Red Moon

Red Moon, by Benjamin Percy

When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is. 

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off of it, the only passenger left alive, a hero.

Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but he is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy.

So far, the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs.  But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge and the battle for humanity will begin.  

Okay, since the jacket isn't real helpful, here is a brief synopsis of Red Moon: a prion (which you may remember from Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, Lost World (or from real life, if you're into that instead of sci-fi)) infection spreads throughout the world's population, going back to the 700s or so, so that in the alternative present-day, the presentation of the disease, lycan, has led to an uneasy semi-stalemate between the two populations.  Percy has substituted key events in world history with lycan equivalents, from the settlement of a lycan-only home territory in the 1940s and 50s, to a lycan (rather than Weather Underground) Days of Rage in 1969.  Now, two young people, one the daughter of revolutionaries, the other the son of a man working towards a vaccine, and the sole survivor of a lycan terror attack on a plane (alterna- 9/11) find themselves trying to survive and navigate the impending clash of cultures. 

It's an interesting idea - looking at the birth and growth of our own world's turn towards suicide killers, revolutionaries rather than armies, and decades-long guerilla warfare through the lens of werewolves - but the book doesn't quite coalesce.  For one thing, it's all a little too pat.  Percy's substitutions - lycan Haymarket for Haymarket, lycan Tounela for Israel/Palestine and so on - act more as a sci-fi gimmick than a plausible history of his world.  Our own history happened for various complicated reasons - you can't just substitute werewolves for one half of every battle and think that's sufficient. I mean, the Weather Underground had ties to communism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and other revolutions across the world, and in Red Moon, it's basically just...lycanthropy.  Which begs the question (never really answered) - has everything else happened as we know it have happened?  Was there a Vietnam War?  A Korean War?  What about McCarthyism?  How about the Cuban Missile Crisis?  Are we to assume that some form of those momentous US events happened, but always with lycans on the other side?  Perhaps Percy expects us to draw from our own knowledge of history the belief that this all followed and happened naturally, but given the changes he's presented, I want to know how the WUO (here called the Revolution) started in Red Moon. As Marmaduke says in one what may be one of the worst movies ever made, "How did we come to this, Phil?"

Speaking of plausibility, I may not have traveled the Pacific Northwest extensively, but I'm pretty sure it's not the sort of place where people are constantly running into each other by happenstance.  I mean, in the last fifty pages of the book, Patrick finds his father's old vaccine co-worker, then runs into Claire after like, a two year absence, right when he's about to be airlifted out with the vaccine, and then they (and the band of angry Hispanic people that - you know what, don't even ask) get attacked by the President and government agent who killed Claire's parents just happens to be along for that ride as well and tracks Claire down in a final showdown. Really?  All  those people just happened to be in the same place at one time?  I mean, that's not even counting the way that Patrick and Claire met in the first place, or the way that Patrick literally stumbled across his MIA father while walking back to his military base.  If all I had to go on was Red Moon, I would pretty much think that the West Coast (not to mention the Russian/Finish border area) was about ten square miles, and had a population of 2,000, the way people keep running into each other.  And you may think that asking for plausibility in an alternate werewolf universe is stupid, but why go to the trouble of creating this setting, and making it so "gritty" and then being like, "And now I'm going to make all my main, secondary, and tertiary characters meet up!"  And the way that, like Rasputin before them, many of his characters are absolutely immune to bullets, stabbings, and vicious animal attacks.  It's like playing a game on cheat mode.  Not that characters don't die.  They do.  But like, some of these people, *coughPUCKcough* should really be succumbing to the throat-stabbing, multiple gunshot wound injuries they're sustaining here. 

And to top it off, after all this semi-commentary on the rise of the radical within, the book ends with a pure sci-fi/thriller moment.  I guess it is not entirely out of tone, but after all the build up, you kinda expect that the denouement will be more than just some impossible-to-kill villain sprinkling poison in your corn flakes.  At the very least, let the vaccine out and get the inevitable clash of those who are poisoned with those who seek treatment.  Maybe Percy thought that would echo too much the course of the X-Men movies, which has may of the same themes (but, oddly enough, in a more appropriate fashion - at least it doesn't pretend above its station) and has the same "if we can't beat 'em, make 'em just like us" plan.  But instead, after the great battle over the vaccine, we're left watching Patrick take the last dose, and knowing that it's all going to be irrelevant shortly anyway, since we'll all be lycan in a few months.  Or, I dunno, dead, I guess?  It was hard to figure that out, since they poisoned the original lycans before grinding up their bones to make the bread, and that stuff probably really travels through the food chain.  Like mercury poisoning.  It also begs the question - why did they bomb the shit out of the Tri-Cities if they were just going to infect everyone anyway?  Wouldn't a mass-scale infection like that be easier to spread if your infrastructure hadn't just had a bomb dropped on it?  Don't we want roads and shit to be working, and the military force safely focused on another country?

Percy's writing in Red Moon isn't bad - a little too simile filled, too descriptive-heavy, for my taste, but it does the job of getting the mood across very well.  Everything is ominous - it's not just blonde hair, it's seaweed spread across the beach at low tide, all the animals are all meaty or sinewy, voices are mucousy, glass splinters, adrenaline stabs, and mountains rise like fangs.  I think that if you want to enjoy Red Moon, it needs to be read for what it is - an alternative werewolf  history/thriller - rather than what it could be - sharp-edged commentary on our own political morass.  It's fairly gruesome, but mostly earned.  I'm just wishing that it made a bit more sense. 

Heads in Beds

Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of , by Jacob Tomsky

Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business.  As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans.  Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in "hospitality" for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel.  He's checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bedsheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money.  In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multibillion-dollar industry we think we know.

Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who's seen it all.  Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department's dirty little secrets - not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior.  Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it's like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more).  Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge.

Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle.  This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear.  Thanks to him, you'll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money  from putting heads in beds.  Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

Phew.  I feel like I just read the entire goddamned book again, typing that out. I think the jacket over-sells the "hilarious antics and seedy underbelly" aspect of the book.  From my end (which would be the end just having finished the entire thing and now trying to make some goddamn sense out of it) it feels more like a giant middle finger to the hotel managers, rather than trying to shock or titillate the public.  Which, I guess maybe some of it is shocking and/or titillating (although I mostly found that it was not wholly unexpected, just probably grosser) but that's not really the story he's telling here.  He's telling his own hero-journey along the bumpy path of hoteliering (not a word, don't even bother trying to look it up). 

My mother is actually the one who purchased Heads in Beds for me, because for some weird reason, she only buys me two (2) types of books: YA books that I've already read (sorry, mom) and non-fiction. Because I read so much slush (no slur, man, I love slush) the non-fiction I read is usually the non-fiction equivalent: true-crime (Death in White Bear Lake), big name books (In the Garden of Beasts), and like, travel books.  Which, I've learned so much about Iceland! Oh, and insider-y type books, you know Heat, Blood, Bones & Butter and Julie & Julia. Because I also love food, goddammit. 

I enjoyed Heads in Beds.  It has a good mix of eccentric characters, plot-line, and insider details.  Plus, Tomsky seems to understand that we don't really want to hear about how he spent a year living abroad in lah-di-da Paris, we want to hear about the time his manager called in sick to work from three floors up because she had done just a tad too much coke the night before. 

At one point, in a long paragraph of text, I found myself wanting to read it in more detail and not skim it, because I wanted to sort of...do right by the author.  Despite the petty grumbling and ostensible ickiness of the job, he endears himself to the reader, which can be a hard thing to do in a "tell-all" type book.  Given the level of snark displayed, I wouldn't have thought to sympathize with Tomsky as much as I did. Gentle readers, I will not lie to you.  I too once worked in the service industry.  And by "once worked" I mean I still do, but not in that soul-crushing see-fifty-customers-an-hour way that underpins our most basic transactions.  And it gave me a profound insight into the service industry: Don't treat your servicers like shit.  There - I just gave you one of life's most important mottos. 

