The Light Pirate

The Light Pirate

By Lily Brooks-Dalton

Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world.

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time— The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

For a book about the end of the world, The Light Pirate is surprisingly peaceful. We follow the story of Wanda, from birth to death, in four sections, Power, Water, Light and Time. There is drastic upheaval, deaths, births, storms, fires, magic, murder and the loss of every marker of modern life, but the story uses a dreamy, semi-distant approach to these crises, so at no point does it feel as overwhelming as it otherwise might. 

In the first section, Power, yet another hurricane blows through a Florida that looks only a little more hard worn than the one we know today, devastating one particular family and resulting in the birth of a girl with an effervescent power. This is the most visceral and urgent section, describing a single 24 hour period, and the only one (with the exception of the epilogue) which is told linearly. With each subsequent section, we get more and more emotionally distant from the story.

In Water, ten years later, it is the last gasp of civilization, as Florida succumbs to nature, and the family is torn asunder again. 

Light, another ten or twenty years along, is the longest section, as it flits back and forth between the present, when Wanda finds potential new companionship, and fills in the gaps of the past, the final severing between Florida and the outside world, the loss of their home, and the loss of Wanda's mentor and mother figure. Time, which is a mere single chapter long, is the capstone to Wanda's arc and a look into what appears, finally, to be a stable and hopeful future. 

Although we dwell in detail on the decimation of life and property through the book, we spend no time at all on the creation of a new community which can survive the changes world. Perhaps that is why the ending appears optimistic: we don't wallow in the drudgery, the sheer effort of living, that even the best commune could offer under such circumstances. Whereas we hear in detail about the creeping encroachment of water and the sweat and pain of finding shelter in a world so blasted that it's impossible to be out in the daytime, we get to gloss over things like the return to a human existence where 50% of kids don't survive to their first birthday. (Something which was on the forefront of my mind, since Light introduces two women, one of whom must have had a kid since the loss of infrastructure, and one whom is imminently anticipating giving birth. As a reader, I'm immediately projecting the death of the mother and/or baby, which isn't, I assume, the tone the author was going for).

I don't think the epilogue is intended as trickery, I do think the author wants to offer hope. I just find myself cynical after seeing how far down the road we've already brought ourselves, with no expected reversal in sight. The last year has brought not only the inland mountain flooding in North Carolina, and the headlining wildfires of Los Angeles, but, in an eerily prescient twist, the widespread loss of electricity to the island or Puerto Rico on New Years Eve, due to deteriorating infrastructure. It's simultaneously hard to imagine a future in which the country simply abandons entire states (as tempting as the idea sounds, for other reasons), and yet hard to deny that seems overwhelmingly difficult to reverse - if we even had agreement on the whys and hows (and ifs!) it should be.

The depressing subject matter notwithstanding, it's a little treasure of a book. The descriptions of nature, the glimpses into a life which is both beyond comprehension yet all too real, the way the characters find the strength to keep going and continue making connections in spite of the odds. The primary relationship is between Wanda and Phyllis, an older neighbor, who eventually takes Wanda under her wing and gives her the tools (literally and figuratively) to survive. I mentioned this before, but aside from the first section, the entire book feels dreamlike and drifting, letting the atmosphere seep into the story at every level.

The Light Pirate seems to say both that the destruction of civilization is inevitable, and that we must adapt to the world, instead of adapting the world to us, if we wish to survive. I sure hope it's wrong. 

 

 

49: A Dystopian Book With A Happy Ending

There There

There There

By Tommy Orange

A wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Well, it ain't no YA.  I was kind of dreading this, a little, because even though I might be sore sick of YA, I still wasn't really in the mood for a polemic on social justice issues.  I'm worn out.  And there's something a bit voyeuristic about it.   There's a scene in there where Tony dresses up in his regalia and gets on BART to go to the Powwow and people are staring at him and he's thinking, basically, lap it up, sure, let's give the white people a fun story to tell about seeing a real Indian all dressed up.  I get a little bit of that same sense reading this. Basically peering in on someone else's life and making judgments on something I know very little about.  

But the book is generally strong and interesting to read.  Orange switches both POV and style, so we get some essays, but mostly chapters in a multitude of characters, most of whom are semi-loosely related in fashions that will become clearer as we get further into the book.  The finale centers around the Powwow, where everyone has gathered for their own reasons, ranging from initiation into a more Indian lifestyle, job/hobby, finding family, robbery, and the most fourth-wall reason, collecting stories from Indians to get a better sense of the modern "Urban Indian", as opposed to the historical, stereotypical reservation Indian.  One of my favorite scenes is Dene, the historiographer, talking with another character about the project and what it means to be Indian.  

But the book ends basically on a cliff-hanger, with no (at the time) intended resolution.  There's a way to do it that makes the story stronger, but in this case, I feel like it made everything else weaker, by not tying up at least a few of the loose ends.  We end one storyline literally with a boy's de facto grandmother beginning to look up at the doctor who is (we assume) going to tell her whether he lives or not.  Another is with a character bleeding out on the floor.  

These characters are teetering on revelations about family members, life and death, and we don't spend enough time with them during the book to really get a sense of how we can even assume or guess at how they'll handle it. Because we have so many characters, and this isn't a twelve book series, we're only with each character in small chunks.  Orange does a decent job with such a large cast, but I never entirely figured out who all was who in the criminal side of the book. 

I don't know; this one feels tough because yes, it feels completely unfinished, but also, I don't feel any impetus to get back in these people's lives. So I don't think I'd be up for a sequel, and that just kind of encapsulates my review: good, but not compelling.

10: An Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner

Year of the Reaper

Year of the Reaper

By Makiia Lucier

The past never forgets . . .

Before an ambush by enemy soldiers, Lord Cassia was an engineer's apprentice on a mission entrusted by the king. But when plague sweeps over the land, leaving countless dead and devastating the kingdom, even Cas' title cannot save him from a rotting prison cell and a merciless sickness.

Three years later, Cas wants only to return to his home in the mountains and forget past horrors. But home is not what here members. His castle has become a refuge for the royal court. And they have brought their enemies with them.

When an assassin targets those closest to the queen, Cas is drawn into a search for a killer...one that leads him to form an unexpected bond with a brilliant young historian named Lena. Cas and Lena soon realize that who is behind the attacks is far less important than why. They must look to the past, following the trail of a terrible secret--one that could threaten the kingdom's newfound peace and plunge it back into war.

I really enjoyed this one! I think it's like a light YA, in the sense that it involves young adults, and isn't suuuuper heavy on complex plotting, but there's certainly some flexibility there, and definitely some dark moments, when we find out what happened to the sick woman (spoiler alert!).  

It reminded me in many ways of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, which, aside from the protagonist sharing a similar nickname (Cas/Caz) along with the ability to see ghosts, recent release from an unjust imprisonment and a badly scarred back, also has a similar castle politicking/adjacent to royalty vibe with the same kind of medieval fantasy flavor. I mean, the plots are totally different, so it's weird that the protagonists have so many surface similarities, but I love Curse of Chalion, so the similar parts were welcome, and the differences were entertaining. 

There definitely could have been more world building.  We enter into a situation with two warring countries trying to make peace with a political alliance, and beset by a vicious plague.  Cas' backstory involves three years behind enemy lines, and the storyline involves a huge political marriage, but we never spend any time in the next country, or know what they think about, you know, the marriage, or the baby, or the plague, or the fragile detente.  Who IS ruling the country next door? It was never clear to me.  [And how on earth are they going to gloss over the ol' switcharoo when the next ambassador comes a'calling? A question alluded to, but never answered].  So although the story felt satisfying in many ways, it also felt weirdly like it was the second in a duology, or maybe that there was supposed to be another book after this one, perhaps exploring whatever Cas' brother is off to. 

