Winter Counts

Winter Counts

By David Heska Wanbli Weiden

 

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

I think I've said this before but the hardest books to review are not the bad ones, or the good ones, but the average ones.  What can you say about a book that does a reasonably decent job, but offers neither easy critiques nor glowing commendations? I suppose this scenario is what sets an excellent reviewer from a middling one (like me) - if I were a pro, could I pierce the heart of the book? Well, I'm not, but I'd like to set things down, so here goes:

The setting is the most unique part of the story, which is otherwise a fairly generic "enforcer type goes after hardened criminals to protect/defend his family and winds up uncovering corruption and doling out justice".  It's a good thing, then, that the setting can carry so much of the story.  It influences everything from the circumstances of the crime, to the lack of justice*, and the particular methods of deus ex machina that are used (i.e., the Lakota yuwipi which gives Virgil the insight to discover where the next location is).  

Because the book hangs so heavily on that frame, I think the plot doesn't stand on its own as much as it ought to: both Virgil's initial meeting of cop Dennis at the Colorado bar, and Virgil tracking Rick Crow to the abandoned museum were coincidences that don't make sense on closer inspection.  Dennis just happens to be undercover at the only bar we know Rick frequents in Denver? And Rick is hanging out at the museum after everyone else left... why? Why did they go to the museum in the first place, since it seems like the heroin crew has their own hide-hole? I mean, I assume Rick wasn't just sitting there because he was waiting for Virgil (and then Ben) to drive up and beat the shit out of him.    And I guess we're not going to find out how the heroin crew knew Nathan's cousin was wearing a wire (aside from "it was obvious")? Lol, well, sure, I'll accept that one, I guess.

I liked the main character, Virgil, and I liked Chef Lack, and the way Virgil initially thought he was full of it (uh, yeah, let's forage for turnips) but eventually came around to someone who genuinely wanted better for the reservations and was doing good.  There's nothing I would really point to as being bad or ridiculous, or dumb, or unbelievable, just you know, an okay kind of crime thriller. 

*If all the book does is get more people aware of the shitty and messed up legal system that governs the reservations, then it's been worth it to me.  This country systematically took rights away from native people and destroyed their culture as much as possible, deliberately, and THEN, in an effort to correct the awful mess it made, made even more laws that fucked people over.  The fact that the reservations are basically governed like the Wild West, and criminal prosecutions are subject to the federal whims is not, as the author points out in the afterward, a secret.  After basically undercutting every cultural method of resolving disputes internally, the U.S. government then turned around and said, "Guess we fucked up before, so to make it up to you, we're going to leave you on your own, just like you wanted, albeit two hundred years ago, before we sacked your nations and salted the ground." It's like that saying, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas." Is bringing the nations under state law the answer? Probably not, but man, is the current system not working.  American Indian/Indigenous Peoples law is a hideous hodge-podge of papered over inequities, and we're apparently not going to do anything about it except feel bad.  That money, sitting in an account for taking the Black Hills? That's true.  Anyway, what am I doing about it, except writing angry screeds on book reviews that no one reads? Yeah, I know.

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

By F. C. Yee

 

Genie Lo thought she was busy last year, juggling her academic career with protecting the Bay Area from demons. But now, as the Heaven-appointed Guardian of California, she’s responsible for the well-being of all yaoguai and spirits on Earth. Even the ones who interrupt her long-weekend visit to a prestigious college, bearing terrible news about a cosmos-threatening force of destruction in a nearby alternate dimension.
 
The goddess Guanyin and Genie’s boyfriend, Quentin Sun Wukong, do their best to help, but it’s really the Jade Emperor who’s supposed to handle crises of this magnitude. Unfortunately for Genie and the rest of existence, he’s gone AWOL. Fed up with the Jade Emperor’s negligence, Genie spots an opportunity to change the system for the better by undertaking a quest that spans multiple planes of reality along with an adventuring party of quarrelsome Chinese gods. But when faced with true danger, Genie and her friends realize that what will save the universe this time isn’t strength, but sacrifice.

Yes, the story is about a reincarnation of a metal rod from ancient chinese mythology in the body of a Californian teenager.  I know this, and I love it anyway.  Genie Lo is dry and funny and trying desperately to keep her head above water in her home life, college applications, boyfriend problems, and keeping her commune of demons from breaking out and wrecking havoc over the countryside.  

On a college visit, staying with her friend Yunie's cousin, Genie ends up getting enmeshed in several demonic and non-demonic army retreats (drawn to her aura), and joining forces with various gods, in the absence of the jade emperor, to stop the threat and potentially ascend to the throne of heaven.  Genie's got her money on Guanyin, while Quentin is backing his old buddy Guan Yu, with straight-A student type Nezha, and former defeated foe (and emperor's nephew) Erlang Shen rounding out the contenders, and Great White Planet tagging along to keep score.  