There is just a relationship between the customer and the worker that people who have never worked often fail to understand.  There is an even weirder relationship between customers and waiters that I admittedly don't understand, because I do know that waiting tables is thankless, and I have been fortunate enough not to have to do it.  But people who have not worked do not realize that this is a symbiotic relationship.  Even in something as simple as a cash-for-goods transaction, you can achieve better or worse levels of service, often depending on your own behavior.  Employees are rarely shitheads to absolutely everyone.  We have favorites.  And the best way to be a favored customer is to be nice (and to be a goddamned regular, because if you're just passing through, you can handle it impersonal).  I still, even after 10+ years, remember a certain customer's name and face, so that every time he paid (by check, always) I had it in the system and could refrain from asking for ID, making his check-out just that bit faster and smoother.

This whole book is, like True Porn Clerk Stories (by Ali Davis, another great addition to the annals of the service worker, and one more true of my own experience) telling people what they should already know: be decent, and you might get some unexpected (or expected) benefits.  Everything the Tomsky (and Davis) say is true: everyone has had that terrible customer who, once gone, magically makes every following customer as sweet as honey.  Everyone has had to learn to lie, lie, lie to customers, because the truth does not always set you free: sometimes the truth just pisses someone the fuck off. 

Heads in Beds (which I am strenuously trying to avoid typing as Beds in Heads, although my fingers much prefer that version) is basically one man's Icarus flight: rising slowly ( or quickly, it's hard to get a good sense of time) through the hotel ranks only to fly too close to the sun, to give in to the urge to stick it to management just a little too much, and the subsequent fall from grace.  Here, thanks to the union (almost a deus ex in Heads in Beds, as they tend to be) Tomsky's descent is cut short, but you're definitely left with the feeling that this isn't going to take long to boil over again.  I can only hope that he's left the hotel business before he ends up murdering someone (management being more likely than a guest, because that is how the service industry works - guests come and go, but your bosses are dicks forever). 

I appreciated Heads in Beds less for the cheat-the-system advice (free minibar, free movies!) and more for the ethos.  There is an art to good service, an underappreciated art to anticipating needs, oiling the machinery and generally working the behind the scenes magic that goes undetected by the customer.  While there isn't any particular secret to writing a good tell-all (and there definitely needs to be a better description for these types of books than memoirs or tell-alls.  Sometimes these aren't tell-alls, and generally they're not lengthy/scholastic enough for me to think of them as "memoirs"), Tomsky gets the job done in fine journeyman style.  I don't know that you need it in permanent format, but if you're looking for a quick, fun read while you're waiting for a deliveryman to please hurry up and drop off this bookcase so I can maybe plan a trip to the grocery store later then I would say it's a great choice.  

EEEEEEEEBOLA! Double Header

Outbreak, by Robin Cook

A gripping medical drama that focuses on outbreaks of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, a deadly virus. Dr. Melissa Blumenthal, a Centers for Disease Control investigator, is thrust into the center of each seemingly unrelated outbreak. She slowly unravels the mystery of the virus and the conspiracy of doctors behind the growing crisis. (From School Library Journal)

The Hot Zone, By Richard Preston

The virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard experts are terrified.  It is airborne, it is extremely contagious, and it is about to burn through the suburbs of a major American city.  Is there any way to stop it?

In the winter of 1989, at an Army research facility outside Washington, D.C., this doomsday scenario seemed like a real possibility.  A SWAT team of soldiers and scientists wearing biohazard space suits had been organized to stop the outbreak of an exotic "hot" virus.  The grim operation went on in secret for eighteen days, under dangerous conditions for which there was no precedent. 

OOooo, one of these books is not like the other!  In the sense that Outbreak is fiction, and also, not very good, whereas The Hot Zone is non-fiction, and nightmarish.  I checked out Outbreak because I was in the mood for a mystery thriller, and I guess in that sense Outbreak lived up to the hope.  But the premise collapses in on itself about two-thirds of the way in, and the terrible, horrible, no-good ending is just....awful.  But I was intrigued by the opening chapter of Outbreak, which deals with the original Zaire Ebola outbreak, so I decided to get The Hot Zone, which goes into the history of the virus in more detail, and I was not disappointed in that.  But let me back up.


Outbreak is about a woman in the CDC who gets sent on missions to contain what turn out to be Ebola outbreaks in cities around the U.S.  We meet her CDC pals, the two guys she's hooking up with, her boss, and the first victim of the outbreak.  Then all hell breaks loose.  That part is fine.  It's a mystery!  Why is Ebola infecting the index cases?  So many questions!  Then.  THEN.  It begins to go off the rails.  First, her boss sexually harasses her.  Big-time.  This guy, (Dubchek) tells her his wife is dead, then asks if she's dating anyone, and she says no, and he's all, let's get back to work, then:

That sounded good to Marissa.  She stood up and went over to the coffee table to pick up her papers.  As she straightened up, she realized that Dubchek had come up behind her.  Before she could react, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around.  The action so surprised her that she stood frozen.  For a brief moment their lips met.  Then she pulled away, her papers dropping to the floor.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't planning that at all, but ever since you arrived at CDC I've been tempted to do that.  God knows I don't believe in dating anyone I work with, but it's the first time since my wife died that I've really been interested in a woman.  You don't look like her at all - Jane was tall and blond - but you have that same enthusiasm for your work.  She was a musician, and when she played well, she had that exact same expression I've seen you get."

Marissa was silent.  She knew she was being mean, that Dubchek certainly had not been harassing her, but she felt embarrassed and awkward, and was unwilling to say something to ease over the incident.

"Marissa," he said gently, "I'm telling you that I'd like to take you out when we get back to Atlanta, but if you're involved with Ralph or just don't want to . . ." his voice trailed off.

Marissa bent down and picked up her notes. "If we're going back to the hospital, we'd better get going now," she said curtly.

He stiffly followed her to the elevator.  Later, sitting silently in her rent-a-car, Marissa berated herself.  [Dubchek] was the most attractive man she'd met since Roger.  Why had she behaved so unreasonably?

Like, what just happened here?  That was definitely harassment.  That feeling of embarrassment and awkwardness?  Is because your boss hit on you and you are now in the awful position of having to say no to someone with control over your job. The only unreasonable thing you did was not immediately get on the horn and get this sleaze written up.

THEN.  Her boss is an absolute DICK.  Since she "behaved so unreasonably," he ignores her when she's working and trying to talk over the details of the outbreaks with him, so that she can't do her job properly (which is to assess and control the situation and work out how it started), he refuses to allow her access to the lab which might answer some of her questions on the basis that she's "not qualified" (i.e., hasn't touched his dick), hangs up on her in the middle of work calls, and is a general all-around asshole.  Meanwhile, Marissa doesn't report him to HR, instead, she spends the book alternately kicking herself because that Dubchek, he's so dreamy!  Why didn't she take him up on his super offer!  And then believing that he's the one who's setting the Ebola loose, then, once she founds out (spoiler!) that he's not, she does this:

"So when will you be coming back to the CDC?" asked Dubchek.  "We've already gotten you clearance for the maximum containment lab." This time there was no doubt about his grin. "No one relished the thought of your stumbling around in there at night anymore."

Marissa blushed in spite of herself. "I haven't decided yet.  I'm actually considering going back into pediatrics."

"Back to Boston?" Dubchek's face fell.

