Queen of Nothing

As the exiled mortal Queen of Faerie, Jude is reeling from Cardan’s betrayal and is determined to reclaim everything he took from her. Opportunity arrives in the form of her deceptive twin siser, Taryn, whose life is in peril. Jude myst return to the treacherous Farie Court and confront her lingering feelings for Cardan.

But Elfhame is not as she left it. War is brewing, and she becomes ensnared in the conflict’s bloody politics. When a terrible curse is unleashed, panic spreads throughout the land, forcing Jude to choose between her ambition and her humanity…

“I feel the soft brush of his tail against my ankle, winding around my calf.”

… This is not a scenario I would ever have imagined myself finding totally hot, but such is the power of Holly Black. Or maybe it’s the pandemic enforced isolation.

Probably it’s a little of both.

Queen of Nothing, the final book in Holly Black’s Folk of Air trilogy was everything I wanted.

Did it all totally hang together? Nope!

Were some things too easily resolved? Absolutely.

Did I mind? Not one bit.

With the exception of one off-page death – not to be all blood-thirsty, but I feel like we deserved to see it – part three of this power-grabbing, sexy, magical adventure was the satisfying conclusion I needed.

Escapist, immersive and a little bit silly, this series is one of my top recs for surviving the panny-d.

We have all the necessary ingredients for total distraction: sexy faeries, political intrigue that has nothing to do with actual real life political intrigue (I remain a little unsure why all these faerie clans were so mad at each other and I do not mind at all), complicated female relationships, spies and a really big snake.

If you don’t think a really big snake is a necessary ingredient for total distraction then you have clearly never been faced with one. Nothing focuses the mind quite like a really big snake.

Jude’s story has a satisfying three-act structure that totally pays off in the finale. If in book one she was teetering on the edge of herself and during book two barrelling down the rabbit hole of Roy family levels of manipulation and general evilness (like Succession but with magical kingdoms instead of America’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate), in book three she finds something like balance. While she is not exactly a nice person by the end – thank God. That would have been so disappointing – she has found the middle ground of her humanity and her desire for power, and it is a surprisingly solid place. I don’t get the sense she’s totally ‘clean’ – her and Cardan are still very much the people they started out as (albeit older and wiser, heads of state, etc) – and a potential future that sees her fall off the no-active-evil wagon is not unimaginable, and there is satisfaction in that, too. What has been so attractive about Jude from the beginning is her propensity to make a total mess of things, and she doesn’t shed that tendency to achieve perfection like so many YA special snowflakes before her.

Like I said, she is what she has always been: a human girl in a faerie world. It’s complicated, but she’s figuring it out.

Right now we need distraction, we need satisfaction, and quite honestly, we need sexy times. The Folk of Air series provides in all departments. If you’re looking to be somewhere else for a while, these three books are a great option.

Crudo

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

After falling utterly in love with The Lonely City, I got pretty obsessed with Olivia Laing. I did the usual thing I do in these instances – sought out as many podcast interviews as I could. Olivia Laing gives good podcast. My favourite of her interviews – as is so often the case – was on Literary Friction (my favourite of the bookish podcasts I listen to), where she talked about her novel Crudo, written in a frenzy over seven weeks in the summer of 2017.

The book is about existing during that summer – the early days of the Trump presidency, the first fallout after the Brexit vote and the ongoing tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire. It’s about the numbing horror of the 24-hour news cycle, the creeping sense of detached fear we have that maybe we’re in the midst of a long and drawn out apocalypse, where the most we can hope for is to bow out before the bloody end – and this was before most of us knew what a zoonotic disease was, and the role our casual destruction of the planet played in creating them. It’s also a book about learning to be married in your forties, having spent the vast majority of your life alone. On Literary Friction, Laing said it was, in part, a book about selfishness.

A weird thing about Crudo that you don’t strictly need to know going in is that is it is sort of autobiographical – Laing herself was a woman just married in her forties navigating the relentless horror of that summer, and is sort of written as Kathy Acker, a famous post-modernist writer who died in 1997. Laing writes from the perspective of an invented Acker, who in turn built a career out of theft: she wrote her own re-imaginings of Great Expectations and Don Quixote, among others. Like Laing, Kathy loved to write from the invented perspectives of the famous and dead.

