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