Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Beautiful, evocative writing - would definitely recommend! Can't wait to read more from this author.

This book was beautifully written and shows us the insights of someone struggling with the mental health and what impact it can have on people they love. We follow Mina who is on the edge, her husband Oscar her rock who wants to help meaning 'be happy' and the friendship, attraction and connection Mina feels towards Phoebe.
Oscar decides it could be a good idea to move to London for a few months to get Mina out of New York City, to refresh and focus on herself. When Oscar has to travel back to America for work Mina is left alone in the apartment and seeks solace with Phoebe.

It took me a while to get into the flow of this book, I wasn't overly excited to carry on reading it. This could be because of the subject in which the book deals with, depression, suicide and self harm. But there were some poignant pieces of storytelling which helped me understand the main character and her daily struggles of trying to 'be happy'. This book is great to help understand more about mental health and a lesson not to dismiss someone who is struggling. It made me look into myself and try to understand some of the feeling I feel on a daily basis that I have tried to repress.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

Buchanan is a rising star. Harmless Like You was an incredible debut, so you can imagine my excitement when I managed to get an ARC of Starling Days. Reading this book felt like snuggling into a well-loved blanket; the characters and the plot were different different, but there was the easy familiarity of her writing style. Buchanan has a way with words that I can’t adequately describe - I just find her work very readable and incredibly engaging. She creates extremely complex and flawed characters who I can’t help but become entangled with. It’s just an outstanding novel, and I’m excited to get my hands on a physical copy when it’s finally published.

(Side note: I’ve just found out that she’ll be visiting my local bookstore!!!)

A gentle, slow-moving, beautifully-written examination of depression and marriage. The blurb misled me a little, as I was expecting there to be a surreal or strange element here, but there's nothing fantastical about it: just a woman battling depression, falling in lust with a woman, then deciding to stay with her husband. It wasn't at all what I was hoping for, but then books can't just be what we want them to be all the time. This book would appeal to people who like Sally Rooney or other modern, realistic novels about artsy middle-class women in their late 20s/early 30s.

Wasn't able to read this in time before it was removed from my e-reader

Neena's always been a good girl - great grades, parent-approved friends and absolutely no boyfriends.

But ever since her brother Akash left her, she's been slowly falling apart - and uncovering a new version of herself who is freer, but altogether more dangerous.

As her wild behaviour spirals more and more out of control, Neena's grip on her sanity begins to weaken too.

And when her parents announce not one but two life-changing bombshells, she finally reaches breaking point.

But as Neena is about to discover, when your life falls apart, only love can piece you back together.

Rowan Hisayon Buchnan knows the sheer unrelieved monotony of depression. She sees the way in which it saps life’s colour and drives loved ones to despair. She understands these things because she has experienced first-hand the “struggles of people very dear to [her] and [faced her own] challenges”. In an Author’s Note she says: “Not everyone who is sad is sick but I have been sick and I have loved those who were sick.”

Starling Days, which follows closely on the heels of her Betty Trask Award-winning Harmless Like You, is the complete antithesis of an uplifting novel. It is stark, joyless and authentic – it also poses difficult questions. Can love defeat misery? Should we expect those closest to us to save us from ourselves? Is it fair even to ask?

The story begins one humid night in August with Mina, a twenty-something classicist and associate professor, as she walks barefoot and alone across New York’s George Washington Bridge. The water below is “dark as poured tarmac” and she wonders about the people driving past in “their shadowy cars.” The lights suddenly become brighter as a police car pulls up beside her. A young officer tells her to “step away from the rail.” It doesn’t look good, “normal women, innocent women, [don’t] walk alone on bridges at night.” She may be there to jump. She insists she is merely clearing her head. Her husband Oscar is called to retrieve her. He’s been through this before – on their wedding night, only six months earlier, she attempted to kill herself.

