Absolute Worst Case Scenarios

Psychologically speaking, this has been a weird month for me. I haven't read a single novel yet. Since you’re reading my book blog, you probably have an idea how weird this is. I will admit with chagrin that I’ve been reading lots of book-length fanfiction, but I’m not sure how to talk about that, so I’m going to skip it for now.

Instead, let’s talk about the one book I did make it through—Randall Munroe’s What If? There’s a good chance you’re familiar with his work from xkcd, his webcomic about science and life and stick figures, which is exactly what any kind of media at all should be—reverent and irreverent at the same time, intelligent and hilarious and poignant by turns and sometimes simultaneously.

“What If” is a column on the xkcd website where people ask unlikely or impossible questions, and he uses science to figure it out. What would happen on Earth if the sun disappeared? How long would it take to print out Wikipedia? What would happen if you made a periodic table wall out of bricks of the different elements?

A surprising number of the answers are “we would all die horribly” (I don’t think that result from printing out Wikipedia, so there’s something), but the level of attention to detail and scientific explanation is absolutely a blast. There are xkcd-style illustrations throughout, there are funny footnotes, there’s dry humor. If you liked The Martian (which you did, of course you did), you might have a lot of fun with this one—I can picture Mark Watney writing in to Randall Munroe for advice.

I used to have a high school teacher who had an Ultimate Dinner Party list—all the people, living or dead, whom you’d want to have at your dream party. Oscar Wilde, Richard Feynman, Ida B. Wells, and, I’m now pretty sure, Randall Munroe.

I don't make any promises about being back on the blogging bandwagon (though a lot of my favorite bloggers are mostly offline, so maybe it's just a different bandwagon? Hi, Aarti!), but I did actually read a novel last week, and I've started another one, and maybe, just maybe, next week will be different.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to rewatch Veronica Mars with me, give a holler.

Feminist Surrender

I'm gonna try to tell this one linearly, with my experience of the book.  It's called The String Diaries, by Stephen Lloyd Jones, and I picked it up randomly from the library new release shelf.  I didn't know anything about it, but the cover was kind of cool, and I liked the blurb.

"The String Diaries opens with Hannah frantically driving through the night--her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?

"Stephen Lloyd Jones's debut novel is a sweeping thriller that extends from the present day, to Oxford in the 1970s, to Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, all tracing back to a man from an ancient royal family with a consuming passion--a boy who can change his shape, insert himself into the intimate lives of his victims, and destroy them.

"If Hannah fails to end the chase now, her daughter is next in line. Only Hannah can decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to finally put a centuries-old curse to rest."

So, I checked it out.  And started reading it--even more surprising, since checking a book out is a low bar, but starting to read it is a higher one.

(Warning: spoilers for the first 20 pages or so ahead.)

First scene: Hannah is driving through the night while her husband bleeds out.  As advertised.  It's tense, but they do have a destination, which helps.  When they arrive, she prowls the house for a bit to figure out if it's safe.  This takes a little too long--a little more time is spent peering around corners than is appropriate for maintaining the tension.  But eventually she gets her husband inside, leaving her daughter in the car where she's--safer, I guess?  Or at least sleeping?

Next scene flashes us back to the '70s, where our viewpoint character is a stuffy, slightly OCD academic who finds his favorite table at the library occupied by a beautiful woman and overtly attempts to use entitlement to get it back.  They flirt; she is gorgeous and French and intriguing.

Okay, this was the point where I had this iffy feeling.  The second scene, in which our super-manly intellectual guy is somehow overcome with unfamiliar Feelings due to a mysterious, sexy French woman just seemed way too...pat.  

This was the point at which the "woman thing" in this book became really noticeable to me, and when I started thinking about it.  Here are the things I realized, going back over what I'd already read:

• Hanna, in the first chapter, was kind of irritating.  She's our viewpoint character, and she wasn't meant to be irritating, but she's hesitant when decisiveness is called for, makes some subpar decisions, and is bossed around by her half-comatose husband.  The last part is important, because....
• There's this weird balance between being prepared for this eventuality (with implications that there was a plan for this because it was always a risk) and being a novice to this kind of life threatening situation (where her naivete would be quite understandable).  But her husband, who clearly (in the next chapter, if not this one) has the same amount of preparation as her, is calm and cool and giving good advice while bleeding to death, while she fumbles around and leaves her kid alone in the car in the middle of the night for some reason.
• Nicole (the French lady) falls instantly for our professor who is clearly, like Robert Langdon, an eminent academic who's just been waiting for a gorgeous woman and a globetrotting adventure.
• The female characters reminded me of Stephen King's women.  They are front and center and in the middle of the fight, but they are slightly foreign, and might not be as good as men (read: people) as others, but they have access to some sort of mysterious Understanding.  There was a time when I found that sort of thing flattering, but that was a long time ago.

Okay, so this is the point at which I glanced at the back of the book, out of curiosity regarding the blurbs.  And can I tell you what the first thing I noticed was?  Six (glowing) blurbs; not one woman.

I gave it one more chance and dug into the third chapter, the historical part where we learn the origin of whatever's haunting these women.  I know what's going on, that we're tracking the bad guy here, I find out about the supernatural elements (which are hinted at in the first chapter).  But when it finally clicks--when this skeevy dude does the thing he's gonna do, even though it's not a surprise, it's somehow a huge disappointment, because our author has put what I'm sure he thinks is a new spin on a story that's all about rape.

The bad guy's a shapeshifter.  A woman rejects him, and he takes the form of her lover and has sex with her.  And then stuff and etc. but whatever--this is just an amazing new way for a character to rape someone and terrorize a woman with violence!  And while I can imagine a book in which this is actually about identity and trust and is an extended metaphor for how well we really know people--this is not a book I'm going to follow down that path.

Maybe from a female author.  Maybe if the main character had seemed like someone who was doing the best she could, instead of playing the horror movie victim.  Maybe even if some women had blurbed the book, saying they loved it, that it touched on something true about the experience of being terrorized.  Maybe.  But none of these were true.

It's possible that I've misread what's going to happen, that there will be a major plot twist and this isn't what it seemed like it was going to be.  I'm not good at subtext, and I'm kind of new to this thing where I notice subtle sexism.  There's some controversy around reviewing (pronouncing judgement?) on a book that you're quitting in the middle.

But you know what?  My reading list is too short.  150 pages into a 400 page book, I'm out. 

On the plus side, I do feel like my critical faculties got a decent workout.  So not a total waste of my time.

Better Than English Class

I suddenly, spontaneously started rereading Watership Down this week, after seeing this post from one of my favorite bloggers, Siderea.

You know how sometimes someone is so smart that you love them, and then they just keep being smarter and smarter until you almost hate them because you kind of envy their genius and being able to live in their own head where they know all this stuff and think all this stuff?  Yeah, Siderea.  It helps that her interests overlap with mine (psychology, books, Boston), but you should read her multi-part essay on the coordinative communication (among other things) in the US health care system, because it's brilliant.

