The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl

 By Paolo Bacigalupi

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand.  Undercover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...

Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of  a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned on the streets of Bangkok.  Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.

What happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism's genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution?

As interesting as those questions are, the actual book was something very different from the one described in the blurb.  Okay, well, the description is technically accurate, but it manages to completely elide much of the book's plot and characters.  In fact, the Windup Girl is only one of about six main characters, who all sort of loosely interact and engage each other.  It's hard to say whether she's even a main character.  Her plotline serves mostly for titillation until she finally ends up murdering a bunch of politicians after a grotesque rape. Which, totally deserved, but still oddly unfulfilling. I know that Emiko has been "engineered" to be obedient (apparently by including Labrador DNA? Like, what the F? Are we not content to use her as a figurative and somewhat literal whipping boy, but now she's also part-dog?) but having Anderson use her the way he does (first by fucking her, then by effectively selling her to the aforementioned rapist politician) and then be rewarded by her continuous attention and care even up to his death is gross. 

Aside from my aversion to the whole sex-worker aspect of the book, the whole thing is also entirely misleading.  We spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book following the characters as they engage in various plots:

• Anderson, who is supposedly undercover looking for seeds or new plants, or a geneticist, but whom we never see actually doing any of those things, just thinking about them while he flits in and out of the factory for his cover story;
• Hock Seng, the "yellow-card" Chinese factory manager who is trying to steal the plans of whatever gizmo the factory is actually making;
• Carlyle, Anderson's white friend who has a plot to unplug the city's levees unless they let him import shit;
• Jaidee, aka "the Tiger", who is an enforcer for the Environment Ministry, apparently hell bent on eliminating all foreign imports and feuding with the Trade Ministry (which is obviously hell bent on increasing imports);
• Kanya, Jaidee's subordinate, who is a mole at the Environment Ministry for the Trade Ministry; and, of course:
• Emiko, who really just wants to get the hell out of Dodge.

Like, NONE of that is relevant to the climax of the book, which happens when aforesaid rapist politician (who happens to be the regent for the child queen) is murdered, and the Trade Ministry decides it's a good time to take out the Environment Ministry. Even the parts which you would think would concern such a coup, like Anderson and Carlyle's bargain with the Trade Ministry to supply military and pumps, end up meaning absolutely nothing, since the pushed-up timing of the coup means that none of that arrives in time for the action.  Or Kanya's double agent-ness, which we find out only after Jaidee has died, and which apparently didn't impact why Jaidee (or his wife) died either, and none of the coup.

It's a little frustrating, to spend so much time with each person's squalid concerns, only to realize that none of that impacts anything that happens in the end.  Anderson dies from the plague the factory inadvertently created (which by the way, uh, we never really find out if it's actually spreading or not), Hock Seng gets robbed of the gizmo plans just as he breaks into the safe, and we also do not find out what importance, if any, the gizmos have to any other thing in the book, Carlyle's pumps are worthless, since Kanya deliberately floods the city anyway, Jaidee is dead, having gone on a revenge-spree that went literally nowhere, Kanya ends up facing like no consequences either of her double agent activity or her flooding the city, and Emiko ends up just like, living in New Venice, talking to this old geneticist who says he can make her clones fertile.  Honestly just disappointing.  It really feels like this was the first in a planned series, rather than a stand-alone, since it just, like, drops all these threads in the end of the book.

I did select this as my "cli-fi" book to read, although I'll be reading more cli-fi for another prompt later.  On that level, I would also say that some sort of introductory lead-in about how and why we're at the point we are when we start the book (genetic plagues, engineered fruit, megadonts, etc) would go a long way towards smoothing the first, mmm, quarter of the book.  I think Bacigalupi's written some short stories that were also set in this same world, and I don't know if he felt that those were enough of an introduction, but a lot of this just was just very non-intuitive.  Particularly with all the plots going on, I was having trouble figuring out whose side the "White Shirts" were on, why we even cared if there was a new fruit which was actually an old fruit introduced into the market, what calories had to do with anything, since, despite the book's description, no one was actually being paid in calories, money still worked perfectly fine.

And some background about the particular geographic setting would have helped a lot too. Considering how important the Trade and Environment Ministries are, Jaidee's introductory chapter is incredibly confusing.  He's taking bribes, he's not taking bribes, he's inspecting Customs, which I would have thought would have been Trade's purview, he's setting things on fire.  There's just a lot of moving parts that don't coalesce until much much later in the book, almost too late for me to develop interest in the factions. A lot gets introduced and without background, I just can't tell how much of it is important.  There's a bunch of stuff about Megadont unions that's never really relevant, for example. Maybe it's world building, and I'm not saying spoon-feed us, but a gentler easing-in, even just focusing on one person for more than one chapter at a time, would have probably given me a much better attitude about having to finish this.

