Girl After Girl

Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train has been compared to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and you can pretty much immediately see why.  (I'm going to try to walk you through it with minimal spoilers, but you know, be warned.)  You've got your multiple unreliable narrators, you've got your cast of intensely dislikable people, you've got your missing person mystery that keeps unfolding into a more complicated and darker tale.  The moving parts are in place.

So you've got Rachel, who rides the commuter train to London and back every day, and at a stopping place on the track, she has a favorite couple she watches, on their deck or through their windows.  A harmless little fantasy, though perhaps she's got more invested in these strangers than it strictly normal.  It makes a little more sense when we learn that they live just a few houses away from where she used to live with her husband, and where he still lives with his new wife.  No wonder she likes to focus on someone else's house when the train stalls there.

But Rachel's life, we find out, is kind of a mess--she drinks, she has blackouts, she harasses her ex's new wife. And when Neighbor Lady goes missing, Rachel worms her way into the investigation.

Then you meet the woman she's been watching, Megan.  You find out about her "perfect" marriage and her husband and her rather run-of-the-mill but not-quite-right life.  Her secrets start to unfold, bit by bit. Her timeline runs earlier, interspersing her life over the past year with Rachel's "present day."

And there's her neighbor, Anna, who is Rachel's replacement in her old home.  She provides a counterpoint (an objective one?) to Rachel's blackouts and emotional confusion. 

So: multiple points of view.  The present and the past intertwine, and the story unfolds as we learn what secrets the narrator's been keeping from us.  Gone Girl, right?

Gone Girl was better, though. I'm not sure I can articulate why, but I can tell you a few things I've noticed here.  One, for example, is that part of the mystery hinges on missing memories.  It's not that we can't know what happened or find reality, it's that key information is hidden from us--and the character--because she can't remember.  And I don't think it's a big reveal to tell you that things start to resolve because she eventually does start to remember things.  Missing memories feel like kind of a copout to begin with, but when spontaneously getting them back (by, presumably, trying really hard to remember?) is the resolution--well, it's kind of deux ex machina, if you know what I mean.

Also, here's a big one that's bugging me: again, lots and lots of characters who are unlikable to varying degrees and with varying kinds of icky personalities.  But all three of these women are driven by the notion of motherhood--specifically, having a baby.  Rachel couldn't get pregnant; Megan doesn't want to have a baby; Anna has a child around whom her life focuses.  This book is about all the ugly, messed up ways that women obsess over babies and having them or not having them. 

It just kind of makes me want to throw my hands up in the air.  I mean, if all three of them were related to each other--if it was one pregnancy/child that the whole plot revolved around--maybe?  But it's three different women with different off-putting obsessions with babies.  And you know, I'm a mom, and I am the one at the party who is holding the baby so the parents can go do whatever they want--I lurve babies as much as the next person, and I love my son and have my own complicated relationship with parenthood.  That's not a boring topic. 

But being obsessed with the concept of babies--with the idea of getting pregnant, with the vague notion of motherhood that doesn't have to do with an actual kid--and filling your book with people whose brains (ugly, scheming, weird brains) revolve around that feels kind of reductive.  Like, not one woman in this story has some other motivation?  This isn't a book about parenting or parenthood; it's kind of about sex and suburbia and secrets, but for some reason that's all boiled down to getting pregnant. Not adopting, not parenting, not forming a specific relationship with this little person who is your family now and whom you must both command and obey.  Nope.  Getting pregnant.

It's not that this overwhelms the book.  But it's there, and it feels reductive to me.

And also?  Once they start giving the hints we needed, the right pieces of information, I immediately figured out what happened.  Withholding information till late in the game is how mysteries work, but the very best mysteries give you the information but make it hard to put together.  This one was somewhere in between.

So, not as impressive as Gillian Flynn.  But hey, I'm reading it fast and furious.  And Rachel is a very specific portrait of a person who can tell you every single thing she's doing wrong, even as she does it, again and again.  She sees the car wreck she's living in, but she can't steer away.  That is actually pretty fascinating to watch, and probably the most well-crafted part of the book.  If you ever wonder how bad decisions happen, Rachel's your go-to girl.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read the last 10%.

Space Operetta

I love a title that tells you just what you're going to get.  The best example of this was Louisa May Alcott's A Long, Fatal Love Chase, which, as Mike pointed out, kind of spoils the ending on the front cover.

But if what you're going for is truth in advertising, you can't do better than The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers.  The story of the book is one of those plucky-Kickstarter-self-published-upstart-makes-good heartwarmers.  The story in the book is pretty much exactly as cuddly and lovable.  It's one of a genre that I think of as Firefly stories, where an oddball crew of deep spacers muddle along as a ragtag family of sorts, getting into scrapes and laughing along the way.  The beginning of Rachel Bach's Paradox series, Fortune's Pawn, kind of reads like that, and I think losing the ensemble cast to focus on Devi was actually a weakness in the later books. 

But wow, do I digress.

Angry Planet starts with Rosemary, who's just been hired as a clerk on a deep space drilling ship.  Their job is to punch wormholes through subspace (or something) to create pathways between distant planets. Rosemary is running from something (but who isn't in deep space?), but the ship just got a sweet new job that will, unfortunately, involve a year of travel before they can punch their hole and get home instantly.

That's pretty much the whole summary.  There's action, but it's not action-packed.  There's a lot of incident, a lot of story, but they work as anecdotes, introducing and deepening character development; the things that happen to them don't build to a crescendo.  For a while, I expected things to build--Rosemary's secret (when we learn it) to be relevant to, say, Sissix's family life or Ohan's health situation.  But they're not; most of these things are just people living their lives.  It's episodic, and the things that happen are small and very important.

It reminded me of Hellspark (which is amazing and out of print and you should read it, you can borrow my copy), in that there was a very interesting focus on how hard it can be to live every day in a culture that is different from your own, even if you're used to it, and even if the people you're surrounded by are people you love.  Culture is pervasive, and we often don't even realize how it affects us. 

Kizzy was probably the biggest knockoff character, since she was so obviously Kaylee from Firefly.  Sissix was probably my favorite, somewhere between glamorous and maternal, and also a lizard person who I picture very much as looking like Vastra from Dr. Who (who, I'm sorry, needs a spinoff).  Dr. Chef (you couldn't pronounce his name) and his cheer in the face of sorrow; Ohan, whose pronouns are plural and who doesn't really know how to interact with his crewmates; Jenks, who I kind of pictured as a little person Naveen Andrews, I don't know why.

The ship's AI was a character, and while that storyline got a decent amount of time, I feel like it could have gone deeper.  There are a lot of places where things could have gone deeper--some cultural hurdles to interspecies dating are addressed, but I can imagine some psychological and hey, anatomical ones, too.  The moral and ethical issues around how the Galactic Commons is dealing with the eponymous small, angry planet were definitely laid out, but that was another place where the deep alienness of an alien culture could have been looked at with a finer eye, and maybe some deeper conclusions drawn.