I caution you, that post is actually a series of three post, and there is a LOT of content there.  I actually started just reading them, but as I went along, I realized I really, really wanted to read the book again, and I ended up doing it as a readalong, following each chapter with the relevant part of the post.  Also, I kind of want to read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, by Moore & Gilette, which she references frequently throughout the essay and which seems so on point.

So it seems I'm now reading Richard Adams' Watership Down again, and trying to convince my book club to read it, too, since I feel like this is meaty.  Although I have to say, Siderea's  theory that the first 65 pages are hard to get through doesn't fit with my experience of the book.  I see her point, that the book is playing out a bigger story than "rabbits looking for a safe home," but you don't know that till later--that's all true.  But I think the search-for-home story is plenty compelling in its own right; it's a ripping adventure story, and the fact that it gets astronomically more complex and beautiful after the beginning doesn't mean the beginning doesn't work on that first, frosting level of the layer cake.

I grew up watching the animated movie (which is super violent, by the way, and not for very little kids), so I remember this story from my very earliest childhood.  It's a great movie, with some amazing voice actors, and does a very impressive job of world building, which is always so much harder in a movie where exposition-dumps are tricky to pull off. 

This is a gorgeous story.  That post is a fascinating read.  I'm so glad this hopped back into my hands after all these years.  Book club, please join me!

(Oh, wait, pun not intended, but I just saw it and dammit, I'm leaving it in!)

On the Veldt

When I try to understand people who say they don't really know how to read science fiction, one way for me to sympathize is to think about my relationship with mystery novels.  I've read ones I liked, even that I count among my favorite books.  But they have their own rhythms, and those are often foreign to me.  There are patterns to a mystery that are unusual in other books, and they can make it tricky for me to get my feet under me.

Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die comes highly recommended by Aarti, who glows not only about this book, but about the whole series of Detective Emmanuel Cooper novels.  Most of my favorite mysteries take place in fascinating settings, so this sounds right up my alley.  But it turns out, reading this book, that Dr. Siri Paiboun and Mma Precious Ramotswe have more in common than I realized, and Emmanuel Cooper represents a different type of mystery. And I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that.

As a mystery, as far as I can tell, this  is a great book.  Cooper is sent from Johannesburg to a small town called Jacob's Rest after a confusing phone call indicates that there's been a murder.  It turns out that the captain of the local police has been shot; really, there should be a whole squad of detectives on the case. But before he can get backup, the Security Branch shows up--and if you want scary government bullies, I think that Afrikaners in 1950s South Africa are just what you're looking for.

So, Detective Cooper unravels the secrets that Captain Pretorius has been keeping, and the small town scandals, while trying to avoid the dangerous attentions of the Security boys, who are looking for a political arrest.  Along the way, we meet dozens of characters from all walks of life--and South Africa is full of different walks of life.  There are black people, or natives, colored, or mixed-race, and whites, who are divided into English and Afrikaner, or Dutch.  It's a little confusing until you get used to it, but that's nothing to the oppression that the division bring to the people who live with them.

We meet all sorts of characters; the deceased captain had a slew of burly, angry sons; the Old Jew who runs the local general store, in spite of being a skilled surgeon; the native police officer, Shabalala, who grew up with the victim.  Cooper makes allies and enemies and tries to get closer to the truth of who Captain Pretorius was and what someone might have wanted to kill him.

Okay, so let me get at the thing that bothered me most about this book, which was the women.  There were a few--Pretorius's fervidly nationalistic widow; Dr. Zweigman's nervous wife; the shy brown mouse Davida, who works for him and lives with her grandmother.  There are not many, though, and not much is going on with any of them that does not directly relate to the story; for the most part, the women don't get the great character moments that really drive a mystery.

And then there's Cooper's attitude toward them.  Aarti points out that his longing, his objectification, his wavering between lust and protectiveness, are a manifestation of how insidious the power imbalance of a society like this can be--even our hero can't help but be aware of the fact that his status as a white man gives him complete power over these women.  But I feel like this is deeper, like he just doesn't see them. I think it goes further than the power imbalance would imply.

Honestly, I would have been completely turned off the book by how I felt about the female characters, if the author had been a man.  But the author, Malla Nunn, is a woman, and that leaves me flailing a bit.  On one hand, I'm still kind of turned off, but on the other, I can't help but feel that a female author must have been doing this on purpose, making a point not just with Cooper's feelings (which I agree, can fit into his character and society in useful and relevant ways) but also with her narrative depictions.  I'm still having a really hard time reconciling how I feel about this.

(It also brings up an interesting question of whether it's fair to judge a female author differently than a male author, or to bring assumptions based on the author's gender to the table, but I'm going to save that for an upcoming post about another book whose female characters have me scratching my head; stay tuned.)

Something else that threw me off with this book--and I think this worked really well--was the sense, as you're going through, of what Cooper is fighting for.  In most novels, even if the detective is far from home with few resources, there is a sense that if he finds out the truth and gathers enough evidence, that's what's important--he can then bring these things to some sort of central authority and come down on the perpetrator with the power of the system.  But Emmanuel Cooper is part of a system that is more horrifying than even the perpetrator of the crime.  When he's on his own, running scared from murderers and madmen and politically powerful racist bastards, I couldn't see where he could turn, or how anyone could be brought to justice.

This adds an enormous layer of tension and, I think, of verisimilitude, since the fact is that the white hats don't always get to save the day.  It also makes me hate South Africa even more acutely, knowing that even a good man with the power of the law on his side can't save the world.

I highly recommend the audiobook, too.  The reader does an amazing job with the accents and voices, and that makes an enormous difference, I think, in this world where everyone is so clearly separated by status and origins.  A fascinating book.

Orthodox

I love books about religious groups, whether it's novels about cults or memoirs of nuns.  Mennonites, the Amish, Mormons (mainstream and fundamentalist), Orthodox Jews.  Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation after My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, by Leah Vincent, clearly fits in here, and it isn't the first "leaving Judaism" memoir that I've read.

Leah Vincent was the favorite daughter of a Yeshivish rabbi in Pittsburg.  Yeshivish was not something I had heard of, but apparently it fits between Hasidic and Modern Orthodox in the triumverate of conservative Judaism.  Leah grew up with ten brothers and sisters and knew that she would go to seminary for a year after high school before getting married.

But there were places where should couldn't quite make herself fit, and the small rebellions brought such oppressive consequences that the rebellions began growing larger, until her family was estranged and Leah was living on her own in New York, neither exactly a good Orthodox Jew nor a secular woman.

It's a pretty familiar story, if it's the kind of book that you read.  The interesting angle here is the sense of solitude, and the importance of sex in Leah's life.  You get the strong feeling that, if she had been given the smallest chance, Leah would have ended up exacgtly where her family wanted and expected her to be--married to a good Yeshivish man, mother to a dozen children.  But instead, her first small, curious rebellions--exchanging letters with the brother of a friend, buying a clingy, V-neck sweater--were met with such ruthless cutting off that she had no room to try to repair things.  She's left as a person with no preparation for the real world, who must navigate it anyway.  The pitfalls of this are one of the most interesting parts here.

