Black Water Sister

Black Water Sister

By Zen Cho

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies.  As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

I zipped through this book. First of all, I was excited to read it, since "dead grandmother controlling daughter in the name of a mad god, committing felonies" sounded amazing.  And it felt really fresh when I was reading it.  Sometimes it feels like everything is very much same-old, same-old.  So Back Water Sister, which is set in Malaysia (like The Night Tiger, which I also loved, and which also incorporated a good deal of Malaysian history and ethnography) and involves a lesbian Generation Z graduate just trying to make it while she's being possessed was a delightful change of pace.  

That being said, it did feel a little disparate sometimes.  There's a lot to dig into, like her parents' re-entry into the country and family life after getting sick and losing their jobs, but it didn't really pan out the way it seemed like it might.  There was a weird scene about her mother going to a church group meeting that felt like it was supposed to have undertones, but I couldn't figure out why it mattered at all. 

Although I used Gaudy Night for multiple languages, and although everything in Black Water Sister was in English, it felt more multi-lingual, what with the particular cadences of the languages and the layan, lah, etc which were sprinkled throughout.  

It did feel sufficiently spooky, and Jessamyn (Min) felt wholly realized as a character.  She doesn't gain any superpowers (apart from when she's inhabited by spirits) and isn't much cleverer than other people around her, so she's also really easy to root for.  She seems kind of depressed, but not in a self-pitying way, and her love for her parents is sweet as well.  And she's neatly counterbalanced by her grandmother, who, like my own grandmothers, is somewhat manipulative and determined that she's in the right.  [Side note, I heard this nonsense on the radio recently about some new study that showed the special bond between grandmothers and their grandchildren, and first of all - no study on grandfathers, huh? And the study measured this bond by having the grandmothers look at pictures of random people and then their own grandchildren, like yeah, I too, like my own family and prefer them to random strangers, but how is this newsworthy? Also, some grandmas are buttholes.]  In some ways though, Min and her grandmother and mother and uncle are all more memorable characters than the Black Water Sister, which means maybe she isn't scary enough.  For example, in the Diviners, Naughty John, the antagonist, is WAY memorable, a significant actor in their own right.  The Diviners series was a huge disappointment and I hated it by the end, but that wasn't John's fault, as he was absolutely pants-pooping terrifying in the first book. 

Anyway, the actual plot isn't bad.  Min hears voice, gets dragged to the temple and immediately winds up in some shit, then has to maneuver her way between Malaysian gangsters and mad spirits, both of whom want a piece of her (in different ways).  There's a lot of familial love there, and some twists that you kinda expect, but ultimately she's able to lay her various problems to rest.

12: A Book about the Afterlife

The Word is Murder

The Word is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

A woman crosses a London street. It is just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, and she is going into a funeral parlor to plan her own service. Six hours later the woman is dead, strangled with a crimson curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric man as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. And Hawthorne has a partner, the celebrated novelist Anthony Horowitz, curious about the case and looking for new material. As brusque, impatient, and annoying as Hawthorne can be, Horowitz—a seasoned hand when it comes to crime stories—suspects the detective may be on to something, and is irresistibly drawn into the mystery.

But as the case unfolds, Horowitz realizes that he’s at the center of a story he can’t control, and his brilliant partner may be hiding dark and mysterious secrets of his own.

Finally getting back on track with my reading program - although I was reading (To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is greatly improved when you catch all the little clues and asides when you already know what happens) I was steadily ignoring all the books on my e-reader which I'd checked out and then turned off my wifi so the library wouldn't take them back, since they're all weeks and weeks overdue. This includes Summer House Party which I thought could work either for favorite season or book with a party in, but didn't like at all (it was three novellas and I stopped after the first one, and frankly, can't even remember it anymore) and Olive Kitteridge, which is very well written, but sort of depressing, so I got a few chapters in and couldn't pick it back up. Anyway, I'm expecting some others to turn up soon in my library queue, so I figured I had a limited amount of time to actually read ANY of them before the wifi was turned back on and they disappeared, so I read The Word is Murder in one day and enjoyed it very much. 