I don't regret reading this, and it was well written, but without the incentive of the reading challenge, I don't think I would have kept going after the initial rape scene with Emiko, in the third chapter. I think the book would have benefitted from focus - are we a book about a political upheaval caused by famine, plague, and foreign interests? If so, we can eliminate Hock Seng, and most of Anderson and Emiko.  Or are we a book about the ethics of manufactured, but illegal, people? In which case, let's get rid of Jaidee and Kanya (and also Hock Seng, sorry HS, you had nothing to do with any of the other plots, you just served as a sort of naysaying Cassandra).  Or are we going to expand everyone's stories into more books? In which case, where are they? There was just too much going on. 

However, the world that was created was fascinating - the idea that bio-engineered food famines and plagues are now how wars are fought (although not, apparently, in Thailand, which still uses good old fashioned tanks and missiles) is worth exploring.  I mean, there's a lot to unpack, what with oil wars, the Malaya uprising against the non-native Chinese, whatever the hell happened in Finland, all of which is just, like, alluded to.  Again, if I need to read a short story to get context for a stand-alone book, then I don't think the books succeeds on its own as it needs to. 


41: A "Cli-Fi" Book

A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove

By Fredrik Backman

Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?
Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

This one has shades of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine and The Rosie Project, books about people who simply have trouble connecting with other people, and (of course, I mean, these aren't tragedies here, although a lot is sad in all three books) the eventual connections and friendships they find in spite of it, by the end.

I was charmed by Ove, even though the writing style for me was hard to get into.  It might have been the translation (although I doubt it) but it had both a very staccato feel as well as a kind of sing-songy rhythm/ child's verse sentence structure in parts.  Like, "Here is a man who looks angrily at the cat.  The cat looks unaffected by the anger." (That's a made up example).

Ove definitely has been through a lot, as we find out in the course of the book that his mother died when he was young, his father died in an accident when Ove was sixteen, he gets fired from his beloved train job from a false theft accusation, his house burns down, the insurance he had on it was fraudulent, his wife loses their child and the use of her legs in a bus accident, his wife gets cancer and dies a week before he's let go from his job (I think - the timeline of those last two is hinky, since at points he goes to his wife's grave, which already has a gravestone up.  I happen to know it can take a while, sometimes months and months for a gravestone to be done, unless somehow Ove has harassed the stone cutters into doing it overnight [not a real stretch, considering]).  Even so, he was incredibly rude and grumpy, and there were definitely points that felt like the book took kind of a magical realism approach to how anyone in real life would be completely turned off by his attitude.

The book did read a little sit-commy at times, like during arguments between the pregnant woman and her husband.  It swung between that and just, like, treacle-y heartbreak in the flashback chapters.  I think the author was going for more black comedy, particularly in the present day chapters as Ove tries again and again to kill himself, but it sheer amount of terrible things that happened to him as a young adult were like, ridiculous after a point.  It was jarring to bounce between them, I guess. 

In fact, all the timelines were hinky - we find out that his neighbor has dementia and his wife can't care for him anymore, but his neighbor can't be that much older than Ove, since their wives were pregnant at the same time. Plus, we find out in the last chapter that after all this, Ove dies in his sleep four years later, like, whaaat? In this day and age, and with modern medicine being what it is, seems kinda strange that at least three people have died or become completely incapacitated by age 65 in this subdivision.  Seems to me like they should be investigating the water around there.  And what kind of place is Sweden where they just take people away for having dementia?  Does this actually happen, because if so, it's both horrifying and tempting. In the US they do as little as possible to care for people so you generally stay at home until you start leaving the house in the middle of the night and then get into car accidents from trying to drive to your accountant's office at 4 in the morning for a non-existent meeting, at which time the family will just take away your car keys and call it good and you STILL won't be forcibly removed from your home.

I'm kind of grumpy myself.  I've just started the next book and I'm already unhappy. Is there going to be a day that we can eliminate UNNECESSARY RAPE as character shorthand for female trauma? I did read that Rapunzel book, and there was definitely some there which I did get through, and I don't know if I've just already reached my rape quota for the year, or if it just felt extremely and unpleasantly gratuitous, but Paolo Bacigalupi, you are on my shit list.


23: A Book Set in Scandanavia

The Winter of the Witch

The Winter of the Witch 

By Katherine Arden 

The Winternight Trilogy introduced an unforgettable heroine, Vasilisa Petrovna, a girl determined to forge her own path in a world that would rather lock her away. Her gifts and her courage have drawn the attention of Morozko, the winter-king, but it is too soon to know if this connection will prove a blessing or a curse.

