The Best of Flashbacks

Did you know that there's new Bloom County? Was everyone else aware of this but me?  Berke Breathed has been producing new Bloom County strips online this year!  And now they're coming out in a collection called Bloom County XI: A New Hope, and I got it from Netgalley to read and my heart, it grew three sizes that day.

I don't think I can overstate how much Bloom County meant to me when I was a kid.  I learned about satire there, about politics and the press and what it looks like to be sincere in the face of cynicism.  Opus the Penguin was the mascot of my New Sincerity movement. Milo Bloom is the guy I'd want running my political campaign.  Steve Dallas is the ur-slimy-dudebro to me. Bill the Cat...well, I've got nothing for Bill, but as a prop he gets the job done.

The new book drops right back into the middle of the series when it comes to art and style, but drops into the modern era.  The cover made me worry that the art would be more like Outland, the trippy spinoff that marked the end of Bloom County, but it's not; it's got the friendly feel of the best comics from the late '80s. And the stories are not spun out of the 1985 material, but take the same sensibility that the comic had in its heyday and bring it into the modern world: naive and determinedly optimistic Opus tries out internet dating, Steve Dallas tries to find a place for his particular brand of masculinity in the world, and Milo runs his Bill/Opus ticket for the Meadow Party in the 2016 election.

 

 

(Source) 

Reading this was amazing.  It was like getting back a part of my childhood, and remembering how it felt to learn so much of what I still know today.  Welcome back, Opus.  I missed you.

Hit Me Where I Live

When I picked up Gemini, by Sonya Mukherjee, from Netgalley, I'll admit it was mostly because conjoined twins is a sensational story.  How do they manage the day to day? How do they manage relationships? Get along with their parents? I was in it for the melodrama.

Which is why I was seriously knocked on my metaphorical, emotional butt when this book reached right into the darkest and most secret parts of my heart and laid them out on the page with great sympathy and perfect comprehension.

This sounds like hyperbole; it's not.  This is what happened, and there were totally non-dramatic moments in the first 30 pages of this book that had me near tears because I felt exactly like that in high school.  Hell, for years into adulthood. I was Clara.

Clara and Hailey are conjoined twins, joined back to back and sharing too much of their nervous and digestive systems to have been separated.  Their mother is firmly insistent that they are perfectly normal--and they are, for the most part. They're smart and funny and generally healthy.  In their small town, everyone knows them and they're no more remarkable than anyone else--no staring, lots of friends.

But Hailey and Clara know they're different.  Hailey knows she's unmissable, so she dyes her hair pink.  Being conjoined isn't even close to the main thing about her, and if she can't blend in, she'll stand out in her own way.

Clara knows she's a freak--she understands that she's smart and a good friend and all her strengths, but she also knows she's a freak, and she keeps a tight, firm clamp on any feeling that might look like wanting what other girls have--to travel, date, or dance.

The book is about their senior year, about looking ahead at staying in their small town or reaching further into the world--and trying to be brave enough to reach.  I love Hailey, who is scared but determined. I love how they complement each other, and how they recognize that.

But oh, I am Clara.  There are words that Clara says to herself in this book that I literally wrote to myself in my diary when I was a teenager.  There is a tight control that she keeps on herself, because she knows that she is not one of these normal people whom someone could love. She knows that she lives in the world on sufferance, and she will not ask more than she's entitled to.

So when I tell you that this book is in so many ways perfect, when I tell you that it's beautiful, and that I love all of these characters who are doing the best with whatever they have to work with--when I tell you these things, I hope you believe in the tender beauty here. The whole thing is a breathtaking, heartwarming experience.

My Favorite Thing About Hamilton This Week: Teach 'Em How To Say Goodbye

Well, the original cast of Hamilton is splitting up.  Lin-Manuel Miranda, Philippa Soo, and Leslie Odom, Jr. are leaving the show.  On one hand, it's the end of an era.  On the other, Chris Jackson, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry--when I go see the show in February, I will still see some of the people I've been goggling over for months.

But, back to the subject: my favorite thing about Hamilton this week, in honor of LMM's big goodbye, is the song I can't stop listening to, sometimes with tears in my eyes:






The final curtain call was streamed live on Facebook, which is pretty cool, but I would also like to point out how incredibly cool it is that the theme song from The West Wing played there at the end.  LMM is so my kind of nerd.

Detective-ish, Thriller-ish

So, I've been reading a book called The Widow, by Fiona Barton, which I got from Netgalley a while back. And coincidentally today, I ended up listening to Slate's Audio Book Club episode from last year about The Girl on the Train, which I read a while back. It's a good episode (I really like that feature, especially for books I've already read); I have my agreements and disagreements with their points, but it's a good talk.  But there's one interesting point that they make that strikes me as very true of Girl and also of The Widow.

The titular widow is Jean, whose husband has recently died and who is living through a media circus. We also see the reporter who's getting close to her, and the police officer who's investigating the event that made Jean and Glen the target of so much attention. The details unfold gradually, but it's not too spoilery to say that it has to do with the disappearance of a little girl named Bella four years ago.

The observation about Girl that the Slate piece makes is that it doesn't really work like a mystery, nor precisely like a thriller.  In a mystery, you have a detective who, while often tragically flawed, uses skill, intellect and character to uncover the details of what happened. None of these really applied to the main character in that book--it's not about watching her figure things out, it's about watching her stumble around. But it's not quite a thriller, either, because most of the "what will happen" we know the answer to--the question is more of a mystery's "how did it happen?" So the book is somewhere between a very slow thriller and a lumbering, semi-backwards detective novel.

This conversation immediately made me think of The Widow. And I know that sounds really pejorative, like criticism, but I think it's just a genre I don't have a name for (or maybe it's just a thriller).  The Passenger was sort of like this, too.  You have two parallel stories, one in the past and one in the present.  The present one is very much fallout of the past one, and the present is happening as the details of the past are revealed.  Usually--as in The Widow--the characters mostly know the details (though only Jean knows the whole story) and it's the slow tease of revelation for us as the readers--kind of a reverse dramatic irony.

