May Book Reviews
I post reviews to Twitter, Instagram and Literal within a day of finishing a book. Here are the books I read in May.
Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi
In this novel, an unusual couple and their pet mongoose take a trip on an even more unusual train and come to find out just how connected they are to their fellow passengers. It’s a sprawling story disguised as a simple one, its branching paths expertly contained by the setting and Oyeyemi’s powerful — and sometimes frustrating — narrative control.
Some folks have made Wes Anderson comparisons here, and I get it — train setting, intersecting dramas of wealthy people, twee flourishes — but I feel like Peaces shares more DNA with Altman and Lynch, willing to embrace a sort of shaggy aimlessness and a preference for strangeness and uncertainty. I appreciate the emotional tenderness Oyeyemi brings to this approach, though, which infuses inviting warmth into a story that doesn’t show its cards easily.
Peaces is definitely an Oyeyemi novel — interwoven fantastic and domestic elements, themes of class and race, a unique approach to building and resolving tension — but it’s built less on the fairy tales and dream logic that characterize her earlier work (though those are certainly still present) and more on a complex overlapping of very human — albeit highly unusual — relationships. There’s a Rashomon effect in play on almost every page, each character entering the story with their own secrets. By the end we get a picture of an entire web of connected intrigues, heartbreak, and family drama, though that map might take another two or three reads to fully decipher.
I’m not sure there’s an author writing today who better integrates fabulism into startlingly contemporary stories, but Oyeyemi isn’t interested in taking it easy on the reader — it takes work to absorb and understand everything going on here, and even then you’re not guaranteed a satisfying resolution — and I think it’s worth the effort.
House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones
May was a rough brain month, which means I had a hard time focusing on a book instead of blankly staring at my phone. Enter this lovely 400 pages of comfort reading.
A sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle, House takes place in the next pseudo-continental kingdom over and follows the adventures of burgeoning witch Charmain as she grows into herself and helps save her country from the looming threat of giant purple bug people.
Like Howl, it’s a delight, if a bit more chaotic. Jones has an incredible knack for worldbuilding through story, with the focus entirely on the adventure at hand and all the important little details falling into place on the way to a satisfying end.
Is House of Many Ways as good as Howl’s Moving Castle? Not really — that book has more going on in a tightly-wrapped package than this wild sprint. But if there’s one trope in all of fantasy literature I find completely irresistible, it’s a complicated magical house with plenty of secrets — and the titular House of Many Ways delivers.