Mrs Hemingway is a beautiful representation of the relationship Hemingway had with his wives as well as the relationship they had with each other and how this shaped his career. It is eloquent and elegant but at the same time harrowing to read.

It is a story about how far you are willing to go to hold on to your husband and how long you are prepared to fight to be Mrs Hemingway.
Each wife in turn has a voice in the novel, Hadley, Fifi, Martha then Mary and each recounts how she captures Hemingway's attention and then watches as the next one makes her mark. Each story is entirely different from the others, they all went about their marriage in different ways, in different parts of the world and I willed each wife not to make the same mistake as the last. Although the marriages ended in the same way, it didn't feel predictable, it still felt fresh and it made the sense of foreboding unbearable - no matter how different they were to eachother, each wife faced the same fate - it was sad, it was angering, but what can be done? Hemingway's attention span for his women pretty much lasted as long as his novels before he was on to the next one.

I was gripped from page one with this book. I really felt that I traveled with the ups and downs of this book.
I loved that it was based around real love letters and telegrams and  Naomi wrote it with such confidence that you have to remind yourself that this is still only fiction.

It will stick in your head for a long time after reading and the descriptive scenes of Paris or on the beach in Cuba will make you wish you were there without a doubt!

May We Be Forgiven
A.M. Homes

May we be forgiven is one of those books that I have seen on the shelves and twitter posts and never read but thought I should to see what the fuss is about. It won the Women's Fiction prize, so it must be good. As it happens for the SYP February bookclub this book was voted in as the read.
I don't want to say that I hated it, as hate seems like such a strong word, but this book was definitely not for me, in any way.

It is one of those books that when someone asks what it is about, it is really hard to describe... 'so there's this guy who's brother gets in a car accident and kills a family, then comes home to find the guy (his brother) in bed with the brother's wife and so he kills her over the head with a lamp...' so that sums up the first, say, 20 pages and the premise to the story, it then goes on to describe a life of fostering the children, internet sex dates, lesbian relationships with teachers and stranger's abandoned parents.
Yeah. It felt abit like that when I was reading it. With every new escapade I was thinking 'what is going on here? What is going to happen next?'

I think there are a few fundamentals that really jarred me with this book:
1. I didn't get on with the writing style at all. Some people love the style of Austen or Dicken's works, some hate it. Not everyone can get on with them. It's like that, but this is the polar opposite of Austen/Dickens. I found the style very crude, it spent far too long describing the dirty condom left in the bin after sleeping with Jane (the brother's wife before she was killed) and an episode where a tampon was put in the wrong place (don't ask) and subsequently the girl pooed on the floor (really). Some at my book club thought this style to be gripping and realistic, but maybe I'm old-fashioned (and ignorant enough to want to live in a fairy tale land of books where harsh realities are glossed over), but I just found it crude and unenjoyable. In fact I found it very masculine as well, not just because it was told from a male character's point of view, but because of the crude nature of it, yet I discovered about half way through that A.M. Homes is actually a woman!

2. What some found as 'darkly humorous' and 'intensely gripping' I found to be pretty ridiculous (see back to list of plot points). It was argued at the book club that it was describing the realities of nature but I found nothing realistic about a mysterious girl leaving her senile parents on Harry's doorstep with all the legal forms handing over all power of attorney to him without him knowing, and then just leaving him to get on with it so she can go live her life. or when the murderous brother is dropped into a wilderness camp with other convicts and his brother seemlessly sends him a fulled data-loaded ipad of which his Israeli terrorist-looking friend starts to order guns and bombs off of it and it takes the authorities a while to bat an eyelid. When would that ever happen??
I got that it was trying to satirize society in parts and how harsh it can be, and it was quite amusing in parts but I just found it emotionally detached and plain ridiculous. I wanted more from it, more emotion over the grief of the wife and less focus instead on the dirty condom left in the bin.

I think the happy ever after almost swayed me at the end. I contemplated giving it 3 stars instead of 2 (until I was reminded how much i disliked the first 90%), it seemed to wind down at the end towards this happy ending of redemption and the functioning dysfunctional family, which was sweet, but could've happened without all the rest.

Although I may not understand why, I'm glad others liked it, it makes for a good debate at book clubs, but it is not the kind of book I would suggest anyone read if there was a choice.

I have recently read Every Day by David Levithan, a book that seems to be on everyone's lips this year, and I thought it would make for an interesting discussion.



Have you read it?
If not, it is about 'A' who has no body, no gender and no sexuality - each day A wakes up inhabiting a new body of a 16 year old and has to spend the day impersonating them, trying not to interfere with their lives. A does this every day and has no reason or understanding of how it happens or why. Then one day A wakes up in the body of Justin and everything gets turned upside down when A falls in love with Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon and starts to break the rules one by one.

