and it’s only during sex that it becomes clear why.

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

Review | Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend, by Emma R Alban

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DontWantYouParent Trap meets Bridgerton, and make it sapphic. Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend has a heckuva fun hook, and the story definitely lives up to the hype! It’s charming, heartwarming, and absolutely delightful.

It’s Beth’s first season, and she has just this one shot to snag a wealthy husband or else she and her newly-widowed mother, Lady Cordelia Demeroven, will be out on the streets. This is also Gwen’s fourth season; she’s pretty sure she’s destined for a ‘most seasons without a match’ medal, and mostly amuses herself at parties by challenging friends and cousins to ‘spot the heir and the spare’ games.

When Gwen rescues Beth from an over-eager old man, both young women realize they’d much rather hang out together than deal with all the tediousness and stress of the season’s endless social events. They also realize that their parents seem to be attracted to each other, and scheme to help them along towards their own happily ever after.

Beth and Gwen’s relationship is really sweet. Even more than the physical attraction and the fun sexytime scenes, their friendship and desire for each other’s happiness really shines through. These are characters who genuinely enjoy spending time together, and my favourite parts are when they’re just having fun hanging out together and laughing at silly things going on around them.

For me, though, the main highlight of the book isn’t the main romance, but rather the second-chance romance brewing between Beth’s mother, Lady Cordelia Demeroven, and Gwen’s father, Lord Dashiell Havenfort. When both were in their own seasons, they fell in love, but Lady Demeroven was in a similar situation as Beth, where she needed to marry rich to secure her family’s financial stability. Lord Havenfort was heartbroken, and even though he went on to marry Gwen’s mother, when his wife died, he never bothered finding a new one, and instead chose to remain a perpetual bachelor and lady charmer for the rest of his life.

Their meet-cute at the same ball where Beth and Gwen meet was just sparking with unresolved sexual tension, and their will they/won’t they dance running parallel to Beth and Gwen’s romance just stole the show for me. I absolutely felt for Lady Demeroven’s desire to reunite with Lord Havenfort yet also secure her daughter’s future with a wealthy match to another family. The man who eventually began courting Beth seems sweet enough, but his father is a total ass. Seeing through Beth’s eyes the parallels between this potential future father-in-law and her own abusive father is heartbreaking, especially when she notices how much her mom makes herself small to feed this man’s ego, just so she can secure Beth’s future. I love how Beth pushes her mom to consider how their happiness (Beth’s and her mom’s) is more important than financial security, but I also understand why her mom would be afraid to make that leap.

Lord Havenfort seems like a good man, and I sympathize for how much Lady Demeroven’s fears keep happiness away from both of them. A member of the House of Lords, he’s championing a bill to give women the right to divorce their husbands. This objectively makes him a hero, but on a more visceral level, it also makes him a personal knight in shining armour to Lady Demeroven and women like her, because if such a law had existed earlier, she may not have had to put up with an abusive marriage for so long.

Honestly, their romance just stole the show for me, and the big climactic moment between them just made my heart swell. I am so absolutely fantastically proud of Lady Demeroven, and so happy for them both.

I also really like how the novel explores the ways in which social conventions determine the options available to Beth and Gwen. It’s illegal for two women to marry, and most couples in their situation make do with being friends who visit each other’s estates and steal whatever moments they can for romantic encounters. Both Beth and Gwen struggle to come to terms with that restriction, yet as women, they couldn’t really have careers on their own, and so need husbands for financial stability. This is especially true for Beth who doesn’t have the security of Gwen’s father’s wealth.

The book highlights this theme with the two women servants who both work in the same household under different married surnames, but are actually a couple. Social snobbery works to their advantage, because most members of society don’t bother paying enough attention to the servants to even notice they’re romantically involved. One of them tells Gwen that this is the one time she’ll admit that Gwen’s wealth and social status puts her at a disadvantage, and I like how the story explores these kinds of nuances about privilege.

Overall, this is a fun, lighthearted, and feel-good book. The sequel, You’re the Problem, It’s You, featuring Beth and Gwen’s cousins, also seems like fun. Both cousins’ meet-cute at the end of Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend showed a lot of promise for their chemistry together.

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Thanks to Harper Collins Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.