"Yellowface" by Rebecca F. Kuang (The Borough Press, 2024)

Novelist Juniper (June) Hayword, 27, is having a late drink with her more beautiful and much more successful writer friend of 9 years, Athena Liu, when Athena chokes and dies, despite June's Heimlich attempts. They met at Yale. Juniper takes Athena's just-completed manuscript, gets it accepted and with editor Daniella's help produces version without Athena's pretention, tragedy porn and obscurity. "The Last Front" is about the plight of Chinese volunteers in WW1 Normandy. She reads the source material, tries to learn Mandarin, and exagerates the depth of her friendship with Athena in case people doubt her authorship or see signs of Athena's style.

She publishes the book as Juniper Song (the middle name her hippy mother gave her). She turns down the option of using a sensitivity reader. The book's a big success. She sees Athena's ghost at a reading. She'd seen how Athena was transformed into a celeb (bio details cherry-picked) and feels it happen to herself. Adverse crits and accusations pour in. @AthenaLiusGhost's posts are the most upsetting. People rake through her old, offhand posts seek evidence. Support arrives later. People start attacking Athena's ethnic credentials - she used "almond-shaped eyes". June discovers that @AthenaLiusGhost is Geoff - Athena's white ex whose first novel flopped. Athena had talked to him about "The Last Front". June calls his bluff when he tries to blackmail her. Someone posts that "This book is so racist that it's obvious only a white person could have written it". We learn that Athena stole words from her for a student mag story.

After pressure for a follow-up she produces a novella, "Mother Witch", that starts with a sentence or 2 of Athena's then is about her (June's) mum. It gets respectful reviews. Then posts appear from others saying that they have the same sentence or 2 - Athena shared them at a workshop. The posts speculate on how much of the rest of the story was original.

Athena's mum still had Athena's notebooks. She doesn't want to read/reveal them in case they're embarrassing. Right-wing organisations support June. Her sales rise again. She wonders whether to give up writing, but she needs it. To conquer writers block she goes observing - real life becomes plot-twists. Her agent suggests IP work. She goes back to teaching and is inspired (she'd forgotten that writing could be a communal activity), but realises she's adapting students' ideas. She picks on a student who wonders whether June killed Athena and stole her manuscript. She goes to her mother's house, where she grew up. Her mother's going to sell it. June's old notebooks are there. Her mother wants her to retrain as an accountant. Somebody posts a review of her book, showing in detail how it seems to be written by 2 people. She's suddenly inspired to write when she has the idea of writing up the true story - something much like "Yellowface".

Anthena's account revives. June asks for a meeting. At night, at the top of steps, June converses with Athena's voice, confesses. Actually it's Candice, who lost her publishing job because of June. Candice has it all video-recorded. They fight. June wakes up in hospital. She realises that Candice can't reveal the video evidence without risking assault charges. She works out how to portray her book at a hoax and expose the rotten foundation of the publishing industry.

I enjoyed it - I understood most of the in-jokes and recognised the character types. June's sister Rory (Aurora), mentioned near the start, gets to speak briefly, half way through. She's an ordinary mother. I don't know why she's in the book at all.

The author has a MPhil from Cambridge, UK. I learnt that "barcons" are bar gathering at literary events.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins (it’s a thriller about the book trade – the appeal is niche – and you can sense Kuang’s uncertainty about what does and doesn’t need explaining)
• Wamuwi Mbao (ultimately as much about the loneliness of the writing craft as it is about theft, appropriation, guilt and complicity ... June is always close to grasping what the reader immediately perceives about herself and Athena: that, regardless of who succeeds and who fails, they are united by the loneliness of their chosen lives ... there are structural problems that take the polish off the novel. While Kuang is good at sustaining the vivid tension-and-reveal tempo, there are only so many times the fizzing fuse can be deployed before the reader’s patience begins to wear thin. ... The other problem is one of time stretch.... Yellowface manages the trick of feeling current, but there are moments of timeline yo-yo that tangle and pull at our suspension of reality)
• Brenna Taitano (when I completed my first listen, I agreed with some of the more negative reviews: hastily ended chapters, foreboding that never gets addressed, and weak metaphors. )
• Trevor Pateman (Kuang has a lot of fun and makes us laugh though there is sufficient (and clever) ambiguity to allow opposing sides to laugh at the same gags)

"Normal Rules Don't Apply" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

'The Void' - 2028. Barbara's a doctor. Her daughter's moved back to her to be within a school's catchment area. In a 5 minute incident all people who are outside die.