One of the most unique things in the book - the self-insertion of the author - was also one of the most off-putting at times. I found myself wondering how Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg feel to see themselves given roles in a fictional book about real people, and I can only assume poor Damian Lewis (who was the other lead in Homeland), bears the brunt, as he bears so much resemblance to the fictional actor Damian Cowper (apart from being murdered, that is - spoiler!).

Unlike Gaudy Night, I found it satisfyingly mysterious. I did have an inkling who the murderer was (as well as the side-mini mystery) but still found the conclusion entertaining and engrossing, if a bit too Ruth-Ware-victim-walks-straight-into-the-murderer's-clutches at the end.  In that way, Horowitz as narrator is genius, since it allows him to be a little bit smarter than the readers, but not as smart as the detective.  A good stand-in for the reading public, although I also wondered at times if the whole thing was a set-up on a much larger scale, i.e., The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which appears multiple times in To Say Nothing of the Dog, so perhaps I was over-primed in that direction). 

It also has the wonderful publicity of making me curious about Horowitz's other books, particularly the Alex Rider series, since he mentions them so much.  Subliminal advertising.  I've also only just realized that Horowitz is responsible for much of Midsommer Murders, which I absolutely adore and watched at least the first five seasons back in the initial pandemic rush of entertainment consumption. It's an excellent companion to a jigsaw puzzle. 

I found it to be a bizarre mix of real and fake, but engaging and a good mystery, for all that, and perhaps more importantly, I am back on track with forward momentum!

14: A Book with Cutlery on the Cover or in the Title

Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night

By Dorothy Sayers

When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the "Gaudy," the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters—including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup."

Some of the notes threaten murder and one of them involves a long Latin quotation, which makes Harriet suspect that the perpetrator is probably a member of the Senior Common Room. But which of the apparently rational, respectable dons could be committing such crazed acts? When a desperate undergraduate, at her wits' end after receiving a series of particularly savage letters, attempts to drown herself, Harriet decides that it is time to ask Lord Peter Wimsey for help. And when the mystery is finally solved, she is faced with an agonizing decision: Should she, after five years of rejecting his proposals, finally agree to marry Lord Peter?

This is the first Sayers I've read, and not for lack of recommendations.  I tried once, earlier in my life, and just... couldn't.. get... into... it, and I have avoided carefully ever since all efforts to get me to enjoy her Wimsey series.  (In this way, I treat Sayers like I do Georgette Heyer - often recommended based on the types of books I enjoy, but no matter how much I try, I simply do not like these authors, and to avoid further wastes of time, I don't even bother with any of their books anymore).  

Anyway, I chose this because someone on Goodreads said it has Latin in it, which it does, factually speaking, but I think it's a bit of a waffle to say that this has two languages in it.  That being said, Sayers did that even more annoying thing of using two languages and then not even bothering to translate.  [Fun sidebar, when I was in second grade, I took Latin [Minier sidebar: can you believe a public school teaches Latin to second graders??] and the only thing I retained was what I later realized was a drinking song for young collegiates. So maybe I would have fit right in at Oxford in the 30s.  We also put on a play about the death of Iphigenia - very educational].   Which fine, one passage is about harpies (not in favor, I assume, based on context) and then the last bit, I'd already been familiar with, since I read Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is really why I was interested in Gaudy Night to begin with (something Willis took so much inspiration from couldn't be all bad, could it?) and anyway, now I'm re-reading To Say Nothing of the Dog and enjoying it quite a bit more than Gaudy Night, so maybe it's not a waste.  Gaudy Night doesn't have any sense of humor about itself, and maybe that's why I can't get behind Sayers. Everyone is such a caricature, but no one recognizes it.  At least in Christie, Poirot knows he is ridiculous, and uses it to great effect. Sayers feels snobby, all the academic elitism that's going on,  like rich, aristocratic people who wear terrible clothes because they can afford not to care what other people think.  The poor are crazy, the rich merely eccentric.   

Anyway if you want a very wordy, "highfaultin'" mystery, by all means, read Gaudy Night, or perhaps The Name of the Rose, which also has the distinction of being more literary than mystery and thus failing at both being a good mystery or fun to read.  Not that I thought that the Gaudy Night mystery was nearly as bad as Name of the Rose, it just felt like supremely low stakes (a somewhat indiscriminate poison pen whose main threat for most of the book, is bad publicity), and easily solvable (and not to rag on myself, but if I know who it is and the main character is being told "You mean you still haven't figured it out? Apply a little thought to the problem", then what's to enjoy?), and for a 460 page book, those are both grave sins.  

