Book Reviews

The Best Kind Of People Zoe Whittall

Canadian novelist and poet Zoe Whittall’s latest novel The Best Kind of People examines the painful aftershocks of a rape accusation. Set in the fictional wealthy town of Avalon Hills, Connecticut, life as they know it is turned upside down for the Woodbury family when father and popular science teacher George Woodbury is accused of sexually assaulting multiple female students. Having saved the school from a shooting 10 years prior, the town are initially dumbfounded their local hero could be capable of such heinous acts. But disbelief quickly transitions to hate. George’s trauma nurse wife Joan receives daily public harassment and when their straight-A student daughter Sadie is abandoned by her friends and bullied, she rapidly descends into casual sex and drug use. The Best Kind Of People is, if nothing else, timely. Engrossing, you will be left wondering just who George is. 9/10

Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill

The best of the stories in this new collection of shorts, from the author of Veronica and Two Girls, Fat And Thin, are very, very good. The stand-out is The Arms And Legs Of The Lake, in which Gaitskill weaves a painfully intricate and absorbing drama from the perspectives of a group of strangers on a train journey to Syracuse, NY. The narrative drifts in and out of the viewpoints of, among others, a damaged African-American Iraq war returnee, a middle-aged English teacher and peace activist and Carter Brown, a Second World War vet. In another story, College Town, 1980, we meet a group of shiftless flatmates adrift at the start of the Reagan era. Some of the other stories are more conceptual in nature, aiming for a pleasure that is more cerebral. 7/10

The Bedlam Stacks Natasha Pulley

Natasha Pulley had a lot to live up to after the success of her debut novel, The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street. But she’s managed to do just that. Sticking to a similar era (there are subtle connections between the two books throughout), Pulley abandons England for Peru. The book follows a crippled smuggler working for the East India Company as he heads deep into uncharted territory to find cinchona trees, the only source of quinine that can cure the outbreak of Malaria across the Empire. It’s a fast-paced adventure story with great characters and a message about colonialism. It stutters in the middle but once back on track, rolls along to a satisfying ending. 7/10