January 2023 📚 Wrap up
If you are into literary fiction, you will love the books I read in January!
1. The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (2018)
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother's hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of "blush words" that aren't in the Bible.
One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family's life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents' suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of "the other side" and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her.
Trigger Warning: abuse
My thoughts:
✅ Although we focus on Jas, it is great to see how all members of the family are affected by the loss of Matthies and how differently they respond to grief.
✅ The distance that the parents have imposed between them and the rest of the community is passed on to their children who struggle socially and they cross the lines of socially acceptable acts.
✅ The child voice and consciousness has been portrayed in a realistic and natural way. The jump from one thought to another, the creative way of thinking and the parallelisms as an attempt to figure out how people think or how the world works and the combination of vulnerability and cruelty enhance the child perspective.
❌ I have conflicting thoughts about the ending. Although I found it unexpected and impactful, it creates more emotional trauma and damage to the characters on top of their already unresolved issues.
My rating:
4/5 💛
2. I Want to Watch by Diego De Silva (2002)
David Heller is a lawyer who has made a reputation as an imaginative, astute and highly successful defender of his clients - many of whom are clearly guilty. Celeste is a schoolgirl, barely sixteen, who is using her spare time to earn money as a prostitute, hanging out along the beach near her home. One afternoon, she witnesses a man leaving a rucksack by one of the fishing boats moored along the shore. Curious, she decides to follow him.
My thoughts:
✅ Interestingly flawed characters who are capable of realistic and clever decisions.
✅ No romanticization of toxic relationships.
✅ I was intrigued to see where the story goes.
✅ Great and surprising ending.
❌ I needed more scenes with Celeste and David because they trusted each other and created a strong bond too quickly.
My rating:
4/5 💛
3. Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova (2018)
Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Rome and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things—to decide what to keep and what to throw away.
Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return. The fierce silences between mother and daughter, the unbalanced friendships that leave her emotionally drained, the sense of an identity based on anomaly, even the relationship with her husband, everything revolves around the figure of her absent father. Mirroring herself in that absence, Ida has grown up into a woman dominated by fear, suspicious of any form of desire. However, as her childhood home besieges her with its ghosts, Ida will have to find a way to break the spiral and let go of her father finally.
My thoughts:
✅ Interesting perspective as we focus on how people who live with a person who suffers from a severe mental illness are affected.
✅ Realistic ending.
❌ I needed more scenes with the protagonist and her mother.
❌ It should have been shorter. There were some long passages repeating sensations and feelings that we have already covered relating to our protagonist's emotional baggage.
My rating:
3/5 💛
4. Truth or Dare by Camilla Lackberg (2021)
Liv, Martina, Max and Anton have been best friends for years. So on New Year’s Eve, they’re more than happy to spend it together – drinking, flirting, and playing games.
But each of them is keeping a terrible secret. And when a game of truth or dare takes a dark turn, it’s not long before the shocking truth emerges.
My thoughts:
✅ A gripping story full of secrets and twists.
✅ The number of hours that it took for the whole story to start and end roughly corresponds to the amount of time that it took me to finish reading it.
❌ The blurb did not prepare me for the huge amount of domestic violence and personal trauma that it was described. Consider this your trigger warning.
❌ Besides Liv, all the characters lack personality. Although I don't mind reading about unlikeable characters, even when their rude behaviour was justified by a horrific past/present and I felt sympathy for them, there was no element to spark interest in me for them as people.
❌ No actual resolution. The characters do not resolve their trauma and baggage. They will only be "free" when they start dealing with the horrible things that have happened to them.
My rating:
2/5 💛
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