The role that sex plays in Leah's transition is also unusual, and fascinating.  I think the main thing is that it seems more intensely personal than a lot of other memoirs that I've read, although that's probably me misinterpreting personal and simply private.  Anyway, from the first things that cause her trouble--wanting to talk to a boy, wanting him to like her--to the ways she finally tries to connect with people (men) when she's on her own, so much of her experience with the secular world revolves around sex.

I find this interesting for a few reasons.  First, it seems to relate to how a lot of people coming from sheltered environments first interact with the wider world; since everything is "evil," there's no sense of what's really risky, and so they don't fully understand that watching an R rated movie is fundamentally different from doing dangerous amounts of drugs.  This might be an exaggeration, but the point is that, without the cultural calibration that comes from years of living in the world, it's hard to know what choices are healthy ones.

So, this brings me to my biggest criticism of this book, which is the unexamined nature of a lot of the things she thought at the time.  In the afterword, the author talks about how, in writing the book, she's explicitly trying to relate things through the eyes of the girl she was, how that girl saw things.  I appreciated that note, because my reaction would have been worse if she hadn't acknowledged this.  There are some things she does that are dangerous or morally wrong, and within the story she doesn't really acknowledge that at all.

But even with this caveat, I feel like the book didn't do a good job with some of this.  For example, when she was living on her own in New York for the first time, some of her only human contact came from hanging around in basketball parks, watching pickup games.  She eventually becomes a regular and makes friends, becomes involved with the men she meets there.  Now, she's explained how the culture she grew up in was very racist, and in befriending these men, she's clearly stepping outside her comfort zone.  But there is a very uncomfortably racist overtone to this whole section.  The sleaziness of the way she was used by these boyfriends is played up, without getting any sense of even one of these men (the ones she slept with or the ones she didn't) as real people.  They were "black guys" she was spending time with.

There are other things--an affair with a married man, the fact that she has virtually no female presence in her life at any point--that are presented in such a matter of fact way that it's awkward to read them.  The book is clearly a memoir, told from a later time, so the sense is that of remembering the events with Leah, not of living them firsthand.  This is fine, except that it makes the absence of any kind of critical eye, any kind of analysis that comes with distance, all the more distinctive.  The author doesn't criticize the narrator's perceptions, but neither do we live so intimately in the narrator's mind that these perceptions seem right, nor do we see the narrator go through any process of growth wherein she realizes that hey, maybe all these other people are people, too.

This disconnect was the main flaw, but it really brought the book down for me.  While the account was intimate and raw, it was an account of a sheltered young girl going through a lot of emotional upheaval, and by keeping us locked in her perceptions, the book prevented a lot of insight it could have offered in the process of integrating into mainstream culture, or of finding yourself after a oppression and estrangement.

On the spectrum of insular community books, I would probably give this a good 3.5 stars.  It was worth reading, and it was a good account, but it left me wanting to know more about what now-Leah thought of the experiences of then-Leah.  With that, this could have been an amazing book.

The Traitor

In I Am the Weapon, his name was Ben and he was sent to kill the mayor of New York.  I loved it.  In I Am the Mission, his name was Daniel and he had to infiltrate a terrorist militia compound.  Good stuff.  And finally, the third one, I Am the Traitor, has arrived, and he's come back to his own name--Zach--and he's out to take down the Program that turned him into a killer.

If that sounds like it's from a movie trailer, it should, because that's what this whole series reads like--a rampaging action movie. And it moves--all the deep background stuff that's been going on in the first few books pays off here--Zach's friendship with Howard, his confusing relationship with Mike, Mother and Father and Zach's memories of his childhood.  He's driving toward the truth throughout this book, and it's just where you want him to go.

There are some drawbacks along the way.  There's a girl (as there was in each of the other two books) who seems to be jammed kind of forcibly into the plot.  There are a lot of scenes where they're going from one place to another in what, if you stop to think about it, isn't really a very well-thought-through plan.  Howard manages not to get killed in some of the most unlikely scenarios.

But you don't want to nitpick with a book like this.  If the costuming isn't perfect, if the setup isn't convincing, well, the scenery whips by fast enough for it to go unnoticed if you squint.  The building is intense, and the denouement (if one can use such a word for such a book), if unlikely, is a satisfying ending to what's gone on so far.

So, is it as good as the first two?  No.  Does it deliver what you need to wrap up a really cool series?  Yeah, I would say so.

Rat Queeeeeeeens!!!!!!!

Guys, guys, Rat Queens volume 2 is coming out!  In just a couple of weeks!  AND I GOT AN ADVANCE COPY TO READ AND I'M SO EXCITED AAAAAUUUUUUGHHHH!

(If I was a blogger who did gifs, there would be a gif here.  Picture it.)

The book begins the morning after the debauchery that ended the first volume, with a lovely post-house party scene that involves hangovers, breakfast, and random bedmates wandering through the living room.  There's no shame--everyone says a cheerful hello (and a few raunchy comments are made), but someone shows up from city hall and we're off on a new adventure.

Over the course of this volume, we get some great character development on most of the Queens--snippets from Violet's life as a dwarf, where she gets the "just a girl" treatment and works for the family business as a model, and bits of Hannah's past, including the reason why she and Sawyer are on-again-off-again despite their clear chemistry and affection.  And these are the minor bits--most of the past in this story belongs to Dee.

It turns out Dee has left a lot behind, and that someone has stolen an important relic from her people that could put the world in danger.  Also, Sawyer's in trouble, and, of course, the rest of Palisade is, as always, in danger (in addition to the world-danger).

So all this is going on, and in the meantime, we're getting the bits that really make this series sing--the broad, interwoven cast of characters, many of whom have twining history (Hannah's nemesis used to be a college friend; Sawyer's second in command is another AMAZING woman; Orc Dave gets some nice moments, both with Violet and without).  Betty gets a little bit of the short shrift here, but she still has some nice moments--funny ones, of course, because she's the stoner and that's her role, but another great moment when she realizes someone she cares about is in trouble and goes berserker. 

This is everything that I loved about the first one--the sass, the affection, the heroism, the human drama, the horrifying monsters.

There was a change in artist last year, after the original artist and co-creator, Roc Upchurch, was arrested for domestic violence.  He was replaced as the artist for the series, which means that the last two issues in this volume had a new artist, Stjepan Sejic [sic].  I was worried about this, because I did love Upchurch's art.  But I'm really happy with Sejic's art--it's different, but it's clear and easy to follow (I'm pretty easily confused by muddy visuals), the characters all seem very much themselves, both recognizably and intuitively.  It feels nearly seamless, and I'm left happy--happy with the whole series and wiggling with delighted anticipation for the next one!

Lies and Lies

The compulsive liar, the con artist, is a story that is always absolutely creepily intriguing.  I have a couple of second-hand doozies in real life, and it's fascinating to try to poke them apart and figure them out.  I think the creep factor is largely because it reminds you how much we depend on other people's self-reporting for the things that we believe about them, both internal and external.

The Impostor's Daughter is a memoir by Laurie Sandall.  It's her own story, but clearly the emotional center of that story is her larger-than-life father, the stories he tells about himself, and whatever truth lies behind them.  It's a graphic novel, and it seems to be her first, but she's an accomplished writer and she knows how to tell someone's life story.

