Let's Read Comics!

I've been collecting comics, reading some and not others, generating a backlog.  They don't take long to read, though--there's no reason I should have the latest volumes of amazing things like Nailbiter, Saga, and Rat Queens, not to mention tantalizing new possibilities like Paper Girls, Orphan Black: Helsinki, and Hexed: The Harlot and the Thief.  And stuff I've read and want to go on about--Bitch Planet!

So, let's start here: Django/Zorro, by Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner, which I got from Netgalley.  I'll admit that I'm starting here mostly because I don't have a lot to say about it; Django Unchained was an amazing movie in classic Tarantino fashion--take the worst bad guys you can think of and unleash an offensive amount of violence on them.  It was the best of revenge fantasy, and one of my favorite Tarantino films, I think (though I don't know if I could watch it often) partly because Jamie Foxx played Django so straight.  He wasn't a caricature or a stylized placeholder; he was a real man with nothing to lose in an impossible situation.  It was a great combination.

I was kind of hoping to find that combination of irreverence and steely practicality here, the flavor of Django, that Tarantino thing brought to the character of Zorro. But this felt like a straight Western.  It probably wasn't a bad one for that--the bad guy had a pretty cool evil plan/backstory, and Don Diego de la Vega is fun, in a fussy, flamboyant way--but there isn't much characterization, not much feeling, and not a lot of depth here.  You can hardly see characters' eyes in a single image here, which feels emblematic of how little connection I felt to the story.

It's not a bad Western.  It's a great episode of an old Zorro program. But I expected more whimsy from Zorro, and more intensity from Django.  I think I'd set my hopes too high.

But never fear!  Soon I'll bring you Princeless, Rat Queens 3, and a lot more goodies. Watch this space!

Beware That Girl

Kate has fought her way from private school to private school, leaving her past as far behind her as she can, looking for her best shot at Yale.  Waverley is her chance, and she'll do whatever she has to to make it work.  When she meets Olivia--reserved and maybe lonely--Kate sees an opportunity for access to money and resources that she completely lacks on her own.

Both girls have secrets, but they find a friendship in each other that they haven't had before. When a handsome young staff member comes to school, though, the delicate social world of the campus is thrown into turmoil.  Kate is a master game player and she won't let anything get in her way, but Olivia's friendship means everything to her--emotionally and practically.

So there's my back cover blurb-style summary of Beware That Girl by Teresa Toten.  This was one of the most un-put-down-able books I've read in a long time--it's quick, and I'm afraid I have to use the word trashy, though that is in NO way a pejorative.  I love books about manipulators of human behavior, whether they're the protagonist or the antagonist, and I love Kate, who at first seems like a major antihero, but whom I really come to see as focused and maybe a little too hardened.  Olivia's fragile reserve gets more ominous as you go on, and it's amazing how each character develops so much over the course of the book--they keep unfolding as you go along.  It's masterfully done.

One other small thing that I loved was that, while most of the adults had huge blind spots, they were all well-intentioned (except the evil ones).  They screw up and make mistakes, but they're not brushing off kids asking for help, or pretending they don't exist, or trivializing them.  They're blind, but there are a lot of people trying to take care of Olivia and Kate, and I think that went a long way to making me believe that this was a world full of real people.

The big weakness I do want to touch on is the treatment of mental illness, though--a lot of thriller tropes about mental illness are sort of lumped together.  Sociopaths are fascinating, but they're not all the same, and they're not even close to all murderers; having no empathy doesn't make murder enjoyable.  Sure, when those things go together, you get a bad scene, but the psychology here is definitely ripped from the headlines, and not of the most reputable scholarly journals.  There are a lot of mental illnesses that come up here as central plot points, and almost none of them are more nuanced than somewhere between melodrama and slasher movie.

But woo, Nellie, it kept me reading.  Fast-paced, switching back and forth between Kate's intense, smart first person and Olivia's spaced out, nervous third person, and I wasn't sure if the book was ever on the rails till it got yanked directly off them.  It was a wild, wild ride, and there was a cute dog named Bruce, too.  I wish there was a dispenser that would give me a book just like this one whenever I need it--on long train rides, and between big dense literary novels.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this one!  I guess they're my dispenser.

Fellside

One thing about advance copies--because I prefer to write a "real review" (whatever that means) for those, I try not to write about them from the middle of the book. I think this serves me poorly as a blogger, because I feel the most strongly in the middle of the book.

