Dibble Dabble

I start in on a bunch of stuff and get distracted.  I won't say that my awesome streak is broken, but we're dialing it back to normal with a few duds among all the delight.  So, a quick spin through the thanks-but-no-thanks list, with a stop in charming-and-delightful land to freshen up in the middle.

Misdiagnosed: One Woman's Tour of--And Escape From--Healthcareland, by Jody Berger. Didn't get much past the first chapter of this one--the problem with a memoir is that the narrator and the protagonist and the author are generally the same person, and if you don't like them, it's not worth going there.  I rather like medical memoirs (though admittedly I've read more from the doctor's POV than the patient's), but from the very beginning the author just doesn't know how to handle the health care system.  She doesn't ask good questions, gets annoyed when she's given a tentative diagnosis instead of a real one, insists that she doesn't take drugs (as in, I won't take aspirin), and clearly has trouble prioritizing her health and her travel appropriately.  I understand that the system can be confusing, and that dealing with your health is scary, but she seems to bring the chaos with her, even by her own account.  Pass.

Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl.  Read this one out loud to Adam, and I was surprised at what a hit it was.  I've often heard Danny's dad mentioned as one of the best parents in literature, so I was a little surprised that the story turned out to be all about poaching--kinda criminal, plus hunting which is not always embraced nowadays.  I wasn't thrilled how the poaching was justified by how awful the victim was (Adam really liked saying "Mr. Victor Hazell," though), but it's true that it was a charming story, and Danny and his dad are just a great couple of characters.  This was just a lovely book, and Adam really enjoyed it.  I think he's old enough to follow Charlie & the Chocolate Factory now, and I'm excited to dive into more Dahl.

The Mind of Winter, by Laura Kesischke.  Whoa, nellie, never you mind.  Someone (Booksmugglers, maybe?) put this book on a list of anticipated releases ages ago, so when I saw it at the library I picked it up.  When I read the blurb to Mike, he shook his head sadly.  And I can see that--it's a thriller about a mom of an adopted Russian (adopted as a baby, now a teenager) who, trapped at home with her daughter in a blizzard, suddenly becomes obsessed with the idea that "something had followed them back from Russia."

Here again, though, we have a super unlikeable protagonist.  To be fair, that was her thing--the author was clearly writing an unlikeable narrator. But there's a difference between observing that someone is superstitious and asking "what's wrong with them?"  Your in-laws are not judging you every time they ask how you're doing.  If you're that paranoid, a) I don't want to hang out with you for a whole book, and b) I don't feel a lot of sympathy when you start to feel persecuted by something you can't put your finger on.  You clearly felt plenty persecuted before.

 So that's the round up of late.  More to come, though, because I also read a couple of interesting comics and a FABULOUS novel.

*Disclosure: I got a free advance copy of Misdiagnosed from the publisher. 

Little Gems

It's so often surprising where the good ones pop up from.  I mean, random shelf browsing has a pretty reliable 25-45% return rate (in my completely made up statistical experience), but when it comes to a category--nun books, Regency romance--a random choice is not necessarily the best way to get the job done. 

The world of Jane Austen follow-ups is a big one, ranging from retelling her original stories from alternate points of view to sequels or spinoffs of minor characters.  Roaming the aisles at the library, I saw something called A Visit to Highbury by Joan Austen-Leigh, and the author's name caught my eye.  The fact that it was actually Jane's great great grand-niece didn't actually promise a good book, but I liked the notion of the owner of Harriet Smith's boarding school having something to say.

And somehow, this book is incredibly charming.  At first I was waiting for it to get all modern--for one of the new characters to turn out to be a hustler of some sort.  But no, it's just a really nice little story, told in the form of two sisters who haven't seen each other in years corresponding.  Mrs. Pinkney is unhappy in London with her new husband, who is not sociable enough for her tastes, so takes up writing to Mrs. Goddard, the schoolmistress who is watching the events of Emma unfolding in her village.  Mrs. Goddard relates village gossip; Mrs. Pinkney tries to get to know her husband.  Mrs. Goddard has servant problems; Mrs. Pinkney befriends a young neighbor.  People are cranky and selfish and shy and whatever other flaws people have, but they stretch themselves and become better. 

This is just one of those books that is lovely.  Just lovely and charming and dear, in its small and domestic way.  It makes me very happy to be reading it.

The End, The Middle, and The Beginning

I didn't read Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists--I will add a 'yet' here, because at this point, I most definitely will--but I heard enough great things that I was pretty excited about The Rise & Fall of Great Powers.  The synopsis is pretty cool, too--Tooly was raised by a mysterious bunch of bohemians but hasn't seen them in years, when...

The Rise &a Fall of Great Powers hinges on a mystery, but it's not a mystery novel.  The story is told back and forth between three different times--1988, when Tooly is 10, The End; 1999, when she is 21, The Middle; and 2011, when she is in her early 30s, The Beginning.  We learn slowly about her life, which is unorthodox; her personality, which is charming; and her history, which is mysterious.

The strange thing about the mystery is that she's living it, but seems incurious about it; for the longest time I couldn't figure out if she knew more than I did (it didn't seem like it) or if it was a part of her character, a part of her story.  At The Beginning, she's running a failing bookshop in a small Welsh town, skimming along on the surface of things.  Her past is in the past and her present barely exists; it's like she's waiting for something.  And she is, I suppose, because she gets a Facebook message out of the past, and she ventures off to see what's going on.

At The Beginning, Tooly is ten, and she's living a life on the move.  She and Paul--fastidious, awkward, upright Paul--move to a new city each year--Sydney, Bangkok, Jakarta--for his IT job.  It's clear that her existnce is a secret, that he has no idea what to do with a child, and that there is nothing untoward about their relationship.  We are left to wonder.

And in The Middle, Tooly is turning 21 in Manhattan, wandering around, scoping people out, looking for opportunities to take to Venn.  It's unclear if she's a burglar, a con artist, a great observer of humanity, or all three, but when she talks her way into a random apartment and meets law student Duncan and his roommates, she has an encounter with "normalcy" that she's not quite sure what to do with.

I can't say for sure that I loved this book as I was reading it--I liked it a lot, and I found it compelling, definitely.  There were moments when it felt very much like a Minute Observations book, but it was saved from my distaste for that genre by a few things--1) Tooly is quite lovable, in naively cynical way; 2) the full cast of characters in each period and the burning question of how they relate to each other; 3) more "aha" moments of observation than I've literally ever read in a book.

Seriously, I don't highlight except for book club, and I was highlighting all over the place here.  The language is deceptively simple--it's not about flowery phrasing, but rather about observations that are exactly how I've thought of things but never heard them expressed.

Fogg formed opinions as he spoke them, or perhaps afterward, requiring him to ramble at length to grasp what he believed.  This made speech an act of discovery for him; others did not necessarily share this view."  Dude, that's me!  Sarah suffered from "the intractable lifelong argument between what [she] knew and what [she] felt."  Yes, I know that!  And have you seen my house?  I need to be reminded that, "eventually, you must do things with things."  Not only is that distressingly true, but the context of the phrase in the story bears all the same weight that it does in my mind--things, almost no matter how trivial, have people and memories and implications attached to them, and so doing things with them, or not, is fraught.  Or at least, to a clutterbug like me.