The mystery of what is going on with the attacks is not that hard to figure out - the real question was always going to be be "why is the former queen so pissed off" but I guess when you abandon someone to die and then then marry their fiance and have a kid and then it turns out that the person you abandoned not only didn't die, but was spirited away to be tortured under the guise of medical experimentation, then that all makes sense. But seriously, there are at least three prominent people who survive the plague just in this book, you'd think people would want to see the person dead and buried, especially if one is the QUEEN.  Don't just drop her off at the nearest trauma ward and assume she's going to kick the bucket.  And what if someone recognizes her?  I mean, if nothing else, Cas' brother deserves to be banished for going along with such a stupid plan.  

I was reading a thing the other day about how boys/men don't have "toxic friendships" the way that female characters do.  They're limited in the way their relationships are expressed.  And initially I was going to applaud how fraternal and lovely the brothers' relationship was (and it is), but it's also interesting that the author of that article felt really right, that it seems like in books with male protagonists, you usually wind up with these ride-or-die friendships or no friends. It would be interesting to see a book about toxic male friends.  Not that I, necessarily want to read a book about toxic male friends, but I think it would be good to have one.  The one I can think of about toxic female friends was The Best Lies, and that one drove me crazy.  

 

15: A Book by a Pacific Islander Author

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

By Carol Rifka Brunt

1987. The only person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus is her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can be herself only in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down.
 
But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life. At the funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail containing a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and that this unexpected friend just might be the one she needs the most.

So I was super pumped about this when I started, I was a few chapters in and immediately hooked.  And then... I started to hate it.  The main character, June, is supposed to be 14-15, but feels more like 11-12, she has no social or emotional maturity, is deeply and weirdly in love with her uncle Finn who is dying of AIDS (and even weirder, we find out at the end of the book that Finn's partner, Toby told Finn that he (i.e., Finn) would make her fall in love with him, like that's a normal thing to say about an uncle-niece relationship) and is really off-putting to everyone around her. 

This infatuation/all-encompassing love she has for her uncle was really what made me reluctant to keep going. If she were actually dating him (which it sounds like she wanted to do[?!]), she'd be a plethora of possessive red flags.  She's mad other people aren't as upset as she is by his death, she doesn't want to share her time with him at all, she gets mad that other people know things about him that she doesn't know (like his partner! who lived with him for years!), she's totally undone by the idea that some of the things she thought were Finn's (like a jar of guitar picks) actually turn out to be his partner's, etc., etc. Like dangerous levels of obsession here. And after Finn's death, she does the exact same thing to his partner, Toby.  Like, at one point she steals her passport so she can take Toby on a trip to England, like that's a totally normal thing for a 14 year old to suggest to this adult man who was living with her uncle, whom she has known (and known of) for probably two whole months, if that (Finn died February 5th, and the book wraps up around the end of tax season). 

I forced myself to keep going, and started to get back into around the 3/4 mark, where she starts to see her various lies beginning to unwind, and she actually has a conversation with her sister, Greta (instead of assuming the worst about her). I felt worse for the people around her than I did her.  She sounded like a petulant, ignorant child, always thinking in these totally black and white terms, like her mother is horrible for what she did to her brother, Finn (even though we find out Finn stayed longer in England because he met Toby, thus eliminating the chance for them to work as artists together), and how if people don't do things just exactly the way she has it in her mind, they must HATE HER, because SHE'S SO WEIRD. If this is meant to be a picture of someone with a social disorder, kudos.  Because like I said, I cannot imagine a 14 year old, even in 1987, who thinks it's reasonable to be a caregiver for her uncle's lover, and that said caregiving would involve a trip overseas. 

Around the 3/4 mark, as I've said, the action starts to pick up, and we spend less time mooning about how wonderful Finn and June's relationship was (despite the fact that she *GASP* never knew that Finn couldn't drive, how dare she not know that???) and how deeply she's grasping onto Toby, and there's actual action, regarding the painting she and Greta have been defacing, regarding Greta's habit of getting drunk and lying down in the woods, and Toby's illness. I did tear up a little when she rescues him from Bellevue Hospital, but I don't know if the ending saves the rest of the book. I could definitely have used less in the middle, when we spend all this time hearing about how wonderful her uncle was and how only he understood her, truly, (even though she apparently knew very little about him or his life), and how every single thing that Finn ever touched was precious, precious to her!  She does remind me a lot of Gollum, actually.  Obsessive, unpleasant to be around, always assuming the worst of people, pretends, 'oh, woe is me' even though she's pretty much 100% self interested herself.  

I know I chose this for the 1980s, and the AIDS crisis looms large, but aside from that, it just didn't feel super 80s to me.  The Sun Down Motel felt more 80s for all that the time period didn't even matter as much in that book.  

 

13: A Book Set in the 1980s

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

This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War

By Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

Okay, so I kind of hated this book.  Not for any "good" reason - it's not poorly written, or full of plot holes (although how would you even be able to tell) or stupid, or badly characterized or anything simple like that.  It's just way too much High Literature in my Fantasy/Sci Fi. 

You're dropped into a, well, I guess it could be futuristic world, except that all the places the two soldiers visit are clearly historical versions of Earth in some way, and we start with alternating chapters between a person from each faction, called Blue and Red.  

The conversation is initiated in a gloating kind of way, but quickly becomes a real connection between the two and then they turn into, I guess love letters, and then the very last few chapters are basically the two of them trying to evade capture and deprogramming by their respective groups. 

But it never felt to me like we, as readers, were properly introduced or welcomed by the characters. First of all, a bunch of times there's referrals to things that the characters deal with that are just sort of alluded to without ever actually touching on why or how they were important.  Which I guess makes sense for people who are actually writers letters, but for people who are simply fictional characters using letter writing as a way of telling a story, it's annoying and off-putting. It feels like we're watching from a distance rather than being welcomed into this tale.

Plus, they start getting into shenanigans about being together, and it feels like performance art. There's much made there about inscribing stones that are ground up into dirt which is then rubbed onto the side of your car and driven to an junkyard and scrapped for metal which is made into earrings and it just becomes so much dross by the end of it. Maybe it's a complement, but it's like hanging out with a real pair of lovers who are so interested in themselves and their love affair, they can't find anything else to talk about. Eventually, the only people who want to talk to them are each other.

#41 - A Book with a Reflected Image on the Cover or "Mirror" in the Title

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

 When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

by Nghi Vo

The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history.

 

 How many times have I said I expected and wanted a book to be better? Add this one to the list. I enjoyed the first one, albeit in a quieter way. For all that's it's very short, it felt like it dragged in the middle, while also not much happens. The framing storyteller mode is charming, but then everything is filtered through Rabbit, so we're getting a story of a story, and it doesn't really come together until the end, but it feels like more of a "Ah, okay" than a "Whoa, really?!" moment.  Anyway, I was interested enough to pick up this one, which I hoped would improve on the series. It did not. 

Vo plays around more with the storyteller trope and the unreliable narrator.  Here, both Chih the cleric and the Tiger take turns telling the story, which changes (drastically, in some cases) with the teller.  And that sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it falls very flat for me, mostly because there didn't seem to be much point.  There's a lack of cohesiveness in the way the intertwining parts of the story pull together. For example, what happens in one installment doesn't seem to affect or tie in much with what happens in the other installments.  Basically Chih goes, "This is how I heard this part" and the Tiger goes, "No, it was like this." and after you finish reading both parts you're not left with any kind of sense that maybe the truth was somewhere in the middle, it's like you just read two different stories about different things.  

Now that I've typed it out, I think that was my biggest problem, that lack of feeling like both stories were self-serving but different reflected versions of the truth.  Think of this like a divorced couple (or any couple really) or a lawsuit - both sides have their own versions of arguments and grievances, which present their own protagonist in the best possible light (or the most logical light, etc).  So it's a really interesting idea to create this dueling POV.  But it just wasn't that successful for me.  I didn't finish it and come out with more than the stories themselves, no greater insight for having heard both halves.  Maybe Vo should have tried that old chestnut and added a third storyteller: "His side, her side, and the truth".  