‘Dogs in Jeopardy’ - Franklin goes for a job interview. He's asked questions like "if you were a sanwich, what type would you be?" A horse tells him to bet on it. He wins £10k. Returning to his car, a dog talks to him.

'Blithe Spirit' - Mandy is a ghost. She was married to Greg and worked for a MP, Jonathon.

‘Spellbound’ - A fairy tale (where a childless queen is granted a wish and had a child, but breaks a promise) and a story (about a clergyman's family of 5 daughter and a son) are interleaved - the mother is a fairy-tale expert is is recounting the fairy tale. The princess is told that she and her mother will be released from a spell if she gives the witch a baby boy. A new au pair arrives at the family's house, asking to see the boy.

‘The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ – Franklin stumbles into a relationship with Connie, 32. She takes him to visit her family. He's asked what instrument he'd like to be.

'Shine, Pamela, Shine!' - a retired, ever-inspiring primary school teacher whose been divorced for 15 years had 2 kids. His re-married ex had 2 kids.

‘Existential Marginalization’ - Tillie's toys dread her. One day she runs into the road and is put on life support until she is "switched off". The father leaves, the mother remarries. She chooses 2 toys to take to their new home and burns the others.

'Classic Quest 17. Crime and punishment' - Franklin and Connie plan a quick marriage. One of her sisters tries to sleep with him. Her father's found stabbed dead. He's arrested.

'Puppies and rainbows' - On a break from a film ("In a time of madness"), US actress Skylar (brought up on a trailer site) visits the Greenacres set, shown around by Franklin. She dates Price Alfie. An under-age porn film of hers is found. She has to give uup the prince though she oves him.

'Gene-sis' -Kittie recreates the world. Unicorns? She tries talking dogs and horses.

'What-if' - Franklin's driving a woman - a new assistant at the studio. She tells him what happened when she turned to the witch with a boy - the witch was dead. After "The divide" (?) the Classic Quest series remained popular, especially with middle-aged women. He gets royalties.

I had an audio book, so making notes was difficult. There may well be mistakes in the above. I'm unconvinced that all the interconnections are fruitful. The stories are entertaining a paragraph at a time, but I don't think any of the pieces could survive stand-alone as they are.

Other reviews

• Alex Clark
• Justine Jordan
• karissareadsbooks (Many of the stories end on an abrupt reveal or transition. Just as we might be beginning to understand the rules of the universe, it’s too late and we’re on to the next story. The fact that characters show up again helps and I therefore trusted Atkinson to take me through and explain where we were. For me, that explanation never came in a satisfying way.)
• Blue book balloon (There is an explanation, sort of, for the coincidences and links, lending a distinctly metaphysical touch to the book. It adds its own charm but the rest of the stories still very much stand in their own terms, every one of them. My favourite would, though, I think be Existential Marginalisation)

"Object Permanence" by Anne Berkeley

Poems from "And Other Poems", "Magma", "The North", "Under the Radar", etc. The poems are roughly grouped into themes - family, garden/nature, memories of school, arts, jobs, objects/events that trigger memories, etc. When she read from her book on 1st Mar, 2026 I think she read p.11, 13, 32, 46, 50, 64, and 68.

Notes: Kettle's Yard (p.35) is the Cambridge house of a late art collector that can be visited (closed on Mondays, though people may still be inside). "Mary's" (p.43) is the name of the greengrocer's in Sawston, near Cambridge. The bowser on the cover (and on p.68) is near the Sawston bypass.

Forms: Though she doesn't often use forms they're apt when she does. "Breaking news" is a loose villanelle. Until I read the notes I didn't realise that "Missing (for Roland)" is a lipogram - 6 stanzas, each missing a letter. I think the missing letters spell "roland".

When an object is removed from view then reappears, adults assume it's the same object. Babies don't. Picasso wished he could draw like a child, and poets like to see the world as if for the first time - after all, you can't jump into the same river twice. When an object is still remembered after years, it might have significance, though we may not be aware of the meaning. It may just be a bookmark showing us where to return when we're ready to understand. In nearly all these poems, memory is reliable. What does change is the interpretation.