The narrative moves between New York and London as Oscar seeks ways to alleviate Mina’s unhappiness, but she has struggled for many years and there is no simple answer. He becomes obsessive over her whereabouts and worries when she is left alone; she comes off her medication to “learn the floor plan of [her] sadness”. Then something snaps in Oscar and, using his father as an excuse to escape the situation, he crosses the Atlantic and goes to ground, leaving his suicidal wife to cope in a cheerless apartment.

I can’t claim to have ‘enjoyed’ reading Starling Days, it is far too gloomy a book to be pleasurable in any sense of the word, but it is well written and it held my interest throughout; I’ve no doubt many readers will find it relatable. However, while this may not be Rowan Hisayon Buchnan’s magnum opus, she is quite clearly a talented writer and one feels she is on the cusp of something special. A novelist to watch.

Earlier this year I read the moving memoir “Mind on Fire” in which the author recounts his experiences with manic-depression, suicidal thoughts and the destructive impact his mental health issues have upon his personal relationships. An experience similar to this is dramatically rendered in Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s new novel “Starling Days”. It’s the story of Mina and Oscar, a young married couple living in New York City who temporarily move to London so Oscar can help his father prepare some run-down properties for sale. But Mina struggles with feelings of sadness which threaten to overwhelm her and self-harm. Her issues with mental health are portrayed with equal weight against Oscar’s no less heartrending emotional negligence being born as an illegitimate child who seeks to forge a connection with his aging father. Amidst their struggles, Mina makes a strong romantic connection with Phoebe, a red-haired English blogger whose presence brightens the world for Mina when she begins to feel overwhelmed by a suffocating loneliness. It’s noteworthy how this novel realistically and sympathetically portrays the experiences of a bisexual character. But Buchanan portrays all her characters’ journeys and dilemmas with a great deal of sympathy that made me feel wholly connected to them.

This is only Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s second novel but I can already see she has a touching methodology in her fiction for portraying the lives of distinct individuals who are powerfully connected. Her first novel “Harmless Like You” depicts the lives of a mother and child in different periods of time. In a similar way, “Starling Days” gives equal weight to two characters’ perspectives and how their personal struggles create severe challenges in their relationship. But the author has a magnanimous way of rendering the daily reality of their situations without making any judgements. She conveys in their dynamic how there’s no perfect way to go about helping someone dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts. It’s not something that can be neatly fixed. It’s more like a balancing act between therapy, medication, attentive loved ones and an inner drive to continue. We see how Mina must consider these every day while also grappling with feeling like a burden because of her condition.

It feels as if Buchanan is slightly playing upon recent trends in literary fiction to invoke or retell Greco-Roman mythology through a modern perspective. In preparation for writing a tentative academic monograph Mina loosely researches stories of the few mythological women who survive in their tales since so many female mythological characters die through punishment, their own folly or cruel coincidence. Rather than creating her own fictional account of these women Buchanan references their stories amidst Mina’s own plight. It creates interesting points of comparison but also provides a poignant frame in which to see Mina’s journey as a literal struggle to survive amidst the beaconing hand of death. There’s also a playful sense that Mina is more able to understand the tragedy in these epic tales than the inscrutable complications found in modern life: “This world made so much more sense if it was filled with angry, hungry gods.”

As moving as I find Buchanan’s writing, she has an occasional tendency to needlessly complicate some sentences in order to emphasize the physicality of her characters’ movements. So she’ll write “Her hands picked up her phone” when she could have instead just written “She picked up the phone.” Or “His legs carried him down the stairs and to the hall” instead of “He went downstairs.” This clunky phraseology can be distracting. But overall her writing has a pleasing fluidity to it in evoking all the undercurrents of emotion within her characters’ lives as they navigate the world and interact with one another. This is most powerfully rendered in the dialogue and communication between characters who gradually disconnect from one another until the reader can feel the sad gulf which exists between them.