Anyway, the point is that this book is full of feelings I recognize, a lot, and a straightforward way of discussing them.  And so, if there are long passages in which someone putters around their apartment thinking about life and what to eat, I'm with them, because eventually I'll figure out what Sarah has to do with Humphrey, or where Venn went.

Is the ending too pat?  I don't know.  I like an ending with some hope and some completion; I'm more likely to be frustrated if something isn't neat enough than if it ties up too neatly.  But I think it's important that Tooly figure out the things that I've figured out, and so I'm glad she comes to where she did.  There's enough sorrow here for me, and even enough unresolved bits.

Finally, one other point in its favor that I'd like to point out: I tend to be really fussy about male writers with female POV characters.  This is really, really impressive.  Tooly felt like a woman to me,  not like a "person who happens to be a woman."  She is naive and tough and odd, perhaps childish, but not specifically because of her femininity.  I think you could have convincingly written her character as a male, though the implications would have been different, which says to me that she's not naive because she's a girl.  In some places, her "female speak" might have been a bit stilted--started comments with "I think" is definitely something women do, but it felt very noticeable in some places--but in most places, she just talks like someone I believe is a real person, a real woman.

So yeah, highly, highly recommended. 

(Oh, yes, Netgalley.  Got it free from Netgalley.  Sorry, disclosure!)

The Highest of High Fantasy

Is there anything more seminal than Tolkien?  Is there anything more definitive, watersheddy, than The Lord of the Rings?  I've seen the movies, I've read The Hobbit, I've tried to read the series before.  But this time--this time I am taking it on!

Today I finished The Fellowship of the Ring, an audiobook version read by Rob Inglis.  It was a great performance--a mellifluous voice, distinct characters, and he even sang the songs!  I'm incredibly glad to have done it this way--there's a lot of rambling, and I'm a bad skimmer, so I get more out of having a reader's performance to bring some drama to the more pedestrian--in this case, literally--parts of a story.

So, some observations from a LOTR newbie--well, a newbie who knows the whole plot from the movies.

(You'll have to forgive all my list-based posts lately; it's just so much easier than trying to organize my thoughts coherently.)

1) While I understand why they cut him from the movies, I was quite fond of Tom Bombadil.  I actually really liked how he spoke in verse, even when he wasn't singing.  Also, his songs are the ones Inglis performed best.  And those poor, put-upon hobbits needed a break just then, needed someone to help them out. 

2) The whole "whoops, the ring slipped on my finger in my pocket by accident" thing could have been prevented if they'd taken a cue from Lyra in The Golden Compass and welded it shut in some sort of tin.  Honestly, all they needed to do was put it in some kind of box, or tie it up tight in a handkerchief.  Anything so it couldn't be put on impulsively or "accidentally." 

3) OMG so much walking.  I could almost tell you which days they crossed hedgerows and when they turned right to go uphill and follow the ridgeline, versus turning away east to go across a small river and then back up along a lane around a blackberry hedge.

4) Related, I think this is less an adventure novel than a travelogue.  I'm picturing Bill Bryson as, say, Pippin Took, and how he would have written about the journey.  Tolkien clearly had this world fleshed out, and he was mostly looking for an excuse to walk through it.  And to tell us the words for a lot of different places in several languages.  Let it never be said that this man needed to get a hobby--dude had one.

5) Is there anything an elf can't do?  I mean, seriously, why do other races even exist except possibly to admire the cloaks and boats and armor and weapons and archery and music and magic and beauty and dignity and longevity and delicious cooking and restorative beverages and woodlore and probably their cleaning products and the aroma of their morning breath and their advanced basket weaving skills?  How are the elves not invincible?  Seriously, it sounds like it must be boring to be an elf, just wandering around being perfect.

6) OMG, so many songs.  I have been wondering if the tunes that the reader used were canonical from somewhere or interpretations that he and/or his production team came up with.  That seems like some pretty cool prepwork.  Some of them are actually quite lovely, and some are just forgettable and interminable. 

I will always have lots of patience for them, though, because of the music from Rankin/Bass's animated version of The Hobbit.  Many, if not all, of the songs are directly from the book, and I can still sing pretty much all of them by heart.  I'm pretty sure my singing is better than the incredibly cheesy orchestrations, but still--there are some things that will live on in your heart.

Anyway, I'm diving into The Two Towers as soon as I get it downloaded to my phone.  19 hours down--34 to go!

Book Club: Transatlantic

Dateline: book club, June, 2014.  After several months of wobbly meetings in which book discussion was low, the streak was broken with an excellent meeting around a book that garnered mixed reviews from our membership: Colum McCann's TransAtlantic. 

Before we get into the questions, let's first cover my own pervasive ignorance.  Colum McCann is not (as I initially thought) Cormac McCarthy, so this book is nothing like The Road.  Nor is he (as I think though), Colson Whitehead, so this book is nothing like Zone One. It also isn't, as kept accidentally telling people, Transamerica, which is an excellent and completely unrelated movie starring Felicity Huffman as a MTF transsexual woman on a road trip.  Totally unrelated to any of these things.  So my expectations were--well, all over the map, which turned out to be the wrong map.

No, this is a book about...well, I'm not sure what it was about.  I can tell you what happens--two pilots fly from Canada to Ireland at the dawn of human flight, before the Great War.  Frederick Douglass visits Ireland to lecture on slavery and raise money for the cause of abolition.  A modern politician brokers peace in Ireland.  An Irish maid makes her way to America and starts a new life.  An American woman becomes a reporter, and her daughter a photographer, and they report on that trans-Atlantic flight we mentioned before.  A young man is killed in the Troubles, and later his mother mourns him. 

These stories are tied together by characters who move through their lives--the reporter's mother was the maid, and her great grandson, long after her death, was the murdered young man.  The photographer daughter meets the modern politician; the maid met Douglass.  You can't say they're not "tied together."

And there are other ties--you kind of want them to be themes, but they're really motifs.  You want the book to be about Ireland, about the character of the country, its politics, its division, it struggles, but really, it's just there.  There's a lot of telling, and there's even a decent amount of showing when it comes to the streets and the buildings and the bushes and...just, stuff.  But I can't say I felt shown anything about the people, where the anger comes from, why the fight is going on.  The strokes were all too broad.

Almost all of the women in this book had children out of wedlock--not all, but many.  Given the time periods covered, this wasn't a coincidence.  Motherhood?  A woman dividing her life between her personal goals and her parenting?  Losing a child?  I mean, all of these happen repeatedly, but I'm not sure if anything is being said about them here.

So--either this book succeeds only on the level of observing its immediately environs with pretty, pointed language, or I don't get it.  On to the questions!

