The Frozen River

The Frozen River

By Ariel Lawhon 

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

So I was reading the book and enjoying it reasonably well as one does, and then I come to the author's note at the end and apparently Martha Ballard is a real person! Whose diary entries were excerpted for the book! And it's based around a real rape case! Except that almost all of the rest of it was manufactured, i.e. bodies and murder plots and the Colonel's nefarious backstory about scalping people during the French and Indian War! All of the "juicy" bits.

I was thinking about why this made me so unsettled, and it reminds me of that terrible book The Ministry of Time where the author exhumed someone who died on the ill-fated Franklin Exhibition in 1846 and then wrote this whole book about him time travelling and having sex in lurid, graphic detail. I suppose in one sense, these people died hundreds of years ago and it's not like their relatives are going to be scandalized. And people write about long-dead famous people all the time - Cleopatra, Empress Sisi. But it feels weird that a "normal" person could be molded into this whole fantasy, especially when these modern books are likely going to be more readily accessible and certainly more popular than their actual true biographies. All of that is to say that I enjoyed the story more when I thought it was a story, and had I known it was a fictionalized version of true events, I would have preferred the author not to add their own spin on things.

And I did enjoy the story when it was a story. The mystery is interesting, given how many people seemed to have motive, both moral and immoral, to kill Burgess. The characters (which again, feels like a weird thing to say given that all of these people appear to be based on actual patients and neighbors and relatives) are all neatly drawn and delineated. The authors note humorously says Lawhon helpfully changed names so there weren't ten "Hannahs" in the book. There's a neat piece where [spoiler!] Martha's matchmaking and assumption about a girl who had a child out of wedlock are neatly turned on their head - something to give our hero feet of clay.

I agree the historical detail and setting is a big part of its charm, and it's a nice change of pace to read about a couple who love each other. Although rape plays a central role in both the current and flashback stories, and it is described (in a courtroom setting), it didn't feel exploitative.

It's nothing that strains your brain, or is meant to say something deep about our cultural institutions (except, perhaps, about the overweening arrogance of certain types of men - to take, to dismiss experience born of decades of work). The mystery of which of Martha's family members may be involved in Burgess' death is not hard to guess correctly, and Martha's victory over the villain is never much in doubt. It's just a good story, well-told. 

 

43: A Book That Includes A Nonverbal Character

The Woman They Could Not Silence

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

By Kate Moore

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they've been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line - conveniently labeled "crazy" so their voices are ignored.

No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose...

Kate Moore writes about women whom history has forgotten, women who have suffered and whose lives have changed the course of history and whom, despite that, we know very little about. Her first book, The Radium Girls was distinguished more by the subject matter than by the writing. Moore's style is a bit flat here too - she cites constantly from the source material but in so doing, I find her use of quotations more distracting than anything else. I would much prefer her to present the facts and cite by footnotes than constantly insert quotations like a Zagat's Guide. There's almost too much focus on Elizabeth and her own thoughts. It's not a short book, although it does go pretty quickly, but in the last few sections, Elizabeth is released and we broaden our scope to her lobbying efforts. It's certainly less interesting, so I don't fault Moore for spending relatively little time on it, but it would be nice to get more of a sense of the effect these laws had on the systems and any long term impacts her anti-asylum groups had.

 

That being said, once again Moore has chosen an excellent subject. Elizabeth Packard is wholly compelling personage and, as seen in her own writings, eloquent and persuasive.  We see very little of her life prior to her institutionalization and perhaps a bit more background could have helped to explain why she felt so called upon to resist, especially given how common it seems it would have been to keep a low and biddable profile in order to return home. Moore's author's note indicates that she wrote, then cut, an entire beginning section that dealt with Elizabeth's church discussion groups, which seem to kick off the schism between Elizabeth and her husband.  Were there other moments of resistance before this that paved the road?

