Book review: Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett

How entertaining can a novel about a whaling family in a tiny community in Australia be? The answer, I was pleasantly surprised to learn while reading Shirley Barrett's debut Rush Oh! is very.

Mary Davidson, the oldest daughter in a whaling family in New South Wales, chronicles the difficult whaling season of 1908. Drama, misadventure and first love all feature in Mary's telling, as do a pod of whales who align themselves with Mary's father and his crew of whale hunters.

First off, I didn't expect this novel to be funny, but it really is. It's full of little laughs, and that's all down to the wonderful protagonist. Mary's retelling of the season of 1908 is charming, her voice a little like a grown up Anne of Green Gables. Mary is slightly naive, and wonderfully forthright in most things. Her honesty about her family, about the people in her community, and about her feelings for John Beck, the newest recruit in her father's crew, is by turns poignant and hilarious, and always straightforward even when nothing else in her life is. Mary is an optimistic, lively, independent female, who very rarely lets life bring her down.

Book review: I Call Myself a Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women Under Thirty

I call myself a feminist.

I call myself a feminist because gender equality is something we're still striving for even in 2015, because women are still judged and treated in different ways to men and those ways are often demeaning, because being compared to a woman or female characteristics is usually a way to insult someone.

I Call Myself a Feminist, edited by Victoria Pepe, Rachel Holmes, Amy Annette, Martha Mosse and Alice Stride, features essays by 25 women under the age of 30 on feminism. From writer and journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge on what men can do to support feminism, to student Maysa Haque talking about her Islam and her feminism, to author Louise O'Neill writing about her journey to feminism, the book is full of different perspectives on women, their power and their struggles.

It's the different perspectives that are key. I almost cried with joy when I saw the first essay was written by Hajar Wright. Could it be that this book was willing to include a non-white perspective? And as I read further, it became clear that there was more than one non-white perspective in the book, and that there was plenty of other diversity in the book too. The battle for feminism is one that affects all women, but women from non-white backgrounds, women who are not straight, women who are not middle-class, are often battling discrimination on two fronts, or more. Student Jinan Younis captures the subject perfectly in her essay Manifesto for Female Intersectionality, but intersectionality is addressed again and again throughout the book, and it made my heart sing.

I Call Myself a Feminist is an important, powerful book that succinctly lays out why there is still a need for feminism. Its writers are brave, and its editors have curated a collection of essays that I want to press in to the hands of everyone I meet and say: "This. This is inspiring and needed and you should read it because it will help you understand the world and make it want to be a better place." We all still need to call ourselves feminists, and I Call Myself a Feminist tells you why.

•I Call Myself a Feminist is released in the UK on November 5, 2015.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Book review: Early One Morning by Virginia Baily

Sometimes you start reading a book, and know within a few pages that you've got something special in your hands. Virginia Baily's Early One Morning is one of those books.

In 1943, on a street in Rome, two women lock gazes. One is Chiara Ravello, on her way home from running a risky errand. The other, unnamed, is being forced onto a truck on its way to a concentration camp. With the latter is her young son. As the two women look at each other, Chiara makes a split second decision, and claims the boy, Daniele, as her nephew. Thirty years later, in Britain, a teenage girl uncovers a secret which leads her to Chiara. Together, the two must face up to how Daniele has affected their lives.

Baily's genius is that she makes you feel not just for Chiara, who we see as a young woman and when she is much older and worn down, and for Maria, who is lost and trying to rediscover who she is, but also for Daniele, who we barely see. In fact, we don't see Daniele as an adult ourselves, and the time we spend with him as a child and teenager is minimal, and even then it's all through Chiara's eyes (and occasionally other people's). But somehow, I still felt I knew Daniele enough that my heart could hurt for him. His faults are front and centre in the minds of those who know him, but Baily also makes Daniele's vulnerabilities clear, creating a character who draws our sympathy, as well as eliciting complicated emotions from the other characters.

Early One Morning starts during the Second World War, and gives an interesting perspective on the conflict. We see soldiers who have run away from battle, prisoners on trains, families who have been ruined by war, and of course Daniele. Instead of showing victims from the battlefields, Baily shows us the everyday victims of the war, and their suffering is just as awful. Chiara and her family must carry on living their lives as normally as they can, even though absolutely nothing is normal.

