Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy

This was a “challenge” book.  I wouldn’t particularly have chosen to read a book about the problems posed by being a fat teenage girl: I could write my own book on that subject.   Having said which, it was quite interesting to read about the beauty pageant culture.  $200 to enter a competition for schoolgirls!   And this was in 2015, so I assume that it’s more like $250 now.   I don’t know how true to life the book is, but the beauty pageant was considered such a big deal that all the entrants got the day before off school to prepare for it.   I can just imagine my old headmistress’s face if a load of girls, or even one girl, had asked for a day off school to prepare for a beauty contest.   Furthermore, it was lovely to read an American teenage novel set in the South (Texas).  In my day, they were all set in either New York/New Jersey or California, and the rest of the US never got a look in!

The book also introduced me to the concept of “mums”, which are apparently a Texan thing.  “Mum” was originally just a shortened version of chrysanthemum, because girls would wear chrysanthemum corsages for “homecoming”.  But now people wear big OTT things with decorations and even teddy bears attached.   Also, apparently it’s a thing for girls to ask boys to school dances, not the other way round.  But they can’t just ask.  They have to wear fancy dress or bake a cake or something.   I’m sure it can’t have been like this in the ’80s and ’90s.

Anyway, the idea of the book is that the unfortunately-named Willowdean is a very overweight teenage girl, whose mum (mum as in mother, not mum as in chrysanthemum attached to teddy bears) runs the local beauty pageant, with which the whole town is obsessed.   In the year that she’s sixteen, Willowdean, together with three other girls all considered unattractive for various reasons, all decide to make a point by entering.   But so does Willowdean’s glamorous best friend, whereupon the two of them fall out.   We also keep hearing about how Willowdean’s beloved auntie died of being extremely overweight, which is rather miserable.

Willowdean is disqualified from the competition for breaking the rules, which avoids the author having to show her either winning or losing.  The competition includes the girls parading in their swimwear, which I’m not sure is entirely tasteful for 16-year-olds to be doing in front of an audience.  However, she gets a very handsome sporty guy as a boyfriend, and has another guy chasing after her as well.  I assume that this was the author being positive.   In my experience, handsome sporty boys do not go after fat girls.   Sorry, but they don’t.

I was assuming that the book would end with Willowdean becoming really confident about everything, and everyone in the town realising that you didn’t have to be slim to be pretty, but it didn’t, really.   Willowdean was never really not confident, apart from worrying that people would think it was weird for a good-looking boy to be going out with a fat girl.  Anyway, she and her best friend made up, and she stopped worrying that people would think her relationship was weird.

It was a nice idea.   But being a fat teenage girl really isn’t very nice, because it’s very hard to be confident when the world is so negative about you.  And that was in my day, before social media and everyone sharing photographs of anything and everything.   As for beauty pageants. I remember when Miss World was as big an annual televised event as the Eurovision Song Contest, and I always thought it was a bit of fun.   But the idea of making such a big deal of a beauty pageant for schoolgirls, held in public with a big audience, isn’t something with which I’m 100% comfortable.  But, hey, each to their own!

I’ll get back to the historical novels now :-).

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

  This was a strange book.  It was a dual timeline story, but I didn’t think that the modern story really added anything, and I think the book would have been better just sticking to the one story.  The historical story was that of Ann Eliza Young, one of the many wives of Mormon leader Brigham Young, who divorced him and then campaigned for an end to polygamy.  The modern story was about Jordan, a teenage boy from a polygamous sect, whose mother had been wrongly accused of murdering his father.

The book, whilst it never defended polygamy or the mistreatment of women, did try to be positive about Mormonism by repeatedly pointing out that it was by far the most successful religion (denomination?) to have originated in the United States, which was a fair point.  It also reminded the reader that Mormons had been persecuted before they settled in Utah.   So it was quite an interesting take on things, but it was written in a very odd way.   It was partly narrated by Ann Eliza and partly by Jordan, but we’d suddenly get an extract from a Wikipedia page, an extract from Ann Eliza’s father’s memoirs, or part of a PhD being written by one of Ann Eliza’s descendants (real? fictional?).

Some if it was quite thought-provoking, but the way it was written was just … strange!

Leizar by David Gelernter

  This book obviously meant well, but it would have helped if the author had bothered to do a bit of basic historical research before writing it.  The main character Leizar was born in a fictional village/shtetl in Russian Poland in the 1840s.  We were told repeatedly about Russian oppression.  We were then told that the village was in Galicia – specifically, near Wadowice.   That was Austrian Poland!   It was never under Russian rule!  Even now, you can tell that it was Austrian Poland, because you get extremely nice cakes and pretzels in Krakow; but that’s rather beside the point.  For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to write a historical novel, at least get something as basic as that right.   Also, I had to laugh when Leizar later rocked up in Glasgow, and was given haggis, neeps, tatties and whisky for his tea, because obviously that was what everyone in Victorian Scotland had for their tea every night!   Having said all that, the book did make some valid points about persecution in the Russian Empire (er, even though the author didn’t know where the Russian Empire actually was), and about people making new lives for themselves in Britain.

