The Wren, the Wren, Anne Enright
Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize, The Wren, the Wren follows the mother-daughter relationship of Nell and her mother Carmel, and how the actions of their grand/father have left more than a lifetime’s worth of tumult and trauma on their day-to-day interactions and lives, most of the time without them consciously taking note of it. It can especially be seen in their relationships with men and the treatment they accept from them. One of the blurbs on the book, as well as the back cover description, calls Enright “our greatest chronicler of family life,” and though I can see why she is described that way, just from reading this one book, this was the first book I had read by her! If any of you have read something by her and liked it, please let me know 🙂
Everyone Here Is Lying, Shari Lapena
I needed an easy page turner for my last trip, which was a week of traveling, and a ‘thriller’ seemed like a good idea. I put thriller in quotes because although the book does indeed have to do with a missing child, and there is even some murder and some misery throughout the story, the large majority of it is simply he said/she said narratives and the police investigating what each neighbor has said about the other. And I normally try not to include any major plot spoilers in these small reviews, but given that the main reveal includes a gendered trope that is harmful to the overall narrative of violence committed against women and children…spoiler incoming! The whole time the police are investigating various men for the disappearance of a 9-year-old girl, because let’s be real, 99% of violence against women and children is committed by men…she has been kept captive by a woman neighbor who has a crush on the girl’s father and who ‘wants revenge’ because said man is having an affair not with her, but with another woman at the hospital where they both work. Big eye roll from me over here, if you couldn’t tell. Not only is this unrealistic, but it contributes to the narrative of ‘look, it’s not only men that are committing violence against women and girls!’, which is certainly not true and only causes harm. And for it to be written by a woman…I know fiction is fiction etc. etc. but to a certain extent, fiction is based on reality, and that is why I expect better of it, especially when it is written by women.