Vo is part of the new wave of sci/fi/fantasy authors who are including more varied representations of gender/sexuality/etc, which seems like it would be a natural fit for a story about a Tiger and her wife, but again, it just didn't seem to have that much to say about it.  I was intrigued enough from the first one (and of course, the length is a bonus - not much time commitment!) to get this one, and I'm still intrigued, but not so anxious for the next one to arrive. We'll wait and see. 

04 - A Book with a Tiger on the Cover or "Tiger" in the Title

Normal People

Normal People

By Sally Rooney

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

There was such an emphasis on "good" versus "bad" - whether or not Marianne or Connell were "nice".  I understand some of that, to a degree, since it's something I struggle with as well - do my interactions with this person make me nicer, how can I be nicer to people - but there was such a focus on it, it was hard to tell if it was coming from the author or the characters.   There's a point at the end where Marianne thinks about how Connell's life has been shaped by the first fateful decision to sleep together - where he went to school, how he dates people, his attitude - and marvels at the impact they have had on each other.  That's the beauty of Normal People, to narrow in on that piece of astonishing truth. 

One thing that did drive me crazy though: the book is basically shorter sections, generally taking place weeks or months apart, and switching viewpoints between Marianne and Connell.  We'd end one, and then pick up the next, usually halfway through a scene, and then the narrator would flashback at some point to what happened since the last section.  For example, Marianne and Connell would sleep together, and then the next section be them breaking up, and we'd have to flashback to see what happened in the interim.  It's fine to do it, but it felt way overused and got pretty stale by the end. I'd be like, ho hum, here we go again, waiting to see how things got fucked up this time.    

For all that I've been complaining about these contemporary romances involving people jumping into long term commitment, Normal People sure was the antidote to that! The push and pull of the relationship went on for years.  I think though, it was a good pace - nothing felt out of character or surprising, although, I am going to complain that once again, we miss out of some of the most important character development by skipping through long swathes of time towards the end of the book - in this case, both Connell's anxiety/depression treatment, and Marianne's masochistic sex habits.  The ending is optimistic and hopeful, with Marianne basically telling Connell that they'll come together and you do believe her (at least, I did) but it's built on this idea that both Connell and Marianne have matured and know themselves well enough to avoid their earlier pitfalls, and honestly, I'm not sure that foundation is supported enough since we've effectively glossed over both of their "recoveries".  

It's a nice enough book, not going to become a favorite of mine, but well-written.  Now that some time has passed since I finished it, I think my main feeling of the book looking back is "wistful" although that's not something I necessarily thought of while I was in the midst of reading it.  I ended up taking some time off reading "serious" fiction for awhile after this one, I felt like I just needed more lightweight books to lift my serotonin, although, as always, it's the thought provoking and difficult books that inspire me to read more.  Normal People does a good job of narrowing in on a specific phase of some people's lives - let's call it the "college years" - where each relationship becomes a building block of your adulthood and decisions feel like they echo down the rest of your life, and while all this is going on, you make stupid decisions because communication is a learned skill and most people can't do it very well when they're in their early 20s.  A lot of the first half of the book is like that - hurt feelings and missteps because one of them assumes the other's intent or some such, and that felt realistic for the most part, but I can also see where readers might lose patience with characters whose heads are basically up their own butts pretty often.  Perhaps that's why we feel optimistic at the end of the book even though (as I said above) I don't think Rooney covers enough of the critical turning point for readers to believe in the ability of Connell and Marianne to handle a relationship well: it's because we have been there ourselves, and we have done it successfully. 

Shipped

Shipped

By Angie Hockman

Between taking night classes for her MBA and her demanding day job at a cruise line, marketing manager Henley Evans barely has time for herself, let alone family, friends, or dating. But when she’s shortlisted for the promotion of her dreams, all her sacrifices finally seem worth it.

The only problem? Graeme Crawford-Collins, the remote social media manager and the bane of her existence, is also up for the position. Although they’ve never met in person, their epic email battles are the stuff of office legend.

Their boss tasks each of them with drafting a proposal on how to boost bookings in the Galápagos—best proposal wins the promotion. There’s just one catch: they have to go on a company cruise to the Galápagos Islands...together. But when the two meet on the ship, Henley is shocked to discover that the real Graeme is nothing like she imagined. As they explore the Islands together, she soon finds the line between loathing and liking thinner than a postcard.

With her career dreams in her sights and a growing attraction to the competition, Henley begins questioning her life choices. Because what’s the point of working all the time if you never actually live?

 

This is another of those workplace rom-coms where the prospective couple is vying for the same job, which always makes me a little nervous - there's gonna be some tricky maneuvering to make sure everyone gets their happy ending, and I didn't love that part of The Hating Game.  But I was persuaded because of the strong focus on the Galapagos, which was definitely the best part of the book.  

I liked it well enough, and it was a super fast read, so I finished the whole book one night after dinner, but  I never went back to re-read any parts, you know? It was cute, and amusing, but light.  Also, no explicit sex scenes, if you're curious.  Implicit!  

We get the entire book from Henley's perspective, which is for the best, since she comes off as more the "wronger" than the "wronged" in the initial (and subsequent) interactions with Graeme, especially once we get his side of the story.  From his perspective, I'm not entirely sure what her attraction would be.  

And I know that the whole plot of the book is about two people vying for the same job, but all that stuff with her boss and the big denouement was, eh, not that fun.  The cruise trip was much more entertaining, and I wish we'd had a week longer of that, and less time back at the office at the end.  Plus, three different men have taken credit for her projects in her work career? That's... majestically unlucky.  I also thought her and her sister's relationship was a little bit off.  She loves her, but thinks she's a failure, sure, okay, I'm on board, but then this whole plan of her sister's to get Graeme too distracted for the competition is just blown off like it's just another day in the Evans household and all is quickly forgiven.  And then we come out into a hard left when we find out her sister is being abused.  Jeez, it just kept getting weirder and weirder.  And a little 27 Dresses of it all.  

Anyway, it's fun, breezy, and light, and don't think too hard about it and you'll have a good time! And also desire to book a cruise asap. 

 

 

The Ninth House

The Ninth House

By Leigh Bardugo

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?

Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless “tombs” are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

So, I hate the way this book starts.  We start in "early spring" with our narrator, Alex, banged up and holed up somewhere, and no idea what is going on (the readers, I assume Alex knows what's going on).  Well, okay, I guess we want to build up some tension.  And then we flashback to "winter" and STILL have no idea what's going on, in another chapter without any proper introduction.  So we have to flashback AGAIN, to "fall" and now at least we're getting some introduction as to what on earth is going on, but seriously? That was basically a waste of two whole chapters, and for what? I can't fathom why the author did it, and frankly, it made me seriously pissed off and I decided to switch to another book because of it.  

That being said, if you can get past that, the book does pick up, although takes a while to get moving and it's still a very dark book.  Essentially Galaxy ("Alex") Stern* sees ghosts, and this ability gets her handpicked to succeed Daniel "Darlington" Arlington as resident ghost peace-keeper for Yale's secret societies (and no, I didn't bother keeping the societies straight, and I managed just fine) but shortly after she arrives (aka in the "Winter") Darlington is swallowed up and disappears by some magic hole and she's left to sort of muddle on for herself.  Then she discovers various cover-ups and nasty shenanigans involving murder (as one would expect in a book with a bunch of magic and secret societies).  

I was surprised by the amount of sexual assault in this book!  Haha, not a sentence you read (or write) every day.  I mean, not only the magically coerced rapes, but also just rough lifestyle.  I guess I just wasn't expecting it, not that it was unduly graphic or tastelessly done. LOL "taste" at the idea of drugging and sexual assault.  

The book wraps up the main storyline, but leaves it open-ended for another adventure (like Hench did), and I'm pretty sure Bardugo is already planning more, since Amazon describes this as "Book 1 of Alex Stern". It's hard to judge this one well, since a lot of the Darlington sections felt like a prelude for a sequel in which the gang tries to rescue Darlington from hell (or wherever he went).  They don't add much to Alex's main storyline here, although given that Darlington was disappeared because of an ongoing investigation he was doing into said shenanigans... maybe they should have. 