 

It's inspiring, and intentionally so. Moore writes that she deliberately chose a story with "a happy ending" for which I commend her. Nothing like reading about women needlessly thrown into asylums without proof to make you crave a happy ending.  Elizabeth's courage is manifest, but it's still a tragedy that she endured so many years of separation from her children. I did find it amusing that once her husband Theophilius accepts that she cannot be squashed, they seem to be able to live if not comfortably, at least compatibly.  It just goes to show the damage that a weak man, with all the tools of an unjust system, can do in the pursuit of his own protection. If only he had been able to admit that Elizabeth was always the stronger of the two, perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Maybe it was Theophilius all along who held the insane views since his belief in his own superiority was clearly contrary to the truth.

But Moore's central thesis, which she hammers hard at the beginning and slightly again at the end, that "insanity" is merely a convenient way to dismiss and thwart those who would challenge those in power, is a convincing one. It begs each of us to consider all the ways in which our own prejudices and judgments are informed not by truth but by habit. I find myself uncomfortably close to the subject matter right now, as I find myself advising a family that - for her own protection - a woman needs a guardianship. But Elizabeth's example should be a guide here as well - regardless of the circumstances, to treat everyone with kindness and dignity even if they cannot manage themselves.  

 

And if ever we needed a reminder to keep fighting, the book itself is proof that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The Arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends towards Justice." 160 years later, it is Elizabeth Packard's name, not the good doctor MacFarland, whose name adorns the Illinois state asylum in Springfield. 

 

32: A Book About An Overlooked Woman In History

Let It All Burn

 Let It All Burn 

By  Denise Grover Swank

Darcie Weatherby of Perry's Fall, Ohio has a preteen, sixteen-year-old twins, a wayward grandmother, a nightmare boss, a manipulative ex-husband, and hot flashes that start fires like the one that burned her boss's house down. Unless she figures out a way to get things under control, there's a chance she'll spontaneously combust at the Founder's Day Masquerade Ball.

I don't know what the heck THAT was. It started out normal enough, a woman having hot flashes accidentally starts fires, okay, okay, okay, some magical realism, sure, gotcha, and then at the like, 90% mark, we take an abrupt right turn into millennials-long guardianship over a Greek goddess who gets reincarnated every fifty years (and a somehow completely unrelated side plot about diamond smuggling). What the fuck?

The basic idea is fine, but Swank can't stop adding weirder and weirder parts that don't add anything and don't make sense, like the FBI agent who first meets Darcie while he's investigating this diamond thing, but then becomes intensely interested in her to the point of following her around and demanding answers like a crazed stalker.  And she doesn't have any answers! 

Or the part where Darcie's cousin Ella is an investigative reporter and we think there's going to be some big reveal about the Mayor or that Ella is going to find out what's going on with Darcie's firepowers but instead of any of that panning out, instead at the grand gala there's a lengthy digression about Ella acting drunk because of an allergic reaction, and she winds up spending the fateful event on a cot. 

The ending and explanation come out of nowhere and the book wraps up with all kinds of loose ends flapping in the breeze, like how Darcie will incorporate a fourth child in to her family (and what her current kids will think of that) whether it's noted that Tammy just up and disappeared, like, just... anything! Any of it! Even the parts that are explained are explained in a really baffling way. What is this stupid bargain Persephone made, and why does it reset every fifty years? Why does it make the gods mad? What happens when it ends? Why, why why?? It was like Swank couldn't figure out how to wrap it up so just added in some god stuff. It would have been better if Darcie was just becoming a fire demon, like her friend suggested.

However, prior to that point, it was a decent read. Darcie's nicely fleshed out, her friends and kids are fun and there's space there for an interesting story about her growing into herself in this new phase of her life. But we... got something else instead, so I'm just going to slowly back away. 

09: A Book That Features A Character Going Through Menopause

The Briar Club

The Briar Club

By Kate Quinn

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

I've had this on my hold list for probably seven or eight months at least, patiently waiting my turn. At this point, Kate Quinn is now one of those authors of whom each new release will be guaranteed a spot on my reading agenda.  Although the blurb didn't exactly grab me - a far cry from her books on WWII spies, codebreakers, and other assorted heroines - it still ended up carrying her trademark: secrets, women, and yes, ultimately, spies.  