It's just a really charming book, and the characters are (mostly) trying their best. It manages to blend the mom's sudden and scary illness/college visit/mysterious absence of jade emperor and new demonic presence really well, although mom's illness got maybe the shortest shrift.  There's obviously themes going on in there about sacrifice and doing the right thing, and there's a scene which perfectly encapsulates the infuriating attitude of those born to invisible privilege. Surprisingly, I think Genie's mom nailed it at the end when she talks about how sometimes we have to accept that we can't control or guarantee the future, and all we can do is keep making the best decisions we can and supporting each other (and also the importance of letting your teenage daughter have a normal college experience, even if is she an ancient magical beating-stick).  I mean, that kind of anxiety is something I still struggle with, and I am much older and less prone to beating people up than Genie is. 

The old characters, particularly Erlang Shen, really got developed and fleshed out.  Erlang Shen become less of a three dimensional villain, what with his explanation for his earlier actions, and his relationships with some of the other characters adding a humane side to him.  As far as the new characters went,Yunie's hilariously deadpan older cousin blew everyone else away, but there wasn't a really sour note.  

The tone of the book wavers somewhere around Avatar: The Last Airbender (which makes sense, since the author's other book is an Avatar book) and Kung Fu Hustle, with the mix of martial arts, comedy, and sudden bursts of warmth and heartfelt interactions.  It's interesting how much happens "offscreen" - Yunie's adventures, and her parents' reconciliation could both have been much longer sections of the book, but we breeze past everything at a pretty good clip, and I didn't mind the recap-style overview, although others might.

The ending tag also really hit the spot for me.  I was honestly not sure if there would be a third in the series, so I was (a) glad to see how things got wrapped up and (b) COMPLETELY surprised by how things got wrapped up - the (SPOILER ALERT) time jump really tugged my heartstrings, the way that they kept working towards rescue and not giving up even years later.  I'm kind of mad though that we didn't get to see Genie in college, and all the stuff in between.  I also forgot about the three versions of the Ruyi Jingu Bang, and thought she already had the cloning power, so it's good that the rescue wasn't supposed to be more built up.  If there ever is a third one, I'm on board.   Especially since they make so many interesting allusions to what happened in the interim! A collection of short stories set in this timeframe would be perfect.

Just as a side note, um, do her mom and dad not notice that she's made of iron and has glowing eyes?  Let's make that one of the short stories!    Come on, do I have to do all the hard work here?

Stormswift

Stormswift

By Madeleine Brent

The year is 1897. Deep in the mountain wilderness of the Hindu Kush, a seventeen year-old English girl is brought to the primitive tribal kingdom of Shul to be sold as a slave. Her ordeal endures for two long years before at last there comes the chance of escape to Lalla, as she is called, who believes herself to be Jemimah Lawley, heiress to the great house and estates of Witchwood in the county of Surrey. On the hazardous journey of escape across Afghanistan with a man who hates her, she hears for the first time a name that will later echo menacingly in her life... the name Stormswift. Once home, she faces the shock of being compelled to doubt her own identity. Is she truly Jemimah Lawley, or is she suffering from a delusion caused by her degrading ordeal as Lalla of Shul? Soon she is plunged into a new world, where she finds there are others who, like herself, are perhaps not what they seem to be. Life in England brings her strange adventures and a touching friendship, but also the heartbreak of love without hope. In these pages Madeleine Brent has woven a tale of many surprises as mystery after mystery unfolds, but strangest of all is the mystery which causes Lalla of Shul to return to the barbaric land of her captivity, there to encounter the dark shadows of death and disaster before she at last finds the happiness she believed could never be hers.

So I've written about Brent before, and I maintain that as far as rip-rollicking adventure stories with fun heroines, they are delightful.  For example, in Stormswift, we encounter Jemimah Lawley, aka "Lalla" aka "Mim" first as a captured slave in 1881 Kafiristan, what is now known as Nuristan, a province in Northeastern Afghanistan.  In short order she assists her fellow Greek slave with a birth, gets sold to a mad prince, and escapes with a peddler, Kassim, who surprise, surprise, is more than what he seems.  Specifically, an English spy who promptly gets shot up by his Russian counterpart.  After removing the bullet from Kassim and burying the dead Russian, Jemimah manages to get both their butts back to the embassy in Herat (and by the way, tracking down her route in this first part of the book was pretty fun.  So much traveling through parts of the world I rarely engage with!).

P.S. I know the description says 1897, I don't know where they came up with that - Jemimah's parents were massacred at Bala Hissar in 1879, and she was held for two years before escaping, clearly putting her the timeline of the book in the early 1880s.  

Then, she's shipped back to England, where she discovers that an imposter has taken her place after her two-year kidnapping sojourn, so she joins a Punch and Judy traveling show run by this "hilarious" guy and his Romany girlfriend.  Except then the Romany girlfriend's ex-boyfriend tracks them down and beats up Punch and Jemimah, and offers to marry his ex-girlfriend, so she leaves with him.  And we're only like, barely halfway into this and haven't even been introduced to like, the main villain!