This was... on the whole, mmmokay.  I don't know that I want to read another one, but I have no regrets on this one.  There was a LOT of New Haven stuff, which maybe would have been more fun/interesting if I'd gone to Yale, or lived in the area.  There's also a fair amount of, well, "building and zoning practices" for lack of a better word.  Part of one of the mysteries is that the secret societies want tombs built on top of nexus points, and no one knows how to make more of them (OR DO THEY?!) and it's a Big Deal if the societies lose the tombs they have.  I mean, I know I've asked for more day to day realism in my fantasies before, but I wasn't really expecting zoning law.  It's definitely not the area of law I would have picked to include first in a fantasy. 

This also had the vibe that Cat Among the Pigeons did, with multiple murderers being revealed at the end.  And SPOILERS, obviously, but Belbalm and Sandow were clearly evil.  I mean, maybe it's just me, but any person of authority in a horror novel is basically a villain, right? I was temporarily misled when Belbalm says her house is a sanctuary, but basically as soon as she invited Alex to a "salon" in, like, Chapter Four, I was like, "Way evil." Unless you're in the 1800s, salons are basically code for "evil rich people".  And maybe even if you are in the 1800s.

Even though the book was a little bit all over the place, what with the flashbacks, and the scatterbrained world building, it still did a good job building up anticipation for the showdown and resolving the various mysteries.  I was reading this on my kindle, so I really noticed the slow versus the fast parts - I would spend what felt like ages reading, and only be a little bit further along, and then it would get really zippy for a bit and then slooooow again. The pacing felt inconsistent, is what I'm trying to say. 

There's definitely some handwaving about how random people/events just happen to unlock huge parts of the mystery here.  I think it's very convenient that one of the mysteries about the magical drugs happened to involve Alex's roommate, who otherwise had no connection to that storyline, but I guess there's some attempt to make it less so, since the bad guy in the roommate story was eventually revealed to just be a convenient fall guy for other villains.  Also how convenient it was that the ghost who just so happens to asks Alex for help looking into his (150 year old) murder turned out to be connected to the other major mystery.  The stars (haha) are really aligning in New Haven, I guess!  

 Ninth House had strong Veronica Mars vibes to it, so maybe that's why I liked it as much as I did, despite its flaws.  [It also had strong The Magicians vibes, which, I hated (but read) the books since I found all of the characters to be unsympathetic whiners and enjoyed the tv show much more]. It had way too many storylines, a lot of unnecessary filler, did a terrible job introducing the characters and world building in the beginning, but for all that, if you want to read a dark magical fantasy about a world wise and weary young lady standing up for The Right Thing against corrupt and powerful people, then here you go!

*Also, how adorable is it that Stern is star in german, so her name is basically "Galaxy Star"? It makes me want to throw something.

Cat Among the Pigeons

Cat Among the Pigeons

By Agatha Christie

Late one night, two teachers investigate a mysterious flashing light in the sports pavilion while the rest of the school sleeps. There, among the lacrosse sticks, they stumble upon the body of an unpopular games mistress—shot through the heart point-blank.

The school is thrown into chaos when the “cat” strikes again. Unfortunately, schoolgirl Julia Upjohn knows too much. In particular, she knows that without Hercule Poirot’s help, she will be the next victim.…

What a misleading blurb! There's absolutely no mention of the missing royal jewels which were smuggled away from a faux middle-eastern country in the midst of a revolution, and which are now ensconced at said British girls' school.  And misleading tagline! I think it's a bit of a stretch to call this a Hercule Poirot novel - yes, he's in it, and solves the mystery, but he basically comes in 90% of the way there, talks with one of the schoolgirls and the police, and then sits everyone down to do the reveal.  Much less detection that his normal métier. Although it was still a relief to have him and not ersatz Poirot.  And this wasn't one I'd read before, so I was very pleased to get into it.  Did it hold up?

Well there's a fair amount of the trademark Christie stereotypes and semi-racism (that's when they acknowledge that people are being racist, but it's intentional so it's supposed to be a joke).  This one has not only aforementioned middle-easterners, but also spanish dancers, french schoolteachers, and emirs.  As usual, the level headed people are lauded and the dramatic people discover things that get them killed (also they're nosy and can't keep their mouths shut). 

I always try to pay very close attention to clues and things, in the hopes that I will someday, solve the mystery before the detective does! Alas, I managed to guess one part of the mystery (kidnapped princess was not actually the real princess) but failed to get any of the murders - but I argue that having two different murderers with two different motives was a cheap trick! I also kept hoping that it was a fake-out that the prince and his pilot friend both died, since they seemed so nice in their initial chapters. I know Christie does sometimes have the victims narrate a bit of the story, but it was a little poignant here.  

Overall, I liked it, although I might have liked it better with at least 100% more Poirot.  It did keep me guessing, and I think any Christie is generally pretty good. I do like the ones where one of the couples ends up together so I definitely convinced myself that's what was going to happen here and I have to say - you got me, Dame Christie.  I fell for it.  Anyway, if you like Christie, by all means, read this one.

Good Girl, Bad Blood

Good Girl, Bad Blood

By Holly Jackson

Pip is not a detective anymore.

With the help of Ravi Singh, she released a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together last year. The podcast has gone viral, yet Pip insists her investigating days are behind her.

But she will have to break that promise when someone she knows goes missing. Jamie Reynolds has disappeared, on the very same night the town hosted a memorial for the sixth-year anniversary of the deaths of Andie Bell and Sal Singh.

The police won't do anything about it. And if they won't look for Jamie then Pip will, uncovering more of her town's dark secrets along the way... and this time everyone is listening. But will she find him before it's too late?

This is the second in the series, which I reserved almost as soon as I finished the first one... last year, though it took so long to be available now the third one's slated for publishing, and since I didn't write a review of the first, we'll just have to guess at how they compare to each other. I liked parts of this one, and didn't like parts, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a positive impression.

What I liked: obviously, the lengthy recap at the beginning, which was necessary for moi, since I never remember anything, and that it was done in such a way that it didn't seem forced or anything. It was good, I appreciated the recap, and helpful, since many of the people and events from A Good Girl's Guide to Murder carryover or have additional effects and storylines in Good Girl, Bad Blood.  

I liked that Ravi was there but not really shoehorned in as a more active participant since this mystery wasn't directly concerning him.  A lot of times it feels like shows or books with popular characters have pressure to keep those characters a big focus of subsequent plots, even though it doesn't make much narrative sense.  I also liked that the "cast" of characters was manageable - even after reading the recap of the first book, it seemed like there was just a lot of different plots to keep track of in that one. 

I also liked Pip, and the development of her character - with a caveat.  The extended "scream" sequence, after she finds out Max Hastings is acquitted is... a bit much.  I appreciated that the trauma from the first book affected her in tangible ways in this one, but because the story is so compressed here (like a week from beginning to end), even spending one whole day on it feels like A LOT of the book.

And the storyline was also a bit suspect too - so in an effort to figure out which young man is the one "Leila" is looking for, both Stanley and Luke are drawn out to meet her - and Stanley's meeting place just happens to be where Luke's drug deals go down? Sure, Jan.  And I liked that Jackson at least attempted to address WHY ON EARTH Leila would use a local person's pictures for the scam, but I found the explanation to be very silly and unbelievable.  And I think, narratively, it was annoying that the reveal about Child Brunswick came so late in the game - yes, in real life, we discover things when we discover them, but when you have readers attempting to solve the puzzle along with the detective, it feels a little cheap to pull in a HUGE aspect of the mystery at like, 80% of the way through.

I also liked, again, the structure of the book.  I can't remember if the first one had all the diagrams and pictures, but those, along with the interview records and other notes, made the reading experience fun.  I liked getting those

Although, haha, where on earth does Pip live that can comfortably manage: two murders, two kidnappings, another miscellaneous missing child, a relocated person in witness protection, not to mention assorted other crimes, like drug dealing, underage relationships, uh, I know I'm forgetting some, but you get the idea.  I mean sure, okay, all that, but ALSO able to walk from one of town to the other in less than an hour?  Hmmm. 