"It will be a loss to the field," said Dr. Fakkry.  "You've become an international epidemiological hero."

"I'll give it more thought," promised Marissa.  "But even if I do go back to pediatrics, I'm planning on staying in Atlanta." She nuzzled her new puppy.  There was a pause, then she added, "But I've one request."

"If we can be of any help..." said Dr. Fakkry.

Marissa shook her head.  "Only [Dubchek] can help on this one.  Whether I go back to pediatrics or not I was hoping he'd ask me to dinner again."

Dubchek was taken off guard.  Then, laughing at Fakkry's bemused expression, he leaned over and hugged Marissa to his side.

WHOA.  I was - somewhat - prepared for this, having read reviews of Outbreak but COME ON.  WHAT THE FUCK, ROBIN COOK?  This guy deserved to be reported to his superiors for what he did, and you decide to hit on him in front of another work colleague?  Can't say you don't belong together, I guess.  PLUS, this was after she used one of her hook-ups for his connections to the lab (repeatedly) and then when he put his foot down on that (because she kept causing problems) she was like, I think you're the one who is killing all these people. Later, when they break up, and Dubchek decides to get her fired in revenge, you can't say she wasn't warned. 

God, the whole plot just didn't make sense.  The doctors were being murdered because they were HMO hospitals?  Seriously?  There's such a problem with pre-pay medical services?  Plus, if everyone else was on the corporate Board of Doom, how come (spoiler!) Ralph, her other hook-up, wasn't?  I mean, he was clearly in on it.  Was his name not in the records for any good reason, or just because it would have made the book even less suspenseful?  And how come she kept announcing where she was going even though she knew people were following her? And she would announce it to the bad guys, KNOWING they were the bad guys (as opposed to when she'd tell the guys she thought were good, but were actually bad) and then be all surprised when hired assassins show up at her next destination.

AND!  When she got hit with the Ebola gun, then couldn't get to the "antibodies" in time, so she was just like, "Well, guess I'm going to...not check in to a hospital for treatment or sequester myself, but instead travel as widely as possible so that if I am infected,  I can kill the maximum number of people."  What an asshole.

Although, to be fair, that is apparently what REAL PEOPLE do in outbreaks, too.  Let's segue into The Hot Zone! Question time!  Did you know that Ebola is approximately sixteen times more deadly than yellow fever? Did you know that it has no cure, no inoculation, no antibodies, and no treatment? Did you know that your insides liquify and you can vomit so much black miasma that the skin on your tongue starts to come off? Did you know that I had terrible terrible dreams after reading The Hot Zone?  Are you surprised by that?

The Hot Zone is a fascinating book about a real outbreak of a (thankfully, non-deadly to humans) strain of Ebola near Washington, D.C.  It's kind of an oddly structured book, since the first couple of sections are about viral hemorrhagic fevers in general, their entry into the modern world, and basically setting the stage for why we're all so severely fucked if Ebola goes airborne (which, it.. kinda already is, to some degree).

The strain that lies at the heart of The Hot Zone was, like the prior known strains of Ebola and Marburg, initially found in primates.  Once discovered in the monkey house, it's interesting to see how everyone reacted: INAPPROPRIATELY.  Hand to god, these two lab technicians sniffed a petri dish full of ebola, and then when they found out what it was they were like, "Uh, I'm not going to say anything.  If I feel sick, maybe I'll check myself in to the hospital then."  SERIOUSLY.  Reading The Hot Zone made me terribly afraid of our quarantine measures.  People who should have known better: doctors, nurses, people who work with these contagious, deadly viruses, all of them, completely disregarded others' safety in the interest of not disrupting their own plans.  Not a single person 'fessed up to possible infection even after: blood got into "space suits" (used to protect against contamination), sniffing ebola, operating on ebola victims.  The one person who was kind of thoughtful about the human race was a man who, after possibly getting infected in a Sudan outbreak, decided to stay behind and keep working on saving lives.  After he never developed symptoms, he went back home again.  But no else did.  They all decided to take the risk that this unknown strain of Ebola could infect and decimate the population.

Which, thankfully, it did not.  But it does concern me that there's this apparent tendency to just - go on like nothing's happened.  I guess some of the reasoning is that if you anticipate it, Ebola isn't as contagious in the early stages, so you can always check yourself in later.  But what a risk to take, not just for you, but for people around you.  I was discussing this with my mother, who mentioned that she read a book that said something similar happened with Typhoid Mary - she wasn't originally restrained, but simply asked not to be a cook anymore.  She left her job, but came back because she didn't like being a laundress, apparently still not quite connecting the dots that led to her killing and harming a number of people.  Asymptomatic carriers are real things, and the disregard of safety by people who would be expected to know better was one of the scarier parts of the book.

Not to be diminished, of course, by the descriptions of the disease on physical flesh.  I found this to be morbidly fascinating.  I simply had never heard of the effects and the danger of Ebola, I guess I thought it was more like, malaria, or yellow fever, or japanese encephalitis, any one of those strange diseases that you plan around when taking trips (although maybe I should have shelled out for that vaccine after all!). The practitioners and people who do work to ensure that the infected are cared for and risk their lives are to be commended.  Certainly there are brave people in The Hot Zone, who walked into a steaming zoo of Ebola to contain and prevent contagion.  It's an interesting, fascinating book, one which I have taken to bringing up in all my conversations this last week.  "Oh, you live near Washington, D.C.?  Did you know they had an Ebola outbreak?" "You know what Ebola does to you?  No?  Let me tell you!"

Good reading, and good dreaming.



  

Moonraker's Bride

Moonraker's Bride, by Madeleine Brent

Born in a Mission in China, Lucy Waring finds herself with fifteen small children to feed and care for. The way she tackles this task leads to her being thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu, where she meets Nicholas Sabine - a man about to die. He asks her a cryptic riddle, the mystery of which echoes through all that befalls her in the months that follow... She is brought to England and tries to make a new life with the Gresham family, but she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the bitter feud between the Greshams and a neighboring family. There is danger, romance and heartache for Lucy as strange events build to a point where she begins to doubt her own senses. How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? And who carried her, unconscious, into the labyrinth of Chiselhurst Caves and left her to die? It is not until she returns to China that Lucy finds, amid high adventure, the answer to all that has baffled her.

Aha, so I was actually reading Shiver when this book arrived, and I picked it up and read, like, the first three pages, and decided, eff it, I'ma just read the whole thing in one go.  SO WORTH IT. I think it was that moment when Lucy is like, "I know that I could have one of my hands cut off for stealing, but there is no other way to get enough money to feed my little Chinese orphans.  But Ms. Prothero would be so upset.  WELP, JUST GONNA HAVE TO LIE TO HER, THEN, I GUESS." And then heads out like a boss to go thieving (and gets thrown in jail and has adventures)!  I have decided that I have a new (old) favorite archetype: the lady who Gets Shit Done.  Like, yes, you are in a sticky situation, and everything is going to hell, but you have to keep doing the best you can with what you got.  Lady, I salute you.

So Moonraker's Bride, despite it's terrible 1970s title and windswept cover, is actually pretty enjoyable.  Like, good enough that I did, for a brief moment go, "Would it be cheaper to just pay the library fine than buy it online?" because it is hella expensive.*  But then I would deprive other card members of the glory that is Moonraker's Bride.  But.  I was tempted, is what I'm saying (mostly because I am also hella cheap).

I will admit, Moonraker's Bride is not, like, the Decameron, okay?  Ain't no one going to be writing their thesis on it (I hope, geez).  But it is a stellar example of the romantic suspense category, I mean, you've got exotic settings, mysterious treasures, riddles, uptight English people, and an arranged jail marriage (which is not as gross as it sounds).  And I know this sounds like faint praise, but I thought the book would be super-racist (as many of those era are) and I did not find it to be so (note that more sensitive people may disagree). 