It's also stuffed full with a panoply of 50s historical references and side plots. There's almost too much going on, between the birth control pill, gangsters, segregation, the Korean War, modern art, the All American Women's Baseball League, gay rights, and the ever looming spectre of McCarthyism. Not to mention the recipes, for everything from swedish meatballs to honey cake. Quinn does post a lengthy author's note at the end describing some of the real stories behind her fictional ones. The breadth of the historical detail is astonishing at times - there's a scene involving a real dessert called Candle Salad that makes you wonder how Quinn managed to find such an offbeat but perfectly apropos recipe. The only one I wasn't at least a little familiar with was the invasion of Texas, Operation Longhorn, which is both so insane that it's hard to believe it's just a historical footnote now as well as perfectly believable given how nuts everyone else was.

The book is a little bit chunkier than her others: the framing structure involves a murder (or, at least, a dead body) and the police investigation of a Washington D.C. boarding house full of women. Most of it though, is lengthy chapters chronologically preceding and leading up to the murder, each focusing on the key characters and tenants of the house in turn: Pete, the landlord's son, Nora, the secretary and gangster's moll, Bea, the baseball player, Fliss, the English nurse drowning in motherhood, Reka, the former artist who narrowly escaped Germany only to find the American Dream not all it was promised, Claire, the gay pinup girl, and Grace, whose entrance starts the book, and who flits in and out of the others lives in a cross between a fairy godmother and puppet master.

There's certainly some things which, if you're familiar enough with the period (or, ahem, some relevant popular entertainment about the period) come as not-very-surprising surprises and the book itself feels much slower paced than her others, which is to be expected since it takes place over four and a half years. I assume Quinn kept the timeline that way for both historical accuracy as well as to give the relationships time to feel genuine growth, but it does make some things feel like they're being artificially set back, in order to have all the players at the table for the denouement (i.e. Nora reuniting with her boyfriend and Sid's planned escape both get delayed YEARS so they're all at the fatal dinner, plot wise). Those issues aside though, the book doesn't feel very slow, since each chapter concerns a mini crisis of sorts for its respective narrator. It would almost fit the series of interconnected stories prompt. I couldn't not use The Briar Club here though - the blurb literally mentions the unlikely friendships!

It also managed to make me feel somewhat optimistic about how things have trended in the US lately: if we can manage to get through all the shit the 50s pulled, perhaps there's hope for us as well. Overall, it was an enjoyable, if not necessarily demanding, read. I will continue to put my reading trust in Quinn. In fact, I have my eye on one of her older books to fill another prompt.

 

28: A Book That Features An Unlikely Friendship

Ten Second Reviews

Semiosis

By Sue Burke

Colonists from Earth wanted the perfect home, but they’ll have to survive on the one they found. They don’t realize another life form watches...and waits...

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that humans are more than tools.

Ooo, I liked this one a lot, especially in the beginning, which is when it was really out there.  Towards the end I felt like it became more conventional sci-fi-y with a struggle against another colony, but the beginning, where you just don't know what it going to happen next??? Fabulous!  It felt really fresh too, like a whole new idea (although I'm sure that something somewhere had the same germ (haha, no pun intended) of an idea) and even when we do get to the point where they're in constant communication together and they're pretty clear that there isn't going to be another betrayal, it's a well written story.   I'm waffling on reading the second, mostly because the reviews are iffy and frankly, this doesn't need a sequel.  But on the other hand, it was a fun, fascinating world to spend time in, and even just reading about their day-to-day survival was entertaining in Burke's hands. 

The Witches Are Coming

By Lindy West

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one.

