Review | A Portable Shelter by Kirsty Logan

A Portable Shelter

by Kirsty Logan

My Rating:

In their tiny, sea-beaten cottage on the north coast of Scotland, Liska and Ruth await the birth of their first child.

Each passes the time by telling the baby stories, trying to pass on the lessons they’ve learned: tales of circuses and stargazing, selkie fishermen and domestic werewolves, child-eating witches and broken-toothed dragons.

But they must keep their storytelling a secret from one another, as they’ve agreed to only ever tell the plain truth. So to cloak their tales, Ruth tells her stories when Liska is at work, to a background of shrieking seabirds; Liska tells hers when Ruth is asleep, with the lighthouse sweeping its steady beam through the window.

My appreciation and yearning for short story collections has been growing and growing over recent years, and after sadly being disappointed by Lucy Wood's Diving Belles earlier this year, a collection centered around Cornish folklore, I had hopes that A Portable Shelter, a collection this time centered around Scottish folklore, would satisfy my short story needs. Thankfully, it did!

As with all short story collections, there were some stories I liked a lot more than others, though there weren't any I disliked, but what I loved about this collection was how the stories were all stories within one over-arching story of two women, Liska and Ruth, who are expecting their first child and are telling the unborn baby stories that seem to have some kind of basis in reality as they feature people the women know or know of through other people. It's such a clever way to help one story flow into the next, and it really pulled me through the book from story to story.

There are tales of selkies, bears, dragons and people, each one playing with the blurred line between the mundane and the magical, how our lives are influenced by our stories and our stories are influenced by our lives. While the stories are true to an extent, I really enjoyed that we couldn't be sure how true they are - it was never clear if selkies and dragons actually exist in Ruth and Liska's Scotland or if they're metaphors for something else and I loved being able to decide that for myself.

Logan's writing is lyrical and melancholic, yet hopeful. Some of the stories were heart-wrenchingly sad, but many more of them left me with the feeling that things can, and do, get better - not necessarily straight away, in fact never, really, straight away, but eventually they do, and eventually is enough. I'm really looking forward to reading more of Logan's work, particularly her debut collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales.

If you're a fan of fairy tales and folklore, or you're simply in the mood for a good short story collection, I definitely recommend picking this one up!

Review | Diving Belles by Lucy Wood

Diving Belles

by Lucy Wood

My Rating: 

Straying husbands lured into the sea by mermaids can be fetched back, for a fee. Trees can make wishes come true. Houses creak and keep a fretful watch on their inhabitants, straightening shower curtains and worrying about frayed carpets. A mother, who seems alone and lonely, may be rubbing sore muscles or holding the hands of her invisible lover as he touches her neck. Phantom hounds roam the moors and, on a windy beach, a boy and his grandmother beat back despair with an old white door.

In these stories, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred as Lucy Wood takes us to Cornwall’s ancient coast, building on its rich storytelling history and recasting its myths in thoroughly contemporary ways. Calling forth the fantastic and fantastical, she mines these legends for that bit of magic remaining in all our lives—if only we can let ourselves see it.

Short story collections are something I've been trying to read more and more of in recent years, because if a writer gets short stories right they can be exquisite. That there are so many collections out there based on fairy tales, myths, legends and folklore is brilliant for someone like me who absolutely loves retellings and old, local stories. This collection, the author's debut, promised a collection of stories inspired by Cornish folklore, so I knew I had to get my hands on a copy the minute I first heard about it.

I'm from the UK and I'm lucky enough to have been to Cornwall a couple of times; it's one of my favourite places in the UK because it feels like its own little world, like the hidden corner of England, and it's bursting with fascinating history and folklore galore. When I think of Cornwall, I think of smugglers, mermaids, giants, piskies and King Arthur, so I couldn't wait to dive into this collection when I visited St. Ives last year.

That I only finished Diving Belles recently probably tells you what I thought about it. Sadly, I was very disappointed.

Now in fairness to this book last year was a rubbish reading year for me, which definitely contributed to me putting it down, but the main reason was that this collection left me with very similar feelings to how I felt when I finished Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (reviewed here). Most of the stories didn't really seem to go anywhere, and while I understand short stories aren't necessarily plot-driven in the same way novels are, I still would have liked some sort of plot, some sort of reason for the story to be there other than that Wood got an idea that she didn't quite know what to do with.

The sad thing is I can't fault Wood's writing. This woman can really write, some of her descriptions in this collection are exquisite, but personally I like story; when I read a collection of short stories, I want a collection of short stories - not a character study or something that feels like an extract from something longer, which so many of these stories did to me. Like Russell's debut collection, I felt as though Wood wasn't sure how to end most of the stories in this collection so, instead of coming up with an ending, she simply stopped writing and it left me feeling cold.

I also had an issue with the inspiration behind these stories. If it weren't for the fact that it's mentioned in the blurb, I never would have guessed these stories were inspired by Cornish folklore. Sure, I associate giants, mermaids and little people with Cornish folklore more than any other - though my favourite story in the collection, 'Blue Moon', set in a retirement home for witches, featured folklore I associate more with Wales than Cornwall - but these stories could have been set in any coastal UK town. I currently live in one myself, and her descriptions of the coast felt so generic to me that these stories could have taken place down the road from my house.