For example, the experience of reading M.R. Carey's Fellside was one of picking up and putting down. It begins with a very slow and gradual setup, and when all the pieces are in place the tension ratchets higher and higher, to the point where it seemed like every twenty minutes I had to put it down because I was getting myself all twisted up with anxiety that SOMETHING BAD WAS GOING TO GO DOWN AT ANY MOMENT. This is a very good thing in a book, usually, and here it worked in very much the best way, because in almost every case, the bad thing did happen, and the results were worth watching.

M.R. Carey wrote The Girl with All the Gifts, a really excellent zombie apocalypse book that came out a couple of years ago. You probably knew that, though, because they put a little callout from that somewhat iconic cover on the Fellside cover.  While I get it--Carey had a big hit with that book--I think it served this one poorly.  The books are very different, and the implied relationship doesn't serve Fellside well.  It works on its own merits, but not as well as Gifts, and in a very different way.

The book begins with our protagonist, Jess, waking up in a hospital, badly burned, with no idea what happened.  The first part of the book takes us through her trial and conviction for murder in the death of a neighbor boy based on the fire she set in her apartment while high, ostensibly to try to kill her boyfriend.  (There are a lot of clauses in that sentence. I rewrote it a few times; parse at your own risk.)  Jess has no memory, but the court proves their case and sends her to prison.  Her own guilt is worse, though, and she chooses to end her life with a hunger strike.

Fellside is the prison she is sentenced to, and it's where the story really starts; everything before this is setup--necessary, but really just the building blocks.  We meet the rest of the players--Harriet Grace, who rules the block with an iron fist; Devlin, the guard in her pocket; Salazar, the good-hearted but weak doctor; even the ghost of Alex, the boy Jess has been convicted of murdering.  There are a lot more characters--inmates, nurses, a few guards, lawyers--and the best part of this book is that each one is the center of the story from their own point of view.

I read an interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda recently that asked about his favorite books, and one question was about his favorite villains.  His answer was perfect: "I don't believe in villains."  There are people who are selfish and damaged and who enjoy others' suffering, it's true, but nobody would call themselves a villain.  Each of these characters is doing what makes the most sense to them based on their own weakness and strength and motivations.

The big exception here is Harriet Grace--everyone else, you get deep enough into their head to see the unique logic that drives them, but Grace is just a tyrant.  We get her backstory, which could construct her motivations, but I didn't feel it; her combination of cold business and unnecessary rage doesn't ring nearly as human as Devlin's petty need for power or Salazar's sad, small fear of taking action.

But the story really hinges around the ghost.  Here's where I have to stop the deep dive for fear of spoilers, but I will say that Alex as a vehicle for Jess's second life--getting clean, having a purpose--is really interesting.  But the ghost, the body-leaving, the trippy, dreamlike landscape where a chunk of the plot takes place--these things fall toward my pet peeve category of reading long dream sequences, or drug trips, or basically out of body experiences where any description is an impressionistic approximation of what you're trying to describe.

And when the action shifts to that landscape, there's a simplistic, almost fairy-tale-like aspect to the action that feels less nuanced than this book deserves.  The shift from character-driven examination of human motivations to "everyone gets what they deserve" in a dream landscape feels like a bit of a cheat. 

Essentially, you've got a really compelling prison story with a heavy (and somewhat heavy-handed) ghost subplot.  They're tied together tightly; the prison story is amazing and totally worth it; the ghost part is much weaker, but doesn't come close to canceling out the really excellent story.

Again, I feel like this post would be better if I'd written it in the middle of the book.  But then, my full opinion wasn't formed then.  I think there's a prime window of a few hours when I'll need to write all blog posts.  I'll work on that for you.

Where Futures End

I think Parker Peevyhouse, in addition to being an incredibly talented young writer, might have the best author name ever.  You can argue the point with me, but I'm going to need citations if you try to claim there's something better out there, and I don't believe you can provide it.

And then there's the book.  Where Futures End is a set of five connected stories; the first one takes place in the present, the next one ten years from now, then thirty, then sixty, and finally a hundred years in the future.  Interconnected stories is something I usually either love or hate; short stories are not usually my favorite, but when the connections are tight and a strong overall narrative is formed, my book nerd heart goes pitter patter.  This is why David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite book; when it's done right, this is a format that has so much going for it.

And this is very, very right.  In the first story, a boy named Dylan doesn't seem to fit into his life, and wants to return to the Other Place, a magical country that he used to be able to cross over to when he was small.  Ten years later, a girl named Brixney struggles to pay off her family's debt with a fast food job by making a live feed of her life as interesting as possible--and meets someone who knew Dylan. In the next story, Brixney's life is pop culture history, and Epony's family is forced from their farm as droughts and floods--and other things--change the face of the world.