Hmm, what to say on this one? It's undeniably funny, well-written, and passionate.  But so GODDAMN DEPRESSING. Not unrelentingly depressing, or I would have stopped reading.  But notice that West had to end the book on a couple of chapters whose throughline is basically "Don't give up! The world is not a complete dumpster fire yet! There are still some nice things (trees) even though we are rapidly killing them and everyone else and heading towards total annihilation of all that we currently enjoy - oh wait, this is depressing again."  I don't know if the intent was to energize and electrify, but all it did was depress and demoralize.  It was a funny depression though.  Okay, I'm gonna be real here: I am hungover and mentally checked out on this review.  What is my review? That I liked the writing but the message was sad and I would read something else by her, and it had nice short chapters.  Honestly what I should have done was pull quotes because they're all hilarious nuggets, but obviously, I ain't doing that.  I really liked the Adam Sandler chapter, because IT IS VERY TRUE.  WHY IS HE ALWAYS SO MAGICALLY GIFTED?? HE IS AVERAGE, MAKE HIM AVERAGE.

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Disappearing Earth

Disappearing Earth

By Julia Phillips

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska--and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

This one I liked, but it was so slow in the middle sections that I kept peeking at the end, so I could get an idea of whether we were actually headed somewhere, or just going in circles on this kidnapping thing. And for the record, we are going somewhere.  But it sure didn't feel like that for most of the (honestly, relatively short) book.

And the payoff is pretty good, actually!  As we follow a bunch of Kamchatka Penninsula residents for a year after the disappearance of two young girls, we wrap up a bunch of semi-disparate storylines in the last big section, "June".  What was interesting to me was that it looked like a lot of the chapters had been published in advance (some years and years before the book was published), so I wasn't sure if the author had taken a bunch of semi-random stories about Kamchatka women and re-worked them into a kidnapping mystery.

An interesting tidbit is that Julia Phillips isn't from Kamchatka; she's from the U.S., but she spent a few years on the penninsula (or maybe less, it's not quite clear, and she went at different times) and this does read very much more like a U.S. novel than a Russian book (from my admittedly low experience).  In fact, more than anything else, it reminds me of the movie, Wind River, which is about the discovery of a young native woman in the snow on an isolated Wyoming reservation.   The cold, isolation, uneasy and troubled relationship between native and non-native, the role of women in that environment. I didn't even realize till I was reading a description halfway through that all the viewpoints are women, but I did like it - it feels safer, somehow, in a world which can be very harsh, and particularly so here.

Since Phillips isn't writing a mystery, more of a character study, she leaves the ending a bit more optimistic than I think is warranted. Someone who steals an eighteen year old and four years later kidnaps two young girls and the first woman is still there (and alive) a year after the girls arrive? It strains belief.  But it feels  more satisfying this way, I suppose - and you get to go back and kind of track hints and appearances by various characters briefly in others' stories.

The setting is also semi-different. Honestly, considering it's set on the Kamchatka peninsula, I feel like the author tells us that it's isolated and cold and special more than we maybe see it in the narrative - maybe because the viewpoint characters are all in town (even if they're native), we don't get as much a sense of the "interior" as much.  Town is town, after all, and towns everywhere are kind of the same. 

Bad Blood

Bad Blood

By John Carreyou

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

I finally finally finally got back into reading again (you may have noticed that recent reviews were lackluster, if I even finished the book at all) thanks to Bad Blood.  This one was re-energizing, and you kinda spend the whole thing doing that, "What. the. fuck??" look that I always reference from Chris Rock in Nurse Betty when he sees his dad, played by Morgan Freeman, dancing with no one on the side of the Grand Canyon. Just that sense, you know, that someone very close to you has lost all of their marbles. In this case, that WTF applies to all the people who fell for the cult of Holmes.  For years!  For years they went along with this, although to be fair, it was both a very desirable and beneficial pitch, and also it wasn't immediately apparent that it was rotten to the core.  Although it seems like even a slightly more than cursory look would have taken care of that...?

