I've been quietly reading for the Indie Challenge and sharing on my Insta stories but not really remembering to write properly formed reviews, such as they exist for me anyway! Here are my thoughts about the first two books I've read for the 2023 Indie Challenge.
Animal life by Audur Ava Olafsdottir (Pushkin Press) wasn't event originally on my TBR for this challenge, but I picked it up on a recent trip to the London Review Bookshop and felt compelled to read it immediately. It's a slim book but it took me a while to get through as the writing demands complete attention, and I'm often a less attentive (read skim) reader. This is a story about a midwife from a family of midwives in Iceland and it touches on many things over the course of a short story. At its core is the concept of light and dark, birth and death, and how midwifery and its history plays into that. It's one of those books which is somehow about nothing and everything at once, and the main storyline follows the central character as she goes through her grand aunt's papers after her death. The papers include some published and unpublished articles and books about mankind's history and the family history of midwifery. While the story itself isn't hugely full of activity, it's a really interesting look at different attitudes and living in a different climate and dealing with the weather that climate can often provide, and also the role that midwives play in people's lives.
For the Genre Fiction square of the Indie Challenge Bing Square I read The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna (Usborne Books), a brilliant YA fantasy book that's the first book in a trilogy. 16 year old Deka is about to undergo the ritual of purity which all girls have to go through at that time. Pure girls get to get married and be accepted in the community, while impure girls are carried off by Deathshrieks and exiled or killed. Deka has always been an outsider in her village, taking after her mother who is from the South, and she hopes that the ritual will finally make her part of the village, but everything doesn't go as expected...This started in almost the way I expected but quickly went off in a different direction and I absolutely loved it. The author does a brilliant job of building this mythological world and layers so many different social issues amongst the fantastical elements, but the story is the driving force throughout and I really loved seeing Deka learn all about her history and herself and all of the secrets that have been kept for generations as everything she thought she knew gets turned on its head. I really recommend this book and I'm really excited to read the next one in the series.
Have you read either of these? What did you think?