And so on, each about a young person in an unfriendly and unforgiving world, trying to find a magic way out.  And there is magic here, but it's not harmless.  The idea that there's another world you can go to--like Narnia--and that everything is better there and you can leave your problems behind is so familiar, so tempting, and so impossible; even if there was such a world, it would not be problem free.  (Do you know how to get to Solla Sollew, on the banks of the beautiful river Wahoo, where they never have troubles--at least very few?)  Even when things work out for our characters, there are no easy answers to the problems they're facing--just lucky breaks.

There is a line in Epony's story, "When We Went High Concept," in which her boyfriend Cole talks about their situation: their farmland flooded as the government tries to save the cities, their families without any selling points to make them worth a corporate relocation.  "They set the price, and we pay it."  This happens over and over again--we live in the world as it exists, in a complicated society and economy that doesn't care about the individual.  Is it any wonder that traveling to a beautiful land of magic and wonder seems so appealing?

There is so much going on here--ideas of privacy, of media, of economics and loyalty and the environment--but each story is driven by its own characters, and the things those characters desperately want and need.  Each one is irresistable, and then by the end, you see the trajectory that is mapped, the consequences of all the small choices that were made by everyone in the world.  It's gorgeous, and heartbreaking, and thrilling. 

I'm excited about this book.  Welcome to my eternal wishlist, Parker Peevyhouse!

Roses and Rot

Kat Howard's Roses and Rot is about art and magic and love, and fairy tales.  I keep tripping over the fairy tales.

Imogen is a writer, starting a year at an elite artists' retreat.  Her sister Marin, a ballet dancer, is there, too, and they're hoping to reconnect after years of distance. The retreat, Melete, is idyllic, and they have mentors and housing and delicious food, and they make friends and meet charming men and are surrounded by geniuses and work on their art.

You can see that there's a dark side coming, right?  Not really so dark, actually; it turns out Melete is run by the fae; it's a doorway to Faery, and the presence of artists feeds the fae.  But they need more than that; once ever seven years, a tithe is chosen, a person to live in Faery for the next seven years.  Your emotions sustain the fae while you're there, and when you come back you are guaranteed genius and success.  They choose the most brilliant artist for this coveted position.

So the big theme this book seems to wrestle with is what an artist will do for their art.  Spending seven years in Faery is not all sunshine and rose petals--the fae feed on human emotions, and so you're basically gonna be on an emotional rollercoaster the whole time you're there, but most of the characters think it's worth it for what you get in return--guaranteed greatness, guaranteed success.  You will become a legend in your field.

I have a lot of thoughts on this, some of which are simply raised by the book and some of which are critical of its treatment.  It would be interesting to discuss this book next to The Family Fang, which is another novel in which the characters wrestle with the importance of art when it interferes with family relationships. This book is very different from that one (which I really enjoyed), but it takes on some of the same questions from a completely different angle.

Imogen and Marin have an extremely abusive mother, and her presence in their lives has bound them as allies, torn them apart with lies, and informed each of their relationships with their art in a different way.  When they're faced with the question of what they would give up for their art and whether competition between them will cause a rift, you watch the practicalities of that conflict play out, which is very interesting.

I do think that there's a flaw in the idea of art here, which the book doesn't ignore but doesn't really resolve--the idea of talent and success as black-and-white, all-or-nothing concepts.  When you have forty of the world's most talented artists and only one will be chosen, it doesn't make sense to think of the rest as failures. When you have a magic spell guaranteeing you success (through brilliance; that's part of the deal, but the success is the main part), does that mean you're really "better" than anyone else?  It seems like the ultimate desire for a lottery ticket, or to have things handed to you on a silver platter; I understand the desire to make this tough path easier, but the notion that there is any value at all in what the fae are offering is kind of questionable to me, and I feel like the nod in the direction of that doubt isn't as clear as I'd want it to be.

Some other great things about this book: Imogen has a relationship that no one at any point mistakes for a "true love always" relationship, but that is treated as important and meaningful anyway.  You never see this--sometimes you'll get a book where what looks like TLA ends up not working out, but you rarely get one where two people like each other and want each other and so date, knowing they're not in love, but are still expected to treat each other respectfully, and still value each other.  It was something I didn't realize I'd missed till I got it. 