I do see that there's going to be a third one, and I think I'll plan on reading that one too.  I like the style quite a bit,and although I didn't like this one quite as much as the first, it was still very readable.

The Night Tiger

The Night Tiger

By  Yangsze Choo

Quick-witted, ambitious Ji Lin is stuck as an apprentice dressmaker in 1930s Mayalsia, moonlighting as a dancehall girl to help pay off her mother's Mahjong debts. But when one of her dance partners accidentally leaves behind a gruesome souvenir, Ji Lin may finally get the adventure she has been longing for.

Eleven-year-old houseboy Ren is also on a mission, racing to fulfill his former master's dying wish: that Ren find the man's finger, lost years ago in an accident, and bury it with his body. Ren has 49 days to do so, or his master's soul will wander the earth forever.

As the days tick relentlessly by, a series of unexplained deaths racks the district, along with whispers of men who turn into tigers. Ji Lin and Ren's increasingly dangerous paths crisscross through lush plantations, hospital storage rooms, and ghostly dreamscapes.

Ooo, another good one, I'm on a roll!  Eminently readable, although definitely not for everyone.  It's very hard to describe, since the tone of the book is not quite magical realism (as many people have pointed to) but more - the interaction of normal life with the mysticism found in dreams.  Everyday Living with Ghosts, so to speak.   We switch off narration from two main characters, Ren, an 11 year old trying to find a finger, Ji Lin , a young woman working for a dressmaker and in a dancehall, who found the finger, much to her disgust, and one secondary character, William Acton, a British doctor with ~secrets~ (mostly about how he's banging a bunch of women).  

I was sucked in very quickly, the book is pretty atmospheric, so if you like it to start, that's pretty much how it continues.  Both the main characters were fun to read about, though I preferred Ji Lin.  That may be a cop out though, since I mostly just wanted good things to happen to her, and for most of the first part of the book, she seemed to be at risk for "bad things happening" than Ren.  

My biggest beef is that it seemed there was a lot of "suggestive" spiritual/fantastical things, like the weretiger, but they were basically dropped.  The mystery had an entirely human explanation, and although the dreams were intriguing, most of it didn't really connect to things in the normal world (like how each of the five had "something slightly wrong" with them - was this ever really addressed? or the dream sequences, the way that Ren's brother seemed to have another agenda going on, but it never really panned out).  

I know some people were weirded out by the step-brother romance thing - it was telegraphed early enough and obviously enough that I was prepared for it, so it didn't upset me in the sense of coming out of nowhere, and I was really rooting for those crazy kids, but I will say that once it was out in the open and her brother was basically like, "I'm going to try to seduce you," that was a little creepy to me.  Like the vibe at the end of that movie, The Graduate, where they run off so happily, but then we stay on them and you can see the smiles just sort of gradually disappear.  Why can't Ji Lin have nice things!

I would however, be more than happy to read about Ji Lin and Ren's continuing adventures in Singapore! I feel like they would make a wacky and entertaining detective team.  One of the most disappointing things was how little time they spent together in this book - although it wouldn't really make sense for them to join forces (this isn't a comic book, after all), I really would have loved to see them interact more, if only because each got very little support from other people in their lives, and it was nice to see their connection.    Man, I could have strangled William for shooting Ren though, that was messed up. Even if it was an accident.  

I'd like to re-read this again, this time with more of an eye towards the non-mystery parts of the story.  I mean, one of the strengths of the book is that even though I was incredibly curious about how it was going to be resolved, the writing really sucked me into the mood and atmosphere, instead of feeling like it was just slowing the plot down (although at roughly 1/3rd of the way in, I was like, "How can this plot fill the rest of the book?" and I'm still not sure how it took so long to wrap up, but I never minded the ride).  Which is good, because that increases the re-readability. I guess what I'm saying is, it felt very immersive and dreamy, which I hope was the intention of the author, almost like being there, and I enjoyed the trip very much.

Hench

Hench

By Natalie Zona Walschots

Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn’t glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy?

 As a temp, she’s just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called “hero” leaves her badly injured.  And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she’s the lucky one.

So, of course, then she gets laid off.

With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks.

Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it. By tallying up the human cost these caped forces of nature wreak upon the world, she discovers that the line between good and evil is mostly marketing.  And with social media and viral videos, she can control that appearance.

It’s not too long before she’s employed once more, this time by one of the worst villains on earth. As she becomes an increasingly valuable lieutenant, she might just save the world.

 

I think Hench is going to end up in my year-end best list.  At one point, I was telling my husband that I didn't want to accidentally spoil myself because I was having trouble predicting what was going to happen next.  Not that Hench is an original tale - the idea of the mundane in a superheroic world (and even the everyday cost of all that damage from saving the world) has been done before - the Watchmen tv series was amazing, although I Did Not Love the original comic - and ultimately, nothing in the story was THAT unexpected (except for the DETAILED and LENGTHY description of Supercollider's ultimate, uh, "new look"), but Walschots manages to tell it in a very exciting and compelling way.  

I didn't really love the beginning, or Anna, who works for supervillains because it pays (although apparently it doesn't even do that much, since she's living off ramen at the start) and winds up getting severely injured while on the job.  A couple reasons this didn't work for me: (1) she chose to align herself with a person who kidnaps and threatens to cut the finger off some kid, so does she really have the high ground here? and (2) her vendetta against superheroes really becomes justified only when we find out that Supercollider is an absolute trash bag.  If, for example, she'd been injured and focused her rage on a superhero who felt bad about it, we wouldn't empathize so much with her, and frankly, it's just chance that it was Supercollider.  Sort of like a broken clock being right twice a day - Anna was correct here, but wasn't it more luck than skill that led her to target Supercollider?  

But I would be much more interested to hear a non-American viewpoint of Anna's position, because in the US, it is very much an attitude of "You signed on with criminals, you are a criminal".  There are laws which basically impute crimes, like murder, to the "less culpable" members of the gang (like the getaway driver) just because you were complicit in the entire transaction.  In that sense, Anna isn't innocent.  She literally interviewed for the position of "bad guy" and walked intentionally into a life of crime.  On the other hand, even criminals have due process. Is any amount of force justified under any circumstances? Obviously the broad answer should be "no", but in the specific context of the book, this is where I think her position is weak, again: no, I don't think force is always justified, but there was about to be physical violence, with the director of that violence (Electric Eel) indicating that he was capable of doing even worse than the immediate finger-loss.  Just because Anna has the benefit in hindsight of calculating the lost life of the hench people versus a finger and money, what would have been the ultimate loss had Supercollider (or some other hero) not intervened? Would Electric Eel have stopped with money or a finger? She's very blase about the kidnapping and threats until her own life is on the line - Anna doesn't sign on to be a hench person because she thinks the superheroes are out of control until she's actually injured by one.  Only then does she embark on her holy mission of vengeance.  So why the high horse? Perhaps the sequel, if there is one, will explore further her assumption that superheroes create their own villains.  That's like saying laws create criminals.  Sure, without laws, we wouldn't have "crime" technically, but uh, murder would still happen. Is she really suggesting that no villain has a venal desire here? Or that the villains, who set out to create chaos, are better than the superheroes who do so carelessly?

The author mentions in an interview that some people never get past that portion and don't finish the book.  Obviously I did, and I liked it quite a bit.  There's something fascinating and attractive about competent people, good or evil, and obviously here, we discover that their mission is "righteous" (if there is such a thing in this world) since Supercollider is a huge dick.  

I also appreciated the involvement of Quantum, Supercollider's main squeeze, who ends up taking over the ultimate fight (while our protagonist, Anna, basically waits by the sidelines, as someone who is skilled only in data entry should be doing) although it could be seen as a real deus ex machina. 