Now Moscow has been struck by disaster. Its people are searching for answers—and for someone to blame. Vasya finds herself alone, beset on all sides. The Grand Prince is in a rage, choosing allies that will lead him on a path to war and ruin. A wicked demon returns, stronger than ever and determined to spread chaos. Caught at the center of the conflict is Vasya, who finds the fate of two worlds resting on her shoulders. Her destiny uncertain, Vasya will uncover surprising truths about herself and her history as she desperately tries to save Russia, Morozko, and the magical world she treasures. But she may not be able to save them all.

After two duds, I was very glad to get back to Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy.  This one was a bit of a freebie, since I had already read - and loved - the first two, I had a pretty good idea I would enjoy this one.  Although sometimes trilogies end in disappointment!  I'm reminded I still have the Tearling trilogy unfinished, because by the time the third came out, I realized I needed to re-read the second as a refresher, and, well, reviews were kinda negative, so I never bothered.  Invasion of the Tearling is still sitting out, waiting for me.  Oops.

Anyway, I have no such ill-news on The Winter of the Witch (which I keep calling the Season of the Witch, because that song is just a perfect earworm).  It's great!  Very boring, I know.  The reviews are a lot easier when you can just bitch for three pages.  Not to say that the book is boring, in fact, it starts off almost immediately with a tragedy, a beheading, and a frantic flight, that give it a feel that you're really jumping straight from the second book to the third without pause.  Literally, since the third is set immediately after the second.  Even after that though, it slows and picks up speed in ways that you don't expect.  There's a big climactic battle that you think would be the finale in another book, but you've got another whole narrative to finish.  [Sidebar: I don't think I reviewed this one here, but another great book that does this is The Library at Mount Char, which really gets you there, gets you wondering what else is there to do, and then pulls a whole other surprise out of its hat.  Another highly recommended read, but not for the faint of heart!]

Not to say that I loved everything about it - I thought the parts where she ends up romantically involved with Morozko were a distraction and unnecessary for her character.  She never seemed to need a romance, and I didn't really want one for her, even though there had been hints that way in earlier books.  Plus, since it has been awhile since I've read the first and second, the whole jewel storyline felt like it was very much built up in the first two books, both as a mystery and a plot point, but it seemed like it kind of fizzled into nothingness in the third.  I just feel like that was oddly unfinished, although maybe I just need to go back and re-read.

I can't help but compare this book to the Waking Lands books (unfairly perhaps) as how to write and plot well versus adequately. For example, in Waking Land, Elanna is beat up enough that she mentions pulling her shirt up and her ribs are black and blue.  Yet two pages later, she's riding a horse and jumping abruptly into the arms of her beloved whatshisname without even a passing thought to it.  In Winter of the Witch, Vasya gets the shit beat out of her, and she feels it for days, for weeks or months (time passes kind of weirdly for a while). It doesn't get forgotten in service of a cliche.

This trilogy as a whole is a wonderful deep dive into Russian folklore and feels like the best kind of fantasy: heavily and painstakingly plotted, not a thing out of place or out of character, and three books long.  Both the Winternight Trilogy and Naomi Novik's newest, Spinning Silver have rapidly replaced Orson Scott Card's Enchantment as my favorite psuedo-Russian fantasy (which definitely has some weird sexual issues that I enjoy less as I get older and wiser). 

This one I originally had down as my 2019 published book, but I'm switching this and Wicked King because I don't know what's in Wicked King but I feel like the domovoi creatures and the Firebird, for sure, better match the:

27: A book featuring an extinct or imaginary creature

The Waking Land

 The Waking Land

By Callie Bates

Lady Elanna is fiercely devoted to the king who raised her like a daughter. But when he dies under mysterious circumstances, Elanna is accused of his murder—and must flee for her life.

Returning to the homeland of magical legends she has forsaken, Elanna is forced to reckon with her despised, estranged father, branded a traitor long ago. Feeling a strange, deep connection to the natural world, she also must face the truth about the forces she has always denied or disdained as superstition—powers that suddenly stir within her.

But an all-too-human threat is drawing near, determined to exact vengeance. Now Elanna has no choice but to lead a rebellion against the kingdom to which she once gave her allegiance. Trapped between divided loyalties, she must summon the courage to confront a destiny that could tear her apart.

Honestly, I wanted to like this a lot more than I did.  I was not even going to read it at first because I was going to wait for all three of the planned trilogy to come out, that's how much I expected to enjoy it!  But fear not, I am NOT going to be waiting for any more of them.  I read this one and I'm partly through just finished the second one (because I was on a trip and needed something to read) and once that's finished, I am D.O.N.E. with this series. I think, in fact, that The Memory of Fire leaned into even harder the things I didn't like about The Waking Land, so buyer beware.

I did end up picking it for this prompt because it has a bunch of plants on the cover and in fact it's a lot about plants as well. There's a magical earth power in the book, and I know how silly that sounds but I promise it's not as silly as some of the rest of the book.  However, I will note that her power is very conveniently hidden when the book starts, even though she has no control over it, uses it again and again in public, and once she needs it, it is always available to do large or small magic without any training or knowledge whatsoever.  Convenient!

