feminism

‘Until We Meet’ by Camille Di Maio

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It’s 1943. The United States has entered World War Two. Men are off fighting. Women are at home trying to fill the void. 

Four women sit by the water in New York City knitting socks

This is the setting in which Camille di Maio places her latest book Until We Meet. The historical fiction novel centers around two friend groups: one training for the war, and one back home—both waiting for the war to be over. 

Margaret, Gladys, and Dottie are in New York, taking over the absent men’s jobs (and often, to their surprise, enjoying them!), knitting socks for soldiers, and dreaming of their futures. Margaret’s brother has been deployed, and Dottie is in love with that brother and is secretly carrying his baby. Gladys is the model image of the modern woman in 1944: she doesn’t care for romance or gendered ideology, or anything that doesn’t fit her notion of what it means to be independent. Then there’s John (Margaret’s brother), Tom, and William, training for the war they know they will eventually be sent off to fight in.

In the age of letter writing, Dottie, John, and Margaret all share a pen pal in one another. John, though, feels bad for his friend William, who receives no letters from friends or family and asks his sister to write to William in the hopes of cheering him up. Margaret agrees, and so ensues a tangled story of friendship, love, and identity.

Eventually we come to be most closely tied with Margaret and Tom. Tom, who is now writing letters to Margaret in William’s stead, but still signing those letters, William. And Margaret who is eagerly awaiting the return of the men but also already lamenting the day she will have to give up her welding job at the navy yard to those same men. The story continues to gather speed, leaving readers reeling for Tom to come clean and for Margaret to stand strong and grab hold of the future she wants.

Until We Meet shows the strength of friendship, particularly female friendship and the way the women at home support and lift one another up. This is a time of change for women, and some of the women are more open than others to that change. Dottie wants a typical life of the stay-at-home mother, Gladys wants anything but, and Margaret, for the first time in her life, stands somewhere in between. While Dottie and Gladys feel sure in their dreams and feelings about independence and lifestyle, Margaret feels there is no place for someone like her: someone who does want a family but also wants a career and her own passion. This is something Margaret struggles with throughout the novel, trying to rationalize to herself how it could work, what she’s entitled to, and what it means to be a woman in the 1940s.

Much of the novel is told epistolary form, and these letters are often the most engaging sections of Until We Meet. Watching a relationship unfold between two characters who have never met is a hard move to pull off and has the corollary feel of online dating today. Do you know someone you haven’t met? Can you love someone you’ve only met through words? What changes about a person on the page, or today on the screen? 

In these two ways, Di Maio draws a nice corollary to how things in the 1940s were in some ways radically different, and in others almost a shadow image of the world we live in now. Women still struggle with the question of whether to stay home and raise a family, go to work, or juggle both. Love and friendship is, now more than ever, blooming in a space our bodies can’t reach.

A romantic and engaging novel, Until We Meet weaves a carefree sentiment with tough subject matter to offer a thoroughly enjoyable read. Di Maio does a fantastic job of painting the challenges present for both men and women at the time and portraying characters that embody each these changes in and challenges.

Until We Meet was released by Forever, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing owned by Hachette Book Company Group, Inc., in March 2022. You can purchase a copy of Until We Meet at your local independent bookstore.

Read more historical fiction reviews on Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Wolf Den’ by Elodie Harper

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Elodie Harper’s historical fiction debut The Wolf Den is a rare look into the lives of women living in bondage in the city of Pompeii just years before the monumental eruption of Mount Vesuvius. 

The cover of The Wolf Den is an orange and black illustration that portrays the women held captive there dancing, playing the lyre, and sitting contemplatively.

Harper takes readers on a journey into the heart of the Roman Empire’s Pompeii from the perspective of Amara. Amara, a Greek woman sold into sexual slavery, once lived a life of prestige and certainty, until the man who provided for her (her father) died. Now, Amara is forced to live as a prostitute at the behest of a conniving and unsympathetic master. Amara though, and we soon discover many of the other women, are not as servile as their male oppressors would hope. With her friends by her side, Amara aims to be free again one day, and readers join her as she battles both internal and external hurdles to that freedom.

Throughout the novel, Harper does nothing less than exalt women: their strength, the numerous obstacles they have had to overcome throughout history, and their bravery in the face of these struggles. There is not one point in the novel where womanhood, or the role of a female character is portrayed as anything less than powerful and capable. Never are women subjugated, fearful creatures in any way that diminishes their bodies, self-respect, or strength. Harper does a uniquely superb job in valorizing the women portrayed in The Wolf Den while also perfectly capturing the complicated nature of trauma, self-sacrifice, and independence. The story of these women’s lives is not romanticized in any way, but instead they are portrayed with dignity, a sense of humanity, and a voice that has been stripped away from them for centuries.

