5 "a pleasure, a treasure, with relish" stars !!

Warm thanx to Netgalley, Penguin Random House Canada and most importantly to the author for an ecopy. This was released April 2024 (also nominated for 2024 Giller Prize). I am providing an honest review.

Imagine a violet cauldron in a lavender room with deep purple flames underneath. There are three grand duchesses of literature there stirring the pot and chanting the songs of angels. Mizz Zadie (Smith) adds vials of astuteness and compassion (for all), the spirit of Dame Byatt adds classic and erudite wafers (yes wafers honey) that dissolve in the magenta brew and Jeanette Winterson adds beauty and sapphic allure in the forms of indigo dried roses. Let the stirring bubble up and create a most intriguing, breathtaking piece of literature.... OR (in our real world)

You could pick up Curiosities by Anne Fleming and delve into one the most alluring historical fictions that I have ever had the pleasure of reading or perhaps imbibing is a better word.

This is one of the most pleasurable, enjoyable and thought provoking novels that I have ever read.
We are taken into 17th Century England, Germany and Hudson's Bay and learn about some of the most interesting times and people. We have plagues, sea faring, witch hunting, demonology, science, nature and varieties of lesbian love and gender expression. This book is intricate, detailed, deeply moving and a tribute to female queer experience. The more patience a reader has the deeper in love you will fall....

With deepest respect to Ms. Anne Fleming.....

While I don't think this will be the easiest read for the average book buyer, Anne Fleming truly nails the language and prose of the time period. The journey is sweeping and exciting, and the reader's heart races to have the pieces put together for them. I love a good dual timeline, and this ones certainly did not disappoint.

This book took a little time to get used to. The language and style is not the most accessible. but as a conceit to make the reader feel they are reading old journals and letters, it is very effective. Once I got into it I really loved the story. Joan's and Tom's stories are by far the most interesting although I also enjoyed Anne's perspectives. My major criticism is with John's story. For me it created a huge lague in the momentum of the story, and I felt like his history could have been abbreviated. I know the author was likely trying to make us fully understand his motives, but to me it was the least interesting point of the novel. That said, I kind of fell in love with Joan and Tom and found this to be a story worth sticking with.

It's hard to express how much I appreciate this novel. It feels like one of those custom-made stories that I couldn't help but deeply love. There's also some literary merit though—so let's get into it.

The story of Curiosities is twofold: the story of documents and the story withing documents. Framed by "Anne" (who we are to take as the titular author), who "discovers" three fragments of early 17th-century writers, we are taken on a journey spanning a plague, the high seas, and a witchcraft trial. Our players are Tom(asina)—a (tom)boy and sailor, Jane—his childhood friend and later lover, and Lady Margaret—a well-to-do scientist and creator of this small love triangle.

The story, as noted, is framed by the "documents" found by Anne. Each is given an introduction by the author, and each is copied for our reading "as-is." It took me far longer than I should admit to figure out that these major characters are made-up—and I hope I'm not ruining the fun for anyone by saying it here! I've worked in archives in some capacity since I was 19, spending the last year at the reference desk of an academic library. I'm pretty good at finding stuff, but even Fleming got the best of me at times. Various factual figures do make an appearance though, so watch out!

What follows then is a heartbreaking, harrowing, and deeply personal story of three individuals navigating their gender, sex, and desires amid a turbulent and unforgiving landscape. This is a historical world that is deeply foreign: people languish, people die, and fortunes turn ceaselessly at Fortuna's wheel. Just as all good historical fiction should accomplish, the small glimmers of joy sustain the usual bleakness and heartache of life. I don't cry reading, but I almost shed a tear or two. That's impressive.

What makes the conceit of veracity so tangible is the writing itself. Fleming has written her prose in an early-modern English style, with odd words, punctuation, and syntax to match. It reminded me at times of two of my other most favourite gay/transgender historical-fiction books: As Meat Loves Salt and Days Without End Just as those two do, Curiosities utilizes the language of the period to make a startling unique contemporary piece that evokes the past in the clearest way possible. It is absolutely and utterly what I look for in historical fiction, moreso, I think than anything. Fleming isn't perfect though—I could tell a few pages in that it was not from a seventeenth-century hand—but I don't she was necessarily trying to fool anyone. It's subtle, but having read enough older texts, the weight of contemporary syntax, emotional consciousness, and punctuation is detectable.

Fleming has obviously drawn biographical styles from this period, emulating the sobriety of their words while softening them with her subtle contemporary flair. As I said, this is subtle: writing of the past is a tell, don't show affair. Writers of these centuries have an amazing command of language, with upstanding, ascension-prone prose that, to our ears, is quite stiff. Biographies, more than anything, were informed by classical rhetoric and meant to argue a solid point. Fleming turns it: with a more contemporary syntactical structure paired with an emphasis on the characters' internal emotions, the author has made it a modern story we can relate to. And man, can we relate to it!

My years in the archives have sent me through some particularly painful dead-end searches. I have utilized archives to understand difficult and sometimes contradictory aspects of my identities, and there really is nothing like "finding yourself" in the archive. Archival Studies as an academic field is grappling with this new role too, in fact, and I can tell the author has had those same, omnipresent moments when we can see ourselves through the reflection of centuries past. I'm not trying to project, but as someone who lived two years as a transgender man and left it to come back to "womanhood" still a bit confused, finding conceptions of masculine identities that validate the okayness you feel with your physical body is exceedingly hard to find. I've only ever felt normal when I see myself through crossdressing women in the past, and that, as a breed, is dying.

In all, Curiosities is a gem. I am so, so happy to have been gifted this as an ARC and to win a giveaway copy from Goodreads. I've been looking for that transgender historical-literary-fiction novel for half a decade now, and the existence of this tells me the next half-decade might treat us well. While I found some parts in the last third of the novel coming together a bit too cleanly for my taste, the amount of work I can tell went into it, and the sheer uniqueness of it, really trumps a lot of the criticisms. I also rate quite harshly, so a four-star is nothing to shake your head at.

Again, thank you NetGalley for an early copy in exchange for an honest review 🙏

A 100% unique novel and format. Anne Fleming delivers real historical letters detailing the lives of queer people in and around the 17th century. It is even hard to believe that these letters were not written for this novel, they are authentic histories that Fleming pieces together for strong and beautiful storytelling.

This is a must-read!


Review exchanged for an ARC on net galley.