Between Two Kingdoms

Between Two Kingdoms

By Suleika Jaouad

 In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

 It was an interesting experience to read about someone whose personality seems so diametrically opposed to mine. Cancer treatment notwithstanding, it seemed very clear to me that Jaouad is substantially extroverted, someone who thrives on interacting with people and a serial monogamist, seemingly incapable of being alone. Which makes her road trip all the more intriguing, although it does sound like she spent a good chunk of it dwelling on her romantic prospects. 

Jaouad spends the first half of the book detailing her first cancer treatment (since the time frame of the book, it sounds like she's had at least two more bouts) and then the first part of the second half talking about how hard it is to adjust to not being sick anymore, so the road trip takes up a fairly small chunk. For a road trip lasting 100 days and circumnavigating the continental United States, we spend a whole chapter and two weeks not even leaving the state of Vermont and then skip directly from Texas to the end of the story. 

She's a great writer. It's a long book but beautifully described. Naturally, almost all of it is internal musings and descriptions of her pain and care, but it's still well paced, and doesn't get bogged down. And as exhausting as she sounds to be around at points, I both admire and grimace at her bravery in writing about the end of her relationship with Will (again, not a spoiler for those who do a casual google search, she's currently married to Jon Baptiste). It sounds like she was lucky to have Will for as long as she did, doing as much as he did, but never felt lucky. But how could anyone feel lucky, with that kind of diagnosis and illness hanging over their heads? You're more likely to feel like the sword of Damocles is waiting to fall. 

In the end, I don't think that Jaouad comes up with any philosophical ideas outside of ones that seem common sense for someone in that position: focus on the present, not the past, learn to live comfortably with uncertainty, accept the love that others want to give you, etc., etc. But while I think much of the book is Jaouad trying (and mostly failing, so I hope that she's gotten better at this since 2015) to come to terms with her experience, I think much of the value of the book for others is the deep dive into what it feels to be so torn between being sick and being well - between two kingdoms, is the metaphor she uses over and over again. It is hard for many to imagine being so sick for so long that you have something like PTSD from it. And it is a small revelation to consider that being well again after something like that can be harder than being sick, and you should not expect unalloyed joy from a bill of good health.

12: A Book About A Road Trip

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

An American Marriage

An American Marriage

By Tayari Jones

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

I wasn't really looking forward to this, since I thought the subject matter would be very weighty and therefore depressing (I also considered Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder for this prompt, and maybe I will read that too anyway, since it sounds intriguing). And the subject matter was weighty, I guess, but the book is pretty easy to read and skips over a lot of the time that Roy spends in prison, so it's mostly build-up and then the three characters wringing their hands over Roy's return to freedom.

It's fine. I did spoil the ending for myself, so maybe I would have been more rapt if I hadn't know how it would turn out, but as it was, Celestial mostly annoyed with what seemed to be small cruelty in separating herself from Roy, but not actually divorcing him, thus keeping him on her line and giving him false hope. I think it would have been ameliorated if we'd seen better why she did it, i.e., was it to give him strength while he was in prison? But we don't, we just see her realization that he's in prison for a long time, she doesn't really love him as much as she ought, and then her leaning on Andre because (and for real) he's right there. Honestly, if she hadn't gotten pregnant at the end, I would have said that if Andre would up in prison, she would have left him just as she had Roy. She just doesn't seem to be deeply committed to anyone but herself. And that's fine, I suppose, for her, but it does make the book seem like less of a tragedy and more of a pity.

Meanwhile, of course, Roy is out here not appearing to take his marriage vows super seriously either, so who knows. Perhaps there's an argument that they were married longer because he was in prison than they would have been if he'd been out. I did find it funny that the first question in the "book club" questions at the end was one I had been thinking about while reading it, namely, what makes this an "American" marriage? Is it the wrongful conviction? Certainly other countries are subject to the phenomenon as well, although perhaps it's less common. Is it the racism? Is it the ways in which the characters each justified their actions? I agree that it does "feel" uniquely American somehow, like this story could only have happened in this country, but it's hard to say why.