So it turns out Punch is actually a lord, and has a nice house with a relatively nice mom, who puts them both up until Jemimah is framed for the theft of a ~mysteriously important~ locket so she goes to live with Anne/Melanie, who turns out to be married to KASSIM, who turns out to be BEST FRIENDS with PUNCH, who turns out to be in LOVE with ANNE, who turns out to be a BITCH.

AND THEN, Jemimah realizes that the guy in the locket is her old friend the Greek slave, and Anne is murdered, and they all set off for Afghanistan.

So I remembered why I wasn't as big a fan of this one, and it is for two reasons: one is that Jemimah decides she loves Lord Punch, who, let's be honest here, is a real doofus.  I mean, you have mysterious, sexy Kassim, who rescued her from Afghanistan and refuses to sleep with his awful wife, and then on the other hand, you have goofy ass "Henry", who is fucking some rando when they first meet, and hates having to be rich, so he keeps running off, but makes sure to keep his hand securely in the trust fund pocket, so he doesn't actually have to face any consequences of being poor, or actually having to, you know, "work" for a living.  But Henry is "funny" so she just decides he's the one for her even though his big life plan at the end of the book is to run off and bum around on a Mississippi Steamboat, like Mark Twain.  By the way, did you know that Mark Twain had a younger brother who he convinced to work on steamboats with him, and his brother died at age 20 when the boiler exploded and Mark Twain always felt himself responsible?  Now you do.

I mean, I know Kassim keeps getting himself shot, and that's not really the mark of a super successful spy, but seriously, I think Brent had to kill him just to prevent all his readers being like, "Hey!" Obviously Kassim is the superior choice here.  I mean, Henry is just the worst.  His only redeeming quality is that he's like, 100% on board with Jemimah actually being Jemimah (and not a fraud pretending to be Jemimah) although he had a leg up on everyone else because Kassim vouched for her to begin with.

And second, like Anne/Melanie is supposed to be this extraordinary Harpy-like person, but she's frankly just kind of a bad person.  She has affairs, she blackmails her lovers, a couple of them threaten to commit suicide, she employs a burglar.  It's all pretty tame.   For real, when I was re-reading this, I was like, "Oh, yeah, her Sanctuary, that's where she has those drug binges and orgies." But it's not!  It's just like, regular adultery, no drugs whatsoever.  And just one dude at a time.  Too much build-up, she falls really short by comparison. 

That all said, if you want a genuinely fun, fast-paced story about a young woman who overcomes massacres, rape, slavery, snipers, boat rides, false accusations, doofy young men, impersonators, gypsies, two-faced women, and the awful burden of having money, Stormswift is the book for you!

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. 

Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book

Treasure Island

Treasure  Island

By Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Second Reviews

Force of Nature

By Jane Harper

Five women hike into the wilderness on an executive camping retreat.  When only four return, investigator Aaron Falk is concerned that the disappearance of the fifth woman - Alice - may have something to do with her connection to him: she was about to hand over documents as a whistleblower which would have taken the company - and several people hiking with her - down.  This was my least favorite of the Jane Harper books, by a long shot.  As she's done in her other books, the narrative has two tracks: one is the timeline following the discovery of the disappearance, the other the events leading up to it.  Only at the end of both do we know what happened.  Here, the action is just super slow.  We know that Alice doesn't disappear until early Sunday morning, so following everybody from Thursday onward feels really sluggish - especially when we find out - SPOILERS! - that ultimately, the accident had nothing more to do with any ulterior motivations then that Alice was kind of a bitch and everybody was really on edge.  Plus, nothing about Beth's (or Bree's?) subsequent hiding of the body made any sense.  You thought your twin killed someone, so you hauled a corpse twenty feet off the path? That's more or less my two main complaints: very slow paced, and the ultimate solution to the mystery disappointed.  But, as ever, these are well written and Harper does a great sense of place.

The Rosie Result

By Graeme Simsion

This, like Force of Nature, was also the third of sorts, and not my favorite of the bunch.  I did like it, generally, on its own though, so in that respect it's not so similar.  It's the continuation of the The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect, which told more or less the meeting, and eventual coupling up, of the titular Rosie, and narrator Don, who is (by the end of the third, determinedly so) autistic.   The Rosie Result sort of tracks Don and Rosie's son's progress through a new school, and the question about whether he should be tested for autism/is autistic.  It's not as funny as the first installment, not as sad as the second.  It ends, as the others did, on a very hopeful note.  Don and Rosie's relationship is sturdy and I do think it suffers from the focus being on son Hudson, who is sort of a cypher to Don (and to readers) and not as much on Rosie, who is more down to earth and whose interactions with the more literal Don create the best moments in the series. Overall, nice for completists.

I suppose this is my "Australia" reading day - I hadn't even noticed until I started putting the labels on.  These could not be two more different pieces set in Australia - one is a social comedy about current views on health, disabilities, political correctness and parenting, set in and around the suburbs, the other is a murder/crime thriller set in the bush. 

Dispatches

Dispatches, by Michael Herr

From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.