In retrospect you go, how did they sucker this many people for this long? And the answer apparently is, a combination of complete intimidation of those over whom they held power, and complete ingratiation of those who could have destroyed them.  It's incredible!  When I first heard about it, I definitely gave it a brush off:  pfft, who cares about whether another start-up is toxic and also lied to consumers.  Same shit, different day.  But no!  This was an incredible and incredibly engrossing tale of malignantly bad behavior.  Props to Carreyou for his work, he takes an almost ten year long journey about medical devices and makes it captivating from beginning to end.

For all I've complained in the past, I feel like I have to praise Carreyou's organization of his book, which is both chronological (thank you for an easy to follow and logical progression!) and, because he knows you forget people who only pop in and out occasionally, heavy on the "John-who-ran-the-Edison-room" reminders about who the various people are.  Thank you, Carreyou, for recognizing that I can only retain so much at one time, and minor characters' names and identities in books is not one of them.

Like Five Days at Memorial you kinda leave the book doubting that the villains of the piece even realize that they are in fact the bad guys.  As in that case, Elizabeth and Sunny seem to have kind of doubled down on the position that they've done nothing wrong, although I suppose anyone who has the brazen confidence to do it in the first place doesn't have a lot of room for self-doubt or even second thoughts.

The one thing I wish we'd gotten in this is a bit more wrap up of where the key players stood, particularly (for me) George Shultz, who practically disowned his grandson for whistleblowing this whole house of cards to the ground.  I can't say for sure that I'd have the wherewithal to do what he and Erika did in reporting the misdeeds, but to be personally punished for doing right strikes me as so unfair.   So much collateral damage done.  And for what!  A miracle product that didn't work? Such dishonesty in professing to care about people's health while actually causing harm indiscriminately.  Not to mention poor Ian Gibbons, who carried the shame of it to his death.  It makes you mad, it gets your (forgive the pun) blood up!  And this, for god's sake, explains why regulatory bodies, while annoying, are absolutely and completely necessary. 

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

By N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her short fiction, which includes several never-before-seen stories, Jemisin equally challenges and delights with narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

Anyway, this book and a random comment elsewhere made me realize how much I was enjoying these short stories, and the last time I felt like this, which was when reading Connie Willis.  Short stories are tough, man!  I just put a book in the giveaway pile because I read like, four of the ten stories are didn't really get into any of them.  Obviously not all of the ones in a collection are going to be knock-outs for me, but here's some of the ones I liked best:

•  Red Dirt Witch, which combines the fae and Civil Rights Era Alabama,

• L'Alchemista, whose main character is a down-on-her-luck chef in Italy, who is given some magical ingredients,

• Cloud Dragon Skies, about the consequences of interference with nature again after we already fucked it up and then agreed to live with it,

• The Storyteller's Replacement, which uses the framed story to tell a story about a king who eats a dragon heart in order to get a massive hard-on, but karma revisits him in the form of his daughters (somewhat similar to a story by Kate Elliot, whose book of short stories I wasn't into nearly as much)

• The Brides of Heaven, about the interrogation of a woman who, in her desperation to re-seed a male population which has died off, has allowed something...wrong...into their homes

• Walking Awake, which is about a woman who works  at a body replacement facility slowly realizing that she's doing something awful and fighting back,

• Sinners, Saints, Dragon, and Haints, in the City Beneath Still Waters, which is about post-Katrina New Orleans, except with dragons (and sinners and saints and haints and the battle for the City's soul).

Not that the others aren't good - at a minimum, they all do that good sci-fi thing where they tell a story about our world using another world, i.e., The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which is a direct response to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I had to look up because I'd never read it) is a reminder that we've simply accepted how fucked up things are, but even in a world that demands cruel things, we don't have to let ourselves be cruel, or simply walk away and wash our hands of those necessary evils.

Or the Narcomancer, which I enjoyed, and which was more straight-on fantasy, but which felt also like the shorter version of a bigger world (which she says in the introduction it was).  Henosis, which is about legacy, combined with a touch of Shirley Jackson. Or The Effluent Engine, which is a steampunk New Orleans spy-action story, set around the time of the Haiti Revolution. I'm telling you, if you like sci-fi or fantasy at all, you gotta read this. Or The Evaluators, about a predator that takes on the shape of those it hunts (which, I'll be honest, only made a little bit of sense to me, but it felt cool).  There's definitely something for everyone. Also a lot of like, pregnancy horror, so I would say not to read it if you're expecting.  Pregnancy is enough horror all on it's own. 


