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WELCOME TO THE WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW PAGE.                   
​This is where members of the WZ Book Club get to share their thoughts on titles seen on the shelves of our Women’s Library. All reviews are unsolicited and only those attending the WZBC may borrow and review books.
The Woman Zone Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday of every month between 2pm and 4pm at The Women’s Library, ground floor, Artscape.  All are welcome.
​
COVID19 ALERT! Please note that while the Women's Library is closed during lockdown, we welcome your reviews of women-authored books. Send between 200-500 words and cover pic if possible to info@womanzonect.co.za or hipzone@mweb and we will post it here! 

We Dont Talk About It. Ever

9/24/2020

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Title: We Don’t Talk About It. Ever. 
Author: Desiree-Anne Martin 
Publisher: Jacana/ MFBOOKSJHB 
Reviewer: Barbara Boswell
This weekend I read Desiree-Anne Martin’s brilliantly-written and wrenching memoir, “We Don’t Talk About It. Ever.” almost in one sitting! I highly recommend this memoir about drug addiction and recovery, which left me in tears at the author’s bravery and determination to beat the terrifying disease of addiction. 
Desiree-Anne writes poetically and with an honesty that sometimes took my breath 
​away. I could not put this book down; yet was forced to at times in order to just breathe and experience and process the emotions the writing brought up for me. 
Desiree-Anne is also a poet, and this aesthetic comes through clearly in her work. It has the unusual quality of having depth, while being paced quite fast, and I found myself racing towards the end to see how her story ends. 
Another aspect of this book that I loved is the fine textured depiction of Cape Town during the late 80s and 90s — growing up “Coloured” during that time and issues of class, race and shifting racial identity that the memoir subtly brings into focus. 
 Please go and buy this book and support a compelling new voice!
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The Dutch House

9/16/2020

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Title: The Dutch House
Author: Ann Patchett
Reviewer: Christina Coates
 
“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
The Dutch House is a story of how the past can define us, hold us, and grip us in its thrall. It’s also about values — that your job and 
owning a fancy house doesn’t necessarily make you happy. Rather doing what you love and living where your heart desires is more likely to bring satisfaction. This is a fairytale, a modern Hansel and Gretel story, full of archetypes and doubles — there’s an enthralling house and slums, a disappearing or abandoning mother, a wicked stepmother, a controlling father, two sets of entwined siblings. It’s where Henry James meets the Great Gatsby.
Maeve and her brother Danny cannot let go of the house they were ejected from. For many years they return over and over to sit and watch it from the street. The house and their past holds them, the narrative they tell is constantly overlaid onto the house and what happened there. They can’t really move on or live the lives they really want to. The narrative also traps the other characters. It’s only when they’re forced to confront the past and the one person they most fear are they able to unravel the threads and see the people they really are. 
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The Man Who Saw Everything

9/16/2020

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​Title: The Man Who Saw Everything
Author: Deborah Levy 
Reviewer: Christina Coates
 
The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy is a very smart book about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly.
A man in London attempts to cross Abbey Lane (where the Beatles’ iconic picture was taken in 1969). It is 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he cross again in 2016 (Brexit). In East Germany a woman is obsessed by the Beatles. This story slips and slides between time, countries, ways of seeing. Things are fragmented. In order to 
cross the road that he’s been trying to traverse for 30 years, Saul will not only have to look both ways, but outside of himself. Otherwise, he is destined to remain a man in pieces, and lonely in space-time continua.
The story feels like the lyrics of the song Penny Lane where the character is looking back, in and out and through his life littered with people, friends, lovers, experiences. It’s hard for him to make sense of it all — a fugue, a narcotic haze?
I loved the continuous references to the Beatles and their songs and how Abbey Road is linked to the story, how the crossing is made or not.
There is a sharp sense of what it means to look back on a life and construct a coherent whole from its fragments. ​
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The Bell Jar

