Ten Second Reviews

Cut to the Quick

By Kate Ross

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.

I did like this one - it was a nice break from modern day thrillers, which can be so overwrought.  This one is much more of a classic mystery, with interrogations and secrets discovered, although there is still the confrontation of the murderer, here, it's with the guise of an actual magistrate's duty.  It feels like a pretty chunky book - there's a lot to the back story, which comes out in pieces (and more than a few coincidences, but they aren't the most egregious), so it took me a while to get through it.  Overall, I enjoyed the Regency setting, and the characters, enough to look into the sequel.  Onward and upward!

Comics for a Strange World: A Book of Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

 

This follow up in the Poorly Drawn Lines series was not nearly as good as the first, for some reason.  Possibly because it felt like it focused more on robots and technology than absurdist humor.  So-so, but I would get the first book and skip this one.

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By Kathryn Harkup

 

This is an alphabetically arranged examination of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books (funny: you'd never know it from the title).  I really liked this one - first of all, I never realized that Christie was a chemist, and that she kept her poison use really factual and close to reality.  Maybe this is a little embarrassing, but I barely noticed the actual murder weapon when I was reading  - it almost felt superfluous sometimes, since motive seemed so much more important (and Christie always made sure multiple suspects would have been capable of the means).  Harkup goes into detail not only in how Christie used the poison in a particular book/story, but also into the poison itself, famous real life murders, effects on the body, etc.  I have just one complaint, which is that Harkup gets into the chemical properties of the poisons more than is really necessary for most laypeople (and geez, I hope all of her readers are laypeople and not budding young poisoners looking for tips) so I tended to skim the passages about enzymes and receptors and molecules.  But the rest is highly enjoyable, although I would recommend against reading it while sitting with a dying relative receiving morphine, because it will give you bad dreams.

Ten Second Reviws

Edenbrooke

By Julianne Donaldson

Marianne goes to spend some time in the country, visiting friends that her more beautiful and talented twin sister has made, battling highwaymen, fortune hunters, catty women and flirty men. For as silly as some (most?) of Edenbrooke is, I have to confess that when Marianne overheard Philip "complaining" about her and making it sound like he hated her guts (even though we all knew it was actually the complete opposite) something deep in the reptilian, instinctual part of my brain went "Mmm, good".  The heart wants what it wants.  And my heart wants contrived situations in which two people in love think that the other person hates them.  Angst, what a delight! Anyway, 'tis a very silly, slight book, but man, sometimes that's kind of what you need. 

Darkdawn

By Jay Kristoff

For some reason all my formatting is fucking up today (like just moving things on its own) so we'll see how long I can stand it.  Long story short: if you've read this far, you may as well read Darkdawn.  It's good enough.  I read (and liked) the first one, but it definitely didn't seem like we were going to be getting into a whole thing about the Moon in book one.  Mostly it seemed like a pretty straight-forward revenge tale.  Not that there's anything wrong with the Moon, it just seems like we took a hard left somewhere.  Anyway, this book is mostly a road trip, and there is a lot (far too much for my taste) of bantering/griping/star-crossed romance.  Plus, people die like every few chapters, which takes some of the emotion out of all the deaths.  And I don't think that's intentional. Anyway, the bad guy gets super powerful on dark magic but is defeated anyway, Mia's little brother decides he can love this mysterious, murderous sister he doesn't remember who drags him all over creation, narrowly escaping death multiple times and who insists on calling him a different name and telling him he's adopted,  somehow the person that Mia loves comes back from  the dead (no, the other one) to live happily ever after, and the moon is back in the sky and only one sun, so even though like 90% of the people who met/helped Mia along the way are dead, yay? Boo on the changed solar system though, I thought three suns was cool.

To Be Taught If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

By Becky Chambers

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in subzero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.

A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

This short novella got off to a slow start, and it was never really about the plot, but it was a nice change of pace for me at the moment.  I've been reading at a breakneck pace because all my chickens came home to roost, also known as all my library requests came in at once, even though I ordered them at different times and was on several different waiting lists.  So it's been a small frenzy here, and it's good to kind of catch my breath a little with To Be Taught.

The book, as you come to realize, is both a more-detailed-than-strictly-necessary-or-even-enjoyable description of what we might find on other habitable planets, and also a love letter to exploration, knowledge, and dreams of space.  The idea is that there are four astronauts who are on a decades-long exploration of four distant planets (or moons or something - I kind of returned the book to the library already).  When taking off, they don't expect to come back for at least eighty years.  Partway through the mission, they realize that Earth is no longer in contact with them for unknown reasons, and as they get deeper into space, and potentially closer to the mystery of Earth's silence, they have to decide why and for whom they are doing this - ultimately deciding that if Earth wants them to come back, they will come back, if Earth wants them to keep going, they will keep going, and they are prepared to wait forever for Earth to respond, since the question is too important to answer for Earth.  It's a little bittersweet, since it's pretty clear that Earth got real fucked and probably will not be responding, even if they'd wanted to. News alert, you're all going to die in stasis, how nice!

The part of the book that isn't taken up with philosophical questions about how much we owe to the human race is sort of a fun wilderness adventure.  The descriptions, as I alluded to above, are more detailed, and more scientifically accurate than I really even wanted, no doubt a side effect of the author's relying heavily on her mother's astrobiologist background.  My copy came with a short list of questions and answers between the author and her mother at the end, mostly about the interaction between science and science fiction, which I also found enlightening.

It's also managed to make me bookmark Chambers' other big work, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I guess is now just the first in a trilogy.  I like her style enough - and the Big Ideas she has - to get into more by her.  We'll see how it goes - honestly, the interaction between astronauts was not always my favorite part in To Be Taught.  It's hard to give enough space to relationships in a book where the main focus is on the relationship with Earth, not each other.  And also, obviously, when they spend years just collecting samples and then going to sleep for years to travel.  Well, I guess we'll just have to see.

Ten Second Reviews

Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

This is a collection of short panel comics by Farazmand, who got his start online (and is still there, I assume).  These are mostly 4-6 panels apiece, with some longer ones mixed in.  They've got that off-the-wall humor which I enjoy, talking animals and inanimate objects, birds judging how well you sing, aliens who just want friendship bracelets, thirty-seven year-old babies with beards, weirdly tall frogs, robots who suck.  It's got a bit of that Far Side influence, but it feels a bit more Dada-esque (yeah, I know shit).  One thing I didn't like was the formatting - if you have a four-panel page, but a six panel comic, for the love of god, just make it smaller and put it on one page!  It makes it weirdly hard to figure out if the small panel is a continuation of the previous page or a new comic.  Same for the eight (or more) panel comics.  When stuff is online first, you don't have the same space restrictions you'd get if they were published in the newspaper.  So they're all different lengths.  But you gotta solve that problem when you publish - and I don't think they've quite cracked the code yet.  But overall, a fun diversion, and a good gift for someone with that absurd sense of humor.

Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

 

This is sort of the antithesis to Poorly Drawn Lines: short stories instead of panels, arty illustrations instead of block characters, horror instead of comedy, confusing instead of straightforward.  I got this because I wanted some spooky stuff to read, and they were definitely - atmospheric - but I felt like a lot of them were kind of ended the same way: you have a set up with a spooky premise (I killed my brother but he's standing right there drinking, a lady is hearing a chilling song in the floorboards, my friend has a cloud thing that has arteries over her head, my mother warned me about the piano-teeth monster, etc), and then the character takes further action (goes down a hole to follow a monster [in several stories, actually, they should probably stop doing that], cracks open the walls and finds body parts, discovers someone is missing, etc) there's maybe like a little more explanation or clues about what's going on, but mostly not, and then we end with, like an ominous close up (of the monster, of the piano teeth, of the beating heart cloud, etc) but honestly, some of it (most of it) is so confusing, I can't figure out enough of what's going on to be scared.    For example, in the piano teeth one, Emily follows Rebecca down a hole and see her face come off into red worms, and then she leaves and hits her head and comes to back at the house, where she talks Rebecca out of using her body as a sack for Rebecca's red worm babies.  But then at the end, we find out Emily has piano teeth too.  So..... is she already a red worm monster? Did Rebecca change her mind and use her body anyway? It's so weirdly obtuse.  And the one where the brother is killed and then comes back, the narrator follows him down a hole he's been digging, and then sees... someone sleeping on the ground? The wolf the brother killed earlier? The brother is the wolf? Totally unclear. Anyway, beautifully illustrated, but a bit obtuse for me.   