Anyway, I would recommend this book to people who want to appear smart, or for those who want to spend endless agonies debating whether educating women makes them unfit for family life, an idea which (I think) we're meant to assume is absurd, given that it's a cherished notion of the clearly insane person at the heart of the criminal activity, and yet we spend an enormous amount of time going over and over it.  To be fair, Harriet also seems to think that smart women are wasted as wives and mothers, so maybe it was just one of those funny 1930s ideas which were all the rage at the time, like Hitler.  And yes, it is always so weird to me how books from the 1930s foreshadow WWII unintentionally.  It's hard to get a sense here whether Sayers was pro- or anti-Hitler, which seems damning in retrospect, but also explains why there were so many goddamned British nazis.  

Also, I had a similar problem as other readers, which is to say that I really couldn't distinguish between any of the academic suspects, except that one of them was bad at writing a book, and another had a similar name to Harriet (a key plot point, as it turned out!).  And that's okay, since I didn't have to, but seriously, 460 pages and the suspects are almost entirely interchangeable?  Using two languages here myself: No bueno.

42: A Book That Features Two Languages

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

By Jessica Pan

An introvert spends a year trying to live like an extrovert with hilarious results and advice for readers along the way.

What would happen if a shy introvert lived like a gregarious extrovert for one year? If she knowingly and willingly put herself in perilous social situations that she’d normally avoid at all costs?  With the help of various extrovert mentors, the author sets up a series of personal challenges (talk to strangers, perform stand-up comedy, host a dinner party, travel alone, make friends on the road, and much, much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert can teach her lessons that might improve the quality of her life. Chronicling the author’s hilarious and painful year of misadventures, this book explores what happens when one introvert fights her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and sometimes fails) to be a little bit braver.

 

 I fell into this one because I loved the title, and the book didn't let me down.  I felt Pan's pain, as I, too, would rather not, and doing improv and stand-up comedy sounds like a terribly bad time.  It's funny, but also blends in both semi-science and tips/suggestions so that people looking to expand their social skills and friend groups could probably use this as a guidebook as well.  I don't know that the science adds very much - it feels a little shoehorned in, a little teach-y in a book which would otherwise work well as a straight memoir, but at least it doesn't detract much.  

Pan begins the book bemoaning her lack of social life, but more importantly, her loneliness.  As someone who would certainly qualify as an introvert, I sympathized strongly with both the desire for close friendships and support, but also the anxiety that comes with trying to find those people and the effort of putting yourself out there to strangers over and over.  

For all that it dealt with social anxiety and trying to overcome loneliness, it's pretty funny. Bits like this made me laugh:

When I tell other people I'm going to try stand-up comedy, they always touch my arm, furrow their brow, and say, "You are so brave," followed by, "That is my worst nightmare," just in case I was considering making them do it, too.

As far as using the book like a self-help book, I felt pretty good about myself for the first part of it. I don't have a problem talking to strangers or making presentations (although I choose not to; I'm definitely guilty of pretending not to speak English when confronted by a friendly stranger in a foreign country, but honestly? I like being alone. This is how my husband and I are different: when he comes home,  he tells me about random people he meets in bars and on planes and at races, and I am like, "That sounds awful." but he enjoys it.  He still calls himself an introvert, a term I took exception to, until reading this book.  Apparently he would qualify as a gregarious introvert or "grintrovert". I am happily still a shintrovert.) and I have less than no interest in doing either improv or stand-up comedy. It is a bit wistful though, I mean, it sounds like for all that it does sound unpleasant, Pan has a good time, in the end.  And if not a good time, then at least a good story. You have to respect someone who so boldy faces their (and my) worst fears.

And I appreciate anyone who is game for a scenario like this:

Kate goes through the order list. Vivian volunteers to go first. And then there's silence. Kate studies the rest of us.

"I need the people  who brought a lot of friends to perform last so that their friends stay the entire time. Who has no friends? I want you to go in the first half."

I put my hand up.

30: A Book with the Name of a Board Game in the Title