1) Two of the stories focus on characters who are/were real people.  One of them, George Mitchell, is still alive; the other, Frederick Douglass, is a well known historical figure.  What do you think about how their stories were addressed?  Did you find them convincing?  Presumptuous? Authoritative?  Bonus points if you know enough about Douglass or Mitchell to see places that are particularly accurate or questionable.

2) As I said, there are plenty of motifs in the book; parenthood, the loss of a child, race, the Ireland-American connection.  But what do you think the theme of the book was?  What points was it trying to make?  Why did the author choose to tell these stories?  How was his point (whatever that was) strengthened by the connections between the characters?

3) What was up with that letter?  Did that seem overblown to you?  I mean, a letter from a random person TO a famous person can be very meaningful for the writer, but I don't think the addressee's importance necessarily makes the letter historical, do you?  Or was there something else there that I missed?

4) Many of the central characters in this book were women, and they were all directly descended from each other.  I'm kind of impressed to see that from a male author (which seems pretty condescending of me, but there you are), but I'm not completely sure how I feel about how this was done.  All three of the main male characters are Big, Important Men who do Big, Important Things, while the women are mostly living their low-key lives.  How do you feel about the handling of female characters in this book?  Do you think the men being Historical Figures vs. the women being Just Folks is deliberate?  Significant?

It's possible that if I'd understood the book better, I'd have more questions for you.  So I guess question 5 would be: what questions would you ask about this book?  Good questions are often better than answers in situations like this one.

Twelve Is a LOT of Princesses

Fairy tale retellings are somewhere between tempting and anathema to me, and for the same reason--fairy tales rarely make normal human sense.  People do seemingly nonsensical, random things, answers fall out of the sky, and I never understand--can't even imagine--what the characters are thinking or feeling.  So I'm simultaneously skeptical and eager when someone claims or attempts to wrap an emotionally accessible narrative around one of these structures.

For some reason, the Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of my favorites.  It's probably just because my sister and I used to act it out for our little brother, repeating all our actions until each move--sleeping, dancing, sneaking--had been done twelve times.  But there's also something particularly impenetrable about this one that I think makes it very hard to tell.  I read Heather Dixon's Entwined ages ago, and in spite of its flaws I really enjoyed it. 

And so my path was crossed by Genevieve Valentine's The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, and I had to jump on it.  Twelve Dancing Princesses in '20s NYC?  Entwined meets The Rules of Civility? Sign me up!  Twelve sisters sequestered at home by their father (who had been waiting impatiently for a male heir), and their only joy or freedom is sneaking out to go dancing.  They live trapped in an oppressive house, and dancing is their only freedom. 

Okay, first I want to say that this was just such a good read.  Now that I'm at the end, especially, it's absolutely thrilling and heartbreaking and satisfying.  And if the rest of this post ends up talking about all the things that are hard about retelling the Twelve Dancing Princesses story, please believe that it reads that way because this book made me think and feel--about everything from the structure of the story to the lives of women in the '20s.

I think the weakest point of the book can be stated up front--the domineering, oppressive father is not set up as thoroughly as he needed to be.  The sense of being trapped is caught perfectly, and oppression comes through on every page.  But for the first half of the book, I could not have told you what was at stake, what was the risk.  An intimidating man, sure, but what do these trapped girls have to lose?  What's so bad about his anger? 

I can explain this--there is a big moment in the second half of the book where we become aware of what his anger really means--but I think the first half needed that impact.  We need to understand why these girls are trapped, especially as they grow older, more impatient, and more competent.  One thing the book does very well is explore the prisoner mindset--Jo, who takes care of her sisters, but at the expense of being seen as a collaborator, even by herself; Lou, whose longing to be free is stronger than the others, and more dangerous; Lily and Rose, who barely know themselves or each other--but I think it would have helped to be a bit more explicit about how many of the limitations on their options were truly external, and how many had grown only around a lifetime of being trapped.

Really, this is a story about women's secret rebellion; the story only works because the princesses are locked up.  If they were dancing publicly, legitimately, it wouldn't be an issue.  Constructing that prison is one of the big tasks of telling this story.  The Kingfisher girls' prison was well constructed, but I wasn't able to see it clearly for too long.

The other really hard part about telling this story, I think, is that twelve is really just too many sisters.  When you have twelve characters, they're a crowd, a gang.  Each one may have a name and a personality, but the fact is that a couple of them have adventures, and the rest of them are along for the ride.  This is Jo's story, which I think was a major strength.  Jo is their General, and they are obedient, but is she using her power toward the right goals?  Is she doing more harm than good?  And what has it cost her--oh, the answer to that one is long.  Really, the summary can be boiled down to that: what does it cost Jo to protect her sisters?

I'm quite impressed at how well they are all portrayed.  Right now, I can name all twelve sisters and describe their personalities--not just traits, but characteristics.  Araminta is haughty, because it protects her from her fear.  Rebecca is practical, and smart. Hattie and Mattie have each other, and that makes them both fearless and careless of people, but Hattie might be a little less fearless than her twin.  There's a wonderful point near the end where the narrative splits and follows different sisters, and this brings so much together--they cease to be a gang and become the owners of their own stories.  It's lovely to watch.

I think what I'm saying, as I write all this out, is that the second half of the book is much stronger than the first.  Really, I enjoyed the whole thing, but what it comes down to is that the second half hangs together, delivers a combination of writing and characterization and story and setting, that makes me absolutely swoon.  For the first half, I was reading a good book; by the end I was reading one I loved.

Not to Be Confused with David Bowie

Okay, first: if you're like me, when you think "Goblin King," you think of this guy:

Right?  But don't be confused.  We're talking about a book called The Goblin Emperor, no matter how many times I tried to make Maia the Goblin King in my head.  And Katherine Addison's protagonist, Maia, does not look anything like our pale, lean Mr. Bowie above.

In fact, quite the opposite.  He's the fourth son of the emperor of the elves, by an unloved and set-aside goblin wife who was married for political reasons.  Maia is short, stocky, dark-skinned, and relatively uneducated.  But when his father and three older brothers he's never met all die tragically, he finds himself thrust into a role he's entirely unprepared for, and that not everyone wants to see him fill.

This book has gotten a lot of much-deserved love around the internet.  It's a very specific kind of book, about a mannered society where form is very important and meaningful.  You'd say it was a story of manners, but it's not, exactly, because most books like that stay a bit removed from the let-down, informal internal lives of the characters. The Goblin Emperor is very much about how these social forms are isolating, but also how they are the bones of civilization.  I was reminded of reading Dune, and how the many layers of subtle behavior are parsed instinctively by the politicians.  

Maia has no one, in the world.  His mother died when he was young and he was sent into exile with a distant cousin to raise him.  This cousin was angry, resentful, and cruel to Maia, leaving the boy completely unprepared to live in polite society, never mind rule it.  When he gets to court, he's faced with problems as basic as how to live with constant bodyguards and people needing things from him and as complicated as determining whether his father's death was entirely accidental.