Ten Second Reviews

The Tiger's Wife

By Tea Obreht

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

I liked this one alright when I thought it was going somewhere, i.e., all the stories would somehow relate to one another, but it ended up not really doing that, so for me, it kind of petered out.  It did manage to elicit heavy sadness at the end of the Tiger's Wife portion, so kudos, I suppose, but nothing else really gelled for me.  Did we ever really find out why her grandfather was tramping all over the (other) country?  He was looking for the Deathless Man (in all the right places), and couldn't just wait for like, his patients to die? Was he actually trying to meet up Natalie, also for reasons unknown? Unclear.  This made me look up like, reading guides to The Tiger's Wife, trying to figure out what the point was. It was interesting how the setting of The Tiger's Wife feels more fairy-tale like than many actual fantasy books, despite (or because of?) being based in war-torn eastern Europe. There's definitely you know, motifs and shit, about animals, and war, and medicine, and society, the kind of book you teach a class about in high school.  It was well written, but wandered too much, without sufficient payoff, to be truly great.

Magic for Liars

By Sarah Gailey

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

I liked the beginning of Magic for Liars, before you realize what a terrible PI Ivy is (although of course she still manages to solve multiple mysteries, so she's somewhat of an idiot savant, I guess), but then Ivy started doing that fashionable PI thing of drinking too much and sleeping with possible suspects, and also (not a small thing) telling like, everyone who asks, all about the murder case she is working on.  Even though, as she stresses at one point, the murderer is definitely someone in the school.  And yes, in case you were wondering, she does tell her sister (who by the way, committed the crime) like, every minute detail about the case, including showing her the love notes these students were passing which prove one of them got pregnant.   With almost no prompting whatsoever!  Even if her sister hadn't killed a fellow teacher, that's a huge invasion of privacy.  I liked the premise, but was disappointed by the almost deus ex machina way that Ivy ignored everything about her sister which would have pointed her in the right direction.  For someone who was a PI for fourteen years, it just seemed really sloppy and not clever.  Also, after all that, she still covered up for her sister not only accidentally murdering her lover, but also botching an abortion on a student.  Their whole relationship did not make sense to me.  It's an okay read, but sort of felt frustrating, like the plot and character actions and decisions felt less organic than it should have. 

I'll Never Tell

I'll Never Tell

By Catherine McKenzie

Twenty years ago, seventeen year-old Amanda Holmes was found bludgeoned in a rowboat at the MacAllister family’s Camp Macaw. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Now, after their parents’ sudden deaths, the MacAllister siblings return to camp to read the will and decide what to do with the prime real estate the camp occupies. Ryan needs to sell. Margaux hasn’t made up her mind. Mary believes in leaving well enough alone. Kate and Liddie—the twins—have opposing views. And Sean Booth, the groundskeeper, just hopes he still has a home when all is said and done.

But it’s more complicated than a simple vote. The will stipulates that until they unravel the mystery of what happened to Amanda, they can’t settle the estate. Any one of them could have done it, and each one is holding a piece of the puzzle. Will they work together to finally discover the truth, or will their secrets finally tear the family apart?

This one had an interesting premise and structure (I particularly appreciated the table of everyone's locations, especially when you realize that the characters themselves filled it out) but for me it fell apart a bit at the end.  We had like three "false alarms" of seeming to identify the attempted murderer and then realizing that no, it was actually someone else! At least twice (that I can remember off the top of my head), someone goes to confront the person they think is the murderer by themselves, and I mean, everyone's family is weird, but like, if my newly-realized half-brother was accused of murder and then suspiciously fled the scene, I would not then paddle out towards the deserted island where he decamped to have a heart-to-heart with him.  Although, to be fair, without any actual evidence, how are you going to call the police on that?

And to be honest, the whole half-brother thing didn't do much for me, I mean, they allude to the fact that their parents didn't seem to want any kids, so after having five of their own, they discover that Mr. MacAllister had a baby with a prostitute who is now like eight years old, and they just... act as surrogate family together?  Without any of the other kids (including the incredibly nosy one) finding out? Okay, Jan.  

I think there could have been a whole book on how creepy and dysfunctional Mr. MacAllister was: first with the secret baby having, and then the whole, "treat you like my son, and you are my son, but I won't acknowledge that and when I die, you'll get to fight over who inherits with my other son and all of my daughters, one of whom you want to bone" thing, and the the double whammy of both spying on all his children (with actual surveillance!) and enlisting his pseudo-son but actually his actual son to do the spying.  Phew.  Like, is Mr. MacAllister a psychopath?  I also didn't really follow the whole thing about how he assumed his son (Ryan) did it, and then the police did a DNA test, and somehow that cleared Ryan, but Mr. MacAllister didn't see the DNA test, so he still thought Ryan did it, but then somehow the DNA test was in his spy file after his death, so he had to have seen it at some point, but yadda yadda yadda.  

Finally, I hated the identity of the murderer.  You going to tell me that a fifteen year old girl bludgeoned a seventeen year old girl with a canoe paddle and then just like, sat on it for twenty years?  Clearly got her genes from the Mr. MacAllister side of the family.  I mean, they didn't even add that she was incredibly jacked or anything, to make it more realistic, although maybe the fact that she walked away from a horse-car crash that killed the driver of the car was supposed to be a clue that she was superhuman.  

I kid, I kid.  I did enjoy the lead-up to the denouement, it was a fun setting, and the number of characters was good - I didn't have any difficulty trying to keep anyone straight.  They were all easily distinguishable from the others, and each had their own little quirks.  It also got me thinking about what I'd do if, for example, I had five siblings and one of them murdered someone and then twenty years later committed suicide.  Like, do you say anything to the grieving family and tell them who did it?  Obviously here, the MacAllisters just... didn't say anything.  I mean, it is going to be hard to explain why you didn't say anything EARLIER about seeing a blonde girl whacking another, but that's sort of on you.  Amanda's parents deserve the same closure you all got. 

Ten Second Reviews

The House with Chicken Legs

By Sophie Anderson

This is like a middle school reader version of Baba Yaga, where she adopts like an eleven year old girl and then shit happens.  I will be very honest: I did not finish this one and only sort of limply flipped through the final pages (Baba never comes back?!).  Among other things, a kid from the Lake District in England tells our heroine Marinka that he is really into " soccer". It brought me in mind of the first Harry Potter book, in which things just got semi-randomly changed for an American audience (because we do not know what a philosopher is, I suppose) and that was twenty-three years ago (sniff) and we've all come a long way since then, and frankly a little cross-cultural contamination is good for the soul anyway.  Let's raise some fricking cosmopolitans.  Anyway, this may be impolite, but I want to shout out to Nine Witch Tales which is actual witch horror for middle school readers, because back in the 60s they didn't care about "mental health" or "not terrifying young readers".

Fatal Inheritance

By Rachel Rhys

This one was certainly nicely atmospheric - and I don't mean it's suspenseful or thrilling, but that it feels nicely of the time and place, i.e., 1948 post-war French Riviera.  I went along for the ride, but I did have some bugaboos: Eve's a doormat until she needs to be otherwise for the sake of the plot, and then she'll quietly subside again.  I never really got a feel for her personality - is she chafing, is she demoralized, is she seizing her opportunity here, what is it?