But sometimes, you just want to read a book where good people go off and have adventures--not big or scary ones, just small ones.  You want to watch someone use paperwork to save the day (ooh, like Myfanwy in The Rook!)  Have you noticed how many of my favorite books and TV shows are getting callbacks here?  This is not edge of your seat stuff; it's a heartwarming, curl-up-with-cocoa, let's watch movies together with the characters book. And I want another one.

Sha Na NaNo

I just want to wish a good luck to all my NaNoWriMo participating friends!

Sarah Vowell, or Author Q&A

I love Sarah Vowell, as y'all might know or remember, so I was very excited to go see her read from her new book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.  We got two tickets, but Mike wasn't feeling well, so I took my sister instead.  She'd never heard of Sarah Vowell, but Vowell is funny, so I was pretty sure it was worth Marsha's time.  We ran into my friend Kris there, and it was a good reading--dry, witty, etc.

Now, you may all remember the worst Q&A I've ever been to was the last Sarah Vowell reading I went to.  It was humorously bad and kind of embarrassing (though there was a Lafayette callout there that predicted this book, which is kind of cool).  Anyway, that was more than made up for on Friday with the BEST Q&A I have ever attended.

Sarah (I'm going to call her Sarah now; we're tight like that) finished her reading and then said that the problem with a Q&A is that when you have a microphone, the only people who ask questions are the ones who are willing to walk up to a microphone, but when you don't, no one can hear the questions.  So she was going to have a special guest come up and repeat the questions into the microphone. 

And lo, from out of the crowd rose Nick Offerman, to stand beside Sarah on the podium with his own mic.  Apparently they're old friends, and since he's in town rehearsing a new production of Confederacy of Dunces, he showed up to support her.

It was hilarious.  When the questioners were too quiet to hear, he repeated the questions helpfully.  When they were full on loud enough, he would interpret them amusingly.  The question about her trips to France to research the book he repeated as, "Speak to us of cheese."  The one about the Puritans was, "Speak to us of corn."  When Sarah asked if he'd ever been to France, he talked about a trip he'd taken with his wife in which they scouted the guard patrol patterns in the sculpture garden at the Louvre so that they could take a photo of him posing naked with one of the statues.  He was charming and effusive in his love of the book, and she answered questions in her self-effacing but really smart way, and it was just delightful.  Marsha totally got her money's worth.

So now I'm not only enthusiastically awaiting my copy of Lafayette, but I have to rush out and get Paddle Your Own Canoe, to figure out what Nick Offerman writes about when he writes a book.  Poor me!

Offblog

Any hope I had of doing NaNoWriMo is really fading distantly into the background as I fail to write brief blog posts about the books I read (among other things I fail to write).

God, is there anything more boring than a blogger apologizing for not blogging?  So, new plan for the short term: little posts, mostly about comics I've been reading.

Just discovered Hexed, which is amazing and I can't wait to read the new arc, The Harlot and the Thief.  In the first book, though, Lucifer (Luci Jenifer) is an art thief with supernatural talents.  Her mentor, Val, gets her jobs, but she's also got her own past, and her own troubles.  A former client is unsatisfied with her service, and if she doesn't do some nasty things for him, Val could be in great danger.

Lucifer is smart, capable, and usually a step ahead of the game--but not always.  She's extremely competent, but she not only has flaws--she makes mistakes, even careless ones.  But she's not the only super-competent one around--I want to spend so much more time in this world.  So much so that I'm going to overlook the fact that she's in her underwear on the cover.  That was completely unnecessary, guys.

Anyway, it turns out there's a novel, too, and I'm going to try not to get my hopes too high, but I'm already very excited.  I'm also planning to read Michael Alan Nelson's Cthulu comics, because I think he might be amazing.  Let's find out, shall we?

Seriously Scary

The reason I wanted to pick up Wytches by Scott Snyder was because it takes place in Litchfield, NH, which is right next door to where I grew up; our high school served Hudson and Litchfield.

The reason it took me so long to get around to it is because the coloring has kind of a pointillist, spattered style that I found a bit confusing.  I tend to strongly prefer comics with clear, legible art; I hate not being able to figure out what's happening or who's who.

Finally, I got it from the library and started up.  It starts out kind of sad with a healthy dose of creepy. A family going through some tough times moves to a small town in New Hampshire to try to get their feet under them.  The mom has been in an accident and is in a wheelchair; the daughter had a bad experience with bullying that ended in violence.  They need a fresh start.

Some creepy things start happening around town--seeing things that seem ominous; hearing things that shouldn't be there.  It's all very atmospheric and eerie. 

And then, about halfway through?  Holy crap, the horror hits the fan.  Like, there are people and creatures and pacts and threats and people are threatened and taken.  This is about a family trying to hold together against the most terrifying, implacable forces of freaking EVIL with TEETH and it's so scary, guys, so scary.  And you never know where the enemy will come from.

This hit some serious parenting sore spots for me, which made it even more effective, and I have to say that I love and admire Sailor more than I thought I could.  My heart is kind of broken at the end, but I'm absolutely dying for the next book.

Do not read alone at night, but definitely read as Halloween approaches.  Holy crap.

Diversiverse: Love in the Time of Tinder

Welcome to the More Diverse Universe blog event! Check out Aarti's site for all the great posts from other participating bloggers!

I'm not sure if this is cheating, because I started reading this book without even thinking about Diversiverse.  But in addition to seeking out new authors and voices, it's worth spreading the word, so let's talk about Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance.


The craziest thing to me is that this book exists at all.  Aziz Ansari is a comedian and actor whom you may know from the incomparable TV show Parks & Rec. Seriously, that is the best show ever, go and watch it, and then check out Ansari's stand-up.  And then come back to this book and think about the fact that when this comedian decided to write a book, he didn't write a memoir or a humor book. 

No, he decided to write about modern romance--not as a comedian, but as a sociologist.  So he went out and teamed up with a real freakin' sociologist and just took this thing to town.  The book was coauthored by Eric Klinenberg, who is the director of something called the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU (according to Wikipedia) and author of several other books.  This is really a book about what dating is like in the modern world--with cellphones and texting and Tinder and OKCupid. 

And it's not from the point of view of a comedian, though there are plenty of laughs here.  Ansari talks about his own dating experiences, and relates stories that are familiar (if not personally--because I stopped dating before I was able to text--then through the osmosis of popular culture) and often funny. But the core of this book is real data, and the conducted focus groups and interviews and solicited information from people on message boards and basically aggregated a ton of data.

This talks about how instant communication has changed things like the wait to hear back from someone (leaving a phone message with their parents is NOT like texting); about how dating is very different whether you're a maximizer or a satisficer; about the inconsistencies between how people hope they will be treated and how they sometimes treat others. 