I'm not completely sold on a story where the tension comes from a secret that's being kept from the reader.  It very much requires me to trust the author that the secret is a good one, since the secret itself is important; in a more standard structure, the secret is only part of the tension, and how the characters will react to it brings its own question.  But here, the characters know the secret, so we're watching layers of characterization being revealed, not watching character development happen.  It's an entirely different experience, I think, and a more precarious one.

At this point in The Widow (almost halfway), I have a theory about the whole thing. That's often true, but here's the thing--in a book like this, if I'm right about the theory, the book has failed.  If what I've "figured out" is really what happened (and I won't spoil it), then the author has not successfully concealed enough from me, and the slow unfolding will just be a kind of waste of my time. 

I suspect I'm wrong, though, because I feel like the indicators that are pointing me in this direction are far too clear. There is no way this is me being a perceptive reader; some of my expectations are clearly red herrings. I guess you could see those as two different ways to get off track--either make the answers to obvious, or make the red herring too obviously false.


This review won't post before I finish the book, so I'll probably follow up with at least an update about whether I was right.  I really think that this is the kind of thing that the story hinges on--how subtle is the author being in her misdirections? The hints that seem to be dropping so heavily--are they really hints, or are they sending me off on wild goose chases?

Impulse Read

Netgalley is so bad for me.  I see something interesting and I grab it and then my to-read list (which by my calculations is at least 15 years worth of reading) is one book longer.  I try--I have rules that I can only get books whose author I know, or that I had been actively waiting for.  That lasts five minutes; I'm a sucker for a good blurb.

[Warning: severe overuse of parentheticals ahead.]

Ice Massacre, by Tiana Warner, had a great hook: mermaids can kill any sailor with their hypnotic charm, so the besieged island of Eriana Kwai. I'm not generally into mermaids, but Mira Grant's Rolling in the Deep was creepy and scary and I thought that mermaid massacres sounded like fun. (Because I'm sick.) (Also, I just realized that I never reviewed Rolling in the Deep. It's a great little horror novella; go read it.)

So even though the cover image for Ice Massacre has a mermaid pet peeve of mine on it (there's no reason for their tails to bend right where the knees would, and at the same angle; there are no legs in there IRL!), I dove in (ha, accidental mermaid pun!)

Meela lives on a small island off the coast of British Columbia.  Eriana Kwai used to be a prosperous, independent place, before the mermaids came.  But now, any ship near the island is attacked; they can't fish, or easily get supplies from shore, and people are hungry. 

Every year, a new class of warriors emerges from training and goes off to fight the mermaids.  Some years they slaughter enough to give them a few months of safe fishing, but for the last few years, no one has returned home, and things are getting dire.  Meela lost her brother to the Massacre when she was a child.  But now the island has a new plan: train girls, who are immune to mermaid hypnosis.

But Meela has a secret; as a child, she had a mermaid friend, and only she knows that they're not violent animals, but people, with minds and a society. Meela's massacre is personal; she wants revenge.

But of course it's more complicated than that--there are personal rivalries among the twenty girls on the ship, and danger and hardship and loyalties tested.  And there are some loose threads here--mermaid society, as told through Lysi, sounds a lot like high school. And the book seems to take place in a modern setting (with the fantastical mermaid thing added), but you'd think there would be other proposed solutions besides the yearly Massacre. And how do the showers work on this ship, and does it make sense to sleep in nightgowns if you might have to fight at any moment?

So no, you should not try to fill this bucket with water and carry it across the desert. But it's more than adequate to play with at the beach (my GOD I'm nailing the theming here). Meela is stubborn and young and she makes some really stupid mistakes, but they're very standard stupid kid mistakes, and realistic.  The book sags a bit in the middle, as we get a lot of repeated mermaid battles while the tensions on the ship are fraying--not enough build in the middle and a lot more (dare I say it) treading water.

BUT. The conclusion is satisfying. And the friendships here are varied and fraught in ways that I like--Annith, Blacktail, and Lysi are all different kinds of friends to Meela, and even mean-girl-turned bad Dani has different friends and alliances with different meanings.

One thing I'll say, hopefully not spoiling too much (but if it is, here's where you stop reading, because I warned you): I wondered for a while here if I was being queerbaited. Don't worry, dear reader; I was not.

On the Way Out

Corinne Duyvis's On the Edge of Gone actually came out a while ago; I got a copy from Netgalley, but the formatting of the reviewer copy was messed up, so I had to wait till I got it from the library to read it.  It was definitely worth reading.

A comet is going to hit the earth, and people have been preparing.  Some are on generation ships, self-sustaining biospheres that will find other planets to inhabit over years in the stars.  Others lucked into permanent shelters, where they're provisioned to wait out the years it will take for the earth to recover from the devastation.

The rest of the population weathers the impact in temporary shelters and then tries to survive the year-long winter, the storms and floods and dangers.  Denise is one of these, and at the beginning of the book she and her mother and sister have just a few hours to get to their shelter before the impact. But her sister is missing, and her mother is dithering, and they're going to miss their window. When they stop to help the victims of a motorcycle crash, Denise knows they've missed their chance at the shelter.

But the women they rescue lead her to something better--a generation ship, not yet launched.  Can they get on board? What will happen to Iris? What will happen to the world?

It's damning Duyvis with faint praise to say that one of the most impressive things about this book is the representation. It's rather glorious how all sorts of people inhabit this world so casually.  Iris is transgender, Denise is autistic, and her mother is an addict.  Iris and Denise are also biracial. Other characters are gay and Muslim and also autistic and all kinds of other things, and some of these things are plot-relevant and some are relevant only as they matter to the characters themselves.  But the most interesting question, the one that Denise poses by her very existence, is whether the fact that someone has needs that are different from the average means that they shouldn't be met?