I liked the beginning of the book much more than the end. The beginning is the love story of Roy and Celestial, as well as their communications in prison. It felt like it might be a story about handling something terrible and life-altering, something that truly is not your fault, and living through it. Something like optimism. Something like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, haha. But all the characters just wallow. For good reason, especially in Roy's case, but it never felt more than surface level.  I dunno, I just, this is the kind of book where you want to feel deeply for these characters and the loss of their hopes and dreams and the ruins of their marriage, and instead, you just wish they'd be a little more honest - with themselves first, and then with other people. And don't even get me started on the idea that Roy happens to end up in a prison cell with his biological father for five years. Now it's just hokey.

On the plus side, it was a very easy read.

48: A Book That Features A Married Couple Who Don't Live Together

The Book of Delights

The Book of Delights

By Ross Gay

The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.
The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

I am finding it hard to write a review. When I recall the book, I have a sense of remembered pleasure, but moreso than anything it engenders calm and peace. I find myself relishing inactivity, breathing in and out and content to be at rest. A lassitude and quietude. Which of course ruins any hope of productivity. 

The Book of Delights is a series of short essays on the delights of daily life which may occur to you if you simply open yourself. I feel as though they are something like secular homilies, although this description does them no service. It falls short of the talent Gay displays in the transcription of his ideas, the poet's talent for wordplay, for following thoughts like twining vines, up and over and out again.

Below is an entire excerpt from one such essay, which is probably not the best in the bunch, but serves since it is so short and still amusing:

When my brother and I were little kids, maybe nine and seven, one of the big kids (this description has almost none of the gravity it once did, when kids actually went outside unsupervised and uncoached and so the small ones would on occasion be thrown by the big ones into the sticker bush or dropped into a sewer for sport) caught us in the woods and pinched us on the backs of our arms until we cursed, which we adamantly and unusually for our neighborhood did not do. (I wonder, in retrospect, if we acted a bit superior due to our linguistic chastity.)

"Asshole!" we screamed into the woods behind the apartments. "Shitbag!" The tears making our faces shine as this big twelve-year-old twisted the meat on our arms. When we went home crying to our mom (my brother more from the pinching than the cursing, which I suspect he was glad for the excuse to do), she found the kid and read him the riot act, calling him a gutter mouth, telling him that Rossy and Matty are not going to be little gutter mouths like him, before telling him he would probably grow up to be a child molester. She was fucking his ass up. I remember him listening quite calmly, almost demure, calling my mother Mrs. Gay and suggesting he would not become a child molester. I think Tim was probably right, and was just in a  sadistic phase, not unlike my own at around twelve.

But mostly I offer this story as a kind of background against which to enjoy the easy way my mother described her granddaughter's, my niece's, third-grade teacher, who evidently could sometimes not be very nice to some of the kids, as a real dickhead.

 It feels like a rope, a hand stretching out to pull us from the despair and pessimism of These Times and remind us not to sink into depression but to remember the point of life and remember to enjoy what we may while we have it. It is like a small flower, growing amidst adversity, and with love, and hope, I am fortified against the hordes once more. 

01: A Book About A POC Experiencing Joy And Not Trauma

Person of Interest

Person of Interest
By Theresa Schwegel

Leslie McHugh is married to an undercover cop. She thinks she knows what it’s like to share her life with a man who spends his days living a lie, who keeps secrets for a living, who trusts no one, not even her. She can see the pressure, the fear, the pent-up rage, and, worst of all, the distance growing between them that Craig promised he’d never allow. But what does she really know? Lonely, tired, and starting to drink too much, she knows that their marriage is on the rocks because her husband lives a second life she knows almost nothing about.

When a thousand dollars disappears from their bank account, she wants answers, but before she can even ask the questions, their seventeen-year-old daughter, a real cop’s kid already on a collision course with trouble, turns up at the center of Craig’s investigation into a snitch’s violent death. Leslie’s had enough; she’s determined to get to the truth and protect her family---no matter what the cost.

If not for the Challenge, this would not only have been a likely DNF, but, if finished, would have been forgotten quickly, blending into a mish-mash of other mediocre police thrillers.  However, in writing these reviews, I get to memorialize a book which I cannot, in good conscience, recommend to anyone.

The book is narrated in turn by married couple Craig, a police officer investigating drugs in Chinatown, and his wife, Leslie, dealing with their terrible teenage daughter, Ivy (more on Ivy later). We get off to a rousing start with a fight between the two of them wherein Craig calls Leslie a bitch, and they don't seem to like each other at all. In their separate chapters we also get a window into all the ways they're both individually fucking up: Craig by immersing himself much more deeply into the investigation than his superiors would approve, spending his own money on an underground gambling den, and Leslie by falling for her daughter's theoretical boyfriend, Niko.

