Cassandra at the Wedding

Cassandra at the Wedding

By Dorothy Baker

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.

This was not at all what I would have picked out for this prompt (although I suppose wedding planning books don't really "include" weddings, just every other goddamn detail about them) but it was an easy enough read.  I was initially surprised to see it had originally been published back in 1962, since everyone's attitude seemed so modern, but it did devolve into that breezy, California-dreamin' sixties-period Didion flavor.  I feel fully qualified to speak on it, since I read one whole chapter of Play It As It Lays.

I don't think the blurb is exactly right either, since Cassandra is more bent on sabotaging her own life than the wedding.  Not to spoil anything but she takes a bunch of pills when she finds out her sister Judith won't let Cassandra break up with Judith's fiance (on Judith's behalf, this isn't that modern). I'm catching up on reviews, so I've already read Fangirl and I've been going on about co-dependency there too (I only just realized both books involve co-dependent twin sisters, although Judith is considerably more stable than Wren, and Cassandra considerably less so than Cath) but talk about co-dependency!  You try to commit suicide because your sister plans to get married?! Whoa!  So I guess, yes, that is the ultimate sabotage, but in the end (more spoilers!) once Cassandra wakes up again, she seems more or less like a new person: pleasant, accommodating, and not at all displeased to be a bridesmaid (even though Judith's already married, and do you think that's ever going to come up again: "Oh right, when you were committing your very dramatic tantrum, we just up and got married because we thought you might cause a scene. How right we were!").

This is much more of a character study than a plot-heavy book - people are heavily described, and most of the action takes place around the pool.  So for all that it was published almost 60 years ago, it does feel relatively fresh since there's not much that would be different nowadays, except that they would have used a cell phone to call the therapist.  And apparently, weird twin sister relationships are still causing drama even now, so it's very prescient.  I (more spoilers, but only for my thoughts, not anything really important) didn't really like Cath in Fangirl - I feel like she just replaced one co-dependent relationship with another, and while Cassandra clearly has more trouble managing herself, I wasn't as frustrated with her, maybe because while, yes, as melodramatic and "extra" as her suicide attempt was, she seems less helpless.  I mean, she did plan out her potential death (and I'm not sure if we're supposed to be reading into it this way, but I always figured she wasn't planning to die based on her calculating the pills to take) but by golly, at least she had a plan.  Cath seems content to simply wait for things to happen to her - and occasionally bewail the happening.

Anyway, Cassandra is a nice little trip through the California countryside for a June weekend.  It's a good length - any longer and I think you'd start disliking the characters again. Anyway, aside from the abrupt right turn at the end wherein everyone seems to be capable of living happily ever after, even though nothing to that point would indicate that as a possibility, it was still a nice palate cleanser.  A sort of lemony-sharp cocktail.

34: A Book That Includes A Wedding

The Hunger

The Hunger

By Alma Katsu

Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.

That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures in American history.

As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.

What was incredibly startling to me was how little of The Hunger was made up.  There was so much bad shit going on with that wagon train from Day 1, a supernatural explanation was practically required. Mysterious deaths, fraudulent trail blazers, literal SIGNS telling you to go back?  Honestly, this book is spooky in all the right ways; I had nightmares after reading it.

The Hunger may not be completely surprising (I mean, I did have to tell my thirty-three year old boyfriend what happened to the Donner Party, but I think that's because he emo'd his way through grade school and didn't pay attention in class) but it incorporates real events and horror very seamlessly.  There's a lot of characters involved (there were around 80 members of the Party) but Katsu wisely focuses on just a few narrators.  Some of the ominous forebodings do turn out to be red herrings - Stanton's early dalliance with Tamsen Donner and subsequent significant looks winds up having no bearing on any of the action later.  Nor, in fact, does anything have to do with Tamsen's supposed witchcraft.