Baily gives us a story about family, blood and that which we make ourselves, and Chiara has both. As we delve into the past and find out about Chiara's parents and sister, we see why she is so determined to protect Daniele, even sacrificing others who are close to her. I don't want to spoil it, but discovering what has happened to one of Chiara's family members is just so, so devastating. 

Early One Morning is a sweeping story, played out in two continents and two different times, each charged with equal emotion. It isn't a book that breaks your heart. It's a book that chips away at your heart with a tiny hammer until you're left a shattered mess, and only Baily can piece it back together again.

•Early One Morning is out in the UK on July 23, 2015.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Review: Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado

It's easy to judge people less well off than yourself, to comment on why they might be on benefits, or to wonder why they spend money on cigarettes when they can barely feed themselves.

Our television screens are full of programmes about people living on the breadline, but many of them (the programmes) present a one-sided, often snide view. Linda Tirado's Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in a Wealthy World is the counterpoint to all those reality shows, offering intelligent, well-thought out and firm arguments about why poor people are poor, and how society is hard-wired to make it difficult for people to lift themselves out of poverty.

Tirado's book came about after she replied to a question on a forum asking why poor people did things that seemed so self-destructive. Her response, which is used in the introductory chapter of the book, took on a life of its own, as people responded (well and badly).

In Hand to Mouth Tirado expands on her arguments. She uses examples from her own life to illustrate how poor people are maligned every day of their lives, and how behaviour which passes without comment or judgement when wealthy people do it is seen as terrible when a poor person partakes.

Work takes centre stage, with plenty of commentary about Tirado's past jobs and the difficulties, and horrors, she suffered - from being propositioned by bosses and customers, to the nightmare that is trying to balance two (or four) jobs, none of which pay well and none of which have bosses who will accommodate the other. From the off, Tirado quashes the stereotype of poor people not wanting to work or being hard workers - it's clear that she is not the exception when it comes to people in poverty and their struggles with work.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book was that about healthcare, even though, as Brits, we are lucky enough to have the NHS at our disposal and so don't have the same difficulties accessing healthcare as Americans. Not only does Tirado talk about the expense of healthcare, but she also takes it one step further and shows how a lack of healthcare leads to things like not being able to get good jobs, which spirals into not having enough money and so on. It's a connection I, naively, never really thought about.

The best thing about Tirado's book is the humour shown throughout, and the wonderful voice. Tirado is not afraid to use the odd (sometimes more) swear word, or tell it like it is, and that's refreshing. My favourite part of the book was towards the end, when Tirado writes a letter to rich people, which is so on the mark it's funny (I had a job where I sat through meetings like the ones she describes and she's spot on).

Tirado's book doesn't have all the answers, in fact, it's not really a book about answers. It's a book about questions and about highlighting problems, and about trying to make people understand. We all saw (and perhaps took part in) the Occupy demonstrations, we've signed petitions against the cutting of legal aid or against the bedroom tax, but it's only by reading a considered book like Tirado's that I've come to have the slightest understanding of what problems are faced by such a large number of people every day. Hand to Mouth is required reading for everyone.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert

I've been thinking a lot recently about the term "women's fiction" and what is meant by it - is it fiction where the protagonist is a woman, where the author is a woman, which deals with "female themes"? Why does such a term exist?

One publisher who tackles the term head-on and without mercy is Virago, which publishes great books by women, but which couldn't be classed as women's fiction, since the term is meaningless and would do Virago's selection of work down.

Coming to Virago's incredibly strong list (Virago is Maya Angelou's UK publisher) this year is Rachel Sieffert, a Man Booker-shortlisted author. I confess I'd not read her previous novels, The Dark Room and Afterwards, so I had few expectations or ideas about what I was getting.

In The Walk Home, set in Glasgow, "now or thereabouts", a young man called Stevie gets a job on a construction site a few miles down the road from his family, but none of them know he's back. In the early 1990s, Stevie's parents Graham and Lindsey meet and move to Glasgow to be close to Graham's parents.

