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reviews
FOR BOOK’S SAKE @ The Horatia
19/10/11 by Maya Korn
For those of you who haven’t heard of ‘For Books Sake’ it’s an online magazine and community featuring books solely by women. It aims to give women authors a platform and voice and in doing so balance out gender inequality in the literary domain. It seems only natural therefore that the next step for this web based community would be to start a book club. The inaugural meeting took place in the trendy Horatia pub on Holloway road. This venue is known for its open mic nights and free library, giving the right literary atmosphere to the night feel. Its dark, vaguely imposing interior, also added to this, making you feel like you were entering the pages of a Victorian novel. The book up for discussion this week was Katie Ward’s Girl Reading published by Virago. Divided into 7 episodic chapters, it details a moment in 7 girl’s life through the centuries when an artist has captured them reading. The book is very self aware raising feminist issues about the position of women in various roles: mother, worker, victim, objects of infatuation and as such was appropriately chosen by the organisers. Unfortunately though, it left all in attendance cold. We agreed while the premise was very interesting, the snapshots of these women’s lives were quite uninspiring. Their short length and unrelated nature made it difficult for one to engage with the characters. The problem with choosing a dull book for a meeting of minds, however much it matched the purpose of the collective, is it doesn’t encourage discussion. Those in attendance chatted about the novel on and off for half an hour and then lost interest. To make this night fulfil the potential it clearly has For Books Sake will have to work on ways to encourage more sustained literary based participation.
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REVIEWS
FOSTERING GUILT KCL Creative Writing Society by Noémie Duneton I have to admit that although I was very excited to discover KCL Creative Writing Society’s very first novel, I was also slightly worried that the various literary styles that come with a multiplicity of writers might be disconcerting. Yet, I very soon discovered that not only was the presence of ten different authors not a problem at all but it actually gave the novel more substance: the Creative Writing Society managed to turn a possible vulnerability into a great force. Because every chapter focuses on a separate character, each character has a unique voice and the different literary styles are therefore entirely justified - different life stories are described by different words and images, which only seems fitting. As it turns out, the combination of these different voices is what makes Fostering Guilt so special and so thoroughly enjoyable. I had no worries whatsoever about the plot, and in that I was right. The fluctuations between the past - 1990, the year when St. Aloysius’ orphanage burns down - and the present - 2010, when the story takes place - are made very smoothly and clearly. You always want to know more about that mysterious place, the orphanage, and its former inhabitants: the plot makes it a page-turner. The common threads found in several chapters thicken the sense of mystery and the tension while also linking the different characters together. Having the novel revolve around St. Aloysius’ reunion was – I thought - very clever as it gave a real purpose to the whole plot, a force to pull it forward. All in all, I very much enjoyed reading Fostering Guilt and I thought that the authors managed not only to create a gripping plot but to produce a highly innovative and successful narrative style. I can only hope that this will be the first of several novels.
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