The Wardrobe Department

 

The Wardrobe Department / Elaine Garvey
Edinburgh: Canongate, c2025.
231 p.

This is Elaine Garvey's debut novel, which I found serendipitously in my library's collection. It's the story of Mairead, a 22 yr old Irish woman who has left a suffocating home life to work at a small theatre in England. But the theatre isn't the dream life she was looking for - it's still just real life, a job with many attendant issues. 

She works in the wardrobe department, and the descriptions of the actual work are great - sewing up gloves, awkward fittings with actors they have crushes on, washing and pressing until all hours, sourcing stockings at sex shops for the cheapest options and so on. I loved this part of the book; it is so rare to find a book that goes into actual daily worklife, and manages to capture the every day nature of it, the way it makes up most of a life. And also the way that coworkers shape the day. Mairead works with two other young women, one posh and one more raucous and full of desire to live life. Their interactions are so realistic, and they help to shape Mairead's story. And her direct boss is tough but ultimately supportive. Some of the other characters are ones you'd like to throttle, though!

Mairead is awkward and introverted - she's not sure she fits in here but doesn't feel like she fits in at home either. But she still misses it and feels torn between two places. Then she has to go home for a funeral, and that part of the book is the real heart of the story. Her visit shows the reader the background for all the issues she's been having in London, her numbness, anxiety, constant worrying and so on. The family dynamics are finely drawn, between Mairead and her parents but also her wider family. There are some difficult moments in her life and that of her family that are hard to read about. 

But then there is a breakthrough in mother-daughter communication which shakes Mairead up, just as she is ready to board her plane back to London. And once there, she goes back to her daily round of work and home, but somehow her mother speaks through her in a key moment -- Mairead finds her steel -- and everything changes. Although much of the book has us following Mairead stuck in her life, the ending is hopeful, and I thought it ended on a high note. 

I really liked this one. If you enjoy slower paced character driven stories with a wonderful setting, you may also like it. Of course I also found the sewing content relatable and realistic, and appreciated the metaphors arising from stitching that appeared in other parts of the book.


And here's a nice interview with the author at the blog Word Herding, about her work in theatres and how it informed this book, if you want to learn more.

(review first appeared at FollowingTheThread)

Snap by Susin Neilsen

 

Snap / Susin Nielsen
TO: HarperCollins, c2025.
336 p.

I've been finding it hard to read lately, my concentration is off for many reasons. But I picked up this new book at the library and it "snapped" me out of my reading slump! I've read Susin Nielsen's YA books and enjoyed her style - this is her first adult novel, and it made me laugh and cringe at the same time. Great read, quick moving, engaging, and with some uplift in the end. 

It gives us the stories of three characters who become unlikely friends after meeting in an Anger Management class. The publisher's synopsis introduces them best: 

Frances Partridge, fifty-five, is a beloved children’s author. Geraint Blevins, forty-one, is an auto mechanic and devoted family man. Parker Poplawski, twenty-three, is just starting her career as a wardrobe assistant on a hit TV show. What do these people have in common?

Well, what they have in common is that they each reached a point where they snapped, and did something very unlike their usual selves, enough to put them into a court diversion program, and the Anger Management class previously mentioned. The book explores what led to each of them snapping, and why their lives got so complicated. And it acknowledges that we don't know what is behind a "viral moment" like poor Frances' recorded meltdown at a school visit. 

I thought that Frances' story was the most fleshed out here, though Geraint's is pretty thorough as well. Parker's is a little weaker, but it's hard to have three full storylines going. Still, their unlikely and ultimately charming friendship lifts the book beyond any one person, and I enjoyed it so much. I read it all of one weekend, and found it very funny in parts, while still dealing with serious topics and emotional distress in each of their lives. I loved the side characters, too, and thought they added in many extra touches that grounded the book. While the end might be a touch unrealistic (everyone gets their 'revenge', or at least a sense of justice) it was awfully satisfying. I'd classify this as "Uplit", a book that while delving into unhappiness, turns out right in the end, in a way that leaves the reader feeling positive. I really loved it! 

A Sewing Novella: Sew Over It!

 

Sew Over It / Barbara Emodi
c2023
68 p.

I read this quick e-short this week when I discovered it on Hoopla thanks to my library. It's part of the Gasper's Cove mysteries by Barbara Emodi, also a writer of sewing books and a sewing blog. Her cozies are pretty fun, especially for other sewists, so I quickly checked this one out. 

