Cristina Sanders' blog

The Other Catherine – book review

The Other Catherine, by Lauren Keenan

Lauren Keenan (Te Ātiawa ki Taranaki) is making a name for herself writing strong women’s stories of our past told from alternating Māori and Pakeha viewpoints. Both The Other Catherine and her previous novel, The Space Between, follow this device. It soon becomes clear that, though the lives of these women from the outside may appear very different, their lived experiences have distinct similarities. They struggle, love and fear, find joy in small things, have unfulfilled desires and hope for a better future. Throw these experiences into a colonial context: women’s lack of agency and political power, poor sanitation and health, hard work and lives dependent on the mercy of men, and you’ll find a compelling story.

Mother Mary Comes To Me – book review

Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy

Anyone who fell in love with The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, will be drawn to Mother Mary Comes to Me, to understand how she could write such an extraordinary novel. This is her memoir, and just as bold and in-your-face as fiction, with the drama of Indian life, the outsized personalities, the confusion, the heat, the colour, the overwhelming sense of chaos that seems to define life on the subcontinent. The feeling that your life isn’t yours to own – just by being a woman in India you are liable for so much to so many.

In Roy’s case the overwhelming suffocating feeling of debt is to her mother. Bloody hell. Mothers!

Ministry for the Future

Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson has gone into the future for us, and things are as we all, surely, anticipate. The world is burning and flooding and we are wiping species from the planet with aplomb. We have soiled the bed. Civilisation, basically, has fucked itself. This is not so much a catastrophe story (though it certainly begins that way), but a genuine and extraordinary exploration at what we might do afterwards to save what is left before the apocalypse.

I can see why Barack Obama called it his book of the year for 2020. Maybe if it had been published before he left office he might have kick-started a better response, instead of kicking the can up the road so future current numpties could blow it up. In Ministry for the Future the disaster of climate change somehow doesn’t (as we’re praying) miraculously come right by itself but escalates at an alarming rate. Who’d have thought? The UN sets up a ‘Ministry For the Future’, a body protecting the rights of future citizens from known harms committed by their ancestors. That’s us. The après moi le déluge generation. What a brilliant scenario.

Sophie, Standing There

Sophie, Standing There, by Meg Mason

It’s a dull title, but apt. Sophie stands there a lot, waiting around for people to need her. I thought Meg Mason’s previous novel, Sorrow and Bliss was a terrifically clever (and dare I say funny in the context of mental illness?) description of an awkward, dysfunctional woman. I loved it. I felt such sympathy for the character. But my God. Sophie. There’s nothing particularly funny in this story, not funny haha, not funny peculiar, not funny clever, which is a shame as Meg Mason is absolutely capable of all three. But if you’re feeling down and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude to cheer you up, Sophie’s your girl.

Whistler – book reveiw

Whistler, by Ann Patchett

I was over a third of the way through this book and asking myself, what’s with the horse on the cover? My God, Ann Patchett is an incredibly clever writer. I’m a huge fan: The Dutch House, Tom Lake, State of Wonder are all big favourites of mine. Whistler is the best of all of them. Don’t worry about the horse. The horse will come back.

George is on the way

George, a novel by Cristina Sanders

It’s no secret that George Grey is the subject of my next historical novel and I’m not at all embarrassed to say that I have dipped into the speculative realm to give him a bit of swag.

Bateman Books have taken George on, and I’ve sent the final (final final final) proofs off today. Hooray! I let George have an early read. He liked it. The rest of you will have to wait until February.

A Waiter in Paris – book review

A Waiter in Paris, by Edward Chisholm

Paris is a city of illusion, according to Chisholm in his brilliant memoir, A Waiter in Paris. He dives into its dark side. Nonetheless, he does the city no harm at all. The long hours, grim streets and all-night bars throw a bohemian romance over all the misery as if the behind-the-scenes exploitation and squalor he describes are a necessary background patina to the bright lights above. Think Moulin Rouge and the painted girls dying of consumption. What’s a star without night?

Land – book review

Land, by Maggie O’Farrell

Firstly, what an incredibly beautiful cover! The colours of rich earth and moody sky and deep wells in the Irish landscape that a reader might fall into and never find their way back as happened to several characters in this book, though we’ll never really know why. This is a novel dripping with the mist of superstitions, damp with hidden meanings, fractured with the bones of ancestors lying under the soil. A worthy successor to Hamnet, then, and absolutely ripe for those happy to believe in the hocus pocus of sacred springs and gollum-like fish. Judging by book sales, that’s a great many of us. ‘Give me the ring, it says’ (the fish).

Night, Ma – book review

Night, Ma, by Elizabeth Knox

I had bought Night, Ma and left it on my table for a while, wondering if I really wanted to go there when there were nice, frivolous, bouncy books still on the pile to read. I finally opened it with trepidation, still bewildered as to why writers turn themselves inside out to offer up all their innermost vulnerabilities. I’m a late-comer to the intimacy of memoir. Now of course I recognise it is this very vulnerability that makes the genre so compelling. Human nature recognises and engages with truth, and truth is at the heart of every great story. Perhaps we connect with memoir in a more primal way than fiction and feel every scene, every touch, with far more intensity because it’s not just made up out of some frivolous author’s head, or some AI bot. Here’s the truth, as one woman sees it. Night, Ma comes alive through Elizabeth Knox’s almost subcutaneous observations of the people closest to her. And that’s fascinating.

London Falling —book review

London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Hard not to have The Clash in your head when reading this. Their iconic London Calling song was written some 30 years earlier, but I feel the same sense of urgency and high stakes: London is drowning / And I, I live by the river.

Radden Keefe’s London Falling from the outside looks like a cleverly constructed and wildly imaginative crime novel but in fact, is a meticulously researched and impeccable referenced true story of the Russian-financed underworld in London and a boy who gets sucked in.

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