And the solution to the mystery bugged too.  So her mysterious inheritance is basically unrelated to the "accidents" which keep befalling her, since those are just about the lost Nazi art smugglers who want to get into the house.  And the art is in Guy Lester's house because...? I never made the connection of when and how it got buried behind the wall, and why it needed to be removed conveniently when Eve was still in the house.  Smugglers really demand punctuality and courtesy when removing stolen items, I guess.

But the tagline, "She didn’t have an enemy in the world…until she inherited a fortune." isn't really true: she didn't have an enemy because she inherited a fortune, she sort of just managed to wander into a criminal ring simultaneously with inheriting a fortune.  It's not a very surprising mystery (you know who is mysterious and angry but falling in love with her, and who is mysterious and nice but secretly using her very early on, and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing that Guy Lester did is clear about halfway into the book, although they save the "revelation" for much later) but it's not a bad piece of fiction, and it's such an interesting setting that the novelty at least, should keep you going until the end.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood

By John Carreyou

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

I finally finally finally got back into reading again (you may have noticed that recent reviews were lackluster, if I even finished the book at all) thanks to Bad Blood.  This one was re-energizing, and you kinda spend the whole thing doing that, "What. the. fuck??" look that I always reference from Chris Rock in Nurse Betty when he sees his dad, played by Morgan Freeman, dancing with no one on the side of the Grand Canyon. Just that sense, you know, that someone very close to you has lost all of their marbles. In this case, that WTF applies to all the people who fell for the cult of Holmes.  For years!  For years they went along with this, although to be fair, it was both a very desirable and beneficial pitch, and also it wasn't immediately apparent that it was rotten to the core.  Although it seems like even a slightly more than cursory look would have taken care of that...?

In retrospect you go, how did they sucker this many people for this long? And the answer apparently is, a combination of complete intimidation of those over whom they held power, and complete ingratiation of those who could have destroyed them.  It's incredible!  When I first heard about it, I definitely gave it a brush off:  pfft, who cares about whether another start-up is toxic and also lied to consumers.  Same shit, different day.  But no!  This was an incredible and incredibly engrossing tale of malignantly bad behavior.  Props to Carreyou for his work, he takes an almost ten year long journey about medical devices and makes it captivating from beginning to end.

For all I've complained in the past, I feel like I have to praise Carreyou's organization of his book, which is both chronological (thank you for an easy to follow and logical progression!) and, because he knows you forget people who only pop in and out occasionally, heavy on the "John-who-ran-the-Edison-room" reminders about who the various people are.  Thank you, Carreyou, for recognizing that I can only retain so much at one time, and minor characters' names and identities in books is not one of them.

Like Five Days at Memorial you kinda leave the book doubting that the villains of the piece even realize that they are in fact the bad guys.  As in that case, Elizabeth and Sunny seem to have kind of doubled down on the position that they've done nothing wrong, although I suppose anyone who has the brazen confidence to do it in the first place doesn't have a lot of room for self-doubt or even second thoughts.

The one thing I wish we'd gotten in this is a bit more wrap up of where the key players stood, particularly (for me) George Shultz, who practically disowned his grandson for whistleblowing this whole house of cards to the ground.  I can't say for sure that I'd have the wherewithal to do what he and Erika did in reporting the misdeeds, but to be personally punished for doing right strikes me as so unfair.   So much collateral damage done.  And for what!  A miracle product that didn't work? Such dishonesty in professing to care about people's health while actually causing harm indiscriminately.  Not to mention poor Ian Gibbons, who carried the shame of it to his death.  It makes you mad, it gets your (forgive the pun) blood up!  And this, for god's sake, explains why regulatory bodies, while annoying, are absolutely and completely necessary. 

Ten Second Reviews

Witchmark

By C. L. Polk

In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own. When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.

I was really excited about a magical Edwardian murder mystery and the reviews were good, but this disappointed.  I will be real honest: I skipped most of the middle of this book, from like, page 100 to page 200, and then I read the last like, thirty pages, because I wanted to know how it ended, but I didn't care about the journey.  That's a summation of my feelings on the book: I liked parts of it, but the writing didn't pull me in, and it felt oddly tense between world-building and character-building.  Each oth got short shrift - for example, Miles' reaction to seeing his sister, from whom he's been estranged for years, and who thought he was dead, was more of a toddlers Do I have to talk to her now? It felt hurky-jerky, the way things were revealed, or switching between scenes.  Interesting setting, but 100 pages in, I still didn't have a feel for the different magical classes, or anything that had happened in the war, two crucial plot lines.   Not quite a DNF, but close enough for government work.

The Woman in Cabin 10

By Ruth Ware

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

Mmm, so the trend of alcoholic women narrators in thrillers is alive and well! To be fair, I think this predates some of them (but postdates, for example, The Girl on the Train, which is sort of the ur-text for these modern thrillers). This one is a doozy: not only is Lo depressed, alcoholic, and claustrophobic, she's also got PTSD from a recent burglary.   She's so skittish the biggest mystery of all isn't the murder but how she manages to hold down a day job.  It was also interesting seeing how much of this was ganked by The Woman in the Window: unreliable narrator, suffering from trauma, disappearing women, the solution involving a woman pretending to be the wife (aside from the actual wife). I was particularly interested because I too, went on a boating cruise in the far northern hemisphere recently, but alas, even leaving aside the midnight murder, our experiences were not at all similar.  For example, if one had wanted to hide a woman on the boat I was on for more than one day, she'd have to be dead already, and preferably in small pieces, since we didn't have even empty cupboards, let alone empty rooms conveniently two floors below the crew. I was reading a little quickly, but did they ever explain whether Richard was behind Lo's burglary too, or was that supposed to be a coincidence? And whoever it was who took the mascara? What I found really a neat twist in this one though, funnily enough, is that there is no big "confrontation" scene - Lo never meets Richard after she finds out what he's done, just keeps on the lam, and I did find that a bit refreshing.  Sometimes these get so formulaic you go, "Well, she's not going to be safe here, she still needs to meet up with the villain in person" - something that The Woman in the Window definitely suffered from, by the way.  I've read a couple of Ware now, and they're not bad, but the glut of lady-led thrillers on the market means you've got to work a lot harder to stand out in a good way. 
 

PopSugar Challege 2019

 PopSugar Challenge 2019 Wrap-up

1. A book becoming a movie in 2019
2. A book that makes you nostalgic
3. A book written by a musician (fiction or nonfiction)
4. A book you think should be turned into a movie
5. A book with at least one million ratings on Goodreads
6. A book with a plant in the title or on the cover
7. A reread of a favorite book
8. A book about a hobby
9. A book you meant to read in 2018
10. A book with POP, SUGAR, or CHALLENGE in the title
11. A book with an item of clothing or accessory on the cover
12. A book inspired by myth/legend/folklore
13. A book published posthumously
14. A book you see someone reading on TV or in a movie
15. A retelling of a classic
16. A book with a question in the title
17. A book set on college or university campus
18. A book about someone with a superpower
19. A book told from multiple POVs
20. A book set in space
21. A book by two female authors
22. A book with SALTY, SWEET, BITTER, or SPICY in the title
23. A book set in Scandinavia
24. A book that takes place in a single day
25. A debut novel
26. A book that's published in 2019
27. A book featuring an extinct or imaginary creature
28. A book recommended by a celebrity you admire
29. A book with LOVE in the title
30. A book featuring an amateur detective
31. A book about a family
32. A book author from Asia, Africa, or South America
33. A book with a zodiac sign or astrology term in title
34. A book that includes a wedding
35. A book by an author whose first and last names start with the same letter
36. A ghost story
37. A book with a two-word title
38. A novel based on a true story
39. A book revolving around a puzzle or game
40. Your favorite prompt from a past POPSUGAR Reading challenge
41. A "cli-fi" (climate fiction) book
42. A "choose-your-own-adventure" book
43. An "own voices" book
44. Read a book during the season it is set in
45. A LitRPG book
46. A book with no chapters / unusual chapter headings / unconventionally numbered chapters
47. Two books that share the same title
48. Two books that share the same title
49. A book that has inspired a common phrase or idiom
50. A book set in an abbey, cloister, monastery, vicarage, or convent

So what did I learn from this? Well, that I read a hell of a lot of books; that branching out can be a good thing, or a very bad thing; that I needed something to get me excited about reading again;  that there isn't a better place to read than on the deck of a masted ship while sailing in one of the most isolated fjords in the world, unless it's curled up in a sunny spot in the house with a warm blanket and a cat; that the silliest books sometimes make for the best reviews; that reading about morphine addiction next to a dying woman will give you bad dreams; that finishing this challenge gave me more of a sense of accomplishment than most of the rest of my life this year; that I really ought to proof-read my entries a bit better; and that I can't wait to do it again.