Hand to god, I liked just about everything about it, but especially Lucy - she plays a good martyr, and mostly tries not to rock the boat, but at the same time, when shit needs doin', she gets it done.  There's a scene in which a little boy is lost in a snow-storm, and Lucy is the only one who might know where he is, but her patronizing patron won't listen to her, and does she wail into some nice fellow's waistcoat until he goes out and saves the day?  No, she puts on her big girl pants (literally) and walks through a blizzard to rescue this kid.  Also, words cannot express my delight at the dinner scene wherein she believes that she was brought over to England to be a concubine. 

Brent's books (and I have to admit, I went out and immediately read two more after this one, Golden Urchin and Stormswift (not as good, sadly, but still a fun time)) follow a fairly basic pattern: accommodating, yet stalwart heroine, usually raised or living in a distant and exotic location, is brought back to civilization, i.e. England, and deals with people trying to kill her, romance, and overcomes an obstacle which only she, with her unique background, can surmount.  Also, any extraneous people in a love triangle (whether with the heroine or not) are summarily killed before the book ends, either because the author reeeeeeally dislikes loose ends, or he went through some early high-school trauma that has led him to believe that death is easier than facing rejection.  [Yes, apparently Madeleine Brent is a pseudonym for a Peter O'Donnell, but don't let that dissuade you]. 

So this particular book just hits all the right spots for me - I have a serious weak spot for Chinese orphans and lady missionaries who care for them after watching The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (I know, I'm embarrassed for me, too) and arranged marriages which basically start off as the strangest method of charitable donation ever, but turn out to be true love.  The book did drag a little in the middle (if by drag, you mean mysterious night visitors, feuding neighbor families, bonfires, cave kidnappings, secret butler fathers and snowy rescues) after Lucy tries to accustom herself to English life, but picks right up again after her presumed-dead husband comes back.  Then the book takes a CRAZY turn for the awesome when Lucy and her father-in-law go tramping through China in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion.  I would watch the shit out of the tv-movie, is what I'm saying here. 

Honestly, if you're not already convinced, I don't know what else to say to get you to go out and procure your own copy.  I mean, more for me, I guess.  But if you're looking for some enjoyable escapist literature, I don't think you can go wrong here. 



*(It would totally save me, like $20, but then they might take my card away.  Also, I feel like that behavior is particularly frowned upon when committed by a member of the library's board of trustees.  Whoops!)

Gone Girl

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary.  Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.  Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge.  Under mounting pressure from the police and the media - as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents - the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior.  Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter - but is he really a killer?

As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love.  With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence.  Trouble is, if Nick didn't do it, where is that beautiful wife?  And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

I know everyone and their mother, or least I and my mother, has read this book, and I am very late to the game.  I blame the library hold list, and my mother, for not lending me her copy (SIDENOTE FAX: I read this interesting piece (linking to this more in-depth article) which, inter alia, says that English is to blame for all the blame going around - our language prefers the active tense of "My mother took the book" to the passive "The book was taken." THE MORE YOU KNOW.  I can't help pointing fingers, you're the one who taught me English! Also known as the Twinkie defense).  

ANYWAY, I read it and I really liked it.  It's a basic beach read, actually, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable.  This is formulaic (that formula would be, more or less, (The Bad Seed + The Good Son) x (Drew Peterson + Jennifer Wilbanks) + Elvis Costello's Watching the Detectives and a dash of War of the Roses - the 1989 movie, not the Plantagenet fights in the 1400s - Mix well, let simmer for four hours and serve), but even though it evokes all manner of associations, it never feels tired.  Flynn has created an entirely distinct body of work, one which still manages to seem (sort of) plausible, even given the outrageousness of the story.  It's suspenseful in the right parts, and manages to build through somewhat increasingly crazy plot twists without coming off as totally unrealistic. 

There really ain't no way to talk about Gone Girl without mentioning spoilers...a lot of spoilers.  So beware, all ye who enter here. 

I was (possibly more than I should have been) extremely gratified to find out that my early supposition was correct: Amy is a lot smarter than Nick.  While both are obviously fairly morally deficient, Flynn does a good job of making you root for both characters: because they're both so reprehensible, you get a thrill each time one of them gets one over on the other.

The first half of the book ("Boy Loses Girl") really draws you in - although it's much slower paced, as it details both the first days following Amy's disappearance, as well as diary entries dating back years.  You're presented with Nick, beginning to flounder in the face of his spiraling lies, and you feel not just suspicion, but also contempt.  Regardless of whether Nick did or didn't do it, you begin to think, he's behaving so stupidly he almost deserves what's going to happen to him.  That feeling is assisted by Amy's diary, which manages to juggle an almost impossible variety of goals: from Amy's perspective, the need to create plausible and yet completely fake entries, ones which tie in both what we the reader (and by proxy, the police) know and believe of Nick, and from Flynn's perspective, creating a vision of Amy which both allays suspicion against her and makes her unlikeable - and not just unlikeable, but unlikeable in such a way that it is believable and yet distasteful, and even though you kind of hate the diary-Amy, you still wouldn't want her to die.  I mean, she might be kind of a self-centered shrew in disguise, but at least she's not a mope like Nick.  And yet, that is exactly the goal of Amy herself - to make you sympathize with her, even while she admits her own faults.  I think this is one of Flynn's strongest areas, creating a layered story-line that holds up to alternate views without collapsing (even if the layers aren't all that complicated, it still took some fine maneuvering).  

I was actually sort of falling asleep in the first half of the book (it was past my bedtime) and  I have to say, once you get past that point at the end of the first half (you'll know the one I mean) the rest of it goes down like (okay, I was going to make a joke about diarrhea here, but let's just leave that to the imagination).  Smoothly, let's put it at that.  I found myself siding with Amy even more, at least while she played her cards right.  I can't resist a nice, competent, get-shit-done lady!  Even when she's a sociopath, I guess.  The tide begins to turn when she reneges on her original plan (never go back, Amy, you planned so well!) and makes two - no, make that three* - crucial errors.  Then you're back on Nick's side, hoping that he'll come out on top against his malevolent wife.

Niggling complaints:  in any mystery, there's going to be points at which you go, well, what about THAT plothole, huh, because it is much easier to criticise than to create.  Here, there's a couple of details that I'm still wondering about, since everything else was done so expertly:  How was everything purchased and delivered to the woodshed?  $200,000 of things comes to quite a bit - did Amy buy it all online, and, if so, how was it delivered?  Couldn't the UPS man have testified that he delivered a package a week to Amy alone, and never saw hide nor hair of Nick?  Or if purchased in person, wouldn't Amy have had to sign for it? Was she an expert forger, too?  So that's out there.  Another is why wouldn't they have found traces of sleeping pills in Desi?  His mother certainly seems like someone who could have put up enough stink to get an inquest, and if so, how would Amy have explained slitting the throat of a drugged and comatose man?  [On the other side, it's possible that with a "burning bed" defense argument, Amy would have successfully passed a trial anyway, and Flynn decided to skip it for narrative purposes, but it seems sort of sloppy in a book where everything else is plotted out meticulously]  And finally, Nick's decision to stay with Amy for the sake of the baby is asinine, since I'm pretty sure that living with Amy is going to screw that kid regardless of whether or not he has Nick playacting as a loving husband in the background.  CUT YOUR LOSSES AND RUN, NICK!  But he doesn't, and in the end you think that much less of him.  Gosh, you think, after you finish the last section, Nick's going to find himself six feet deep in six months, and I can't bring myself to feel bad.  Maybe Amy had a point, after all.  I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to say that even though he never does, the ending is still satisfying, since, after all, if Nick has made that bed, then he damn well better lie in it, and he does. 