The police investigation is totally confounding and I'm not sure it's intentional. Apparently in-fighting between Chinese and Vietnamese gangs is important to the plot, but it's barely explained. I guess, ultimately drugs=bad, but why or how Craig losing money at the gambling table will unlock the whole case is never explained to my satisfaction.

There's so many bad decisions made by Craig and Leslie in the early chapters that you never really get on their side. They never become sympathetic, a critical failure of the book. Aside from Craig's stealing marital funds for an unsanctioned job (while calling his wife a bitch) Leslie decides that her drug dealing daughter's activities should be kept from Craig at all costs. So Ivy gets picked up from a rave, high and carrying ecstasy and Leslie's reaction is to cover for her, to the extent that she won't even mention to Craig that Ivy is grounded, in case he asks why (and she's incapable of lying about THAT, I guess).  Great parenting! When she's not doing that, she's flirting with her daughter's boyfriend, going to his jazz shows, and assuming Craig is having an affair (he's not).

Nevertheless, the book offers no real points of interest until Leslie is drugged, followed home, and violently raped. It's gruesome and comes out of nowhere and completely changes the tone of the book. Now Craig and Leslie are united against the rapist, whose identity takes up the plot of most of the last section of the book. Then, Craig kills him off-screen.  It's like Schwegel wanted the emotional payoff of a revenge sequence but because both of these characters are so unsympathetic for so long, mostly you're just appalled.  

In retrospect, I realized that while I checked the general ratings on Choi's A Person of Interest, I'd just read the blurb on Schwegel's book and assumed it would be a typical run of the mill procedural. I did not expect (more fool me) how... unpleasant it would be. You feel grimy and unhappy reading it.

And a minor quibble, after all that, but the title makes no sense. There's never really a "person of interest" in the book. At point Craig and Leslie call someone that, but (a) it's a lie and (b) this is like 90% through the book. Nor is there ever really an investigation into a snitch's violent death, as the blurb suggests. There is a death, about halfway through, but I'm not sure he's a snitch. 

And finally, *spoiler alert* I guess but did they ever explain how the bad guy (completely forgot his name since it's introduced at the very end) knows that Leslie is the wife of this undercover cop? It sounds like he and Leslie were both somewhat coincidentally in the club together and he took a chance to sow more discord and frame Silk, but how did he know Craig was an undercover cop when none of the people Craig was gambling with seemed to know? For awhile we think the rapist is Juan/Yuan, which makes sense that he knows Craig is a cop, but how does this other guy know Leslie is related to the case? Is it a plot hole, or do I just not care enough to pay attention? We'll never know.

38: Two Books With The Same Title

A Person of Interest

A Person of Interest
By Susan Choi

Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician nearing retirement age, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion.

Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings – toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past – and that might even win him redemption.

Once again, complete ignorance strikes. I had no idea this book was broadly set around the Unabomber, so the references to the newfangled computer geniuses took me aback. I also had no idea that Choi almost won the Pulitzer, and had somehow not connected that she'd written Trust Exercise - a book which has been in my To Be Read list for years, but never attempted due to some reviews hinting at unhappy stylistic flair. If I had known, or remembered that, maybe I would have been better prepared for this. Ostensibly yes, about a mathematics professor who finds himself unfortunately entangled in an FBI investigation into the bombing of his neighboring office, it's much more a character study into someone  alienated from almost everyone in their life. It's not a thriller, it's LITERARY.

The problem you see, is while it's well written, we spend the beginning third of the book wallowing in professor Lee's painful reminiscence of the past, wherein he met and fell in love with his first wife Aileen (who happened to be married to a friend of his, and pregnant to boot), and she separated from her husband and then lost custody of the baby due to some immoral, if not strictly illegal, machinations by her ex-husband.

What should be a quickening pace is instead bogged down again and again by the intermittent forays into the past. And the author's writing style doesn't help. There's page long paragraphs composed of only one or two sentences, meandering but important, and frequently I would be finish a paragraph only to find I had read none of it, and have to return, unhappily, to follow more closely.  I'm sure no author is boo-hooing that their readers have to *gasp* actually focus on reading their books, but again, it makes the reading experience slow, repetitive, and unpleasant, which shouldn't be the case for a book as well written as this one.

