If May was a good reading month, then June was perhaps the opposite. I read far less last month than I hoped and I found myself bogged down in the books I did read. Nevertheless, a couple of crackers are on the list, starting with a light-hearted undead caper. Here is my June 2024 book review roundup!
The Undead Rom-Com
Cursed Under London is set in Elizabethan England and is a new series by a British comedian, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch. It is an undead Romantic Comedy. You may wonder, “How can that even work?” to which I can answer, “Surprisingly well.”
Fang and Lazare have both died. Only they’re not dead. Both find themselves victims on London’s mean Elizabethan streets. Both in the wrong place at the wrong time and murdered by street gangs. Despite this, they’re still alive. Unknown to each other before their sticky not-quite-demises, they meet up and work together, along with an apothecary, Nell, and a small dragon called Amber, to discover what the devil is going on.
The novel is set in an alternative London, where the normal world sits over another, filled with creatures of legend and fable. Lazare for example, now resembles a bog-standard vampire, with wings; only he isn’t, because he doesn’t have pointy teeth.
The book reminded me a lot of Legends & Lattes. A slightly twee fantasy adventure with a lot of warmth and feel-good thrown in. Legends and Lattes has been fantastically popular, although, to be honest, I found it a little underwhelming. It was a bow with one string. Not so Cursed Under London. It has the same “will they, won’t they” romantic vibe, but it has a richer core, and deeper characters. The denouement is particularly powerful.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of Cursed Under London but I’m glad I took the time to read it. It has the light-hearted satirical air of Pratchett, but without the feeling that it’s trying too hard. I enjoyed the world that Gabby Hutchinson Crouch has created and the story is strong too. As I mentioned at the start of the review, this is the first in a series. While Cursed Under London’s central mystery is resolved, shadowy forces lurk in the background waiting to reveal themselves in later installments.
You can pick up a copy of Cursed Under London, here.
The Counterfactual
I loved Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual. It might, perhaps be a little lost on US readers, but it’s the story of the possible lives of 8 children who were killed in a WWII London bomb raid. It’s funny, poetic, and meaningful, charting the fortunes (or otherwise) of the UK since 1945.
We are still in counterfactual territory with Cahokia Jazz, which blends Walter Mosely/Raymond Chandler-type noir with an alternative history where small pox didn’t ravage North America’s Indigenous population. It’s the 1920s, prohibition is in force, but the city of Cahokia never collapsed and faded from history.
There is lots going on in Cahokia Jazz. Many of the mainstream reviews of the book suggested that the central story was engulfed by the complexity of the alternate world Spufford has created. This was my experience of the novel too. The world-building is exceptional but the creation of a complex realistic multi-racial society, with many new terms and attititudes to describe different ethnicities and explore how they interrelate, threatens to overcome the novel’s central mystery.
The novel opens with the discovery of a body and it’s up to two of the detectives of Cahokia PD to find out what is going on. The answers are not straightforward, with race and prejudice featuring in both the crime and the attempts to solve it.
Cahokia Jazz is an ambitious novel of the type that we need more of. It’s a deep work of imaginative fiction. It won’t be to everybody’s taste but I was glad to have put the effort in to unravel its many layers and reach the novel’s devastating conclusion. Not an easy read, but one that cements Spufford’s place as the master of grand ideas.
The “End of Days” Thriller
Justin Cronin is famous for writing The Passage, which as I mentioned last month, I haven’t actually read. The Waterstones SFF Book of the Month choice for May (which I read in June) was The Ferryman; a title that gives almost nothing away about what the book is about.
This is the most “Stephen King” book I’ve read in quite some time. Ostensibly, it’s about a small enclave that is hiding from a climate apocalypse. There is a two-tier society, with one group continually reiterating; being reborn and then living a very long time with a very healthy lifestyle. They are supported by service teams who live in the “Annex,” who are generally looked down on by the inhabitants of “Prospera.”
Most of the narrative follows Proctor a “Ferryman.” It is his job to to ensure the inhabitants of Prospera quietly move on to their next life. (In this case, literally – the inhabitants of Prospera will head to the nursery, where they are reiterated and returned as 16 year-olds, with no previous memories.) Things start to go wrong when Proctor has to help his own dad (Newly arrived 16-year-olds are assigned foster parents) make the journey. Proctor’s mother had previously been a very rare suicide, and his dad’s unexpected reaction to being “retired,” makes Proctor think that something is rotten in the state of Prospera.
This is a hi-concept novel filled with twists and unexpected revelations. There are echoes of Blake Crouch but it mostly reminded me of Stephen King’s writing. Prospera is not unlike small-town America, and the peculiar goings-on do so, around the daily lives of largely ordinary people. The interplay between residents of Prospera and those in the Annex set up a “them and us” mechanic, which Cronin uses to explore prejudice and free will.
The Ferryman is a hefty novel, probably a little overlong, but compelling all the same. I’m not sure it’s destined to be a classic but it has some great SFF and dystopian ideas that kept me interested, as well as a gentle examination of grief. I get slightly annoyed by novels that are predominantly told from one person’s point of view and then switch when the author needs to allow the reader access to knowledge the narrator doesn’t have. It always feels lazy or that the author couldn’t commit to the constraints that they set upon themselves. It doesn’t necessarily spoil the novel but perhaps makes it less than it might have been.
You can find copies of The Ferryman, here.
The Book Club Choice
I was partway through The Whalebone Theatre at the beginning of the month and mostly enjoying it. As I wrote this column last month, I knew it needed something to propel it toward greatness. This did not arrive. A highly-feted debut novel, the book felt very run of the mill and needed a tighter edit. Being a book largely set in WWII, reading it on the 80th anniversary of D-Day added some extra emotional weight, but to be honest, as a whole, the book didn’t offer much more than the countless other books set in the period. Though quite different in tone, if I were going to recommend that you read one recent(ish) War novel it would be All the Light We Cannot See By Anthony Doerr.
The Children’s Eco-Thriller
The Wanderdays by Clare Povey was sent to me by Usborne Books. I’ve very much enjoyed some of their recent books, but this one didn’t leave me with the same sense of wonder (or wander, perhaps?).
It’s an eco-thriller, with the mother of Flo and Joseph being kidnapped by an evil David Attenborough type. Ok, that doesn’t sound quite right. Imagine if David Attenborough was in fact a hidden polluter and asset stripper; that’s the bad guy. He has a lair on “Fantome Island,” which might just be the best villain hideout name ever.
The book has a solid message of being true to yourself, as well as the more obvious, “destroying the planet is bad,” theme. It also has a nice thread about a child dealing with anxiety. Joseph has to find ways to cope with the things that he finds difficult in order to complete his part of the “Save the Mother” mission.
The story in The Wanderdays is solid, as are the characters, but the complete package lacked something that I can’t quite define. It’s by no means a bad book, and if you have children who are interested in the underwater world, as well as ecology, they’ll find much to love here.
That’s it for June. With only 5 books read, a slightly lean month. Look out for my July reads soon.
Disclosure: I received copies of The Wanderdays and Cursed Under London in order to write this review.
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