See you next year!✋

Ten Second Reviews

Fleishman is in Trouble

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

A satiric novel about a disintegrating marriage was probably not the best choice for a post-nuptial read.  I appreciate the wit and social commentary, but the general and specific unpleasantness of the marriage and the people in it were Too Much.  I didn't find it enjoyable, more like a duty.  After getting through husband Toby's two hundred plus pages of narcissism, sex, and whining, I really wanted to read Rachel's POV, but was disappointed to find it was only like sixty pages long, and consisted mostly of her accepting shitty behavior from everyone around her until she eventually has a full on mental breakdown.  Uplifting? No. I felt like this book ends with the equivalent of a winking-face emoji, as our erstwhile semi-narrator Libby decides she'll write about the end of a marriage, but leave it on a cliffhanger, because...? I'm not actually invested in whether these characters manage to get together at all, they clearly have fault lines going all the way down.  I just, sort of like, wanted bad things to happen to Toby and just wanted Rachel to stop giving a shit, and well, there's an audience for everything, I suppose, but not me for this.

The Egg and I

By Betty MacDonald

As all the reviews make clear, for a pretty racist semi-autobiographical version of a young wife living out on a chicken ranch in the upper Northwest, this is a real entertaining book. There's definitely some things I bet MacDonald's family regrets her putting in print now (like, for example, that she thinks taking the land away from the American Indians was a good thing because they're just lazy good for nothing drunks) but when she focuses on herself and the day to day indignities of life, like neighbors visiting at 7 the one day she's still in her pyjamas, or how her tropical plants are dying while her husband's very practical garden is blooming, she's wonderfully funny and wry.  She's aslo amusing when talking about her neighbors, including Mrs. Kettle, who lives in basically a pigsty, but keeps one room locked up and pristine for visitors.  MacDonald may have a sharp pen, but she isn't shy about her own failures and shortcoming, so it doesn't come off that mean spirited - except for all the really racist bits.   I really enjoyed this although I have to say that this is one book that censorship would likely improve my experience. 

Ten Second Reviews

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

Anya could use a friend, but she wasn't expecting to find one at the bottom of the old well she fell into.  Emily has been there for 90 years - she's ready to get back out into the world, and her gratitude towards Anya knows no bounds.  Until Anya begins to realize that Emily may have been in the well for a reason - and Emily doesn't want to go back.  This one, like Be Prepared, takes inspiration from the author's life (although I assume all of the ghost stuff is made up).  Anya is a scholarship teenager at an expensive prep school, trying to navigate relationships, and Emily seems like the answer to a prayer, helping Anya with tests, tracking down the cute boy's class schedule - at first.  But when Anya doesn't like Emily's methods and tries to distance herself from her, Emily threatens even more destruction  - this time on Anya's family.  I don't know if it's the inclusion of ghosts, but this one felt slimmer than Be Prepared, more like a short story than a novel.  It also seemed like it ended really abruptly.  It seemed like the last scene (when Anya and her class are outdoors) was supposed to be connected somehow to Emily, but I couldn't figure out why (are they just out beautifying things? Did Anya tell people where to find Emily's bones? What is it?) and it seems like everything just wraps up really tidily.  While still entertaining, definitely not my pick for Brosgol's finest.

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Kylara Vatta, daughter of one of the great trade and shipping families, has been sent home from the military academy in disgrace.  Her father arranges a new job for her - taking an old ship off for scrap - which should give her some time and space from her embarrassment, and set her up in the family business.  But it's not long before Ky starts to take matters into her own hands, and accidentally winds up in the middle of a planetary war, where she'll have to use all her military training to survive mercenaries, mutinies, and pirates.

One of the Publisher's Weekly reviews for a book in this series says that Moon is great at action and space battles, but it's "too bad she so frequently drowns them in mundane details that provide realism at the expense of entertainment." I could not have said it better.  I like slow sci-fi books that talk about commerce and boring things (how else could I have made it through the Ancillary  series?) but already in Trading in Danger, it feels like we spent a hundred and fifty pages ramping up to action, and then forty pages on the aftermath - planning funerals, reading mail, arranging a new name record for the ship (I am not making any of that up).  I didn't mind it at the beginning, but it definitely feels like the end is unbearably slow paced, like when people (mostly my family, although I'm sure other people felt the same way) complained that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King movie had like, ten endings that went on for an hour.  It's a weird pacing problem.  The other problem that Publisher's Weekly had, which I definitely agree with, was that things are set up, and then there's no payoff: like this polo match which is alluded to multiple times like it has meaning, and then is just skipped, or the whole ship model kit that Ky receives from one of her old military instructors which has a secret code in it that she just ignores, but then also happens to have the one part she needs later to re-assemble the ship's beacon. That pissed me off.  Come on!  You can't just be like, here's a mysterious package which has a mysterious part, which turns out to be the one part you need, but we're never going to even talk to the sender or mention him again, or even have consequences of using what is clearly a military beacon on this junk ship.

I'm just not quite convinced enough to keep going.  Based on the reviews, although the rest of the series has more action, they're all plagued with similar issues. 

Be Prepared

Be Prepared

By Vera Brosgol

All Vera wants to do is fit in―but that’s not easy for a Russian girl in the suburbs. Her friends live in fancy houses and their parents can afford to send them to the best summer camps. Vera’s single mother can’t afford that sort of luxury, but there's one summer camp in her price range―Russian summer camp.

Vera is sure she's found the one place she can fit in, but camp is far from what she imagined. And nothing could prepare her for all the "cool girl" drama, endless Russian history lessons, and outhouses straight out of nightmares!

This is a middle-school readers semi-autobiographical graphic novel about nine year old Vera, who, finding herself not fitting in amongst her (non-Russian) schoolmates after a disastrous sleepover, begs her mom to send her and her brother to Russian scout camp - where she unhappily discovers that there's just never a guaranteed way of fitting in and making friends.

This was going to be a Ten Second Review but - as you'll notice - I got a little expressive and the review got a little lengthy.

I really loved this book. It's beautifully illustrated, with muted colors and expressive faces, but more than that, it really gets to the heart of a common pre-teen girl (and boy) experience: beginning to compare yourself and your family to others and feeling awkward or embarrassed or just plain uncool.

I remember myself the pain of having to leave a slumber party early (god, ALL the slumber party shit.  Why do I still love the idea of slumber parties when all of my memories are of like, extreme embarrassment? WHAT PYJAMAS YOU WEAR DETERMINES YOUR SOCIAL STATUS FOR LIFE AND LET'S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT THE DELICATE ART OF GIFT-GIVING), and the like, social minefield that is your pre-teens and early teens. Why no, I haven't been scarred at all by events that happened decades ago and I definitely don't still remember the excruciating details of another twelve year old making fun of me (with what is, in retrospect, not even good sarcasm).