9/14/2020

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​Title: The Bell Jar
Author: Sylvia Plath
Publisher: Faber
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
My sister gave me a copy of The Bell Jar more years ago than I can remember. On the back of this tattered Faber edition, it says 80p – so there’s a clue. Decades later, I finally read it. It was my intention to write a review of this extraordinary book that could have been written yesterday.
To that end I thought I’d find out a little more 
about Sylvia Plath herself. Knowing only that she had committed suicide and had been married to fellow poet Ted Hughes who turned out to be a bit of a rat, inherited her work after she died and destroyed some of it – there was clearly so much more.  And indeed there is – so I’m afraid I am hi-jacking this ‘review’. Not to tell the bigger Plath story (which has been chronicled many times over), but to look at where this book stands, for me, at this moment in time. For many reasons.
Firstly, because my sisters inscription in the book says ‘Dearest, just because it’s winter here – with warmest love’. I had just moved to Cape Town from London, so it carries a special message.
Secondly because depression and issues around troubled minds seems to be strongly in the ether right now – COVID coincidence? Who knows.
Thirdly because Esther Greenwood in the book has a summer job working at a woman’s magazine – and having spent many years working at one myself, bells were set off – and bells of nostalgia as so many magazines, women’s titles amongst them, have ‘folded’ – a demise maybe accelerated by the pandemic. Again, who knows. But women’s magazines were a world in their own right – maybe one day someone will do a PhD on their significance. Or the significance of their closure. Maybe someone already has.
Fourthly because I just heard that Florence Howes died aged 91. She was the US founder of the Feminist Press back in 1970 – and in her own words started what became ‘….an avalanche of the rediscovery of women writers.’ While Plath has been called ‘one of the most fascinating and tragic women writers of the 20th century, it was her contribution to the ‘confessional poetry movement’ that saw her hailed as an important feminist writer.  Semi- autobiographical, The Bell Jar it seems most certainly has a ‘confessional’ feel to it.
Googling I found that Plath’s mother wanted to block the publishing of The Bell Jar in 1963. Describing the writing of book to her mother she said, ‘What I’ve done is throw together events from my own life – fictionalising to add colour – but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when she is suffering a breakdown.’ She compared her despair to ‘owl’s talons clenching my heart.’
But lastly, no matter the content, some books just get to you because of the way of the writers words. Like ‘It was the day after Christmas and a grey sky bellied over us fat with snow.’ I loved that.
Sylvia Plath died in 1963 aged just 30. 
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September 14th, 2020

9/14/2020

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The Book of Longing

8/28/2020

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Title: The Book of Longing
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Reviewer: Nadia Kammies
​I loved both Sue Monk Kidd’s previous novels, New York Times bestsellers, The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings. This latest work that envisages the life of the wife of Jesus, if he had been married, follows along similar themes of female oppression, empowerment and the feminine divine. Set in Palestine and Egypt in the first century, the book reimagines the New Testament from the perspective of Ana who secretly writes the narratives of the neglected women of the 
Old Testament.
Ana’s deepest longing is to be a voice for women, an intention she sets for herself in an incantation bowl. This is revolutionary during a time and culture where women are betrothed and married with little control over their lives.
Ana also speaks for the women around her, like her aunt, Yaltha, accused of killing her husband, and her friend Tabitha, who brings shame on her family by publicly accusing the Roman soldier who raped her. Her friend’s tongue is removed for speaking out and thus “bringing shame on her father and his house”, a punishment written in the Scriptures.
These traditions that objectify women predate Christianity and Islam but continue to resonate and impact women’s rights and their role in society today. Ana realises that her stories are replete with brutality, and therefore need to be protected from those who would silence them. The power of her words is encapsulated in the comment by Jesus after he reads one of her texts,
Your story caused your aunt’s suffering to lift off the papyrus and enter inside of me. I felt her suffering as my own and she was made new to me.
This validates Ana’s drive to write. I think every pain in the world wants to be witnessed, she tells Tabitha. Through Ana, the author invests herself in the silenced stories and erasures of women on the margins of history. This book reminded me of another NY Times Bestseller, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, that narrates the story of Dinah from the Book of Genesis, the only daughter of Jacob.
The Book of Longings is a love story but its focus is on Ana while the events surrounding her husband’s life unfold in the background. The ability of women to gain strength from one another and from within themselves is very much a theme running throughout and is especially relevant in the context of the #MeToo movement.
The author’s note provides insight into her justification for imagining Ana. If she had lived, as it is likely that she well might have given the cultural and traditional importance of marriage in society at the time, why was she erased? Did celibacy render Jesus more spiritual? The author challenges us to imagine what was possible when the invisibility of women was real, and holds up a mirror to our society today, in much the same way that her character does for her time.

