Category: Reviews

#6Degrees of Separation From Passages to Liar

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

PassagesThis month’s starting book is Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life by Gail Sheehy. First published in 1976, it’s a self-help book I’ve never heard of let alone read. Judging by the blurb, it’s not one I’m likely to read either.

Picking up the theme of adult life crises, my first link is to Train Man by Andrew Mulligan in which Martin’s meticulously prepared plan to throw himself under a high-speed train is disrupted by a twelve-minute delay.

A railway station is also the starting point for The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves. It’s the story of Mary O’Connor who, for the past seven years, has waited every evening at Ealing Broadway station with a sign which says: ‘Come Home Jim’.

A missing person is also the focus of End of Summer by Anders de la Motte in which a woman returns home to try to solve the mystery of her brother’s disappearance many years before.

Moving from summer to the opposite season, A Winter Grave by Peter May is a futuristic thriller set in Scotland.

Taking the previous author’s surname provides me with a link to Only May by Carol Lovekin whose main character – May – is a young girl who can’t be fooled by a lie.

Staying with untruths, Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen concerns the unforeseen consequences of a lie told by a teenage girl.

My chain has taken me from the predictable to the unpredictable. Where did your chain take you?

#6Degrees of Separation (2)

#BookReview Ponti by Sharlene Teo

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PontiAbout the Book

It is 2003, and in the sweltering heat of Singapore sixteen-year-olds Szu and Circe develop an intense friendship. For Szu it offers an escape from Amisa, her beautiful, cruel mother – once an actress and now the silent occupant of a rusty house. But for Circe, their friendship does the opposite, bringing her one step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.

Seventeen years later, Circe finds herself adrift and alone. And then a project comes up at work, a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the same series that defined Amisa’s short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a lost friendship that threatens her conscience . . .

Format: Paperback (304 pages)    Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 23rd April 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

The book moves between three different timelines: Szu’s account of her teenage friendship with Circe in 2003, Circe’s reflections in the present day, and Amisa’s story beginning in 1968. I have to say I found Amisa’s story the most absorbing, describing as it does how, as a result of a series of disappointments, she becomes the cold, distant mother we encounter through Szu’s eyes.  The sadness of Amisa’s story is that the shattering of her dreams is something she never really gets over.

Szu’s and Circe’s teenage friendship emerges from a shared feeling of being outsiders,  ‘citizens of nowhere’ in Circe’s words. It’s this sense that they don’t belong that initially draws them together.  But, despite being intense, it’s not an untroubled relationship because of their different backgrounds and life experiences. Looking back, Circe marvels at how brief what she terms the ‘Age of Szu’ actually was. She describes the gradual fracturing of their relationship, how being friends with Szu became ‘like carrying around a heavy, sloshing bucket of water’.

I could completely empathise with what Szu goes through but also understand what a vast amount of patience on the part of a friend would be required to see her through the worst times.  Circe, who in the modern day story seems to rid herself of partners in the same merciless way she does her tapeworm, I found less easy to like.

All three women are, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, trying to find their way through life.  It’s a well-crafted novel and an impressive debut. There was a lot I liked about it without completely falling in love with it.

In three words: Insightful, intimate, assured

Try something similar: Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

Sharlene TeoAbout the Author

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award.  She was shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Flundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel.  (Photo: Goodreads author page)

Connect with Sharlene
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