Did I guess who the evildoer was?  Um, not really, even though it was perfectly clear from the prologue.  Again, the facts aligned so easily, I'm not even sure how you explain his actions and survival in a non-supernatural way.  That being said, Katsu's job had to have been incredibly hard, to interweave the truth and fiction as well as she did. Although I imagine it helped to have a truth stranger-than-fiction. 

I very much enjoyed it, although for whatever reason I didn't find the last half as quietly engrossing and unsettling as the first half - perhaps because I anticipated death, perhaps because the monster you see is not always as frightening as the one you imagine. There's also relatively little gore, it seems like a lot of it takes place off-page.  All-in-all a very engrossing and semi-unusual horror story, given the setting and characters.  Five (severed and eaten) thumbs up!


38: A Novel Based On A True Story

Ten Second Reviews

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

By Harry Kemelman

Rabbi Small takes over a congregation in a modern suburb of Boston which doesn't quite know what to make of the scholarly young rabbi.  When a dead woman is discovered in his car, the rabbi is caught between temple politics and a murder mystery.

This was more of a character study than a murder mystery - the solution comes out of nowhere in the last ten pages, and we spend more time with various congregants debating whether or not Rabbi Smalls'  solution with the broken down borrowed car is fair than we do going through clues.  It's kind of a cozy, where no one is threatened, and the wrong person is arrested and everyone is basically nice to each other.  Not bad if you're in the mood for it.  Also, and this is not relevant to the review, it seems like Harry is a weirdly uncommon name for an author.  I know it's a nickname, but I feel like there's lots of Jacks out there, not that many Harrys.  Food for thought!

Descendant of the Crane

By Joan He

Princess Hesina of Yan's father is murdered and she's thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father's killer, Hesina enlists the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death, because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago. Hesina doesn't know who to trust as she gets to the heart of the mystery surrounding her father's death, and the political machinations which are forcing Yan into war.

I actually read this before Behind the Throne but they share a lot of similarities - unhappy maternal relationships, murdered fathers and a quest for justice, a princess taking power unexpectedly, (spoiler!) family members secretly betraying them, bodyguard/detectives who keep them from getting killed and help solve the mystery, asian-inspired settings, imminent war with neighbor, you get the picture.  But both were disappointments, and I don't know if I would have liked Behind the Throne more if I'd read it first, since, in addition to the larger issues I had with it, it also felt kinda derivative.

I was into Descendant of the Crane initially, but it falls into the same trap as Behind the Throne:  too many people, too much confusion and plots, obvious villain (at least in this case, the villain was only obvious to the reader, not the main character, so her lack of action makes more sense) and by the mid-way point I just didn't care about anyone.  This did have a weird fucking subplot about magic and immortal people and her father and mother having lived for aeons (how they transitioned power without anyone noticing this was the same fucking person all the time, and also why they only just now decided to have and adopt a bunch of kids is totally unexplained, by the way) which is when I kinda felt like the whole thing jumped the shark for me.  I was enjoying the imminent war with neighboring country plot in Descendant of the Crane, but there's too much going on, and even the parts I liked didn't make up for all of the bloated parts about her weird dad and her adopted brother taking over. I'd be interested in finding out what happens, but I don't think I'm going to read any more books in the series.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

By Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

As the young folks say, this one made me feel all the feels, but I was disappointed to find out, when trying to look up how much of this "based on the author's life" book was true or fiction, that Sherman Alexie apparently has a sexual harassment problem.  Also, that he didn't draw the illustrations in the book! I feel very let down by both of those.  So I am left struggling with how much to like it.

It's certainly a very moving book, a portrait of a young man who doesn't deserve all the shit hurtling his way, over and over and over.  We know, by virtue of the fact that we're reading this as a book by Sherman Alexie, that he does in fact make it off the reservation and find success (albeit ultimately brought low by his dick).  That doesn't really make all the things that happen to him any better, but at least you get some hope for the future.

Alexie's style is well suited to the story - matter of fact and poignant without being maudlin.  He straddles the line well, and it's both a fast read as well as genuinely moving.  Alexie manages to lay out a lot of the reasons the reservations are failing the people, without being preachy or pointing fingers. Not that fingers shouldn't be pointed, because the history of American Indian policy in the United States is a total shitshow, but it helps keep the story running smoothly.