I listened to the audiobook, which means I couldn't see the graphs, but it also means I got to listen to Aziz Ansari tease me about how I couldn't see the graphs, which I think was a fair trade off.  The jokes were funny, and while a lot of the delivery is pretty straight, when he wants to make a point, he's a great performer.  My only complaint about the performance is that all of his quotes from interview subjects sound whiny--he sounds like he's making fun of whomever he's quoting.  My friend Noah does that when he's telling a story; even the people you're supposed to like in the story sound kind of dim.  I might be a little sensitive to that after hearing Noah quote me in anecdotes over the years.

I love pop sociology; "pop" as in "popular," but also as in "popcorn"--light, fluffy, delicious.  In the world of pop sociology, Aziz Ansari (and Eric Klinenberg) delivers.  Totally worth a listen.

Diversiverse: Creeping Terror

Welcome to the More Diverse Universe blog event! Check out Aarti's site for all the great posts from other participating bloggers!

No, wait, the Diversiverse isn't the creeping terror; it's Stephanie Kuehn's Complicit that is a creepfest of a book, in the best possible way.

Jamie's a bit of a nervous guy, and you can't blame him, because he's got problems.  The biggest one is that his older sister's just gotten out of jail, and he doesn't know what she's going to do. Cate was put away for burning a barn to the ground, an accident that killed several horses and severely injured a girl.  Jamie's nervous about what Cate's going to do.

And when Jamie gets nervous, his body betrays him.  His hands go numb, or he passes out, or loses time.  His memories are spotty; he can't remember anything before he was six, and almost nothing before he and his sister were adopted by their wealthy parents a few years later.  He has just the vaguest, distant images of his birth mother.

So when Jamie's phone starts ringing, and Cate starts calling, telling him that there are things he needs to know and to understand, he's not sure what to make of it.  We follow him as he gets closer to a girl, Jenny, at school, as he searches his past for understanding of Cate and of things he can't remember, and as he navigates school and therapy and his parents.

The sense of suffused dread that's going on here is insane.  You can tell from the very beginning that there is something going on, a lot more than what Jamie is telling you.  Jamie is the perfect unreliable narrator, because he is so straightforward.  Jamie's own confusion is enough of an indication of what is going on.  But the book still had me guessing at what the reveal would be, and I speculated my way through every possible permutation of any given character being actually dead, actually alive, or actually imaginary.

Really, I figured out the reveal well before the ending, but it wasn't one of those realizations where you then get frustrated that the book is lagging behind your understanding.  Instead, it's about watching the realizations unfold, and wondering where on earth this roller coaster is going to take you.

In addition to the aforementioned roller coaster, there is a lot of really great, meaty stuff going on here.  There are issues of class throughout this book that are dealt with in so many ways; Jamie and Cate are unique in their wealthy community, because they come from a poor, dangerous place, but now have all the privileges of their new family's status.  But they don't quite fit in, and they get trouble with a lot of people for that, in a way that makes you wonder where the loop of these troubled kids from the wrong side of the tracks being problem children started out. 

In so many ways, I felt like this was Cate's story, even though she's only in the book for a few minutes total.  Her presence looms large in Jamie's mind--really, all of his history, his memories (bot present and missing), and even the memories of others (their adoptive parents had two children who died years before) shape his life.  But Cate is the holder of the memories; this entire book is the process of Jamie figuring out what Cate knows--what she lived through and remembers, he is uncovering bit by bit.  And the more you learn about her, and the complex mess of her life and the actions she's had to take, the more you're kind of knocked over by her.

I love a book where you can look at any character and imagine how the story would look from their point of view--not just how the plot would unfold, but what angles and tangles would be added with their perspective.  This was a brilliant example of that kind of book.  And very, very creepy.

Ironically Titled

I finished the book Abandon, by Blake Crouch.  I kind of wish I hadn't.

(Got a free copy from Netgalley; this is definitely an honest review.)

I'm cramming this post out because I want to put this book behind me.  It's got a great premise that totally pulled me in: a hundred and some-odd years ago, a small mining town in Colorado became a ghost town.  Every resident disappeared, leaving behind no bodies, no clues, no indication of what had happened.  In 2009, some hikers are exploring the town.  We get the two parallel stories--Christmas in 1896, and the modern expedition.

When it comes to characters, we're starting off kind of weak.  In the 1890s, of course, we know everyone's going to disappear.  And by the time things really start happening, it becomes clear that that's not misleading--they're just all going to die.  The fact that it's dragged out and a lot of people die horribly in a lot of horrible ways, well, that's the part that makes it kind of like watching a slasher movie.  Sometimes there's blood and guts and sometimes horror and torture.  It's pretty disturbing, without a lot of psychological payoff.

In the modern parts, we get something similar.  It's straight out of a horror movie, between twists and double crosses and that moment of safety when OH NO THAT'S THE KILLER and random coincidences.  And even though you have nominally likeable characters--Abigail, our heroine, who's a reporter trying to connect with her estranged father while writing an article about the ghost hunters who are investigating the town; the ghost hunters themselves, Jane and Emmett, who seem well-intended and maybe to know some things; even Laurence, who's trying to reconnect with his daughter--there is zero character development.

Abigail doesn't start out meek and find her courage, or start out cocky and find her humility, or start out a flatlander and find her mountainous spirit.  Technically I guess she starts out comfortable and finds herself able to walk with lots of injuries, but Laura Dern's limping run across Jurassic Park to trip the circuit breaker stands out in my mind way more than the novel that I was reading literally an hour ago.

And let's talk about the details.  Abigail is a reporter, but during the two day hike to the town of Abandon, she asks no questions of her subjects.  They don't discuss their backgrounds, she doesn't chat them up.  The group talks a bit about their trip generally, but it's not till they've known each other for three days that she asks, say, "how did you get started in paranormal photography?"  She's a crappy reporter.

Really, I didn't like any of these characters.  Of course, tons of them turn out to be evil, or at least nasty, so that's deserved.  But it gave me nothing to hang my hat on.  I kind of liked a couple of the mining town residents, in an "interesting character" kind of way, but lots of them turned out evil, too.

I think I'm gonna keep thinking of things that bugged me about this book for ages.  I should probably just let it go.  The world is full of other great books to read.

The Club of Books

So non-work book club appears to have fallen by the wayside: Persis is having a baby, Molly's super busy, and Natasha got married. A summer hiatus turned long-term.

But work book club has taken up the slack.  This month's meeting wasn't our best; I think the book didn't grab everyone, so most people hadn't finished it (which I consider to be a book club tradition, but which is a first with this group of overachievers).  I was halfway done at the meeting, but I'm almost through now, so I figured I'd at least give you a rundown.

Across the Nightingale Floor is the first book in the series Tales of the Otori, by Lian Hearn. I feel like I have many things to say about it, but they're not particularly complex.  Let's see, where to begin?

Summary: when the warlord Iida slaughters a village, there is one survivor.  He is taken in by a kind nobleman of the Otori clan, who opposes Iida.  Otori gives our orphan the name Takeo and adopts him as his own son, and Takeo and his adopted father plan to free the realm of their mutual enemy.