There's so much great stuff here--how different everyone's emotions are during intense experiences; how hard people work to try to help each other and stay calm, even when not everyone can. How everything has consequences--can I tell you how great it was to read a book where a character is seriously injured and is actually prevented from doing a lot of things for days and days after the injury? It's refreshing that an accident, or a death, or the end of the world is freaking people out, and that those emotions come and go in cycles.

Another theme that I always find fascinating is scarcity. We live in a world where, while we're not exactly post-scarcity, many of us have the privilege of thinking in post-scarcity terms.  It's easy for me to say that everyone should have enough to eat when I have more than enough to eat.  But if there wasn't enough food for everyone, what does fair and righteous look like? Does someone being a drug addict make them less "deserving" of resources? If not the fact of her addiction, what behaviors would do so?  What about Denise, whose autism makes her uncomfortable in many situations (being touched, being rushed), but who is otherwise a functional young adult?

In the end, the book shies away from answering the scarcity question with an ending that's not only optimistic but with lots of room for sunshine and lollipops.  But the book asked the questions and addressed consequences, and I wish more books would do both things.

It wasn't perfect.  It sagged a bit in the middle, treading water (ha, literally! It takes place in Amsterdam) while all the pieces got in place for the final act.  The story was good, but it's the ideas, the questions, and the characters that are great--warm, compassionate, and challenging.

Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated

Oh, I'm stealing this one from Elizabeth, because she was right, I was shocked at how many of my most beloved books don't have more than even 1,000 ratings on Goodreads! The Top Ten Tuesday feature is from Broke and Bookish, and today's list: Top Ten Books We Enjoyed That Have Under 2,000 Ratings On Goodreads.


So, I'm going to skip the really old or obscure ones--I mean, Rumer Godden doesn't need my boost, even on her "backlist," and the translation of that French nun book from the 1950s was terrible.  Let's just go with the stuff that I am truly shocked to learn is not being scored by 100 new people every day!

1) Lifelode, by Jo Walton.  Really, there isn't enough love for Jo Walton by definition, because All The Love would not be enough love.  But this one is definitely underrated.  There's a lot going on here with time and memory and alternate family situations.  But what it comes down to is just a beautiful glimpse of a moment, and the lives of some incredibly real people--some likable, some not--doing the best they can.

2) Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow. The Scorpion Rules is getting great buzz, but don't be afraid to go back to this fantasy novel with a Native American feel, because the friendships here are incredible.


3) Scarlett Undercover, by Jennifer Latham.  If Veronica Mars was Muslim and maybe a little supernatural.  But that dark noir bite? Is so hard to find.

4) I'm going to put a bunch of K.J. Parker novellas here, because I'm not going to choose between Blue and Gold, The Devil You Know, and Downfall of the Gods. (Oh, who am I kidding? Go read Blue and Gold.) Suffice it to say, all three of these books are clever and snarky and twisty, and clearly underrated, if only in that they're not often enough rated.

5) Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan. Once again, I assume that because the word of mouth reached me, it reached everyone. The combination of cultures and mythology and way more about Muy Thai fighting than I ever believed I'd love to know.

6) Ursula Vernon--really, everything she writes.  I mean, maybe it's just that kids' books don't get many reviews on Goodreads, but seriously, Danny Dragonbreath, Harriet Hamsterbone, and my personal favorite, Castle Hangnail, are exactly what your children should be reading.  (Yes, Danny can be annoying when he finds girls weird. Even though he learns, some kids aren't aware of the boy/girl thing yet. Still.)

7) The Wolf Road, by Beth Lewis. I mean, okay, this just came out, but the far-future old-West feel is amazing, and Elka is one of my favorite not-quite-likeable characters ever.

8) Point of Honour, by Madeleine Robins! All the Sarah Tolerance books, people! Fallen woman turned private detective (living in the guest house behind her aunt's bordello) in the 1800s. Sarah is a badass, and if you guys don't start reading these there won't be more--please, for me!

9) Gena/Finn, by Hannah Moskowitz and Kat Helgeson. Maybe this one just hit me really close to home, but in the age of internet friends, it means so much to have a picture of what that kind of a bond can be.

10) The Golden City, by Kathleen J. Cheney. This one--this book was so great.  Fantasy set in turn of the century Portugal, with selkies--and, even better, a potential romance built on mutual respect and admiration before hormones.  This deserves way more attention.

I'm leaving out so much.  So many comics series (Princeless! The Three Thieves! Hexed, and its tie in novel, which was really surprisingly great!), so many old favorites (A Patch of Blue, The Nun's Story, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane), so many kids' books and novellas and brand new books that I have faith will still get their buzz.  I thought I was behind in my reading and reviewing; you guys have to get on the ball!

The Dang Townsfolk

Okay, I finally, finally finished Hex, though I'm still kind of asking myself why.  Why did I finish that book?  In my last post on the subject I said I wanted to know how the story ended, but really I think it was like a car accident I couldn't look away from.

So the interesting thing that I learned, from Goodreads and the afterword, is that it is, in fact, a translation.  The author is Dutch, and the original version was published and set in the Netherlands. There was a translator, but the author polished the final version and wrote a new ending in English, in which he is fluent.

Now, I had thought before I started reading that it was Dutch, but when it took place in upstate NY, I assumed I was wrong.  So this clarifies things.  There's a good amount of local geography--someone did their research--but there is a decent amount of clunkiness here, and I'm wondering now how much of that is the translation and how much is my opinion of the writing.

I said before that the writing was okay--I think I was wrong about that.  There are just a few too many places where I couldn't picture what was happening, or places where characters spoke in what was really narrator-speak.  Example: I spent two pages trying to figure out what an "A-frame swing" might look like before I realized he meant an A-frame swingset, at which point I got it.

