Black Water Sister

Black Water Sister

By Zen Cho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12: A Book about the Afterlife

The Word is Murder

The Word is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night

By Dorothy Sayers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

42: A Book That Features Two Languages

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

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

By Jessica Pan

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put my hand up.

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

Accidentally Engaged

 Accidentally Engaged

By Farah Heron

When it comes to bread, Reena Manji knows exactly what she's doing. She treats her sourdough starters like (somewhat unruly) children. But when it comes to Reena's actual family—and their constant meddling in her life—well, that recipe always ends in disaster.

Now Reena's parents have found her yet another potential Good Muslim Husband. This one has the body of Captain America, a delicious British accent, and lives right across the hall. He's the perfect, mouthwatering temptation . . . and completely ruined by the unwelcome side dish of parental interference.

Reena refuses to marry anyone who works for her father. She won't be attracted to Nadim's sweet charm or gorgeous lopsided smile. That is, until the baking opportunity of a lifetime presents itself: a couples' cooking competition with the prize of her dreams. Reena will do anything to win—even asking Nadim to pretend they're engaged. But when it comes to love, baking your bread doesn't always mean you get to eat it too.

This one wasn't a keeper for me.  It was eh - alright - fine - but I probably won't remember much of it six months from now, and I'm not going back and picking up others in the series. Reena as a heroine is not my cup of tea.  Feeling perpetually harassed by her family and very much the failure she assumes the worst a lot (which, to be fair, is pointed out and addressed in the book) and it's kind of a downer in the book. Instead of celebrating the things she can do well - and I kept thinking she would transition over to a bakery job instead of finance and she just... never even considered it? despite having a food blog and applying for a bread scholarship - she just circles round and round the things she's unhappy about.  It's maybe a more honest approach, but not only is that not really the bread-and-butter of the romance genre, it married very weirdly with some of the more slapstick/cliche aspects of the genre, i.e., the cooking show videos, which seem to exist mainly as a plot device to get Reena and Nadim to realize how cute they are together than have any realism or introduce any real tension or obstacles for our couple.  

And yes, they get married despite knowing each other for all of what, two months (about 95% of which they acknowledged they were lying to each other about significant things)? Some of the belief in a happy ending is the suspension of disbelief about mundane life things, so having a depressed heroine is fine, but trying to pair it with a quickie wedding/elopement that magically solves all problems and it becomes a very hard sell. 

This might just be a personal pet peeve, but I had a very hard time remembering that Nadim had an English accent, even though they mentioned it every other page - they way he's written doesn't sound that English, I guess, which, YMMV, but was an unnecessary distraction. And the way he keeps referring to his being from Africa instead of Tanzania. I don't know any Tanzanians, but that seemed "sus" to me. Yes, I'm trying to pick up the newfangled slang. And the foot fetish! That absolutely did not work for me. Sure, fetishists need love too, but what a thing to introduce. This book takes some weird turns, for sure: foot fancying, orgies (not a joke), green card marriages. 

What did I like about it? Descriptions of food.  There's some recipes in the back that I actually wanted to try, except then I read them and it seemed like more work than I want to do, cooking-wise, at this stage of my life, i.e., I ain't cooking nothing when I got this baby hanging on me. 

I liked that everyone did disclose things (although, geez, what a family of hypocrites) and that even talking about some things that had been very hurtful (Reena telling her sister Saira that Saira's anti-fat screed had kiboshed her own book deal and blog) didn't wind up with people falling into each other's arm - which is also the case in real life when you tell someone you've been holding a grudge against them for months and months. 

Overall, I would have preferred something where the main characters are a little more self-confident, a little more adult, and a little less unnecessarily complicating things for themselves. I did think this quote was both amusing and a perfect summary of that: 

"Anderson, before we film the segment, Nadim and I have a confession. We weren't really engaged when we entered the contest." She explained everything, their parents setting them up, their refusal to be married, and the fake engagement to enter the contest.

Anderson frowned. "So you're not really married?"

"Yeah, we're married now, but we weren't engaged when we made the videos," Nadim said.

"So you weren't a couple back then?"

"No, we were a couple." Reena said. "Just not engaged."

Anderson shrugged. "You guys are making this more complicated than it needs to be. Your parents set you up, you were a couple, and now you're married. Sounds like you were engaged to me. I'd like to start in five minutes. Are you ready?"

18 - A Romance Novel by a BIPOC Author

 

 

Honeycomb

Honeycomb

By Joanne M. Harris

An entrancing mosaic novel of original fairy tales. The toymaker who wants to create the perfect wife; the princess whose heart is won by words, not actions; the tiny dog whose confidence far outweighs his size; and the sinister Lacewing King who rules over the Silken Folk. Dark, gripping, and brilliantly imaginative, these magical tales will soon have you in their thrall.

 

 This collection of fairy tales feels, well, "real" is the wrong word, but maybe "lived in"? It feels like these have been sitting around for a few hundred years, maundering through Europe and getting jotted down by Perrault in passing.  Well, for the most part.  Some of them (the barnyard animal voting series) are fairly heavy-handed comparisons to the current American political environment.  

The book contains a multitude of short stories - and here it's important to note that this version at least (and hopefully all of them) is exquisitely illustrated and put together, feeling both whimsical and substantial - generally no more than three pages each.  Periodically, we'll catch up on the latest doings of the Lacewing King, a faerie king who starts off  terribly cruel, but then faces a series of punishments and setbacks (mostly orchestrated by people whom he's pissed off) and tries to find love and redemption. It's interesting, but not really what I wanted from a book of grim fairy tales. I wanted all of the stories to be short, pointed, and harsh.  I mean, the first story ends with some eye-snatching. That is some quality dark content!