It's interesting, because knowing she's a magazine feature writer (which happens in the middle of the book), certain elements of her style kind of came together for me.  There are these different threads of the story, and they come together, but--I'm not sure quite how to say this--it's like the importance, the relevance of the story is assumed? 

Okay, let me try to explain that.  We start with her childhood, where her father with his amazing stories and enormous personality is the center of the family.  Laurie, as his favorite, is close to this--she gets a lot of her father's love and the family's spotlight.  As she grows up, she comes to realize gradually that his stories aren't just amazing, but outlandish, and even unlikely.  As a young writer, she decides to interview him and write about him, a project which starts as a profile of an amazing man but kind of morphs into an investigation of his lies and the people he's hurt with them. 

Along the course of this investigation (which doesn't end but grows more intense after she publishes her article), we also follow Laurie's personal life and struggles--her successful career as a magazine writer (and how growing up with her father taught her to be a good interviewer), her growing addiction to Ambien, her on-again-off-again relationship with a great guy who's not right for her. 

These are all really great stories, especially her research into her father's stories and his real history.  There's the unsatisfying element that often comes with a memoir, in that you can't wrap up the ends as neatly as you can in fiction, but enough other threads come together that it's emotionally a satisfying ending.  And her personal story is really effective--how easily a life can be either mostly fine or a complete mess, with just a change in lighting and angle. 

The place where things aren't tight is the beginning, and I think this has to do with the fact that the tension, the sense of what's at stake, isn't set up at the beginning the way it needed to be.  You start with a little kid listening to her father's tall tales, and before you know it she's a young adult telling these stories to other people at cocktail parties.  Yeah, her father's full of tall tales, but there's no sense for the longest time that this is a bad thing.  Of course, later we find out that these aren't just eccentricities or yarn-spinning, but lies that have hurt people but the tension is kind of placed into the story, rather than being earned.

I think I associate this with magazine writing because it does read like a magazine piece, in that the Thing that the journalist is investigating and writing about is assumed to have import--that the Thing is worth writing about is a given, because you're reading it.  The New Yorker doesn't have to explain to you why this new ballet company is worth reading about--you're reading the article because you want to read whatever The New Yorker has to share with you. 

That's kind of true of a book like this (con artists! compulsive liars! titillation!), but because it's also very much about her personal life and how being her father's daughter affected her, I think the implications of her father being the unlikely character he was (is?) need a little more explicit spelling out. 

This is really just me thinking about how the book worked, how it was put together.  It's not so much a complaint as an analysis--while I think it would have been a better book for this kind of structural change, her personal life and her investigation were interesting stories in and of themselves, and absolutely worth reading. 

Lying is fascinating, really.  The vast majority of what we know about the world is second (or more) hand; when you start to look closely at the reliability of information sources, it can really mess with your mind.  When you're a kid and your parents are the source--well, that's going to mess you up. 

Uprooted

I just this minute finished Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which I got from Netgalley for review. (Thank you, Netgalley!)  I loved His Majesty's Dragon, but drifted away from Temeraire after a couple of books; my attention wasn't quite held.  Here comes her new series, and I was excited.

I've been trying to write this review for a couple of days, actually, even though I hadn't finished the book.  But I want my review to be clever and charming and touching and everything wonderful, and I can't find a way to adequately convey how much I loved and adored this book, so I'm going to go with bullets.

So: Things I Loved About Uprooted (In No Particular Order)

1. Let's start with Kasia, because the book does.  Everyone in the Valley assumed that the wizard would choose Kasia when he came back, as he does every ten years, to take a girl away to his tower.  Kasia is beautiful and accomplished.  Nieshka, our narrator, is chosen instead.  She's taken away from her village and family and her best friend, and as her new life grows, you expect her one to recede in the narrative.

But no, her best friend Kasia, maybe the person she loves most in the world, doesn't disappear conveniently as Nieshka moves on to bigger things.  She is a pull, a motivator, an ally.  Nieshka will risk everything for Kasia, and she is asked to.

2. A totally separate thing to love that also has to do with Kasia is the number of characters in this story who could have been the protagonists.  If you wrote a book from Kasia's point of view--where her best friend is whisked away, but reappears when our protagonist is in danger and then they have adventures together--this would be a fabulous book.  Nieshka is the center of the larger story, and she's telling this one, but hers is NOT the only story.  This is one of the many things in this book that I always want to see in books and so rarely do.  Marek, the prince, has his own story that he is living, and you could tell the whole thing from inside the capital, too.  This isn't one story, it's a score of them woven perfectly together.

3. Something that's bothered me in most fiction I consume for a very long time is how the notion of what is right versus what is expedient is often painted as black and white.  There is the Moral High Ground, where people are Good and don't let their side down, never give up, fight to the death (though rarely does it come to that for our main characters!).  The people who want to compromise are always slimy politicians, so worried about how they'll look that they never do the Right Thing.  The real world is so much grayer than that.

This is handled so beautifully here.  When Prince Marek insists they push forward in the fight against the malevolent magic of the Wood, he may be right or he may be wrong, but he doesn't seem irrationally shortsighted.  When Nieshka sees the war with their neighbors as wasteful and unnecessary--which it is! and pointless!--it is clearly pointed out that this may well be, but the enemy cannot be relied upon to think the same thing.  While war shouldn't exist, you can't will it into not being by simply pretending it isn't there.  You need another plan.

4. I call this one the Perfect Knowledge Problem, which also comes up a lot in books I read.  The Right Thing To Do is not always easy, but in most stories it's easy, at least, to discern.  You know what the Heroic Act is, if you can just bring yourself to do it, or survive it.  This is a book full of imperfect knowledge, where it's often impossible to tell which act is the heroic one and which is foolhardy.  And often enough, the characters choose wrong.

5. And they're always a dozen steps behind!  This should be frustrating, but it's not--it's so realistic, so brutally perfect.  Every single character here is doing the best they can with the information and motivations they have.  Every one of them is trying hard to do what they perceive to be good.  Without exception.  And everything is, of course, still a mess, because perceptions of good differ, and people have imperfect knowledge, and things don't always come out the way you planned.  Life is messy.

Luckily Nieshka is good at messy.  When the Wood becomes more dangerous, she finds the magic (oh, the magic!  The world of magic here!) to fight it.  When politics are needed, she tries to learn them.  Mostly, she just pushes on, past her limitations, holding on to her friends.

I loved this book.  Loved.  It was a delight.  I worried, at one point, when the scene changed, that we were going to get into a Slimy Politicians and Political Machinations story, but, while those factors are not entirely absent, it never becomes a turn-off.  This book contains good against evil, and man against man, but those are not the same battles.  I can't tell you how satisfying it was to read a book where everyone was doing their best, where even the people who are chasing our heroine with an army are truly trying, with all their resources, to do their own version of the Right Thing.