Also, try saying this sentence out loud as though you really needed to communicate the idea to another person: "What about our loved ones who were out of town?" (I have never called my loved ones my loved ones out loud, especially not in a moment of panic.) "She's as terrified with Katherine as she was obsessed." (Aside from the misuse of "with" to go with "terrified," that is not how anyone talks extemporaneously; the reversed sentence structure is a rhetorical flourish you primarily see in written text.) And what teenager thinks of seeing/making out with/doing it with his girlfriend as "kindling renewed passions," even in the narration in his head?

Other weird things that threw me out of the writing: people mention being Americans all the time.  The third person omniscient narrator switches from using characters' first names to the "Mr. Hampton" construction at weird moments. A high school student is allowed to have his girlfriend sleep over with barely a passing mention. Someone makes "druidic gestures."

But okay, that's the writing, possibly the translation.  At the core of the book, though, I have a couple of pivotal problems.  One is, as I mentioned in my other post, the weird thing with women.  When the townsfolk (oh, there are SO MANY townsfolk in this book--they are referred to collectively and very frequently) start having weird visions, a LOT of them are about things like a woman being sexually attacked by an animal, or a big pile of children strapped together in the shape of a breast (yeah, that one makes NO MORE SENSE in the book than it does here), or a local woman's naked, flaccid flesh. There are all kinds of moments where a husband and wife go through something, and the husband is presumed to be the actor (should he speak up? should he do something?) while the wife encourages or discourage or is proud of or disparages him.

There are so many examples of this.  But the weird foreignness of the women is really just related to the weird foreignness of everyone's internal life here.  The townsfolk problem isn't just about the overuse of the word.  You know in books like The Stand and 'Salem's Lot, where Stephen King takes these long moments to give you a glimpse into the life of a character who will never appear again?  Like, the world is falling apart, and here is Mrs. Humphrey in her kitchen deciding whether to hide in the basement or join the mob running past her house. Here is Bammy (ugh, that name) finding her new hometown on fire.  Those are to humanize people who are doing inhuman things, to show you enough of their internal life to understand that even when they're behaving like sheep, they still exist, these people, as individuals.

None of that here. Townsfolk act like idiots, vote for whatever their benevolent dictators tell them to, join a mob, gossip, whatever--and they do it as a group, with no individual thought.  They're sheeple.

(xkcd)

But in real life, even when people are acting like a violent mob, even when they're psychologically subsumed by the mob, they still exist as individuals.  They go home after that to their separate houses and think their separate thoughts.  The townsfolk just don't get that kind of respect here.

And the worst part is, that's kind of the point of the book.  Like, both that they're not acting rational and the fact that they're accountable for it.  It's hard to explain without giving the whole thing away, but basically the direction the story takes leaves this omission of agency to be not just a frustrating lack of style but a big hole where the emotional center of the book is supposed to be.

Finally, I'll tell you one thing that I thought was pretty interesting about the premise that was never really explored at all until in the end it was supposed to seem important: the people in Black Spring have two separate problems: the witch (who is creepy, and whom evidence suggests is dangerous if not properly managed) and the oppressive, dictatorial, quasi-religious local government that has sprung up to manage the situation.  Even though the story revolves around people who push the edges of the Emergency Decree rules (don't interfere with the witch; don't tell Outsiders anything), no one in the book seems to notice this at any point at all.

Part of me wants to go on; the rest of me wants to go to bed.  Sold.

Diverse Books Tag

I saw Jenny's post with this tag and took it upon myself to tag myself, because I really wanted to make this list.  So, without further ado:

The Diverse Books Tag is a bit like a scavenger hunt. I will task you to find a book that fits a specific criteria and you will have to show us a book you have read or want to read.

If you can’t think of a book that fits the specific category, then I encourage you to go look for one. A quick Google search will provide you with many books that will fit the bill. (Also, Goodreads lists are your friends.) Find one you are genuinely interested in reading and move on to the next category.

Everyone can do this tag, even people who don’t own or haven’t read any books that fit the descriptions below. So there’s no excuse! The purpose of the tag is to promote the kinds of books that may not get a lot of attention in the book blogging community.

Find a book starring a lesbian character.
I have been wanting to read Everything Leads to You, by Nina LaCour, for ages.  I'm pretty sure it's new adult romance, which is not always my jam, but it's about a set dresser in Hollywood, which kind of is, so I'm excited.

Find a book with a Muslim protagonist.
Oh, here I want to talk up Scarlett Undercover, by Jennifer Latham, because it's a really fun teen detective book with a vaguely supernatural and very Veronica Mars vibe. Scarlett's relationship with her sister and her sense of family are tied closely to her religion, and I love the way she honors those things without necessarily being a believer.

Find a book set in Latin America.
Alaya Dawn Johnson wrote The Summer Prince a few years ago, and I've always regretted not reading it.  There was some discussion about the use of Brazilian culture by an author who is not actually Brazilian herself, but the discussion was interesting and the book sounds very well done, and like something I very much want to read.

Find a book about a person with a disability.
Otherbound, by Corinne Duyvis, is about a boy who has visions every time he closes his eyes (and, in a separate but connected storyline, about the girl he has visions about). This causes him all sorts of problems concentrating and managing life, and he lost a leg in an accident at one point because of this.  The girl in the other part of the story is mute, having had her tongue cut out when she was made a slave.

Find a science fiction or fantasy book with a POC protagonist.
Oh, there are so many places to go with this one.  Let's see, I think I'll hit N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, because it's one of my absolute favorites.  But that's pretty famous and I've talked it up before, so I'm going to throw in a little nod for a comic that I haven't heard much about--Bayou, a creepy, Wonderlandesque story about a little girl in the South in the 1920s whose father is accused of killing her white playmate.  Lee goes into the swamp to try to get the girl back and prove her father's innocence, but the world she has to travel is both marvelous and dangerous. Sadly, only two volumes came out, but they're wonderful.

Find a book set in (or about) any country in Africa.
Mala Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die was a gorgeous mystery novel that is very much about place, both geographically (the South African veldt), historically (apartheid), and culturally (a small town in the 1950s).