Oh, and also?  Not following through on your plan to commit suicide and thus ensure that your husband goes to jail forever in some gigantic "Fuck you" which you wouldn't even be alive to see happen anyway?  Weak. I like my sociopaths to really go all out, Amy.




*Falling in with Greta and Jeff; allowing herself to get caught by Desi; falling for Nick's televised pleas; although frankly, the first is the only one that she doesn't manage to make lemonade out of lemons.  And given how Gone Girl ends, you could argue that everything wraps up just as she would want it to, anyway.   

Grave Mercy

Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers

Escaping from the brutality of an arranged marriage, seventeen year-old Ismae finds sanctuary at the convent of St. Mortain, where the sisters still serve the gods of old.  Here she learns that the god of Death himself has blessed her with dangerous gifts - and a  violent destiny.  If she chooses to stay at the convent, she will be trained as an assassin and serve as handmaiden to Death.  To claim her new life, she must be willing to take the lives of others.

Ismae's most important assignment takes her straight into the high court of Brittany, where she must pose as mistress to the darkly mysterious Gavriel Duval, who has fallen under a cloud of suspicion.  Once there, she finds herself woefully underprepared - not only for the deadly games of love and intrigue, but for the impossible choices she must make.  For how can she deliver Death's vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?

So Grave Mercy has gotten quite a few good reviews, and I guess I am a little hard pressed to say why. It's fine, don't get me wrong, but it's not a miracle of writing, and there are quite a few things I really didn't enjoy about it.  It begins with Ismae's very short-lived marriage (which, since I'm pretty sure she never gets divorced, means she's still married throughout the book.  Which: odd).  Soon enough, her new husband discovers that she has some serious scar/birthmark issues going on, and decides that she needs to be burned at the stake - I get that the birthmark means that the god of Death is her father, but why that is such a huge problem is not really ever explained.  So the local herbwitch smuggles her out to the convent where she can accept her destiny as La Femme Nikita, 1485-style, or marry some random guy.  Hmm, tough decision.

So in the convent she finds out that she is immune to poison, and I am already sensing that the Mary Sue is strong with this one.  It's a feeling that lasts much longer than it should, considering.  She meets some other novitiates, trains up, and goes out on her first assignment, and let me tell you, this girl thinks she is hot shit.  I don't know what kind of brainwashing they do at the convent, but there is way too much of "Kill first, ask questions later" for Ismae to be as confident as she is.  She's on her first assignment!  Which she almost screws up.  I don't care how much you train, when you go out into the real world and are expected to produce results for the first time, you get nervous.  And I think it's flaw in the character that she's not nervous - it makes her seem stupid, for not being nervous, and it makes her harder to relate to. 

The second place I got tripped up at is when she gets sent out with this Gavriel Duval guy on assignment.  Why this chick gets sent out with him is beyond me.  She has gone on a total of two (2) assignments, both of which she very narrowly avoided botching, and, as we discover later, she is both unprepared for real world scenarios, and totally susceptible to deeply wounded backstories.  It would make sense if (PLOT SPOILERS UP AHEAD) as we discover later, Crunard's master plan involves somehow using a novitiate assassin as some sort of  scape goat.  But he's not, as far as I can tell.  Why the abbess didn't insist on sending someone with a) more experience and b) more loyalty to the convent, I just don't know.  I understand that Crunard was the bad guy, and he was using the abbess as well, but it's kind of like, either she totally trusts Crunard, which, since we're told to suspect anyone else, I don't know why he would be above suspicion, or she doesn't, in which case, she needs to tell Ismae to watch out for everyone.  By not uniting against Crunard, the only thing the convent accomplished is alienating Ismae, who, although probably not their star pupil, still represents a significant amount of time and energy spent molding her into this ninja assassin. 

Do not even get me started on the poisons and the weapons.

Plus, I could not figure out if this convent is supposed to be well-known, secret, or what?  Like, I am so sure that the court of Brittany just allows these ladies to train young women as killers. VERY PLAUSIBLE.  And yet, everyone seems to know what the convent of St. Mortain means.  So, I guess, that like, no one is concerned that there's a gaggle of assassins running around? And no one thinks it would be a good idea to maybe...send them off to kill a bunch of people in France?  I guess I'm just confused about this whole target thing, which may end up being better explained in later books: if the god is picking targets, why is he so focused on like, state politics?  I understand that apparently a free Brittany = continued worship, but (1) that doesn't even sound like it's right, since the new duchess of Brittany totally says that Mortain is a saint, not a god, implying that the leader of Brittany doesn't support the old gods as is anyhow, and (2) I would think that just knowing that there's a pack of wild young ladies avenging wrongs in the name of Mortain would be enough to make people leery of not doing their best to stay on his good side. And if he's not picking targets, then why the visions and the marque and all that? It just feels very thin.

Okay, and before I try to temper this review with why the book is "fine", I want to get one more thing out of my system: lack of humor.  I mean, this book needs some levity, and it doesn't even have to be like, Ismae cracking out wicked bad puns after she kills someone, a la James Bond.  I just mean, like, banter, or something a little bit to relieve the unending tension. 

Okay: things I liked: I enjoyed the idea that there was a closeness between the three new novitiates, although honestly, it was more of a tell than a show.  Because the book necessarily skips quite a bit of training time, I feel like the scenes in which Annith, Ismae, and Sybella really bond get left by the wayside.  I mean, we see Ismae talk Sybella off the ledge (figuratively and literally) and then the next thing we know, Sybella's been off on a month's long assignment, and while I did get a sense that the three were close, I felt that part could have been stronger.  (So it's a back handed compliment, so what?) 

I also liked how the book ended - given that there are, as I said, three new novitiates, and this is a planned trilogy, I don't think I'm reaching too far to say that each book will center on one of them.  The next one is Sybella, I believe.  So Grave Mercy did a good job of wrapping up Ismae's story line and getting her to a place of, if not absolute resolution, at least temporary resting so that we can look in on the other girls and see how they're doing.  I am intrigued by the other two ladies, and while it's never a good idea to want to know more about a secondary character than the primary one, it does at least bode well for follow-up books.

So it's a fairly standard book, not offensive, but the focus on the relationship between Gavriel and Ismae to the detriment of world-building is both a strength and a weakness: strength in the sense that there are many questions and avenues for the next two books, weak in the sense that you just get a sense of absurdity  and implausibility about some of it. And in a world where fourteen year old girls get sent to assassin training school in medieval France, you need to ensure you keep as much plausibility as you can or else the whole thing is a three ring circus.

The Brides of Rollrock Island

The Brides of Rollrock Island, by Margo Lanagan

On remote Rollrock Island, men make their living - and fetch their wives - from the sea.  The witch Misskaella knows how to find the girl at the heart of a seal.  She'll coax a beauty from the beast for any man, for a price.  And what man wouldn't want a sea-wife, to have and to hold, and to keep by his side forever?

But though he may tell himself that he is the master, one look in his new bride's eyes will transform him just as much as it changes her.  Both will be ensnared - and the witch will look on, laughing. 

I've re-started this review, like, five times, and you all are damn lucky that I did because this morning I was high on some fabulous music, and that never turns out well.  A whole lotta shakin' goin' on.  I've gotten pretty far from the mood I was in when I finished this book, a week ago.  I definitely thought that more time would assist in my writing a "review" but clearly that was a wash. 