Almost as soon as I got into it I didn't like it very much because it begins with the main character, Elanna, in the court of King Antoine, who is holding her as hostage for her parents good behavior.  Within a chapter, the king is murdered and Elanna is arrested for his murder. Obviously she's rescued since otherwise it would be a very short book and finds her way to the land of her parents. Now you'd think that this would lead to a lot of tension and drama about being torn between two worlds, and the plot description makes it sound like she's really torn between two countries but in fact almost as soon as she gets back to her old homeland she switches allegiances just because they told her that everything she heard growing up with King Antoine was lies. and also she realizes almost instantaneously the three-party system makes more sense than a monarchy. This is why we shouldn't let 19 year olds run for office. They're pretty dumb.

It's even more laughable and doubly ironic when at the end of the book she unilaterally decides to let the daughter of the old King put in exile instead of putting her on trial and potentially executing her even though the new Queen is standing right there and is in complete disagreement with Elanna. Not only is this completely in contravention of everything they've said about checks and balances so far, nowhere in the history of history has letting a potential contender for the throne live been a good idea. In fact in most cases all it does is spur opposition who now has a figurehead behind which to put a rebellion.

SPOILER for the second book: They do this AGAIN in The Memory of Fire and OF COURSE it's going to come back to bite them in the ass in the third book.  But the second book leans even harder into this idea of "We're going to have a revolution and completely overthrow a despotic leader BUT ALSO NO ONE WILL DIE BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO USE VIOLENCE TO OVERTHROW AN UNFAIR SYSTEM ARE JUST AS BAD AS THE SYSTEM, WAAAH.  I have an abhorrence for this rhetoric, as you can tell, as not only is it completely unrealistic and cast the whole thing in a fake-y Disney-fied aura, it's also disingenuous to suggest that an oppressed people become as the oppressors if any attempt to overthrow their shackles results in a death.  There's obviously going overboard, example one being the Troubles in Ireland which had A LOT of civilian casualties, deliberately so, and Ireland being Waking Land's obvious inspiration, but as much as we might praise non-violent protests, these types of activities worked because of world opinion - in the environment that these books are set in, i.e., magical early Roman/British history, there are no televisions, no radios, that will put public pressure on the leaders to stop this.  Also, I need hardly add, that non-violent protests are almost always accompanied with violent protests, because of course you're going to get multiple factions arguing about which method is best to achieve your goals.  This gets to the heart of one of my biggest complaints about The Memory of Fire - even though what'shisname shows up in a country already fomenting revolution, as soon as he appears, everyone just defers to his ideas and plans, even though (in my opinion) his ideas aren't even directed to the same goals, he just wants to save Elanna and Eren.  I'll stop there before I get further sidetracked.  END SPOILER.

In fact I found the character of Elanna to be completely unlikable throughout the book. She's, I suppose, typical for a teenager but you would have hoped that someone with her history and in this setting she would have more sense and be more measured in her actions instead of hmm, just going around to whatever thing she thinks of is an emergency at the time. For example, even though she hasn't seen this man in fifteen years, and has no idea whether he's trustworthy, she demands that they go rescue one of the revolutionaries who was sentenced to be executed even though it could potentially cost more lives and, as we find out in the end of the book, completely ignores her own father who was actually executed. It's like the only things that she thinks about are the ones that are immediately in front of her; there's no layered sense to her understanding. She's mad at her parents until someone tells her that they didn't want her to be taken hostage then she loves them until she finds out that her mother has a relationship with one of the generals on the other side and she blames her mother for colluding with him until the general actually saves her life at which point she forgives her mother for actually passing information that did in fact lead to the death a quite a few of the revolutionaries. Some of that was pretty obvious but she has to have all of it pointed out for her by other people. And to bring it back to that initial suggestion that she would be torn between two worlds, once she finds out that King Antoine may not have been the kindly, charitably minded king she thought he was (leaving aside, also, how ridiculous she thought that in the first place, since he LITERALLY KIDNAPPED HER AT GUNPOINT) she doesn't give anymore thought to him or regret to his death.  Everything is black and white, no gray, and in a book that has such promise, a lack of shaded characters is a serious detriment.

I'm not going to discuss the romance too much except to say that I thought it was silly and improbable and definitely a distraction at a time when she had more important things to think about. And, now that I've read the second book, I also despise what'shisname, who is an absolute ASSHAT in book two.  The whole thing is just making me upset all over again.  In The Waking Land she spends all this time flirting with and creating drama over this guy, telling him her parents engaged her to someone else for political purposes, but she really loves only what'shisname, and it is so junior high, I can't even.  Let us move on.