This is kind of a prequel to the whole series, a short mystery (involving the murder of a sewing machine rep) that still satisfies, while it introduces us to Valerie Rankin and her world. In this book you meet all the characters who will make up the series, and you get a feel for the town and Valerie's position as a recent returnee. 

It's a little clunky in parts -- for example, Valerie's dog's name changes suddenly halfway in -- but it's a fun intro to the series. I found that in this story, the sewing puns and sewing content are in peak form, with comments that made me laugh out loud. I really enjoyed this, after having read the first two in the series. I'm falling behind, with book 6 coming out in October. I'll have to find book 3 and get busy!

(first reviewed at FollowingTheThread)

Colours in her Hands

 

Colours in her Hands / Alice Zorn
Calgary, AB: Freehand Books, c2024.
350 p.

This was an intriguing book that I liked for a number of reasons. There's embroidery, there's Montreal, dance, colour and family drama. 

Mina is close to 30 - she lives independently although she has Down's Syndrome. Her slightly older brother Bruno is her legal caretaker, and this responsibility is something he takes very seriously, making sure he is always available when Mina (or her social workers) have an issue - which is often. His girlfriend Gabriela loves Mina, but Bruno's refusal to have a child because of his responsibilities is driving them apart at the beginning of the book. After Gabriela leaves him, he meets Iris, a clothing designer who had come across Mina in a park and discovered her artistic talents. 

Mina "knits" - it's really embroidery, but Mina calls it knitting. It seems to come naturally to her; the colours speak to her and she just knows what to put together. It's an emotional connection. When Iris discovers that Mina has bags full of her embroideries, she sees fame and fortune ahead -- this outsider textile artist needs to be known. But this goal seems to exclude her telling Bruno or even Mina herself about her plans. 

These stories swirl around each other, and include Bruno's work as a prop designer for a small theatre as well as some other side stories. There are questions of how well two people know each other, what kinds of things are revealed or kept secret, and of course ethical questions arise around art and ownership and who has the right to share things. 

The book is fascinating, and Mina's character is strong and compelling (the author says she was inspired by her own sister-in-law). But I did find there was a lot of extra stuff going on that made the book maybe a bit longer than needed. And the ending was a bit off for me; there was a character introduced near the end who had a problematic relationship with Mina and that was never resolved. 

But I did find this so different from anything I've read lately, and it was full of art and music and people who live intense lives and care about things. I'm not sure I really liked any of the characters much, but I enjoyed a lot about this story, and loved the descriptions of Mina and her "colours" as well as Iris' sewing. Other stitchers will understand! I've read Zorn's earlier novel, Five Roses, also a great Montreal novel, and am happy that I was able to finally read this one too. 

(review first appeared on Following The Thread) 

Let's Move the Needle!

 

Let's Move the Needle / Shannon Downey
North Adams, MA: Storey, c2024.
254 p.

I haven't been writing many reviews lately - I've been reading but the state of the world is distracting me a lot. However, this book was helpful to read, and I'd recommend it to anyone else looking for practical ideas and steps to help you move forward. 

I bought this recently, as it falls so much into my areas of interest -- craftivism in particular. It's written by a woman who is a stitcher (badasscrossstitch.com) and a long-time activist. It was very inspiring. 

Her area is cross-stitch and embroidery, so that's the examples she uses. But this book isn't just about the craft, it's really focused on the activism part. She encourages all artistic practices - fibre arts, visual arts, dance, music, etc, to get involved, using whatever your practice is in the service of activist ends. 

I really liked this book, it was practical, wide-ranging, and inspiring all in one. She goes over some ways that craft has been used in political settings in the past, then shares some contemporary projects, but the heart of the book is the introspection required to be effective. She has many interactive questions to go through so that you can narrow your focus down on the 1-3 main issues you want to be engaging with. It's an important element, becoming aware of what is important to you and why. And then how you'll pursue that in future. 

Once you have an idea of where you would like to focus, the rest of the book explains how to work with others - how to form groups, keep them running, use the logic model to plan outcomes (ie: know the WHY of any project), evaluate, and maybe even end a project. She incorporates instruction on tactics, planning documents and more, to make this easy for those new to organizing. 

She does mention in her opening that craftivism can sometimes be seen as 'gentle' and non-confrontational, but that's not where's she's at with it. Her craft is a tool to speak loudly about the social justice you want to see. 

