"The expanded earth" by Mikey Please

An audio book

On July 2nd - "The Descent" - people shrank to 10% of their height. Many people didn't survive the shrinking (pacemakers, artificial hips, cochlea implants, etc, didn't shrink). Millions of years ago, therapods suffered the same shrinkage. Elizabeth Godwin runs a research project in the New Forest about plankton being a superbeing - their dead and living bodies forming a binary code. She wants to conect with it, with God. A young researcher Lazlet wants to work with her. He creates a connectome so people can connect with a pool of plankton. Religious fanatics take over the project, taking Lazlet away.

There are various little, independent stories - "Elsewhere". All astronauts but one die. She returns to earch with a memorystick containing data about July 2nd. On an island, battling parties stop arguing because there's so much more land now. Some people see the collective plankton as a God correcting the faults of mankind.

Giles wakes, shrunken. He wants to find his daughters - Eva, who has a weak heart, and Sadie. Seeking a phone charger he finds a tent village of survivors. They build a car needing 6 to drive it. Cats and dogs are frightening. Alwyn is killed with a scalpel by a woman in red (actually it's paprika, to keep animals away). Children have set up their own tribes and try to kill the adults using fireworks, etc.

Matilda (a paramed) and Bob (Police) attend a traffic accident where people's clothes are left, and there's a shrunken body. They visit a nearly building. Shrunken Godwin is there. She thinks her experiment might have caused people to shrink in the range of a km or 2, and is worried that Lazlet will cause an event that will affect the world. She thinks that in a coma aren't affected so she advices people to take barbituates. Matilda and Bob try to inject as many people as possible as the predicted event gets close.

Giles returns to the building where he worked. The women who killed Alwyn is there. She says that Richard isn't a priest. He's fanatical about the end of the world and is killing people. Giles finds his fully grown daughters and Matilda, who's an ex-lover?

Oh, it's the first part of a trilogy. It has elements of SF and fantasy that don't always mesh - wouldn't small people have such high-pitched voices and such different ears that communication with normal sized people would be difficult. I like several of the ideas.

Other reviews

• echoesinanemptyroom
• potsandplots (The Expanded Earth contains two central stories. One is set before “the descent” (where humanity shrank), and the other is in essence a quest, where a disparate group of adults is shepherding a gaggle of children to safety. ... This quest aspect of the story is strangely reminiscent of Watership Down. ... The other thread offers an explanation of how the descent occurred. Hubris and science gone wrong. An eccentric scientist, their research derided, stumbles upon something incredible. This work is appropriated by people who don’t understand its significance, triggering a cataclysm. These events centre around Matilda, a paramedic, as she tries to cope with, understand and contain the initial shrinking outbreak. ... While these are the two main threads, there is a third strand that is arguably even better. A potpourri of stories from around the world, giving wider context to the tale and showing us glimpses of what is happening away from the main story )
• goodreads (3.83 rating; 1,015 ratings)

"Midwife on the Orient Express" by Fiona McArthur

An audio book.

Prologue - a 12 year old Lucas sees his mother drown in the sea in Australia.

Now he's a world-famous infertility doctor. It's 23rd December. He's with his 80 y.o. grandmother Winsome in Venice, waiting to catch the London train. She's done the trip several times. Now a widow, she's hoping to meet Max again.

Australian Kelsie by chance is waiting there too. She left Lucas at the altar 15 years before, when she was 18, because she suddenly had career ambitions. It was his grandmother's example that had made her dream of doing this journey one day. She's manager of a Maternity Unit.

They're both attractive and single. They meet. Lucas is still grumpy. Winsome sees an opportunity to do some matchmaking. She sees that Max, now a widower, is on the train.

A passenger, Anna, gives birth. Kelsie and Lucas are impressed by each other's handling of the breach birth, and sleep together. After, Kelsie thinks that Lucas (still) doesn't respect her abilities enough, and he doesn't want to be led up the garden path again. He's helicoptered from Calais to a patient in London who thinks she's about to give birth. Kelsie and Winsome talk. Kelsie decides that Lucas doesn't have a controlling personality.

Epilogue - Max and Winsome are married. Kelsie is giving birth.

No. Decisions and tension built round very little.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.74 rating; 334 ratings)

"Tomorrow's woman" by Greta Bellamacina (Andrew McMeel publishing, 2020)

Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The Times, Vogue, London Magazine.