• The person remembering in "You only live twice" realises something that they didn't realise at the time (something that readers soon suspect, so it's revealing that the persona didn't realise).
• In "My first trip abroad" the persona knew she should be thrilled. "The photograph is the proof. I smiled./ I remember, and I don't remember/ being there and what it felt like, how I felt nothing/ felt as if the smile was a lie and I had failed"
• I've made some notes about 'The bowser'

Other reviews

• Helena Nelson (Anne Berkeley writes about a decrepit old tank like other poets write about love)
• Sheenagh Pugh (This collection delineates various people, including the author, via objects, places and moments that have been important in their lives. ... The one poem where I did feel I didn’t really know what was going on was “Monday at Kettle’s Yard”. ... This is a collection notable for its keen observation)
• D A Prince (a collection centred on looking, watching, observing and remembering)

"Pulse" by Cynan Jones (Granta, 2025)

• Peregrine - 2 nestling-stealers at night launch an inflatable for a raid. The small one (who's bossed by the big one) who's on the cliff side is haunted by an incident with a boy he'd bullied years before, throwing away his rucksack - a boy he thought he saw on the clifftop the day before. Something had happened to the boy after. The man feels guilty. A rope slips and he thinks he'll fall like that boy's rucksack did. He's left dangling. The ending's fragmentary - maybe the nestlings escape and the man feels absolved.
• Reindeer - A man is asked by a policeman to shoot a bear. He goes up into the mountain, wounds a deer as bait, and determines that the bear is more hungry than rogue. The bear knocks him out and drags him. He finds dead reindeer tied to a buried sleigh with bells and presents. He returns down the mountain, gets a lift from a farmer who says "That guy. Last year. There's a lot of us think it was right, what happened to him". There were earlier hints about the man having been involved in an incident.
  Odd. Was the man hallucinating?
• Cow - A pregnancy test is negative. He lives on a farm with his wife and her parents. It's lambing/calving time. He's unfit, hasn't played football for weeks - "Thought of his knee, opened up, the physio saying, You wouldn't need a general. Then, of her, a cannula in the back of her hand" (who is "she"? His mother-in-law?). They look after the orphaned lambs in the "hushed shed, the hospital sense of compromised bodies. Resting, recovering, waiting. Relegated to a purpose". A calf is stuck during birth. The father tries brute force and asks his son-in-law for help. His daughter is angry and makes them call the vet. He does a caeserian. The son-in-law thinks the calf is dead but it shows signs of life. The ending is "Come on, he begged. Come on."
• Stock - His shop is closing down(?) so he gives carrier bags of goods away to his regular clients. He visits his nan who lives an hour away. He helps Ifan, who's having to sell his animals. Someone lives in a converted chapel. Annie drives a car, Mari's in the back. He's scared about the police. He has locked a grocery delivery man in the back of their van, threatening to kill them.
  I think I can learn from this. What's gained from fogging the details? This isn't just delaying facts to add suspense. It's not simple "Unreliable narrator" tactics. Even when we know what's going on, details are withheld. From the start of the piece we suspect that the main character is under strain - "He sat integrated amongst the felled trees". Later, the odd sentence loses clarity - e.g. "Bones of a sudden watery, as if he was unmixing". His thoughts come fast, and not always clearly. In "He waited. Bloomed with heat again. A slight chill immediately meeting the edges of his sweat. His neck vein thick, suddenly. Too small." what is too small? His vein? I had to re-read too much. Is the shop his? Is Ifan his uncle? Is Mari his daughter? Everything is closing down, coming to an end.
• White Squares - A man shoots ducks on a river with an air-rifle. The other ducks in the flock don't react. Further downriver kids and parents wait on the bank, his ex and son (who he's not allowed close to) among them. Each has a piece of white paper with a number on it, the number of a plastic duck. He wants his son's duck to win. He wants his son to be lucky. Right at the end the man recalls how his father (who had also left his wife) taught him to shoot - How his father had moved the bottles further and further away each time he hit one. How he'd at last been allowed to shoot targets on a small white square of paper
• Pulse - a couple with a young child are in an isolated wood cabin in Wales. There's a storm which threatens to make a tree fall onto power lines which might dangle into the wet ground, electrocuting them all. He tries to cut the tree down, then calls from help. Tree surgeons cut down the tree then go. They said that "It's not the trees that go.It's the ground". A week later he's still trying to clear the fallen wood. Another tree is coming loose. There are sparks from the power lines to a bough. They rush from the house. The ending is "The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water// If the power's in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.// The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms". It was in "The New Yorker"