Moving on:  So TBoRI, henceforth to be abbreviated to. . . Bride Island.  Because nothing says appreciation like being too lazy to fully type out a title.  And I did appreciate this book!  Actually, I had bypassed it in the library because the description and the cover (I know, I know, never judge a book by its cover, what up) kinda said "melodramatic teen girl dramaz" and I was not in the mood for it.  But my momma recommended it, and momma says, baby do. 

The book starts with a brief vignette, before going back in time to Misskaella's youth - the constant teasing and comments from her siblings and townsfolk, condemning her for her otherness (apparently, the entire island is redheaded and kinky, except for Misskaella, which begs the question of how closely related they all are that a recessive gene is town gossip). So anyhow, Misskaella doesn't really fit in, and people give her crap all the time about how she is shaped like a seal, which means that when she is left without financial support, she doesn't really care two hoots about the probable negative consequences to creating human ladies out of seals for the horny menfolk.  (This review is getting out of hand, y'all. BUT I CAN'T STOP).

Okay, the good part of this book is that things will happen, and you'll kinda go, "How are we going to extricate ourselves from this sitch?" Because each step in this path just gets more and more untenable.  From drawing brides out of the seals, to the women abandoning their former husbands on the island, to the sealbaby hybrids growing up and there being no daughters and and and.  It's just not a workable long term plan is what I'm saying.  And yet each new development comes naturally, and never at any point do you go, Well, If I had a deus ex machina, I could get away with some crazy shit too.  It's of a piece.  There is not one false note, one piece which removes you from the story and makes you question it.  To be awfully maudlin, you are wrapped up in the tale as much as the mams are wrapped up in skins. 

TBoRI is an interesting look at gender politics.  I maintain that the reason the men were so transfixed by the selkies is that there was witch magic involved as well, but my mother thinks that the men were simply weak willed.  The difference between an optimist and a pessimist, I think.  It's hard to forget that horrifying scene wherein the men begin bringing back the selkies wholesale, and the father reveals that he's been stashing this selkie in a small back shed next to the house where his wife and children live.  It definitely hearkens to those awful sex slavery cases in real life, and Connie Willis' All My Darling Daughters, where you're sacrificing a creature not fully human to sexual abuse and base desires. Some people complain that of all the perspectives in the narrative (variously the witch, a child, and a man) there is none which comes from the brides themselves.  I think it's well done, because the brides themselves are so wholly disenfranchised, so completely without recourse or a voice in the chain of events which occur.  One of the only times we see a selkie taking her own initiative, she is running into the sea, killing herself over her heartbreak. 

When you finish, you feel as though you've learned something, but it's hard to say exactly what that is - be kinder, perhaps, to the ones around you, don't hold onto to something so hard that you choke the life out of it - if you love something, set it free.  Even after the great pied piper migration, after things begin re-setting themselves, you wonder at whether things have really changed. It's clear that some men are still so hard as to be glad that their former brides are being hunted as animals and rendered down, as Lanagan puts it. 

The book is balanced such that it's poetical enough to seem a dream, but real enough to stick with you after you close it.  It's the mark of a well-written book that a simple, toss-away phrase in the first page strikes you so much that you hold it in mind for the rest of the book.  When I was looking for it again, I almost couldn't find it, it was so wrapped up in a paragraph.  It's a far cry from some books which are only keeping me half interested, skimming and skipping over the prose. You feel salted afterwards, so real is the sea breeze.

So, TBoRI is a wonder, sure enough, though as I expressed to my mother, it did not make me sob, and therefore, was not close to catching Jellicoe Road in my heart.  It is hard enough to forget, that's for sure.  And certainly not a teen melodrama at all. And let that be a lesson to you: listen to your mama, and if she yearns for the sea, let her be.

Cinder

Cinder, by Marissa Meyer

Sixteen year-old Cinder is considered a technological mistake by most of society and a burden by her step-mother.  Being cyborg does have its benefits, though: Cinder's brain interface has given her an uncanny ability to fix things (robots, hovers, her own malfunctioning parts) making her the best mechanic in New Beijing.  This reputation brings Prince Kai himself to her weekly market booth, needing her to repair a broken android before the annual ball.  He jokingly calls it a "matter of national security," but Cinder suspects it's more serious than he's letting on.

Although eager to impress the prince, Cinder's intentions are derailed when her younger sister, and only human friend, is infected with the fatal plague that's been devastating Earth for a decade.  Blaming Cinder for her daughter's illness, Cinder's step-mother volunteers Cinder for plague research an "honor" that no one has survived.  But it doesn't take long for scientists to discover something unusual about their new guinea pig.  Something others would kill for.

Okay, is it sad that this now counts as more posts in one month than in all of last year?  What a shallow pool!  Anyhow, Cinder!  I will say this: I was not particularly heartened by the reviews I read of this, but what I realllllly wanted to read was the forthcoming sequel, Scarlet (which will not be published until,  hmm, February, although that has not stopped an alarming number of young ladies from posting gif-filled reviews on goodreads based on ARCs.  Screw cyborgs, in the future, all communication will take place via gifs) but you gotta read Cinder first, so read it I did.

Okay, so, just to forewarn you, this review is going to be a lot of "spoilers" (it's in quotes for a reason), and a lot of "I want my fairy tale fantasies to have more reality, myah!" (just go ahead and imagine that whole sentence in Skeletor-voice).  So, Cinder (for reasons other than the fact that hundreds of adaptations and variations have been published on roughly the same storyline for hundreds of years) is pretty predictable.  The basic facts as we expect them to be in a Cinderella story are: unwanted daughter/loses out on doing something fun/but has a good heart/earns a reward/gets a She's All That style makeover/and some male attention/usually while also giving everyone who was mean to her a karmic kick in the pants.  So when you set your story in a futuristic world where people live on the Moon (more on that LATER) and a plague has been sweeping the world, and cyborgs are real, and so on, you give yourself a lot of opportunity to surprise your readers.  But intentionally or not, Meyer gives the equivalent of a flashing red beacon to the fact that Cinder is this missing princess from the Moon:

They said [Queen Levana had] killed her niece, her only threat to the throne.  Princess Selene had only been three years old when a fire caught in her nursery, killing her and her nanny. 

Some conspiracy theorists thought the princess had survived and was still alive somewhere, waiting for the right time to reclaim her crown and end Levana's rule of tyranny, but Cinder knew it was only desperation that fueled these rumors.  After all, they'd found traces of the child's flesh in the ashes.

Anyone who doesn't read that (which pops up pretty early on, only 11% of the way through the book) and immediately go, "Well, we've got a missing princess there, and a young lady missing a pound of flesh here....I think I might know where this is going," should maybe consider getting their gullibility meter checked.  And once we know that, it becomes less fun, and more of a drag to keep waiting and waiting for Cinder to figure it out, which: 45% of the book until she finds out that she's from the Moon (they say "Lunar" in the book, but I think saying she's from the Moon more accurately expresses how odd I find this concept.  And how did they not notice Moon refugees flying in from outer space and landing on Earth? That's never really explained.  I mean, we watch every asteroid and meteoroid that gets even fifty thousand miles away, I'd think that we'd have a grasp on people actually landing within our atmosphere by the time this book takes place.  Plus, where do people live on the Moon? Is it all indoors? Have they transformed the Moon's atmosphere, because otherwise, how are people movable between both locations?  And how come Prince Kai appears to never have seen a Moon spaceship, or Moon building materials before?  Hasn't he been going to school?  Do we not have cameras anymore? What is going on?!?!) and 98% of the book until she finds out she's the missing princess herself, which is just - by the time that penny drops, I was ready to pull my hair out.  Or someone else's hair, but same thing, really.