Melete sounds amazing.  The buildings, the art, the characters; it's like the ultimate college experience, only you're old enough to appreciate it.

Some things that didn't strike me right: I'm pretty sure the author's not from New Hampshire.  Mid-October is not early fall in central New Hampshire.  A foot of snow is not something residents freak out about. A minor issue, but I found it amusing.

There is a risk, when writing about brilliant writers, because you will probably at some point have to show me their writing.  The author made the wise choice to show any of the poetry that some of the secondary characters wrote, but she did have to include some of the fairy tale-like stories that Imogen wrote, and this was a struggle for me.

See, the stories in fairy tales are deep and dark and rich and creepy.  But the telling of fairy tales is blunt and unadorned, without characterization or subtlety.  No one has depths; characters are types. There is no internal life to a character in a fairy tale, and the language has a very standard, practical, straightforward style. So while the metaphors between the creepy Grimm brothers lives of Imogen's characters and the real-world experiences of the sisters worked just fine, there is no way that you can convince me that this is writing that's supposed to be transcendent.  I think Margo Lanagan is probably the go-to character for a fairy tale-style story that also packs an enormous emotional wallop; reading Imogen's excerpts, the metaphors are masking the dark reality, not enhancing it.

So what's the verdict?  Well, I enjoyed reading it, and it moved me along through the story.  And there were some interesting issues that it made me think about from very interesting angles.  I feel like it didn't meet me squarely on those issues, though; I was less in dialog with the book than prompted to do the thinking on my own.  Definitely a good read, but there was some missed potential there for it to be a great one.

The Fun Family

Oooookay then.  The Fun Family, a graphic novel by Benjamin Frisch.  Billed as a "what if the family behind (an off-brand) Family Circus was really messed up?  Review copy from Netgalley, and my thanks to them, in spite of my feelings about the book.

At first, it looks like the happy family from the comic strips, mediocre punch lines based on cute kid misconceptions and all. Mom made sticky buns and the kids are so cute! Then we start to see the cracks--Dad is defensive and secretive; Mom does all the work and is starting to resent it. They're going to therapy, which Dad thinks is stupid. This is the kind of story I'm expecting, so it makes sense and I follow it.

Then...oh, then.  Dad shows Robby his secret hobby (which is Ned Flanders creepy, not Charles Manson creepy, but any hobby you keep in the crawlspace is suspect). The therapist is a complete quack who misinterprets everything Robby says to fit his own framework. Mom is leaving, but she's only taking two of the kids.  Dad is semi-catatonic and Mom still expects her alimony, so it's up to Robby (who's, what, 10?) to put food on the table, while his sister finds God through Grandma's ghost and the baby is still nine months old.

So, it's not the unlikeliness of the story that bothers me, and it's not even the "everyone's a selfish idiot."  It's the combination of all those things baked together with a straight-man kid protagonist who is so immersed in the real world that the cartoonish nightmare he lives in doesn't make sense (even on its own exaggerated terms) by comparison.

I mean, there is not a single non-insane adult here--which works as satire, that's fine.  But if it's straight satire, you shouldn't have a narrator from the real world wandering around going, "wait, each of you is a two-dimensional cardboard cutout who has no real-world thoughts or feelings!" It doesn't make sense.  The parents are selfish and ignore the kids entirely; the therapists (there are several) are quacks who don't listen to anything; the pediatrician is oblivious; the reporter is focused on the story.

Which is a storytelling strategy I could get behind, but then you pull the rug out from under these observations you're trying to make by making the central problem of the story not a search for meaning or comfort or connection or adulthood (since we're following this with the kids), but rent money.

So yeah, this was a heavy-handed satire about all the ways people search for meaning and avoid connection (which is a weird combination to focus on to begin with, but let's go with it) that really shot itself in the foot with a protagonist who doesn't leave room for satire.  Really, this book reads like the therapy project of someone who's very angry at all the adults from his childhood who didn't realize that no one was taking care of him.  It made me very sad, and pretty angry, and not in a good way.

The Buried Giant

Oof.  Guys.  Oof.  Not good.

I always feel bad when book club all hates a book, because I voted for it.  But I will admit that it makes a good meeting (does anyone remember the fabulous sangria festival of rage that was The Children's Hospital?), and sometimes, when it's unclear what's actually happening on the page, it's helpful to have a group of like-minded interpreters around to sort out who went where and what that part meant.