A truly compelling novel, it will be hard to put The Wolf Den down once you start. Harper’s plot, protagonist, worldbuilding, and prose are all of the highest quality and well worth the investment of all 400+ pages.

Previously published in the UK, The Wolf Den will make its US debut on March 29, 2022. Preorder a copy from your local independent bookstore today.

Read more historical fiction reviews on Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Honor’ by Thrity Umrigar

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What is honor? Is it your value as a human being? Is it your worth in relation to your actions? Is it the weight with which other’s view you? Thrity Umrigar seeks, not to answer this question, but to pose it in a way that forces her readers to interrogate its meaning in her latest novel by the very same name: Honor.

Honor begins with a newspaper clipping: a woman and her husband have been burned alive for their interfaith marriage. A marriage between a Hindu and Muslim is nothing but dishonorable in their small Indian village. The woman, Meena, and her unborn child, though, survive the burning. Backed by a lawyer fighting to change the corrupt legal system in India, Meena presses charges against her two brothers—the men who burned her husband to protect their honor and hers. 

Next, we meet Smita. An American journalist who was born in India and hasn’t returned since she left at fourteen, Smita is suddenly summoned to the country by her coworker who is stationed in India. At first, Smita thinks her friend and coworker simply needs some help recovering from an emergency surgery, and Smita, though hesitant to return to the place of her birth, pushes her apprehension aside for her friend. When Smita arrives though, it quickly becomes clear that her coworker called Smita to India for a very different purpose: to take over coverage of Meena’s story. Smita is thrown into a whirlwind of emotion as she attempts to navigate not only Meena’s heartbreaking story and the inherent issues they illuminate for her homeland but also Smita’s own deep-seated traumas that lay hidden in that same land. 

Misogyny and patriarchy, class and privilege, racism and toxic masculinity are only a few of the major themes that Umrigar explores in Honor. She poses tough questions such as: are people born evil or are they made evil by their circumstances, by their station in life, by the way they are treated and made to feel dishonorable? Umrigar doesn’t by any means hide her stance on many of these questions and issues, and she often flat out tells the reader what she thinks is right and wrong, but not always. By the end of the novel, we are still left with an elusive feeling as to who was “good” and who was “bad.” We hate Meena’s brothers for what they’ve done, and yet that feeling is somewhat challenged when we learn that the brothers too were pressured to fulfill a task they thought to be handed down by the gods. Umrigar clearly paints a complicated picture not only of India and the issues illuminated by the country’s policies and practices, but issues that Smita points out exist everywhere.

Part drama, part romance, part social justice call-to-action, Honor is a novel that quickly draws you in and doesn’t leave much room for dawdling. While the plot and backstories of the characters often feel a bit canned, this somehow doesn’t detract from the engaging nature of the novel. It works because Umrigar sets Honor up in such a way that we are compelled to seek out the why, not the what of the novel. Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen? Why were these characters compelled to make the choices they made? And while the answer seems to lie somewhere in the title of the book, still the reader asks “Why? Why is that honor? Why is that what honor means to him, to her, to you?”

Slated for release by Algonquin books in January of 2022, Honor by Thrity Umrigar is an important and deeply tragic book that asks all the right questions of humanity. 

You can preorder a copy of Honor by Thrity Umrigar from your local independent bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Out of Darkness, Shining Light’ by Petina Gappah

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out-of-darkness-gappah

Racism, misogyny and the ironies that arise from situations in which we “do right” are just a few of the topics taken on in Petina Gappah’s new novel Out of Darkness, Shining Light.

A historical novel that fictionalizes the actual removal of a missionary and doctor’s body out of Africa in the late 1800s, Out of Darkness, Shining Light is told from two unexpected perspectives. One is Halima, Doctor David Livingston’s cook, and the other is Jacob Wainwright, a freed slave and a Christian. Through these two narrators, we are afforded a glimpse into the harrowing journey of the group that literally carried Livingstone to the edge of the Earth.

While the frame of the novel centers around Livingstone’s removal from Africa, the core of the book gets at much deeper themes. Halima is a slave who is maybe not a slave, who is treated like the woman she is: not as worthy, intelligent, or capable as her male counterparts. She is chastised for having feelings towards another man when her partner is abusive, and their union is forced. She is made fun of for loving a child that isn’t hers. She’s told she can never own a house even if she is free one day, simply because she’s a woman. And yet, it’s Halima who provides for the group. Halima who in the end is shown to be the strongest of all.

