Love, Leda - Mark Hyatt

This novel has a fascinating backstory to its publication. Hyatt was an outsider poet in the 1960s and early 1970s, before he died by suicide. His poetry remained a niche enthusiast interest for much of the past fifty years, and luckily two of those enthusiasts decided to compile his poems into an anthology and reached out to his family and friends as part of that process. One of his friends had kept thousands of pages of his writing, including a complete novel manuscript, safe for nearly five decades. The result is this, rescued from oblivion. Hyatt’s novel is a wild, first-person stream of consciousness narrative about the titular Leda, and his experience as a poor, queer man in 1960s London.

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I do recommend this. To me it’s incredible to recover lost art and give it public due, sort of a time capsule, and something that could not be created now. It is rougher than other novels—the author was not here to work with an editor, and the compiler wisely opted not to impose much editing. It has the quality of a manuscript, but a quick, pacey one, if the style agrees with you.

The Incandescent - Emily Tesh

Dr. Sapphire Walden teaches invocation magic (demon summoning) at Chetwood school, a private boarding school in England. We follow the course of one school year with her, in which her staid schoolmistress life is shaken by a dangerous demon incursion, the hauntings of her own past, student dramas, possession, and two separate romances. This is an eventful, teacher-focused magical boarding school novel for anyone who has ever thought, “but how did those Hogwarts instructors manage?”

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In sum I’d put this down as a solid modern fantasy novel that’s most interested in the question of what it means to be a teacher—as a matter of logistics, career, and identity. It has a cool approach to integrating magic into our world, it has a high-stakes plot, and it has romance elements, but those are mostly secondary to the examination of life at Chetwood and concerns of identity within that system.

Shibboleth - Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

This book came recommended by a friend who knows the author; it seems to have had a fairly small promotional cycle on its release this year, so I wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Shibboleth is a satirical campus novel set at modern-day Oxford, taking aim at the patterns of identity politics in student activism. The protagonist is Edward Zahir, whose grandfather was from Zanzibar but who was raised essentially white and middle-class English. The students around him are invariably wealthy, but from different backgrounds: white, English Angelica; Black, Egyptian, Muslim Youssef; white, English, gay Conrad; Black, American Liberty; white, German, Jewish Rachel. The identities of this group, plus a loose collection of secondaries, form the network of conflicts which take place in the novel.

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As it stands, I cannot recommend this book. It was also quite long, over 350 pages, so the reader needs to be very tolerant or very determined. I might just not get the context fully, not being English or knowing that educational system. Definitely the humor was not for me. I recognize parts of my experience in there, of course I do, but without the tempering elements which make them real. And I learned, in reading this, that I need more empathy for characters in the stories that I read—even, especially, the ghoulish ones. I only resented the protagonist more for having been given the privilege of depth and nuance, and having been forgiven his shortcomings, when the others so often were not.

Small World - David Lodge

Small World is the second book in the Campus Trilogy by David Lodge, a famous set of connected satirical campus novels. I’ve read and reviewed the first one previously. I wouldn’t have read this except that I found a copy in a little free library just around when I was reading Shibboleth, and I can never resist a narrative set. Despite that, let me be plain that I strongly do not recommend this book or any others in the trilogy, as the two that I’ve read have been horrifically sexist, hardly free of other bigotries, and simply not that compelling outside of academic navel-gazing interest.

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So it’s overall a major distraction, and the satire is weakened to the point where I begin to question its value. And Lodge is careful and observant, and describes a culture and an era that I see value in having documented—but it’s not worth reading at this cost, and frankly, it’s not worth recommending, even for the historical value, without heavy caveats. Which I have never seen done.