So this month, Work Book Club discussed The Buried Giant.  The one thing I'll say that makes me feel better is that we were all interested in reading it; I can't be blamed alone for pushing it on the group.  Though, god help me, I would have if it had come to that; I generally really like Kazuo Ishiguro, and this one has been on my to-read for ages. Never Let Me Go is a great book.  The Remains of the Day is hypnotic and sad.  I even liked A Pale View of Hills, though it was a little confusing. 

And yes, there was a lot of confusion about what actually happened, and even more about what it meant, but I think the really big theme here was Really Cool Ideas That Went Nowhere.  Or maybe Themes the Book Presents but Fails to Explore.  Either way, I don't really have discussion questions about the book so much as discussions that I wish the book had fostered.  So let's talk about those.

1. Ground-up worldbuilding is tricky with unreliable narrators.  It takes delicate work, which is decently done here, I think.  When you're trying to establish whether this is a world where there really are dragons, giants, and ogres, or if it's just a world where people vehemently believe in those things, you're going to be hampered by the fact that the main plot point is vague memory problems in most characters.  I'll give him props for this; I was never really confused about what kind of world I was in (though I was confused about some (many) of the details).

2. What does it mean to have an intimate romantic relationship with someone if neither of you have any long-term memories?  You have your day to day life, and your emotions, but without memories of core experiences, where does the deep bond come from?  Is it about clinging more tightly to what's right in front of you?  Is it about falling in love with this person every day?  Are you even the same person they fell in love with when you don't have your memory?  I mean, we find out later that Axl was a great warrior. That's who Beatrice married;  how does that relationship compare to these two people with no memories of these characters?

3. I think we can globally get behind the notion that stealing someone's memories is bad guy behavior.  How deluded is it to think you're doing it for a good reason?  Like, is this the road to hell that's paved with good intentions? Or is it just flat out selfish, a way to keep your boot on the neck of someone you've beaten?

4. The argument between the warrior and the monk about the value of penance is fascinating to me.  If the monks' penance can bring forgiveness to the entire kingdom, then wrongs will continue to be done and cancelled out in a neverending cycle.  But if you switch over to Wistan's punishment/vengeance model, where even old wrongs have to be paid for as a debt, do you inevitably end up in a cycle of hatred and revenge?  What keeps a man from doing evil if he can buy his way out of punishment with a novena?  But what actual good does revenge do?

4b. WTH, Arthur?  Did he really do that?  Because that's a real jerk move.

5. Why, god, why does everyone say the name of the person they're talking to in EVERY SINGLE SENTENCE???

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  I have so many questions that I can't phrase in any way except "what's with that?"  What's with the woman in the boat on the river, and the pixies?  What's with the evil birds?  What's with the giant's mound at the beginning of the story?  What's with that last paragraph?  What's with Edwin in general?  What's with any of this book?

If someone can explain it to me--explain what it reveals, instead of what it obscures--I would be grateful, but I don't think that's a thing this book does.  I think this is a book that's more like When We Were Orphans, which was the Ishiguro book that I struggled with the most.  Because that was a book that was full of things that just didn't make sense, even knowing that the narrator is unreliable and in deep denial and spinning everything and maybe even a little crazy.  This one is a thousand times more bewildering. 

I strongly recommend that you go out and read Never Let Me Go.  And that's all I have to say about that.

My Favorite Thing About Hamilton This Week - Angelica: Tomb of the Unknown Wingwoman

I have been listening to "Satisfied" repeatedly for weeks and feeling a lot of Angelica love, and sympathy, and heartache. I got myself all Team Angelica'd up.


And then I was listening straight through the album for the first time in a while and I heard "Helpless" again.



And oh, Eliza!  She's not the brash one, but she doesn't mind watching Angelica charm the room.  And then she falls so hard.  Listening to them in order--"Helpless" and then "Satisfied"--is sweet and then heartbreaking, but listening in revers just really makes it about those two sisters, and how they love each other each in their profound and different way.

Props to Angelica, the best damned wingwoman in American history.

(Also, Peggy.  Never forget.)

Sarah Vowell: All Up in My Business

One thing I didn't mention about The Girl from Everywhere in my review is that I'm having this moment where all my media are coming together--oddly enough, via Sarah Vowell.  I own a copy of Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, about the history of Christian missionaries in Hawaii, and The Girl from Everywhere makes me want to read that at last--mostly because of the way it touches on Hawaiian history, while failing to include any Hawaiian points of view.  There are Americans who want to annex it and whites who want to save it, and some Hawaiian folklore that's pivotal to the plot, but not much else.

