Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in December 2021. These reviews have minor spoilers.
1. The Woman In The White Kimono by Ana Johns
I Really Liked this book, but there were a few things that affected my overall experience reading it. First off, the narrator of the audiobook is the same one that read The Oyster Thief by Sonia Faruqi and we all know how much I loved that (read my review here). I do not mean to say that this narrator does not know how to do her job, it’s just that her style of narrating an audiobook doesn’t click with me somehow and I don’t like it. Fortunately, she only narrated half the book in this case (the other half was narrated by a male narrator) and that made the experience more bearable. The other thing that made me cringe a little is the beginning of the book; it opens with the main character preparing to introduce her intended to her parents, and she is completely in love with him. He is too with her and seeing them together is a little bit cliché but then the story takes on a more serious tone after her parents meet Hajime and reject him as a husband-to-be for their daughter.
This novel is set in Japan post-WWII and the clash between the defeated Japanese and the victorious Americans resonates from the pages hitherto because it is when Naoko’s parents meet Hajime that we too learn why he is an unacceptable match: he is a gaijin, and if Naoko marries him, she will bring dishonor to her family. They tell her she will marry the man they chose for her instead, a wealthy Japanese man who happens to be the son of one of her father’s clients, but Naoko has another problem. She is pregnant, and ultimately decides to leave her family to marry Hajime and go back to America with him.
This book is Naoko’s story, the story of thousands of real Japanese women who fell in love with American soldiers and who were ostracized in their own country for consorting “with the enemy”; of thousands of women who were also mistreated and discriminated in their new country because the US did not look upon these marriages kindly either. The US did not want to give them visas, and it did not recognize any marriages between American soldiers and Japanese women. This is shown in the book when Hajime is transferred back to the US without being able to get his superior’s consent to the marriage and he never returns to Japanese soil. In the meantime, Naoko’s family takes care of her “problem” and she is admitted into a women’s clinic where she is expected to stay until her delivery due to the fact that she is already too far along for an abortion. This is the story of Naoko fighting for her baby and the life she was meant to have with the man she loved, but which was taken away from her because neither she nor Hajime were supposed to fall in love in the first place.
When talking about WWII nobody mentions these women, and it wasn’t until I read this book that I found out that this had actually happened. These women were victims of the war too and I am glad that I read it. It made me aware of something that I had not known before, and to me that is the definition of a good book.
2. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
This is the second installment of Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy series, and in it we are shown the fate of the women of Troy after the city falls and the Greeks destroy it. Hecuba, Priam’s widow and the former Queen of Troy, is now a slave in Odysseus’ household while Andromache, Hector’s widow, belongs to Pyrrhus now. Agamemnon claims and later marries Cassandra. Menelaus, for his part, takes Helen back even though she remains the most hated of women.
Ultimately, this book is about fate; not only the fate of the women of Troy after the war but also the fate of the Greeks after they conquer the city. And that fate is intimately linked to Achilles. Just as he incurred the wrath of the Gods when he defiled Hector’s body and refused to bury it, so too does Achilles’s son Pyrrhus incur the wrath of the Gods when he kills Priam and follows his father’s example by defiling the body and refusing to bury it. And now, none of the Greeks can go home. They are stranded on the beach beside the destroyed city waiting for favorable winds.
This book is similar in scope to A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (read my review here) and though I liked the end result of Haynes’s novel, I admit that I liked Pat Barker’s work a lot more. As in The Silence of the Girls, we witness the events in the Greek camp through the eyes of Briseis, the once Queen of Lyrnessus and war prize of Achilles. Now she is the wife of Alcimus, one of Achilles’s closest men, and a free woman. Despite her new position , Briseis is still struggling with her lot of being a Trojan woman, an invisible Trojan woman, carrying a Greek child. We are also privy to Pyrrhus’s thoughts as he tries to measure up to his father’s legacy knowing that he is found wanting and isn’t as great as the previous leader of the Myrmidons. Finally, we are also aware of the disgraced Trojan prophet Calchas’s point of view and see how it is him who figures out why the Greeks cannot go home. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
3. The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary
This book is a contemporary romance novel, and this genre too is usually out of my comfort zone. This too was a surprising read for me, and I liked it more than I expected. For starters, I liked the protagonists. Tiffany is funny, quirky, easy to identify with and she has the type of friends we all want. The kind that protects, support, and watch your back 24/7 while Leon is shy, a bit of a loner, and a little at odds with Tiffany’s colorful disposition. But frankly, that is the best thing about him. He is okay to stand in the back and let Tiffany shine; personally, I found this to be a breath of fresh air when it comes to romance, and I liked Leon a lot more because of it.
Another thing that I liked about this book is that it touches upon a topic that other romance novels unknowingly encourage: an abusive relationship between the protagonists. In other books, abuse can be portrayed as a healthy thing, and I think that in this day and age we are moving passed that. In this book, Tiffany is the victim of an abusive ex-boyfriend that tries to force her into getting back together with him by making her feel guilty for her decisions and actions. This unfortunately is a very real problem, and I liked that the author didn’t shy away from addressing it here. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
4. First Steps by Jeremy DeSilva
This is a nonfiction book in paleoanthropology where the author tries to determine why humans walk the way they do. Why, he asks, are humans bipedal when other mammals are quadrupedal? I have always found the history of early humans fascinating and enjoy reading a good nonfiction book on the topic every now and then, as I did earlier this year when I read Almost Human by Lee Berger (read my review here). But this one struck me as peculiar because not many people focus primarily on our feet and their function of locomotion. In truth, not many people think all that much about feet, and I was interested in what this author had to say. I found it a very interesting read. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
5. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez
This book is also a contemporary romance and I admit I liked this one too. I say this because I was having the hardest time finding a contemporary romance that I liked thus far (before I read The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary). I tried, for example, reading The Dating Plan by Sara Desai and The Intimacy Experiment by Rosie Danan and I could not finish them. In this book, I liked the protagonists too. Kristen is sassy, independent, no-nonsense, and strong while Josh is considerate, tender, and at all times thinking about Kristen and her well-being; he is also always thinking about ways to help her feel better if she is not. I liked that about him. It was sweet. And in a similar fashion as the other contemporary novel that I read this month, this book addresses the topic of infertility and reproductive diseases in women, something that is rarely talked about in this genre but that I think is definitely worth raising your voice and talking about. Topics such as these shouldn’t be taboo. I gave this book an I Really Liked It rating.
That is everything I read this month. Thank you for reading.