There's a 6+ page forward by Robert Montgomery. He writes

• "Greta writes in a kind of reinvented English where inanimate objects are filled with life"
• "As a poet, you should struggle and push against the walls of the language you write in; and Bellamacina does this to new levels, and perhaps more brilliantly than any poet of her generation, creating new phrasings in English, which make at first only musical sense"
• "poetry in English, to be new, needs to forget the English language as much as possible, the heavy weight of all its structured precedents, and especially the terrible dulling administrative English we are forced to use every day. Twenty years ago I began to look for a poet who could do that - when I found Greta, I finally found that poet"

The section headings sound promising - "Tomorrow's woman", "Pregnancy", "Love", "Loss, grief, and thunder". So, here are some extracts: all sentences -

• she has loved all the women she has heard/ in a throat hood/ behind an eye inhaling rain. (p.3)
• Hands like stolen trees/ stuck up in the fog,/ a library card to Jerusalem/ only human in waves// a courtyard of scarlet fire/ closed so far down into itself. (p.4)
• Our child hasn't learnt his knees/ or the broken dreams of the Internet.// There is only our unprescripted love,/ not even a word yet/ but for you it's Modernism. (p.7)
• The sea birds come to show their support/ spiring pendulums, dead and still alive -/ small airports of gathered whale processions/ and invisible life// living namesake threats. (p.10)
• Hair of a horse/ over a faded clock,// modern hair like rainfall/ hunched blackbird dampness// sun beast isles/ burning in its nest. (p.19)
• The bed remains ancient in its ritual of worship/ a personal attack against strangers/ made up of all its own Trojan wars/ hung in literature, undebated. (p.22)
• The Internet is full of eagles, they cry out from all the/ isolated fullness, pushing like bread// they remind you of a storybook. (p.30)
• Viagra water flickering through morning tea/ tribes of water burning the air,/ and white heat that is a renamed cover version of water. (p.34)
• Before there was anything/ there were the stars touching time with hope,// before there was anything/ love was still blind in the darkness,// all of wonder above you,/ where you put it, up high. (p.48)
• Shaking the locking organed funfairs// the daytime observes its place to the sun,/ bewitched by the size of the hills (p.57)
• We have become old dreams/ lying on hourglass traps/ boarded up like embarrassed commitments (p.76)
• We assure ourselves 7:59, O'children/ lifting up our children,/ embarrassed angels. (p.77)
• There is no allotment for this blue rehearsal// we have replaced our faces like old caretakers,/ overwinged by the thought of secret exits// bluer than the untangle of a ballroom. (p.86)
• The night continues to note down the morning dawn// it breaks slowly, gentle like a smile/ ragged with hand-peddles from a mountain seascape. (p.89)

"Phosphorescent" is my favourite.

"It was you" by Jo Platt

An audio book.

The blurb mentioned a Book Group and a woman opening herself up to new possibilities, so I started reading, but I got 25% through without feeling that it was going anywhere. So DNF.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.78 rating - 2,074 ratings)

"The bean trees" by Barbara Kingsolver (Virago, 1989)

The main character Marietta (first-person - a girl living in the states) doesn't know who her father is. After 5 years working part-time in a medical lab she buys a cheap VW and leaves home, renaming herself Taylor Greer. On the way, in a bar, she's given a Cherokee pre-toddler. She calls her Turtle. She finds a hotel in Broken Arrow to stay in for a while, paying her way. Then she drives to Tucson, gets punctures, finds "Jesus Is Lord Used Tires" run by Mattie. Upstairs is a sanctuary for Guatamalan and Salvadoran refugees.

Lou Ann Ruiz (third person) is giving birth in 2 months. She's into horoscopes and signs. Ivy's her mother and her grandmother's close. Her husband Angel, an ex-rodeo, who lost half a leg in an accident, has left her. After the birth of Dwayne Ray she advertises a room. Taylor applies and moves in.

Turtle's first word is "bean" (it looks like what it will grow into) and she soon learns the words for other vegetables. Taylor's mother phones to say she's remarrying. Lou Ann gets a factory job. Angel wants her to go to live with him. Mattie is interviewed on TV about the sanctuary. Taylor becomes friends with 2 refugees who live with Mattie - Estevan (an ex-teacher of English; she rather loves him) and Esperanza (who wants children). They speak to each other in Spanish because they know different Mayan languages. Esperanza tries to overdose on aspirin. Taylor learns that their daughter was taken from them because they didn't reveal names of union members. Taylor says "Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner too. I come from a place that's so different from here you would think you'd stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirst for decoration and the national pastime is having babies ... Half the time I have no idea what's going on around me here".