Jacob Wainwright on the other hand, the pious Christian that he is, denounces the savagery of his countrymen and aims to convert all of Africa to the one true religion: Christianity. He parallels his savage counterparts in his treatment and view of women as inherently evil, in his blasé reflections on punishment and death, and in his othering of all who are not what he sees as the ideal. And yet, he in many ways is a victim of his circumstances: stolen as a child, shipped across the sea, and taught the white man’s view of white vs. wrong.

A cutting, funny, and most often horrifying novel, Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light is a beautiful and soulful book that tells a story that desperately needs to be told.

Slated for release by Scribner Books on September 10, 2019, you can preorder a copy of Out of Darkness, Shining Lightby Petina Gappah at your local independent bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Bowlaway’ by Elizabeth McCracken

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bowlaway-mccracken

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken is the acclaimed author’s latest release. This multigenerational novel explores themes of love, connection, and imperfection all within the setting of a bowling alley.

McCracken starts the novel off with the finding of a body in a cemetery. The body though is alive, and its keeper, Bertha Truitt, comes to wholly change the town of Salford, Massachusetts. Against all odds and all societal norms, Bertha, a white woman, marries an African American doctor when segregation is still very much alive and opens a candlepin bowling alley where women of the town come to bowl and show their worth as more than just housewives.

Over the span of the novel, characters die, leave, and keep coming back. Through a series of mysteries and missed connections, the bowling alley sees a number of new owners with new agendas as Bertha’s family, both blood and not, try to unravel their inherited mysteries and find their own place in the world.

While the story is intriguing, I often found myself unable to be fully pulled into Bowlaway. Much of the novel is told as summary as we are whisked through time to new places and new periods where the characters are often unfamiliar and unknowable because of the constant shifting. Further, while the plot of the novel has unbounding potential for interest, the stakes for the characters in many of the scenes feel distant or not wholly there.

A quick read with an element of humor and remorse, Bolwaway is slated to be released by HarperCollins on February 5, 2019. You can preorder a copy of Bowlawayby Elizabeth McCracken at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘The Last Girl’ by Nadia Murad

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the-last-girl-nadia-muradIt could’ve been me. It could’ve been you, your mother, your wife, your daughter. It could’ve been any woman living in the “wrong” time, the “wrong” place, believing the “wrong” thing. Nadia Murad’s story is the story of every woman who could have been her and wasn’t. Her story is the story of every woman in her tribe who had been her to someone else: a slave, an object, a sabayya.

Nadia grew up in a village outside of Mosul, Iraq called Kocho. Her family lived a simple life of farming, community, and prayer. But they weren’t Muslim. They were Yazidi, an almost dirty word to the leaders and followers of ISIS who were quickly taking over Iraq. And so, when ISIS decided they wanted the Yazidi gone and they needed a collection of dispensable women to keep them occupied, they began destroying the Yazidi, killing their men, kidnapping their boys, and forcing their women into slaves of sex trade.

But it was still hard for Nadia to believe anything would happen to her village, to her. Nadia was born in 1993, there hadn’t been an attack on the Yazidi in her life time. Even when ISIS came to Kocho, surrounding the borders and denying anyone entrance to and exit from the city, Nadia still had faith that everything would be okay.

And then it wasn’t. And then all of the men were dead. And Nadia was separated from her family. And she was sold. And she was raped. And she was beaten. And every ounce of dignity she had was taken from her. And she didn’t give up.

This isn’t a story about how it all ends. Nadia is the author. We know it has a “happy” ending. She lives. This is a story about what happened. This is a story about what nobody else knows is happening, what nobody is listening to, what happens when one group of people decides another isn’t worthy to be alive. This is a story about genocide and rape as a weapon of war. For Nadia, this is more than just a story, her story, this is the story she hopes will be the last. This is the story, she hopes, that will be about the last girl who was ever sold into slavery, who will ever have everything worth anything taken from her, who will have to survive to ever live again.

The Last Girl is an account of something so terrible and so recent it’s hard not to sit and think about what you were doing three years ago or less when the events of the book were taking place. It’s hard not to be enraged, deflated, encouraged, and hopeless all at the same time. The Last Girl is terrible, beautiful, and absolutely worth every moment of every person’s time. It’s a story that everyone should read, that everyone should be aware of is truth. It’s a story so powerful because it’s history and it’s the news all in one. It’s a story that should be read, that should be listened to, so that Nadia can have her dream, and so that every girl who’s experienced anything even close to Nadia’s story can one day find peace that somebody somewhere was the last girl ever stolen, the last girl ever abused, the last girl ever whose body was not their own, even for a moment.