So this was a bit of a last minute add-on because The Woman in the Window got pushed to 2020, and in the spirit of the competition, I decided I would definitely read a book being made into a movie that was actually released in 2019, but when all was said and done, I didn't really want to read The Goldfinch, since I'd already tried A Secret History and hated it, so I decided I would make Where'd You Go, Bernadette? my selection for 01, and move How Long 'Til Black Future Month? into 16.  Long story short, I am very glad I got prodded into Black Future Month, and very sad I read The Woman in the Window which turned about to be for nothing, nothing!


16: A Book With A Question In The Title

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

This is a book club book. And I mean that in an only mildly derogatory sense of the phrase. Book club books are, well, like pornography, hard to describe, but you know 'em when you see 'em. They're generally fiction, about people and relationships rather than say, thrillers or mysteries. Often, women will be the main character(s), and uh, the more I try to pin these types of books down, the more likely I am to rile up either (a) book group members, or (b) the authors of these types of books. I don't want to imply that any single book group is like this, but I just want to classify a certain set of books and when I read this set of books I automatically think, "book group book". I hope you know what I mean. It's not meant to be a slur on quality, but probably it's more about accessibility, and the way in which the book often gives people things to think about, but does it sort of non-aggressively, so that the members of your book group don't wind up screaming at each other over chips 'n' dip.

It's probably becoming very apparent that I have never actually been part of a book group, but I hear that stereotyping based off of representations of things in the media is very popular these days. For my part, I would rather have a book group for really difficult books, like Joyce's Ulysses, which I totally read without understanding a single thing that was going on, although it did not ruin my enjoyment of the book AT ALL. And I mean that in the sense that I enjoyed it muchly.

Anyhoo. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is not, despite the title, a teen mystery à la Nancy Drew. I know, so misleading! It begins with the 80 year old Lily telling us that she is filled with guilt, regret, shame over something that happened with her "old same" Snow Flower, before winding us all the way back to the beginning of the tale. It starts with Lily's footbinding, as a matchmaker "discovers" that Lily's feet are perfectly proportioned to become the smallest (and thus, most beautiful) lotus feet in the area. Since Lily's fortunes are now on the rise, without a single thing being done, she's also considered for the prestigious position of laotong with another girl.

And just as a side note, See's done a really great job explaining all this background and cultural placement without reading like a very dry history book. It's entirely focused on the women's inner world so the need to get the details right about things like the placement of the women's room and who sleeps in it, and how the rituals of matchmaking proceed is very important. Not only that, but these types of details are the ones most often forgotten over the years as historians record the big earthshaking events, but rarely the day-to-day activities of women. So it's a pleasure to get this peek into Lily's world, even if I myself could have read even more about the minutiae of Lily's life. See strikes a nice balance between simply relaying information and storytelling.

Anyhow, Lily is found a candidate for laotong - Snow Flower - a girl who fits the signs from a larger, more prosperous family and village. The girls bind themselves together, promising to never let another come between them, and settle in for a life-long friendship. Okay, now SPOILERY SPOILERS!

The promise lasts about as long as it takes Lily to realize that Snow Flower has been lying to her for the past six or so years, and is actually the daughter of a dedicated opium smoker who has ruined her family's fortunes. Lily is devastated to find out (at her wedding) that Snow Flower is really hitching her wagon to Lily's rising star rather than the reverse. This part was a little tricky for me - the full secret and reveal came as a surprise to me, even though there were hints all throughout (but as you know I'm very slow to pick up on hints), so it was nice that just when you thought Snow Flower was already at her lowest low point, you find out some other horribly sad fact about her life and future. Lily, on the other hand, is a little snot. It's not completely unexpected, and it's true that Lily might deserve to feel betrayed, but it's the first crack in their friendship, and it's aggravating to see Lily, who had previously thought that Snow Flower was head and shoulders above her but welcoming her anyhow, not really be so willing to extend the same courtesy to Snow Flower. It's our first glimpse at the Lady that Lily becomes - righteous but cold.