Reading Crudo you get whiplash. It is the perfect microcosm of modern life – as they describe it on Literary Friction, the epitome of the state of the nation novel – veering between the different sorts of excess we have at our fingertips. The too much news contrasts with the too much food, horror on screen is read against a backdrop of the glorious Italian summer Kathy spends eating and drinking with her new husband. Crudo means raw in Italian – that’s what it is. This book is about the way the world leaves you raw – and how opening yourself up to someone by marrying them does the same thing.

Crudo is particular to that summer, but applicable to the others that have come since. Trump is no longer president, but Trumpism is still thriving and I’m scared of what will happen next now it is freed from the few remaining threads of accountability the White House provided. Here in the UK, we Brexited, and we’re not focused on it because there is so much else to worry about, but it is chaos and it is destroying businesses, and the consequences in Northern Ireland are as bad as all of the experts nobody listened to predicted. The situations have shifted, but the feeling is the same. The impending doom. There was an odd sort of comfort in sitting in that for Laing for a while, like I recaptured, briefly, that feeling of all being in it together we glimpsed in the early days of the pandemic, when people stood in doorways banging saucepans for the NHS just to feel like they were doing something.

It is not a hopeful book, but it is not strictly a depressing one either. It’s all so beautifully normal – Kathy’s lazy days, the small fights with her new husband that feel huge until they don’t anymore, her constant desire for more space from the man until she has it, and the terrible feeling of missing him when she finally does. It’s a snapshot of a moment that adds up to a devastating and intimate portrait of a person in the midst of a life-shifting summer – but the reality of lift shifting is it doesn’t feel especially huge at the time – in what feels like a world-ending crisis, but actually turns out to be a precursor for whatever comes next. Though Olivia didn’t know that then.

It made me wonder what this crisis is a precursor to.

Sometimes you just have to sit in it for a while, and there’s no one better to do that with than Olivia Laing.

February wrap-up

The one time this month I wore outside clothes, documented

Since Covid, what small, previously not-much-considered thing has grown into something much larger for you?

For me, it’s cooking. I’ve always enjoyed it, but in the pandemic I have clung to it like a life raft. Assembling a recipe offers structure, a roadmap from point A to point B. There is a rhythm to the chopping and frying and boiling on a low heat for 15 minutes that soothes me. There’s the health thing, too – another desperate bid for control on my part, but I take a certain amount of satisfaction in the feeling of nourishment.

I’ve been trying new things, too, buying the ingredients I would always skip because they are too expensive. They are still too expensive, really, but I justify it to myself that I’m spending the money I might have used eating out were it a normal year. When you grow up without much money you get into the habit of thinking there are certain things in life that just aren’t for you – somehow in eating the foods from the fancy bit of the supermarket I feel like I am reclaiming a space I didn’t even realise I wanted. This year I bought a mango for the first time. I had to Google how you cut it. I tried cacao powder. I have oyster mushrooms in my fridge right now, something I’ve never tried before – the non-regular, non-cheap mushrooms have always been strictly off limits in my mind. I’m excited.

I never thought cookery books would become such a central part of my library, but when I’m tired but can’t take the scroll any longer, I find myself reaching for them and leafing through the pages, poring over the pictures I’ve pored over countless times before. A cookery book is a luxury item. All of mine were gifts – like the oyster mushrooms, until recently it hadn’t occurred to me they are something I might buy for myself.

This month on the blog
I continue my obsession with Holly Black’s Folk of Air series
Some pandemic ruminations with Zadie Smith
I reviewed The Liars Dictionary, a book about language and all of the ways it lets us down

I’m reading
Beyond the Guilt Tax: Revisiting the Post-Colonial Syllabus by Sumana Roy

“A Band-Aid for Bullet Wounds”: Is the Self-Care Craze Doing More Harm Than Good? by Anne Helen Peterson

She Was Never In Control. Why Did I Ever Believe A Teen Girl Could Hold All the Power? by Tavi Gevinson

Quote of the month
“I am sometimes unduly terrified by my shortcomings, and I do not trust God. But at my worst, for now, I remember that one thing I still control is whether or not I give in. And then I go on.”

– Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

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The best thing that happened to me, hands down, this month was How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. At some point I will write about it, and hate myself for how little justice I did to explaining what this book meant to me.

Tell me about your February. How are you getting on?