So, really, the one thing I was surprised by was that her sister (and the king!) actually die of the plague.  DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING, DID YOU?  After all that, she gets down to Peony in time to hear her last words but not shove the antidote down her throat. I will be real here folks: this reminded me of nothing more than The Hunger Games: a young teenage woman, beset by a dystopic society, will do anything to save her younger, flower-named sister, who is unfailingly gentle and kind, and is, in the end, unable to do so.  But you know what?  I read two chapters of the Hunger Games and was immediately wrapped up in Katniss' attempts to protect Primrose (so much so that when I found out she doesn't survive the series, I put off reading the third book in the trilogy for over two years) whereas here, I felt nothing when Peony died.  That's in part because I am also part cyborg and thus unable to feel human feelings, but also because Cinder just does not engender the same quality of urgency and emotion that The Hunger Games does. 

OH!  And the other thing, that is brought up (justly) in other reviews, but which I wanted to touch on as well here: what world is this, where they have a deadly plague, but absolutely no quarantine measures?  I mean,  not even checkpoints for different sections of the city - Cinder just waltzes back after hiding out when her neighbor comes down with it.  You know who else has that kind of disease prevention mastery?  The CDA in Monsters Inc.  Which is a cartoon movie about monsters.  As another reviewer said: no wonder they have a problem with this disease.  Also, what what what is this place that just allows a seventeen year old prince whose mother is dead and whose father is currently dying to just go waltzing about random marketplaces?  This is not Aladdin, y'all, and maybe I should be worried about how many kid's movies have made their way into Cinder.  Cinder does have the feel of a mish-mash (and I can't tell you how distracting it was to have "Kai" from the Snow Queen fairy tale, pop up as the prince in this Cinderella story): in addition to everything else I talked about above, for some reason the evil queen kept reminding me of the Wizard of Oz. 

It's okay, the book keeps moving along briskly enough that you don't really stop to bitch about all this when reading it.  But the constant need to overlook thickheaded narration, weird reality holes, and reminders of other media takes its toll on the overall experience.  Cinder did not really keep me rapt, and having read it, I'm not at all on tenterhooks about how Cinder is going to get out of the prison she winds up in at the end of the book.  In fact, knowing that she eventually meets up with Scarlet, the main character in the sequel, makes me less interested in reading it.  Meyer has a really interesting idea here, and I want it to really shine, the way that it can.  For now, though, it's got a wee bit too much polishing that still needs to be done.   

No Crystal Stair

No Crystal Stair: A documentary novel of the life and work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller, by Vaunda Michaux Nelson

Lewis Michaux was born to do things his own way.  When a white banker advised him to sell fried chicken, not books, because "Negroes don't read," Lewis took five books and one hundred dollars and built a bookstore.  It soon became the intellectual center of Harlem, a refuge for everyone form Muhammed Ali to Malcolm X.

No Crystal Stair covers Lewis Michaux's life from 1906 to his death in 1976, and while it is interesting, stylistically, it's a bit of a light read, considering it's a biography of a man who lived through two world wars, one great depression, and civil rights era, not to mention his establishment of a long-standing business and friendship with Malcolm X.  Vaunda Nelson is Lewis Michaux's grand-niece, and she writes the story from the perspective of various people's reactions to and about events in Lewis Michaux's life.  Interspersed with those sections (which are generally not much more than a page long) are illustrations, pictures, and FBI file notes.  It's especially appropriate for children (and me) as it doesn't wind up spending too long in any one place, keeping the reader's interest and moving along briskly. 

It's a nice book, but it doesn't have a lot of depth to it - it offers a glimpse of the various times and momentous events in Lewis Michaux's life, but aside from his apparently plentiful charm as a salesman, skimps on details of his personality and personal life.  It's more of a celebration of life than any real look at how this man achieved what he did.  In fact, I could have stood to have this be longer, if Nelson had included more details about how, exactly, Michaux expanded from five books to a store, what he did while he struggled to get the storefront going, and so on.  It's hard to get the sense of the journey that he made, especially in light of the fact that the creation of the National Memorial African Bookstore didn't truly begin until Michaux was over 40 years old. I was more intrigued by the bookseller aspect than the African American history one, so I was disappointed by the glossing over of those details.

It is a fun read though, if only for the cameos by black celebrities through time.  It's the Forrest Gump of African American culture.  Which is the point, really: that one man dedicated his life to creating and fostering the culture of a marginalized people and succeeded beyond anyone's dreams (except perhaps his own).  It is a "moving tribute", as PW puts it, one which could and should be in every school library: but someday I'd be interested in seeing what an adult biography of the man would net.  No Crystal Stair, unlike the Langston Hughes poem from which it takes its name, is limited by its intended audience, even as it may inspire them to greater and larger things.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

This is a book club book. And I mean that in an only mildly derogatory sense of the phrase. Book club books are, well, like pornography, hard to describe, but you know 'em when you see 'em. They're generally fiction, about people and relationships rather than say, thrillers or mysteries. Often, women will be the main character(s), and uh, the more I try to pin these types of books down, the more likely I am to rile up either (a) book group members, or (b) the authors of these types of books. I don't want to imply that any single book group is like this, but I just want to classify a certain set of books and when I read this set of books I automatically think, "book group book". I hope you know what I mean. It's not meant to be a slur on quality, but probably it's more about accessibility, and the way in which the book often gives people things to think about, but does it sort of non-aggressively, so that the members of your book group don't wind up screaming at each other over chips 'n' dip.

It's probably becoming very apparent that I have never actually been part of a book group, but I hear that stereotyping based off of representations of things in the media is very popular these days. For my part, I would rather have a book group for really difficult books, like Joyce's Ulysses, which I totally read without understanding a single thing that was going on, although it did not ruin my enjoyment of the book AT ALL. And I mean that in the sense that I enjoyed it muchly.

Anyhoo. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is not, despite the title, a teen mystery à la Nancy Drew. I know, so misleading! It begins with the 80 year old Lily telling us that she is filled with guilt, regret, shame over something that happened with her "old same" Snow Flower, before winding us all the way back to the beginning of the tale. It starts with Lily's footbinding, as a matchmaker "discovers" that Lily's feet are perfectly proportioned to become the smallest (and thus, most beautiful) lotus feet in the area. Since Lily's fortunes are now on the rise, without a single thing being done, she's also considered for the prestigious position of laotong with another girl.

And just as a side note, See's done a really great job explaining all this background and cultural placement without reading like a very dry history book. It's entirely focused on the women's inner world so the need to get the details right about things like the placement of the women's room and who sleeps in it, and how the rituals of matchmaking proceed is very important. Not only that, but these types of details are the ones most often forgotten over the years as historians record the big earthshaking events, but rarely the day-to-day activities of women. So it's a pleasure to get this peek into Lily's world, even if I myself could have read even more about the minutiae of Lily's life. See strikes a nice balance between simply relaying information and storytelling.

Anyhow, Lily is found a candidate for laotong - Snow Flower - a girl who fits the signs from a larger, more prosperous family and village. The girls bind themselves together, promising to never let another come between them, and settle in for a life-long friendship. Okay, now SPOILERY SPOILERS!

The promise lasts about as long as it takes Lily to realize that Snow Flower has been lying to her for the past six or so years, and is actually the daughter of a dedicated opium smoker who has ruined her family's fortunes. Lily is devastated to find out (at her wedding) that Snow Flower is really hitching her wagon to Lily's rising star rather than the reverse. This part was a little tricky for me - the full secret and reveal came as a surprise to me, even though there were hints all throughout (but as you know I'm very slow to pick up on hints), so it was nice that just when you thought Snow Flower was already at her lowest low point, you find out some other horribly sad fact about her life and future. Lily, on the other hand, is a little snot. It's not completely unexpected, and it's true that Lily might deserve to feel betrayed, but it's the first crack in their friendship, and it's aggravating to see Lily, who had previously thought that Snow Flower was head and shoulders above her but welcoming her anyhow, not really be so willing to extend the same courtesy to Snow Flower. It's our first glimpse at the Lady that Lily becomes - righteous but cold.