The novel poignantly considers the complications involved in relationships steered by dependencies that are emotional, financial and/or sexual. It’s not necessarily bad that such dependency exists because it necessitates a level of openness and vulnerability that’s needed in a strong relationship, but it can create a hierarchy and possessiveness which can impact upon people’s sense of self-worth. Fully accepting yourself while also truly loving someone else is difficult. “Starling Days” powerfully shows the nuance of such connections and it gives the story a rare clear-sighted honesty.

I think this will appeal to fans of the author's debut, Harmless Like You. It addresses some of the same themes, including depression/mental health, the importance of art and the difficulty of feeling that you have a split identity. It is compassionate and complicated. The simple story wasn't really to my personal taste, but I can see plenty for other readers to appreciate here.

I loved Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut novel, Harmless Like You, which focused on art dealer Jay and his estranged Japanese mother Yuki, flashing between Yuki's youth in 1960s New York and Jay's contemporary journey. What I found particularly fascinating about the way that Buchanan portrayed Yuki, who is determined to pursue a career as a visual artist, is that she hurts others so much precisely because she believes it’s impossible for her to have much impact on others’ lives; she believes nobody can really care about her. There’s something of that in Mina, the Chinese-American protagonist of Buchanan’s second novel, Starling Days; but unlike Yuki, I felt that we never really got to know Mina.

 Starling Days is a novel about clinical depression, self-harm, and suicide, and it felt right that I was reading it when I went to an exhibition about these themes by a female Chinese artist, Chen Ze, in the White Rabbit gallery in Sydney. However, I found it very difficult to engage with Mina’s state of mind for the majority of the text, especially because the narrative is split between her point of view and that of her husband Oscar; I wasn’t sure what Oscar’s sections added. Moreover, the novel starts with Mina thinking about her dual heritage (plus the Japanese last name she’s inherited from her husband, who is desperately trying to learn kanji through playing children’s games on the computer) and her bisexuality, but has very little to say about either. Instead, she feels so self-focused, which is unsurprising due to her illness but which doesn’t induce empathy in the reader.

The writing also felt off-kilter for much of Starling Days, which surprised me, because Harmless Like You was so on point. It often feels a bit try-hard; ‘a breeze ran through the tree, and the leaves applauded’… ‘a body in scrubs the colour of the swimming pool where she’d made her first tentative laps as a pre-schooler’,  while sometimes hitting the right note; ‘The river was as dark as poured tarmac’. Buchanan’s prose was really what carried Harmless Like You, so I was disappointed by the frequent clunkiness here.

Buchanan’s second novel reprises many of the themes from her first, Harmless Like You, including art, mental illness, and having one’s loyalties split across countries and cultures. Oscar and Mina have been together for over a decade, but their marriage got off to a bad start six months ago: on their wedding night Mina took an overdose, and Oscar was lucky to find her in time. The novel begins and ends with her contemplating suicide again; in between, Oscar takes her from New York City to England, where he grew up, for a change of scenery and to work on getting his father’s London flats ready to sell. For Mina, an adjunct professor and Classics tutor, it will be labeled a period of research on her monograph about the rare women who survive in Greek and Roman myth. But when work for his father’s Japanese import company takes Oscar back to New York, Mina is free to pursue her fascination with Phoebe, the sister of Oscar’s childhood friend.

Both Oscar and Mina have Asian ancestry and complicated, dysfunctional family histories. For Oscar, his father’s health scare is a wake-up call, reminding him that everything he has taken for granted is fleeting, and Mina’s uncertain mental and reproductive health force him to face the fact that they might never have children. Although I found this less original and compelling than Buchanan’s debut, I felt true sympathy for the central couple. It’s a realistic picture of marriage: you have to keep readjusting your expectations for a relationship the longer you’re together, and your family situation is inevitably going to have an impact on how you envision your future. I also admired the metaphors and the use of color.

The title is, I think, meant to refer to a sort of time outside of time when wishes can come true; in Mina’s case that’s these few months in London. Bisexuality is something you don’t encounter too often in fiction, so I guess that’s reason enough for it to be included here as a part of Mina’s story, though I wouldn’t say it adds much to the narrative. If it had been up to me, instead of birds I would have picked up on the repeated peony images (Mina has them tattooed up her arms, for instance) for the title and cover.