I think there's also some parallels to be drawn (if one were so inclined) about the narrative taking over the reality.  Here, the idea of superheroes as well, heroic, is so ingrained that it actually gives Supercollider power (more than just, like, the power to plow into buildings without being prosecuted). I mean, what are we dealing with in society right now if not this idea that "feelings" trump "facts".  Another recent take on what it means to be "good" in today's world, where every choice actually implicates a net negative is The Good Place.   There's definitely a lot of scope for critical examinations of Hench, and I liked that it wasn't necessarily easy - you know, Anna doesn't become a better person by the end of it, it's hard to say whether justice was actually done, and even the person who "won" isn't happy.

Maybe it's just me climbing out of a rut, or maybe I was just in the mood, or maybe I've become a complete nihilist in the face of *all this*, but Hench was a refreshing delight.

Dear Mr. Knightley

Dear Mr. Knightley

By Katherine Reay

Sam is, to say the least, bookish. An English major of the highest order, her diet has always been Austen, Dickens, and Shakespeare. The problem is, both her prose and conversation tend to be more Elizabeth Bennet than Samantha Moore.

But life for the twenty-three-year-old orphan is about to get stranger than fiction. An anonymous, Dickensian benefactor (calling himself Mr. Knightley) offers to put Sam through Northwestern University's prestigious Medill School of Journalism. There is only one catch: Sam must write frequent letters to the mysterious donor, detailing her progress.

As Sam's memory mingles with that of eligible novelist Alex Powell, her letters to Mr. Knightley become increasingly confessional. While Alex draws Sam into a world of warmth and literature that feels like it's straight out of a book, old secrets are drawn to light. And as Sam learns to love and trust Alex and herself, she learns once again how quickly trust can be broken.

I wasn't immediately drawn into this book, but thought I'd give it a chance, you know.  It had that feel of "downtrodden orphan suddenly experiences good fortune" a la Mandy or Daddy Longlegs or Anne of Green Gables and those can be fun.  I honestly don't know if it would have been okay if it hadn't been set in Chicago, but it was, and now here I am, not even finished with the book, and already typing out my feelings because I'm so annoyed.  

This book felt like it was written by someone who had no idea what Chicago is like, and reading the author biography, maybe this is unfair, but she sounds like some rich white person who went to school at Northwestern (in Evanston, a pretty rich, white town) and now lives in a fancy fucking suburb and thinks she knows Chicago because she knows the restaurants that rich, white people eat at downtown, and she knows the North Side (the "good parts" of Chicago). 

Example 1: Everytime Sam takes the train somewhere, or walks around in a neighborhood other than the north side, she's either beaten, threatened, or harassed.  This shit was RIDICULOUS.  She literally takes cabs from downtown to Evanston because she can't take the train anymore.  This is some weird-ass tourist fear bullshit.  This insane reactionary attitude about the public transportation is making me see red.  That's just made up fear-mongering. If you've grown up in Chicago, you get fucking used to the bus (never mentioned, haha, probably because only people who actually live here take the bus and Reay's just a damn sightseer) and the train, and you have your protection - attitude, keys, loud voice, pepper spray, whatever - to draw on if you get singled out, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you just keep your damn head down and it's FINE.  Not to mention that anyone who'd been in an abusive home would, I assume, have even more experience doing this. And of course, all of her Chicago friends, Kyle and Cara, also get beaten too, because no one who lives here can possibly go without getting attacked.

Example 2: Name dropping  and pill popping.  No, wait, no pill popping, just name dropping.  I felt a vague disquiet early in the book when she's referencing neighborhoods and shit, like it all felt off somehow, you know?, but halfway through, she make an egregious error about where something is located that I am personally familiar with and I was like, "This shit is wrong."  I mean, the premise is that Sam is from Chicago, right? How is that possible when she talks about it like it's a foreign country? Why name drop these neighborhoods so aggressively if you're gonna be so wrong? It would have been better not to mention locations at all! Then I could have filled in the blanks of where she's at, but it's like Reay just heard these names and didn't bother looking up what the actual character of these places are. Chicago has a hundred neighborhoods, some good, some bad, and yes, it can change in the space of a few blocks.  I can feel myself getting angry, and honestly, I know I sound like a crazy person, but the real indignity is not that she's getting it so wrong, but that she's using the city like some crime-filled backdrop for Sam's elevation and that's not right.  Chicago is a lot of things, and it deserves more than just to be some cheap shorthand.

It's like Reay wanted us to know how much research she did so she name drops Chicago restaurants like it's going out of style, and all of these places are, again, rich white people places, north side places.  Sam's geographic locations (including Grace House, where she begins the book) when she's in her orphans state are incredibly vague, but as soon as she meets up with all these suburban assholes we get incredibly specific.  Not to mention, all these places are fucking expensive.  Sure, she's going on dates with wealthy guys, but honestly, she never takes her foster kid friend Kyle out for like, $10 pizza? Or those semi dubious "chicken-fish" places? And never a qualm about the menu prices? Which brings me to my next point:

Example 3: This book sounds like it was written like someone who was never poor.  A specific example: Sam gets broken up with, and goes home and watches "two Austen movies, ate a whole pizza and an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's", then, not even like two chapters laters, tells Alex that she never went into the cookie aisle because she couldn't afford it growing up.  Bitch, you can afford Ben and Jerry's!  I'm sorry, you have NO MONEY and yet you're buying the fancy ass $4 pints of ice cream? You're going out to eat at Spago and Spiaggia and Billy Goat Tavern? You're taking cabs all over the damn place? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! Is this what someone who has never been poor thinks it's like? At one point, Alex surprises her by wanting to go running, so she goes to Fleet Feet (*rolls eyes*) with him, and lets him buy her shoes and shorts and who knows what else (no mention of needing a dang sports bra, I see, what a freaking fantasy world) and never a qualm!  

And for ~plot reasons~ Kyle manages to get adopted in like, two months, which, I don't think you can even get a court date in less than two months in Cook County, let alone go through the adoption process.  Damn.  And haha, she thinks the Chicago Marathon would be cancelled because it's windy and rainy? Lol, I can think of one race cancelled (mid-race, because who knows what the weather will be like the day before) and that was because it was like, 95 degrees and 100% humidity and people were passing out.  The racing season begins when it is still like, 35 degrees in the daytime, and the races start before the sun is up.  Not to mention, I don't know where Sam is running mile 20 that she's on Lake Shore Drive hearing the sound of waves crashing, but I think she's going the wrong way.  Mile 20 is like, in Chinatown.

Anyway, aside from that, I never really connected with Sam, and thought the plot was all very telegraphed. Except for that marriage proposal. Man, nothing says "good idea" like proposing to someone who has never gone on a date with you. 

Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

I've been reading so much genre fiction, getting into this was a bit of a shock to the system. And I wouldn't say that it was even that enjoyable - Lydia, the sixteen-year-old center of her family, is found drowned in a nearby lake, and the book is basically about the shattering of the family both after she is found and the cracks that led to the event in the first place.  What's weird though, is that for all I didn't want to be drawn into it, I pretty much ended up sobbing through the last fourth of of the book, from when the officer finds Nath (what a horrible nickname, if your name is Nathan, then Nath should sound like the first syllable of that, right? But everytime I read Nath, it sounded like "Nash" in my head with the short "a" and it drove me crazy) passed out in the car and picks him up and takes him home.  Ng basically writes about a family that bottles up every anxiety, and hurt, and microagresssion, and this is the section that releases them, along with the reader, each character having their own catharsis in sync.

This is definitely not an "action-driven" book, once the initial tempest is done with the vanishing and discovery of Lydia's body, we basically spend the rest of book flipping backwards and forwards through time, hitting seminal moments in the family life, although the point Ng drives home (REPEATEDLY) is that oftentimes, what is seminal to one character may make a much different, even fleeting impression on another.  I mean, we're not left wondering what the title "Everything I Never Told You" is supposed to mean - every couple of pages, we hit another memory or incident that carves out the hearts of one or more characters, who then never air their grievances and just let it fester. Apparently this family never talks to each other. "Everything I never told you" is interchangeable for "everything". 

