The Girls, Hot Milk and Black Water

The Girls by Emma Cline is strangely captivating in an unsettling way. I liked how the early chapters set up the main event, we know from the start something bad will happen. But it is the relationship of our (too) young narrator Evie with Suzanne, the older girl she meets at the run down ranch, that is at the heart of the novel. The emotion that is the focus of the story is the demand for attention. Is this a girl thing? In any event it should not be an excuse. The book is well written and constructed, uncomfortable and unconvincing at times but never less than interesting. 

I'm really not sure what to make of Hot Milk by Deborah Levy. The writing seems to swing between ordinary and startling. I found the language to be sometimes obtuse or idiosyncratic. Or is it because our narrator Sofia is herself an anthropologist and the book maybe veers towards a study of this subject? When she talks about being given a croissant, she says "I had an appetite beyond my status and size". And later "History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver". I did like the short insertions at the beginning of some chapters written by another person about Sofia. I liked the setting and descriptions of the area around Almeria. I loved the characters and the story. It was just it's presentation that I guess was meant to be disturbing and it was just that.

I was glad that with Black Water Louise Doughty had returned to the dramas of books like Whatever You Love (brilliant) and Stone Cradle (not so). Especially after the histrionics of Apple Tree Yard. Set mainly in Indonesia (with a welcome break in America) John Harper is a flawed central character. Part thriller, part historical and part family drama, the author does not stop to weave a dizzyingly complex web, backwards and forwards in time. This hugely ambitious novel does not always work, but when it does I was enthralled. "..... closing the door behind him with a small shove that, however gentle, thudded with the resonance of fifty years of accumulated guilt".