Is this book on its own, a good and worthy book?  Yes, for sure.  But how much do we separate out the art from the artist?  How much leniency do we grant for a childhood of hardship?  How do we support a person who uses his fame and fortune in bad ways? And perhaps, only "middling" bad, on a minor scale.  I mean, I only checked it out of the library, so it's not like I'm funding genocide.  But it did color my impressions, and it really disappointed me.  And it's well-nigh impossible to be absolutely saintly in this - it seems like you would never be able to live a life in the modern era that doesn't benefit some asshole somewhere.  I suppose that's the credo to The Good Place - in this life and times, how can we always do good?  And what is the better good - boycotting a gross person, or reading a work of art and enlightenment and potentially learning something yourself in the process?

All we can hope for is the same energy and drive to continue to better ourselves that Junior has. 

43: An "Own Voices" Book

A Morbid Taste For Bones

A Morbid Taste For Bones

By Ellis Peters

A Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in western England, Brother Cadfael spends much of his time tending the herbs and vegetables in the garden—but now there’s a more pressing matter. Cadfael is to serve as translator for a group of monks heading to the town of Gwytherin in Wales. The team’s goal is to collect the holy remains of Saint Winifred, which Prior Robert hopes will boost the abbey’s reputation, as well as his own. But when the monks arrive in Gwytherin, the town is divided over the request.

When the leading opponent to disturbing the grave is found shot dead with a mysterious arrow, some believe Saint Winifred herself delivered the deadly blow. Brother Cadfael knows an earthly hand did the deed, but his plan to root out a murderer may dig up more than he can handle.

I don't know if this exactly qualifies as "set in a monastery, convent, abbey, etc" but it's got a lot of Benedictine monks, so we'll call it good.  Between this and Bitter Greens anyway, I think I did enough religious reading.  The mystery isn't incredibly mysterious, but I was intrigued by the cover-up (there's no way a Benedictine monk murders a man in an effort to take a saint's bones and it's NOT a huge deal without a massive cover-up, and how on earth do you cover it up in medieval Wales - that's what made me doubt the identity of the murderer so long).

My mother loves Brother Cadfael books, and this was an easy selection for me to make. It's just plain bad luck I read it in the middle of a couple of heavy hitters, and it suffers from comparison. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, just that there really isn't very much to it.  Cadfael and crew go up to Wales to dig up a saint's bones, there's some local opposition, the local opposition dies, two separate inappropriate romances are going on, temporarily adding action and confusing the matter, and eventually Cadfael realizes that one of the monks is particularly vainglorious and wants to make a famous name for himself, so they stage a saintervention and then kinda accidentally wind up having to kill him, and switch his body for the saints in the reliquary to hide it. It does sound like other books in the series get much further into Cadfael's backstory, which was more interesting than the plot or the characters in Morbid Taste.

Peters does that thing where the main character is the "moral" character, as clearly opposed to one or another adjacent character, and sets it up so that a newly introduced character, whose side we are also supposed to be on, bonds with the main character about how buffoonishly venal the "bad guy" is. I'm explaining it horribly, but trying to describe what it is about that trope that rubs me the wrong way so much.  I don't know, it just sets off a mean-girls vibe that winds up making me like the hero less and the villain more. Also, I had no love for the side romances in the story, to be perfectly frank, I kinda wished they would all break up.  I mean, this monk has been there a week and lets an accused murderer flee the scene and you're going to put him up in a cushy "jail" and then let him flee the scene too?  Because true love? That sounds like poor decision making.  But of course all these romantic sentimental decisions turn out to be the "right" thing to do.  BALDERDASH.  Let me just have  a nice murder without this treacly bullshit. A real taste for bones, as it were. 



50: A Book Set In An Abbey, Cloister, Monastery, Vicarage, Or Convent