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A Long Petal of the Sea

8/12/2020

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​Title: A Long Petal of the Sea
Author: Isabel Allende
Publisher:: Bloomsbury
Reviewer:  Beryl Eichenberger
I am a great fan of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda – fuelled by a visit to Chile some 15 years ago and a visit to his quirky ‘ship like’ home in Santiago – and also of Isabel Allende, so her  new book  ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ immediately captivated me.  The title is a Neruda quote (his description of Chile) and throughout the book, chapters open with another appropriate quote.  But the significance of these references  are 
strengthened by the part that Neruda played in rescuing refugees from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil war in 1939 after The Fascist and Franco’s rise to power.
Allende is the consummate storyteller grasping the reader from page one. ‘This is a story of displacement and loss, of sorrow and hope, of a couple trying to find their place in a world in shambles, torn apart by violence’ – she says in the Foreword.   And those words set the scene for a story that grips and engrosses, tossing emotions high and low and finally bringing some peace to the protagonists, Victor and Roser.  
1938 and the Civil War is raging in Spain – the young, quiet, medical auxiliary Victor Dalmau is working at the field hospital on the frontline close to Barcelona, his home town. His brother Guillem is a born fighter and is at the Madrid front while mother Carme remains at the family home with Roser  Bruguera, the talented young pianist to whom they had given a home and was a student of Carme’s husband Professor Marcel Lluis Dalmau. As the civil war gains momentum and defeat is imminent for the Republicans, a fate of murder, incarceration or torture is a certain future for those not supporting Fascism and Franco. The now widowed Carme and Roser, pregnant with Guillem’s  child have to join the massive exodus fleeing their beloved Spain to France.  These are the first rich characters that Allende draws with vigour and strength.  Under Allende’s vivid pen the cast grows as we meet the upper class del Solar family in Santiago, Chile who are destined to have a major influence on the Dalmau family’s life and success.
And there are many more such characters, some wonderfully flamboyant, some selfish, many generous, while the selfless doctor Victor remains at its heart. Indelible appearances filled with longing, love and passion. Not least of which is the appearance of Neruda himself.  At the end of 1939 he commissioned the ‘Winnipeg’ to bring two thousand refugees to Chile. Living that journey is the Dalmau family, one of the many groups of exiles. The ship docked on the day war broke out in Europe and the refugees were cast into a new life in Chile.  
Allende’s sweeping narrative spanning four generations follows the lives (and loves) of Victor and Roser as they navigate their convenient marriage into a late blooming love, charts their successes and indomitable sense of survival in a landscape that is ever-changing.
This is a story of relationships borne out of war, of an understanding of what it means to be an exile, of power and the tragedy that it is so often coupled with, of seeking success and love, but mostly it is of finding a sense of place in one’s heart and body. Allende is herself a political refugee having escaped Chile under the Pinochet regime to live in the USA. She writes from the heart as she states in the Foreword ‘Where do I belong? Where are my roots? Is my heart divided or has it just grown bigger?’
And as Victor says as an old man:  ‘The most important events, the ones that determine our fate, are almost completely beyond our control. In my case, when I take stock, I see my life marked by the Spanish Civil War in my youth, and later on by the military coup, by the concentration camps and my exiles. I didn’t choose any of that: it simply happened to me’.
This is a powerful novel that has such resonance in today’s world. What choices are there when a country is at war and humanity is at its lowest ebb. As refugees flee their beloved countries trying to make new lives in different cultures how many really find a sense of place? 
​ends.
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Afterland