So I'm trying something new (and no, it's not "actually be faithful about doing book reviews" although it also, sort of, is) and I want to record it for posterity, i.e., my future self, who I assume has the same terrible memory that current self does.  At least, I can't imagine that my memory is going to get better.  So I'm committing myself to the 2019 PopSugar Reading Challenge, and my plan is to faithfully set down the books I choose and read, here, in my own personal corner.  As a warm-up, I've decided to post a review of the last book I read, Dispatches.  Who's up for some little light reading, am I right?!

Actually, that's not even true, and I just realized it, because I finished A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue after Dispatches and didn't remember until just now, even though it was literally the day before yesterday.  I wasn't joking about my memory.

So maybe it makes sense for me to review Dispatches then, because it truly is a book that sticks with you.  Not the plot; there is none.  It's more the sense of being in a certain time and place (here: the Vietnam War, circa 1968) and the emotions that come with it than any linear story-line or through-point. 

The book is very roughly segregated into sections, but it reads more like one continuous fever dream.  For those who loved Apocalypse Now, this guy did the narration and honestly, probably hugely influenced the feel of the movie.  Michael Herr is a master at conveying the closing distance to madness from living in these conditions, the grunts who just want to leave, the generals who can't admit that the war is failing, the correspondents who are drawn to it, not realizing yet that everything else in their life will be duller and grayer by comparison (even if they aren't literally being shot at and mangled) once they leave the war zone.

This really was an incredibly well-written book.  It's sad, incredibly sad, as you realize the futility and waste going on, the refusal to consider the human cost of things, and, in hindsight, the loss of normalcy for the soldiers who went over there.  In one of the later sections about the correspondents who went over there, Herr describes a soldier trying to show one of the photojournalists pictures of a dead posed vietnamese woman, severed heads, ears, destruction, not realizing that "every other soldier had the same pictures". There's racism, not only towards the Vietnamese, but between the white and black soldiers.  There's the sense that these kids (one of them is twenty) may be indelibly wounded from the things they've seen and done.  A long section is about the siege at Khe Sanh, the endless shelling, and immobility, and also the strange quiet when the rains lifted and support arrived, a place where you could easily go mad in hell and return weeks later to find that it's nothing more than a standard outpost, returned again to being militarily unimportant. 

I also learned that Errol Flynn had a son, Sean, who was a Vietnam War photojournalist.  I was so taken by this news, I looked him up on wikipedia and spoiled the ending of the book: the golden boy (at least the way Herr describes him) two years after the events of Dispatches, takes a bike through Cambodia in search of Viet Cong and disappeared, declared dead fourteen years later, although it's believed he only lived one.

It's not the easiest book to read (in fact, I bemoaned to more than one person that I wished it were about a hundred pages shorter) but I'm glad I read it, sad it happened, but satisfied that this record was made, to preserve the time, to give us knowledge, possibly, to avoid a recurrence.

Red Moon

Red Moon, by Benjamin Percy

When government agents kick down Claire Forrester's front door and murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is. 

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off of it, the only passenger left alive, a hero.

Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but he is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy.

So far, the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs.  But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge and the battle for humanity will begin.  

Okay, since the jacket isn't real helpful, here is a brief synopsis of Red Moon: a prion (which you may remember from Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, Lost World (or from real life, if you're into that instead of sci-fi)) infection spreads throughout the world's population, going back to the 700s or so, so that in the alternative present-day, the presentation of the disease, lycan, has led to an uneasy semi-stalemate between the two populations.  Percy has substituted key events in world history with lycan equivalents, from the settlement of a lycan-only home territory in the 1940s and 50s, to a lycan (rather than Weather Underground) Days of Rage in 1969.  Now, two young people, one the daughter of revolutionaries, the other the son of a man working towards a vaccine, and the sole survivor of a lycan terror attack on a plane (alterna- 9/11) find themselves trying to survive and navigate the impending clash of cultures. 

It's an interesting idea - looking at the birth and growth of our own world's turn towards suicide killers, revolutionaries rather than armies, and decades-long guerilla warfare through the lens of werewolves - but the book doesn't quite coalesce.  For one thing, it's all a little too pat.  Percy's substitutions - lycan Haymarket for Haymarket, lycan Tounela for Israel/Palestine and so on - act more as a sci-fi gimmick than a plausible history of his world.  Our own history happened for various complicated reasons - you can't just substitute werewolves for one half of every battle and think that's sufficient. I mean, the Weather Underground had ties to communism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and other revolutions across the world, and in Red Moon, it's basically just...lycanthropy.  Which begs the question (never really answered) - has everything else happened as we know it have happened?  Was there a Vietnam War?  A Korean War?  What about McCarthyism?  How about the Cuban Missile Crisis?  Are we to assume that some form of those momentous US events happened, but always with lycans on the other side?  Perhaps Percy expects us to draw from our own knowledge of history the belief that this all followed and happened naturally, but given the changes he's presented, I want to know how the WUO (here called the Revolution) started in Red Moon. As Marmaduke says in one what may be one of the worst movies ever made, "How did we come to this, Phil?"