If you don't understand what I mean, here's a sample:

But now that she was pregnant, the little dumb show, Gaither's penning of his letters in the kitchen where she would observe him and his cheerful reading of the paltry responses, had come to an end. It was true that she had mostly been in bed, and that Gaither had gotten the mail from the box when he came home from school and heated chicken broth in the kitchen, and washed and dried the bowls afterward. But she could easily see him relocating his correspondence from the kitchen to the lamp table next to their bed, perhaps directing a superfluous inquiry to her prone form: "Aileen, what was the name of those beautiful flowers you planted? I'd like to tell Mother." She could easily see him having added the most recent card from his mother to the tray that he brought her each evening and expressively reading his mother's few words while she struggled to eat. But Gaither had done neither. She knew that for him estrangement from his parents was painful, both for how unwanted a condition it was for himself and for the distress he assumed it caused her. She couldn't disabuse him of this latter notion without insulting him further, but the truth was that his estrangement from his parents did not upset her at all. It was easier for her than she imagined the opposite would have been: their pious embrace of her as a daughter, correspondence duties of her own, treks to their sterile home on Christian holidays. All of it intensifying unimaginably after a child was born. Gaither had once compared her, with what seemed to be uneasy admiration, to Athena sprung unsentimentally from Zeus' thigh, or maybe out of his head: neither of them could exactly remember the story. But Gaither's meaning had been clear, that even as a child Aileen was essentially parentless. Aileen's parents had been learned, mildly crusading, moderately well-off and extremely late-breeding; though when they finally had children, they somehow had six, of which Aileen was the last. Aileen's childhood had taken place in the time after her parents had acquired housekeepers and assumed an emeritus status, so that passionate attachment to that primal relation of parents to child and measuring of all subsequent relations against it were foreign to her. What she had were her siblings, numerous enough that they composed more a loose federation than a snug family. Some she had always shared an easy sympathy with, and others were so much older she'd hardly known them at all. With no one did she have an exceptional bond, as she might have if there had been fewer of them overall.

That is a single paragraph.

The book presents some interesting questions, which I believe are also used in her Trust Exercise book: when we inhabit a character's head, how can we trust what they're telling us?  You see it here, when, at the very end of the book, Aileen's sister tells Lee that his terrible temper is the reason Aileen was scared of him. We see some other characters allude to fights he had about various work issues - granting tenure, etc, but because Lee doesn't think he has a temper, these are all presented as harmless disagreements with colleagues. And there's certainly space for that to be believable, even as we see how little responsibility Lee takes for his other cantankerous activity.

I mean, any man who watches his wife lose her infant child and takes not a single step to prevent it or console her (because he doesn't want to raise another man's child) is certainly trash, and I am glad that he acknowledges in the end, that he is responsible for the destruction of his marriage, not his wife's ex-husband or anybody else, but it does feel unsatisfactory that there's no real follow up from this. Aileen's dead, so there's no resolution there. Their daughter, Esther, appears only at the close, and we don't get any conversation or resolution with her. And while we might assume that Lee has undergone real change, since he accepts and isn't an asshole when Aileen's long lost son appears on his doorstep, again, we get a single introductory conversation and not much more, between the two of them.

While the primary focus is on Lee's relationships and emotional withering, there's also the Unabomber plot in the background! Choi makes the interesting choice to fictionalize a different bomber who (it turns out) knows Lee personally. I suppose it would have to be plotted this way, since otherwise Lee wouldn't become "A Person of Interest" and wouldn't have his life so disrupted that he effects real change - well, except that I do think that this could have been done without actually making him instrumental in catching the bomber, which begins to tread into that thriller territory we've been kept so assiduously away from.  It seemed to me that the great upheaval for Lee was the realization that his former friend, and wife's ex-husband, Gaither, was not the architect of all his sorrows, as he'd been so used to presuming, for the last thirty years or so. And so the idea that the bomber could have been someone else, someone who, again, from Lee's biased perspective, had everything, this idea could have affected Lee without the whole going-to-Idaho-at-the-bomber's-invitation-and-getting-inserted-into-an-FBI-operation-while-a-tangential-civilian.

37: Two Books With The Same Title

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

Ballad for Sophie

Ballad for Sophie

By Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia

1933. In the small French village of Cressy-la-Valoise, a local piano contest brings together two brilliant young players: Julien Dubois, the privileged heir of a wealthy family, and François Samson, the janitor's son. One wins, one loses, and both are changed forever.