First thought: there are only so many tropes you should be allowed to have in one book.  I think the only YA trope that isn't here is the love triangle.  But you've got the Chosen One who is Naturally Good At Everything; you've got your standard Instalove, which tops out with a neat Falling Into Each Other's Arms During a Moment of Danger.  Some of these are so sticky I'm still trying to scrape them off--it turns out that Takeo's unknown father was a part of The Tribe, which is a group of people with ninja superpowers.  So Takeo has magic ninja powers and Only He can assassinate Iida!

So, yes, dense with tropes.  Rich in tropery.  There are parts I really like--a ton of kick-ass female characters, and some delighful set pieces of Takeo using his superpowers, people you think you trust making the wrong choices.  But between the tropes, the narrative style, the stoic characters and the major off-stage plot happenings, I felt like I was kept at a distance from some core part of the story.

It led to an interesting (if slightly awkward) book club, though, with big fans and big haters squaring off.  Which is usually worth it--though maybe not so much this time.

Speaking of, though, Kris and I have decided that we should resurrect Non-Work Book Club in the new year.  It needs a better name, though.  We'll need to get on that--clearly, top priority.

Thrilling and Chilling and All Kinds of Creepy

So let's talk Lovecraft.  I have never read H.P. Lovecraft before, but it's one of those things that one picks up by osmosis if one spends enough time in certain circles.  Purple prose, Cthulu, racism, Arkham, the Old Ones, tentacle people from horrific fishing villages.  That kind of thing.

But I'd never read anything by Lovecraft, in spite of the fact that he's one of Brenda's absolute favorites, so I was interested when I saw a review copy of The Zombie Tales of H.P. Lovecraft on Netgalley, and I picked it up.  And to my actual surprise, I kind of loved it.

Surprise because I figured it was one of those things that had to be overhyped, you know?  Like, it's old, so maybe you recognize it for the precedents it set, or because you can see its influences down through the years.  But you don't actually enjoy those books, right?  The overwritten ones with interjections like "the horror!" in the middle of sentences?  They aren't actually successfully building atmosphere, are they?

But yeah, they are.  These stories are really surprisingly readable, not the rambling concatenation of fifty-cent words that mean "horrifying" that I was expecting.  Most of them are stories about generalized dread that build to a final, punchy reveal at the climax--a reveal that you've already figured out, but that still packs a bunch when it's laid bare and bald the way he does.

So let's see, which Lovecraftian milestones do we hit?  Purple prose: check, though not as much as I expected.  Cthulu: nope, not in this zombie-themed collection, more's the pity; ditto Old Ones.  There's a hint of the tentacle people in one of the stories, a delightful one about a man whose shy friend marries a woman of questionable background and ends up having his body gradually usurped (ooh, that one ended creepy). Arkham: yes, we spend plenty of time there, at Miskatonic University; the linked stories about Herbert West, Reanimator take place in that area.  Now that's a creepy one; I think I got the most creepiness out of the fact that the narrator is West's assistant, and as his doubts creep in, you wonder at how a person finds themselves involved in digging up a potter's field to try new reanimation substances.

Which brings us to racism.  Only a couple of instances here, just because it doesn't come up.  But honestly, one of those instances was literally one of the most offensive things I've ever read.  Basically, one of the corpses that Herbert West strives to reanimate is a black man who was killed in an illegal boxing match.  The way the narrator describes the body is the most outrageous, offensive thing I've ever read. 

Honestly, this is why it took me so long to review this book.  I meant to write this post a week ago, but I felt like I needed to address this, and to talk about how moments like this affect a book.  About how the fact that the book is nearly a century old would normally affect my reaction, but this is beyond the "times were different; atmospheric racism" defense.  About how to like problematic works. About a controversy that's I'm following on my Tumblr about a fanfic I've been loving, wherein the villain uses a racial slur, and how that author was failing her readers.  About social justice and all kinds of things.

But I just don't feel qualified.  So many great people are saying all these things, and I am a good solid step behind.  So I'm just going to go with how much I liked this problematic thing, and say this: there are a total of 2 racist moments in this book, one horrific and the other just icky.  There is no defense of this. 

But this book is also horrifying and creepy and atmospheric and evocative and full of meticulously crafted moments of dread.  And on the whole, I really, really enjoyed it.

Over My Head

I have a half-written post about H.P. Lovecraft, but while my opinions of the book are quite straightforward (and generally positive), and my opinions on the racism in the book are very straightforward (and holy WTF!?! negative), my opinions about how to write about those things together is not clear and I'm not up to it tonight.

But this week I also finished a charming little novella by William Ritter, a sweet little Jackaby story that's worth reading if you're a fan, called The Map.  On Miss Rook's birthday, Jackaby takes her on a little adventure.  It's slight and sweet and delightful, with all the best parts of the Jackaby stories--strange creatures and esoteric mythology and odd places, but especially Jackaby and Rook.

In this short format, their banter--which is a bit anachronistic when you're trying to build up the historical part of the historical fantasy--works beautifully.  And since the story is so small, stepping briskly through all its paces, you don't get bogged down in exposition or in trying to make the adventure bigger than it is.  Reading this, I think I would love to read a book of Jackaby stories for Ritter's next one--case files, like Holmes and Watson.  I think that would work better for the strengths in this series than a longer novel like Beastly Bones.  

So I offer you this, and I'll give you more on Lovecraft (and hey, could there be two books more different in tone?) shortly, when I feel ready to wrap my brain around Real Issues.

Middles

I'm in the middle of many things, and I've gotten out of the habit of blogging from the middle.  And to be honest, I'm not yet sure what I think about either of the books I'm reading.

Vengeance Road, by Erin Bowman, sold itself to me by promising something like Charles Portis's True Grit, which was a delightful book.  I got Vengeance Road from Netgalley, and it's definitely working on the same template--a teenaged girl on her own in the West, trying to avenge her father's murder.  It's got the language down, and I love that Kate's a practical girl, doing what's needful toward her goals.

I would say that this book is a bit more emotionally complicated than True Grit is, but it's also a bit less stylish.  Maddie's voice permeated that book, and a lot of its appeal was her vast competence, even in areas she knew nothing about (where she knew to hire the right men and manage them properly).  Maddie was distant and odd, and that's a large part of her charm.

Kate, on the other hand, is much more recognizably human.  She's practical, but not always completely rational.  This works in favor of the story, actually, because it's about the cycle of revenge, and how damaging it is, and the messes in Kate's life are a big part of that.  I guess I was expecting the story to be a bit more cleanly adventurous, rather that emotionally and ethically messy.

I make it sound preachy, but actually, this is what I love in a story--when the things that are taken as given as "good" and "bad" are thrown into question.  The tension between the real world's ethic of turning the other cheek and the great storytelling history of revenge being justice makes this a complicated and authentic story; to get her father's killers, Kate has to become a killer herself, and there's no way to do that without hurting people along the way.  This is something I wish more stories addressed, and this one really does stare that in the eye, which I admire a great deal.