This is a real shame considering Wood grew up in Cornwall herself, so I was expecting Cornwall to seep through the pages. The folklore was certainly Cornish enough for me, but I would have loved to have seen Wood play around with Cornish dialect, to mention specific place names that really centre the reader in a time and place. I wanted to see mentions of St. Ives and Bodmin and Zennor and Lizard, not description after description of the sea. Her descriptions were beautiful, they just didn't sing Cornwall to me in the way I was expecting them to.

I was also frustrated to see this collection being compared to Angela Carter. Now that is neither the book's fault or the author's, so I'm not actually holding this point against my rating, but I wanted to mention it all the same because it seems like every fairy tale or folklore-based collection I pick up is being compared to Carter. Just because something is a retelling or is inspired by an older story doesn't mean it's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. It's unfair to new and emerging authors, who are constantly being compared to someone who is considered a literary great, and it's unfair to Carter - The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is probably her most famous work, but that's not all she was. She played around with Shakespeare and her commentary on gender and its fluidity is fascinating, so let's stop narrowing her down to one body of work, shall we?

Also, this collection isn't like The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories at all. Wood's stories are quiet, creeping stories that use the fantastical to highlight just how mundane normality is, Carter, on the other hand, wrote about mothers riding on horseback to save their daughters from homicidal husbands, women who can be licked into tigers and maids who are robots. I really don't think there's much comparison to be had.

So, if you like slow stories that aren't plot-driven, this book is for you. I wish I was sophisticated enough to love a book like this but I love a plot and there wasn't enough of it here for me. Having said that, I'd still recommend picking this up if it sounds interesting to you because Wood's writing is lovely and she's definitely an author I'm going to keep my eye on - she has the potential to be fantastic.

Review | Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes by Emily Urquhart

Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes

by Emily Urquhart

My Rating: 

Like any new mother, Emily is thrilled when her first child, a daughter, is born. The baby, Sadie, is healthy and stunningly beautiful, with snow white hair and fair skin. Even the doctors and nurses can’t help a second look at this magical child. But soon a darker current begins to emerge—something is amiss. After three months of testing, Sadie is diagnosed with albinism, a rare genetic condition.

Emily, a folklore scholar and an award-winning journalist, is accustomed to understanding and processing the world through stories. With Sadie at her side, Emily researches the cultural beliefs surrounding albinism and finds a curious history of outlandish tales of magic, and of good and evil reaching back through time, along with present-day atrocities. In some parts of the world, people with albinism are stalked; their condition is seen to bring luck and health as well as danger and death. Investigating the different reactions, in different cultures, to those with albinism, Emily begins to see her child as a connection between worlds.

Part memoir, part cultural critique, and part genetic travelogue, Beyond the Pale is a brave, intimate investigation into the secret histories that each of us carries in our genes and an inspiring and beautiful memoir about parenting a child with a disability—and building a better future for that child.

I feel like this year is the happiest I've felt with my reading habits for the longest time. When you step into book blogging it feels as though you must read what everyone else is reading, not because anyone else tells you that but because, naturally, you want to join in when other bloggers are really excited about a book they've been reading. I really tried, but I don't read primarily YA so a lot of the books that are very popular in the book blogging community tend to pass me by. For a while that bugged me, and now it doesn't because all that matters is that I enjoy blogging and I enjoy reading.

This year I've really gotten into non-fiction. For a while I was convinced non-fiction just wasn't my thing. When I was younger I was interested in stories, in fiction, I wasn't interested in reading a memoir. As I got older most of the non-fiction I read I encountered at university, and when you associate non-fiction with essay writing it can be hard to seek out non-fiction purely for enjoyment's sake. Over the past year or so, however, I've really begun to enjoy non-fiction. I love non-fiction centred around history and historical figures - I'm a huge history nerd - but I've also enjoyed reading some literary criticism and memoirs, and recently I read and enjoyed Beyond the Pale.

I had no idea whatsoever that this book existed until I saw Jen Campbell mention it on her YouTube channel and it sounded fascinating. I knew very little about albinism, but I had encountered it a little during my MA while I was researching witchcraft, and the idea of a folklorist exploring the beliefs surrounding albinism and looking into her own family history sounded right up my street.

Emily Urquhart's writing style is very readable. When she's discussing the early stages of her daughter's diagnosis and the different types of albinism there are it could have been easy for me to get lost - I'm not scientifically minded at all - but I was never confused, nor should I have been. This book isn't a science book, it's a memoir and a travel book and criticism all rolled into one, and while albinism is the focus Emily pays so much more attention to the people with albinism than the condition itself. Everyone she meets is treated with such respect and her daughter, Sadie, is just adorable.

There's a real spectrum of beliefs in this book, from the biblical suggestion that Noah had albinism and therefore the condition is associated with being the child of an angel in Christian theology, to the more heartbreaking realities in Tanzania in which people with albinism literally live in fear of their lives. Some of the stories may be a little hard to read but they're worth reading: it's incredibly important that we don't remain ignorant to some of the atrocities that people with albinism are forced to face on a daily basis.

I really enjoyed this book. It satisfied the craving I've had for non-fiction all year, and once again reminded me to continue to broaden my reading habits. The only reason I gave it four stars rather than five was because I was hoping for a little more along the lines of folklore; after a while it seemed to disappear from the narrative completely other than the times in which Emily reminded us she's a folklorist, but I still really enjoyed reading about her trip to Tanzania and her research into her family history.

Super interesting read, I highly recommend it!