When Turtle is X-rayed the doctor says she has old compound fractures. Social services say Taylor has no claim on Turtle. She decides to try to find Turtle's relatives so she can get them to sign something. She offers to take Estevan and Esperanza - they're in danger of being deported. They set off early and are stopped. The couple say that Turtle's their daughter. They find the original bar but the owner etc has changed. They rent a lakeside cottage for the night. Turtle twice says "Mamma" where humans are buried. Was her mother buried? Does she think humans grow like beans? Estevan and Esperanza can easily merge into Cherokee Nation. We're led to believe that Taylor will leave Turtle with them (thinking Turtle would have a better life that way) but in the end they pretend to be Turtle's parents and sign adoption papers. Taylor phones her now-married mother for the first time in months. Then she has almost a conversation with Turtle, about the people back home. They pause in a library where Taylor identifies what Turtle calls a bean tree as wisteria. It came from the Orient. It thrives in poor soil thanks to rhizobia - bugs that help the plants. She phones Lou Ann, who isn't going to join Angel - she asked advice from his mother. She's found a boyfriend of African descent.

Chapters have titles which are the odd-page headers. There's an avalanche of happy news at the end - I guess the characters deserve it. Some symbolic loose ends are tidily tied up too. Themes include motherhood, language, finding a home, friends vs family. The prose is fast-moving, the style flexible -

• The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious-looking, like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie
• I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona
• she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We'd just thought it was allergies
• White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts
• the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds
• Cynthia was concerned about Turtle's tendency to bury the dollies, believing that it indicated a fixation with death, but I assured her that Turtle was only trying to grow dolly trees

I like it.

Other reviews

• Annie sauveur (I see its faults. A book about a white woman making a lot of half-hearted commentary on POC issues. ... it’s weird that she didn’t call the police—especially when she discovers that Turtle had been sexually abused. It’s a little strange that she just adopts Turtle and that’s the end of it. But I think that is who Taylor is. She is very straightforward, steadfast, and headstrong. Blunt, to a fault. ... In some scenes, she blends into the background, she asks and answers in ways that fit the other characters a little too well. ... The writing is magic.)
• Winona media (This novel is about great damage and great healing. From a rich mix colloquial language, off-beat characters, and an imaginative plot, a central theme of hope in the face of justified despair is skillfully developed.)

"some strange music draws me in" by Griffin Hansbury

An audio book. 2 alternating timelines.

1984 in Swaffham, USA. Mel is 13. She's overweight and will soon move to a new school though her friend Jules won't. They try to learn about sex by watching films. She's into Michael Jackson. Mel sees a trans - Sylvia - though she doesn't realise that at first.

Mel's sister Donna left home early with a man. Mel's father is useless. Mel attracts all the rage of her mother Irene. She seeks out the trans. There's a beautiful sunset that draws people from their houses. Sylvia befriends her. S/he hitched to NY when about 15 and mixed with Patti Smith's friends. Mel doesn't know if Sylvia likes girls or boys. She flirts. She doesn't know whether she fancies Sylvia or wants to be her.

2019: Max is suspended from work. He taught LGBT literature before it was common. Then the school boasted about him. But he was careless about pronouns. He's forced to have a sensitivity tutor. He realises that "today, weakness is a weapon". His mum has recently died. He's come back to sell her house. He's visiting sister Donna [ah, so Max used to be Mel] who he's not seen for a decade. Donna's husband Stetson is in prison for 5 years - drugs. They have a daughter, Dakota, 12, who's clued up about non-binaryism - she goes to a talk by a queen in a library. Donna asks Max if he'd like to look after Dakota long-term. He realises Dakota (who says she's pan - she's already told her mother) needs him in the way that he'd needed Sylvia.

1984: Sylvia "folded you into whatever she was doing.". She's maybe 23? She's planning to sell her dead mother's house. She was preparing a station wagon for the Demolition Derby, painting the driver's door white so cars don't crash into that side. Mel went there with Jules to watch. She introduced Sylvia and Jules to each other. Sylvia won the "most agressive driver" prize. Two men dead-name her (use her old, male, name). She has an interesting bunch of "outsider" friends. Sylvia and Mel talk about live. Sylvia says that trans are a minority within the minority of non-mainstream behaviours, and she only knew about male-to-female transitions. At 14 Mel has sex with a Harvard boy. She tells Jules about it and they come together. Sylvia's arrested for using a woman's toilet. Jules' parents put up "Wanted" posters and practice shooting. A rumour goes round that Mel and Sylvia made out. Boys challenge her to prove she likes sex with boys. Sylvia's house is set alight. Did Jules do it? She was jealous

Jules died in a car accident when she was 20. In 2019 Max tracks down Sylvia. She's divorced from a woman, working with LGBT people. She says that her house being burned down was the best thing that happened to her - with the insurance money she got herself through college. She admits that she caused the fire.