And I - OH MY GOD I just remembered how much I hated bringing my sleeping bag  - which was flannel and super bulky and had to be wrapped up with elastics tied together because they had worn out and snapped - when my friend had, like, the speedo of sleeping bags - shiny, tiny, with its own cover bag to stuff it into. It was teal and hi-tech and shaped like a coffin, not a rectangle (remember that I don't make the rules about what is cool, I just know that coffin shaped sleeping bags are cooler than rectangles, or at least they were back in the mid-90s) and so fucking cool and everything my sleeping bag wasn't and I bet you my friend had not one clue that I was dying inside about her sleeping bag. She's happily married now with a really cute baby girl who slept on me for like an hour during dinner once, which was amazing and I highly recommend, and I really hope I have enough willpower not to message her and be like, "REMEMBER YOUR SLEEPING BAG FROM TWENTY YEARS AGO? I think I'm finally working out my feelings about it!"

I'm going to move on from my own traumas for like, one hot second, to reiterate that Be Prepared makes me want to, like, go back and relive my youth except now, I would be able to unclench and actually enjoy it more, having learned the hard lesson that is growing up and becoming (and loving) your own self.  Be Prepared achieves the hard balance of getting to the heart of these seemingly insurmountable embarrassments and cruelties (which are in hindsight pretty minor) without actually wallowing in it or becoming too schadenfreude-y.  This is not cringe-kink (ew, gross, I hate this word I just made up and will never use it again). 


I will definitely be reading more from Brosgol (I already have Anya's Ghost waiting for me at the library), and if you want to relive your youth, without actually, you know, reliving it, please pick this book up.  

Ironically, the girl whose slumber party I left early now leads hiking expeditions into the wilderness for young women. What a wonderful world.

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title

The Mere Wife

The Mere Wife

By Maria Dahvana Headley

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

I was a little sad when I realized my final post would be on November 7, rather than October 31, but we'll make do somehow.  This was a good final choice in my challenge, I think - I had deliberately set aside The Count of Monte Cristo for my trip, and just hadn't been able to get to this one before I left, but it turned out to be both well written, attention-getting, and "light" (in the sense that the chapters feel short, and even though it's like, three hundred pages, seems like it zips along pretty quickly).

This is a re-telling of Beowulf, which I first (and last) read when the much-lauded Seamus Heaney version came out (I was fifteen, can you tell I was a nerd?), and I did enjoy it quite a bit, although I don't remember much of it now.  I am pretty sure there's some departures from the Beowulf version though, especially in regards to the "kidnapping" of Willa's son Dill, and his later return to Herot Hall and intervention in the fight between Dana and Ben Woolf.

What Headley's accomplished though, is the feel of a modern day monster/fairy tale.  The allusions to Gren's fur and claws (which may, or may not be, as we discover when Gren grows up and Dana begins to realize her experiences shortly after she was released as a prisoner may not be reliable) and the contrast of Willa's stepford wife life with the creeping intrusions made on suburbia by creatures living in a hole in the mountain, gives you the sense of falling into an inevitable dark dream.

It does suffer a little bit from what happens when you use the dream style to narrate your books, which is a case of what happened-ism: like, is diving into the lake a metaphor, or did they actually pilot the whole train into a body of water that drowned everyone? Questions for a closer read than I really care to do!

Anyway, it's been real, PopSugar.  Let's do it again sometime.

12 - A Book Inspired By Mythology, Legend Or Folklore

Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

This was the only book on the list that I've read before, because the prompt explicitly required it.  Although I have other, shorter, favorite books, I'd happened to have recently re-read those when the list came out, and I knew I'd have two weeks traveling that I could spend on a nice thick doorstopper.  I've read Count a few times already, and I was really looking forward to re-reading it.  Well, this time, I got five chapters in and had to put it away.  Even though I knew what was coming, and it wasn't a surprise in any way, for some reason the destruction of all of Edmond's hopes on his wedding day just really upset me.  I had to switch to Sherlock Holmes for a few days before I had the strength to continue.

I know this sounds incredibly snotty, but I do get new things out of it every time I re-read it.  Partly because it's so fucking long, there's probably like whole pages I've skipped and never noticed.  Last time I remember thinking that we spent a lot of time going over Benedetto's storyline, which I barely noticed this time around.  This reading had me way focused on the Count's bizarre belief that God was guiding him (because God loves REVENGE too? Actually it probably does) and this whole thing he had about people "deserving" happiness, depending on whether they had suffered a lot.  Also, my perennial gripe about how long we spend on Albert and Franz and the Rome saga, which I ALWAYS find boring and out of place, as a very long meander through a (frankly uninteresting) side character's perspective.  Come on, we have REVENGE waiting!

I also ended up re-watching the 2002 movie version, which does a yeoman's job compressing a thousand page book into a comprehensible two and a half hour movie, and ends up squashing the Haydee, Mercedes, and Albert stories, so Haydee disappears, Albert becomes the Count's biological son and Mercedes reunites with the Count, with all three sailing off into the sunset.  A dramatic departure, but on the extras the director is like, "I stand by that.  It's the only way the story even makes sense" and I kind of get where he's coming from.  As nice as it is to see the wicked punished, and as necessary as it may be for the Count to realize that the innocent by proximity, have also been punished in his mad schemes, it feels oddly unsatisfying for Mercedes (by all accounts a real stand up woman) to end her days poor and living off whatever money her son makes as a soldier (and what kind of future would the son of a now infamous traitor have in the army anyway?).  And the last scene we have with Mercedes we leave on a weird, uncertain note, basically - she won't accept help, so who knows how she'll live!

Maybe I'm softening in my old age.  Although maybe not, because I definitely forgot how Danglars' story ended and when I got to it, I was like, "This is it?! He keeps $50,000 livres and goes on his merry way?? This is bull#$%!" For real though, what the fuck.  Danglars basically engineered the whole damn thing, and he has no conscience, so appealing to one is a wasted effort.  I think the Count just ran out of steam there.  To be fair, Villefort's madness would leave a real bad taste in your mouth, but again, nothing that happened to these people was anything other than the result of their own evils, all brought home to roost. Yes, they could have lived undamaged lives if not for the Count, but simply because you are not caught being bad does not make you a good person.

 I also was paying much closer attention to the lesbian storyline this time around because last time I was kind of like, "Huh, that's kind of gay" and this time, I was like, "I'm pretty sure Dumas knew what the fuck he was doing with those two women."  If not, then, I mean, he's really good at writing lesbians accidentally.  

I read this while sailing around Greenland, which was great, because I had both plenty of time, and also (as a book I'd previously read) not so much invested in it that I wasn't able to do other things on the ship.  Honestly, I said I always get new things out of it each time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because I get the same things out of it too: entertainment, drama, REVENGE, guilt, sorrow, love, and epic-ness.  Whatever else Dumas may have been, he was a hell of a story-teller. 


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book

Treasure Island

Treasure  Island

By Robert Louis Stevenson

The classic adventure tale of buried treasure and pirates, young Jim Hawkins becomes involved in a search for the lost treasure of legendary pirate Captain Flint.  He sails to Treasure Island only to discover the ship's crew is planning to mutiny and kill their passengers after the treasure is found, and his life will depend not only on his own quick wits, but on the uncertain benevolence of Long John Silver, leader of the mutineers.

Despite this book being a classic in just about every sense of the word, I realized very early on that the only thing I knew about it was that the main character was a young child, and there was a bad pirate called Long John Silver who kinda, like, took the kid on an adventure??? In hindsight, I'm pretty sure most of my impressions were generated by Muppet Treasure Island (and like, Swiss Family Robinson, which also involves children and pirates) - which was somewhat problematic, since I've never even seen Muppet Treasure Island.   But I definitely got the idea this was a kids book.  I mean, it was a Disney movie! Uh, sure, like a pirate kids version of And Then There Were None.  As Jim says at end, of their fully staffed ship, only five people made it out alive.   Jim is almost murdered multiple times (although he fears the torture worse) and ends up shooting and killing another pirate.  I'm just saying, at no point did I have any idea of what to expect.

