More Jackaby

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

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

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

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

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

"He's fainted," said Charlie.

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

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

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

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

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

Red Letter Day

Guys, I filled my kindle. 

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

Or is it just because I have SO MANY BOOKS?

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

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

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

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

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

Interstellar Origami

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Hit of Romance

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

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

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

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

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

Below the Radar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sorry, it's late.  Good night!)

Euro-Psych-Creepy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nimona!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Is Just the Word

Writing official reviews always feels so awkward to me, partially because I feel like summarizing (synopsizing? Is that a word?) a book tells you almost nothing about the experience of reading the book.  But you need the synopsis to talk about the things that do matter, and so I feel like I'm jamming it in.  This is worse when I'm reviewing a book that I read a few weeks ago, so I'm going to apologize in advance here if the next couple of reviews are particularly awkward; I read these books on vacation, and while I remember them clearly, I'm not blogging from as deep a place in my gut as I usually do.

Thus caveated, I want to talk about The Gracekeepers, which has gotten a lot of buzz recently.  It has a beautiful cover and a premise that you can't resist.  But as lovely as it was, especially the beginning, this book ultimately wasn't a very good fit for me.

In the future (all my recent books seem to start that way), the ice caps have melted and the world is mostly ocean.  Land is scarce and expensive, and the landlockers who live there look down on the damplings who spend their whole lives on boats. Callanish works at a graceyard, where she presides over funeral rites in exchange for the supplies she needs.  North has a tame bear act with the Circus Excalibur, whose ragtag crew is her only family.

The circus is struggling, and North is supposed to marry the son of the ringmaster.  But she doesn't want to, and she has a secret, and she doesn't know what to do. Callanish also has a secret, and a history that she's trying to reconnect with.

The two do come together, but the book is mostly two separate stories, which come together only in a few key places.  It's about being an outsider, I guess, and being alone in a dangerous world, with either no one to rely on, or surrounded by people who love you but don't know you.  And it's lovely and lyrical and touching, and for the first half of the book I would have compared it to Station Eleven (which I loved) because of the world building and tone.

But as the book continued, the practical and emotional problems faced by the two heroines didn't seem to build.  The book wandered, with point of view chapters from peripheral characters--the clowns, with their edgy, angry, fierce agenda, a beautiful example of the classic purpose of the fool; Melia and Whitby, who hold onto each other and nothing else in the world; Flitch, who is neither a good man nor a bad one. These were wonderful for the deepening of the tone and themes (how everyone is, in some way, trying their best; how everyone is the hero of their own story), but didn't add to the narrative.

This is why I say it wasn't the book for me; I'm a narrative girl.  And while I can love things with loose narrative, or internally driven narrative, I didn't feel like North was changing or learning much over the course of this story.  Callanish was, but I was more interested in the circus, because it had more characters.  And North was basically treading water through the whole book, until the very end. 

I think this was a beautiful book, and I think it might have been a very meaningful one.  It is absolutely the perfect book for some people.  But sadly--because there were a lot of wonderful bits--not for me.

I received a copy of this book for free from Netgalley for an honest review.

A Beautiful Story of Big Ideas

Have you read anything by Erin Bow?  Really, have you read everything by Erin Bow?  You should go do that right now, because she keeps coming up with more amazing stuff.  It's not just how she writes; it's what she chooses to write that makes her so amazing.

I absolutely loved her second book, Sorrow's Knot, which had a Native American-based fantasy setting and a beautiful story about friendship and letting go.  It was so far from being formulaic that I didn't even realize how much I wanted a book like that until I found it. I followed that up with her first book, Plain Kate, which I've just realized I didn't blog about.  It was a lovely, touching book--a much more standard fantasy setting and story, not as special or unique as Sorrow's Knot, but still a very pleasing book.

But now, now comes her next book, The Scorpion Rules, and I was lucky enough to get it from Netgalley.  This is one of those ones that I knew was coming and would type into their Search field, because I wanted to read it the instant it became available, and now here it is, and O, Reader, it is every little thing I wanted it to be.  It is smart and personal and huge, and it asks tough questions an isn't afraid of them, and I wish I knew more about ethical theory and geopolitics and maybe even goat herding, but I don't need to because this book gives them all to me as a gift.

So in a distant future, the much-reduced population of Earth struggles with scarce resources, especially water.  But in this new world of small kingdoms, there is a system to minimize war: the children of great leaders are sent to live apart, essentially as hostages.  The AI that oversees the world keeps these Children of Peace, rears them until they come of age, and, if their parents declare war, kills them.  This is the life Greta, daughter of the Queen of the PanPolar Alliance, has lived since she was five years old.

Greta's country is on the edge of war, and her life may be forfeit at any time.  And here is the first place where Bow does such a brilliant and subtle job with this story; each of these teenagers is absolutely royalty, with all the fierce strength and bravery and composure you could hope for in what one dreams royalty should be, but they are also teenagers, and afraid.  They are trapped, raised to power but entirely powerless.  They have seen friends die.