So I will say that I loved this book--loved the world building especially, and loved that Maia was a good character--smart if uneducated, determined to do the right thing, if not without resentments and angry impulses.  Most people, in fact, were good here, which I also liked--pompous did not equate to evil, and everyone was trying to make things work, as far as they could.  There were bad guys, but most of them thought they were doing good, one way or another--if not objectively, capital-G Good, then at least doing the best they could toward whatever end they thought was important.

A couple of things tripped me up in the book--one was the language, which was very cleverly used, but got away from me at times.  I completely lost track of everyone's name, entirely, especially since they all had first and last names and titles, and they were called different combinations of them through the book.  I think Csevet is the only one I was able to keep track of, because he had the fewest syllables.  There were absolutely points where I had no idea who was on stage for pages at a time, till someone would say something military or religious, or you'd get a "she" thrown in and I could place them.

Also, I think the middle sagged just a little.  It's not that I ever got tired of the character development, or that it ever stood still.  But I realized recently that one of the things I like about stories is watching people solve problems.  This was the problem I had with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia--not a lot of problem solving--and I think that The Goblin Emperor had a lot more information gathering, a lot more passive preparation for problem solving, than I wanted.  I wanted Maia to take some kind of haphazard control of his life earlier than he did.  By the end, everything was where I wanted it to be, but it took Maia a little longer to get into the right headspace than I wanted--I'd rather have seen a few more fumbling efforts on his part, rather than his very slow movement toward true ownership of his life. 

I will say, though, that I'm really disappointed that there probably won't be a sequel to this.  It doesn't need one--we are left at the beginning of a golden age, you can just tell--but I wish I could spend more time with Maia, his bodyguards, his betrothed, Csevet, and the rest.  I wish I could see the great, confident man Maia will become.  That's a pretty great place to leave your feelings about a book.

Wonder Love

R.J. Palacio's Wonder came out a few years ago, and as usual I didn't get to it till long after everyone who told me how great it was.  I do listen to you all--I really do!  There are just so many great books out there.

In a lot of ways, it's a very simple story--a boy with severe facial deformities attends school for the first time.  Auggie has been home schooled through fourth grade, mostly because he's been in and out of the hospital for various surgeries. 

But now, in fifth grade, it's time for him to go to public school.  It's nothing more or less than you would expect--a combination of stares and avoidance until people get used to him, some people being nice, some being polite, some being mean. 

I think the amazing thing that's going on here is the perspective--in a few different ways.  First, the importance of peer relationships at 11 years old is given just the right emphasis.  Some books will get you swept away with how vital your social standing is to your overall quality of life at that age, and it's not untrue, but it's also not untrue that a couple of jerks don't have to ruin your life--or they can, if they put their minds to it--and that a loving family can carry you a long way through rough social waters. 

The other cool thing is that the story is told from various points of view.  Auggie gets more time than anyone else, but two of his friends, his high school-aged sister, and his sister's boyfriend all get chapters to tell their perspectives, and that is absolutely invaluable.  Because being Auggie is hard, and complicated, but knowing Auggie is life changing, too, and not without its own complications.  And the book portrays that beautifully.

Then recently, I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of the new short, The Julian Chapter.  Julian is the "bad guy" of Wonder; he does most of the teasing, and any deliberate meanness pretty much originates with him.  I'm always interested in the book from the mean kid's point of view, but it's not that I expect a lot of new insights.  Mean kids are mostly angry and scared and traumatized, but they've turned that outward.  Lauren Oliver did a great job telling that story in Before I Fall, and it's going to be tough to top that one.

But I can't be surprised that Palacio brought the same humanity and balance to Julian as she did to all her other characters.  Even Julian's mom--who photoshopped Auggie out of the class portrait--is treated with care and respect.  And Julian's combination of denial, panic, and simple selfishness is so...understandable.  All the bad guys here are people I'm just a jot of self-awareness away from being, all the time.  Even Julian's "redemption" is well-earned.

I think what R.J. Palacio brings to this set of stories is the true idea of loving thy neighbor as thyself.  You don't love yourself the same way you love other people.  You love yourself through a deep awareness of your flaws, with your heart always open for the forgiveness that you always need.  A book full of struggling, non-boring, good people is a rare find; I wish I could read this one for the first time again.

Finger on the Trigger

I have no recollection of why I requested the ARC of I Am the Weapon, by Allen Zadoff.  At first glance, it really doesn't seem like my kind of book, does it?  Heavy on the YA, kind of violent, romance-y.  But then, if you make a list of the things I do look for in books, we do hit all those items here: how-tos, problem solving, extreme competence, and characters who find their boundaries tested.

(Also, when I was a teenager I dreamed up a story about juvenile assassins, so I'm kind of attached to the premise.)

I'm generally skeptical about assassin books, because it's one of those things that sounds all dramatic, and sure, it probably leads to some adventures, but really its practitioners are unlikely to be lovely people.  Being a killer has an exciting ring to it, but I don't trust a lot of books to make this as complicated as it needs to be for the premise not to be kind of depressing and offensive.

This book, though, grabbed me tight and didn't let go.  I gulped it down, and it's made for that--the first person narrator addresses the reader in spare, practical prose.  The competence is finely honed, and his humanity is hardly in evidence.  He's a tool, a weapon, and that gives you both the dramatic adventure that you want and the cold heartlessness that you need to convince me to follow along.

The narrator is, I think, 17, and he's been an assassin for several years--ever since his parents were killed by his best friend.  He works for a mysterious organization, and he believes that he's doing good, though that belief has little to do with his day to day life. 

He's highly trained at fitting in as a teenager, and I think that's one of the most entertaining aspects of the book--watching him carefully fake being a normal kid, all the while watching his back, knowing that he could take out everyone in the room before they knew what hit them.

Of course there's a girl, and she gets in the way of the mission--this could have been cheesy, but it's handled really well, because it's not about instalove--it's about interest, fascination, and something that clicks--something about the chain of events has him thinking about his past and his personal history, and he's off his game.  The book did not go where I expected, and for a YA book that mostly takes place in a high school, that's really amazing.

Now I'm waiting for I Am the Mission, the follow-up that comes out in June.  This was a great hidden gem that I really just lucked into--seriously, so far 2014 is a really wonderful reading year for me!

Asia, Rising

Book club last month (my god, I'm behind) read Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which had a lot of buzz around it this year.  It seemed like an excellent book club pick--an interesting setting, a clever premise, good writing.  But somehow, none of us really had anything to say about it.

The structure of the book is that of a self-help book, and each chapter has a title that is a piece of advice.  Because of this, it's told in the second person, which is an incredibly risky thing to do but is handled quite well here.  It's the story of a boy growing up in poverty who hustles and eventually runs a large, successful bottled water conglomerate in some unnamed, presumably Southeast Asian country. 

Why didn't we have much to say?  Why didn't it stick with me very much?  I think because it fits that "literary" category, which is that it's a slice-of-life book.  While that life is very different from mine, making this WAY more interesting than a similar story about a North American bottled water magnate, it's still about the emotional experience of living in the world.  It's about being young, hustling, wanting more than you have, being afraid, growing old, and dying. 

