This is billed as the ‘what happened next’ story of a suffragette, set in 1928. And though I think that’s selling it a little short I’m struggling to come up with a better way to describe it. Can we only be defined by what we once were? It’s not just Mattie the ex-suffragette’s story; the minor characters make it the story of a time and a place. We see Mattie’s housemate ‘The Flea’ working as a health visitor trying to dispense contraceptive advice among other things. Her teenage charlady’s dealings with family and friends shed light on the way women were expected to behave at that time. And one of Mattie’s former suffragette colleagues has fallen under Mussolini’s spell. I really enjoyed it and I was surprised at the end to find that it’s a prequel of sorts (I think) to another of Evans’ books so I’ll be looking out for that one.

Suspect this was a free book of the week on iBooks at some point. It’s been knocking round my phone for ages and I finally finished it off. It deserved better really. It’s an Irish mystery that, as a Brit, I felt was all a bit stereotyped as it’s a murder involving a nuns and priests and the Catholic Church being generally repugnant. I think the plot suffered from my reading it in fits and starts so I forgot who a few of the characters were; the ones who stuck in my head were good though and I’d certainly pick the author up again and try and give her less of a short shrift next time!

I read Stella Duffy’s Saz Martin mysteries a few years back and my memory says they were pretty good (later I’ll go and check what I actually said at the time, there are often discontinuities between my memory and reality) but I don’t think I’ve read any of her other books since. This jumped off the library shelf into my hands and engaged me so much I read it in about 24 hours which is something I used to do all the time but rarely get to do any more (mostly I blame me and my life for that rather than the books). The story’s about a woman, now grown up with children in the UK, who was adopted into a cult in America as a baby, and about how the past comes back to haunt her. In places it was a little predictable maybe but in the kind of “oh no, this is all going to go horribly wrong, can I read it with my eyes closed?” probably intentional sort of way. A good read for sure.

It starts at the end – with the house burning down, and a quick look at what’s going on in the town which seems to involve some kerfuffle with an American family adopting a Chinese baby. And then the story goes back a year or so to show us the lives of the families involved: one seems to be the stereotypical successful all-American family with a child each year of high school, the other is a nomadic unit with a single mother and her daughter. But it’s obvious from the beginning that neither of them is really a stereotype, I thought Ng’s characterisation and eye for details was great. I only had a couple of minor complaints. The setting is the mid-90s, which makes sense when it dives further back into the past, but, to me at least, the mid-90s world is enough like the present day that the occasional period details sometimes seemed jarring. And I felt some of the male characters got short shrift and were a bit more hackneyed than the females, but since that’s the opposite of the usual complaint I can live with it, besides it wasn’t all of them.

The book has a slow start once we go back to the beginning of the story, deliberately I’d assume so that we see the slow build up of tensions in the community, then it really gets going half way through. But all in all it was a very enjoyable and well plotted read, I liked the way the threads of the story intertwined and reflected each other. Hmm, reflecting threads? Well even though I can’t keep an analogy straight for a single sentence I can tell that Celeste Ng can craft a fine tale and I’d like to read more.

So, we’re definitely in confirmation bias territory here. Cordelia Fine quotes tons of research that shows that arguments like “men have to be the breadwinners because their ancestors evolved to be hunters and women are just inferior/better-at-other-stuff and wouldn’t it better if they just stayed home and had babies” (that’s my lousy paraphrasing, not an actual quote) are just nonsense, and since I completely agreed with her premise to start with I wasn’t reading this looking for holes in the reasoning. Instead I found myself wanting to memorise the arguments on every other page to use as fuel in future debates. There’s so much good stuff here, and so many refutations of the tired old cliches about men being good at one kind of thing and women being good at another. Here the cliches are stripped down and shown to, on the whole, only be wearing clothes composed of the social and cultural constructs we’ve built around them. Which is the kind of thing I’ve been trying to say for years without having the research based knowledge to back it up.

Some of the major points I want to remember are: The way men are supposedly more risk-taking than women depends on a very narrow definition of risk (e.g. pregnancy has a higher death rate than sky-diving) and a narrow definition of men (wealthy & educated white western men tend to perceive the world as a safer place than most everyone else does); and that’s before you get onto the fact that there’s no single scale to measure how ‘risk taking’ any single person is; that testosterone isn’t the deciding factor in how aggressive people are; and there’s a great statistical analysis of how the “women are limited to one baby a year-ish, but men can have hundreds” theory just doesn’t wash in the real world.

This book concentrates on the role than hormones play in what makes us act in ‘male’ or ‘female’ ways (spoiler: not much, and what are these ‘male’ and ‘female’ ways anyway?) and Fine’s previous book Delusions of Gender apparently approaches the same argument from the brain’s point of view and I’m looking forward to reading that as well.