Okay, here's where I say it wasn't flawless.  Much as I loved Kasia, she was kind of a cypher, more a role than a character.  (I think this was done for a reason, because there was a bit of mystery about her, and I'm hoping there will be a sequel from her point of view.)  I wish that Nieshka had connected a little better to a lot of the secondary characters, because while they were believable and served the story well, I wanted a bit more of a sense of them outside of their roles.  The magic system was fascinating, but mostly described in metaphors, which made complete sense, but again, I wish it had been a bit more concrete in some of the details.  If you need me to pick nits, I can.

But I loved it.  Loved loved loved.  I want to read it again for the first time.  I want to read another one.  I'm going to go back for more Temeraire just because I can't not at this point.  This book was wonderful.

Short Stories

Bah, anthologies.  I devoured them by the bucket in high school; short stories are a great way to consume a ton of fantasy very quickly, without the level of investment required for a novel.  I own SO many volumes of Sword and Sorceress! (And why didn't Dorothy J. Heydt's character Cynthia ever get a novel of her own?  A crime, I declare it!)

But I was not as discriminating then, and I've had so little patience for anthologies lately, because I can't bear to skip around and not "officially" finish them, but I also can't bear to read my way through the parts that are either outright blah or just not for me.

So those are my prejudices going in, and the reason that I didn't absolutely love Kaleidoscope, an anthology of diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios. I've never read an anthology--even an all-star one!--that was not uneven. 


Some of the stories were great! Some were kind of thin.  Actually, "thin" is probably my biggest complaint--I don't know if it's that the stories were particularly short, or because some of the authors didn't have a good instinct for YA, but some of them felt phoned in, either being all setup/worldbuilding with no incident, or just being kind of generic.

And generic is what it shouldn't have been, because the great thing here is the broad representation you have in this volume.  The point of this book is to see characters you don't see nearly often enough--a superhero with one hand, a girl in wheelchair fighting to break a curse, tons of non-white, non-straight characters having the usual fantasy adventures.

I think that the stories that did this best were my favorites--Faith Mudge's "Signature," about a girl who finds out that she and the owner of the bookstore where she works have both entered into deals that might be too much for them, was one of my favorites.  Priya Gowda is in a wheelchair, and her story is informed by her traditional family and the limitations the world sets on her, but there's far more to it than that.  "Chupacabra's Song," by Jim C. Hines is a really touching story about a girl on the autism spectrum who has a way with animals that may be more magical than her vet father realizes.  "Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell", by E.C. Myers, is about a girl whose schizophrenia and meds interact with the new popular party drug in unexpected and upsetting ways. 

These are stories that do the best task of storytelling--take a character, with all the details and subtleties that make them human--and put them into a situation that requires them to face it.  Each one is shaped by who the character is and what they are trying to do, and they're all especially exciting and moving, because they do such a wonderful job of expanding around these things.

But then there's Garth Nix's "Happy Go Lucky," in which a high school girl from an elite stratum of society suddenly finds out that life isn't fair when she's stripped of her privileges.  Reading it reminded me very powerfully of the Twitter feed @dystopianYA, because there is nothing here to make it stand out.  Sure, Jean's parents are both dads, and she's dark-skinned, but this is not meaningful to the story in any way.  Really, there's nothing here that doesn't look exactly like Matched, or Divergent, or any of a hundred other utopia-is-really-dystopia books on the shelf.  Someone tapped Garth Nix for a story and he ripped one out in a couple of hours. 

There were plenty of other stories that were not much more than the sum of their blurb: "Cookie Cutter Superhero": when you get a chance to go into the Superhero Machine and turned amazing, do you want them to make your body "normal?";  "Krishna Blue": what if a gifted artist developed the dangerous skill of consuming colors from the world around her?; "Double Time": if you could go back in time five minutes, would things really be better?  (The last one, at least, was a nice little story about a figure skater with an overbearing mother.  Maybe it was a little simplistic, but it was actually pretty charming.)

Okay, so not bad.  But these were light, quick reads--I might say that they were very YA, but that sounds pejorative.  Really, they're focused around being a teenager, which is great, but many of the stories spend more time spelling out their fantastical concept, rather than speaking to me.

But of course, this is always going to be the anthology problem.  If I was thrilled 1/3 of the time, entertained 1/3 of the time, and deadly bored 1/3 of the time, is that a good read?  In a novel I'd have a firm opinion on that, but in an anthology, who knows?  I'm certainly in the minority in walking away disappointed, and let's admit that I haven't read an anthology in years, at this point.  And I love very much that this book made room for characters who don't show up nearly often enough.  I just wish that these characters would show up all over the place, so I could have more of the ones I loved.

Harrison Harrison

Harrison Squared! Daryl Gregory's novel about the monster-fighting teenager has hit the shelves, starring Harrison Harrison, one of the main characters in the super-creepy novella We Are All Completely Fine.  My friend Brenda, an enormous Gregory fan, agreed to write a joint review with me.  My parts in green, hers in brown.  

Quick summary: we both like the book, though maybe not as much as we'd expected.  It's very much a YA book, with an almost whimsical charm--not what the novella might lead you to expect.  

BRENDA: I feel like Harrison Squared was made for me. I love Daryl Gregory and H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, I memorized “The Cats of Ulthar” for a speech in high school. That said, this doesn’t rise to the same level as my favorite Daryl Gregory books (Pandemonium, Unpossible and Other Stories, Afterparty, and We Are All Completely Fine). It’s entertaining and a fast read, but it doesn’t have the same sort of depth as his other books.

SHARON: The reason I wanted to read Harrison Squared at all is because of We Are All Completely Fine, but I think that served this book poorly, because they're quite different in tone.  I was expecting and hoping for something much darker, grittier, and more ambiguous.  This was very much a YA book, and I can't love it as much as I wanted to because it's standing next to the book in my head.

The tone caused me one other problem, which was that the details of this creepy, Lovecraftian little town were so over the top that it made it hard for me to really submerge myself in the world.  Harrison arrives at this school where there's a class on tying nets and swimming in an underground lake under the school and that history book!  The math homework! And he finds them as outrageous as I would, but there's no notice of this.  I mean, would these students be able to pass the MCAS?  How has no one else ever noticed the weird cultishness?  The details were wonderfully amusing, but I couldn't figure out how seriously I was supposed to take them.

This book feels like Harry Potter sometimes, when he’s exploring his bizarre school. It is entertaining (I laughed out loud at his History textbook, The Subjugation and Domination of Various Peoples and Lands: A Guide to Effective Government), but not particularly satisfying. It’s like the book started out as an ongoing inside joke:

• Practical Skills – just tying nets
• Cryptobiology – trying to reanimate a dead frog with electricity
• English – textbook Catastrophes of New England: 1650 to 1875
• Non-Euclidean Geometry

I loved the contemplation of the nature of memory in the prologue – “’facts’ I’ve layered on over time, like newspaper on a paper mache piñata.” This is one of the reasons I love short story collections that are obviously a person trying to create meaning by looking at the same thing in many different ways, getting to a point where the least true-to-life story is also the most “true.” I feel like a lot of Daryl Gregory’s work is like this. In particular, he returns often to the story of a relatively normal person dealing with the eccentricities of genius, including in this book. He even rewrote one of his novels as a short story (and vice versa) to continue to look at it slightly differently. I’m actually a little disappointed that Harrison’s supposedly fabricated memories are true.