I was attracted to this book on NetGalley (my thanks to the publisher for approving my request) by two things. Firstly, the book blurb says, ”Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women.” and secondly a quote on the front cover says it is ”beautifully weird” (I like books that are beautiful or weird, so both together sounded great).

Unfortunately, having now completed the book, I am not sure where either of those descriptions comes from. Yes, it is true that Mina has mental health problems: the book starts with her walking over a bridge in New York and being unable to persuade police officers that she wasn’t planning to jump. The story moves on from there as she and husband Oscar move to London to give her opportunity to get away from things and build a recovery. And, yes, it is true that Mina is a classicist working on a paper about women in Greek mythology who survive. But the strand of the story that deals with mythological women is very under-developed which felt to me like an opportunity missed (I was surprised, given the blurb, that only about a dozen paragraphs in the whole book focussed on mythological women - it seemed that each time that subject got started, the chapter suddenly ended and the story moved on to something else).

And I know it might just be me and the other books I have read, but I failed to see anything at all weird about this story. Mina meets Phoebe. Mina is bisexual. Mina is attracted to Phoebe (as the blurb puts it ”…she finds a beam of light in a living woman.). I don’t quite see what is weird about that. And there certainly isn’t anything weird about redecorating some flats in London. Given that quote, I was expecting the characters, the story, the writing style or the structure to be “beautiful” or “weird” and none of them are. The story starts at the beginning and goes to the end via the middle - that’s not weird. The writing is straightforward story telling - certainly not weird.

I’m sounding a bit negative. That’s because the book wasn’t what I was expecting (and hoping for) based on the blurb. But, on the positive side, the actual story is fine.

The story we do get is a compassionately told study of a troubled mind mixed with a compassionately told study of a person who is married to someone with a troubled mind. We spend time with both the main characters, seeing things from both points of view even when they are physically separated. It is written in a very accessible way that flows through the story. It is not a cheerful story, but I can imagine that anyone who has experienced mental health problems themselves or in a relative or friend will relate to a lot of what Mina and Oscar think and feel.

There is nothing in this book that made me actively dislike it. But equally, there is nothing that made me excited as I read it. That’s the definition of 3 stars for me.

Starling Days is a novel about mental health, bisexuality, and how you can't be healed by a single person. Mina lives in New York City with her husband Oscar, who has to come and fetch her when she's found standing on the edge of a bridge and is unable to convince the officers she wasn't about to jump. A chance need for a trip and a desire to get away lead them to travel to London, where Oscar tries to sort out selling some flats for his father and Mina finds herself drawn to Phoebe, the sister of one of Oscar's oldest friends, whilst she tries to manage going off her medication.

This is a novel deeply about mental health, about how a person perceives their own illness and their suicidal thoughts, and how their husband both tries and fails to understand and to help. It doesn't shy away from looking at Mina's thought processes, but also tries to balance thoughts with narrative and with Mina and Oscar's different perspectives. Phoebe brings another crucial element, not only about attraction, but about how Mina hopes for someone who can bring the sun when she is feeling awful, only for that to not be as easy as it might seem. A thread about Mina's research into classical women who survive brings interesting parallels and also a comment on how women are treated, though it stays as a background thread rather than coming to the foreground.

Starling Days is moving, a sometimes blunt and sometimes understated novel that explores mental health and human relationships.

This book took me a while to get into, but by the end I found it completely absorbing. Oscar and Mina move to L:ondon in the hope that this will help with Mina's mental health problems, but they can't escape real life, and the stresses within their marriage, and within their own personalities. The book conjures up a real sense of what it is like to be a stranger in London, and whilst I felt that Mina's mental health issues were rather minimised, the central characters felt very believable.

Oscar and Mina are newlyweds who leave New York for London hoping it will help fix both their relationship and Mina's mental health issues.