I felt like what was missing here was problem solving.  I wanted the characters to be challenged or tested, but that's not what this book was about.  As Jenny says at Reading the End, "I like books in which principles and values are challenged by a changing reality in interesting ways and the holders of those values have to figure out what to do about it."  I wanted to watch them sort things out, but any real situation-handling or problem solving that they did was offscreen, between sections.  We saw only glimpses, snapshots of the results.

Though we didn't really have a discussion, I'm going to frame this with discussion questions, just because that's what I like to do for the book club books.  I really should start doing this before the meeting; I think it might help a bit.

1) Do you think the self-help conceit added much to the book?  Do you think it affected much of anything outside of the first page or two of each chapter?  Did you enjoy the openings of the chapters?  Find that they fit with the rest of the book?  Oh, let's just say it: these might have been my favorite parts of the whole book.

2) How did you feel about the parts of the book that take on points of view besides "yours?"  Did they seem to be forced into the structure of the book, or purposeful asides from the author? 

3) Did it seem weird that the character's behavior toward his wife was so notable weak?  What does it mean for a second person book when "you" are behaving in ways that you don't approve of?

4) Do you notice that I'm mostly talking about the writing style?  Is there anything to say about the story?  I'm trying to think of questions, but none of them mean anything.  What did you think of the father?  Did you miss the sister when she went off?  Were you embarrassed for the main character when he showed up on the date in his tacky new clothes?  What did you think about....?

Really, this is pretty sad.  I don't have much, even thinking about this months later.  Has anyone else read this book?  If you have, do you have any interesting questions you'd bring to a group discussion?  Please, help me.  I'm fading fast here.

Man, we should have read Harry August for book club.

Yes, I'm Still Into Zombies

So shoot me.  I know, it's past its apex.  And even my fascination has run a bit thinner--I've gotten much more discerning about my zombie media consumption.  But the best zombie stories are really empty world stories; they're about living on the brink of annihilation, in which everything familiar has become a threat, and there's something hypnotic about this notion that I don't know if I'll ever really get all the way past.

And that is all to the good, because along comes M.R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts, and after reading the free five chapter preview on Amazon, I sat on the edge of my chair and waited...waited...waited for it to be available in the states.  But then I lucked into an advance copy, and the rest is (or shortly will be) history.

Oh, I hate doing this part of the review, where I try to tell you the premise in a way that's interesting and catchy--I'm not a blurbologist.  Melanie's world is limited to classes and her cell, teachers, other children, and soldiers.  Something's off about it, but you figure out fairly quickly what's going on--civilization has mostly fallen, and we are in a military lab trying to cure the disease that turns people into hungries.

Melanie is crackling smart, and patient with her very restricted world.  She loves learning, and she especially loves her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau.  Her story is the story of a little girl who has nothing, but loves the world anyway, and it's incredibly touching, even after you establish that there is something deeply amiss about this world, and even about Melanie.

This book... this book.  It's about how tragedy hones you down into the essence of yourself. It's about how passions can become obsessions, and how one person's collapsed remains of a world is another's new opportunity. Sure, it's about what it means to be human, but it's also about what it means to see someone as human, which is another thing entirely.

Plot-wise, mostly it's a traditional British Walking Adventure, though, making our way across a destroyed British landscape.  The walking part has been hit or miss for me historically, but it's done well here, and the post-apocalyptic landscape is a very solid example of the genre.  But what makes you--me--love the book is Melanie, Justineau, and Parks, and how you come to root for each of them.  Even Caldswell is intriguing and fascinating and...maybe admirable?  I'm not sure I'd go that far. 

But I can't put the book down, which is everything I wanted it to be.  I highly recommend grabbing the Extended Free Preview (which is listed as the Kindle edition on Amazon right now).  I think that's all you need to get how I feel about this book.

If I'd Known Then What I Know Now

The life relived is a thing these days, I think, like vampires or zombies.  Kate Atkinson's Life After Life did it in a literary fashion; Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August has a different spin that is both more compelling and more explicitly philosophical.

Harry August lives his life through, and when he dies he is born again--in the same year, the same place, to live the same life over.  He is a kalachakra, and after going through the usual first-few-lives rough spots--thinking you're crazy, getting all philosophical, wondering if you're the only one--he learns of the Cronos Club, a group of people with the same gift/affliction.

Each of them lives their life in a loop, and they meet repeatedly during the overlaps.  They're libertines, researchers, adventurers, and philosophers.  But something else is happening--the future is changing, and Harry needs to figure out why.

This book sounded intriguing, which is why I picked it up (disclosure: I got an advance copy from the publisher for review).  Then I read the Book Smugglers' review at Kirkus, which was kind of mediocre, so I put off reading it for a bit.  But when I did pick it up, it drew me along almost seamlessly, and I couldn't put it down.  

Groundhog Day is an apt comparison.  Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall also came to mind.  But unlike so many other books structured around this premise, this one was really an adventure/mystery type of story.  Most of these other repeated life books are about trying to get it right, trying to be a good person, or trying to find the meaning of life.  But when that comes up in this novel, it's somewhere between a sideline and a McGuffin. 

Of course, these long-lived people who are so different from the rest of us wonder why they live and what it means.  They mostly don't wonder, though, what they should be doing with their lives.  Each of them sorts that out for themselves, to whatever extent it's possible.  Some pursue knowledge as the source of understanding, some pursue pleasure, since they can.  Some work to do good for us normals, while others work to help other kalachakra.  The answer to the book is not the answer to the great mysteries.

The Book Smugglers review speaks of August's detachment, and they're not wrong.  That didn't bother me, though--it seemed like a scientist's account of the events.  The first half of the book is mostly given over to learning about how it works to live this kind of life--how you manage childhood with adult memories, how the Chronos Club communicates, the risks and rewards of living multiple lives.  I love this kind of detailed layout of a complicated system, and it's done very deftly here. 

The adventure picks up in the second  half of the book, where Harry has discovered the problem and is trying to sort it out and solve it, and I won't spoil that, but I will tell you that it trots along and keeps you rolling.  There's a bit of a slow spot in the middle between the two sections, where we've learned all about kalachakra life but we're only just starting to suspect the danger, but that lag passes pretty quickly. 

Okay, my ONE big complaint here?  There's a framing element to the story, a premise that it's being written as a letter to someone.  That only comes up in a very few places, but when it's revealed at the end, it doesn't make sense.  I just feel that if you're going to use a framing story like that, it has to make sense, and this doesn't.  To hide the identity of the letter's recipient, the author has structured a letter whose writing makes no sense.  It doesn't come up enough to be a big problem, but it's kind of annoyingly careless for such a tight, controlled writer.