Our man Leizar was born in a shtetl (shtetl being a Yiddish word meaning a small town in Eastern Europe with a predominantly Jewish population.   There was a lot of Yiddish in the book, although most of it was translated into English in the following sentence.) in … er, supposedly Russian Poland.   The author seemed to think that there were Cossacks camped outside every shtetl in the Russian Empire 24/7, carrying out pogroms as and when they felt like it.  There really weren’t.   There were widespread pogroms in Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648-57.  Widespread pogroms then didn’t really become a thing again until 1881.  And Cossacks were never permanently stationed outside villages.   However, obviously there were pogroms, and the author was trying to highlight that.  As I said, the book meant well.  And there was general persecution – the book showed Leizar’s brother being executed for a crime which he didn’t commit.

Leizar became involved with left-wing movements, moved to Warsaw and got married.  He and his wife then decided to emigrate to America.  Again, a bit of very basic research, or even basic general knowledge would have helped.  Ships do not sail between Warsaw and Hamburg: Warsaw is not a sea port!   For some reason, Leizar’s ship docked in Glasgow instead of Hull.   He was then rather bizarrely clapped in irons for having left-wing sympathies, even though he was only passing through Glasgow.   I’m not convinced that that was very realistic!   Anyway, he was eventually released, and his wife and children joined him, and they settled in London.

We then got a nice section of the book which was reminiscent of the Jewish historical novels of the late ’70s and early ’80s – think Evergreen, Almonds and Raisins and even A Woman of Substance – before everything started being about the Holocaust.  Obviously it’s important to write about the Holocaust, but how many books set in Auschwitz have there been in recent years?   Leizar and his family got a market stall in Petticoat Lane, and got along very nicely.  We did hear that most of Leizar’s relatives in Poland and Germany had been wiped out in the Holocaust, which was another important reminder of the persecution that there’s been over the years, but we also saw that Leizar and his family were comfortably settled in London and that, despite the struggles of the Depression and the war, things were going well for them there.

It was an interesting book in many ways.   But it’s very frustrating that some authors write historical novels without even bothering to do very basic research into the history and geography of the places about which they’re writing.

Barbie

Having missed “Barbenheimer” at the pictures, I’ve now caught up on both halves of it.  Thank you to Amazon Prime for making this available for £1.99!   I can’t make up my mind what I thought of it, though.   It was totally bonkers.   Margot Robbie as a Barbie doll who got cellulite.  Ryan Gosling dancing around in a very strange coat.  Helen Mirren making sarcastic remarks as a narrator.  America Ferrera giving speeches about how women couldn’t do right for doing wrong.   I’m not sure whether we were supposed to take the whole thing as a serious commentary on the battle between feminism and the patriarchy, whether it was all meant to be ironic, or, er, both.  The film clearly thought it was very clever, and that was quite annoying.

We had a lot of Barbie dolls living in pink Barbieland, which was all ruled by Barbies, with Kens in a secondary position.  Then one Barbie and one Ken went to the real world to find out who’d caused Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie to develop cellulite, and there were a lot of scenes involving people chasing each other round Venice Beach.  Barbie then went back to Barbieland, with two humans in tow, and found that Ken had taken over Barbieland because he liked the idea of a patriarchy.  With horses.  (All the men is this film were basically portrayed as idiots.)  The Barbies eventually regained control, but Margot Robbie Barbie decided to become a human.

I think the real star of the show was actually Rhea Pearlman as Ruth Handler, who created Barbie and played a major role in Mattel, in the male-dominated world of the ’50s and ’60s.  As for the rest, I really can’t decide if it was brilliant or if it was rubbish.  It was just … strange.

I don’t remember there being controversy over toys when I was a kid, although arguments over Barbie were going long before then.   TBH, Barbie didn’t loom very large in my universe.   I did have one Barbie doll – who wore an impossibly tight yellow jumpsuit – but I never had any of the Barbie paraphernalia.  Sindy dolls were much more popular in the UK, and my sister and I had several Sindy dolls … plus a Sindy house, with a swimming pool 🙂 .   Sindy dolls were for girls and Action Men were for boys, but that was never a big deal.   In fact, it was better to be a girl, because no-one thought it was particularly weird if girls played with train sets or read Biggles books, but boys would never have admitted to playing with My Little Ponies (“bronies” were not a thing in the early ’80s) or reading Malory Towers.   Also, we had Long Distance Clara in Pigeon Street, but I can’t remember any male cartoon characters doing traditionally female jobs!

