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.