To Lily's credit though, the two young women stay close for the next several years - or at least, as close as they can be given that Lily is married to the head honcho and Snow Flower is married to local unclean butcher, and both of them have mothers-in-law from hell. They go through a couple of year like that, havin' babies (or miscarryin', on Snow Flower's part) and visiting every so often, until the Taiping revolution, in which millions and millions of people were slaughtered. Lily is caught out at Snow Flower's house when this happens, so instead of leaving with her family, she has to climb a mountain with Snow Flower and her abusive husband and small children in the dead of winter. Once up there, Lily does her best to keep the whole family alive, by using her position as Lady to get more food for Snow Flower's scrawny firstborn son, but things sour after Snow Flower's second, heartier son dies, and her husband beats her, buries her son without her, and makes her miscarry another child. Lily compounds Snow Flower's misery by high-and-mightily telling her that her husband is a terrible person and Snow Flower should get over it by being the best wife she can be and having another child right away. What a gem of a friend!

This is really when things get sad: Snow Flower's fortunes, which never were high to begin with, fall even further as she gets beaten regularly and falls swiftly into depression, while Lily, who never had much in the way of difficulties, except possibly a loveless relationship with her husband, gets a moment of joyful reunion with him after they make it back down the mountain. It's sad because you can see what's coming, even though Lily can't: her constant nagging and nitpicking at Snow Flower are the only way she can care for Snow Flower - she can't relate to her, she can't sympathize with her, because their lives are so different now. In Lily's mind, following the rules means a happy life, since that's always worked for her, but Lily doesn't realize how lucky she is, and how justice should be tempered with mercy. So Snow Flower tells Lily that she needs another support group and Lily blackballs the shit out of her, ruining her status in the town.

Eventually Lily does realize where she went wrong, and repents, but it's still a tragedy. The book is supposed to be about this deep friendship, but I honestly think Lily stops being a real friend to Snow Flower the moment she realizes that Snow Flower isn't the high-falutin' person Lily thought she was when she was 7, which is more the matchmaker's fault than Snow Flower's. Lily's life isn't the easiest either, but she has so much when Snow Flower has so little, and Lily always seems very immature throughout - very much the angry teenager who stomps through the house and slams the door when you won't let her stay out until 11 pm.

It's a very compelling book, and I gobbled it right up, and like I said earlier, the setting and details are well done. It was really interesting to read about a time in which women basically did not go outdoors, ever, and hardly walked, and the culture which built up around footbinding (which obviously creates a lot of societal stratification, as seen in SFatSF). It's true that the women's lives might seem limited in scope, but See's managed to bring out the deep emotions and joys and sorrows that women of the time and place experienced. What's sad is that even female friendship, which is possibly the one real comfort these women got, was bound by these rules and regulations, and in many cases limited to their girlhood.

I do feel like the system that created the laotongs was the same that led, in part, to its destruction. And the book is a big warning on the perils of miscommunication. I know this review is more of a synopsis than my usual, but I will say that I enjoyed it very much, even if it was bound by the limitations of the "book club" type.

Code Name: Verity

Codename: Verity, by Elizabeth Wein 

Oct. 11th, 1943—A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it's barely begun.

When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage and failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy? 

Happy New Year!  I've decided to celebrate a day off in the middle of the week by reading about young female spies getting tortured in World War II.  I think I've talked before about the overabundance of WWII kid's fic out there, but Codename Verity is a worthy addition to any collection.  My mother, bless her heart, read it before giving it to me with her recommendation, but I wasn't feeling it the last time I picked it up, several months ago.  It was one of those things where I'd heard too much about the book, and had gotten the impression that there was some "twist" to it, and I was taking everything with such grains of salt I couldn't concentrate on the story.