Published by Tim Duggan Books in November of 2017, The Last Girl by Nadia Murad is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

Read more nonfiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ by Mariana Enriquez

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things-we-lost-in-the-fire-enriquezThings We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez is a book of liminalities. Mixing horror with magical realism and history, Enriquez takes readers on a journey through the lives of women living in Argentina in the form of exhilarating and entirely enchanting short stories.

From ghosts to drugs, haunted houses, to murder, Enriquez melds together the real terrors of life under dictatorship and oppression with the most horrifically imaginable terrors a mind could muster. Each of the story’s main character is a female who is experiencing some sort of liminal space. For many this is space is the entire crux of the story. A woman torn between two places, two ideas, two people, and often torn to, potentially, the point of death.

In the book’s opening story, “The Dirty Kid,” the main character is a middle class woman choosing to live in a slum. The woman finds that the homeless child who lives on her corner might have been murdered, and she might be the only one able to identify him. Caught between issues of class, police corruption, and her moral gut, the main character can’t seem to act.

Similarly, in “Green Red Orange,” the estranged girlfriend of an internet addicted depressive finds herself caught between her boyfriend’s mother, her desire to give up on the man she once loved who now won’t come out of his bedroom, and, once again she is left with an inability to act.

Each of the women in Enriquez’s stories are faced with more than just challenges, they are faced with near impossible decisions. While the reader often doesn’t end up seeing the actions that the characters take, Enriquez leaves every story at a cliffhanger, begging the reader to write her own ending.

Published in February of 2017 by Hogarth Publishing, Things We Lost in the Fire is available for purchase at your local bookstore.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.

‘Lola’ by Melissa Scrivner Love

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Lola-Scrivner-LoveWhat could a book about gangs, murder, drugs, and rape possible shed new light on in 2017? Besides death, heartbreak, and inequality, it seems like modern day gangster novels don’t tend to give much more. Lola, by Melissa Scrivner Love, though is a whole new kind of gangster novel.

A book in a league all its own, Lola, the main character of the title novel is a character of a similar caliber. An underground gang leader, Lola heads the Crenshaw Six, a small gang in East L.A. that focuses mostly on drug trade and tends to lay pretty low. Until, the Crenshaw Six get a job that could change their entire trajectory and all of its members’ destinies, especially Lola’s.

The neighborhood of Huntington Park thinks that Garcia, Lola’s boyfriend, is the leader of the Crenshaw Six, and Lola struggles constantly to deal with both the perks and the frustration of leading a gang from behind the scenes. Lola is unintimidating, she can easily make her way into important places without being suspect, she can sit down with a man and make him feel like he’s in power simply by virtue of being a woman. It’s part of how Lola has made her way so high into the gang, but it’s also something that infuriates her. She wants to have an equal: someone who not only she sees that way, but that sees her as an equal as well. That seems an impossible feat when every other leader is a man and that somehow makes them more than her.

In fact, Lola itself is a feminist calling to reevaluate the way women are perceived in society: weak, small, and incapable of little else than cleaning floors. Lola does her best to defy these stereotypes while also constantly finding herself bogged down by them. Every time she cooks meal, cleans a floor, feels compassion, she chides the thought that she’s only doing it because she’s a woman, not because she’s a person. For every woman who finds serious issue with the gender norms of our time, Lola is a hero of sorts.

What makes Lola so magical and the reader feel so connected to her, despite her tendencies to cut off fingers and shoot people in the head, is that she leads from a moral compass, even if slightly skewed. She’s a feminist, she cares for the innocent people around her and for those who are loyal. She is disdainful of drug addicts, but adoring of children. Most of Lola’s morals make up the remaining themes and messages of Lola the book. Issues of race, inequality, injustices, parenting, and the meaning of love are just a few of the deeper themes that run through the pages of Lola.

Love’s only slip up comes in the form of her point of view. Mainly the book is told in a close third person point of view with Lola leading the way but the narration coming from an unknown third party. However, there are times where head hopping can throw the reader for a loop. Suddenly we are inside of another character’s head who we’ve potentially never even met, feeling what he feels and understanding his motives in a way we probably shouldn’t. Usually Love sticks with Lola and makes it clear that even evaluations of other characters are Lola’s, and that makes those evaluations even more valuable and interesting. Nevertheless, the slip ups can be a bit distracting for readings watching closely.

Overall, Lola is a fantastic and riveting book that will keep you reading all the way to the end. Just the right mixture of violence and terror, Lola is not overly graphic and though violent, it is never gratuitous.

Lola by Melissa Scrivner Love is slated for release by Crown Publishing on March 21, 2017. You can preorder a copy from your local bookstore today.

Read more fiction book reviews at Centered on Books.

FTC Disclaimer: This book was given to me in return for a fair and honest review of the text.