There are blank lines between paragraphs. The paragraphs are often short and often combine description with figurative language or sonics -

• The landscape regained its vastness when he cut the engine before the ground got too steep. With the gradient rising sharply, the trees loomed (p.19)
• In the firelight, the world was only the immediate trees and the circle within the firelight. Beyond was a thumping blackness (p.20)
• The prip prip prip of postage stamps parting from their perforations. The thudunk of inking pension books (p.97)
• Her scream smashed him from sleep (p.172)

Other reviews

• David Hayden (These stories are spaced out in very short paragraphs, many of only one sentence, and these often of just a few words. It is a device that in less skilful hands might produce a false reaching after of poetic effect; here it brings a physical rhythm that generates a maximum of force, presence and meaning.)
• Rhys Thomas (you can feel the cadence and delivery, the tension, how each word has been painstakingly considered – but it’s subtle, never distracting, and never reads as though forced. In fact, as with many great prosaists, it is so distinctive and hypnotic that occasional moments where it falters feel almost jarring. This very rarely happens; where it does more commonly is within the dialogue which is by no means bad, but can lack the same poetic magic of the prose at times, pulling you out of rhythm slightly. ... Often these stories, particularly ‘Peregrine’ and ‘Stock’, show that Jones has pass to roam the same corridors as [Hemingway and McCarthy].)
• bookmunch (he is fond of rural settings, of short stichomythic sentences, of sudden shocking incidents (in which you may not always know quite what has happened) and back stories delivered like rumour that the narrators tend not to want to discuss. The writing at its best is frequently obtuse, alien and beautiful.)
• Carl Wilkinson (beyond the crystalline details of the moment that holds our horrified gaze lies the pain carried by the characters that is only hinted at: the old farmer with his constant dry cough, his wife ill in bed and the young couple longing for a pregnancy that has failed to materialise. ... “White Squares” feels under-developed, packing less of a punch than the other tales. But it underlines how powerful Jones’s writing is in the rest of the collection.)

"Highway cottage" by Ralf Webb (Penguin, 2025)

Poems from Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, etc.

Lines begin with capitals, and stanzas of a poem are more or less equally sized rectangles, making the pieces look like poems. Many pieces are a little more than a page - removing some of the line-breaks would have saved a lot of paper. I'm struggling to find much that's worthwhile - I don't understand what poems like "The Poet's Dream" are trying to do.

"A Singing contest on Thorn Hill" has an "xaxa" rhyme scheme ("country" rhyming with "bloody" etc).

Here are some extracts -

• Somewhere around here, in a postwar ex-council house/ My stepdad will be falling asleep/ In front of localised cremation ads./ What dreams of your own are you siloing away/ In the folds of those vintage ermine coats? (p.15)
• In summer, bindweed flowers like thousands/ Of tiny dish antennae. 'Environmental Protection'/ Is a misnomer. Phone them and it just rings. And rings. (p.27)
• a vein throbs like a slow-moving worm (p.29)
• The old muscles of his adolescence/ Come out of retirement, and stretch/ His tattoos into nonsense symbols (p.49)

"The Rose Arbor" by Rhys Bowen

An audio book.

In 1968 a child, Lucy (3), goes missing from London. DI Jones (50+, male, single) and DC Marisa Young are sent to Weymouth to investigate. Liz, 27, a reporter and Marisa's flatmate, goes there too. A lead takes them to Tydeham, a village taken over by the Army in 1943 and never returned. Liz senses she's been there. She phones her father, a retired brigadeer, who says he's never been there. His wife is getting forgetful. There's a 1943 timeline in which we learn about the big house in the village being emptied, the artworks going into storage.

Liz stays while the others return to London. She meets James Bennington, who used to live in the big house and now lives in London. She recalls having seen someone being buried nearby. The police find a woman's skeleton there. Liz returns to London. Jones says 3 girls disappeared years ago - an early case of his. Marisa suggests that Liz might be one of them (an only child, Liz was born when her parents were in their 40s). Lucy's parents have blackmailable pasts - her father (actually stepfather) is rich and secretly gay. Her mother Susan used to live in a squat.

In a flashback we learn that one of the missing girls was an evacuee picked up by a man.