I love the phantom limb sensation. I know that later it will be discovered that it is somehow metaphysical  and is warning him of the presence of something supernatural. Also, I love that the main character has a physical disability (“maimed and limbless” according to Coach Shug) that is at the same time integral to the plot and treated very matter of factly. I love characters like that (think MilesVorkosigan).

   

Neither the mother nor Aunt Sel are believable characters, and they don’t add much to the book. They’re too exaggerated. Which is one of the reasons why I dislike when we switch to the mom’s point of view briefly (outside of my general dislike of POV shifting).

I love love love Lub. He’s so free and cheerful and odd. And the juxtaposition between him and the way his people are depicted in Lovecraft should be jarring, but just seems original and creative.

I feel like I'm complaining too much; the other side of this simplicity is that the pleasing parts are so simply pleasing.  I agree that the mother was kind of a flat character, but I found Aunt Selina to be delightful.  She should never have been in charge of a young person, but that of course fits right in with a teenager trying to save his missing mother.  She's proud and impulsive and kind of brittle and I had a lot of fun with her.  I loved Lub, too, and the all the other teenagers you get to know (including the very weird and creepy Isobel and what's going on there I'd like to know!  There's a whole other book there.)

How did you feel about the end?  Ambiguous much?  This seems like it's setup for a series, but I'm not sure if the part that's still hanging will support it. 

I didn't see it as setting up a series so much as the hand coming up out of the grave at the end of a horror movie, showing that everything is not actually okay. I mean, how could you have an HP Lovecraft based book with a happy ending? 

Definitely too much of a YA book for me, though. This always happens when I get my hopes too high!

Other random thoughts:

• Fingercant is cool. I want to learn it.
• I knew immediately the Albatross was a boat. I hate it when characters don't figure out something obvious.
• The Scrimshander is legitimately scary.
• I want to read Thomas Glück’s book. It makes me think of Bloody Jack.

Yes to all of those, especially Thomas Glück's book!  This book was a lot of fun; it lost points only for the expectations I had going in. 

Thank you so much for reviewing this with me, Brenda!

*Review copy received from Netgalley.

Reportage

Instead of a review, an update, because I'm not wrapping anything up anytime soon.

Let's see, I finished Lock In, and also the tie-in novella, Unlocked: An Oral History of Hayden's Syndrome.  I basically stand by everything I said in my post from the middle of the book--it's a fascinating, well-written take on illness and identity, and the world building is amazing.  The mystery is good, too, though I definitely got lost in the middle, as I almost always do in a mystery, losing track of who we're talking about and which of them said what in an earlier scene.  But it's fine--a good mystery will carry you over those bumps, as this one does.

Unlocked came as part of the audiobook I listened to, and it was good, but I don't think it added very  much to the novel.  The viewpoints, the stories, and the process it described were all pretty much covered in the novel, and wound neatly in with characters and a puzzle, which made it more engaging.  It didn't really add anything, but I think it made a fine appendix to the main book.

I had started reading Otherbound, by Corinne Duyvis, and I was enjoying it a lot.  It takes a broad concept--every time this boy closes his eyes, even for a blink, he sees/hears/experiences someone else's life, a girl in another world entirely--and then addresses the very detailed nitty gritty around it.  It also shares major plot points with two other books I read recently; like the title character in Harrison Squared (review forthcoming), Nolan is missing a leg, and as in Lock In, the question of having control of your own mind and body is a significant issue here.

I did set it aside for a while, though, because I got my hands on Naomi Novik's new book, Uprooted, which I'm halfway through and completely in love with.  Whether or not you are a big fan of Temeraire (I loved the first one and kind of drifted away during the third), the first half of this book is a delight.  I'll let you know how the rest goes when I get there.

I read volume one of Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth, because the internet keeps telling me to (especially the Book Smugglers), and the first volume was good, though kind of disturbing.  I'll have a review when I've read more.  I've got a bit of a comics backlog right now, actually, with some ARCs and some library grabs and new volumes of Angel & Faith to get to.

Really, this is just a post of promises for real reviews that will be coming soon.  And they WILL be coming, honest.  I just need to get a little more reading in sometime soon.  

Socrates vs. Plato: Smackdown

I need to take some time to come back from this rough stretch in the real world; apologies, and no promises.

But there have been some fabulous books to discuss in this period, and I'm going to start with The Just City, which we'll be talking about at my work book club next week.  I posted from the halfway point, but now I'm done and I think this is a good place to gather discussion questions before the meeting.

Some quick review points, though: the sequel/companion books, The Philosopher Kings, comes out in May, and if you haven't read the first one yet, you might want to wait for a few weeks, because I suspect that it's a read-one-after-the-other situation.  It's not so much a cliffhanger--well, maybe it's a cliffhanger.  It could be a very abstract, nonspecific ending, but I suspect this was one long story in Jo Walton's mighty, magnificent head.

Okay, without further ado, questions for discussion of The Just City, which you must read, preferably with your book club.

1) To what extent is this novel a feminist novel.  But wait, let's back that up a bit and ask: 1a) what is a feminist novel?  Which is a broad question, but this is a book for long discussions of meaning.  And after you answer that, then you can answer the main part of question 1.  I have no idea of the answer to 1a.  But if you rephrase it: to what extent are the positions and depictions of women in this society the main or driving force of this novel?

I felt like the idea of what a woman's position is or could be in this imagined society was really the most compelling, driving force here, and I think it highlighted the whole point of this book, which was where philosophy meets practicality.  Who's going to do the manual labor, and how are we going to deal with childbirth?

Which leads to SO MANY OTHER questions, like 1f) given that none of the masters has ever had a baby (male or female), how is it that men can't help with the child rearing stuff, or 1m) to what extent are the Just City's limitations around women caused by the fact that the majority of people come from ancient history, especially the men?  Or 1s) rape and its many aspects: did it freak you out that Maia had to face Ikarus over and over again?  Or that Socrates was his friend?  What does it mean to be friends with a rapist?  With one who doesn't realize what he did was rape?  Even after being told?

I could go on forever.  Maybe these should be separate questions, but then you get back to 1) to what extent are these questions the main problem of the novel?  Or maybe, is this--the situation of women here--a lens for looking at all kinds of privilege and entrenched prejudices?

I'm not sure about this; the masters are almost all white, for clearly explained reasons, but of course the children are all treated as equal, apparently.  It seems oversimplifying to say that this is about women and how they are treated, but really way too broad to say that it's about oppression in general.

I can already see that my question numbering system is shot to hell.  Anyway.

2) The main theme of the book is very much about the transformation of the general to the specific.  Theories are turned into principles, which become plans and then actions.  Where along this chain do most things fall apart?  Is this something you see in the rest of the world, too?  How does this relate to the trouble people have in seeing why someone different from them might need the world to be constructed in another way?

3) What do you think about the depiction of gods as characters here?  How do gods' motivations and considerations compare to mortals', and how are they scaled down appropriately.  Compare it to other books in which gods are characters (I'm thinking of NK Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy, but if you have others in mind, please mention them in the comments, because this in particular fascinates me).  How do gods understand mortals?  How do/can they care about them, and how do they manage their relationships with them?