Here's an eerily prescient portion of my review, which was written before I read book two: "The part with the mountain people was also frustrating, because at no point did anyone say 'If you don't help us then we'll both die so your options are: a king we know will kill you, or one who may potentially be on your side.' Tough decision, hmmmm. If this is the level of political machinations that this author can manage I'm not sure I want to read the next book, which is set at court rather than on the battlefield."  Yeah, that was borne out.  I hate to be so cranky, but this premise had such promise and it was squandered.  I will also make a final note that fantasy books clearly based on western Europe in shape, history, and mores allow authors to use shorthand in establishing the world, and it can be a serious crutch when, like here, the author does not spend enough time developing the fantasy world and relies too heavily on our own understanding of history to do the work.

O6: A book with a plant in the title or on the cover.

Red Mars

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

I will be honest: the reason I had it on my list as a book to finish in 2018 is because I started it last year, got about a third of the way through and just gave up and did not want to finish. It was not good! I was initially misled, which didn't help, into thinking that it would be about the murder that takes place in the prologue, like a Martian dinner mystery, which it definitely WAS NOT.

Also, the other thing I struggled with in the first section was the significant Ayn Rand overtones for the "first hundred" where everyone is this super smart person who insists that they're the right person to make decisions for everybody else.  I mean, they vet all these people and on a mission that is like a knife's edge of failure, and before you even get to mars you already want to start a revolution, disengage entirely from the Earth people supporting you, completely rehaul the design of your living accommodations and just make this shit up as you go?? It seemed not only very short sighted, but also extraordinarily presumptuous for any one of them to assume that their ideas were any good in relation to the actual reality of being on Mars. How was a team of scientists and governments on Earth working cooperatively going to be any worse for the planet than some random Mensa type who summarily decides what should be done before even getting there?

There were, in fact, far too few mechanical difficulties - it was actually distracting how easy it was for them to set up a colony: oh we have everlasting power, and machines that don't break down, and even though the whole planet is freezing and icy and uninhabitable, no one ever dies from it, or has an accident, or is so tired they fall asleep at the wheel and make a crater. It's just like, oh, we built a house! Oh, we set up windmills! Oh, we separated into like, fifteen small encampments, and none of them gets mysteriously wiped off the map.  There are a lot of comparisons in the book to the discovery of America (which makes sense) but also there are a lot of colonies in America that just died out for totally unknown reasons.  I mean if we want to use that analogy we should be discovering dead Martian colonists for the next thousand years and frankly in the course of this book there are no major disasters except essentially the man-made ones with the immigration nonsense. Even the months-long dust storm is just an inconvenience, ho hum, we have literally no visibility for months, but it never craps up our balloon, and we're still able to lock on to a homing beacon.  Even the people who go mad actually turn out just to be very foresighted about the upcoming arguments over Martian development. COME ON.

And also where are they getting all of this food from? Food doesn't become a scarce resource until like 80% of the way through the book but how are they getting all of this freaking food for the first fifteen years? Are they growing it? Are they having it shipped from Earth? It is completely unclear to me and also unclear how the colony on the south polar cap manages to survive for 20 years. 

So that was my initial beef, and although I did end up getting more into it by the end (it helped that there was more focus on the socio-political side of things, and geared up into action finally) there were just a lot of issues I had with the book.

 

At one point there's a whole bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo about opposites and contraries and the psychologist who later goes mad goes into like a whole side issue about marriage being allowed, female adultery being not allowed, male adultery being neither forbidden or not allowed and incest being forbidden and I'm not entirely sure what the whole point of this process is. It's so bizarre and frankly unnecessary to the book and he does it trying to figure out people's personalities too (stabile, labile, extrovert, introvert). I think the author flips too much between science and entertainment and leaning too heavily or one of the other at different times.

One of the other problems is that none of the characters are very likeable. We start off with Frank who indirectly leads to John's murder -

 

SIDEBAR: It is never adequately explained why Frank would manipulate people to the extent that they're ready to murder John. We're never presented with Frank's point of view during John's life except that brief excerpt in the prologue.  I mean, but even in John's section of the book, we're givin some indication that he's not being told stuff, but because he doesn't even notice he's not being told stuff, we don't even know what we're missing!  By the end of the book Frank's doing just about the same things politically that John was trying to do and trying to create a separate Mars, and it was never clear to me that they had different goals/objectives in the first place, aside from all that unnecessary nonsense about both wanting to date Maya. Don't even get me started on that. END SIDEBAR

 

- John whose first man shtick begins the longer "civilization/detective" portion, Maya, who flips back and forth between the two of them and is incredibly unlikable as a result, Arkady, who incites revolution at the very beginning and yet doesn't really seem to fill up to that, Nadia, who does robots, Ann, who's another whiny bitch in a book that doesn't need more whiny bitches, Simon, who's a wet rag, Sax, who is monotonic the entire time, and Hiroko, who leaves before we ever get a chance to know her and frankly doesn't deserve all of the accolades the other first hundred seem to give her because Frank's right which is that she just left like, 10% of the way into this rather than deal with other people. And the fact that she has been bearing children spliced with all of the other people's donor material is briefly mentioned but then entirely dropped and frankly it's a disgusting invasion of privacy. Hiroko is no one's hero. 