1997. In a huge mansion stained with cigarette smoke and memories, a bitter old man is shaken by the unexpected visit of an interviewer. Somewhere between reality and fantasy, Julien composes, like in a musical score, a complex and moving story about the cost of success, rivalry, redemption, and flying pianos.

When all is said and done, did anyone ever truly win? And is there any music left to play?

Had absolutely no idea this was a graphic novel when I chose it, but no regrets. It's a strikingly beautiful take of a talented pianist being interviewed as he slowly dies from cancer, and tells the story of his youth and rise to fame, including his competition with a supernaturally talented - but less fortunate - boy against whom the pianist is always measuring himself. 

The drawings are piquant and add the right touch of sharpness to a narrative which is frequently tragic although ultimately hopeful. It's extremely emotionally satisfying, as we get to review Julien's own past and actions through the interviewer's kinder, more distant lens. At one point, Julien refers to himself as the villain of his own story, but it's not nearly so straightforward as all that. The authors have done an incredible job making him multifaceted - both victim and perpetrator, winner and loser. The destruction of his childhood by forces beyond his control sets the stage for his unhappy life of fame.  Although playing is the only thing which seems to give his life purpose, it is only when he has irrevocably severed that link that we see Julien at peace.

Although Julien is obsessed with François as a literal rival, in the end, Julien's deeper struggles are against his own idealized vision of himself, and all the ways he sees his own failures and lapses. In all the book, there is never a point at which François speaks with Julien, and so we are left wondering what, in fact, François ever thought of Julien to begin with.  Would he have blamed Julien for the early derailment of his dreams? Did he know of all the ways that Julien's life intersected with his own? Is there a world in which they could have been friends? I know how I would answer those questions, but perhaps that says more about me than François.

In any case where an audio experience is described through a written medium, there's going to be some loss of translation. It's a testament to the authors here that a story ostensibly about music can be conveyed so well through the pages of Ballad for Sophie. In fact, one of the authors is a musician and composed music for the book, which though unnecessary, is a  There's no false notes (pun not intended). As I sit and recall the novel for this review, I find its impression is only improved in my memory.  I would recommend this book to any reader who appreciates art, in all its forms. 

31: A Book Where Music Plays An Integral Part Of The Storyline

Assistant to the Villain

Assistant to the Villain

By Hannah Nicole Maehrer

ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem, terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits.

With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important, it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job offer—naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. Don’t find evil so attractive, Evie.

But just when she’s getting used to severed heads suspended from the ceiling and the odd squish of an errant eyeball beneath her heel, Evie suspects this dungeon has a huge rat…and not just the literal kind. Because something rotten is growing in the kingdom of Rennedawn, and someone wants to take the Villain—and his entire nefarious empire—out.

Now Evie must not only resist drooling over her boss but also figure out exactly who is sabotaging his work…and ensure he makes them pay.

After all, a good job is hard to find.

Well, we have an early contender for least favorite read of the challenge! And what a surprise dark horse, although in theory, at least, I get to choose all of these books according to my tastes so none of them should be awful (Ernest Hemingway and 'less than three stars on goodreads' notwithstanding). But I had this one on my possible reading list even before the challenge came out, so it should have at least been palatable.  

But I was only 3% of the way in before I realized I didn't like it, and 7% when I first contemplated not even finishing it. And if not for the challenge, I definitely would have abandoned it without a second thought. But instead I struggled through it - it has the benefit of being fairly insubstantial - and finished it as fast as I could.  

Ostensibly it's some sort of arch Office meets twisted fantasy story mashup, but it's mostly an excuse for the author to attempt to be funny via anachronisms, i.e. the villain has a department of interns and a woman who runs HR, and a everyone drinks "cauldron brew" aka coffee. The thinly veiled references to modern office bureaucracy didn't amuse me though, all it did was heighten the bizarre mental gymnastics you have to do in order to accept that our heroine isn't a massive idiot. 