4) Philos, eros, agape.  How useful is this construction of love?  What's so wrong with eros?  What did Plato have against eros?  I might need some actual Plato reading to catch me up here.

5) Tangentially related, how do you think the author managed the fact that all these people are basically living and arguing about Plato's ideals without actually managing to answer many of the questions that come up?  It seems only natural to me that answers would never be satisfactory, but it feels like Plato lays out all these answers that just lead to more questions, but no one in the story tries to lock down further answers, as though Plato was the only one who had the authority to declare things firmly True and Right. Does that seem natural?  Don't you wish someone had answered some of these questions?

6) Also, don't you now want to have a Socratic dialogue?  Have one with me!  I'm available for arguments and discussions.

There's so much more--slavery, Kebes, robot sentience, Athene's temper, cliffhanging, babies!  Damn this is the most readably meaty book--or meatily readable--that I've encountered in a while.  I preordered the sequel, which I NEVER do.  Can't wait for book club!

In Real Life

In my life, anyway, everyone has strep.  My house is full of strep.  Adam explained to me that the nurse told him that every surface at school, including the table where he eats lunch, is just covered with strep.  Good times.

I need to read more comics; I can plow through those faster and get more finished.  Memo to self.

Also, I'm having another big coincidence in my reads--two books that start out being about something else but end up being basically about losing control of your body, being trapped in it with no volition.  Freaky stuff.

More when we make it out of Strepland.

Lock In: Early Days

I'm on an incredible roll with "issue" books.  Not just YA, either, but books that are just all about making you think about Big Subjects and the Meaning of Things.  There are a few in the pipeline right now; the one I want to talk about here is John Scalzi's Lock In. 

This one, more than any other recently, is explicitly an issue book--that is, the plot is secondary to exploring in detail a world in which the issue is played out. The idea here is that some small but significant percentage of the population--3%, maybe?--has been affected by an illness that results in "lock in," a state in which the brain cannot control the body whatsoever, though the mind continues to function perfectly.

The illness, Hayden's syndrome, strikes across class barriers, and money is no protection, meaning that there are just as many well-off Hayden's sufferers as poor.  The book takes place 20 years after the beginning of the epidemic, and technology has caught up with the needs of this new class--neuroscience and robotics allow Haydens to participate fully in society.  But a new law is ending government support for these people, and the political situation is dicey.

So that's the setup, and then you have this novel about Chris Shane, a Hayden from a wealthy family whose father is running for the Senate and who has just joined the FBI's squad dealing with Hayden-related crimes.  There's been a murder, and there are political overtones, and etc. 

Okay, so the summary is interesting and all, but I'm only about a third of the way into the book, and besides, I hate summaries.  They either give things away or they bore me to tears), But the thing I'm finding interesting is all the ideas here, sociological and political.  The first thing that jumps out is the tension between the people who are working to cure Hayden's and bring those who are locked in back into control of their own bodies, and those who consider the notion that they need to be cured insulting.  This reminds me very much of things I've read about the Deaf community, and the idea that seeing it deafness as a handicap or disability is offensive.

Now, it's not a perfect comparison.  A Deaf person can participate fully in the community--particularly the Deaf community--with relatively little support.  A Hayden needs to have his or her body taken care of constantly, needs complicated and expensive surgery to be able to interface with a robotic "threep," and needs a lot of technology to interact with the world.  The fact that all of these things are free from the government, while exactly the world I would like to live in, seems kind of unlikely in a United States that doesn't even have real universal health care.

Then again, the idea that non-normative bodies and abilities and ways of being in general are not defective is a big one in the world today, one that I wish I was able to incorporate more deeply into my own thinking.  I have very entrenched notions around "right" and "wrong" ways to be, and while I can look at those notions and disavow them, on a gut level I react to things as though there's a right way to be, a best way to act.  (Hint: I'm usually doing it wrong.)  Anyway, so this is pressing some of my own buttons, even though in theory I am behind the politics of the Hayden's radicals here. 

Even more interesting, though, is when the political gets personal.  Our protagonists's father has made his career as an advocate for Haydens, trying to make the world see them as people, but it's not easy.  Shane faces small prejudices, microaggressions, "no offense" moments, and awkward conversations.  Shane handles it with grace, barely even seems to register these moments, but as they pile up, you as a reader begin to get the slightest feeling of what it's like to live in the position of walking around as a special interest citizen.

Oh, here's another thing--I have no idea if Chris Shane is a man or a woman.  The book is told in the first person; a threep has no gender.  I'm actually listening to an audiobook, which is read by Amber Benson, and a female reader often implies a female protagonist--but there's another version of the audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, so that doesn't really help. 

Now, Ancillary Justice might have primed me for really not worrying about my protagonist's gender, but this does bring up another issue, which is sex.  So far, Shane's sexuality has not come up at all.  I have to assume it'll come up--I mean, how can you have a whole society of people who have normal-feeling bodies that they can't move and not address their sexual feelings, or even romantic ones.  But I've noticed the absence of information around this subject, and I'm hoping it's something that will come out soon. 

Not because I need romance in the story, but because if you're going to sell me a book that depends so heavily on a cultural, political, and anthropological examination of a society in which X is a factor, you really need to touch on all basic human needs--food, shelter, work--sex. 

Theme Night!

I'm on a rip-roaring damned streak, book-wise.  Ancillary Justice was amazing, and then The Just City blew my mind (is still blowing it; I slowed down so we could read it for book club), and also I finally read Francis Hardinge, and The Cuckoo Song is as good as I've been hearing.  I have a slate of ARCs of sequels that I'm salivating to read (Shadow Scale and Beastly Bones), but I also have some things I've been eying for a while that I want to get to (The Seat of Magic and Imaginary Girls).  This is an embarrassment of riches, and I am not complaining.

So I'm in the thick of things, and in a few days I'll have a joint review of Harrison Squared for you, and my own thoughts on Otherbound, which I've finally gotten around to and find really fascinating and ambitious.  But the funny thing is that I'm having what I think of as a Stanislaus moment--one of those times when two random books you're reading coincide in a weird way that makes you blink and look around, like is this synchronicity, or coincidence?

Because what Harrison Harrison and Nolan from Otherbound have in common is a pretty unusual trait: both are teenaged boys who are missing a leg.

I suppose it's a small thing, but somehow it feels Deeply Meaningful to me.  Maybe I need more sleep.

The Things We Do For Love

You look at the post title and you think that there are a thousand books I could be reviewing.  But it's none of them--the thing I did for love was read this entire book from start to finish.  Because my six-year-old son loved it.

He didn't just love The Secret Zoo; he got it--he understood what was going on, could always recount what had already happened and connect it to what was happening now.  He liked the corny names of the zoo places, he didn't mind the fact that most of the middle is nonsensical filler--the bad guys you perceive are not bad, there's a whole meaningless chase scene that's some sort of misunderstanding.

This is the kind of book that people mean when they say that kids deserve smart books--I mean, this is the cautionary tale part of it.  And you know, it's probably a third grade reading level or something like that.  But the language is just awkward and repetitive.  Thesaurus words are tucked in where their connotations are not quite right.  It's not explicitly wrong, but it's just not quite good. 