In fact, despite the popular idea that this is a kids book, perhaps because the narrator is a child, and it's short, honestly, it didn't feel very child-like.  I also struggled with the whole intro, in which we meet a variety of pirates whose relationship to each other was less important for Stevenson to describe, than the ominous signs and portents and chills which accompany their actions.  So, I guess I'm pretty sure that the pirate at the beginning was Flint's first mate (we never meet Flint, but everybody talks about him all the time) and had the treasure map, but just wanted... to retire in poverty?  It's unclear to me why he's just camped out at the hotel basically waiting for the other pirates to track him down, but you do you, as the kids say.

Then there's like, Blind Pew and his gang, who are somehow affiliated with Long John and his gang, although they never appear together in the book.  Or maybe they're competing pirate gangs?  All I know is, we meet a whole bunch of pirates in the first fifty pages that never appear again and aren't, actually, relevant to the main story.  Well, I guess they add spice.  And for some reason, Jim and his mom just give the map to the local squire? And then the squire decides Jim will be going on this trip and we never hear about his mother again (except that before they depart, Jim can spend one more night with her - like, was this childcare in the 1800s? Good lord).

And THEN! I was delighted to find out Long John Silver was hired as the cook! Amazing!  It makes the chain restaurant so much more apt!  Other things I was surprised by: the fact that Long John is both a mutineer and like, a triple agent! He actually is the only "good" pirate, even though he's the one that lead the mutiny. And they're more concerned about getting off the island alive than they are in looking for treasure (which does make sense).

Treasure Island has a lot of dialect, and also some like, 1880s sea-faring slang, which makes whole pages at times incomprehensible. In fact, I found the story better when there was less dialogue.  Its beginnings as an action serial are clear.

I will add just as a final note, that having just sailed on a masted schooner, I have no further insights on Treasure Island except to say that the experience is the opposite of restful, such that I had like, waking night terrors for four days following my sail, thinking that I was still rocking gently on the boat and also had no idea where I was.  Maybe that's just me. However, I can certainly understand the desire to mutiny, if only to claim better sleeping quarters.

I had a tough time with this prompt, since "celebrity" and "admire" don't really go hand in hand.  But in addition to the recommendation, I happened to have a very handsome set of adventure stories which I bought two years ago and never opened, so this was the perfect opportunity.

28: A Book Recommended By A Celebrity You Admire 
(Barack Obama)

Blackfish City

Blackfish City

By Sam J. Miller

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.



Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

There's something I just really enjoyed about this book - the vibe, the feel of it, the concept, the execution, whatever it was, I was just rapt from page 1. There are four narrators (for a little while, sorry, Fill!) but it maintains relatively confusion free, everything eventually coming together to solve the mystery of the woman with the orca, and the Breaks disease. It feels fresh and new in a way a lot of dystopian fiction doesn't (at least, YA fiction).  Some of that may be because of the setting, which allows Miller to completely invent the city and its social structures and strictures.  It's also a pretty fun revenge story, and those are generally a good time.  I like a good revenge story in fiction.  It gives you all the feels from punishing wrongdoers without actually having a mental breakdown and like, going after every person who has ever cut you off in traffic.  Revenge in real life is not nearly as awesome. 

The other thing I appreciated about this was how dark it was without actually being depressing.  Fill is murdered, the polar bear dies and it's presumed that Kaev will descend into madness again, the city is a mess, and we kind of leave our characters in a boat, on uncertain waters, but you do feel like it's possible for things to be okay.  I would be interested in spending more time in Qaanaaq (or the rest of the world) but it seems like it would be hard to duplicate the tension and sense of impending collision that marks Blackfish City.  Part of the book's strength is each character's internal narration and the sense of loss and loneliness that each has, which is both explained and solved by the end of the book. 

There's a lot about current social issues - otherism, disease, economic injustice, climate change, gender/sexuality - that does feel timely (and pointed).  It's not really a very subtle book, but honestly, how far have we gotten with subtle? There's a lot going on, and the tone of the book does change from the beginning (more of that internal struggle and place-setting) and the end (action action action), but that really didn't bother me the way it did other reviewers. 

Maybe I'm letting the novelty of it count for too much, but it weirdly reminded me of another dystopic masterpiece, the ineffable 17776.  Particularly with the Memory Map of Qaanaaq, and the feeling that of a very lived-in world, even if we only focus on a few people in it.  We're all bound together, let's try not to sink this ship.


37: A Book With A Two-Word Title

The Liar's Club

The Liar's Club

By Mary Karr

A trenchant memoir of a troubled American childhood from the child's point of view describes growing up in a an East Texas refinery town, life in the midst of a turbulent family of drunks and liars, a schoolyard rape, and other dark secrets.

I give it a big old Eh, or maybe a Meh.  I really struggled with this prompt, and eventually went with this one as it was just on a top fifty list of memoirs, and I agree the writing is nice, but it felt hazy, without a consistent through line.  We just wandered from anecdote to anecdote without saying anything.

I think there are definitely better memoirs out there - The Glass Castle is one of my favorites - and maybe this one just wasn't what I was in the mood for.  You do have to slow down for this one, try to savor the writing, because it is really very well written.  Karr is a poet, literally, and her memoir is like poetry too: beautifully written, with words that sound meaningful, but when you string them together it's more about a feeling than a scene. It sounds nice, but makes no sense. The Liar's Club just meandered almost unbearably, especially in the first section.

And I guess what I'm also struggling with is this weird juxtaposition of calling the book The Liar's Club, and seeing how much mental space her father takes up, but in actual practice it seems like her mother is really the figure that looms largest in her life, and in the book: from her mental breakdown, bringing her own mother home to die, leaving with the kids to Colorado and getting married multiple times, finally reconciling with her husband in Texas again, and this final revelation about her prior family and the loss of her first children  - I felt like this is the person who should have have the focus of the book trained on her.  Instead, she feels almost like a supporting character. 

Even though the author notes that she spoke with her mother on the subject and gave her the final book to read, there's no depth to her mother in The Liar's Club, she's just this opaque, semi-crazy out of control person - what on earth was she thinking for all of this?  Why was she making the choices she made? If you've got this resource, why not use it? Get into this woman who apparently was married off at fifteen but cared so much for her mother that she wouldn't evacuate from a hurricane.  The title feels misleading - Karr's father doesn't have half the mystery and allure that her mother has, for better or for worse (mostly worse).

And Karr herself, as a child of seven or eight, simply doesn't have any autonomy or direction apart from that her parents allow her.  While the things that happened to Karr (and the things that almost happened) are horrifying, I never feel like we get any better sense of why they're happening than Karr as a child did.  There is no clarity or knowledge that author Karr brings to her childhood confusion.

31: A Book About A Family

Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea

By Ruta Sepetys

Winter 1945. WWII. Four refugees. Four stories.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. But not all promises can be kept . .

I was under a mistaken impression of this book.  I thought it was going to be like All the Light We Cannot See, but it's actually marked "YA" and was very short and easy to read.  Not like, short-short, but all the chapters are like, two pages each.  There's a lot of blank space in the book.  I finished it in less than two hours.  Salt to the Sea takes the viewpoints of four characters: a fifteen year old pregnant Polish girl, a repatriating Lithuanian nurse, a Nazi forger fleeing with treasure, and a budding young sociopath.  

As children's books about WWII go, it's not really breaking much new ground in the ideas that war is hell, Nazis were awful, and crimes against humanity were committed on a massive scale.  Where it does excel is in covering a geographic area and event that doesn't get much press: the sinking (spoiler!) of the Wilhem Gustlof off the coast of what is now Poland. It also focuses more on the shrinking eastern front of the war, as the Russians approached, sowing devastation and rape indiscriminately on whichever women were in their path.  There's also no shying away from the mass rapes committed by the Russians in their march west, as it plays a vital role in Emilia's story.