So the Villain is, obviously, going to be totally misunderstood and actually not a bad guy, right? I mean, a love story between psychopaths is clearly not what the author's intending here. But immediately after the prologue in which Evie gets the job offer, she finds three severed heads - actual human heads - on her desk, and she mentions a "test" when the Villain left a whole ass dead person in her desk to see how she'd react. And she's like, "It's FINE! I'm sure those people deserved it!" Like, what?? That's not fine in the context either of a fantasy world or an office job! Here's a quote that I think is meant to come across as flirty? Sexy? I have no words:

 

'I would, you know. Torture someone,' she clarified, an alarming sincerity on her face. 'If I knew it would help you-- if it was someone hurting you...I'd do it and I'd probably enjoy it just a little.' With that, she spun on her heel, her sunny dress offsetting the weight of her words.

Girl, get your head on straight. 

If you want to read a book in which the villain is actually a misunderstood hero who doesn't just murder people and leave parts around for their ostensible secretaries to find (which, let's be clear, is upsetting and gross behavior) then read Nimona instead. That's a great take on the villain/hero idea. Or if you want to read about someone who works for a villain and actually becomes villainous themself, try Hench. That's an interesting take on what being evil means. Assistant to the Villain is neither of these. In fact, it is merely a mess.  

Lest we ever get the wrong idea about the Villain, it's made clear that he's incredibly HOT and SEXY and Evie would do him in a minute. So it's okay that she also thinks he kills people for fun. Because all can be forgiven if you're hot and wear v-necks, apparently. And look, Evie can boink who she wants. But it's all treated like just another ho-hum meet cute, and it just makes you doubt her mental acuity. It's not like she's like, oh, I'm sure he's innocent! Instead her biggest hangup is that she thinks he doesn't like her that way. Which clearly he does, because he even thinks her dumb comments about finding the mole are super insightful. Here, I highlighted it because it was so obnoxiously pandering, this is after they're talking about why he doesn't just torture all his employees to find the mole:

'And you know if the traitor finds out you're looking for them, they'll inform the person they're answering to. You want to take them by surprise, too.'

He couldn't catch the drop of his jaw in time. 'You - Yes, that's exactly it.'

This is a jaw-dropping revelation? Genius. No one else could have come up with some primo A to B reasoning like that. Which, again, just makes it irritating that we're supposed to pretend she's smart, but she can't even figure out that this guy likes her. The everybody-knows-we-like-each-other-except-us! trope is so middle school.

So this guy, (who again, is both supposedly a villain and also her boss) thinks the sun shines out of her ass and they run around trying to find out who the spy is on the inside ruining the Villain's plans. Except of course, it's Evie herself, accidentally using some sort of magical ink which writes everything down in duplicate, and feeding stuff to her father who secretly IS some kind of psycho, since he fakes a whole life-threatening illness, lets his daughter think they're destitute in order to keep up the facade, and then tries to sell her to the blacksmith so she stops bugging him at home. He also plants a bomb like fifteen feet from her desk, and somehow (this may have been explained, but let's be honest, I was not giving this my full attention) lets a poison-spitting monster out to terrorize a house party. 

 

Oh, and about that the aforementioned house party: Evie gets an invitation, meets up with her coworkers who all agree that it's a trap, they GO ANYWAY, Evie talks them out of letting the Villain know they've all been suckered into this stupid trap, then when Evie realizes that as a result of this decision, the Villain has to talk briefly with his father, she RUNS AWAY because THAT is worthy of the dramatic flounce, apparently. And when the Villain catches up to her instead of talking about plans to address the obvious TRAP, they... have a slow dance. Until the poison-spitting monster shows up, of course. At every possible point, our two main characters choose the option which makes the least rational sense. 

Whatever, they deserve each other. Let's cross this one of the list and thank our lucky stars we don't have to read any more about them.

****

These didn't really fit into my review, but here are some more passages I highlighted in anger:

Granted, she didn't want to become evil, but when you spend most of your life trying to see the sun, you begin to wish for rain.

What the fuck does this mean? 

 

This is when she thinks she's dying:

 A different face flashed in her mind - her boss, The Villain. Evie couldn't believe she was leaving him when he needed her most. Who would make him begrudgingly smile now?

Evie is a clown, so I guess it's fitting that her last thoughts are about making people smile. 

This is when she and the Villain head back to her house, and by the way, this is like, months after she started working for him:

The yellow tulips lining the front walk looked odd from her current position: being in a carriage...belonging to a glorified murderer.

First of all, I think we can drop the "glorified". He a for real murderer. Second, why is this suddenly weird? Did it take being in a carriage to realize you had flowers at your house?

26: A Book Where An Adult Character Changes Careers