But Unfamiliar Fishes is going to have to wait, because I've already started reading Lafayette in the (Somewhat) United States, and I imagine that you can guess what inspired that!  Listening to Hamilton (again and again) you're just reminded how many amazing characters, how much energy and intelligence was brought to bear on the issue of freedom and the Revolutionary War.  If there was a book about Hercules Mulligan (and his slave/assistant, the enigmatic Cato), I would read that, too.

It makes me think about what the drive and problem-solving that young entrepreneurs bring to their tech start-ups would do if it was applied to politics instead of capitalism.  There were amazing people living in amazing times, but I know a good number of amazing people who, if their goal was to start a new country instead of a company, would kick butt at it.  But in a different time and place, their passions (and politics) would of course be very different.

That's one interesting point that Vowell makes about the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution that soon followed--Americans were already passionate about government.  They weren't just tearing down the abusive old ways; they had firm ideas about how things should be run and they knew what they wanted to build. Politics was the national pastime, and even though not everyone agreed (can you really call it freedom if it's not for everyone?), $#!* got done.

I wonder if Sarah Vowell has seen (duh) and written a review of Hamilton.  I would read the heck out of that.

The Girl From Everywhere

Sometimes I do this thing where I hold off on reading the end of a book until I can write my blog post, because it's the only way I can capture my actual response.  In the case of Heidi Heilig's The Girl from Everywhere, I can tell that the last 10% is going to be closer to what I wanted than the 60% that came before.

This is one of the books that I read about ages before it was published and have been waiting for with excitement.  In a nutshell, though, my feelings about it are that there's half a good book here, and half filler.

The premise is wonderful.  Nix lives with her father and their crew on a ship that can travel anywhere.  Really, though, the skill is her father's; he can study any accurate, hand-drawn map and create magic that takes the ship to that time and place.  This is a marvelous premise, and the first part of the book, where we're being introduced to the characters and the world, is really wonderful.

But Nix's father has an obsession; her mother died when she was a baby, while he was away from their home on Hawaii.  Since he returned and found out, he's been looking for a map that will lead him back to that exact window of time, after he left and before she died.  Nix's life has been full of chasing down maps, schemes to make money to buy them, and failed attempts to go back to Hawaii in 1868.  And Nix's father rides out the highs with hope and the lows with opium.

So this is the premise, and we meet the characters and the crew as they seek the latest map. The beginning of this book is lovely, as they scheme to get to Hawaii, and then find themselves there in the wrong time.

But the middle of the book, almost half of it, is them killing time on Hawaii.  There's a plan falling into place, and a boy for Nix to meet, and her life for her to think about.  There's worrying, and walking around Hawaii, and what's probably supposed to pass for shenanigans, but the plan is practically a McGuffin--I didn't care much about the scheme some Suspicious Characters cooked up--and the Cute Boy is clearly an object, and I just didn't feel it.

Then, at the end, we snap back into action. Nix decides to move forward in the only way she possibly could have--the only way that makes any sense to me as a reader--and we get back to the plot, which gets kind of convoluted, but at least interesting again.

Basically, I showed up for a time travel book, but I got a love triangle book.  That's really what's supposed to drive this; Nix's relationship with her father and her sense of being "torn" between her dashing best friend Kashmir and the handsome lover of Hawaii, Blake.  But there's no contest, really, so it feels like a waste of time that she spends so much time agonizing about it. 

It's not really a terrible book, but I had very high hopes, and it turned out to be just...fine. Book Smugglers had a lot of the same criticisms in their review, though I think they gave it a little more love than I have. It's something to breeze through in a couple of hours; something with a cool premise and, if you like a good teen love triangle, you might be into it. 

I will say, though--if there's a sequel, I will probably read it.  It might be Joss's history, or Slate's, or even the continuing adventures of Nix--any of these would bring me back for more.  So I guess on that level, it succeeded admirably.

My Favorite Thing About Hamilton This Week

Okay, I concede; I'm joining the chorus of people who can't stop talking about Hamilton.  I have listened to pretty much nothing else for weeks.  I have one of these songs or another in my head every day--yesterday it was "Satisfied," but today it's "Wait for It."  

My favorite song changes, my favorite character changes, my favorite thing about the story changes.  So let's start keeping track.  