And now a new hostage, not a royal but the grandson of a general, appears.  And this is where you expect something typical, where the new boy a) teaches these snobs about defiance, and b) is so hot that Greta can't resist him.  And neither of these is how it plays out.  But it's not the opposite, either--it's something entirely different.  Elian is defiant, but he also doesn't understand the rules; he doesn't beat the system just by being the first to stand up to it.  Greta is drawn to him, but how could she not be, when their fates are so closely tied together.  And he's not the one she's realizing she loves.

Oh, there are so many wonderful characters here.  The Abbot, the AI who runs the Precepture with a loving but horribly firm hand; Xie, Greta's poised and powerful roommate and best friend; Han, small and maybe one step behind, but always right there, ready to get in the game.

There are so many moral questions this book asks.  When you think of the idea of holding children as hostages, it turns your stomach, right?  When you realize that this prevents wars (it is a demonstrably successful tactic)  that save the lives of millions of children, does that change your opinion?  Does the good of the many outweigh the good of the few?  Does a closely observed study of the lives of the few living in a comfortable prison change your feelings?  The devil, after all, is always in the details.

The story goes further, but I won't ruin it, except to say that the idea of physical threat--threats of death, of the deaths of those you care about and those you feel responsible for, of torture and pain--is central here.  This book is an exploration of the psychological and political ramifications of torture and threat, and it is poignant in the questions it asks, even though I don't know that there are any good answers.

The answer is to be strong, and brave, and that the best you can do is the right thing.  That's not a facetious answer; in real life, the right thing will sometimes cause the wrong consequences.  That has to be faced; would you want your friends to risk their lives if they could save yours?  Would you want a country to go to war if it would end your torture?  Would it be a good thing if the world was ruled by a benevolent dictator who did not see individuals, but the greater good of humanity?

These are such brave questions to ask, and such hard questions to address, and Erin Bow is so honest with them, and so intimate with the people they affect.  And I make this sound abstract, as though Xie supporting Greta doesn't make me want to cry, as though I didn't want to punch Elian.  As though goat farming wasn't full of funny, frustrating stories.

You should go out right now and become an Erin Bow fan.

Go on.  I'll wait.

Why No Post

I was so determined to get back on the posting horse last week, and I was doing so well, and then I got all sucked into the last few episodes of Sense8.  This is a Netflix show that you should probably watch; it's not perfect, but it's pretty gorgeous.  It's about these eight random people (well, these eight random beautiful middle class people) from around the world who discover that they can share their thoughts, "visit" each other, and communicate with their minds across the world. 

The part that's lovely is that each of them has this full, complicated life, with their own problems and loves and communities.  Nomi has the best girlfriend ever; Kala is not sure about her upcoming wedding; Sun is the unappreciated daughter of a man with a wastrel for a son.  Lido is a famous actor with an amazing boyfriend; Will is a cop who has a complicated relationship with his father; Reilly is a skilled DJ who is very closed off in her personal life.  They are all completely different, and they all have lives that are more rich and populated than those of most people on television.

Because this is a show about community.  And you know what most TV shows lack?  Peripheral characters.  I always thought it was cool that How I Met Your Mother involved people with recurring friends, while most TV shows involve very few people who are not consistent cast members.  The Friends friends didn't have any other friends. 

But in Sense8, every character is living a completely separate life, and each one is populated by friends and coworkers and family.  Sun's martial arts teacher; Wolfgang's notorious uncle and childhood best friend; Capheus's mother and business partner and customers.  Each of these people is surrounded by loved ones and family and friends and a whole network of a world, and then this added network of other people is layered on top of it.

They try to learn about their connection and the dangerous people who know about it, while mostly trying to deal with the complicated and sometimes violent circumstances in their own lives.  Pretty much everyone gets to take advantage of Sun's martial arts training, Matt's police skills, and Wolfgang's experiences with violence.

I'm explaining the plot, but not the love.  I love this show.  I love these people.  I want to spend time with them and take care of them, and the show mostly made me glad that they all have each other. 

Also, I'm not sure what Sun practices, but I kind of want to take Aikido.  But I'm like 40; it's too late to start something like that, right?

Back to books soon, I swear.

Revenge of the Romance Novel

I don't read a ton of romance, though not for any particular reason.  I've never taken the time to develop the tools to find the ones I'll like, not the way I can flip through a science fiction novel and tell from the back cover and the first 5 pages whether it has a shot of being up my alley.  I mean, there's still a margin of error, but I know what to look for (personal stakes presented immediately, female characters, minimal stimming on the technology).  I don't have a toolbox like that for romance, so I don't bother going there very often.

But lately, I've been reading a lot of fanfiction (weirdly, and maybe I'll talk about that later), and I've been thinking that part of that is the really intense focus on romance.  So maybe what I needed was a real, official romance novel to gt me back on the reading track.  And then this Mary Jo Putney book, Not Always a Saint, came up on Netgalley, and I've heard of MJP, and maybe she was recommended to me?  Anyway, I should try that, right?

