Pink Fiction Club

  ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ is imagined as a sapphic retelling of ‘The Great Gatsby’ , set in the jazz age with a sprinkle of magic and historical fiction. What’s not to like? Unfortunately, while  ‘The Great Gatsby’ will remain etched into the American and world literature, not because of the glitz and glam of the age, but because of the criticism of it, I am afraid that ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ has not even gotten close to the level needed for that kind of veneration. The story follows Annie, a naive young woman, who came to Crow Island, a place filled with magic and mystery to settle her father’s estate. However, as she moves about, she gets intertwined with the forbidden magic and meets Emeline, the local witch. This, in combination with the idea that all of this is set post WWI in which magic is very much real but forbidden drew my attention. I really wanted to like it, but the author did so little in so many pages I found myself skimming through so many pages of Annie’s q...

  I have not heard of this book at all until I have seen two of my best friends read ‘Follow Me to Ground’ and love it on Goodreads. As I trust their judgment, I decided to give this one a go. I have not had a very good reading month in September, so I was very excited to announce I have adored everything about this novel and found it incredibly eerie, haunting and magnificent all in one. The book is very ambiguous, but I believe it gives the reader just enough clues to follow the narrative and understand the horrifying things happening in the novel. It is one of the best uses of magical realism I have read in a long time and I truly hope that Sue Rainsford’s other work (that I will definitely be reading) is just as successful as ‘Follow Me to Ground’ The novel follows Ada and her father, who are not entirely human, but creatures who have the ability to heal humans, or ‘Cures’ as they call them of most illnesses, either by breaking them apart or burying them in the ground and allow...

  I am not even sure where I came across this book, but the title and the overall plot looked interesting enough to download it on my kindle. Additionally, I have been on a mission to read a bit more books outside of my usual genres and cannons, so a contemporary novel by a well renowned Japanese author seemed like a very good idea for that. However, I believe that I was simply not the right audience for ‘Lonely Castle in The Mirror’. It is far from a bad book, but at times I found it quite childish and not mature enough to be dealing with the themes it has tackled. I do have to put a disclaimer here that I am thirty years old, while the characters in the novel are much much younger than that, as they are all pre teens. In that sense, it is logical that I would not relate entirely to them and their problems and I could imagine that somebody much younger would appreciate this book more than I did. Also, I have read this in English translation, so I am leaving the option that some o...

  One thing about me is that I have FOMO, so I will read almost everything that I see is popular just to see what all the cool people are talking about.  Morgenstern's prose is magnificent, truly a lyrical experience in the prose. Her sentences are lush, gorgeous and they truly feel like poetry at times. Her writing made me want to purchase a physical copy of this book just so that I could underline them and keep her sentences in my head. However, the problem is that this is not a 600 page epic poem, but a novel. Unfortunately, I found myself getting kind of bored at times. The overall idea is absolutely fantastic, but I wish it had better editing. Shaving off like a third of this book would have made me enjoy it so much more.  The descriptive nature of the overall story became repetitive after a while. The amount of time the author mentioned bees and honey in the last 100 pages made me start hearing buzzing.   I am not a stranger to a novel that does not reveal...

  This book was another one that I picked up because I read about it everywhere on the internet. It was advertised as a sapphic novel with elements of body horror and mystery. I am not the biggest fan of any kind of horror, least of all body horror, but the more positive reviews I have read, the more interested I was in finding out what was happening in this novel. I finished it a few weeks ago, and I am still not completely sure how I feel about it. ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ is the debut novel by Julia Armfield and it follows the story of two women- Miri and Leah. Leah has just returned from the deep sea mission that went badly and took longer than anticipated. Although Miri is excited about her wife returning, it becomes painfully obvious really quickly that something is seriously wrong with Leah. As the story progresses, the narrative is intertwined between the present day falling apart of their marriage and Leah and their past as we try to piece together this story and understa...