This week, my favorite thing about Hamilton is the friendship between the four young men who fought the war together: Laurens, Lafayette, Mulligan, and Hamilton.  Lafayette is the brilliant general, of course, but Laurens the fierce abolitionist (who challenged Charles Lee after Hamilton was ordered not to), Mulligan the spy (who has one of my FAVORITE bits in the whole show; "Hercules Mulligan, I need no introduction"). They sing "The Story of Tonight," and reprise it later at Hamilton's wedding; they split up and pursue their roles in the cause, they come together to crow about it at the end. 

Hercules Mulligan is amazing; I looked him up on Wikipedia.  He was a tailor who spied on his Loyalist clients; his slave, Cato (about whom little is known), did much of the actual transportation of information.  Mulligan was later a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which makes me wonder more about Cato and their relationship.

But these four boys--kids, really--and how they back each other and cheer each other and do this amazing thing together--that's my favorite thing about Hamilton this week. 

Also, JENNY SAW THE SHOW and there better be a WHOLE POST ABOUT IT very soon! You don't get to bury that in the tags for a review of a book you read on the bus on the way to the theater!

My First Con: Smashing Success

It seems strange that I've never been to a fannish gathering before. I've never considered myself a con person; I actually tend to shy away from listening to the creative types behind my favorite works.  I mostly blame Hollywood and Orson Scott Card for that.

But then Mike sent me this link, and Ann Leckie was giving a keynote at some thing in Cambridge, and Jo Walton was going to be there, too, and oh yes just everyone else on my Kindle thank you very much. So I talked Lily and Christian into coming with me to listen to Ann Leckie speak.

Which was delightful.  The whole thing was delightful.  Ann Leckie was delightful--she claimed it was her first speech, which I have a hard time believing because is it possible to win a Hugo and a Nebula and a bunch of other things without giving a speech (even if you discount thank you speeches)?  Also it was a good speech, about our cultural fear of AI and how it's a fear of the Other and therefore dangerous to keep around unexamined.  I wanted very, very badly to grab her and make her talk to me extensively afterward.

Then, after Lily and Christian went home, I went Jo Walton's reading, from the next book in the Just City series, Necessity, which will be out this summer.  After that, since there was nothing else going on, the crowd (about half of whom seemed to know each other) coaxed her into reading some of her poetry.  I'd never read any of that, and it was really lovely (Prospero's monologue to his daughter came very close to making me cry), but it also (like so many other things) started me thinking about Hamilton and the how much I love the use of formal structures in language (and how much trouble I have connecting with free verse, which I suppose is why I think of myself as not caring for poetry.  Separate blog post, really).

And after that, I got into the elevator with Jo Walton, and when I mentioned that I was walking to the bookstore where she was doing a signing, she walked with me, since she didn't quite know the way from the building we were in.  And we had a lovely chat, about first cons and blog posts and domestic fantasy, and she is a great lady and I was only a little too fawning, if I do say so myself.  When we got to the bookstore I got a copy of Lifelode, which I read years ago, but isn't available as an ebook and hasn't been in print in a while.  Now I have one, and it's autographed, so there.

After lunch (Darwin's, for the record, where I haven't been in years but oh, that Mt. Auburn sandwich is still delightful; I ate only sandwiches this weekend), I went back to the con for a panel on metaphysics, where I developed a pretty intense crush on Ada Palmer, whose first novel, Too Like the Lightning, I have from Netgalley and can't wait to read now. At the point where someone can explain to me how Renaissance philosophers wrestled with Homer in their attempts to understand whether Dante was divinely inspired, I need to subscribe to their newsletter. Pamela Dean spoke on that panel, too, and Jo Walton convinced me to buy her reissued ebook The Dubious Hills (which I have); also John Chu, author of the Hugo-winning story "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere." 

At this point, as much as I was enjoying this, I had a raging headache, so I headed home.  This was my big solo weekend, when the menfolk were visiting my in-laws, so I ate another sandwich (torta from Tenoch, if you're keeping track) and started writing this post and called Lily to tell her that she left too early, and chatted online with my fanfic friends, and kept rereading The Goblin Emperor, which is such a lovely book.  And I put next year's Vericon in my calendar, because these are the conversations I want to have, just me and writers and thinkers whom I admire greatly and a handful of other fans. 

This is living.

Gena/Finn and ALL THE FEELS

This book GUTTED me.  This book caused me to cry in the shower--not hyperbole or exaggeration, I leaked tears from my eyes while washing my hair, no lie.  And I am not a fiction crier (real life crier, absolutely; mood swings galore).  I squealed, I tingled, I flapped my hands, I cried out "No!" and I--literally--wept.