I was really intrigued when I first heard about it and I really commend David Levithan on it - although it sounds quite simple to explain it must have been so complicated to pan out and make into a coherent plot with a little loopholes as possible. It's an interesting subject as a whole, the idea that this person (well not really a person, entity really) exists without any physical identification or gender.
I don't know about you, but my brain couldn't quite get itself round the fact that A was genderless, it kept trying to attribute it to one or the other. Levithan says himself that the majority of readers instantly fall into the trap of calling A a 'he', which I am guilty of myself*, maybe because Levithan is a male writer, or because the first body in the book is male. Who knows, but I think it is instinctive for our brains to try and assign these unknown qualities that in real life are second nature to one or the other.
Did you automatically imagine A as male or female? Or did you stick with knowing A as genderless?

How important do you think gender is to a story? It's an interesting message that Levithan is trying to put out there with a genderless main character. Should we spend more time focussing on more important things in life and love? Would the story have been different if A was defined to being either male or female? Of which would also then define them by being straight or gay for falling in love with Rhiannon. I think it is so easy to go through a story and so subconsciously notice the gender or the character - especially when told in first person - that you don't really think about it, but with Every Day  Levithan is making you 100% aware of the lack of gender - to the point where it becomes a discussion point between A and Rhiannon. It is quite ironic really, in order to portray the potential message that gender doesn't have to be the focal point of a character, he has to highlight the gender (well, lack of it).



*However, I also want to bring your attention to a little thing I picked up on, which probably aided in my mental assumption that A was a guy, that both UK and US covers have pictures of guys on the front (although the UK cover has a girl on it too, I was under the assumption that that was Rhiannon, rather than a double version of A). It's hard not to be presumptuous, but surely having a picture of a male on the cover of a book about A who is genderless, makes it slightly redundant?

Should characters and plots be defined by their gender and sexuality? Or should they take a leaf out of A's book and be open-ended and unattached to any physicality which could define them, and instead focus on the mind and the powers within?

If you haven't read Every Day yet, I would strongly recommend you read it, even just to see what all the fuss is about!

How do you choose what book to read next?

Now this is something that I started thinking about after an outing through a bookshop with my boyfriend. Both being lovers of books, we spent a long time walking among the bookshelves, pointing out books that were good and not so good. I found myself not only drawing on books that I had already read, or had waiting on my to-read pile, that I wanted to recommend to be read, but I kept pointing out books that were 'big' at the moment. I realised that I had built up a large amount of knowledge on the upcoming newest, hottest reads purely through twitter and blogging and this was how I choose a lot of my new reads.
This got me thinking, how do you choose your books? There are so many books out there - where to start?

Once again it is Friday and the sun is shining! It's been an exciting week, we have a new royal baby, George, and a new JK Rowling book!

I'm going to talk about the latter this week as the revelation of JK Rowling's latest book 'The Cuckoo's Calling' under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith took the publishing and media world by storm.




Rowling says that she sold 8,500 copies across all media in the few months of release as Robert Galbraith, although the Bookseller claims only 500 hardback copies were sold - but within 24 hours of the leak the book was at #1 of the Amazon.com charts and between 14 and 20 July, 17,662 copies were sold compared to the 43 copies the week before.

Rowling claims that it was not an elaborate marketing/PR scheme to boost sales and would've liked it to have been kept secret a little longer. I can see why she used a pseudonym -  when The Casual Vacancy was published sales were phenomenal, but I couldn't help but feel like these sales were purely because of who she was and her success with Harry Potter. Not that she couldn't write necessarily, but she was so famous for the Harry Potter series as a children's genre, I wasn't quite sure if she could cross over to adult fiction. I went to a Q&A with Anthony Horowitz at the LBF'12 and he said one of the hardest things for a children's author is to cross over to adult and he had tried many times. It was almost like she managed to skip the queue with her adult fiction, she was guaranteed sales from day 1. Now with The Cuckoo's Calling she gave herself that freedom to give her work the chance it deserves for the writing itself, not just her name. For a little while anyway...

But what makes me just a little bit sceptical over her claim of no PR plan, is that being who she is and the success of her previous work, she knew one day that it would be revealed... She wouldn't be able to get away with Robert Galbraith forever, and I doubt she'd want to - she claims she wanted to keep it quiet for a little bit longer, which suggests that she wanted to reveal it eventually, so somewhere, sometime there was a plan to push sales and give it the credit of her name that it is due.

What do you think about it all? Do you think it's all a media stunt or is using a pseudonym a great way for famous people to write anonymously? Have you got yourselves a copy yet or plan to?
Let me know, I'd love to hear all your reviews of it all!

Stay tuned next week for your summer reads and maybe even a summer competition....