Find a book written by an Aboriginal or American Indian author.
This is just what this tag was meant to do--this one sent me hunting.  I mean, I could have gone with one of the Sherman Alexie or Louise Erdrich books that I've loved or that I'm excited for, but instead I went looking for something new.  What I picked is Ragged Company, by Richard Wagamese.  It's about four homeless people who spend their days in a movie theater.  When they find a winning lottery ticket but can't claim the prize without proper identification, they get one of the regulars at the movie house to help them out, and their fates become entwined.  It sounds fascinating, and like one of those "glimpse inside the world" books that I really enjoy.

Find a book set in South Asia (Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc.)
Looking at my Goodreads, I think everyone I know has read Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger except me.  And I love a good antihero protagonist. So let's fix that problem, shall we?

Find a book with a biracial protagonist.
I'm reading one right now! Corinne Duyvis's On the Edge of Gone is about a teenaged girl trying to take care of her drug-addicted mother and find her missing sister during an end-of-the world scenario involving a meteor.  Denise and her mother are Dutch, but her father is Surinamese, and this is one of many ways that Denise often feels apart from the people around her.

Find a book starring a transgender character or about transgender issues.
I'll take this moment to plug Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, which I read a couple of years ago and really liked. It's a pretty straightforward story of a trans guy dealing with high school--coming out to his parents, friends, and acquaintances, and the pleasure he finds in music and the local radio show he DJs. It's "just" a slice of life book, but I found it honest and really lovely.

Doomed

I've been reading Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvalt, and I'm a quarter of the way through and I might need to take a break.  I'd say that I might need to stop reading, except I actually do find the story interesting and want to know where it goes.  It's good horror.

But--oh, the buts. The writing is adequate; when I am occasionally confused, it's usually cleared up by pushing through for a while till I get to a part where it makes sense again. At first I thought it was because of the worldbuilding that was going on in the first couple of chapters, but no--sometimes it's just not clear in a scene who is doing what, or how the person who was standing over there is now sitting over here.

Whatever--that's nitpicking, and if it's detracting from my ability to get lost in the story or trust the author to take care of the details, I can live with it on the path to the creepy old witch. 

The place where it really falls apart, though, is the squicky woman problem.  Really, it's a broader problem of the characters all being pretty shallow and caricatured. The head of the "police" force is singleminded and kind of crude; our main focal character is an upright, settled, liberal man of middle years. There's the smart teenager who wants more, the troublemaker, the perfect wife, the wise and levelheaded neighbor, the beaten woman who's maybe a little unstable.

But the thing I keep noticing is that in this loosely outlined world, the women are helpmeets and sidekicks.  It's all very 1950s, in feeling if nothing else.  Our hero's wife is a great partner, but we get no glimpse of her personality, except that she was once very excited to move to Black Spring because of the local geology. Another woman, a new neighbor whose arrival allows an infodump explaining the town's curse, is named Bammy (which strikes me as kind of gross for some reason) and her only notable moments are using a particularly prudish and original euphemism for sex and asking her husband if it's all right to relate information to the people they're conversing with.  Another local woman was beaten by her husband, and her personality and feelings about that were clearly written by someone who has very little insight into the minds of others.

I don't know, maybe it's just that I'm feeling emotionally rough today, but I don't have it in me to watch this author condescend to these characters. There are moments of casual sexism (and racism) that are clearly intended by the author to provide information about the characters who think and say these things, but the more minor offenses that the author commits himself keep me from trusting him to be using those bad-guy-mannerisms carefully. 

Basically I feel kind of punched in the face, and I'm just not in the mood. I'll definitely finish it, and maybe I'll blog about it again with some details.  For now, though, it's getting set aside for something more thoughtful--if equally trashy.

The Good vs. The Great

This is not a question about good books vs. great books.  It's about several books I've read (some lately, some just lately called to mind) in which someone striving for greatness has lost some of what I would call their goodness. So the question before us today is this: is the Good the enemy of the Great?

I talked about this a little bit when I read Roses and Rot, a novel about artists who are competing for an opportunity to live in the realm of Faery for seven unpleasant years and then return guaranteed to be the greatest artist of their generation. The characters feel bad about it, but it is generally considered to be the most desirable thing, and people are turned against each other over this prize.  People cease being good to each other in pursuit of greatness.

Before I go on, let's define our terms.  By "goodness" I mean virtue and kindness, either to oneself or others.  Spending time with your loved ones, participating in the day-to-day life of the people you care about, doing the small things that keep the world running smoothly.  As I type this, I'm realizing that a lot of this is really emotional labor and is coded feminine.

And "greatness," of course, is Accomplishing Something Big.  In a lot of my examples here, it's about art, but there are other areas that are coming to mind--intellectual or research pursuits, politics--any kind of world stage stuff, really.  Big projects that aren't about you or people you know, but about putting something out there into the world that goes beyond yourself.  Though that makes it sound more altruistic than it sometimes is; a concern for your legacy can be tied up very tightly in accomplishments that have their own merit.

I started thinking about this again when I read Scott McCloud's The Sculptor, which is an amazing book and really deserves its own review, except this is the main thing I thought about the whole time: what kind of person would give up living their life to leave a legacy?  There's a lot more going on there, and maybe I'll get to talk about it, but that's the sticking point--the protagonist of that book, David Smith, is single-mindedly devoted to Art, on principal, as an ideal, to the point where he is often not a very good person in his pursuit of his vision.  Aside from the things he gives up for himself, he ignores or lives on the goodwill of his friends, he blows up at people he cares about, he loses most of his ties to the world, because all he cares about is this big, abstract thing called Art.  All he sees is the greatness, his or someone else's, and he's not a very good person.

Look at the female lead in that book--she is a very good person, whose goodness is a large part of what she is and the things she does.  She helps homeless people, she does street art, she wants to touch individual people, not a vast Society.  Her legacy is in a million tiny touches.

Where this really started to come together in the non-art world, though, was when I read the incredibly amazing Raven Boys, which is just a gorgeous examination of privilege and how close you can be to someone and not be able to walk in their shoes at all.  Again, a million things to say about the book in general, but look at Gansey.  Look at his search for the ley line and the lost king Glendower.