Also, the day is saved at the end when our hero convinces a penguin to believe in itself enough to fly.  Flying penguin saves the day.  Because physics has nothing to do with it.  (Yes, there is explicitly magic involved in the book.  But not around the animals or their abilities.  Somehow the animals are just super smart, the polar bear is not dangerous, and penguins can fly if they believe in themselves.  All apparently unrelated to magic.)

I'm groaning only because Adam's too little to know how a blog works, or to read this.  Because I know that it's possible to love books that are not great--I have read WAY too much Mercedes Lackey not to know this.  And I love him so much that I'm going to run right out and get the sequel, Secrets and Shadows, because he'll be thrilled. 

But maybe not till after we've read the first Harry Potter.

Blanche White, On the Run

As part of my goal this year to read more non-white authors, I've been scooping up lots of things that are a little bit outside my wheelhouse as they cross my radar.  This is how I ended up getting a copy of Blanche on the Lam from Netgalley.  It's the first in a mystery series by Barbara Neely, written in the 1990s and being reissued now. 

I don't read a ton of mysteries, and this one was unlike any that I'd read before.  Really, it almost didn't read as a mystery to me, since I wasn't even sure what the actual question was regarding what was going on until very late in the game.  There were clues and characters and things, but the level on which this book worked for me was a social examination.

Blanche is a black maid living in Atlanta, and she's in some trouble.  She's bounced some checks, and instead of a fine, she's sentenced to 30 days in jail.  With two kids (her niece and nephew) to take care of and already struggling financially, this couldn't be a worse situation.  So when her escort disappears in a scuffle at the courthouse, Blanche impulsively walks away.  Suddenly, she's on the run and in even more trouble.

Luckily, the cleaning service she works for has assigned her to a week-long live-in job outside of town.  Figuring this is a good place to lay low and make a plan while her mother watches the kids, Blanche shows up for work and finds herself on a rural estate of a strange family who clearly have a lot of secrets.

The secrets themselves don't come together till quite late in the book--there is murder, but it's near the end.  Mostly, there's a powerful sense of something very fishy going on, and an even more powerful sense that the absolute best thing a black lady with common sense can do is keep her nose out of it.  No, this book is carried by its observations about Blanche, the world she lives in, and how she holds her life together.  And in that, it's a gold mine.

I'm a sucker for stories told from the below-stairs point of view; I'm always wondering about the teachers' point of view about the high schoolers in my YA novels, and the children who are on the run with your heroes to keep your action thrillers heartwarming.  So Blanche's very opinionated thoughts about her employers are delicious.  I love how she sits in their chairs and bathes in their tubs when they're not around, not for the luxury, but to claim back her own humanity when she's seen as a tool all day.  I love how she has a huge network of friends to call on, and the amount of investigating she can do with sheer gossip.

There's so much about being black in the world, in America, and in Atlanta here.  There's the unspoken solidarity that exists even when you can't keep secrets, and the risk of finding yourself overly fond of employers who don't see you as fully human.  Blanche's alienation from the people around her--her sense of her own differentness--was uncomfortable, but it was supposed to me.  It's what gave her the space to investigate, and our glimpse into it was really fascinating.

The next book in the series is called Blanche Among the Talented Tenth, and I have that from Netgalley, too.  I'm looking forward to seeing Blanche from a new angle--a working class woman in a ritzy black resort town.  I hope, as I keep reading these books, that I get a chance to spend some time with Blanche somewhere she feels completely at home, too.

An Imperfect World

Alternate post title: Jo Walton is a brilliant genius.

Never mind her ability to write charming, fascinating, beautifully constructed stories that I love.  And don't just look at the incredibly different stories she takes on, from alternate 20th century history to Victorian dragons to domestic fantasy. (And I'm also not just saying that because she linked to my blog that one time.)

No, what makes me say "genius" is the kinds of enormous conceptual ideas she undertakes when she writes.  She tells stories that read as very feminine--personal, intimate, and based around the emotions and psychology of individuals and families, and that are often centered in the domestic sphere.  But she uses these stories to take on ideas that are every bit as big as any Great American Novelist might pick up (and my apologies to her for the comparison, as she's British; I don't know if the Great British Novelist is a thing). 

Lifelode was about love and family and complicated domestic relationships, but it was also about how time and memory work, and intimacy and geography and a lot of other things.  Farthing was a murder mystery with a charming, flighty aristocratic girl for a narrator, and also about the insidious appeal of fascism to the intellectual.  Tooth and Claw was about Victorian dragons, but it was also about how the strictures of culture are no less binding or real for being artificially constructed.

And now I'm reading The Just City (which I got as an advance copy from Netgalley thankyouverymuch) and it is blowing my mind.  Seriously, after Ancillary Justice I thought I'd met my quota of compulsively readable concept novels for a few months, but no, here's this gorgeous piece of work that has me wanting to read Plato, for crying out loud.

So the idea here is that in Plato's Republic, he outlined what the perfect society would look like.  The goddess Athene decided it would make a cool experiment to try it out, so she got some people throughout history (if you ever prayed to Athene to let you live in The Republic, you're in) and they started setting it up.  Children raised from age 10 (acquired from slave markets and ancient Greek orphanages), duties assigned according to skills, technology and art from across the ages come together to create an ideal world, with the hope that, raised on a diet of all that is Good and Right, the best of their generation will grow up to be philosopher kings.

What would happen if these ideas were put to the test?  Well, a lot of things, from disagreements to entrenched sexism, to ten-year-olds maybe not being quite as blank-slatey as Plato expected.  To Socrates himself showing up and turning things on their heads.

I was about to talk about all the themes, but so many of them come back to choice and consent and personhood.  This is stated very bluntly by Apollo, who shows up to learn about exactly these things, but it's reflected in so many ways throughout the story.  Slavery is a big one, since most of these children were bought.  The shadow of slavery hangs over things, from the robots who do the menial tasks (can a city claim to be egalitarian if someone still has to do the gruntwork?) to the children bought from slavery who, in different ways, don't leave it behind.  

The more specific ideas of consent and equality turn up, unsurprisingly, in the experiences of women.  Although Plato's society has women as equals, not everyone believes everything Plato said with equal ferocity.  The place of sex in society (because eros is inferior to agape and philos), the ways women have to deal with their own concerns (because if you tell everyone he raped you, they won't believe you and they'll look down on you afterwards), and the difference between the lives of the adults and the world they're constructing for the children (sex/procreation by lottery, anyone?) are all complicated and invite you to think your way through a logical society until the logic starts to fall apart under the constant footsteps of normal, flawed human beings, all trying to do their best.

I love the Socratic dialogues.  I love the different information you get when you switch points of view, and see Apollo's take on the masters, and the children's take on their world.  I love that Socrates keeps trying to get the robots to talk to him (I'm only halfway through the book, but I'm pulling for a robot uprising led by Socrates).  I love everything about this book, and I'm thrilled that the sequel, The Philosopher Kings, comes out in June.  I'm absolutely preordering it.