It didn't dwell on self-pity nor did it deliver sermons. As it says, "A small town can feel threatened by an outsider, and an outsider can come from within." and Queerness was a way to escape from a low-down life that was risky anyway. I liked "when she fell out of herself" but not the use of "audible" in"I swear I heard an audible crack inside my skull"

Other reviews

• Milo Todd
• goodreads (a 4.41 rating - 1,469 ratings)

"Little Earthquakes" by Jennifer Weiner (Pocket Books, 2004)

Lia (first-person), an ex-actor, seems to have lost a child. She can't cope. She flies from LA home to her unemotional mother (who she's not seen for 11 years) telling her sitcom-writing husband Sam not to look for her. She's stalking a woman. After 9 weeks with her mother she still hasn't told her what's wrong. She met Sam, married after a year, then left him 10 months later after having lost a child Caleb (though after 100 pages we still know nothing). She pawns her ring and moves into her own place

Becky co-owns/manages Mas, a restaurant in Philadephia. Becky feels overweight. She knows that a woman is watching her. She's married to a kind doctor Andrew whose mother Mimi has married 5 times. Andrew had sex problems caused by his overbearing mother that Becky coached him out of - she lubricated herself with olive oil the first time they had sex. When Becky goes to a yoga class, a fellow mother-to-be Ayinde breaks water. Becky and Kelly (an event planner) get her to hospital. She has model looks, a Yale degree, and is married to Richard, a very famous basketball player. He flies back smelling of woman's perfume. She gives birth to a boy, Julian, and regularly invites her new friends around. In flashbacks we learn how the women met their husbands. Then they compare their pregnancies. Kelly's mother was strict. Kelly's husband Steve is suddenly sacked.

Becky wants an all-natural birth but ends up with a C-section, giving birth to Ava. Kelly wants an epidural She gives birth to Oliver. Steven, now sacked (though Kelly doesn't tell the others), passes out. Ayinde wants to bring her baby up without help. Her mother Lola sends her a book about how babies love routine.

The women compare strollers, the support their mothers provide, their experiences of sex after giving birth, and breastfeeding. Julian sleeps in his parents' bed, which displeases Richard. Ayinde want to return to TV journalism but is told she's too pretty and famous. Andrew's mother Mimi turns up at short notice to stay for a while. She's against breastfeeding. She wants to give the baby a manicure. She stays over 3 weeks.

Becky brings Lia into the group (chats with Lia give her a chance to escape Mimi). Lia says her baby was unplanned. She offers Lia a menial job at Mas. Lia goes to a therapy group and is angry about mothers who grieve about children who died when 11. Caleb was 10 weeks old when he died. Kelly applies to return to work after 3 months, while Steven is still job hunting. She struggles to combine work (20 hours/week)with childcare - Steven hangs around in pyjamas do nothing much. Lia babysits 3 times a week.

News of Richard's one-night-stand breaks. Damage limitation. Julian has a heart murmer. The woman rally around. Julian's ok. Mimi insists that Jew Becky celebrates Xmas, sending a tree and ham. Andrew at last puts his foot down.

Lia meets a woman who had another child after her first died. They talk. Her mother contacts Sam and finds out what happened. She tracks Lia down and that chat about why they've not liked each other. Lia calls Sam, asking him to fly to er - she's ready now. Becky is pregnant again. Andrew finally agrees that his mother is manipulative and needs to be controlled. His mother over-reacts. Becky suddenly decids to apologise. Somebody interviews Kelly in her home about combining work and parenting. She lies - saying that Sam is on a business trip whereas in fact he's jobless and has been send out to do shopping. Alas Steven returns early, the baby vomits, etc. He's not been helping. She tells him to get out. The girl who said Richard made her pregnant turms up on Ayinde's doorstep to apologise. Her mother won't talk to her.

A month later Steven returns promising to turn over a new leaf. The girls all meet before Lia returns home to live with Sam.

Mimi soon becomes cartoonish - not funny, just predictably OTT. The ending's too cosy.

Other reviews

• Sahar's blog (her characters do not become four aspects of her own personality, but remain four distinct and very different women.)
• Kirkus reviews (each woman starts out with an issue and each faces a challenge. Lia’s challenge is obviously her loss; her underlying issue is her mother’s emotional coldness. Becky’s issue is weight ... Becky’s challenge is her obnoxious, overbearing mother-in-law. Overachieving Kelly’s issue is the poverty she has overcome. ... Kelly is thrown a curve when her husband gets laid off ... . For Ayinde, ... being biracial has been a lifelong struggle. Now her basketball star husband is slapped with a paternity suit by another woman. But love conquers all. Becky’s husband miraculously grows a spine and quits being a mama’s boy. Kelly and her husband learn to communicate and support each other in following their real professional dreams. Ayinde’s husband proves he is a devoted father ... Lia finds peace with her loss, realizes that her mother has always loved her, and reunites with her husband. After her realistic examination of new motherhood and marital strain, Weiner pulls her punches with a too-neat ending)