Series 4

And just like that we're back with Series 4!
You guys may remember that we wanted to do this series specifically on writers of colour, and our first book is Cauvery Madhavan's "The Tainted"
What do the girls talk about?
Well, our goal with this series is to challenge our relationship with race and racism and we got right into it with The Tainted
Turns out we learned we have a LOT of preconceptions about what it is to be Indian. And we're now pretty sure all of them are wrong...

This week the girls talk their way through Amita Murray's gorgeous "The Trouble With Rose" In doing so, we learn about:
- Great Indian Families (bonus points for recognising EVERYONE YOU'RE RELATED TO THEREIN)
- True acceptance, both self-acceptance, and acceptance by others, and how rare it is
- The girls' killer one liner notes on repeated themes in the book (in fairness that's mostly Saoirse) Said notes that kept cropping up were...

This week the girls get stuck into Candice Carty-Williams' timely and hugely important "Queenie"
What did they come across? Well...among others:

- How important it is to have heroines (because yes Queenie is a female hero) that are not trying to make you, the reader, like them. Which made us love Queenie even more tbh
- That maybe the romantic love story isn't the thing we're interested in
- How relatable and heartbreaking Queenie's self-destructive actions are, BUT...

This week we talk about Brit Bennett's beautiful "The Vanishing Half". We are seriously having a tough time figuring out if we have a favourite book so far this series, because this one is yet another INCREDIBLE addition.
The girls get into:
- The choices a person makes being a product of how they were taught as children
- The contrast between running away from yourself vs becoming who you want to be
- How we're just finding SO MUCH RACISM buried in ourselves (it's deeply upsetting)
- and outside expectation and how it can mess with a person...

This week the girls get stuck into Banana Yoshimoto's classic "Kitchen",  discussing, among other things:
- Are we reading the author or the translator?
- How the abnormal becomes normal once it's your everyday life
- Is Chloe as goodlookin as Eriko? (spoiler: She really isn't)
- Anger over misgendering and how it's pretty cool it's an automatic response now
- The life within inanimate objects in a home...

The girls' first book of 2021 and the last in our series about authors of colour is Cho Nam-Ju's feminist powerhouse "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982". In discussing this stark novel's approach to laying out the cadaver that is misogyny and disregard for women, girls, sisters and mothers, the girls talk:
- The physical and mental health issues motherhood and pregnancy present (and we had NO IDEA)
- Sexual assault and how small actions build up over time (why are you feeling our bra straps?!)
- What if sexism isn't just an outdated societal rule? What if it's a tradition? One that we're proud of?
- How sexism affects children (maybe it's NOT adorable when little boys bully the girls they like!)...