We spend a lot of time with the refugees just trying to get on to the boat, and relatively little on board, which makes sense, since the ship's journey was only supposed to take two days, and they were sunk ten hours into the trip.  It's a fascinating and engrossing look at the event, but obviously a KYA book can't be all things at once: there's a lot of side plot about Florian stealing bits from the Amber Room which his Nazi mentor hid away, which adds more subplot about another WWII mystery that I don't think the book necessarily needs (especially as Sepetys' tying it in this way is complete speculation), and it cuts what is perhaps the saddest note about the sinking: because it carried some Nazi officials, the boat was not marked as a hospital ship, so under the "rules of war" (what an oxymoron) the sinking of thousands of refugees and civilians was not a war crime.  Not that I think that thousands of women and children fleeing an encroaching army should shield Nazis, but it's such an ironic and poignant detail, I'm sorry that Sepetys wasn't able to work it in somehow.

It's fairly well written, all the parts with Alfred made my skin crawl (intentionally so) although I did kind of love that Hannelore's last proclamation to him was her Jewishness, a last "Fuck you" to the ultimate fuckboy.  The multiple narrators actually worked well for this, as we got both a variety of viewpoints and didn't spend too much time on any one person. 


19: A Book Told From Multiple POVs

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

By Seth Dickinson

Baru Cormorant believes any price is worth paying to liberate her people-even her soul.
When the Empire of Masks conquers her island home, overwrites her culture, criminalizes her customs, and murders one of her fathers, Baru vows to swallow her hate, join the Empire's civil service, and claw her way high enough to set her people free.

Sent as an Imperial agent to distant Aurdwynn, another conquered country, Baru discovers it's on the brink of rebellion. Drawn by the intriguing duchess Tain Hu into a circle of seditious dukes, Baru may be able to use her position to help. As she pursues a precarious balance between the rebels and a shadowy cabal within the Empire, she orchestrates a do-or-die gambit with freedom as the prize.

But the cost of winning the long game of saving her people may be far greater than Baru imagines.

I don't know what I can or should say about Traitor: I liked it well enough, but I did find it losing my attention as I tried to track names, characters, backstories, action.  There are thirteen duchies in Aurdwynn, and even despite the map at the beginning, I wasn't like, super on top of who was who.  Also, and here's the thing: in any book that revolves around betrayals (not any more a spoiler than the title, come on) there's going to be that plots-within-plots feeling that is a little bit expected and a little bit exhausting. Although it's not a surprise to the reader that Baru betrays the rebellion (or, it shouldn't be - if you've picked up on any of the hints, or read the fucking title of the book) Dickinson does a pretty good job still making you feel bad about it.

The plot felt a lot like Red Rising: child of the oppressed somehow infiltrates the ruling class and ends up in a competition/test to prove themselves while also gathering enough power to bring the ruling class down from within.   Traitor deals a lot more with the sticky political things: colonialism, and germ warfare, and economic subrogation, and religious tyranny.  It doesn't want to be an action/thriller, it wants to get at the idea of becoming the very thing you swore to destroy.  What if, in seeking to undo the crime done to you, you commit those very crimes against someone else? What good is revenge when you have already killed everything you meant to save?

The pace of the first section is pretty quick, as Baru makes it from island to school to posting to uncovering and imploding a rebel plot fairly quickly, but we spend more time in the later sections, where Baru first infiltrates the (newest) rebellion and then helps to win it, which I felt started to drag a little, if only because of the aforementioned need to remember names, backstories, action, and plots.  It's possible some of the convolution will pay off in later installments.  It can be so tricky to review firsts in a series that way.  I still remember JK Rowling promising big payoffs and answers to mysteries raised in the first couple of books that kind of fizzled out by the time she finished the seventh (i.e. why does Harry Potter have so much money in his vault, and I am so unsatisfied by the answer.  We waited ten years to find out his dad is just rich, really?).

I read the whole thing in one go, but a few days out, I'm just not feeling the need to read the sequel right now, which is a bad sign for me finishing the (forthcoming) quartet.  I think you get back to this idea of: how much time do you want to spend in a mind that is this unhappy, and in a world which is this difficult and unpleasant?  Even Baru's successes were in service to a greater tragedy, and there's a point at which it's just not that fun.  I enjoy a good revenge story - I'm very excited to be re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo for my final book - but Baru so far is unrelenting misery, and the reviews for The Monster Baru Cormorant sound like more of the same.  When are we going to get REVENGEEEEE?? Would I practice revenge in real life? No.  Do I want a revenge fantasy while Baru seems hell-bent on a realistic look at what revenge does to a person? YES.


One of the things I didn't like about Wonder Woman when it came out was this scene where they're trying to hold a war council and talking about sacrificing a town, and Diana's like, "How can you not try to save absolutely everyone?" which is such an unrealistic attitude to have in war.  Contrast that with The Imitation Game, which I just watched yesterday, when they realize they have to lie about cracking Enigma in order to prevent the Germans from changing their cipher, thereby sacrificing loads of people they could have saved for the greater good.  I appreciated that as being both a more realistic and a harder (and therefore more heartfelt) choice.  It's easy to just indiscriminately help people, it's harder when you have to decide who you will let die.  Here, Baru takes the stance that everyone is worth sacrificing, which I think tips the spectrum too far in the other direction - too easy when you only have one thing you want to save, you know it will always win. Baru is sort of like the anti-Wonder Woman in that respect.

We'll see how I go - I might end up waiting until the whole series is published and trying again then.

25: A Debut Novel

Lysistrata

Lysistrata

By Aristophanes

Translation by Douglass Parker

The bravest of women, Lysistrata, determines that there is only one way to end war forever. She calls a convention for women only and makes them swear to give up love. Dressed for seduction and armed to the teeth, they beat off their men and refuse to sleep with them until the fighting has ceased.  But, no matter how strong the will, the flesh is weak, and it is impossible to keep the women from joining the men. Backsliding is an ever-present danger.

To an Athens bereft by military disaster, as to the world today, LYSISTRATA stands as an impassioned plea for peace.  With a comic realism that borders on despair, Aristophanes observes that only lust is strong enough to drive out war.

Oh my god, I did not investigate my library's selection of ancient Greek texts, and just picked whichever translation popped up first (it also had a bright pink cover, and fun illustrations which were adorable) and, well,  the translation is not bad, I mean, he's obviously tried for like, rhymes and idioms and stuff, which is why you would never guess from just reading the play that the translator is also, clearly, insane.  I mean:

Even the most rabid advocate of the wide circulation of the classics in any form must blanch slightly at the broadcast misconception that this play is a hoard of applied lubricity.  Witness its latest American publication bowdlerized in reverse, nestled near some choice gobbets from Frank Harris'  autobiography and a slick and curious quarterly called Eros now under indictment.

What in the ever-loving fuck, you may be thinking. Or who the fuck is Frank Harris? The thoughts also crossed my mind.  But I mean, what the fuck is this:

71. The ensuing reconciliation scene, with its surrogate sexuality, is one of the most curious in Aristophanes. It is not lyric; yet both its diction, oddly diffuse and redundant, and it's meter, a paeonic variation on a common trochaic dialogue measure which paradoxically makes it much more regular, seem to call for extensive choreography. I have tried to hedge my bet by stilting the English and employing any regular scheme depending heavily on off rhymes.

I feel like we're getting further away from the goal of his translation, i.e., making it so people who speak English can understand this.   

Beyond all that, the play itself (and the translation) is charming.  It's very short, and involves a lot of jokes and puns about penises, as all best plays do, although it's actually more focused on the interplay between the women and men than it is coming up with new idioms for sex (I see you there Shakespeare, Aristophanes doesn't have a patch on you).  As I mentioned before, Parker does a pretty good job making ancient Greek rhyme, sound modern and make sense, but he has this one weird thing that drove me crazy: he uses "American mountain dialect" for the Spartan characters, which has the effect of completely stopping the rhythm of the page.  For example:

Kleonike: Where did you find that group?