What's somewhat interesting is how my own family mimics or echoes many of the characteristics in this book - in 1977 my grandparents had three children between the ages of 8 and 15, one of whom, ironically (at least in this context, it's not ironic in our family) went on to marry a person from Hong Kong, so that I have several half-Chinese cousins - though there isn't any hullabaloo about blue eyes as they don't run on that side of the family), all of this taking place in small midwestern towns, and yet how little of any of those coincidences struck me as I was reading Everything, perhaps because for all their sins, my family doesn't resemble the Lees in anyway.  Not that we don't have our own problems - as Tolstoy famously wrote, "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What does that have to do with the book? Nothing much, except to lead me to believe that we (and the characters) have brought our own miseries upon our heads, and that it may not be that life is hard - which it is - but that you become so rubbed raw by your own peculiar sympathies that you become your own worst enemy.  

In my edition of the book, Ng says that she started the book sympathizing with the children, but once she had her own children, felt greater empathy for James and Marilyn.  The book does almost give us a real twist, as we begin to assume, after all these flashbacks, that Lydia committed suicide because of the immense pressure Marilyn put on her to live out those dreams that Marilyn couldn't herself.  Ironically, it's actually James' fault for not teaching her how to swim - but they'll never know that, so Marilyn's erroneous realization that she put too much on Lydia is two wrongs making a right, I guess.  

There's also quite a bit of discussion on how things have or haven't changed since the setting of the book, i.e., would James' great regret of being Chinese and Marilyn's great regret of being a woman, which regrets they basically put onto their children, thus messing them up for life, still be the kiss of death today? Honestly, I would say...not. I mean, I'm not an expert by any means, but Marilyn and James are two people who see the world only from the prism of their failures, not their successes, and they didn't have to be that way.  Wouldn't be much of a story if they weren't, though, I guess!

Perhaps it's all just hubris, to think that we won't repeat the mistakes of our own parents, but hopefully I won't have to cope through an accidental drowning in order to ensure that I don't get so far up my own butt that I never realize my own progeny are just that - separate and individual beings who will develop their own traumas, no need to pile mine on them. 

One By One

One by One

By Ruth Ware

 

Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a full-service chef and housekeeper, a cozy fire to keep you warm, and others to keep you company. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers…each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.

When the cofounder of Snoop, a trendy London-based tech startup, organizes a weeklong trip for the team in the French Alps, it starts out as a corporate retreat like any other: PowerPoint presentations and strategy sessions broken up by mandatory bonding on the slopes. But as soon as one shareholder upends the agenda by pushing a lucrative but contentious buyout offer, tensions simmer and loyalties are tested. The storm brewing inside the chalet is no match for the one outside, however, and a devastating avalanche leaves the group cut off from all access to the outside world. Even worse, one Snooper hadn’t made it back from the slopes when the avalanche hit.

As each hour passes without any sign of rescue, panic mounts, the chalet grows colder, and the group dwindles further…one by one.

I've read a few Ruth Ware books now, and not been incredibly impressed (The Woman in Cabin 10 was okay, although had a weird anti-climax ending, and the last one, The Turn of the Key, I really didn't like the ending just because I thought it boggled all rational thought that a person would go to jail and get the death penalty rather than simply admit the death was an accident caused by a young child) but they're so popular, I can't resist checking them out.  And this one I really had a good time with!

We get two perspectives, Liz, the reluctant minority shareholder, dragged along on a corporate "retreat" that's actually a week-long presentation about whether or not to accept a buyout, and Erin, the ski chalet Girl Friday, who has a secret of her own.  The book moves at a pretty good clip, I think I finished it in about two hours or so, and there really isn't any slow point.  Yes, we find out who the murderer is about two-thirds of the way in, and yes, it's pretty clear who it is even before that, but the last third is basically a cat and mouse game which is thrilling in and of itself.  Ha, I was just going back over reviews for another of Ware's books, In a Dark, Dark Wood, and all the reviews on the first page of Amazon are all about how ridiculous that this woman drinks tea with a murderer - I wonder if the tea drinking scene in One by One is a reaction to that, which would be amusing. 

It was certainly surprising to me how much of the crime(s) were planned - since at lot of it depended on circumstances/opportunities the murderer wouldn't have been able to predict.  I guess if the first go-round wouldn't have worked, they'd have just kept (SPOILER ALERT) carrying around a red jacket and faking their skiing the bunny slopes while hoping to run into their victim on the black trails, while other people are conveniently posted in the ski-lift to witness the faux Eva go by?? Hmmm, that seems... complicated.

Are the characters in One by One more than just two-dimensional? Eh, not really.  I mean, it's a thriller? A lot of people have secrets (although really, just our two main characters are hiding anything particular) and people start dying and there's not a lot of time to take stock and think about your hopes and dreams. I did think the little sections before each chapter about Liz and Erin's "Snoop" followers was dumb though, we get all that information from the narrative itself, we don't really need it there, plus it barely changes throughout the book. 

I will say that it was compulsively readable, and probably my favorite of all Ware's books (though again, not as high a compliment as it might be) and just the kind of thing you want to read when curled up with a warm blanket on a cold winter day. 

This Must be the Place

This Must be the Place

By Maggie O'Farrell

 

Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel's past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection.

I have no idea why this was on my reading list - I think I must have gotten the impression it was a comedy? I couldn't figure out why it had a waitlist at the library.  And then partway through it, I realized the author is BLOWING UP over her newest book, Hamnet, and she's actually an award-winning literaturist and maybe I should pay attention and learn a little something from reading This Must be the Place, huh.  

Like many other reviewers, I struggled in the first couple sections.  Not because I was having trouble following the story, per se, but because I was struggling to figure out if it would get any better.  I have an entirely rational dislike of average male characters who seem to glide through life thinking they're special in some way, and Daniel Sullivan was just... not my bag.

 I spent the first part of the book getting irritated by Dan's narration, then drawn into Claudette's story, then so aggravated by Dan's cheating-on-his-girlfriend-who-just-had-an-abortion-like-earlier-that-day activities that I spent the next chunk of book actively wishing him ill, and then after he actually does screw up his life (ironically, not because of the situation with his ex-girlfriend, but because his oldest daughter is shot in a random mugging) with depression and alcohol and drugs, ended up wanting him to get back together with Claudette because of how obviously unhappy everyone was when they split up.  Never satisfied! 

I did like the section on Claudette's memorabilia, partly because it was so unexpected, just flipping along and then suddenly you're in the middle of an auction book on a faux celebrity.  I can't imagine how they did all the photos and stuff - are those real magazines? Are those the author's bags? Inquiring minds want to know.  It suddenly became a mixed-media piece and I was here. for. it.  (I don't know how to do those clapping emojis, just imagine them).  I also liked all the different locations, it really was like traveling all over the world. O'Farrell has a real talent for scene setting.

Here's a fun fact: I didn't care about Phoebe at all - not during her narration, not when we find out she died young, and not when her death becomes a huge driving force in the book.  I mean, in a book where you have a famous actress fake her own death and then marry a divorced American who's wandering the countryside with his grandfather's ashes and apparently all of their collective kids are somehow geniuses/extraordinary in their own ways, and you're gonna add a tragic and random shooting death in there too? I feel like we're approaching magical realism, or maybe the opposite, ordinary non-realism.  

 

Does the story give me any insights or thoughts about relationships, between husband and wife, father and child, etc? Not really, all these people are pretty weird, like living in a Wes Anderson movie weird. 

The back of my edition also has a bunch of book group questions, which I normally find to be pretty banal, but in this case were more intriguing, perhaps because the book itself was more obscure? It did ask why we thought O'Farrell included the viewpoints of fairly tertiary or one-off characters (like Dan's mom Theresa, random acquaintance Rosalind, and former lover Timou) and to be honest, I'm not... entirely... sure? I mean, I feel like Timou's was in there to prove a point that he used Claudette for professional success and couldn't do it without her, although frankly, I don't think anything we hear about him in the book really justifies Claudette faking the death of herself and their child and then telling him that he needs to call her brother if he wants to see their son. I mean - so what if he is a deadbeat dad? Just because Ari seems stable enough without him (although how stable can he be, having a kid at 17?) doesn't give you the moral (or legal) right to cut off that relationship.  Plus, I feel like Timou's been punished enough, what with every jackanapes reporter out there asking questions about his disappearing girlfriend instead of his new projects.  I ended up feeling sorry for him and disliking Claudette more, which may or may not have been the point.