I think this could be a very interesting book club book, if you wanted to do something lighter and really engaging.  There are a lot of good things to discuss--the relation between science and morality, the perils of immortality, the value of an immortal life vs. a mortal one, what you'd do if a loved one told you he was immortal and had lived the same life over and over again, the role of fatherhood in the story, the notion of forgetting as death.  Not really the direction my book club would usually go, but I kind of wish I had them to discuss it with.

Also, now I'm going to look up who Claire North is (I believe it's a pseudonym) and find her other books!

Swooning with Pleasure

Okay, now we're starting in on the backlog of books from my hiatus.  Unfortunately, just limiting myself to the ones I really want to talk about, that's still an awful lot of books, and as you all know, I'm much worse at writing about books I read a while ago.  Still, I have so very many things to say here!

Guys?  Guys.  Have you read Fortune's Pawn yet?  Have you read Honor's Knight?  If not, you should go out and do that, because I can now definitively say that the trilogy delivers from top to bottom.  Rachel Bach's Heaven's Queen gave me everything I wanted from Devi Morris, the phantoms, the Eyes, Caldswell, Rupert, and even the Lady Gray.  My only complaint is that there wasn't nearly enough of the secondary characters from the first book--I wanted more Nova and Basil and Hyrek.

We start out right where we left off last time--Devi and Rupert on the run.  They spend a little bit of time scrambling around, which is much more about being in love than getting anything else done, and I have to say it's the weakest part of the whole series. 

I just don't have strong feelings for Rupert.  There's a lot of telling instead of showing abut how attractive he is and how connected she feels to him.  Especially considering that I'm fully capable of falling hard for a literary character--hell, I'm half in love with Devi--Rupert just doesn't give me much to work with, and consequently the little period of sweet tranquility they experience just kind of drags, and everything that's supposed to feel all teamwork-romance-bliss is just kind of boring.

But, you know, it's not that bad.  The story moves forward, there are some complications, and when they come up with a plan and start to execute it, things take off.  Then you get what you want from the rest of this series--you find out about the phantoms, and Devi figures out her infection, and everyone is taken captive and the lelgis want to kill them and so do the Eyes but Devi outfights and outclevers them until she brings the whole system DOWN and saves the world and everything. 

Wait, were those spoilers?  Come on, you never though it wasn't going to end well, did you? 

This was a romp--if the love had had me convinced, it would have been the perfect book.  As it stands, it is merely an incredibly satisfying and ass kicking book that makes me want to read everything else Rachel Bach has ever written and also possibly to meet and be BFFs with Devi Morris. 

Highly recommended.

Buffy vs. Angel: What Am I Doing Here?

Okay, I'm so far behind with these posts, the guilt is overwhelming me.  I need to just write something, so we'll start with an easy one and just kind of blather about Buffy, because I can always do that.

For example, I was listening to the soundtrack of Once More with Feeling on the ride to work today, and I STILL have to fast forward through Giles's song, "Standing in Your Way," because I will never be not enraged about him leaving.  There are so many things wrong with that.  I think I've come the conclusion that it's a writing problem--there's just no way it's a realistic thing for a person to do.

But even knowing it's the fault of Joss Whedon or whoever was writing the show at that time, I still blame Giles.  Because yes, a 20 year old who's just been through a hugely traumatic experience right after losing her mother should totally be standing on her own two feet.  What the hell kind of a person does that?

Okay, but I'm here to talk about the most recent updates to the Buffyverse, namely the conclusion to Season 9, The Core, and the last volume of Angel & Faith, Death and Consequences.  (There's actually a more recent volume just out, but I haven't read it yet.  Waiting for it from the library!)

Death and Consequences comes first chronologically, so we'll start there.  Here's the thing--this run of A&F is better than Buffy is right now.  It's well-written, neatly balances the bigger story arc (Angel tries to bring Giles back to life!) with the individual stories (Faith has it out with the London slayers who hate Angel! Drusilla's around! Family issues!), the character work is great, the writing is funny.  The stakes are worth it, the struggle is hard, but I don't know how it's going to turn out.

But I still hate Angel.  Hate him.  Christos Gage (writer) is trying to make me not hate him, but I wasn't a huge fan at any point in the story, and after Twilight, I just can't.  I can't tell how much the story is retconning and how much I just missed the first time around.  Supposedly ameliorating tidbits--like Angel was planning to bring everyone to the new universe when the old one perished, or he was possessed by Twilight, not under his own power--are dropped throughout.  But they're a way of dodging what seems to me like the most interesting thing about the whole Angel situation, which is that he made a choice to let there be destruction in the name of what he considered a greater good, and he was wrong.

By taking that back, by making him a victim instead of a perpetrator, it seems like an easy out.  It's too hand-wavy.  But at least the Giles part is real--he was clearly possessed when he killed Giles, but he clearly blames himself for it (because he let it get that far--which implies that he WAS acting of his own volition!).

This is a screed already.  I apologize.

Anyway, The Core was a great ending for Season 9 of Buffy.  The Scoobies in action together, a resolution to the exhausting, drudgy problem of the season, a big bang for a couple of important characters, some sisterhood stuff, good people making bad choices and having to live with them--everything you want.

Oh, yeah, and Spike!  And not angsty Spike--the Spike who was Dawn's unlikely protector in Season 5.  I have an enormous soft spot for Spike--soft isn't even the word--but he's a hero, and it's nice to see him acting on that a bit.

He was actually in Death and Consequences, too, and while he still gets played for some laughs, he also gets to be a hero, which just seems right to me.  I mean, he's the only known case of someone UNVAMPIRING himself, specifically so he could be a good guy.  Yes, he's snarky and not all that bright, but he's a doer, perceptive and loyal to an almost unhealthy point.

Oh, god, this has gone beyond screed.  I'm just ranting.  I'm going to quit now before I start linking to fanfiction.  But I want to throw in a link to this review from the Nerdist of the beginning of Season 10, which, first, has me really excited, and second, captures my feelings about the progression of the comics really well (along with my desire to see what a 30-something Scooby gang is up to).  Buffy 4 Ever.

Honey Bunches of Books

Hiatus means backlog, and that means mini-reviews!  It's too bad, too, because I had clever titles for these reviews.

Let's start with Moral Ambiguity, Part 3: Not That Ambiguous.  Because I was on a little moral ambiguity roll back there, and Not a Drop to Drink, by Mindy McGinnis, fit right in. 

Lynn lives alone in a world where you guard what you have closely--especially water.  Since her mother's death, she's on her own in protecting the pond that keeps her alive.  She's never exchanged more than a handful of words with anyone but her mother in her life.

But when she encounters a wandering family who can't take care of themselves, she agrees to take in their five year old daughter until they can get back on their feet.  Lynn's growing connections to the people around her--to fierce, fragile Lucy; her very pregnant, very angry mother; her young, helpless uncle; and Lynn's own longtime neighbor whom she barely knows--change how she views everything.

Their world is full of danger, and when the time comes to protect themselves, Lynn's matter-of-fact ability to do what needs to be done is vital.  This is where the post title comes in, and what I think made this story so good.  Lynn was raised by a hard woman, and her values are frontier values.  You care for yourself and your own, you don't let yourself be taken advantage of, and you take action when it's needed.