All of these people are obnoxious, Masters of the universe type personalities and I think the book would have been more enjoyable if at least one of the perspectives was from a "normal," i.e., one of these immigrants whose entry we so decry later on. And THAT whole thing didn't make sense to me - even a million people is hardly a drop in a bucket to countries that are apparently so overcrowded Earth is in a constant state of war.  Russia's population right now is 144 million, and the US is 325 million.  There would have to be HUNDREDS of millions of people exported before anyone on Earth would even notice they were gone.  And in the meantime, again, who the fuck is paying for all this? I mean, I appreciated the concept that Mars would basically become a plutocracy, and it has a charming resemblance to the current economic shithole we're pouring ourselves into, but it felt more like the whole thing happened for plot reasons, and not organically through the story. Kinda like the deus ex machina that saves Ann's son, since I know he narrates the second book in the series.

And my last beef (which I know is a surprise since it seems like they are neverending) but how are you going to have a freaking map in the front and not put half of these locations and place names on it?? I was flipping around all over the place especially in the beginning trying to figure out where any of these things were and they are not on the stupid map. Why even have a map at all? In the final portion when they're trying to make their way down to the the South polar cap and they're trying to avoid a giant basin full of ice water I have no idea where this basin ends and begins the map is very unclear about the outlines of it. You and your "map" can go to hell.

09: A book you meant to read in 2018

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08

White Stallion of Lipizza

White Stallion of Lipizza

By Marguerite Henry

The magnificent white Lipizzan stallions, bred for hundreds of years to dance and delight emperors and kings, captivated Marquerite Henry when she saw them perform in the Spanish Court Riding School in Vienna.

Now she makes this unique spectacle the focal point in her story of Borina, one of the most famous stallions of this famous breed.  It was Borina who, at the height of his career, took a fling in the Viennese Grand Opera.  And it was Borina who, as a mature school stallion, helped train young apprentice riders, and thus became known as the four-footed professor.

One of his pupils was Hans, a baker's boy.  Day after day Hans had watched with longing eyes the parade of Lipizzaners as they crossed the street from their stables to the Palace Riding Hall.  Impossible as it seemed, Hans felt that he must become a part of that world. He must become a Riding Master.  

I was originally struggling with a book for this prompt, since I was trying to steer clear of books I've already read (unless explicitly required) and how would you know whether a book will inspire a certain feeling unless you've already read it?  But in looking over old books, I realized a good Marguerite Henry book would fit just fine - and this one more than most, since it reminds me not only of my horse-reading days, but also of my time in Vienna (even if I do now regret never making time for the Hofreitschule, whomp whomp, although I did get to the opera - which had no horses, but was crazy nonetheless).  Nowadays though, even the Lipizzaners are online for everyone's viewing pleasure, so it's not irredeemable.

My favorite Marguerite Henry book has always been King of the Wind, which may explain some of my predilections for heavy angst and happy endings.  (Although really, once Sham dies, Agba just goes back to Morocco?? After like, twenty years, and while he's mute [and I think mostly illiterate too]? How is he going to get a job again? Why can't he just stay with Sham's kids? Why do I care so much? AND THEY MADE A MOVIE I NEVER KNEW ABOUT UNTIL JUST NOW? And it stars Jenny Agutter? Mind blown!) I barely remember any of her Misty books, but Justin Morgan Had A Horse and Brighty of the Grand Canyon - oh I remember those.  

White Stallion is pretty classic Henry.  It follows a young boy (her protagonists are by historical necessity almost always male, although I do note that two young women were admitted to the Hofreitschule in 2008 for the first time in 436 years of operation, aye yi yi) in Vienna in the late 1930s, early 1940s (and let's unpack that later, shall we?) who dreams of riding Lipizzaners instead of delivering pastries. I mean, who wouldn't? We spend probably 80% of the book focused on him before he is even admitted to the riding school, and just a couple of chapters cover his training and time in the school.  The book is more focused on his dream and his relationship with Borina, who was apparently a real-life famous horse.  Which is how I know when the book was set.  By the way, although Henry obviously wanted to write about horses, there is NO WAY she wouldn't get blasted in reviews for writing a book about a kid in Vienna in 1940 and completely ignore the batshittery going on around him, namely, THE ONSET OF WORLD WAR II.  And yes, we know when this is, because Maestoso Borina was born in 1910, and he is thirty years old in the book. Don't even holler at me.  