But I'll admit, I feel a lot more satisfaction when Kate's using her rifle or drinking whiskey.  The more allies she gathers and complicated plans they put into motion, the more contemporary this story feels, which let me down a little bit, what with Kate's great voice, and her straightforward intent.  There's a hint of romance that feels very contemporary, and very YA, too, I'd say, and I could almost do without it.

-------------------

So this is unusual.  I got sick this week, and never posted this entry, and then I finished the book.  It makes for an incoherent review to jump in here at the end, but how I felt about this one changed as I was reading. 

My expectations were definitely for something unusual and interesting.  From the beginning, it was promising, and that's what I was feeling when I wrote my thoughts above; there was a promise of something really interesting and unusual--in terms of plot, yeah, but mostly in terms of character.  Kate is singleminded and focused and suffering badly.

But as we get further in, the story conspires to bring everything back to the mean--it's a good story, a very good YA Western adventure, but I had hoped for something more, and I don't think it was.  There's a nod at the end to how romance doesn't just magically fix everything, but even that nod kind of undermines its own point by having things, eventually, be wrapped up neat. 

The book's truly about revenge, and about how revenge makes you hard and cold, and that's lonely and not healthy.  But while the beginning had some promising treatment of some of the themes--what makes revenge seem so appealing, and how loneliness can make you cut yourself off more to protect yourself--it ended up feeling very much like a "love can heal you" kind of feeling.  There were a couple of interesting twists that felt shoved in there at the end. 

I'm not completely sure how I feel about the treatment of the Apache characters here.  While on the one hand, they are treated quite respectfully as individuals, they do fall into a strong stereotype: impassive, spiritual, threatening the White Eyes who would harm Mother Earth.  There's that magical, all-knowing sense of "otherness" that makes Liluye feel more like a prop than a character.

I liked the book, but I didn't love it.  My hopes were too high.  I guess I'm still looking for that magical Western that I want, somewhere between True Grit and Six Gun Snow White.  Rapunzel's Revenge.  There are some promising leads this fall: Walk on Earth a Stranger, Silver on the Road.  But if you have other candidates, let me know!

 

This Is the Way the World Ends

I don't track how books end up on my to-read list, but I vividly remember where I first heard of Katie Coyle's Vivian Apple at the End of the World.  It was in Rookie magazine, in a round-up of book recommendations, and I remember it so vividly because it was, at the time, impossible to find.  Vivian Versus the Apocalypse, as it was called at the time, had only been published in England, and I waited for almost a year to see signs of it around here.

I was excited to get a copy from Netgalley, but since it was a PDF I couldn't read it on my kindle, and so another year or so has gone by.  But I've cracked the PDF problem (mostly), and I joined Vivian Apple on her cross country trek in the face of the Rapture just as the sequel, Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle, hits the bookshelves.

We open with Vivian at a Rapture's Eve party; her parents are Believers and members of the Church of America, like almost everybody, it sometimes seems.  The party is a blast, but when she gets home to find her parents gone and two holes in the ceiling, she knows she's living in a different world.

Vivian and her friend Harp, between one thing and another, end up on a cross-country trip, seeking a movement of non-Believers called the New Orphans, Vivian's estranged extended family, and possibly the secret compound of the head of the Church of America, whose name is Beaton Frick.  Along the way from Pittsburgh to California, they encounter dangerous zealots trying to earn their way onto the "second boat to heaven," old friends in new life situations, and adults ranging from scary to cold to loving.

The best part of this book was Vivian herself; she spoke not only to actual-17-year-old me, but also to 30-mumble-year-old me who looks back on that 17 year old and wishes she could smack some sense into her.  Vivian is a good girl, a poster child, but always a little discontent with it.  Following the rules never quite got her what she was looking for; she's not even sure what that is.  In the aftermath of the Rapture, she starts out looking for the structures that she knows how to navigate, and only gradually does she find herself to be someone who can take action outside of the system.  This is kind of a theme in my life and my personality (no Rapture yet here), so I really loved that Vivian didn't start out as unstoppable. 

I loved Harp, too.  I love that sometimes she's the sidekick and sometimes she's the chief action-taker--you could write this book as Harp's story, if you wanted to.  She and Vivian each have moments of shining and moments of weakness, and they carry each other through them. 

I would have liked this book more, but the honest truth is, I've read too much dystopia.  Vivian's great, real, convincing--the end of the world is less so.  This book absolutely fails as process dystopia.  There are holes, and in the battle between my finely honed disaster preparedness plan and my richly experienced suspension of disbelief, the part of me that's ready for civilization to collapse walked away shaking its head. 

If only 3,000 were raptured total across the country, how do things collapse so thoroughly?  Heck, how does word get out so fast?  If gas is $14 a gallon and it costs $50 to go to Taco Bell, how come everyone you meet has a fridge full of the same food they've always had?  If the Church of America really believes that God is going to save just Americans, how does the rest of the world feel about the diseases and natural disasters that are sweeping the world?

The ending was pretty satisfying, actually--not entirely closed-ended (both in that there's a sequel, and in that there is room for belief and disbelief in the explanations for the apocalypse), but with a lot of good explanation and more to explore.  But it opens itself up to more questions--not the kind that the sequel will answer, but the kind you want to ask the author about, the kind that my mind keeps calling "holes."

I think I'd say this book is quite successful as a fable.  You can't look at the worldbuilding very closely at all or it falls apart, but if you don't look too closely, if you see the whole world as a set for Vivian to learn and love and live and grow, it's a really charming and fulfilling story.  It's the epitome of a young adult book. 

And I'm going to read the sequel; I guess I'd call that a thumbs-up.

Your October Read

I've mentioned before that Aarti's A More Diverse Universe event is coming up in October, which I'm very excited about.   There's another October reading event coming up, one that I don't usually participate in, but which is very popular: R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril.  It's RIP X this year, and it's being hosted by The Estella Society--basically your classic scary October reading event.

Doing both seems like way too much committed reading, but if you are going to give it a shot, I've got the perfect book for you.  And even if you're just doing one, or the other--heck, even if you're doing neither, you should really check out Tananarive Due's Ghost Summer.

Short stories aren't usually my thing.  I feel like you can't get at the meat of something with a short story, and I often need things spelled out for me in places where shorter fiction prefers to hint.  Anthologies tend to be uneven; collections by a specific author tend to be repetitive.  I know a lot of people who disagree with at least some of these premises (hi, Brenda!), but that's me.

But I like Tananarive Due (I discovered her during Diversiverse a few years ago), so when I saw this collection on Netgalley, I thought I'd give it a shot.  My new Netgalley rule is only authors I know or books I've been waiting for; she's a trusted author, and I was in the mood for just her brand of creepy.

These stories--I couldn't put this book down.  Every one was a little different, so many of them were moving, and some tore at my heart. They're all somewhere on the spectrum of horror and fantasy, some of them loosely connected--the mythology of one town; stages in the life of one character--others just thematically close, grouped according to these things. 