As for Rosalind, honestly I'm not real sure, but man did her section make me want to visit the Bolivian salt flats. I have a photo taken there, by Gray Malin, and it's incredible how distinct each color is and how saturated it feels. Rosalind's narration really captured that for me, which is one of those things I think looks easy when you have an extraordinary writer, but is really hard to do, to describe an extraordinary scene in words alone.  People on goodreads say it's to give Dan the push to apologize but honestly, if he hadn't figured that out himself at that point, he's too dumb to be married. 

And Theresa is anyone's guess, although maybe to underscore that she was only a sainted figure for Dan, but was a more complex person than that in life? Again, it has the effect of making Dan look, I dunno, dumber, maybe, for idealizing her (not that she's not a good person, but certainly not this two-dimensional cutout he seems to be living with) and I already thought Dan was pretty dumb, so there. And her fated-for-life thing with that random guy who keeps turning up was weird.  I don't even want to get into it, because this is already a treatise, but COME ON.

Anyway, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would in the beginning, definitely felt like the parts with/about Janks kind of dragged, since they seem to end up kind of as a false lead in the ultimate marital disharmony, thought it was well written at least, and ended up not wanting to re-read it at all.

Ten Second Reviews

Note that Seven Days of Us and Monstrous Beauty were read in 2019, while Gilded Web was in 2021.

Seven Days of Us

By Francesca Hornak

 

Family gathers together to quarantine for the holidays, with unexpected secrets coming to light.

This was a different kind of predictable - in fact the least predictable thing about it is how much I was won over by the end.  In the beginning, everyone is kind of awful: lies abound, just plain unhappiness, and Jesse planning to just crash into his biological father's life like a bomb was driving me crazy. How could everyone be encouraging this? It's not hard! If your purported father does not respond to your email, HE DOESN'T WANT TO SEE YOU.  I mean, that's pretty much true of everybody, don't just invite yourself places.   But somehow all the contrived craziness cancels itself out and the end is a sweet family holiday story: Jesse's accepted, Emma's cancer is less scary, Andrew's leaving his soul-sucking job, Olivia has a baby (and a dead boyfriend, man, THAT I didn't expect (except I kinda did, because I kept checking to see how long it would go for and saw spoilers, whoops)) and the youngest girl's engagement is over, conveniently bothering her for approximately one and one-half days, just long enough to stir up drama between the family, but not long enough that we start to feel like the relationship was anything but a plot digression.

Monstrous Beauty
By Elizabeth Fama

Mermaid falls in love with land dweller, setting off a chain of events and ghostly curses down the generations. 

This one was....fine.  A young woman in New England finds a ghost (without realizing it) and is drawn to him, only to have to figure out her family's connection with a three/four person murder a couple hundred years ago and - wait, let me try to work this out (with spoilers!).  So the mermaid likes this guy and accidentally drowns him, so the next guy she likes she realizes she needs like human lungs for, so after she's caught and raped by Olaf (the mermaid gets a really shitty deal in this whole thing) she takes his lungs, but then she's pregnant so she gives the baby up and it's adopted by Olaf's terrible wife? Who also accuses her of killing Olaf? (somehow Olaf and his awful wife are the only people smart enough to realize she's a mermaid) and then lures her to the church for murder, except that the mermaid kills Olaf's wife (and also the minister and the little girl who was watching the mermaid's adopted baby also die, because why not) and then somehow the mermaid's husband gives up his life for hers, but she doesn't want him to die so the mermaid takes the baby's soul and gives it to... him?  This part is the most confusing: did her husband die? Did she die? Apparently the husband sticks around as a ghost, and she just...melts? Unclear. And then everytime the baby (or her daughters) has a baby, the mother dies because there is too much soul for the world? Also unclear.  

 

Gilded Web

By Mary Balogh 

Woman in regency England is mistakenly kidnapped and has to marry or face scandal.

This was fine, I guess, ugh.  Mary Balogh is generally alright, but I realized partly through this one that I'd read the third book of this series earlier in 2020 and hated it (mostly because of how awful the hero was - he is literally super mean to his wife for the entire book except at the very end, when he finds out she's pregnant.  Yeah, that's a keeper).  This started out VERY over the top (fake kidnapping! mistaken identity! shenanigans!) but the hero and heroine turned out to be fairly buttoned up and quiet people, so it wasn't too crazy.  I didn't really feel the need for the different viewpoints - I think we get through three or four of the side characters, in addition to the mains, and none of them were that compelling - and it started dragging after the halfway mark.  Plus, the struggle is resolved by the heroine deciding that as long as the hero was willing to call off the engagement, then that means she has enough autonomy to stay in the marriage.  But all of her points are still valid! They're just impossible to solve in regency England under the conditions she was in. Well, not a blazing start to the new year, but we gotta start somewhere!

Queen of Nothing

Queen of Nothing

By Holly Black

 He will be the destruction of the crown and the ruination of the throne

Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold onto. Jude learned this lesson when she released her control over the wicked king, Cardan, in exchange for immeasurable power.

Now as the exiled mortal Queen of Faerie, Jude is powerless and left reeling from Cardan's betrayal. She bides her time determined to reclaim everything he took from her. Opportunity arrives in the form of her deceptive twin sister, Taryn, whose mortal life is in peril.

Jude must risk venturing back into the treacherous Faerie Court, and confront her lingering feelings for Cardan, if she wishes to save her sister. But Elfhame is not as she left it. War is brewing. As Jude slips deep within enemy lines she becomes ensnared in the conflict's bloody politics.

And, when a dormant yet powerful curse is unleashed, panic spreads throughout the land, forcing her to choose between her ambition and her humanity...

I was so excited to read this I decided to get it immediately from the library instead of waiting until 2020 when it would have qualified as a "Author with Flora or Fauna in the their Name" category.  Anyway, before I get to the review, I have to say something.  I will sometimes spend a little time thinking about my review before I actually sit down to type it, and I think it took me less then ten minutes to start wondering about fairy dicks.  Okay, bear with me: they (the fairies, not the dicks) have tails and wings and are like, random different sizes, but they all have human compatible dicks?  Shouldn't this, AT THE MOST, be like a donkey-horse → mule situation? (Also, sidebar, I totally forgot what the name of the hybrid animal was just now, I remembered that JENNY is a female donkey, but not what a mule is, le sigh).  I say this not as a critique against Queen of Nothing, which certainly didn't invent human-elf fucking, but you know, I spent a lot more time thinking about the actual compatibility of penises than I thought I would going in.

Anyway, that's it! That's the review!

Haha, just kidding, I will put the dicks to bed and talk about the rest of the book.  Like, 98% of it is not about dicks.  Maybe 97%, because Taryn gets knocked up, which also involved dicks, but offscreen.  Who else (raise your hands) thought that Taryn's pregnancy was going to be relevant at some point?  Because I definitely did.  I thought that was a big old Chekhov's Baby, ready to go off at any moment.  But it went nowhere!  Again, not really a critique, just pointin' out.

This did feel like a really short book though - much shorter than books 1 or 2; and some of that may be because the story is even more straightforward now (no huge betrayals or double crosses that I can remember, although I cannot be relied on to be accurate in this regard), and we have just a few action scenes seems like, before we get to the denouement.  Honestly, that is my biggest complaint - feels too short, ends too soon, want more drama, more angst, more reunion scenes with Cardan, more everything!  This is one where I kinda hope she ends up writing maybe another series set in this world, or some short stories about Jude et al, because I enjoyed my time with her.  Except her name, which I don't love and always makes me start singing the Beatles song, and it's distracting and annoying. AND IT'S DOING IT AGAIN.  What a sapfest that song is.  Anyway.  I enjoyed this book, the series, and the resolution.  Two thumbs up.  And one dick.