Look at how hard he tries to be a good person, and how bad he is at it sometimes--because he treats people who are completely unlike him in exactly the way the he would like to be treated.  They love him for it, because they know that he is being good and generous to them, even when he is hurting them. But in Gansey's desire to do something great--something that makes him worthy of being in the world in a way that he doesn't quite feel--he can forget that the people in his orbit do not have the resilience of safety and money and confidence and privilege that he lives in without even knowing it.

Gansey works hard to be good, even when he doesn't quite understand what's involved.  But whenever his quest comes to the front, everything else takes a back seat, and the greatness he longs for pushes the goodness that he's striving for out of his reach.

And now I'm thinking of Hamilton, and how many hard moments and personal losses are about the obsession with legacy, and how he gave up the trust of his wife to protect his political legacy (more or less). Or even just the vacations that a person doesn't go on with his children in pursuit of a grand ambition.

Or the dinners that a boyfriend misses because he's working on his art.

Or the rift between two sisters when one wins the prize the other wanted.

I suppose goodness here can be seen as the pleasures of the small life, and greatness as the larger life in the public sphere.  When you put it this way, it's very clearly coded as feminine and masculine.  And when you bring these things right down to it, some of the choices are just about resource allocation; a person only has the time and personal energy to devote to a few things, and the more you put into one area, the less you will put into another.  Big things take big personal investments, leaving much less for the rest of life. 

There is an E.M. Forster quote I've always liked: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." I've always admired this, but I've also thought about it a lot--do I feel that way?  If both are betrayals, isn't my country a bigger one; aren't many of my countrymen also my friends?

I have always chosen the personal over the wider world, and never really doubted it.  Part of that is fear, or lack of ambition.  Part is the value and satisfaction I get from my relationships, more than accomplishments.  But if you start breaking down your values--art, knowledge, your nation, the future--aren't these things enormously important?  And do they have to come at the cost of everything else?

I should have an answer.  I should be able to at least sum up the argument.  All I can give you is that it's a big question, the kind that is better served in the argument than the answering, and the stories that wrestle with it in interesting ways and make unexpected points about it are the ones I want to read more of. 

Goodreads Book Tag

Just when I was feeling kind of blah about all my potential blog posts, Elizabeth at EMM Blogs posted her answers to these questions.  And lately I've found looking at books and thinking about books is almost more fun than reading them, so let's play!

1. What was the last book you marked as ‘read’?
The Passenger, by Lisa Lutz. Way more fun than it had any right to be. And with an almost-too-happy ending, which is my favorite kind!



2. What are you currently reading?
Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater. This book is incredible.  This morning on the train I made a noise that made other passengers stare at me.  That good.
On the Edge of Gone, by Corrine Duyvis. Epic disaster book.  I love the POV character.
Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo.  Audiobook. A fun heist book, though Bardugo often has trouble holding my attention as much as I want her to.
Rogues, edited by George R. R. Martin. I've been reading this one for months and months; it's a good anthology, but I can't read short stories all in a row. I read somewhere between one a week and one a month. They're pretty uniformly good, though with a wide variety of styles.

3. What was the last book you marked as ‘TBR’?
A Wild Swan and Other Tales by Michael Cunningham. Kelly and Cora's recommendation; I don't think they've ever steered me wrong.

4. What book do you plan to read next?
Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. The Booksmugglers liked it, and the premise sounds fascinating.  The first few pages are a little confusing, but I definitely want to see if it's as creepy as it sounds.

5. Do you use the star rating system?
I do, though almost everything gets four stars.  5 means it's on my longlist of favorites; 3 means I don't regret reading it. 2 means it was not a very good book, and 1 means it offended me.  But I don't rate books that I don't finish, so there aren't that many 1s or 2s--only when I finish them for a reason, whether it's book club or because it's so awful I can't look away.

6. Are you doing a 2016 Reading Challenge?
Nope.  I'm putting some attention into trying to read more POC authors, but book clubs are enough of a commitment to me.  I like to follow my whims, book-choice-wise.

7. Do you have a wishlist?
I have an offensively long wishlist at the library.  Like, obscenely long.  I have the maximum allowable number of ebooks on reserve.

8. What book do you plan to buy next?
Hmmm....buy?  I use the library for most of my new book acquisitions. I do really want to buy a copy of Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon, to reread with my son.  I adored that book.

9. Do you have any favorite quotes, would you like to share a few?
What always leaps to mind when someone asks this question is the first paragraph of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

10. Who are your favorite authors?
I feel like as soon as you ask this question my brain freezes up and I can't answer it.  I can list off a few of my favorite books, but a lot of them are by authors I haven't read a million books from.  Christopher Moore is amazing, though.  Ann Leckie, Jo Walton, K.J. Parker, Sharon Shinn.  Terry Pratchett.  



11. Have you joined any groups?
I never have gotten the hang of Goodreads groups, which is a shame, because I do so much bookish lurking on the internet, it seems like I'd love it there.

12. Who do you tag?
Lianna! I know your blog is mostly a writing blog, and that I'm asking you to take time from your real task but I want to know your answers. Keep this one in your pocket for when you need a break from writing! 

Progressfying

I really want to write a post about Scott McCloud's The Sculptor, but it's turning into a huge post involving a bunch of other books, so you're going to have to wait.  Meanwhile I've mostly drifted a bit from all the amazing books I'm reading (The Raven Boys and On the Edge of Gone) because I've been sucked in completely by Lisa Lutz's The Passenger.

I don't need to wait till I'm done with that book to talk about it, because whether or not it's great literature (it's not), I cannot. Stop. Reading it. I think that says all you need to know.  It's a book about a woman on the run--Tanya, who soon becomes Amelia, who soon becomes...well, it's complicated.  And so on.