There wasn’t all this gender-divided marketing, though.   These days, you see little girls walking round town dressed up as Disney princesses.  If it makes them happy, fair enough, but no-one in my day dressed up as a princess unless they were in a play or going to a fancy dress party!   And what on earth is the idea with football clubs producing shirts and scarves in pink?!  If you’re a United fan, you want red shirts and scarves.  If you’re a City fan, you want blue shirts and scarves.   You only want pink if you support Palermo.

Apparently there were lots of different Sindy dolls in the early/mid ’80s, but I only remember them wearing ballet skirts.   Did this make me think I had to become a ballerina?  Er, no.  I did have ballet lessons briefly, but that was nothing to do with Sindy.  Incidentally, I was fat and useless, and the ballet dancer made useless fat kids stand in the back row.  This never happened to anyone in Lorna Hill or Noel Streatfeild books.   Did I think that I couldn’t become a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or anything else because Sindy was dressed as a ballerina?  Definitely not.  They’re only dolls.  Why does everyone want to make such a big deal of everything these days?!    Am I missing something?   Can anyone honestly say that their lives have been that deeply influenced by what sort of dolls were available when they were kids?

Maybe that’s why I didn’t think the film was as good as some people are saying.  We didn’t really have culture wars over dolls in my day.   They were just dolls.   They didn’t represent either feminism or the patriarchy.  I don’t quite get the fuss.  I don’t quite get the fuss over this film either.  Oh well, you can’t like everything!

 

 

 

A Stone’s Throw by Lee Watts

  OK, enough books about the Troubles now.  This one was thoroughly miserable.  Nothing good happened to anyone until the last couple of chapters.   Protestant Roy Ferguson and Catholic Marty McKenna grew up at different ends of the same street.   Then Belfast exploded into violence … and, er, practically every male character in the book, other than Roy and Marty, either got killed or ended up in prison.   Roy escaped from Belfast by joining the Army, and served in the Falklands War … where he saw more people being killed.  Marty joined the IRA, and went to Beirut to be trained by the PLO … whereupon there were bombings and more people were killed.

Eventually, they both came back to Belfast, and Roy joined an elite undercover unit.   Marty decided to find him and kill him, and there was a bizarre moment in which he couldn’t remember Roy’s surname until he heard someone on the radio talking about Aberdeen breaking up the Celtic-Rangers duopoly.   He only succeeded in injuring him, and eventually both their lives settled down.  But, as I said, it was a thoroughly miserable book!  Furthermore, the punctuation left a lot to be desired.   It was quite interesting, but practically every page was full of misery 😦 .

The Mistress of Ashmore Castle by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

This was a good read, and I got through it very quickly and enjoyed it … but Cynthia Harrod-Eagles can do so much better than this.  There’s so much glorious historical detail and description in Anna, and to a lesser extent in some of her other books.   This was really just a lot of fictional gossip about who fancied whom and who had money troubles.  And I could have done with a recap of the two previous books, because I couldn’t remember everything that had happened in them!

Don’t get me wrong, it was very entertaining, but it was just a lot of nothing.   There was one reference to the Entente Cordiale, and a few vague mentions of suffragettes, but it was mostly just about relationships and finances.   It was clearly trying to fill in a gap left by the end of Downton Abbey.  I watched every episode of Downton Abbey, and I loved it.  But Cynthia Harrod-Eagles can do so much more.

Also, there was something weird going on with the names.  As I’ve said before, Rachel and Linda, whilst they’re very nice names, are not names which would have been given to earls’ daughters born in the late Victorian period.   I don’t think I’ve ever come across any English-speaking Linda who wasn’t born in the 1940s or 1950s.   And there was a dodgy pawnbroker called Pogrebin.  According to Google, pogrebin is the name of a Russian demon in the Harry Potter books.  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles must surely have known that: it’s not the sort of name that you just pluck out of thin air.   So why use it in her book?   That’s very odd!  It was as if she was making fun of her own work.  I think she got a bit mixed up with who should be Lady Surname and who should be Lady First Name, as well.

This is a good, light read … but from an author who can write excellent, challenging reads.

 

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

  I found this book difficult to read, because there were no speech/quotation marks.   Why do authors do this?   Is it suppose to look “edgy” or something?   If so, it really doesn’t.   It just looks stupid and annoying, like a teenager being rude to the teacher because they think it makes them look cool.   Other than the lack of speech marks, which really was exceedingly irritating, the book wasn’t bad; but I honestly don’t know why it’s won some awards and been nominated for others.  It wasn’t that good.