Speaking of plausibility, I may not have traveled the Pacific Northwest extensively, but I'm pretty sure it's not the sort of place where people are constantly running into each other by happenstance.  I mean, in the last fifty pages of the book, Patrick finds his father's old vaccine co-worker, then runs into Claire after like, a two year absence, right when he's about to be airlifted out with the vaccine, and then they (and the band of angry Hispanic people that - you know what, don't even ask) get attacked by the President and government agent who killed Claire's parents just happens to be along for that ride as well and tracks Claire down in a final showdown. Really?  All  those people just happened to be in the same place at one time?  I mean, that's not even counting the way that Patrick and Claire met in the first place, or the way that Patrick literally stumbled across his MIA father while walking back to his military base.  If all I had to go on was Red Moon, I would pretty much think that the West Coast (not to mention the Russian/Finish border area) was about ten square miles, and had a population of 2,000, the way people keep running into each other.  And you may think that asking for plausibility in an alternate werewolf universe is stupid, but why go to the trouble of creating this setting, and making it so "gritty" and then being like, "And now I'm going to make all my main, secondary, and tertiary characters meet up!"  And the way that, like Rasputin before them, many of his characters are absolutely immune to bullets, stabbings, and vicious animal attacks.  It's like playing a game on cheat mode.  Not that characters don't die.  They do.  But like, some of these people, *coughPUCKcough* should really be succumbing to the throat-stabbing, multiple gunshot wound injuries they're sustaining here. 

And to top it off, after all this semi-commentary on the rise of the radical within, the book ends with a pure sci-fi/thriller moment.  I guess it is not entirely out of tone, but after all the build up, you kinda expect that the denouement will be more than just some impossible-to-kill villain sprinkling poison in your corn flakes.  At the very least, let the vaccine out and get the inevitable clash of those who are poisoned with those who seek treatment.  Maybe Percy thought that would echo too much the course of the X-Men movies, which has may of the same themes (but, oddly enough, in a more appropriate fashion - at least it doesn't pretend above its station) and has the same "if we can't beat 'em, make 'em just like us" plan.  But instead, after the great battle over the vaccine, we're left watching Patrick take the last dose, and knowing that it's all going to be irrelevant shortly anyway, since we'll all be lycan in a few months.  Or, I dunno, dead, I guess?  It was hard to figure that out, since they poisoned the original lycans before grinding up their bones to make the bread, and that stuff probably really travels through the food chain.  Like mercury poisoning.  It also begs the question - why did they bomb the shit out of the Tri-Cities if they were just going to infect everyone anyway?  Wouldn't a mass-scale infection like that be easier to spread if your infrastructure hadn't just had a bomb dropped on it?  Don't we want roads and shit to be working, and the military force safely focused on another country?

Percy's writing in Red Moon isn't bad - a little too simile filled, too descriptive-heavy, for my taste, but it does the job of getting the mood across very well.  Everything is ominous - it's not just blonde hair, it's seaweed spread across the beach at low tide, all the animals are all meaty or sinewy, voices are mucousy, glass splinters, adrenaline stabs, and mountains rise like fangs.  I think that if you want to enjoy Red Moon, it needs to be read for what it is - an alternative werewolf  history/thriller - rather than what it could be - sharp-edged commentary on our own political morass.  It's fairly gruesome, but mostly earned.  I'm just wishing that it made a bit more sense. 

Grave Mercy

Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers

Escaping from the brutality of an arranged marriage, seventeen year-old Ismae finds sanctuary at the convent of St. Mortain, where the sisters still serve the gods of old.  Here she learns that the god of Death himself has blessed her with dangerous gifts - and a  violent destiny.  If she chooses to stay at the convent, she will be trained as an assassin and serve as handmaiden to Death.  To claim her new life, she must be willing to take the lives of others.

Ismae's most important assignment takes her straight into the high court of Brittany, where she must pose as mistress to the darkly mysterious Gavriel Duval, who has fallen under a cloud of suspicion.  Once there, she finds herself woefully underprepared - not only for the deadly games of love and intrigue, but for the impossible choices she must make.  For how can she deliver Death's vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?

So Grave Mercy has gotten quite a few good reviews, and I guess I am a little hard pressed to say why. It's fine, don't get me wrong, but it's not a miracle of writing, and there are quite a few things I really didn't enjoy about it.  It begins with Ismae's very short-lived marriage (which, since I'm pretty sure she never gets divorced, means she's still married throughout the book.  Which: odd).  Soon enough, her new husband discovers that she has some serious scar/birthmark issues going on, and decides that she needs to be burned at the stake - I get that the birthmark means that the god of Death is her father, but why that is such a huge problem is not really ever explained.  So the local herbwitch smuggles her out to the convent where she can accept her destiny as La Femme Nikita, 1485-style, or marry some random guy.  Hmm, tough decision.