To Lily's credit though, the two young women stay close for the next several years - or at least, as close as they can be given that Lily is married to the head honcho and Snow Flower is married to local unclean butcher, and both of them have mothers-in-law from hell. They go through a couple of year like that, havin' babies (or miscarryin', on Snow Flower's part) and visiting every so often, until the Taiping revolution, in which millions and millions of people were slaughtered. Lily is caught out at Snow Flower's house when this happens, so instead of leaving with her family, she has to climb a mountain with Snow Flower and her abusive husband and small children in the dead of winter. Once up there, Lily does her best to keep the whole family alive, by using her position as Lady to get more food for Snow Flower's scrawny firstborn son, but things sour after Snow Flower's second, heartier son dies, and her husband beats her, buries her son without her, and makes her miscarry another child. Lily compounds Snow Flower's misery by high-and-mightily telling her that her husband is a terrible person and Snow Flower should get over it by being the best wife she can be and having another child right away. What a gem of a friend!

This is really when things get sad: Snow Flower's fortunes, which never were high to begin with, fall even further as she gets beaten regularly and falls swiftly into depression, while Lily, who never had much in the way of difficulties, except possibly a loveless relationship with her husband, gets a moment of joyful reunion with him after they make it back down the mountain. It's sad because you can see what's coming, even though Lily can't: her constant nagging and nitpicking at Snow Flower are the only way she can care for Snow Flower - she can't relate to her, she can't sympathize with her, because their lives are so different now. In Lily's mind, following the rules means a happy life, since that's always worked for her, but Lily doesn't realize how lucky she is, and how justice should be tempered with mercy. So Snow Flower tells Lily that she needs another support group and Lily blackballs the shit out of her, ruining her status in the town.

Eventually Lily does realize where she went wrong, and repents, but it's still a tragedy. The book is supposed to be about this deep friendship, but I honestly think Lily stops being a real friend to Snow Flower the moment she realizes that Snow Flower isn't the high-falutin' person Lily thought she was when she was 7, which is more the matchmaker's fault than Snow Flower's. Lily's life isn't the easiest either, but she has so much when Snow Flower has so little, and Lily always seems very immature throughout - very much the angry teenager who stomps through the house and slams the door when you won't let her stay out until 11 pm.

It's a very compelling book, and I gobbled it right up, and like I said earlier, the setting and details are well done. It was really interesting to read about a time in which women basically did not go outdoors, ever, and hardly walked, and the culture which built up around footbinding (which obviously creates a lot of societal stratification, as seen in SFatSF). It's true that the women's lives might seem limited in scope, but See's managed to bring out the deep emotions and joys and sorrows that women of the time and place experienced. What's sad is that even female friendship, which is possibly the one real comfort these women got, was bound by these rules and regulations, and in many cases limited to their girlhood.

I do feel like the system that created the laotongs was the same that led, in part, to its destruction. And the book is a big warning on the perils of miscommunication. I know this review is more of a synopsis than my usual, but I will say that I enjoyed it very much, even if it was bound by the limitations of the "book club" type.

Code Name: Verity

Codename: Verity, by Elizabeth Wein 

Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy? 

Happy New Year!  I've decided to celebrate a day off in the middle of the week by reading about young female spies getting tortured in World War II.  I think I've talked before about the overabundance of WWII kid's fic out there, but Codename Verity is a worthy addition to any collection.  My mother, bless her heart, read it before giving it to me with her recommendation, but I wasn't feeling it the last time I picked it up, several months ago.  It was one of those things where I'd heard too much about the book, and had gotten the impression that there was some "twist" to it, and I was taking everything with such grains of salt I couldn't concentrate on the story.

Which is: a plane with two travelers is shot and crashes, but not before one passenger parachutes out: Verity, an English (Scottish) spy, meant to join up with the French Resistance on a secret mission,  gets discovered not more than a week after she lands, captured and unable to talk her way out of it without the necessary faked papers, which were accidentally switched with that of her pilot and best friend, Maddie Brodatt. The first half of the book is the story of the two girls' (I keep saying girls, even though they're clearly old enough to have excelled at their respective dirty jobs) mutual history to the fatal crash-landing.

This is where I got tripped up: the idea that this Verity character would be writing the truth for the Germans was so implausible, that I was really strung out thinking - was this a lie? Was this?  In fact, I was pretty sure throughout most of that first section, that Verity was not Queenie, but Maddie herself, pretending to be the other girl for some unknown reason.  Lest you be led astray as I was, let me reassure you: Maddie is Maddie and Verity is Queenie (aka Julie).  I was also ticked off by the leniency with which Verity was (apparently) given to write her story: she goes off on a lot of tangents, most of which serve no purpose other than (as we discover later) as coded messages to the Resistance.  Given that Verity could not have reasonably expected the papers to make it back to the Resistance (at least, not with any real confidence, especially in the beginning), it seems odd that she would have (and could have) written her papers with two such disparate audiences in mind.  I suppose she was hopeful on the off chance they could get smuggled out, but then why did the Germans permit it?  Very odd.

Because I didn't see much point in anything Verity wrote, I was therefore less impressed at her repression of more relevant facts relating to the secret mission.  Since she clearly had to have known more than just what was in the record, it's hard for me to say that she did a great job not telling any of that.  Well, obviously, she was tortured.  But they kept her alive for weeks, ostensibly for the purpose of this written record of key information, and they don't even attempt to get the basis for her mission in France?  Not that it would have mattered in the long run, since she would have lied about it, but it hurts the story, I think, for the reader not to be convinced along with the Germans, of a cover story.  Most of what Verity writes is true, but useless (and the parts that aren't true I found pointless - lies about it being a Beaufort plane, not a Lysander one - eh?).  I was expecting relevant lies.

What is impressive is how well Ms. Wein manages to convey the friendship between Maddie and Verity, even though they aren't together for most of the book: they meet, train up in separate locations, then spend a few missions traveling together before their final fateful trek to France, whereupon they are immediately separated. However, they share a boundless love for each other, which comes across clearly in each narration in the book.  Maddie's final sacrifice is heart-breaking, and I will confess, I did start crying, though the book continues for so much longer that I was quite dry-eyed by the last page.  It is refreshing that this is not just another one of those teen love-triangle books, of which there are far too many (girl falls in love with boy, but they cannot be together due to: a dystopian society/sudden onset lycanthropy/he's actually 300 years older than her and that's super creepy, stop acting like it's not).

I think a reader would benefit from multiple readings: Verity's narration, in particular, contains multitudes, which I could not begin to unpick today.  It also contains quite a lot of mechanical talk about airplanes, especially at first.  It's like the whale chapters in Moby Dick - you just have to get through them, but lordy are they ever a drag.  The author is a pilot herself, and it does show.  Stylistically, I think it would also benefit from not underlining certain sentences about the Gestapo headquarters - you'll see what I mean.  It does make things jump out at you (as it's intended to), but given that we're treated to a run-down of it all later anyway, I think it would be doing more of a service to readers to make them go back to find it themselves. 

I thought it was a good book, a worthwhile book, but the feeling of being manipulated was not worth the pay-off of finding out what Verity was lying about.  Perhaps when I'm feeling less raw about it, I'll return to it.  Because that's the thing: this book does kick you in the stomach.  I'm still reeling from it.  It's not a very comfortable read, but I do sort of feel like finding an online discussion of it, sort of like joining a support group: CNV Survivors, we'll get t-shirts made.