I finished this a few days ago; the ones that have stuck with me most are the ones about children.  Any horror book with children in it is going to have some creepy stuff--the survivor of the zombie apocalypse, the kid who's immune to the fast-spreading disease, the boy who gets more out of ghost hunting than he bargained for.  But the balance between the poignancy of innocence and the reality of fear and the raw simplicity of survival--these are not Stephen King's children, who embody Goodness and Innocence; they're kids written by someone who knows kids.

I think the one that upset me most was about a boy who lives in a lab, where the adults take his blood and only visit him in hazmat suits and slowly lose their hope and their sanity, as he gradually learns more and more about the world.  The first set of stories, about a town called Gracetown and some of the odd things that happen there, includes "The Lake," which I read as a standalone during last year's Diversiverse.  In this town, the odd happenings are sometimes simple and sometimes fraught; sometimes dangerous, and sometimes just the kind of thing that happens to every ten year old in town. 

I also loved that this book was often about the experience of being black.  Whether it was a primary theme (in "Ghost Summer," where a ghost hunting boy learns secrets about his town from a hundred years ago) or a part of the environment (in "Removal Order," when residents are ordered to evacuate, what might it be like to be the one who stayed?), from straightforward ("Free Jim's Mine" is about an emancipated slave and what he had to do to survive) to metaphorical (in "Carriers," the characters are isolated and disenfranchised because of their biology--not race, right?), these stories carry so many experiences and such a vision of the world. 

I loved this book.  It's one of those ones that's readable and ponderable and admirable and enjoyable.  So for October--for A More Diverse Universe, for RIP X, for that time of year when you want something vaguely creepy but not outright scary--pick this one up. 

Roomies in a Hall of Mirrors

I started Peter Cline's 14 immediately after I finished The Fold, because I found out from the afterword that they're sort of set in the same world.  Same mythology, I guess you'd say.  I'm ashamed that it took me so long to read it, when I got a copy from Netgalley ages ago.  My excuse is that I thought it was a book of short stories, for some reason, and I have to talk myself into short stories.  

I'm so glad I had this waiting in the wings, because it's just what I wanted when I wanted more of The Fold. It's got a similar structure, but what made it worth reading was a different take on the mundanities around the mystery. Which is really what I'm in it for; the actual solution to the mystery isn't really the point.

Basically, our hero Nate is cruising along in life, not really doing anything and with no real passion or purpose.  He's got a low-rent temp job and nothing driving him.  When his roommate situation ends, he needs a new apartment, and ends up hearing about this nice, cheap place available in a building called the Kovach building.  

Nate moves in.  He meets the neighbors, who seem nice.  His apartment is great and super-cheap, which he can't quite figure out.  And when he asks the super about it, he gets hazy answers.  And when he asks the other residents about it, he finds out that everyone's been wondering this for a long time.  So Nate gets curious, and his new friends and neighbors get curious, too, and they poke around at the building.  

And things start to get weirder.  

There are doors with padlocks.  There are the weird apartment layouts.  There's that one wall that's always cold.  There's the elevator that never works, with a machine room that takes up half the roof.  And there are the weird green cockroaches with extra legs...

This book is about the unfolding of the mystery, and it's all about the ride.  The end point is a ripping yarn, but it's not about the mystery, it's about the detectives, and how this oddball group of neighbors--Tim, retired and ultracompetent; Xela, the artist; Veek, computer expert; Debbie and Clive, den parents; and of course Nate--put their particular skills together to find something enormous that's been hidden in plain sight for years.

This book is another one that I've mostly cast in my head.  Xela is Riley from Sense8 (which you need to go watch right now if you haven't), only with blue hair.  I think I picture Riley with more blue highlights than just the little ones she has.  Anyway, this girl, with solid blue hair, is my mental image of Xela.

Veek is Indira Varma, who played Idris Elba's estranged wife on Luther (again, go, now, watch it) and Oberon's paramour on Game of Thrones (ditto).  Veek's a bit younger, and not like any other character I've seen her play, but she's got this tough core that covers an emotional fragility that seems just right.  Also I think she's gorgeous.

There are a ton more characters, and I'm afraid I don't have links for all of them.  But casting helps a lot, because, as I said, there are a ton more characters.

I'm not sure if I liked this better than The Fold or not.  Nate was not as interesting as Mike, in that he didn't have super-genius powers, but he did have at least a little more character development.  The wider cast seemed a bit more well-rounded, and the sense of camaraderie really made the story worth reading, I think.  This book isn't changing my life or anything, but it was a quick, fun read.  I think I'm officially a Peter Cline fan.

Committed

Busy couple of months coming up, book-wise!  I've got a couple of read-alongs set up with friends, along with an exciting blogosphere event.  This means a lot of my reading slots are (gasp!) accounted for.

Book club at work is reading Across the Nightingale Floor.  Ben's proposed this book every month for the--what, six?--months that we've had this club, so we finally gave in and picked it for him.  I haven't started it yet and know very little about it, but it seems promising.

Then we've got Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which is the sequel to The Passage, which I LOVED, in a classic-Stephen-King kind of way.  I read The Passage ages ago, but by the time the sequel had come out, I had forgotten a lot of the details in the (big, dense) first book, so I never got around to reading the second.

But now Lily's boyfriend Christian tells me that it's not a continuation, but more of a companion book/prequel, so I'm no longer afraid of the information I've forgotten and I'm excited to dive in. Lily and I are going to read it at the same time because of the intense scariness.  Maybe I'll talk Lily into co-blogging with me--although she blogs for work, so she might not think of it as fun.

Elizabeth and I were going to co-read The Count of Monte Christo this month, but I think we're going to put it off a few weeks, since we both have a lot of other books in the pipeline.  Still, that's on deck; I've wanted to read it for ages and a readalong will get me off my butt.

And then of course, Aarti's A More Diverse Universe is coming up in October!  This is very exciting; I have a long list to pick from for what to read, and I just finished a book that I want to recommend to anyone who wants to read something properly Octobery and creepy for their Diversiverse selection.  See forthcoming blog post for that one--it's really great.

And that's just the list that other people are expecting me to read.  Let's not even get into the ARCs, the new releases that I'm insanely excited about, and the recently discovered authors that I now want to consume all at once.  I am so pleasantly, painfully glutted with books and books and books and delightful books.  Picture my dreamy, sated, cat-in-the-cream smile right now.   Mmm.  Books.

More Jackaby

I don't know if you remember when I read William Ritter's Jackaby, a fluffy bit of a novel about a supernatural investigator and his spunky narrator-sidekick.  Short version of that review; rough around the edges as a novel, but unbelievably charming.

Well, Jackaby's back, as is Abigail Rook and even Constable Charlie Barker in the sequel, Beastly Bones, and my thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a review copy.

It took me a while to read this one--I started it, and enjoyed it, but the structure of the narrative was a little odd, I though.  The first half of the book was a slow burn of buildup, and for what is essentially structured as a mystery/thriller, it takes a looooooong time to get to the mystery.  There's a lot of setup--establishing new characters, background mysteries and problems--that are going to pay off both later in the book and, clearly, in whatever book comes next.  And that's great, but you can't put off the real mystery until after you do all the exposition.  That's awkward structuring.