So in the convent she finds out that she is immune to poison, and I am already sensing that the Mary Sue is strong with this one.  It's a feeling that lasts much longer than it should, considering.  She meets some other novitiates, trains up, and goes out on her first assignment, and let me tell you, this girl thinks she is hot shit.  I don't know what kind of brainwashing they do at the convent, but there is way too much of "Kill first, ask questions later" for Ismae to be as confident as she is.  She's on her first assignment!  Which she almost screws up.  I don't care how much you train, when you go out into the real world and are expected to produce results for the first time, you get nervous.  And I think it's flaw in the character that she's not nervous - it makes her seem stupid, for not being nervous, and it makes her harder to relate to. 

The second place I got tripped up at is when she gets sent out with this Gavriel Duval guy on assignment.  Why this chick gets sent out with him is beyond me.  She has gone on a total of two (2) assignments, both of which she very narrowly avoided botching, and, as we discover later, she is both unprepared for real world scenarios, and totally susceptible to deeply wounded backstories.  It would make sense if (PLOT SPOILERS UP AHEAD) as we discover later, Crunard's master plan involves somehow using a novitiate assassin as some sort of  scape goat.  But he's not, as far as I can tell.  Why the abbess didn't insist on sending someone with a) more experience and b) more loyalty to the convent, I just don't know.  I understand that Crunard was the bad guy, and he was using the abbess as well, but it's kind of like, either she totally trusts Crunard, which, since we're told to suspect anyone else, I don't know why he would be above suspicion, or she doesn't, in which case, she needs to tell Ismae to watch out for everyone.  By not uniting against Crunard, the only thing the convent accomplished is alienating Ismae, who, although probably not their star pupil, still represents a significant amount of time and energy spent molding her into this ninja assassin. 

Do not even get me started on the poisons and the weapons.

Plus, I could not figure out if this convent is supposed to be well-known, secret, or what?  Like, I am so sure that the court of Brittany just allows these ladies to train young women as killers. VERY PLAUSIBLE.  And yet, everyone seems to know what the convent of St. Mortain means.  So, I guess, that like, no one is concerned that there's a gaggle of assassins running around? And no one thinks it would be a good idea to maybe...send them off to kill a bunch of people in France?  I guess I'm just confused about this whole target thing, which may end up being better explained in later books: if the god is picking targets, why is he so focused on like, state politics?  I understand that apparently a free Brittany = continued worship, but (1) that doesn't even sound like it's right, since the new duchess of Brittany totally says that Mortain is a saint, not a god, implying that the leader of Brittany doesn't support the old gods as is anyhow, and (2) I would think that just knowing that there's a pack of wild young ladies avenging wrongs in the name of Mortain would be enough to make people leery of not doing their best to stay on his good side. And if he's not picking targets, then why the visions and the marque and all that? It just feels very thin.

Okay, and before I try to temper this review with why the book is "fine", I want to get one more thing out of my system: lack of humor.  I mean, this book needs some levity, and it doesn't even have to be like, Ismae cracking out wicked bad puns after she kills someone, a la James Bond.  I just mean, like, banter, or something a little bit to relieve the unending tension. 

Okay: things I liked: I enjoyed the idea that there was a closeness between the three new novitiates, although honestly, it was more of a tell than a show.  Because the book necessarily skips quite a bit of training time, I feel like the scenes in which Annith, Ismae, and Sybella really bond get left by the wayside.  I mean, we see Ismae talk Sybella off the ledge (figuratively and literally) and then the next thing we know, Sybella's been off on a month's long assignment, and while I did get a sense that the three were close, I felt that part could have been stronger.  (So it's a back handed compliment, so what?) 

I also liked how the book ended - given that there are, as I said, three new novitiates, and this is a planned trilogy, I don't think I'm reaching too far to say that each book will center on one of them.  The next one is Sybella, I believe.  So Grave Mercy did a good job of wrapping up Ismae's story line and getting her to a place of, if not absolute resolution, at least temporary resting so that we can look in on the other girls and see how they're doing.  I am intrigued by the other two ladies, and while it's never a good idea to want to know more about a secondary character than the primary one, it does at least bode well for follow-up books.

So it's a fairly standard book, not offensive, but the focus on the relationship between Gavriel and Ismae to the detriment of world-building is both a strength and a weakness: strength in the sense that there are many questions and avenues for the next two books, weak in the sense that you just get a sense of absurdity  and implausibility about some of it. And in a world where fourteen year old girls get sent to assassin training school in medieval France, you need to ensure you keep as much plausibility as you can or else the whole thing is a three ring circus.

Atomic Element 26! Double Header Review Day

Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook

It's been nine years since the Horde, an oppressive empire from Asia, were run out of England. However, detective inspector Lady Wilhelmina Wentworth will never be able to escape their cruelty: her mother was raped during the invasion, and Mina is half Horde. Mina crosses paths with the revered Iron Duke Rhys Trahaearn, a former pirate captain who was instrumental in fighting the Horde, when a dead body is tossed on his estate. What begins as lust sparks into full-blown romance as the two learn more about the nefarious Black Guard and catch a murderous madman. Airships, zombies, nanotechnology, outlandish secondary characters, and a complicated heroine round out the novel. - Publisher's Weekly

This week's theme is two-fold: first, the obvious metallic royalty thing going on, which I find amusing, since it sounds like they belong to a single series, but in fact have nothing in common. I would totally read The Iron Dowager Queen, too! The other theme is procrastination, i.e., I read these books so long ago, I had to return them to the library, since they do not let me renew books more than once down here in this god-forsaken wasteland, but I've been putting off writing about them, until I had other things I wanted to put off more. Don't judge me, juggling onerous tasks is how I got so spry and nimble! Also, I know that doesn't make sense and I don't care. WHAT.