I do think that the story of the Lipizzaners during WWII is an interesting one  (and clearly, I'm not alone, since they made a movie about Podhajsky and General Patton saving the Lipizzaners called Miracle of the White Stallion, which now I have to see)  - what place does beauty and art have in Nazi-held Austria, and what does it say about Hans that we know only about riding, and nothing about the terrors going on in the streets? Even the Lipizzaners themselves were caught under the reign (rein?) of the Nazi regime, subject to Nazi stud farms and starving refugees and soldiers.  Perhaps the end note omitting Hans' further activities is for good reason.  

And yet, even so, White Stallion is truly nostalgic, both of a time in history, and of a period in a child's life when you can be consumed wholly by your dream, and achieve it in every measure.  It was a pleasure to discover a Henry book I hadn't read, and the version I had (I don't know if they ever published a normal trade paperback version), which is quite large, with beautiful black and white and color illustrations, was exquisite.

I know this review is chock-full of factota but here's one more to leave you with: Marguerite Henry lived in Wayne, Illinois, which is now kind of a suburb of Chicago, but they did, and still do, host annual Fox Hunts!! Like, for real, they get on horses and chase fake fox smells through the suburban forests.  What the fuck did I just read.  Incredible.


02: Book That Makes You Nostalgic
Jan 5

Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers.

Two days in and I'm already burned out on book reviewing!  This is going to be rough year.  Only 363 days left!  I actually saw the movie last year when it came out, and it was charming - full of attractive people wearing expensive clothes and steely-eyed ladies discarding men like last week's clothes.  Or yesterday's clothes.  However long you wear clothes.  No judgment here!

I hate to be this person, but my impression of the book definitely suffers from comparison with the movie. The movie consolidates people and storylines, cuts down on the cartoon-y villainy and grounds the story more.  And stylistically, the footnotes, while a fun commentary in the beginning, kinda dragged as you kept going.  I didn't need the Malay/Mandarin/Hokkein translations when it was perfectly understandable from context, and I actually skipped some of them since I didn't realize they were footnotes.  But I didn't want to skip the footnotes completely, since some of them were context as well.

The other style issue I had with the book, which is maybe resolved in the later books, is that because the chapters skip around with viewpoints, it feels a little bit like multiple stories are going on, but some of them get (extremely) short shrift.  The Nick/Rachel is obviously the main line, but Astrid's ongoing problems with her husband also come up frequently, and I know they're a big part of the next books, but they impact Nick and Rachel not at all (and see my paragraph down below for why that feels particularly egregious).  Rachel's friend Peik Lin and Nick's cousin Eddie also have viewpoint chapters, but they also feel weirdly unresolved, like there's a build-up but no climax.  I mean, we visit with an elderly doctor friend who tells Peik Lin and her father who James Young is, but it feels weirdly tacked on, not to mention how unrealistic it is that Peik Lin's father, who is a real estate developer himself, has no idea there are fifty missing acres in the middle of town.  Fifty acres is a lot, y'all.  There is no way that people are just like, ho hum, a giant private parkland here in Singapore, who cares, when the entire book is telling us how real estate crazy the place is. 

I'm sorry, but I have just beef with this book.  So the secondary story is about Nick's cousin, Astrid, who discovers that her husband faked an affair to give him an excuse to leave the family that he feels so judged and looked-down by.  And frankly, he's right.  They're all assholes to him.  Just like, in fact, they're assholes to Rachel.  How are we supposed to have any confidence that the exact same thing isn't going to happen to Nick and Rachel?? There's a throwaway line about how joining the family as an attractive man is so much harder than marrying in as a beautiful woman, but how is that comforting in any way?  To show us how difficult an "outsider" has it, five years in, and then to present us with an ending that seems to say, but everything has been resolved happily for THIS outsider is so confusing.  I guess I just didn't get a sense that Nick and Rachel have any stronger of a relationship than Astrid and Michael.  To be fair, yes, A/M's viewpoints tell us constantly that their main spark was sexual attraction.  But over the course of Crazy Rich Asians, Nick goes from not contemplating marriage to proposing, and for insight, all we have is his mother's viewpoint, which is that whoever Nick was with when he's about the age to get married is who he'd propose to.  I mean, I'll take it with a grain of salt, but I didn't get the feeling that Nick and Rachel have anything special that would overcome the obstacles, and maybe that's the most damning criticism I have. I got no sense, at the end of the book, that any problems with Nick's family had actually been resolved.  At most, Rachel's relationship with her mother was repaired, and her relationship with Nick was not in the complete crapper. Maybe it's a wink to a more realistic ending than insta-love, marriage, and babies by book one's epilogue. All I know is, nothing at the end would explain Rachel's willingness to continue to involve herself with a family which is not only insane, but also clearly incapable of leaving Nick's romantic affairs alone.