So I read about half of this book and then wandered away. But then I found myself drawn back to it recently, probably because the tone is just right for my mood--it's fun, and cute, and funny, and adventurous.  It's got a Doctor Who vibe, in that there are murders and big world-ending dangers, but it's still mostly a family show/really light book, with soppy romance and intrepid heroines and a brilliant but socially awkward detective.

"Please try to remain calm.  If you do not remain calm, we may all be devoured ina  horrifically violent manner by that very same medieval monster that consumed your cows...Are you calm?  Mr. Brisbee?"

"He's fainted," said Charlie.

"Well that's not helpful in the least."

This is like watching a show on the CW, but that's not a bad thing.  A CW period romp about the supernatural in 19th century New England?  Sign me up!

(An aside: I have a clear picture of Jackaby in my head, and I realized a few weeks ago that the guy I picture is actually a local actor I've seen in a few plays, Lewis Wheeler.  Charlie, on the other hand, is Constable Hugh Collins from Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.  I'm all about the mental casting.)

So: charm.  Oodles of charm.  There are things about the pacing and structure that I'd change, but the second half alone was a lightweight romp, and the teasing ending--mysterious mastermind, ghost Jenny's challenge--has me perfectly primed for the third one, which I will devour with all due haste.

And, also?  Looking this up to find links shows me that there's a Jackaby novella available free on Amazon right now.  Go forth and be charmed!

Red Letter Day

Guys, I filled my kindle. 

I don't even know what to make of this.  Is it because most of the books are not directly bought from Amazon but other kinds of files converted to mobipocket format?  Is it because I have so many PDFs on there? 

Or is it just because I have SO MANY BOOKS?

I got an error message right in the middle of reading, telling me there wasn't enough memory.  Then the book closed.  Didn't happen again for a while, but then I forgot about it and downloaded a couple more books (because, me). 

Next came a message about how the system update couldn't run because there wasn't room.  At this point I couldn't open any books, so I skimmed through and deleted a couple of things I could spare--some things that I'd finished but not removed, decided not to read but hadn't bothered deleting yet, kept around because I loved them so much I wanted to look back at their covers an reminisce.  A few books that I'll embarrassingly admit I had on there twice. 

I've got it down to 615 items and 188 Kindle samples.  I believe I was at 648 items when things went wonky. 

Guys?  How much space is on a Paperwhite, anyway?  Like, is it really weird that I filled up my kindle?  And please tell me that someone can relate to the need to carry around 615 books everywhere, because you never know which one you might need to read next.

Whoo, boy.  This place where I live, it's odd, I think.  Odd, and very, very full of books.

Interstellar Origami

They always make it sound so easy to fold space.  Remember in A Wrinkle in Time, when they're explaining what a tesseract is and how you just create a fold in space, and at one point (spoiler? maybe? seriously, have you not read that?) they need to escape, and Calvin just says to Meg's dad, "Tesser, sir!" and he does?  (And also, how that sounds so silly if you say it out loud?)

But the point is, it's not that the idea of a tesseract or wormhole is too much to comprehend--it makes perfect sense, really.  It's the idea of doing this, of humans bending space--where do you grab the edges to start twisting?

In Peter Cline's The Fold, the answer is apparently a supercomputer and Science!

Mike, our hero, is a humble high school English teacher.  That's what he's chosen to be, because he realized a long time ago that his other options--which involve using his superintelligence to its fullest--had plenty of downsides.  So his perfect memory, his ability to sort and think and make leaps of logic faster than anyone else, is something he keeps tucked away.

Until an old friend who works for DARPA comes to offer him a summer job.  A really intriguing job, evaluating a scientific project that's shrouded in so much secrecy that even its funders can't get near the information.  Mike's job is to go in and figure out why this "finished" project requires more testing, and why the team has been acting kind of odd.

As with any thriller about the twisting of space and time, it doesn't pay to look too closely at the Science!, but that's to be expected in a story about instantaneous travel. I'll say here that it also doesn't pay to look too closely at how the scientists are doing their jobs, because if you want to talk about how funding works, or how experimental trials, the scientific method, or even industrial risk-assessment work, all these are also played fast and loose here.  The team is doing a lot of hand-waving, which is why Mike is sent in, but even after cracking down, the author still lets them get away with batting away some concerns like kitchen moths.

The pleasure in this book--and it is a pleasure, though maybe a bit of a guilty one--is watching Mike's mind work.  Seeing him ask questions, put together tiny clues, create massive charts in his head, and try to seem like a normal guy--try to BE a normal guy--through the whole thing is the fun part.  And if the character development is a bit flat, you're kept plenty curious to make up for it.

This is apparently Clines's second book set in this world, though the first, 14, appears to be an entirely separate story.  I actually have a copy of that from Netgalley from ages ago, but I hadn't read it yet; I picked it right up after this one, which is super embarrassing and also super satisfying--I wanted another one of these right after I finished, and there it was!

I will say, though, that as much as I'm enjoying 14, I miss Mike.  I miss watching his brain work, and I hope that if Clines does more in this world, it follows him further.  Can I call a violent thriller with  hints of Lovecraftian dreams a romp?  Because you know--this was. 

Quick Hit of Romance

Okay, I need to officially stop trying to grope blindly into the dark in search of a good romance novel.  The masses have spoken: Courtney Milan's The Duchess War will be my next romance attempt.

It's just that a novella seemed like such a good way in.  And I'd heard of Emma Locke's The Art of Ruining a Rake.  So when I saw the prequel novella, A Game of Persuasion, on Netgalley, it just seemed like a brilliant plan.  Lusty romance, minor commitment, and the series is called The Naughty Girls--I mean, this is the sexy, lowbrow stuff I'm looking for, right?

Sigh. Can't even blame the book--it's a prequel/setup for the novel, and while the blurb seemed to hint that it was a good way, in, I disagree.  Because we get zero impression of the hero--the heroine was great (although quite anachronistic in her thinking about sex; still, I can deal with that), but there was so little information about the object of her affection that I got no picture of him at all.  There was a lot about how she liked and loved and wanted him, but not one interaction or memory or personal anecdote or even good description that made him seem like a worthwhile person, or even a person at all.

A lot of the action seemed to supplement the other books in the series; apparently the first one was about our heroine, Lucy's brother.  She spends some time with his inamorata during what is probably the "misunderstandings" part of their book, and that's all well and good.  But there's a lot of Lucy thinking about going into society and caring about Roman and etc., and very little showing it. 

So, not what I needed after all.  I feel somehow that I'm letting the romance genre down.  Sigh--back to my smutty fanfiction!

Below the Radar

I spent a lot of last week reading a friend's novel and writing up commentary for her, which is not really blog fodder, because I would just be teasing you with a book you couldn't run right out and grab.  Also I was traveling.

But I'm still behind, blogwise, so let's see what's in the ole mailbag today.  Oh, here's one I read a few weeks ago that'll be tricky.