With the useful tools, the logical layout, and the points illustrated with some her own hoop art, this is a great book. Very to the point, it has a goal and gives you the wherewithal to join in and, as she says, "Build Community and Make Change". Worthwhile for anyone interested in craftivism, community building and Moving the Needle! 

(first reviewed at FollowingTheThread)

Mina's Matchbox

Mina's Matchbox / Yoko Ogawa
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
TO: McLelland & Stewart, 2024, c2006.
288 p.

I picked up this one recently when it came into my local library. Even though I haven't really enjoyed the other books I've read by this author, I thought this one was appealing enough to give it a try. It was fairly good -- I did like it better than her other work -- but in the end I thought it was pretty forgettable. 

It's 1972, and Tomoko is being sent to live with her aunt's family in coastal Ashiya when her single mother needs to go back to school full time. Tomoko is telling us this nostalgic story from a later viewpoint, and the experience is filtered through a haze of memory. She finds a house of women: her cousin Mina, her aunt, German grandmother, and housekeeper Yoneda, not to mention the pygmy hippo Pochiko who lives in the yard. Her charismatic uncle and older male cousin are only there intermittently. She tells the reader about the year in this magical house with her cousin who is strange but perfect, beautiful, a reader, creative, and imperious, all while also treated with kid gloves because of her illness. All of Tomoko's memories are glazed over with how wonderful everything about this year is for her; it's interesting while you're reading the setup, but then nothing really happens. Everyone is one thing and keeps on being that one thing. The title comes from Mina's collection of matchboxes; she is desperate for more, and Tomoko finds out that Mina keeps them all and creates tiny narratives to match the pictures on the boxes, inscribing the tiny stories inside each one. 

The inclusion of a pygmy hippo and Mina's fixation on matchboxes give this story the odd features that are supposed to make it stand out. I thought the tiny stories that Mina created for each matchbox were unique, and would have liked more of them. I could have existed quite happily without the hippo. Or the strange chapters about Mina and Tomoko's obsession with volleyball, which seemed to come out of nowhere and go on forever, maybe as a way to include Ogawa's commentary on the Munich Olympics. I felt this element was shoehorned in, it didn't feel congruent with the rest of the story and also a bit tone deaf in light of current events. 

While the book started out with a lot of potential, I found it dragged a bit and like I've noted, included set pieces that seemed to be there just for an authorial comment, or to pad out the length perhaps. There were a number of elements that reminded me strongly of Banana Yoshimoto's 1989 novel Goodbye Tsugumi: Mina's sickly nature, Tomoko only having a mother and so having to stay with family in a house near the ocean (and in both the house itself is an important character), the relationship between cousins, and a few more vague feelings of similarity, although much of the plot differs. 

In any case, while I thought this had appeal, particularly around the older women in the book, it didn't quite do it for me. While I did like it more than previous titles by Ogawa, I'm not sure it has convinced me to keep reading her future work. 

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job / Kikuko Tsumura
trans. from the Japanese by Polly Barton
London: Bloomsbury, 2020, c2015.
416 p.

I certainly meant to get a few more reviews shared in January! But I for sure have to share this one as part of the Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza. I finished this book a while ago but it has stuck with me. I really liked it, from the slower pace to the focus on a working life -- I find this not so common with contemporary life. 

In this novel, our unnamed narrator is looking for an easy job. We follow her through five attempts to settle into a job that won't require interaction with people and won't demand too much of her. At first she finds a job right across from her home, which entails watching video footage of a writer, alone in a room-- super easy, right? But she still finds ways to interact with the few other people in this office and eventually finds that she can't stomach the ethics, so quits. And goes back to her employment counsellor for another try, and again, and again. She finds jobs writing ad copy with an almost mythic coworker, writing cracker fortunes, handing out flyers, and finally as a kind of caretaker in a forested park. 

But each of these brings with it new dilemmas and even a boring job becomes eventful for her. There is always something in a job that forces her to develop connections to other people and/or office drama. She just cares too much; there really is no such thing as an easy job. 

It can feel like a short story collection as you go, but by the last story all the threads come together and we find out why she was looking for an easy job all along. I found it relatable and touching. There's a lot about work culture in Japan rolled into this story, as well as women's experiences in particular. I liked the measured pace of this and the quirky details that made each job both interesting and deadly routine, no matter how odd it was, something that's likely familiar to many of us who've worked in similar surroundings. These small details made this story stick in my mind and I've thought about it often since I finished it. It's not a Japanese cozy, no cats in sight here, but I liked it all the more for that.