Sigh. The frustrating thing is that I like romance novels.  I like a little steam, a little smolder, a little will-they-won't-they-but-of-course-they-will.  But apparently I have very specific requirements of my romances--namely, that they have some kind of action plot (or subplot! subplot is fine!) to carry things along.  When two people are just living their lives and falling in love, I find it kind of boring.

Not Always a Saint is about a doctor who is low level nobility and likes to help the poor who accidentally becomes heir to a big estate (think Matthew of Downton Abbey) and realizes he needs a wife who can back him up on that.  His sister, the heroine of a previous novel in this series, starts taking him around to parties.  Meanwhile Jessie is mourning her much-older husband, and realizing that his unexpectedly leaving his estate to their young daughter means that the hereditary male heir of the title is going to be making her life really difficult unless she can find another powerful husband to protect them.  They meet, find each other agreeable (and hot! don't forget hot! but also agreeable) and decide to mate--I mean, wed.

I want to love this--the rationality, the grown-ups using their words and talking to each other about their decisions!  But the threat to Jessie's daughter from the thwarted heir is too sporadic.  Daniel saves her from not one but two random dangerous moments (fell into a pond! runaway horse!) to get things heated up.  His main problem is that he's inherited a big estate, poor baby! 

Even the attraction didn't grab me.  He sees her from across the room and his whole body feels like it's on fire and every fiber of her being does something and then they want each other. 

I feel so mean.  I don't think this is a romance thing, though--I think this was Not My Book.  I was asking it to do a job that it was not cut out for.  I'm sorry, book.

And in the meantime, if you know of a good historical romance novel with some action, let me know.  I could still use something steamy to read.

Scarlett Noir

Okay, I said I'd be back and blogging more, and it's been a couple of weeks, but in my defense I was on vacation for one of them.  Which always seems like a good time to blog, but then never is.

But it does mean that I have a backlog of things to talk about (including a question about Game of Thrones in the comments from the last post that is now going to be its own post very shortly), so I'm going to roll right into one of the backlog, with the goal of mixing in these older reviews with some in-progress discussions, because I appear to finally be back on the wagon.

Today, let's talk about the awesome book that got me back into reading after about two months away from it entirely: Scarlett Undercover, by Jennifer Latham.  I got it from Netgalley, and thank heaven, because it was exactly what I needed, at just the right time.  Teenaged private detective with a rough recent past (think Veronica Mars) takes a case that leads to secrets the people around her have been keeping about her father's murder, and her own heritage.

Scarlett, first of all, is amazing.  She's 17, but she graduated high school early and is taking time off before college.  Her parents are dead--her father murdered years ago, her mother lost to cancer more recently--and she lives with her older sister, who is loving and wonderful and also very busy in medical school.

Scarlett is a private investigator, and when a tween girl comes to her saying she's worried about what her brother's involved in because he's changed so much, Scarlett takes the case.  This is the point where my summary mostly stops, because here the plot starts rolling along.

This is the most authentically noir teenage story I've seen since Brick--maybe moreso.  Because Brick was full of artistry, and was very self-conscious in its use of the language and styles and characters of noir, but Scarlett is just naturally a cool, on-top-of-things problem solver.  She comes prepared, she thinks fast, and she knows what she wants.  So when the job ends up tying into her father's murder, including maybe a cult and maybe even potentially magical artifacts (though Scarlett has no use for the notion of magic; she lives in the real world, thank you very much), she is ready for things.  She's got a plan, a friend in the police department, and a back door out of every building on the block. 

So when there are car chases, people trailing her, thefts, and threats, she's scared all right--because she's smart enough to know she should be--but she's read, and she's not going to back down without a fight.

So yes, I loved this book.  The plot zipped right along, and the character was a complete no-nonsense, awesome girl (who was also Muslim, by the way, and not just incidentally, but in a way that is cultural and familial and thoughtful and modern all at the same time).  She's got friends and attitude and I wanted to follow her around.  And if the plot was a little convoluted and hinged on some serious coincidences--which, oh yes, it did--I didn't mind so much, because it was nothing Sam Spade hadn't seen before, and I was willing to go anywhere with Scarlett.

There was a little romance, but no more than they needed to be (another requirement for pulling me out of a book rut).  Similarly, a good amount of action, but never to the point where I got bored with it (which I do, sometimes). 

I want to hug Scarlett.  I want to see what she does next.  I want to thank her for bringing me back to my old obsessively reading self.  And I really, really want to see what she does next.

On the Grid

I am back from a short off-the-grid vacation and a long blog hiatus, due to a weird reading hiatus.  I'm not sure how many details I'm going to go into on my reading hiatus, but my vacation involved some lovely fellow readers, so that will get a recap, as will the many books I've actually finished reading in the past few weeks! 

So, welcome back to me, and stay tuned!  Thank you for your patience!

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!