Lysistrata: They're from the outskirts.

Kleonike: Well, that's something.  If you haven't done anything else, you've really ruffled up the outskirts.

Myrrhine: Oh, Lysistrata, we aren't late, are we? Well, are we? Speak to me!

Lysistrata: What is it, Myrrhine? Do you want a medal for tradiness? Honestly, such behavior, with so much at stake...

Myrrhine: I'm sorry.  I couldn't find my girdle in the dark.  And anyway, we're here now.  So tell us all about it, whatever it is.

Kleonike: No, wait a minute.  Don't begin just yet.  Let's wait for those girls from Thebes and the Pelopennese.

Lysistrata: Now there speaks the proper attitude.  And here's our lovely Spartan.  Hello Lampito dear.  Why darling, you're simply ravishing! Such a blemishless complexion - so clean, so out-of-doors!  And will you look at that figure - the pink of perfection!

Kleonike: I bet you could strangle a bull.

Lampito: I calklate so.  Hit's fitness whut done it, fitness and dancin'.  You know the step? Foot it out back'ards an' toe yore twitchet.

Kleonike: What beautiful bosoms!

Lampito: Shuckins, whut fer you tweedlin' me up so? 

I hate it so much, I can't even tell you.  It's one thing for the director of the play to make the decision to have all the Spartans talk like the worst parody of a hillbilly from a Saturday morning cartoon,  but to have the dialogue be twisted and yanked and worse: written in dialect, drives me nuts.  I'd be interested to see if more recent translations would do the same, since I feel like that kind of tone-deaf writing is not in vogue anymore.

I bitch, I bitch, but there's actually very few Spartans, and you can certainly skip the preface and footnotes if you want, and the experience of reading the play is only minorly diminished by the issues I describe.  And for a dusty, centuries-old Greek play, it's actually pretty fun.

And finally, I realized I'd forgotten to mention the prompt: I went for "Women: you can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" and although apparently this sentiment predates even Aristophanes, I felt this was sufficiently old enough to count as its inspiration!
 
49: A Book That Has Inspired A Common Phrase Or Idiom

Ten Second Reviews

The Best Lies

By Sarah Lyu

Remy's life changes when she meets Elise.  Charismatic Elise, who is determined to right the wrongs of the world, and bring Remy along with her on her quest for justice.  But Elise's history is darker than Remy realizes - and when Remy tries to get away from Elise's plans, the night ends with Elise killing Remy's boyfriend Jack.  But is Elise the aggressor or the victim, or both? This one had some promise.  I thought it was going to be like a real Basic Instinct or Single White Female (note that I haven't actually seen either of these movies, but in today's cultural world, do you even have to, to know what they're about?) but it turned out to just be sad, a tragedy about an abused child who winds up lashing out and then taking a really wild left turn into murder.  Even though the book leads with the shooting, it didn't feel earned by the end.  As ominous and weird as Elise was, the fact that she was actually being beaten bloody by her father meant that whatever else she was, she wasn't a liar, and she wasn't ridiculous for wanting justice/revenge. So the finale where she kills Jack because he threatened to tell people she set a house on fire if she didn't let Remy detach, just feels really out of character.  Not to mention that I cannot for the life of me figure out what any of these people see in Remy.  At several points, I thought the reveal was going to be that Remy was actually the killer, because she was so frigging obsessed with whatever person happened to be cool in her direction most recently. 

Carry On

By Rainbow Rowell

So sue me, I ended up being curious enough from Fangirl to read Rowell's take on Harry Potter fanfic.  In some ways, it's a lot like In Other Lands, another post-HP take on the idea of a child being indoctrinated into a magical school and growing up and making friends (and making out, which is also very important).  Carry On did not thrill me? I mean, you kind of know where everything is going, and who the "Big Bad" is and frankly, things don't happen at all until Baz appears, 150 pages in to a 500 page book.  Because we're meant to think this is the last of a series, there's a lot of describing previous years' adventures, however, because this isn't in fact the last of a series, none of the adventures can be significant at all to this years' adventure, so they're a little bit pointless.  As is the character of Agatha.  I think I sort of get what Rowell was going for, a reversal of the idea that the Chosen One has a Chosen Girlfriend, but Agatha's role seemed limited to being the Debbie Downer of the group - just real unhappy, and ironically enough, existing only to be moved around by the other characters and her life threatened.

In the end, I felt oddly let down by the ending - leaving your magical protagonist powerless and with wings and a devil's tail which have to be made invisible every twelve hours, and permanent magical deadzones seems kind of a downer to me. I don't know if the forthcoming sequel would solve any of those problems, but after reading Carry On, I have little interest in finding out.  It's just not my bag.

The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window

By: A.J. Finn

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

I alluded to this slightly in my last review, but it bears repeating: any mystery in which I can guess most of the major plot points well in advance of the reveals is just not that good.  I mean, I'm definitely not proud of this, but I am like, consistently terrible about figuring out whodunit.

I was also semi-primed I suppose by having read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine which revolves around [SPOILER] the reveal that Eleanor's mother, with whom Eleanor has weekly conversations, is actually dead, not in jail, but it seemed very obvious very quickly that actual conversations with your separated husband and child just don't go like that.  It was also perfectly clear to me that Grandma Lizzie was suspicious and that Ethan was no good, particularly (in the last case) after Dr. Fox basically accused everyone, and it came out that she was an overly medicated drunk with PTSD, and yet Ethan, a high school aged boy, still wanted to hang out with her. Yeah, right, I'm sure that's what all the cool kids are up to, checking on their looney tunes neighbors and crying gently into their shoulders.  I'm not sure why Grandma Lizzie pinged my radar, maybe I just have a natural suspicion and hatred of supposedly motherly elderly women.  She just set my back up right away, and honestly, I don't know if it was intentional on Finn's part, which is probably a bad sign.

I originally had this on my list (along with White Fang) and that article about how nuts A.J. Finn is came out in the New Yorker, and I was kinda leaning away from it, because a psuedo-Mr. Ripley is not someone I really want to get behind, but then I figured I would rather read this than White Fang.  Joke's on me!

So, the good parts: it did have some good action, although I ended up skimming a bit. Here's the thing, I don't know if I can even be impartial, because when you know how it ends, and the author's just like, circling endlessly, you start to lose interest, because there's no tension there.  You have a limp rope.  So the whole time the Dr. is telling Grandma Lizzie what happened that fateful night, I was like, "Get to the point!" She unspools it over like, two or three chapters.  And the beats in the story are so well-trod, I was like, yes, we've reached the point where no one believes her, but then she's going to find an incontrovertible piece of evidence and somehow wind up in a one-on-one confrontation with the killer.

The only part I needed explained was who Jane Russell actually was, and why she would pretend to be Jane Russell.  Which, sure, okay, a long lost natural mother who just wants to be part of the family, but like, if she was doing so well and was off the drugs, did she like, forget to tell friends she was planning to stake out her son's house for awhile? No one reported her missing?


Haha, I was wondering why the German version on Amazon was rated so much lower than the English language version, and apparently it is because people don't understand that a book advertised as "The Woman in the Window - Was hat sie wirklich gesehen?" may not be 100% in English.  Don't lower the rating just because you don't know German when you see it, ma'am.

Woman is basically Rear Window without Jimmy Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, and Grace Kelly, which is to say, Rear Window without the parts that made it great.  And while Rear Window has all the non-murdery neighborhood drama to dip into every so often, Woman basically focuses 100% of its attention next door.  It is so dangerous to ape a classic, and in this case, all the comparisons do Woman no favors: it's definitely second rate.

 01: A Book Becoming A Movie In 2019  (See Black Future Month for explanation)