The book itself is very nice, the illustrations are top-notch accompaniments, and the paper quality is weighty and feels rich.  I was a quarter of the way through when I bought a copy as a gift for someone, it impressed me that much.  We'll see if they like it though!

47: A Book Featuring a Parallel Reality

Kindred

Kindred

By Octavia Butler

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Woof, this one was heavy.  I had some vague idea that Butler's biggest series was about vampires (unclear how I came by that impression since I literally shelved her books when I was sixteen and worked at a bookstore) and then I kept seeing this one pop up, and thought it might be new, and what actually happened is that this was published in 1970, and is about a time-traveling black woman, and Octavia Butler died in 2006 and her last book was a vampire novel (but couldn't have been the vampire novel I was thinking of), but bears absolutely no resemblance to what I thought she wrote.  Anyway, this is to say that I had some vague impressions about what this was, but I was really not prepared for this to hit this hard.  

I did find myself comparing it to Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, mostly in the sense that an under-prepared young woman finds herself stranded in an unexpectedly dangerous time period, although obviously Kindred's Dana is at more risk than Kevran was - except, of course, of dying from the bubonic plague.  Also, that time period was not specifically dangerous to her, i.e., being a black woman on a plantation was a little more targeted than a white lady traveling through medieval England.  But both books build tension and horror really well, and in Kindred, even though we open with Dana in the hospital with Kevin, and sans arm, I still found myself cheating ahead, trying to make sure that she didn't face too much awfulness.  

So basically, Dana gets called out of time (and place) unexpectedly, discovering that she's being called to the side of Rufus Weylin, a young white boy/man in times of his personal danger.  She's returned to the 1900s when she feels in life-threatening danger herself.  While she may be in the 1800s for hours or months at a time, little time passes back in 1976.  Her trips back occur in quick succession in the 1900s, although years pass between calls in the 1800s.  Her 1976 husband, a white man named Kevin, is pretty fast to accept this once she disappears and reappears in front of him, soaking wet/banged up/etc.  We soon find out that Rufus is Dana's ancestor, and she needs to preserve his life at least long enough for him to continue her family line.  This is complicated, obviously, because she's a black woman and everyone who sees her basically sees "uppity should-be slave".  For all of my lengthy explanation, it's a surprisingly straightforward plot in many ways: the core of the book is the character development and emotional beats.  

Dana does feel some  - affection, at least at first, which then turns into dependence (if only because he is her way out, both to her own life as well as from the worst of slavery in the past) for Rufus.  Her influence on him wanes, as we see him becoming his worst impulses despite an early and positive relationship with Dana.  How much can one fight against a society which says: "You can take" that which you would otherwise not be given?

We also have the interesting side-story of Dana's marriage with Kevin, which takes a (not literal) beating as well.  Although he does accept this is happening, he doesn't understand her position, her feeling of responsibility and care towards Rufus. It becomes somewhat moot, as Kevin gets separated from her and stranded in the past for, oh, you know, like ten or fifteen years, until she can call him back again. I think it was meant to give Kevin the ability to empathize with Dana from having experienced it himself, which feels very intentional - although a white man in the 1970s may have some sympathy for the black experience, it would have been far more unusual for him to be empathetic. Or perhaps that's my own bias towards the past. The Civil Rights movement would have been a recent memory for Kevin and Dana, even if Black Lives Matter would not be born for another fifty years; but Kevin has a benevolent ignorance of Dana's reality.  Although he certainly loves her, and is very worried for her (he comes up with some very practical ideas about how she can protect herself if she gets called back, haha) he has no trauma of his own, before going back. 

In the end, Dana escapes, and Kevin escapes, and we're left with the memories.  The idea of "What do we owe each other?" is one that winds its way through the book, on all sides. It's a somewhat simple book, in idea and execution, but one that has stuck with me for much longer than it took to read.

46 - A Book about Someone Leading a Double-Life

This is How You Lose the Time War

This is How You Lose the Time War

By Amal El-Motar and Max Gladstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism

By Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar 

From racist donut shops to strangers putting their whole hand in her hair, from being mistaken for a prostitute to being mistaken for Harriet Tubman, Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She's the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think "I can say whatever I want to this woman." And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity.

This book somehow manages to be incredibly funny despite just being a horrible, awful, putrid list of racist shit that happened to Lacey (and sometimes Amber, but mostly Lacey).  And recently! It's a bit like The Witches Are Coming (and that other one she did) by Lindy West, but more intentionally funny than angry.  I showed just the first page to some people last week and they cracked up laughing, but in an incredulous way. 

Although both Ruffin and Lamar are technically co-authors, and Lamar has her own voice, Ruffin does all the heavy lifting, taking Lamar's stories and then adding a wink and a nod, like, "Can you believe this shit?!" which are sorely needed to lighten the mood.  Ruffin's career as a comedy writer clearly shows here, giving it a very conversational tone, like you're just gabbing with friends and then they start busting stories out.  (I feel like "conversational tone" gets overused, but it definitely fits here).

It defies belief that these stories happened (a) to one person (b) recently!  I cannot say enough good things about the way that Ruffin presents these stories, which are truly awful.  She manages to tread the fine line of being amusing while also being educational and not making you want to go out and kick the nearest person, which is a FEAT after some of these, I swear.  

I can't recommend this book enough. Go out and read it!

 

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

 When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain

by Nghi Vo

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

 

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

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

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

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

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