Liz and James become friends. James' mother killed herself. Liz visits her birthplace in Devon, which doesn't quite match her memories. She works out that Lucy's real mother was a friend of Susan - Lark. She finds Lark and Lucy just as Lark kills herself. She finds an evacuated girl. She discovers that Alice, a maid of her family, was somehow special - her mother? She confronts her father about it by phone. That night her mother dies of an overdose. Her father tells Liz that her mother accidentally killed Alice (the buried body) and that he administered the overdose. He doesn't say if he's Liz's biological father.

An enjoyable read. It sounds well researched. Did people "process" new emotional info back then? Maybe. She's lucky in her investigations, surprisingly certain about her hunches, and not shocked (or even affected) by the revelations about her past and parents.

Other reviews

• literarytreats (the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit)
• historywomanperspective ( I found Liz to be one of the most frustrating characters that I have ever read. She had no likable trait about her. ... The main problem I had most with her was that she had no sense of justice. I could not believe that she sided with those who had committed horrible deeds. She did not care about what was morally right. I hated the decisions that she made, and I greatly disliked her. ... I was really confused why there were no morals in the story. ... I was really disappointed in this book and could not believe it was written by a popular mystery writer. As for the mystery, it was very convoluted and all over the place. I also found it to be very unconvincing. ... Therefore, this was Mrs. Bowen’s worst novel that she has written.)

"Here One Moment" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

On a delayed Australian plane flight an old lady passenger suddenly gets up and tells people at what age they'll die and the cause of their death. We get the PoV of Leo, 43, who will die in months from a work accident (he overworks, neglecting his family); Sue, 63, (who'll die at 66 of pancreatic cancer); Allegra (a pretty, efficient air stewardess who will self-harm); Paula, 36 (with 2 kids - one will drown at 7, the other will live to 103); Ethan, who's back from a funeral (who'll die of assault at 30); Don and Eve who've just married (Eve's spouse will kill her).

We get first a paragraph from the PoV of Cherry, the old lady, then longer snippets that often have a connection with the surrounding material. After the incident she recalled nothing about it. Her mother was a psychic, her father died young, struck by lightning. Her fiance died in Vietnam. She married David, a rather uncaring man half-Korean doctor who was sterile. Good sex but they didn't like each other much. She started to drink. Her husband started sleeping with Stella. They divorced. David and Cherry decide to adopt. Cherry's mother dies, but not before Cherry gets a reading from her - Cherry recognised the tricks. Cherry remarries. After 30+ years her husband dies on a plane (the same route as the strange flight).

Interrupting Cherry's story are the lives of the various characters. Ethan, fancies his wacky, rich house-mate Jasmine who brings home a man then breaks up with him. He becomes obessive, violent and suspects Ethan. Allegra continues sleeping sometimes with pilot Jonny. She bad back pains. Don knows that he has murderous thoughts while sleepwalking so he handcuffs himself at night or sleeps in a different room. Then 3 people (2 nearly 100 years old) die at the predicted age. The survivors take precautions, just in case. They start getting in touch with each other. The ones who'll die old start taking risks.

Cherry still hasn't been identified. Then after a 4th death (faked for publicity) the predictions begin to come unstuck. She releases a statement saying that she had a mental incident on the plane. In an epilogue we discover that the boy who should have drowned at 7 went on to win a swimming gold medal - after the flight his mother had made him do many swimming lessons, so he survived an incident at sea went he was 7.

A probability theme (fallacies etc) is sustained - Cherry's an actuary. I like the details - how someone pushes aside a headphone with a thumb when spoken to, how the atmosphere in a room changes like in a classroom after the teacher's lost their temper. But I was never convinced by the Allegra character.

Other reviews

• Adele Dumont (The far-fetched plot of Here One Moment wouldn’t matter so much were its characters memorable. But there are just so very many, and post-flight they mostly lead their own separate lives, only really reconnecting via a Facebook group. As a result, there are none of the complicated group dynamics that made her other novels so compelling. ... wit is fleeting, and not enough to rescue a narrative that is too baggy and a host of characters who are ultimately forgettable.)
• Anne Logan (Would men connect with this book as much as women? Likely not, as there were considerably more female perspectives, and at times, the men could be infantilized a bit (in good humour, but still, I noticed it). Does Moriarty have a bunch of male fans? Again, probably not)
• libgirlbooks
• capsulenz