Recapping my January 2025 reads
Love Letters to a Serial Killer
by Tasha Coryell
“I didn’t plan to fall in love with an accused serial killer. Nevertheless, my wrists and ankles are bound to a chair, and I can only blame myself. I strain at the ropes, take a deep breath, and prepare to die.“
Hannah Wilson is embarrassingly unlucky in life and love. Her only comfort comes from the true crime forums she trawls, desperate for more news about the case of serial murders she’s obsessed with. After all, she can’t save herself from more disappointment, but maybe she can figure out who the killer is and save another woman from losing her life. And then handsome lawyer William Thompson is arrested. And Hannah is so full of female rage about everything he’s done and everything she’s going through, that she decides to write him a series of angry letters. She just doesn’t count on him writing back…”
Whilst this book was undeniably ridiculous, with an EXTREMELY silly plot, it was actually interesting to consider the multitude of reasons why someone might fall in love with a criminal. I mean; happy people don’t enter into correspondences with people on remand for murder. I am also fascinated by this obsession a lot of cis white women seem to have with true crime (and how a lot true crime content centres white victims) especially when they are statistically less likely to be murdered than women of colour, trans women and black men. In the book, the main character Hannah, was able to project herself onto the victims which I think further fuelled her obsession. That being said she wasn’t a wholly un-relatable character, although, I don’t know what that says my own precarious sanity…
Think Again
By Jaqueline Wilson
“Whatever happened to beloved Girls series characters Ellie, Magda and Nadine? They’re all grown up now – but if they think life’s done surprising them, they’d better think again…“
“Being an adult isn’t quite what Ellie Allard dreamed it would be when she was fourteen years old. Though she’s got her beautiful daughter Lottie, life-long best friends in Magda and Nadine and her trusty cat Stella, her love life is non-existent and she feels like she’s been living on auto-pilot, just grateful to be able to afford the mortgage on her pokey little flat.But this year on her birthday, the universe seems to decide it’s time to for all that to change – whether Ellie wants it to or not. As she navigates new, exciting and often choppy waters, she’s about to discover that life will never stop surprising you – if only you let it.”
I grew up on Jacqueline Wilson and despite not having a particularly strong memory of any of the stories (how do other people recall the things they read as children so vividly?) , I do remember reading the Girls in Love series because I was always allowed to choose one book at Borders to take with me on our annual family holiday (who remembers Borders?) and I felt very smug choosing the Girls in Love bumper edition because it contained the first three books in the series in one.
Think Again is Jaqueline Wilson’s first book for adults and mama she needs to stick to writing for kids because respectfully… this was garbage!
Strong Female Character
by Fern Brady
‘If you’ve ever been on a night out where you got blackout drunk and have laughed the next day as your friends tell you all the stupid stuff you said, that’s what being autistic feels like for me: one long blackout night of drinking, except there’s no socially sanctioned excuse for your gaffes and no one is laughing.’
This was a really good book to read because it made me reflect on people I know in my own life who struggle with similar issues to Fern and have more empathy towards their experience. It took Fern about 5 years to finish her degree, she describes arriving at university and finding it really difficult to work out things like how to submit an essay or where to go for academic support etc This contributed to her failing her first year about three times. And I must admit I thought to myself, nobody knows those things babe, you just have to work it out. Fern is at a top university studying Arabic, she’s not a silly girl, surely she can work out how to use the library???? However, as I read further, I understood more how hard her, undiagnosed at the time, Autism was making it for her to navigate this new environment with different rules and social expectations. Fern touches briefly on double empathy in the book which is basically the theory that ‘people with different experiences of the world have difficulty understanding and empathising with each other.’ When you find something very easy like communication or being social, sometimes it’s hard to understand how someone else might not and autistic people are always having to put themselves into the shoes of non autistic people but non autistic people rarely do the same. Fern also described how it feels to go into a meltdown or sensory overload which was stressful just to read about let alone experience.
Featured image by Everlyn Nicodemus
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