Laughing at My Nightmare, by Shane Burcaw, is a memoir that's based on the author's blog.  The author has a condition called spinal muscular atrophy, which is a progressive disease that causes him to be unable to control his muscles.  He's been in a wheelchair since he was a very small child, and he has almost no control over his body. 

Memoirs are so, so tricky to review.  You're not just reviewing a book; you're kind of judging the person, since the author and the narrator and the character are all the same.  Especially a book like this one, where it's not a writerly take on things, using the distance of time and the lens of authorship to separate then-person (character) from now-person (author). 

This is a very readable, likeable book.  Shane is really funny, and he is very frank about a lot of things while maintaining an upbeat attitude.  He's really likeable like that--the bantering between him and his brother, the jokes about his personal care routines, his clear affection and love for his friends while also discussing quite frankly that making friends is a survival skill for him, since he can't do anything for himself.  He's funny, and fun, and he even lets you see where his positive attitude is natural and where he cultivates it because there aren't a lot of other good options.  This is actually really healthy, and I found it touching and even personally helpful to read.

This kind of honesty, though, had a down side.  Shane grew up as a special ed kid, and as someone who a lot of people assume on sight is mentally handicapped.  You can't blame him for hating this, hating to be talked down to or ignored or treated like he's anything but the funny, intelligent person he is.  But in discussing this frustration, he's sometimes really mean about the mentally handicapped. 

He always puts out the "hey, I'm sure they're very nice people and it's not their fault and I don't want to be mean, but" in he name of truth, they all kind of smell like poop.  And are gross and inappropriate and he really wishes he didn't have to be around them so much.  I mean, you can totally sympathize when he's at a special needs camp or in a gym class where he's the odd man out.  But he's actually pretty disrespectful, and there's a point where he basically points out that he's never met anyone in a wheelchair he gets along with.  At camp, he hung out with the counselors, aka the cool kids.

Anyway, I found that a bit offputting.  I've worked with autistic kids, and I know he's right; if I was put into a group of autistic people and treated as though this should be adequate socialization--especially in middle school!--I would probably have felt the same way.  But again, the lack of writerly distance hurts a bit there; the sense that the middle school kid who felt that way hasn't grown up to be someone with more perspective, but rather someone who knows he's not supposed to say those things. 

So yes, very readable, very funny in a lot of places, but the voice put me off a bit in places.  But I will say, his ideas and examples of how he maintains a positive attitude in the face of a really hard and scary medical condition that controls so much of his life--that was an important and valuable take away for me.

And, because I don't use this word often enough in my blog, I'll repeat it here: poop.  Poop!

(Sorry, it's late.  Good night!)

Euro-Psych-Creepy

The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango, billed itself on Netgalley as perfect for readers who loved The Dinner.  And while I didn't love The Dinner, I was fascinated by it, so I wanted to read this, at the very least to try to figure out how I felt about this kind of book.

And it turns out that the comparison is spot on in a lot of ways, in spite of the many differences in the books. The book centers on Henry, who is a bestselling author of thrillers and has a perfectly nice life.  He's got a lovely house and a great dog and a wife he really loves.  He's also got a mistress who is pregnant and works for his publisher, and some secrets in his past.

I wouldn't say this book is as tightly crafted as The Dinner.  That's not the point of comparison.  The Truth and Other Lies follows Henry and a few of the people in his orbit--his mistress, her boss (the publisher) and his secretary; Henry's best friend, who sells fish in the village; a man who's been following Henry for years.  Each of them has their own little piece of the story of what's going on, but we have the whole thing.

This is essentially a "will he get away with it" story.  It plays out very loose, with a lot of personal situations (the secretary is in love with the publisher; the stalker was bullied as a child) that are touched on.  But the part you really care about, the place you're invested in this book, is Henry.  This is one of those stories where you kind of want the guy to get away with his secrets, even though he's clearly a bad person, just because you're watching the intricate structure that he's building so precariously, and you kind of want it to succeed, even though it's a monument of badness.

Also, Henry is affable.  I think that's what I liked best about this book--Henry isn't evil.  He isn't even indifferent to other people.  He keeps saying to himself that he's going to do the right thing, and then doing the expedient, wrong thing instead, and justifying it to himself.  This is the kind of villain I can--not sympathize with, but at least imagine becoming.  If I was going to be evil, I would be Henry evil.  Which is sad, but is also intriguing because so rarely can you see yourself in the bad guy, you know?  He's not evil, exactly; he's weak and indifferent, on a monumental scale.

The book gets off track in a few places, and it's occurred to me to wonder how much of this would seem run of the mill in Germany, where the book was originally published.  But I'm pretty sure the point where Henry nearly goes off the rails searching for the marten that's living in his walls would seem a little out of place in any country.

Still, I wanted very much to know how things ended.  And I was even a little fond of some of the characters (sadly, some of them were not the ones who survived).  An interesting book; if a low-key European psychological thriller sounds like your kind of book, this one's probably worth your time.

Nimona!

Quick shot, because I'm sure you've heard this before: read Nimona!  Noelle Stevenson's comic is delightful and you should definitely read it.

I'd never read her before; I gave Lumberjanes a shot, but it just wasn't my thing. Fun and zippy, but a little too YA and punchy, like hanging out with pre-teens on a suger high.  Which is what it was going for, and more power to it, but not for me.  Nimona, however is for me, and for you, and for anyone into whose hands I can shove it.

So you might call the setting steampunk fantasy, but it's not all that steampunk, I guess.  There's magic, and there's chemistry, and it's all mashed up and doesn't matter.  Ballister Blackheart is the most famous villain around, brilliant and embittered, scheming constantly to destroy his enemies, Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, noble hero of the realm, and the Institution of Law Enforcement that he works for.  They've got a pretty standard hero/villain balance going on--until a new sidekick shows up at Blackheart's door.

Nimona is young, eager, and really good at being nasty.  She's also a shapeshifter.  It's all Ballister can do to keep her ambitions in check--to keep her from just destroying the city, instead of trying to bring down the worst of those in power.  But she grows on him--and on us--with her vicious good cheer and clever plans.  Plus she's a shapeshifter!

So you have fun and charming and rompy.  But there's so much more here--Nimona's had a rough life, and the more we get to know her, the more we see why she's so angry.  And here's thing one to love--the bad guys here know they're bad guys, but they also have very good reasons to be the way they are.  They're not evil for evil's sake--they're standing against something that they believe needs standing against.  They're angry for reasons--ask Ballister how he lost his arm--and they're sad and scared and damaged.

And they change.  They change each other--Nimona jollying Ballister up; him reining her in.  Whenever they talk to Goldenloin (whose name, in case you didn't notice, is Goldenloin), someone comes away with a lot to think about.  And as the bigger story starts to build, you start to realize that right and wrong are relative, and that everyone's truly doing their best, by whatever yardstick they use.

This is what I love in a story.  If all bad guys were like Ballister Blackheart--well, we'd have more happy endings.  You can't argue with that, can you?