7/30/2020

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​Title: Afterland
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Umuzi
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
The first time I got to grips with the meaning of the word dystopian was listening to Lauren Beukes talk about her first novel Moxyland back in 2008. Just in case, it means: relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice. Although not all of her books fall into that category, somehow the connection stuck – so the dystopic setting of Afterland came as no surprise. The content however, I did not see coming.
So the year is 2023. Three years prior HCV or the Human Culgoa Virus  pretty much wiped out all men, thus any remaining males are rare, valuable commodities, for all the obvious reasons (think sperm or ‘white gold’).  Two sisters are fighting for possession of one 12 year old boy, Miles. Although from South Africa originally they are all currently in America, but sister Cole, mother of the prized boy is desperate to get him, and herself, safely home. The other sister Billie, is on their trail and desperate to lay her hands on the boy - for nefarious reasons (think kidnap).  With one having tried to kill the other, the tension is heightened and deception levels plummet to dark and ugly depths.  
Along the way we get involved in:  The dirty dealings of the Department of Men and the grim facility where survivors are held, Cole’s relationship with her savvy but impressionable teenage son (which is a lot to do with staying on the same linguistic wavelength), with ‘his’ transformation into a ‘her’ as Mila, and Billie’s agonising attempts at staying alive and focused with a suppurating head wound. We also travel with mother and son, as well as their pursuers,  to Florida for their escape.  Along the way, we meet up with some finely crafted wicked and weirdo characters, as well as a bizarre cult-like order of nuns, the Sisters of All Sorrows, a band of flawed women struggling with their identities.
If that were all, it would be just another scare-story. But what makes Afterland so compelling over and above the man-gone concept, is Beukes’s way with words – her cinematic images, insightful references and finger-on-the-pulse dialogue.  In another life, she’d make a helluva good script writer – if indeed she isn’t already. Another of her earlier books The Shining Girls has just been taken up for adaptation into a TV series to be produced by Elisabeth Moss and Leonardo DiCaprio. And just while we’re name-dropping, in his review in the New York Times, writing guru Stephen King describes Afterland as ‘a smartly written thriller that opens with a satisfying bang.’
But what is so gob-smackingly eerie about this title is its coincidence with the very real viral pandemic in the grip of which we find ourselves right now. Nope, Beukes wasn't clairvoyant nor privvy to any prescient medical intel  – she started writing the book at least five years ago having done her usual meticulous, hands-on research to find out more about viruses. But that it finally came into being at almost exactly the same time as COVID19, sends shivers up the spine – or through the sperm.  Of course unlike HCV, not only men are targeted by COVID – but the gender focus in Afterland raises all kinds of additional issues. Which will surely get you thinking. Enjoy the ride!
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The Gold Diggers

7/20/2020

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Title: The Gold Diggers
Author: Sue Nyathi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Reviewer: Gail Gilbride
​The Gold Diggers takes us on a road trip, which leads to many journeys of the heart.
Zimbabwe is in an economic crisis and many of its people, both young and old, set off for South Africa, in search of a better life. Egoli, 
the city of gold, beckons and we, the readers, find ourselves in a packed Quantam, on the way to nirvana. Each character in the vehicle, has his or her own dreams to fulfil and demons to leave behind. Gugulethu is on her way to find her mother and begin a new life. Dumisani is intent on paving the way to fame and fortune in the mystical city. Chamunorwa and Chenai are desperate to escape their heart breaking home life. They have nothing to lose. Portia is yearning for her husband, who visits home once a year. Their son, Nkosi, is with her and together they will reunite with the man who promised them the world. 
Each passenger has paid dearly for this treacherous journey to a life of their wildest dreams.  Johannesburg city is paved with gold. Everyone knows that. But no one knows of the many perilous obstacles along the way, ones that not many are not able to overcome. 
Nyathi’s deftly told tale, is both lyrical and fast paced. I found myself shocked and tearful at times and at others, delighted by the author’s humour. Her insight into each one’s inner world, creates characters I’ll remember long after the last page is turned.
 The ending came upon me a bit unexpectedly and for once, I would have liked the author to slow down just a teeny bit.
 Sue Nyathi is truly a master storyteller and I’ll be on the lookout for her next offering.
 Gail Gilbride is the author of Under The African Sun
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The Loves and Miracles of Pistola