It’s set in a small town just outside Belfast, in 1975.  It never actually tells you that it’s 1975, but you can work it out by the references to football and music.  Cushla – yes, that it is actually her given name, not a nickname or a term of endearment – is a young Catholic schoolteacher who becomes involved with an older, married, Protestant barrister.   So there are issues of age, class, and, of course, sectarianism.  The Troubles are always there.  Each chapter begins with a mention of violence.

Having grown up with Through the Barricades, Belfast Child and Kevin and Sadie, and having seen a sort of peace reached, I’d really like to read some more historical novels set in Belfast which aren’t about the Troubles; but there seem to be very few of them.   Well, there’s These Days, about the Belfast Blitz, which I read recently, but that’s a rarity.  How about a book set during the Civil War?   Or the Wolfe Tone rebellion?   Or the Williamite War?   Or how about getting away from war/violence, and having a book set in the linen mills, or about the building of the Titanic?

But, OK, this book is about the Troubles – and I chose to read it, so I shouldn’t be moaning about it.   It’s a bit different in that the book’s set outside central Belfast, and the main character’s a Catholic living in a predominantly Protestant area; but it’s mostly about the Troubles.   I’d be interested to know how readers outside the British Isles found it, because it includes references to British TV programmes, to football (with all due respect to Glentoran, they aren’t really a household name outside the British Isles) and to various insulting terms for Catholics which I’m not sure are used even in other English-speaking countries.  Or maybe they are.   Incidentally, one of the TV programmes was Jim’ll Fix It.    Cushla got all the kids in her class to write a letter to Jim’ll Fix It, and a little boy whom she was trying to help, whose dad had been badly injured in a sectarian attack, wrote to ask if Jim’d fix it for his dad to get better.   I can’t decide whether or not that was tasteless.  It would’ve been a perfectly normal thing to do at the time.  I wrote to Jim’ll Fix It in the early ’80s.   Most kids did.  But was there any need to mention it?

Anyway.  No-one in the book ever actually expresses any strong political views, either Loyalist or Republican.  Or any strong religious sentiments.   There’s a constant sense of them and us and never the twain shall meet, but no character ever actually expresses an opinion on whether Northern Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom or part of the Republic of Ireland.   They just live with the endless round of violence.   And, without wanting to give the game away, the relationship is ended by violence.

It had the makings of a good book, but I didn’t think it was as good as I’d heard it was.   Maybe the absence of speech marks just put me off.

 

 

 

Oppenheimer

  Yes, all right, I know I’m six months late to the party with this!   I went on holiday just after it was released, and somehow never got round to seeing it when I got back.   It takes some watching!   Three hours, jumping about between different timelines, some scenes in black and white, and some very loud background music.   I wasn’t sure that I was going to enjoy it, but I did: it was fascinating.

I don’t understand anything about quantum physics, so I can’t comment about the technicalities of developing the bomb.  But the way that Oppenheimer was portrayed was very much in line with what’s been said about him.   And it was just very sad that, after all his work, he lost his career because of the McCarthy witch hunts.  The 1950s had McCarthyism: we have cancel culture.   The film could have just focused on the Manhattan Project: it was very interesting that it chose to focus on the later treatment of Oppenheimer as well.    It was annoyingly American-centric, though.   What about the input that Britain, Canada and Australia had into developing the bomb?   Some of the work was done at my old university, the University of Birmingham.  Not a mention of that!   And going on about how Oppenheimer had saved a lot of “American lives” by avoiding the need for a land invasion of Japan.  What about British, Soviet, Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, Indian etc etc etc lives?!

And how ironic it is that so many of the British and American scientists involved in the work were originally from Germany, Austria and Hungary.   The Nazis and their allies drove out a lot of their best physicists.   (Irrelevant but interesting fact – Max Born, under whom Oppenheimer studied in Germany, and who later moved to Britain, was the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John.)

I thought that maybe it could have said a bit more about how Oppenheimer dealt with knowing about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but maybe he just did.   As the pilot of the Enola Gay – and I sometimes wonder how Enola Gay Tibbets felt about her name for ever being associated with the world’s first atomic bombing – said, it wasn’t his decision to drop the bomb, and it wasn’t Oppenheimer’s either.   And the bombings may indeed have saved more lives than they took.  We’ll never know, because we’ll never know what would have happened without them.

I’m glad that I’ve finally seen this.  It’s an important film about an important subject.  And now we’ll see what happens at the Oscars.   Oppenheimer looks set to dominate.   It’d be nice to have the major awards won by a film which a lot of people have actually seen, not some obscure thing which a lot of people have never even heard of!