The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

This story is set from 1950s-1990s and is about the Vignes sisters who are twins. They grow up together in a small, southern black community and decide to run away from the town they live in at 16 years old. As the story progresses, we learn how a slight different in their skin tone means they get treated completely differently as adults, in their families, daily lives, the communities they live in, the jobs they have, and their racial identities.

Years later, one sister comes back home to the town in the Deep South that she escaped at 16, bringing her black daughter with her, while the other sister passes for/pretends she is white and essentially lives as a white person in a predominantly white community in California, with a white husband who knows nothing about her actual racial identity. Despite how many factors separate the twins, their lives still manage to intertwine and intersect in ways they never expected, through their daughters.

I absolutely loved this book. One of my best friend's Grainne sent me a care package with 4 books in it a couple of weeks ago (all in this post) and this is the one I dove into first. It is an amazing story, so emotional and as well as looking at the long-standing issue of racism, it explores how your past can have a lasting influence as it shapes your decisions, wants, needs and expectations as you grow, and the reasons why people may choose to live a life that is the complete opposite to where they came from.

An amazing book, so well written & everyone should read.

The Female Persuasion - Meg Wolitzer

I'm a big fan of Meg Wolitzer since reading her book "The Interestings" (one of my 20 favourite books of 2020), so when I came across this one in Oxfam Books I had to grab it, I had heard so much about it on podcasts and on social media that I knew I needed to have it.

This story starts off with Greer Kadetsky - a shy college student in the US - when she meets her idol, someone she has admired forever - Faith Frank - an avid feminist and a central pillar of women's rights and the women's movement, known worldwide. Greer attends a speech of Faith's and by chance meets her afterwards, ultimately turning her world as she knows it on its head and opening a door to the life - and career with Faith - that she thinks she wants, different from the future she always imagined herself having.

This is a great book, and touches on so many important topics and issues (aside from the obvious feminist ones) and the effect someone you idolise can have on you and your life, and not always in the positive way you expected. I love Meg Wolitzer's writing and her way of telling a story.

Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood

Another from the Grainne care package of books, this memoir was fantastic (I do love a good memoir). The childhood of Patricia Lockwood was unusual in many respects. She lived in an impoverished, nuclear waste-ridden area of the American Midwest. Her father - hence the title - was a type of priest, and the way she describes her family home and her father would have you in stitches at times. He carries a gun, is always playing the guitar in just his underwear at any spot in the house (even when guests are around) and underwent a religious experience which led him to finding a loophole and thus getting approved for the Catholic Priesthood, despite having a wife and children.

The memoir focuses on both her childhood and adulthood, as she writes about a time when the expense of a medical procedure her husband needed forced her (at 30) and her husband to move back in with her parents, plunging her back into the crazy world that was her childhood and learning to live with that as an adult, who has experienced the world and knows that what she experienced growing up was not exactly "normal."

Educated - Tara Westover

Strangely enough, by complete chance, I read this memoir directly after reading Priestdaddy and there were a lot of similarities in both fathers to begin with, but I quickly saw that Tara Westover's experience was a lot less light-hearted and very different indeed.

This memoir tells the story of Tara's childhood, as her and her family grew up preparing for the End of The World. Her father does not believe in the government (or rather believes that they are evil), western medicine/hospitals or school. She has no birth certificate, no medical records and no school records. Her mother appears to go along with her father's ways to keep the peace.

Parts of the book are quite distressing, Tara, her siblings and her mother get into a number of nasty accidents while working for her dad and on family road trips, and as their father does not believe in going to hospitals, they all suffer a great deal from their injuries - I found these parts quite difficult to read. 

I did enjoy the book - Tara is a fantastic writer and her story is one of survival and perseverance in the face of a paranoid, controlling father and a dangerous upbringing.

Tenth of December - George Saunders

The third book from Grainne was this gorgeous collection of short stories from George Saunders. I always forget how much I love reading collections of short stories as they are - duh - short, but I love that you get the whole story within a few pages, so if you fall asleep after reading a chapter, you're not trying to read back over pages to figure out what was happening, because you just start a whole new story.

I hadn't read any of George Saunders' work before but I enjoyed this so much, I will definitely be picking up some more of his books ASAP. His stories vary widely in theme and topic, which I loved, from class, sex, love, loss, struggle, heartache, despair, morality and war, and he writes brilliantly about every single one. Some stories are incredibly sad, some hilarious, others insightful, others heartwarming, some harrowing and all immensely entertaining. 

I would recommend this book to everyone and anyone, as there is such a range in his stories that you're bound to like them.

A Manual For Cleaning Women - Lucia Berlin

The fourth and final book from Grainne (and the sixth and final one I managed to read over April and May), is another gorgeous book of short stories by Lucia Berlin (I know, when I saw the title I was apprehensive but don't be). The book compiles all of Lucia's best work with humour, wit, emotion and compassion, I loved every single one of these stories.

Again, a super easy book to read - you can pick it up and read a story in 5 pages and put it down to go to sleep while still feeling like you've read the whole story and you're not marooned in the middle of a chapter. She writes beautifully and, as with George Saunders, I intend to pick up a lot more of her work to add to my reading pile.

Et voila! Have you read anything fantastic recently that you think I should try? Do let me know!

I also did my very first "proper" reel showing these books on my Instagram (@siofiee_93) - I would love it if you could show it some love (despite the wobbly filming at points, I had had coffee).

Thank you for reading as always,

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