The Walk Home is not a book where something happens, and then is resolved, and there is an ending, but it is a book about something happening, and the consequences of that. It's a book about how the past can haunt families, even without their consciously realising that the mistakes of the people before are what is damaging the present.

In the present, most of what we see of Stevie is through the eyes of Polish construction manager Jozef, an immigrant to Glasgow whose life is affected by his move to a strange country, his ties to his family and his struggle to fit in with the culture he's left behind, and the culture he's moved into. Jozef's story mirrors the story of Stevie's mum, Lindsey, who moved from Ireland for a better life, but finds that it catches her up in Glasgow in ways she never imagined.

We don't spend an awful lot of time with present-day Stevie, but we do spend a lot of time with Stevie as he grows up, and our relationship with him is built on what we know about his upbringing, which shaped him into the human being he is today. His relationships with his parents and grandparents are key to this, but so are the relationships of the people in his life to each other - they affect him just as deeply as those he is directly a part of.

The most fascinating character in The Walk Home is Graham's maternal uncle Eric, whose past life choices have affected the dynamic of his whole family. From his sister Brenda, to his nephew George, to Lindsey and then finally to Stevie, Eric acts as a warning, a threat and a comfort all in one.

Love is at the centre of The Walk Home - love between siblings, love between a husband and wife, and most importantly love between parents and their children. That last one is at the heart of what happens to and forms each character - starting from how the love between Eric and his father was not enough to sustain their relationship, going through to Brenda and Lindsey creating a mother-daughter love, to Stevie being abandoned by his mother despite his love for her.

The only thing I found awkward about The Walk Home was the Glaswegian accent used for the speech. Reading it, I found it very difficult to hear in my head, and it was only occasionally I could hear the right voice. Most of the time, I just gave up and read it as it would have been without the dialect.

Apart from that, The Walk Home was a moving read. Sieffert has captured a portrait of a family affected by love and loss perfectly, and despite how sad it is, I'm left with hope at the end of the novel that the walk home will be completed.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.

Review: The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby

We almost all of us know how the story of the pink suit ends - its wearer covered in blood, screaming next to the dying body of her husband, the president of the United States of America.

In The Pink Suit, Nicole Mary Kelby presents a fictionalised (although based on some facts) version of the run up to that day in Dallas, through the eyes of Kate, a young seamstress at Chez Ninon, Jackie Kennedy's chosen tailors.

From the rooms of Chez Ninon, through fabric and patterns and sewing techniques, we read as the pink suit is made and worn. And travelling along its path is Kate, stitching not just seams in a skirt and jacket, but also the seams of her life as an Irish immigrant in New York City.

The Pink Suit takes an iconic outfit, and fills in gaps I never knew I had about how it came to be. Kelby's depiction of the battles to get the suit made - the back and forth with Chanel, the struggles of such a difficult if beautiful fabric, the intricate hand sewing required - is detailed and fascinating, opening a window to history that most people forget exists.

Of course, while the making of the suit is central to the story, its creation is also a metaphor for Kate's life - cut from foreign cloth, headed to America to become part of the American Dream, moulded to expectations, finally worn comfortably as a challenge to others. As Kate's life comes together, and as she falls in love, the suit starts to move with her, rather than the other way round.

Kelby's novel takes unexpected twists and turns. While the First Lady is central to the plot of the suit, she's never (by my memory) referred to by name. The White House is nearly always called Maison Blanc, adding a slight air of unreality to proceedings, which is only heightened by Kelby's depictions of the owners of Chez Ninon, two slightly mad old ladies who love fashion but seem to live in a dream world (although they can be pretty perceptive at times). And that day in Dallas is handled so differently from how I thought it would be, which came as a pleasant surprise.

Every chapter of The Pink Suit kicks off with a quote about fashion from one of a number of influential people in the business. While the quotes are about clothing and looks, many are also about the strength of people and inner beauty helping to create fashion. They added a lovely element to the book, as well as showcasing that fashion is more than just about clothes.

The Pink Suit is a beautiful novel, as beautiful as the object of its title. Its pieces - the fashion quotes, the sections on dressmaking, the story of Kate, our knowledge of the Kennedys - come together to form a deceptively simple novel, which fits together perfectly, with no sign of visible seams.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Virago. This did not affect my review.