The other people in the story are more "civilized"--they come from the city, where the rule of law and the structures of society remove a lot of the decision making from life.  I've always thought it was interesting that this invisible thing called civilization--the formal structures like police and roads, and the informal ones like the social contract and neighborhoods--really hold up a lot of our lives.  There are a million things that you hardly think about that go into keeping the world running, and when you remove the automation from those things, the bare machinery of humanity is exposed.  When do you kill a man who is going to come and steal your water?  When he's hurt you?  When you're sure he's coming for you? When you've seen him hurt someone else?

Lynn's internal barometer is solid--she knows right from wrong, and she doesn't argue with herself.  The lines that she will and won't cross are not where ours might be, but they're all the stronger for it, and I think that watching Lynn grow without compromising herself was the most interesting thing about this book.

Next, Is There Life on Maaaaaaars?  Yes, there is--Mark Watney is his name, and he's been left for dead when the third manned mission had to evacuate early in extreme weather.  He's Andy Weir's The Martian, and he's a smart, cheerful, ingenious fellow who can make science fun! And lifesaving!

So Mark's stuck on the planet with all the supplies for six people to spend one month on the planet.  The rest of the crew is en route back to Earth and doesn't know he's alive. The communication equipment's been destroyed, so he's on his own.  His only hope is that the next mission is scheduled to arrive in four years.  Now he's just got to live that long.

This is a science-heavy book.  It's the uber-how-to.  It's a competence fetishist's dream.  Mark's going to run out of water in a few months, so he has to figure out how to turn hydrogen and oxygen into water.  The next mission is going to land on the other side of the planet, so he needs to figure out how to get to the other side of Mars.  Seriously, could you get to the other side of the US if the outdoors was a vacuum?  No?  Me neither. 

This is not a psychological study of a man alone.  This is handbook for survival.  Food, shelter, resource allocation, problem solving.  The positivity was Capraesque, but that's what made it so good--it wasn't about how awful people can be, or how hard it is to be human.  This is man vs. nature in its purest form, and you know who wins?  SCIENCE!  Science proves how freaking awesome it is, and you will wish you knew more about chemistry and engineering when you are done with this book. 

Seriously, this has been a great book year.  I'm totally on a roll.

High School Highs & Lows

I read a lot of YA, but I read very, very little that takes place in high school.  Most of it is fantasy (magic school?  assassin school? I'm in), and some of it is sci fi, and some is realistic, yes, but it's not about the small, fishbowl universe of high school that seems so incredibly important when you're in the middle of it. 

But I picked up Philip Siegel's The Break-Up Artist from NetGalley anyway.  The premise was intriguing--Becca thinks high school relationships are a tool of the social hierarchy ever since her best friend ditched her for a hot boyfriend and a huge jump up the social ladder.  She's developed a lucrative business as the anonymous "Break-Up Artist," and will split up any couple in school for $100.

I was hoping for some sharp snark and cynicism, but what I got wasn't that--it was much more rich and complicated.  Getting ditched by her best friend, Huxley, three years ago threw Becca off and made her seriously cynical.  When her older sister's fiance left her at the altar more recently, it became perfectly clear that love is a joke, and that it's all about social climbing, securing the boring suburban life, "winning" the game.  The fact that Becca's current best friend, Val, is desperate for a boyfriend and that her parents seem to be disinterested roommates just seal the deal.  So when jilted best friends and jealous exes offer her money to end relationships, Becca feels like she's doing the world a favor.

But when her toughest job offer comes in--break up the school's sweethearts, her former BFF Huxley and captain of the football team Steve--Becca starts to find herself looking at the difference between lies and illusions, including her own.

I have no idea if everyone is going to react to this book the same way I did, but I imagine I'm not the only one out there who was pretty much entirely out of the social scene in high school--dating was not something that had anything to do with me.  But more than that, I related to Becca's experience with Huxley.  I got ditched by a best friend at the end of middle school (not for a guy, but for more popular friends), and it messed up my sense of friendship and of self-worth for at least a decade after that.  Not, like destroyed me--it destroyed me for a few weeks.  But I definitely believed that I was not really a good catch as a friend, and that you couldn't really trust your friends to stick around, for a long time after that.  I believed that I was someone who cranked through friends and couldn't have long-lasting relationships.

So the fact that Becca has this very messed up view of the world because of what happened to her just really touched me.  And the funny thing is, there's a level on which she's not entirely wrong--I mean, high school relationships are for the most part, not about true love forever.  They're about learning yourself and making adult connections,  hormones and romance and social roles.  Sure, there are real people involved, and some people marry their high school sweethearts, but it's not so common that a little cynicism isn't a valid approach to the issue.

But in the crazy swirl of gossip and true love always and PDAs in the hall, can you blame Becca for taking the grain of truth that is "most of this stuff that all these kids are so worried about is bull" and following it way to far to "all these people are deluded and romance is the opiate of the masses?"  It's such a natural progression, and such a sensible conclusion reached so wrongly, and such a lot of tough stuff that she's going through that watching her untangle the mess--and watching her own high school hormones lead her into some bad decisions herself--is really, really satisfying.

It's amazing to me that this book exists--a book about teenagers who act like teenagers and make a lot of stupid and cruel decisions, but which makes sense to me as an adult, and is really satisfying on that level.  Also, it's a Harlequin Teen book written by a guy, with a female narrator that I find totally believable.  This book is a freaking unicorn, people.  Thumbs up.

Bohjalian One-Two: Nuclear Homelessness

When you have an author you like and then you read too much of him, you can get burned out.  I thought I was burned out on Chris Bohjalian, but either I had a bad run or the burnout has passed, because I just finished his newest book Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, and reading it was a really good experience.  Hooray; we're back in business!

Emily Shepard is a pretty normal girl living in northern Vermont--kind of an underachiever, a bit of a wild child, but mostly in a standard high school parties-with-beer kind of way.  And it's not too surprising--her parents probably drink a little too much themselves, and fight a little too much.  Northern Vermont isn't for everyone, but it's where the job is; Emily's dad runs a nuclear power plant.

Then one day, everything goes figuratively up in smoke (literally it's more of a meltdown).  A stormy autumn flooded part of the plant; the town is evacuated.  Emily finds herself with no parents, no connections, and a last name that is synonymous with "drunken screw-up who destroyed a community."  She walks away from the evacuation center, and keeps on walking.

Bohjalian writes Issue books--each one takes an event around some topic and brings you the points of view of different characters, different aspects.  Midwifery, holistic medicine, interracial adoption, transsexuality, animal rights. Here you might think you were getting the book about nuclear power, but really you're not--that's not what's explored here at all.  This is a book about a homeless teenager--someone who starts out pretty much fine, but a combination of impulsiveness and a bad situation and suddenly she's doing drugs, shoplifting, cutting, and selling sex at the truck stop for cash.  Emily is a smart girl, but she's a teenager who can't always deal with her own feelings, and when her situation falls apart, she follows very quickly.