7/11/2020

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​TITLE: The Loves and Miracles of Pistola
AUTHOR: Hilary Prendini Toffoli
PUBLISHER: Penguin Random  House
REVIEW: Beryl Eichenberger
Writing about Italy appears to come to Hilary Prendini Toffoli as naturally as Napolitano sauce to spaghetti, opera to love. Married to an Italian who spent the first nineteen years of his life in a village near Verona, it is well known how passionate they both are about food. As a highly regarded journalist and author with a string of writing credits to her name, Prendini Toffoli’s novel  ‘Loves and Miracles of Pistola’ is an ode to her enduring 
She writes with a sharp wit and, coupled with huge affection, she cuts to the core of the subject. And if you think that’s a pun….well maybe it is because the novel is in part a love story to food, with village life and travel to distant parts thrown in.  But more importantly it was inspired by the little known story of the 110 young Italian men recruited to work on the South African Railways in the 1950s – and who brought the wonders of Italian cuisine to this country.
It is the early 1950s. Picture the scene. Campino, a tiny village in the North of Italy, is typical of village life. Everyone knows everyone’s business, families are extended, the farmers are rough and gruff, where the town gossip relishes misdemeanours and tragedy, where weddings are everyone’s business and where frog risotto is a local delicacy. Meet the coffin maker, the silkworm farmer, the baker, bulky Zia Andromaca and orphan Pistola.  Brought up by his grandfather, Nonno Mario, who is renowned for his cooking skills and his voice, the teenager hardly remembers his mother, who died in the war, and the father is a mystery.  Pistola (given name Ettore – I’ll leave you to guess why he was called Pistola) is in love with the local pig farmer’s daughter Teresa, who also happens to be his second cousin. Pigs are an important part of village life - think anti - pasta and you’ve got the picture.  
‘There have always been twice as many pigs as people in the valley. Male pigs are smaller than females and have to perform miracles.’
Food is a second religion and greetings such as ‘have you had a good meal?’ are more common than ‘how are you?’ When Teresa is destined to marry the local thug, the task of planning and cooking some of the many wedding feast courses falls to Nonno Mario.  A heartbroken Pistola drowns himself in helping his grandfather as his dreams of the future slip away.
To ease the heartache Pistola accepts a job in faraway, apartheid throttled South Africa. Working on the trains as a steward this young naïve village boy takes his first steps to manhood. From Johannesburg’s Hillbrow to the jazz clubs of Sophiatown,  Pistola and his compatriots explore a new world and start finding out who they really are – and what they really want.  But it is when Pistola falls in love with the activist Malikah, that the trouble really begins.
This deliciously sensuous novel grabs you from the first as Prendini -Toffoli writes with an energy and full bodied style that is easily read and thoroughly enjoyed.  Italy in its finest traditional food glory is beautifully illustrated and she contrasts this with what was on offer in the then South Africa.  Scenes are set with precision and it is a veritable feast.  Pistola’s dream of becoming a restaurateur by taking over the local mansion in his village, is somewhat distorted as, with adventures galore, family intrigues and unexpected journeys, his path takes some unusual turns.
Such a real book – I lived the streets of Hillbrow, the cramped apartment living, the transient population and remembered the popularity and the treat of going to a ‘real’ Italian restaurant in the 1970s.
What a legacy these young men left on our food landscape.
When I closed the book I wanted the story to go on…i want to know what happens to Pistola next and for me that is a sign of great characterisation and an engrossing, warm story. Oh, and this story with its colour and characters would make a great TV series. ​
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