The Iron Duke, which I have typed as The Iron King twice now, is a really fascinating alternate history steampunk book, and although there are a few instances where I was kinda scratching my head, for the most part Ms. Brook does a good job of absorbing you into the story, and giving you enough world-building to get you interested, but not enough to overwhelm you. In Iron Duke, nanotechnology of some sort was introduced to foodstuffs imported into England (sugar, particularly), and once all the population had sufficient intake, they were activated, so that the people were controlled by the Horde, and kept insensate, apart from the brief periods of frenzy, which were basically induced orgies, meant to control the population growth.

As a brief aside, was the Horde supposed to be Asian, like, the Golden Horde? This was never explained to my satisfaction, and I will be honest with you, at first I thought they were aliens, and this was some sort of sci-fi thing, but I kinda got the impression that they were actually humans. Plus, they're sexually compatible with the English (rrrrawr), but visually separate, since people can tell from looking at Mina that's she's a hybrid. Or a half-breed. A mule. More zippers, mule! (I said, don't judge).

[PS I was just reviewing this for editing, and I realized that blurb up there totally says that the Horde is from Asia. HAHAHAHAHA, obviously my reading comprehension leaves a little something to be desired. But it's not clear in the book, is my point, nyah.]

Anyhow, Mina is pretty awesome, like the Mina from the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, who is based on the Dracula Mina (I was about to say Batman's Mina. I should not be writing this post, for real, yo), who is, by all accounts, also pretty kickass. To sum up: naming your child Wilhelmina is still a horrible thing to do to them. She is on a police force of some sort, that part's only partially important, because we get right to the good stuff right away: a body that fell on the Duke's property, who has been dropped from such a height as to break every bone in his body, and leave him a gelatinous sack. Also, he was frozen when he was dropped! DUN DUN DUN!

I will be honest, I only partially followed the plotline, mostly because it didn't really make much sense, and because not knowing it only slightly impeded my enjoyment of the book. This ain't no War and Peace, y'all, I don't need to remember why this pirate lady went out of her way to drop a guy on the Duke's house, which seems really stupid, since the last thing I would want is some pissed off Ironman bent on revenge chasing me around on a dirigible. In a dirigible? On a dirigible. DIRIGIBLES! One thing this book has lots of is dirigibles! Or uh, airships? Either way, a method of transportation I have no desire to try out, especially after reading this book. And seriously, how could the Duke, who is, apparently, entirely iron inside his insides, not have to like, stay in one place on the ship? Wouldn't that much iron, wandering around deck, trying to make out with people, be like, super unsteady, and tip that sucker over?

I just looked it up, and answers.com (which is a very reliable source) says that cast iron weighs 450 pounds per cubic foot. So, if he's like, five cubic feet (google failed me on my "how much cubic feet per person" inquiry, which I do have to admit is probably not asked very often, and should probably be restricted to the even more esoteric, "how many cubic feet are all the bones in the human body", which makes me sound like a serial killer), then he weighs well over 2000 pounds. You know what else weighs 2000 pounds? A small car. Can you imagine trying to have sex with a car on top of you? Really? You need help. Even if he's only like, one cubic foot worth of iron, that's still like, the same as a big fucking llama. I got sidetracked, I apologize.

So the Duke sees Mina, and thinks she's a hot piece, which he is one hundred percent correct about, and decides he's going to follow her around town, trying to mack on her, and generally being about even money in the helpful:horny odds. Now, I do have to mention, the one truly not good part of the book, is where he rapes her. I KNOW. I didn't want to say it like that, but it kinda is like that, no getting around it. She says no, he continues, because, and I forget this exactly, he's like, in some sort of sex-haze, and doesn't realize no means no. And he realizes later, and prostrates himself, and she forgives him, and they fuck off into the sunset. It's bullshit, but I got through it, and liked everything else, so my experience of the book was not ruined. It's just. . . it's rape, man, and FOR NO GOOD REASON. I have no idea why that scene was written like that. It really made me dislike the Duke, whereas I had been ambivalent before, and the eventual rehabilitation of his character just doesn't seem worth the total smear job.

Like, The Iron Duke really needed not to be a romance book, because all the non-romance parts (besides the bewildering plotlines, which I accept some blame for, I have a short memory) were great, and all the romance parts kinda skeeved me out. The world that Ms. Brook created is delightful, all the nuances, and details, and stuff, even if it's got some holes. I just wanted Mina to team up with the Duke without all the angst, and then for them to go off and like, hunt krakens and bulldoze zombies and solve crimes. I don't think that's too much to ask.