Not to mention, I'm not sure if we were supposed to be titillated by all the namebrand dropping and excesses, but it was exhausting and I think some depth and character gets sacrificed for it.  But I do have to say, despite all that, it's not a bad book, just not one that has inspired me to keep reading.  I'll re-watch the movie, which in my opinion takes the best of the book and moulds it into a more palatable romance and tip my hat to Kevin Kwan, who, if nothing else, has definitely gotten Singapore culture a wider audience, all while costuming it as gaudy escapist fantasy. 



Prompt 35: A book by an author whose first and last names start with the same letter.
Jan 1.

My Lady's Choosing

My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel
by Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris

You are the plucky but penniless heroine in the center of eighteenth-century society, courtship season has begun, and your future is at hand.

Will you flip forward fetchingly to find love with the bantering baronet Sir Benedict Granville?

Or turn the page to true love with the hardworking, horse-loving highlander Captain Angus McTaggart?

Or perhaps race through the chapters chasing a good (and arousing) man gone mad, bad, and scandalous to know, Lord Garraway Craven?

Or read on recklessly and take to the Continent as the “traveling companion” of the spirited and adventuresome Lady Evangeline? Or yet some other intriguing fate?

Whether it's forlorn orphans and fearsome werewolves, mistaken identities and devious double crosses, or long lost lover and pilfered artifacts, every delightful twist and turn of the romance genre unfolds at your behest.

So in the great spirit of trying new things, I read a Choose Your Own Adventure romance novel! I've actually been experiencing a little Baader-Meinhof phenomenon with Choose Your Own Adventures, since I was just playing a new CYOA card game I received last week, and Netflix has a CYOA episode I just watched last night. The interesting thing about all these CYOAs popping up is that since each is in a different format, you get a real feel for the limitations and possibilities with each version. I have to say, the card game is by far the worst, as it's reading-heavy, and doesn't have much tension, since a death merely takes you back one step, and everyone playing is doing so as a collective group. CYOA is not something that's really adaptable for multiple players.

The tv show was interesting, not only for the interactivity of it (which was deliberately chosen for NYE entertainment as it kept me awake longer - alas the ravages of old age and a desire for good sleep) but also for the content itself - meta commentary on the lack of free will on the character inside, but revealing that even as you choose for the character, you yourself are bound to the choices presented. What if, for example, I merely wanted the main character to have a nice cup of tea and look into alternative job prospects? Not going to happen, we're going to be murdering people left and right whether you like it or not!

The other downside, of course, in a video version, is that you cannot simply flip back and forth through the pages, looking for the best scenarios and any endings you haven't gotten to yet. And there are happy endings a-plenty in My Lady's Choosing! It succeeds well both as a nostalgic (although apparently increasingly popular) throwback as well as a charming, pleasant romance. I followed the four main paths (which can be loosely broken down as: Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Scotsman/spies, gothic mystery, and Egyptian caper) and was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it was.

Honestly, I don't read much romance, as I find the sex scenes generally overwrought and the emotions overwhelmingly saccharine and melodramatic most of time, but because the whole CYOA thing is pretty campy to begin with, My Lady's Choosing is perfect fit for the genre. Plus, in the spirit of the old classic CYOAs, the plot never stops for a minute, so nothing drags long enough for you to lose patience with the main character. Obviously, this is a pretty shallow pool, but if you embrace the structure instead of wanting a more traditional story, it's more than fun. I was unexpectedly charmed by the gothic section, which features not only mysteriously widowed men, burned housekeepers, sympathetic postmen, alarmingly attractive vicars, but also vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and young children. I mean, how can you not be entertained by your Heathcliff-inspired swain calling your breasts "Rent Promise" and "Raven's Wing", respectively? And don't worry if those don't appeal to you, "Grecian Urn" and "Sepulcher by the Sea" await if you make different choices.

Look this isn't highbrow stuff and it's not meant to be. At one point in the Scottish storyline, you have the option of helping a mare to foal. If you decide yes, you're told "You and Mac birth the everloving daylights out of that horse. The two of you perform the procedure with such precision, grace, and showmanship that you could have entirely revolutionized veterinary techniques of the early nineteenth century, if only someone had been there taking notes."

It's a winking, campy, breathless trip through all the tropes of regency romance, and no matter what you do, there's a happy ending in wait - even (spoiler!) when you have no other choice but the old gross man three times your age. And frankly, I was getting into the possibilities so much (which includes some lesbian romance as well as hetero, and plenty of endings that don't feature the main four love interests) that I found myself disappointed that we didn't get even farther afield with the endings, like allowing you to get multiple love interests in a single ending. The more the merrier, by the end! You definitely can't subsist only on CYOAs, but as a break once in a while, they're damn fine.


 Prompt 42: A "choose-your-own-adventure" book
 Jan. 1