We're not talking super-talented spies here--we're talking about the best you could do if you walked out of your house tomorrow with a suitcase and some handy cash and tried to disappear.  There's a small amount of planning, and she's not a bad pickpocket, but that's about it.  Going from place to place, drinking, motels, meeting people and maybe trying to find--what? 

Well, when she hooks up with another troubled woman, things get more interesting, and distinctly more complicated.  Tanya/Amelia/our narrator is pretty much the passenger in her life--drifting along and trying to keep out of trouble.  It's kind of a how-to on half-assedly (well, maybe three-quarter-assedly) going on the lam. I love how-to novels.

There's also the central question of what sent her off in the first place.  Tanya's husband dies by accident on the first page, but the reason she runs is that she's run before, and she knows she can't explain herself in even the most cursory investigation.  But what's in her past that she's running from?  This is a gimmick I usually hate--where the Big Reveal is a story that everyone in the book already knows but is kept from us by the narrator.  But it does a good job of building tension here, because it doesn't really matter to the story.  It's an interesting tidbit, but it has little to do with whatever's trouble she's in right now. 

I got this book from Netgalley and I'm so glad I did.  And I'm reminded of another Netgalley book I haven't reviewed yet, Playing Dead, by Elizabeth Greenwood, a nonfiction exploration of the art of faking one's own death.  Tanya/Amelia/our narrator needs a copy of this; I'd better read that next to brush up in case I have to bug out.

Epic WTF-ery: A Book Review

I have led my poor book club down the path of this book that got such good reviews, I can't even.  I don't know where to begin.  Archivist Wasp, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, came so highly recommended by the Book Smugglers, I threw it before my book club with confidence and encouraged their votes until it was our pick for the month.

Fortunately, it seems to have bothered me more than anyone else.  The writing was admittedly rocky, but some felt the story had a strong core.  And if you describe the plot, I suppose I can see how that might be true: Wasp is the Archivist of the goddess Catchkeep; feared and respected by her village, it is her job to record her interactions with the ghosts that are everywhere, and to banish them (I think? What happens to ghosts when she gets rid of them?). Once a year, the upstarts from the shrine get a chance to try to kill her and take her place as Archivist.  The Catchkeep-priest lords over all.  Good times.

She finds a ghost that can talk (which goes against the very nature of everything she's ever learned about ghosts, but she gets past that weirdly quickly) and asks for her help in finding his long-lost ghost-friend. She signs on because she kind of hates her life, and they take a journey to the underworld, which is like a long, weird dream sequence where doors open up into different places and you run into people all out of context and big dogs try to kill you and you just have a feeling about something.

I hate dream sequences.  This is a fact about me, my own pet peeve and peculiarity, but a really consistent one.  I like dreaming; I hate reading about dreams. So the fact that about half this book runs on dream logic takes a big chunk out of my enjoyment from the get-go.

Part of being a ghost is losing your memory, so the ghost she's following around doesn't have much to go on.  But they discover that Wasp can see some ghost memories (with her magic Archivist knife, for some reason), so she fills in the gaps of his past--a high-tech society with supersoldiers fighting a war.  So we have two dystopias--Wasp's distant future of crumbling hardscrabble village life, and the ghost's our-future/Wasp's-past of high tech war. 

So, I have a million questions, and I don't necessarily believe the author could answer them if I had her here to ask.  Like, why are there no ghosts in the memories of the past, if they're just around everywhere now? Is the afterlife really just wandering around for eternity, either on earth or in the ghost world, until you dissolve or someone does....whatever it's Wasp's job to do? That last memory trip--did the ghost go with her into it? Was he himself, or a bystander? How did he talk to both the woman and Wasp in the same interaction? How did that relived memory have any outcome in the real world?

Also, wouldn't it have been SO MUCH EASIER to keep track of everything if the ghost had had a name--or even just a narrative descriptor that separated memory-him from ghost-him?  And how did the tools that he carried from before he died have any effect on living flesh? And how come the prospect of just living in the world seems like a curse until later it just isn't?

Okay, that last one might make psychological sense, if I think about it.  But the thing is, I don't trust the author at all enough to believe that any connection I see is part of what she's trying to do with the story.  It's too sloppy--on a micro level (antecedents that I can't pair with their nouns) and a macro level (literally what happened in that last memory scene?).  Kelly made a great point in our meeting about the parallels between Wasp and the ghost, and my first reaction was "I don't think so." She's right, all those signs are there, some even pointed to deliberately.  But the story is just so sloppy that I had trouble perceiving the patterns even when looking for them.

Oh, also?  That house that is described as "abandoned" at the end of the book?  It was being burned down 200 pages earlier.  If I have to do this for you, there is a failure here.

There was some good stuff--I liked Foster; I liked the creepy apocalyptic landscape of Wasp's time (which turns all green and rosy at the end--is there landscaping version of the pathetic fallacy?); I really liked the mythology around Catchkeep and the other gods.  I just wish that even those neat parts had fit together better, felt more organic, or, god help me, made a lick of sense.

Cast Out Yer Demons

It's a good old-fashioned exorcism!  Between zombies and vampires and various other horrifying and world ending tragedies, here's a horror trope that I haven't seen much of.  Grady Hendrix's last book, Horrorstör (aside: do you know how hard it is to type an umlaut? Too hard) was a raucous good time of the Haunted Capitalist Mecca variety. So naturally I was up for My Best Friend's Exorcism when it showed up on Netgalley.

It's 1988, and Abby and Gretchen are inseparable best friends.  Abby practically lives at Gretchen's house, because although her parents are strict and religious, they are also happy and well-to-do, while her own family lives on the edge of poor and the edge of despair.

One night, after an abortive LSD experiement, Gretchen is lost in the woods for the night, and when she comes out, she's...not okay.  Little things, like not changing her clothes or bathing; big things, like saying she feels fingers touching her all the time.  Gretchen needs help, but no one will listen and nothing seems to help her.  It just seems like things are getting worse and worse.