The Iron King, by Julie Kagawa

Meghan Chase has a secret destiny—one she could never have imagined…

Something has always felt slightly off in Meghan's life, ever since her father disappeared before her eyes when she was six. She has never quite fit in at school…or at home.

When a dark stranger begins watching her from afar, and her prankster best friend becomes strangely protective of her, Meghan senses that everything she's known is about to change.

But she could never have guessed the truth—that she is the daughter of a mythical faery king and is a pawn in a deadly war. Now Meghan will learn just how far she'll go to save someone she cares about, to stop a mysterious evil no faery creature dare face…and to find love with a young prince who might rather see her dead than let her touch his icy heart. - From Amazon

This book is totally not like the Iron Duke, in that this is a) a teen book, b) not steampunk, c) set in Louisiana and faery, not Europe and airships, and d) not exciting. Two things this book is sorely lacking: ass-kicking and exploding zombies.

I apologize in advance, not only am I sickish (this - a runny nose and sore throat - is usually about as sick as I ever get, so I milk it for all it's worth), and have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, I also didn't have much to say about this book even right after I read it, so I'm doubly short on words now. I was very excited about the premise, and also because I got the first two chapters on my kindle, and it was very tantalizing. But now I've read the whole thing, and I am very let down. First, the characters are kinda paper-boardy. Cardboardy. Two-dimensional. Meghan is flat, Robin is flat, and honestly, I skimmed the last half of the book. I didn't want to! It was just. . . not gripping, and kinda telegraphed, so I got bored waiting for everyone to do what I knew they'd end up doing, like, twenty pages back. Except that time Meghan gets drunk on fairy juice. Did not see that coming.

But things like that were part of my discontent with the Iron King: the events didn't really flow, they seemed more like, squares on a gameboard, like now you have a chase scene, now you have a dance scene, now you have your three main characters face-off and wow, I'm bored just trying to describe it. I feel badly, since it's not a bad book, I just sorta was expecting better, and it's so bland. It was a let-down.

Plus, you gotta compare it to that other book about going into fairyland to switch a changeling back, Heir to Sevenwaters, by Juliet Marillier, and this one just does not compare. Not that the changeling isn't frightening. That's some Omen shit right there. I've been trying to think of something else to say about this book, and it's just not coming. It really is that bland. So I am going to bed. I hope you'll all join me for the next installment, The Iron Maharaja.

Billy Budd

Billy Budd, by Herman Melville

Aboard the warship Bellipotent, the young orphan Billy Budd was called the handsome sailor. Billy was tall, athletic, nobel looking; he was friendly, innocent, helpful and ever-cheerful. He was a fierce fighter and a loyal friend. All the men and officers liked him...

All but one: Master-at-Arms Claggart. Envious, petty Claggart plotted to make Billy's life miserable. But when a fear of mutinies swept through the fleet, Claggart realized he could do more than just torment the Handsome Sailor...He could frame Billy Budd for treason...

Herman, Herman, Herman. What are we going to do with you? I'll be honest here, I am not Melville's biggest fan, unless by "fan" you mean "someone who badmouths his writing style every chance she gets and constantly bemoans the wasted hours she spent struggling through Moby Dick, which is, let's face, pretty much the textbook example on why ignorance is bliss". Let's just say I was happier not knowing every minute detail of how, say, the hump back differs from the razor back from the sulphur bottom, and on and on, until I have lost not only the thread of the plot, but my sanity as well. However, now let me speak of Billy Budd, handsome sailor and all-around pretty boy.



This book is certainly mellifluous - if nothing else, Melville does know how to string a pretty group of words together, often at the loss of any sense, but still. The introduction to my book states that towards the end, Melville become increasinly upset at the inability of readers to understand him. I can only say that those readers have my utmost sympathies, because Melville seems to have written Billy Budd in some maniacal fit of pique, with an outdated thesaurus, carefully running on all sentences and obscuring all rational ideas with bizarre word choices and startling similes. Here's a sample:

From his chief's employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for the worriment of the foretopman - for it was from the master-at-arms that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded - the corporal, having naturally enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to foment the ill blood by perverting to his chief certain innocent frolics of the good-natured foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall.

So, it's not quite enough to be mad babbling, but it is enough to make you wish for Melville in person, so you could shake him and scream, "Get to the point!" The story itself is pretty straightforward: Billy the Handsome (there is a fair amount of gay subtext in this novel, not the least of which appears to stem from Claggart's jealousy of Billy for being too. . . pretty. For real.) is accused of mutiny by the master-at-arms. Billy's method of dealing with the accusation is about as sensible as Melville's writing style, i.e., garaunteed to end in misery. There are good themes hidden in the story, of the battle between the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. Compounding Billy's dire situation, and my headache, Melville treats us to an exhaustive (not extensive, perhaps, but certainly exhausting) treatise on the circumstances surrounding the plot - a period of dangerous unrest and mutiny in the British Navy. The atmosphere lends itself to urgency, while the players are left in the end to the worst fate of all: living with their own actions. Thought-provoking, but skimming will do just fine.