“I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me."
This was exactly what was advertised, and frankly, I'm delighted. I've spent years trying to find the perfect mix of salt-crusted fairy-lore and dark academia. Some have come close (I'm looking at you House of Salt and Sorrows) but most haven't quite gotten it right.
A Study in Drowning tells the story of Effy Sayre, an aspiring literary scholar, who has instead been forced to enter the School of Architecture. This is a result of the School of Literature not admitting women for a few vaguely and inherently misogynistic reasons. So she has steeled herself and put all of her efforts into architecture, though what she'd rather do is study one of history's greatest authors and poets, Emrys Myrddin. He is penned one of the world's greatest epics, along the lines of Homer's Iliad or Odyssey.
So when a mysterious competition appears that will have first-year architects design the crumbling mansion of Myrddin himself - though recently deceased - she jumps at the chance. And miraculously, she wins.
And so begins a haunting, mythic story of one woman overcoming her own self-worth, after an eye-rollingly stereotypical mishap with one of her professors, from which she is suffering major PTSD and anxiety. This follows her throughout the whole novel, and becomes delightfully resolved, I might add.
But at the end of the day, this is a Young Adult novel. And while the readership of YA novels stretches far older than 15-25 year olds these days, there is a lack of depth that plagues the plot. A simple-minded villain, a sweet ending and just-in-time sequence of events, are what makes this book the perfect rainy day read. No 700 page book, no unnecessarily complex plot, but the spooks and scares and ominous vibes that will keep you guessing right up until the last page.
I will note that the tws: sexual assault, harassment, psychosis, drugs, trauma.
Okay, saying I love Beth O'Leary as an author would be an accurate description. But it wouldn't really capture how I feel about her. I read my first Beth O'Leary book back in 2019, when I was starting my first serious job, and getting introduced to the world of Bookstagram.
The Flatshare was a kind of game-changer for me. Because it not only introduced me to romance as a genre, but it presented it in a way that to my - jaded and vaguely patriarchal - eyes, didn't perceive as romance. It allowed me to enjoy the book without all of the nonsense surrounding what women read and whether or not it's worthy.
And then her sophomore novel 'The Switch' was released. And yes, it was a little more conservative as far as tropes and plot, but it was still her voice, and that irresistible comfort that comes with it. I truly don't know how she does it, but it's like she hands you a cup of hot chocolate and a blanket when you open up those first few pages.
And so on and so forth, until we get to book five, which is kind of crazy to me. But five books later, and she is still magically sending the warm and fuzzies through the pages of her books.
So Izzy and Lucas are our dysfunctional couple this time around. And immediately it's tense. There are few tropes in this world that will bring so many to their knees, but it is the enemies to lovers, my friend, that will do so. And these two are as enemies-to-lovers as they come. Izzy is the sunshine, to Lucas' grumpy, and yes, it is cliche, and a little bit goofy, but at no point do I care.
Because what could so easily become a boring, repetitive tale of two lovers finding themselves, instead turns into a surprising, funny tale of two people pining so hard that they wouldn't know a confession of love if it hit them in the face. And toward the end of the book, it may very well do.
But while they're dancing around each other and their feelings, there is a beautiful, stately hotel quite literally crumbling around them. And they are tasked by the homely yet manic Madame of the house to try and fix it as best as they can. Marriage proposals, mistresses and mayhem ensue, which causes for some true barrelling laughter at some points, that really lead me to believe that Mrs. O'Leary might just be our modern Bridget Jones-maker.
So, despite The Wake Up Call sitting firmly in the genre, it manages to balance ever so delicately on the border of 'old lady reads', and 'contemporary romance'. It manages to dwell in the vicinity of our Marian Keyes and Debbie Macomber, while dipping its toes into the modern contemporary tones of Emily Henry and Christina Lauren. And for that reason, The Wake Up Call, was a knockout.
As far as biographies go, I’m not usually a big fan. There are, of course, some anomalies like I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy or anything by Joan Didion.
So it kind of makes sense that a biography written about a fictional celebrity would intrigue me more than one of a celebrity that isn’t. Biography of X toes that line, and in doing so, calls the whole genre into question.
The book follows life post-X, through the eyes and mind of her widow, whose name remains unclear. We learn through snippets of opinions and quotes that X was extremely experimental in her art, seeing herself not as an artist, but as the art itself. She’s essentially what Kanye wishes he was.
But as her wife reluctantly delves into her life, the life she had before she became the infamous X and the long trail of names that she used as costumes over the course of her life, we learn that there was much to hide. Interestingly, as well as the novel being about a fictional celebrity, it is also set in an alternate America. One that had a wall constructed to segregate the North territory from the South, a much more conservative and religious community. This is where X’s life began, and while there are many surprising things we learn, a lot of it makes us understand the woman she became.
As with the biographic genre, there were parts I was more invested than others. The most tragic and obscure sections of the novel were captivating, while the chronicles of her life in New York, blending into the contemptuous world of modern art were bland. Whether this was intentional or not, we’ll never know, but I do know that it was accurately boring. Like any third party observing a small, closed inner circle, the art world seemed small and wanky. And the book doesn’t try to change our minds about that, thankfully.
Our narrator and main character was dry, continually questioning why her late wife even liked her to begin with, seeing as everyone else she knew was far more interesting than she was, which made her uncomfortably close to how any mere mortal would feel in the presence of a woman who likened herself to god. And X was mythic, and aware of it. Complex in some scenes, but in others painfully simple.
So what was she? Just a small-world girl who wanted to make something of herself? Or someone destined for greatness, so magnificent that not even the New York art scene in the 90s could appreciate her?
The question lingers with us, the reader, and even after finishing the book, while we know she never really existed at all, somehow, somewhere, she might.
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