I'm not going to give away the twists and turns, because that's what make a horror novel great, but I'll tell you that it gets worse before it gets better--so much worse that I kept wanting to put the book down because I was so worried about Abby, even past the point where I'd pretty much given up on Gretchen.  But Abby won't give up on her friend, even when it looks more and more like that stubborn loyalty will be the end of her.

There is all kinds of grossness here (body fluids, bugs, dead animals) and all kinds of drama, and it's all compelling.  But the absolute best part is the setting--it's 1988, and it's a private high school in Charleston, and Abby is from just over on the wrong side of the tracks. She doesn't have nice things unless she buys them herself, and she can't afford a dermatologist so she wears too much makeup, and she just doesn't quite fit in. 

As with any horror story, it's about something besides the monster.  This one is about being an outsider, and finding that all the systems that have protected you and are supposed to protect you are actually turning against you. The '80s theme was charming and nostalgic, but it also put us in a world where a psychologist was a desperation move, and a scholarship student might be looked at sideways. A lot of closed-mindedness and saving of face happens here, and while these aren't things that don't exist today--well, 1988 was another world in a lot of ways.

Like I said, there are blood and guts. And self-harm and demons.  And the horrible, creeping tension of realizing that no one is listening to you, and that trying to help is just going to ruin your life.  And a good old fashioned exorcism. God, high school is terrifying.

Commonplace Book

I'm not usually a quote-puller, but lately these books have been raining down the wisdom on me.  Dropping knowledge and whatnot.  Figured I'd pass it along.

"You know why experts don't have an easy answer? Because a fucking expert's the guy who knows how complicated the fucking questions are." 
-Claire North, The Sudden Appearance of Hope

"No wolf or bear just gives up when they get beat or hungry. you ever seen a bear jump off a cliff 'cause life handed him a few rough draws? No, you haven't. The wild keeps going till it don't have strength in the muscles and bones. The wild don't give up; it's forever, and so was I."
-Beth Lewis, The Wolf Road

"There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike acknowledge one's superiority."
-Jane Austen, Lady Susan

Now You See Her...

Warning: I have a lot to say about The Sudden Appearance of Hope, by Claire North. I have no idea if it will make any sense.

Let's start with the first thing that struck me about the book: it's unusual in that it has two hooks.  The premise--the gimmick--is that the main character is someone who cannot be remembered.  For as long as you're talking to her, she exists in your mind, but as soon as you leave her presence for even a short time--a minute is all it takes--you cannot remember ever having met her or talked to her.  You can be sitting together on a bus and talk for hours, but when you get off at the rest stop and reboard, you will smile vacantly at her, because you will believe you'd never seen her before.  She can give you a giant stuffed teddy bear, and by the time you get home with it you will remember having bought it, or won it, or found it.  You can watch a video of yourself talking to her and have no memory of the conversation.

So this is the hook--this is what makes the book sound intriguing.

But then this protagonist--Hope Arden--finds herself at a party hosted by a company called Perfection.  Perfection is a lifestyle app, gathering your data and giving you suggestions and instructions, and points for following them.  Find the perfect personal trainer; are you sure you want to eat that? Here's the haircut that would look best on you; those shoes are gorgeous--achievement unlocked! Hope watches Perfection wreak havoc on a new "friend" of hers, and is drawn into what I would describe as a battle of wills between herself and this product.

So, early on in my reading, I felt like this was an author trying to write two books at once, about two ideas, and that maybe they didn't fit together very well.  But now I think they come together over the course of the story.  Not that there aren't obvious ways in which the strive for perfection and the notion of being invisible are related. The idea of being seen, being deemed worthy, being judged--all of these are a part of both sides of the story. 

But there's more to it than even that. Hope can never hold a job, can never have friends or lovers (though she has conversations and romantic encounters).  She is a skilled thief, precisely because not only can no one describe her; no one can remember that she was even there.  She is a collector of facts, a counter of objects, a reciter of words, because she must always keep her mind busy or risk thinking too much about what she is and what she isn't, about the things she can never have.

In some ways, this book is in conversation with North's first novel, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. In that book, the main character lives his life to the end and is born again, in the same year, to live through the same years again.  He can live it differently every time, but he can always remember, as no one but one of his kind can, what will happen around him in the world.  It is an inescapable, inexplicable biological destiny that can seem like freedom or like a curse, but can never be set down (for Harry, even in death). 

Harry's problem is the opposite of Hope's--Hope cannot ever make a connection with the world; Harry cannot unmake those connections, cannot escape what has been and will be.  They're both situations that can seem despair-worthy, from the right point of view, or liberating. Immortality, freedom from consequence. What would you give up for those things?

As in Harry August, the plot is driven by scientific notions that are not just hand-waved away, but put into a conspicuous, opaque box with the word SCIENCE written on the outside. You don't want to look inside the box--it's a shadow theater with no meaning.  There are "treatments" that change people, and the main scientist is a neuroscientist who designed an app that makes people "better," and also some kind of deep brain stimulation thing.  The app basically exists already in a hundred forms, but the book paints it as soul-destroying mind control. The treatments are treated as an inevitable next step, in a way that doesn't feel that organic to me.

But I think I can mostly forgive all the Swiss-cheese holes like that because this is a novel of ideas.  It's a novel that asks what perfect means (even if no one in the story really asks that explicitly), whether gamifying life will remove our  humanity, and what it means to live a life entirely without connections. And all kinds of corollary questions: when it's impossible for you to live by any traditional means, what are the limits of your ethics? What elements of interaction go into forming a relationship? (That's one of my favorites; I've always thought about how most of your understanding of a person exists in your mental image of that person; how does that work without a memory?) Is terrorism ever justified?

So I can wave my hands with the hand-wavingest among us and take the facts presented in this book at face value, and then follow the fascinating question of what they mean, what they imply, and what all that says about me and about society.  It's been a long time since a book asked such interesting questions and let its characters really wrestle with the answers.  I want a lot more of these!

(Note: I received this book from Netgalley for review.)