Small Worlds is a poem of a novel. Caleb Azumah Nelson's language flows and repeats and circles and dances and loops back on itself and sometimes resolves, before it curls out in a new direction, just like the jazz music and musicians and improvisations and the dancing he so lyrically writes about. It's full of beautiful melancholy (as he describes The Roots's Things Fall Apart). It's full of love, feeling, disappointment, sorrow, remembering and forgetting, loss, death and healing. And it's full of wisdom. Here are a few of my favourites (but there are many):

Anger is just love in another body.
and
Since the one thing which might solve our problems is dancing ... .
and
A visitor in my own language.
and
I'm trying desperately to avoid the shadow of grief, wanting to walk in the brightness of her spirit.
and
While grief is never over, we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind. (Or, as I relayed it to a friend, not quite remembering it: Grief is always with us, but there are times when we walk in the light of the person who died, not always in their shadow ... .'
and last but not least:
Maybe this is all we need sometimes, for someone else to believe in the possibilities you see for yourself.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I said to my local bookseller: 'Why would I want to read a retelling of David Copperfield?' What a fool. Demon Copperhead is a wonderful and wonderfully told story and, as always with Barbara Kingsolver, it's a story of a fight for social justice. I wonder if she ever thought about the phonetics of the oxycontin manufacturers Purdue: all those lost people ... . Read it, even if you feel as I did before you do. I was wrong.

Dominoes by Phoebe McIntosh

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dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Dominoes had me in tears in the last fifty or so pages - not because Phoebe McIntosh's writing forced my tears, but because her writing's honesty about and through her characters is so very poignant. The novel is brave and thoughtful and the characters are so alive and (sometimes) funny and because McIntosh doesn't make the final (non-romantic) reconciliation an absolute reconciliation, but more the possible beginnings of one, the characters - especially those two - live on after the novel is finished.

Dominoes is also starkly truthful about the UK government's appalling treatment of the Windrush generation and their right to live and work in the UK and how those rights were randomly taken away from some of that generation. And it's starkly truthful about enslaved people and the slave-holders and how that terrible inhumane time still resonates today, including through the compensation that was paid to the slave-holders and inherited by their descendants, and was never paid - as it should have been - to the enslaved and so inherited by their descendants.

And it's about how to be your best self and how to forgive and how to fight for the life you want for others and for yourself. It's glorious and moving and deserves all the prizes.

The Water All Around Us by Lynn Michell

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dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

the water all around us sings with the beauty and poignancy of a lost whale's song

I read this beautiful story in a weekend. The prose sings, it captivated me and I couldn't put it down. The story is full of hope and wisdom and sorrow. Fenn, a nine-year-old, is brilliantly captured in all her determination and fury and wisely sorrowful sympathy for the lost whale. But all the characters live on in my head - the painter and the man who's planting 3,000 trees; the woman who's come to the island to escape, and the sea and the beach and the small island itself, far to the north of these islands: they’re also characters in their own right and they're all living on in my head.

the water all around us is a novel to remember, to cherish and to think about long after the last page has been turned. It's haunting, just the way the lost whale's song and Fenn's own song for him are haunting. I loved it and the echoes it's left me with. I think you'll love it too.

Sula by Toni Morrison

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dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Storygraph recommended Sula to me and I loved it. Thank you. The prose is miraculous and the story salutary and heartbreaking. From Toni Morrison's passionately eloquent Foreword she argues, in writing Sula, for 'fideilty to my own sensibility' which is 'highly political and passionately aesthetic'. She 'refused to explain or even acknowledge the "problem" [of being a "Negro" writer] as anything other than an artistic one.'

Writing about the characters in Sula Morrison says:

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when - especially when - it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peach was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female - envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva's physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel's accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula's resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation.

Read it. It's wonderful.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

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dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

There are so many characters in this novel but they're all given a distinctive voice by Wilkerson and the poignancy of missed meetings and too-late revelations (through lies told and lies lived by the next generations) is beautifully handled.

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angelayoung's reviews 329 reviews

angelayoung's reviews
329 reviews