Which is: a plane with two travelers is shot and crashes, but not before one passenger parachutes out: Verity, an English (Scottish) spy, meant to join up with the French Resistance on a secret mission,  gets discovered not more than a week after she lands, captured and unable to talk her way out of it without the necessary faked papers, which were accidentally switched with that of her pilot and best friend, Maddie Brodatt. The first half of the book is the story of the two girls' (I keep saying girls, even though they're clearly old enough to have excelled at their respective dirty jobs) mutual history to the fatal crash-landing.

This is where I got tripped up: the idea that this Verity character would be writing the truth for the Germans was so implausible, that I was really strung out thinking - was this a lie? Was this?  In fact, I was pretty sure throughout most of that first section, that Verity was not Queenie, but Maddie herself, pretending to be the other girl for some unknown reason.  Lest you be led astray as I was, let me reassure you: Maddie is Maddie and Verity is Queenie (aka Julie).  I was also ticked off by the leniency with which Verity was (apparently) given to write her story: she goes off on a lot of tangents, most of which serve no purpose other than (as we discover later) as coded messages to the Resistance.  Given that Verity could not have reasonably expected the papers to make it back to the Resistance (at least, not with any real confidence, especially in the beginning), it seems odd that she would have (and could have) written her papers with two such disparate audiences in mind.  I suppose she was hopeful on the off chance they could get smuggled out, but then why did the Germans permit it?  Very odd.

Because I didn't see much point in anything Verity wrote, I was therefore less impressed at her repression of more relevant facts relating to the secret mission.  Since she clearly had to have known more than just what was in the record, it's hard for me to say that she did a great job not telling any of that.  Well, obviously, she was tortured.  But they kept her alive for weeks, ostensibly for the purpose of this written record of key information, and they don't even attempt to get the basis for her mission in France?  Not that it would have mattered in the long run, since she would have lied about it, but it hurts the story, I think, for the reader not to be convinced along with the Germans, of a cover story.  Most of what Verity writes is true, but useless (and the parts that aren't true I found pointless - lies about it being a Beaufort plane, not a Lysander one - eh?).  I was expecting relevant lies.

What is impressive is how well Ms. Wein manages to convey the friendship between Maddie and Verity, even though they aren't together for most of the book: they meet, train up in separate locations, then spend a few missions traveling together before their final fateful trek to France, whereupon they are immediately separated. However, they share a boundless love for each other, which comes across clearly in each narration in the book.  Maddie's final sacrifice is heart-breaking, and I will confess, I did start crying, though the book continues for so much longer that I was quite dry-eyed by the last page.  It is refreshing that this is not just another one of those teen love-triangle books, of which there are far too many (girl falls in love with boy, but they cannot be together due to: a dystopian society/sudden onset lycanthropy/he's actually 300 years older than her and that's super creepy, stop acting like it's not).

I think a reader would benefit from multiple readings: Verity's narration, in particular, contains multitudes, which I could not begin to unpick today.  It also contains quite a lot of mechanical talk about airplanes, especially at first.  It's like the whale chapters in Moby Dick - you just have to get through them, but lordy are they ever a drag.  The author is a pilot herself, and it does show.  Stylistically, I think it would also benefit from not underlining certain sentences about the Gestapo headquarters - you'll see what I mean.  It does make things jump out at you (as it's intended to), but given that we're treated to a run-down of it all later anyway, I think it would be doing more of a service to readers to make them go back to find it themselves. 

I thought it was a good book, a worthwhile book, but the feeling of being manipulated was not worth the pay-off of finding out what Verity was lying about.  Perhaps when I'm feeling less raw about it, I'll return to it.  Because that's the thing: this book does kick you in the stomach.  I'm still reeling from it.  It's not a very comfortable read, but I do sort of feel like finding an online discussion of it, sort of like joining a support group: CNV Survivors, we'll get t-shirts made.