It's about how those little decisions get made, what friendship and family and safety look like when everyone around you is a mess.  Why do you walk out of a warm apartment full of sad, stoned kids onto a winter street and never go back?  How much of the mess is about the past and how much about the present?

The story is not linear, which I think is a huge strength.  Sometimes you'd get glimpses from multiple points in time on the same page.  The structure of the book is Before Cameron and After Cameron--a young runaway Emily takes under her wing--but you learn hints of everything.  You know someone is going to leave before you even meet them; you know things will fall apart before they even come together. 

The structure just makes sense, not only from an emotional standpoint, but also from a pretty practical one--life on the street is a jumble of events and people and problems.  They happen in order--the order is never lost--but really, they relate to each other in constellations around issues, and around Emily's attempts to come to terms with her past, her present, her parents, and herself.

I'm really glad to enjoy a Chris Bohjalian book so much again.  Someone said I should read Skeletons at the Feast, and I really think I'm going to now.  My streak continues!

Note: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

Dallas vs. Chevalier

I had the absolutely bizarre experience of having 26 hours to myself this weekend, and I suspect no one is surprised that I used it to read a bunch of books.  One of them was Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, which I'd been pretty excited about.

I think part of my excitement was that a mainstream historical novel had caught my eye.  I do read an awful lot of speculative fiction. Another part was the Quakers--love the Quakers!  Love most books about religious people wrestling with real world problems, actually--it's not so much about the spirituality as about how processing the world might be different if you have a firm set of rules that you're starting with, however you feel about them.  Anyway, it's an interesting time period, from a point of view I didn't know much about, and I was excited.

In retrospect, part of the appeal was probably that the description of the book brought Sandra Dallas to mind.  I really should read more Sandra Dallas; I have a whole backlog of them.  (Including one about Mormons!)  But I think that the idea of a Sandra Dallas type book with the literary cachet of Tracy Chevalier (does she have literary cachet?  Or am I just remembering that one big Girl with a Pearl Earring moment?) really got my hopes up. 

In the end, I was wishing it was more like a Sandra Dallas book.  I ended up feeling very disconnected from most of the characters, and not particularly emotionally invested in their fates.  I liked the details of living in 1850 Ohio, especially coming from a bustling city in England--milliners, dairy farmers, crazy liberals in Oberlin.  And I can't say I didn't like Honor Bright, the story's heroine.  I just didn't really connect with her.

When Honor's spunky sister decides to move to America to marry a man she  hasn't seen in years, recently jilted Honor--pretty much the definition of non-spunky--makes the most spontaneous decision of her life to join her.  A month of harrowing seasickness convinces her that she will never be able to return to England and is stuck in America.  Halfway to their new home in Ohio, her sister dies suddenly of a fever.  Now all Honor has to look forward to is a never-to-be brother-in-law in a place she wasn't all that keen on going to in the first place.

Honor (and her family, and her future community) is a Quaker, and in 1850, this often means being in the middle of the slavery question.  I think the political angles of that question were quite interesting, and the fact that all of the Quakers appear to feel differently on the subject was also nicely complicated.  But Honor is so reserved, so distant from everyone, you really don't get to know anyone in this book.  Everything is seen from the outside, and I felt very detached.

Then there's Donovan, the charming slave hunter who crosses Honor's path repeatedly.  This is a Jordan Catalano moment if there ever was one--which might mean something different to you than it does to me.  I never understood the appeal of Jordan Catalano.  I mean, yeah, he's cute.  I get that a high school girl would fall for this.  But everyone--parents, teachers, viewers--seems to think he's deep and smart if only he'd try harder.  He's not.  Jordan Catalano gives every indication of being actually, genuinely dim.

Somehow everyone things there's a good man in Donovan who will do the right thing.  Even though he's a slave hunter.  Even though he's quite cruel to many people.  Honor keeps saying that she thinks there's the potential for a good man in him, but I assumed that was wishful thinking talking, except that the book never contradicted it.

And just as Donovan's unpleasantness is minimized, so is the physical brutality of slavery.  I guess it's just that everything is downplayed here--everything plays out at a very mild-mannered level, when I was really expecting more of a sense of the drama.  I mean, there are deaths and births and marriages and mourning here, but the tone is all very even and understated. 

I guess I just wanted more from this book.  It wasn't bad; there just wasn't much there.  I'm really surprised that I've written so many words about what was missing.  And now, like I said, I really want to go read True Sisters for a fresh Sandra Dallas fix.  Or maybe reread Alice's Tulips, which I think is much closer to what I wanted The Last Runaway to be.

Look; I summed it up in one sentence after all.

Moral Ambiguity, Part 2: Kicking Ass and Taking Names

I loved Rachel Bach's Fortune's Pawn with a fiery passion, as I have mentioned previously.  The band of misfits rattling around the galaxy, Devi Morris and her amazing suit of armor, with just enough confusing mystery to keep me tempted, but not so much that I'm bewildered.  It was a fun, Firefly-esque, action-packed charmer of a romp.

And then along comes Honor's Knight and turns it all inside out, pretty much instantly, in the most AWESOME way possible. The charming madcap crew is on a deadly serious mission that involves some VERY morally sketchy behavior.  The gruff-but-respectable captain, it turns out, is pretty much torturing innocent children for the good of the universe.  The Bad Guy (not to be confused with the Dangerous Force of Nature) from the previous book might actually be on the side of the angels.  And the angels may or may not be psychotic.

I am always craving books that don't pretend the answers are easy.  I'm always a little disappointed when the "right" thing to do is easy to determine, and turns out to actually work.  No, we can't sacrifice those civilians to save the world--there's got to be another way!  And then--here's the place where it falls apart--there is. How uplifting! I love a happy ending as much as the next guy--more, depending on who the next guy is.

But reality isn't like that, and the world is full of trade-offs.  You can't Kobayashi Maru your way out of every situation, in spite of what Doctor Who has tried to tell us for the past few years.

There are some good examples of these stories: the episode of Torchwood where they need to sacrifice one child to save the world.  The Cabin in the Woods, where the whole premise is to save the world by killing a bunch of teenagers.  It's wrong to kill a bunch of teenagers...but what if it's the only way to save the world?

E.M. Forster said, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." (The internet, by the way, usually quotes this as "courage" instead of "guts."  I find the original charming.) But there's a difference between a country--an idea and a political system--and The World, humanity, and life as we know it.  But how can you tell the difference?

I'm deep in the rabbit hole here.  The point is, this book starts out turning things on their heads.  This might be the best second book in a trilogy I've ever read--it makes things more complicated, explains the things you wanted to know from the first one, sets up its own whole set of action, raises the stakes, adds depth to the characters--it was so good, guys.  Just so good.

AND!  And Heaven's Queen is coming out next month.  AND I HAVE MY ARC!  I will get back to you on that very, very soon.  I got an ARC of this book, too, for the record.  I would have bought it the day it came out if I hadn't.