  Although I have not read very many good reviews about the debut novel of Coco Mellors ‘Cleopatra and Frankie’, I still decided to read ‘Blue Sisters’ as I liked the topic and the concept. This follows three sisters-Avery, Bonnie and Lucky as they all grapple with the sudden loss of their sister a year prior. They all receive an email from their mother that their family flat is being sold and they need to go back and go through their deceased sister’s things before they are thrown away. I expected so much from this story. Even though I don’t have sisters, I was always fascinated by how well (or in this case not really well) these sibling relationships are presented in fiction as they are such an important part of so many people’s lives. Unfortunately, I found ‘Blue Sisters’ attempt to tackle so much that what this ended up being was an incredibly superficial and surface level discussion on grief, sibling relationship, addiction in many forms, adultery etc. Each sister has somethin...

This book has been on my TBR since the start of the year, and I have finally decided not to postpone reading it. I knew the author from before, as I have read ‘ Art and Lies’ during my uni days, but I cannot say that I remember much of it, unfortunately. Still, the premise of ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’ and the frequency by which this book was recommended, made me want to read this one as well. I must say that I enjoyed it quite a lot and will definitely be reading Winterston’s other work as well. The story follows Jeanette who is adopted by a religious zealot of a mother and is trained to become a missionary for their church. However, although at first Jeanette accepts and is even enthusiastic about this life, encounters with other young women make her discover her sexuality and want to discover her freedom and a different life is born in her. Although the author in my edition of the book claims this is not a straight up memoir, this is a story of the life of a young, religious w...

  This book has been on my 2024 hopefuls and when I was putting down my online Waterstones order for another book, I decided to get ‘Build Your House Around My Body’ as well. I have read a synopsis and it was the spatial setting of Vietnam that made him read this novel. Although it is not a particularly long book, I took a long time to read it and even longer to gather my thoughts around it. The novel seemingly follows two stories- a modern story of an American Vietnamese woman coming back to Vietnam to escape her family and the story from the 1980s of a young, rich woman that disappears without trace. However, once you dig your teeth into it a bit more, there is so much more packed in his book. In addition to Winnie and the woman from the 1980s there is a long list of characters coming in and out, some with magical abilities that are thrust on us without a lot of warning or context clues. The narrative switches the reader between the two stories, indicated at the start of the chap...

This is yet another book that I have listened to on Spotify, and unfortunately another novel that I have not really enjoyed. Taylor Jenkins Reid is not my favourite author and I found her previous work just fine and definitely overhyped, but I heard good things about ‘Malibu Rising’ so I decided to give it a chance. If it has changed my opinion of Taylor Jenkins Reid, it was not for the better. ‘Malibu Rising’ is about the Riva family, now consisting of four siblings and their estranged father- Mick Riva, a successful singer and performer. The structure of counting down until the massive fire engulfing Malibu and flashbacks to Mick and his wife’s meeting and many breakups was probably the most interesting part of the story and was utilized successfully. However, nothing else truly worked well. First of all, Taylor Jenkins Reid is known for her temporal settings such as the Golden Age of Hollywood in ‘Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ or the 1970 in ‘ Daisy Jones & the Six’. In the oth...

I spoke about this book in the video about what I read in February 2024 and about all the reasons I really disliked ‘Green Dot’. This month I got more into audiobooks, especially since I got Spotify premium. On one hand, I was glad I was able to listen to this, as I was able to rush the speed to 2.0 at times, but on the other I am disappointed I spent my credits on it. I absolutely despised this book, mostly because of the main character and her narration, but I also did not find anything even close to redeemable throughout the narrative.  ‘Green Dot’ follows the story of a young woman, Hera, as she gets her first ‘real’ job and falls in love with her married, older colleague. We observe the start and the eventual fall of their relationship and her attempts to make a career for herself. Hera is described as unmet potential, a young woman with a college degree who at the age of 24 still lives with her father and their dog. Supposedly, she is sharp, intelligent and funny with a full ...