Gena/Finn is the story of two fangirls who find each other--and that amazingly perfect friendship--online.  The story is by Hannah Moskowitz (whose History of Glitter and Blood I've been eager to read) and Kat Helgeson, and it's told through blog posts, chat logs, text messages, and some journal entries.  It's about intense friendship, and finding the person who just fits you, and about fandom, and how people relate to the stories that move them.

Gena (pronounced Jenna, for Genevieve, and I'm telling you that because I'm still pronouncing it wrong in my head) is a superachieving high school senior who is a popular fandom blogger and fic author.  Finn (for Stephanie) just graduated from college, is living with her boyfriend and trying to find a job and just kind of stumbling along in the real world.  They're both enormous fans of a cop show called Up Below, which sounds kind of like if Supernatural were a crime drama more like Castle.  Jake and Tyler, the detectives, have a close friendship, and our protagonists are "JakeGirls."

So here's the part where I point out that I'm in a fandom--and if the phrase "in a fandom" comes to you awkwardly, that's okay.  If it doesn't--if it's something you'd use to describe yourself--then this book will sing to your soul.  If that's not you, then what you're going to find here is an amazing, human, anthropologically fascinating rendition of the culture.  I have written these exact comments and read these exact reviews.  I have sent fannish chats to people whose online work I like and then written with them more and become kinda long distance friends (honestly, this is going on right now; it's both thrilling and  kind of meta for me). 

And I have absolutely made some of my best friends online, both vicariously (through a message board my husband belonged to and met up with--hi, Brenda!) and personally (I miss you, Sarah!). That tentative moment when you reach out to someone who you've only known silently, and the thrill when they reach back.  That feeling when you meet someone and realize before you even know them well that hey, I think I want this person to be my best friend ever. And then it gets better and better when you're right.  These experiences are some of the most emotionally important ones in my life, and they're here, with all the adrenaline of the real thing.

There are other important experiences that are here, both ones I've had and ones I've been spared--unemployment, mental illness, and being too young to be as independent as you are. This is not a light and fluffy story, and it's not just a friendship story either.  It's a bit of a love story, and very much a growing up story, and very much about communities and our relationship with television.

And there are no villains, really, though there are jerks, and people who fail.  And there are people who are trying so hard, and others who aren't trying hard enough.

Augh, this book.  The feelings.  I read it straight through, and I laughed out loud, and I cried, and I was so scared with the characters when everything was up in the air.  I want to watch Up Below and read EvenIf's blog and be catty about TylerGirl93.  It makes me love my fandom, and my friends, and it makes me think back onto things that happened when I was 19 and 20 and 21 and wonder what I would do differently and what I would do the same.

This gorgeous, marvelous book.

The Assassins

So, this book that I got from Netgalley appears to actually be two novellas in one: Pieces of Hate and Dead Man's Hand, both by Tim Lebbon, which are part of a series called The Assassins. I was on a roll with fun-looking novellas (waving to KJ Parker, hi, sweetie!), and these looks kind of swashbuckly. 

Sadly, they weren't what I was hoping.  First, I don't think they fit together very well--especially not with Dead Man's Hand coming first in the version I got.  It's a better introduction to the characters, but it's chronologically the second story, meaning there's a bit of a spoiler for the fact that our protagonist is not going to successfully kill his target in the next (earlier) story.

Anyway, in each one, you have our protagonist, Gabriel, who has been chasing his enemy, Temple, across the globe.  When he gets close, his wounds start to ache; after each encounter, he has more scars and injuries.  But he doesn't die--he's been chasing Temple for centuries, ever since Temple slaughtered his family 600 years ago.

In Dead Man's Hand, our narrator is a shopkeeper in Deadwood when Gabriel rolls into town seeking Temple, who is, when the whim strikes him, an assassin for hire.  Temple is creepy--a lot of time is spent during the moments before the narrator opens a door or lights a lamp in a scary room--and the mystery of the hunt Gabriel is on kind of teases it.  It's a short story, so the fact that it's not deeper or richer is maybe okay; the tension comes from not knowing.

Pieces of Hate takes place earlier, and it's told from Gabriel's point of view.  We get the moment when he finds his family dead and then something mystical happens and he's magically connected to Temple, maybe?  But the main story takes place in Port Royal, among pirates.  Gabriel encounters Temple's slaughter, tries to track him, enlists allies, tracks him.  Again, we know he won't win, because we've already read Dead Man's Hand, which takes place later.

The most annoying part is that they're virtually the same story.  I mean, you're an immortal chasing an immortal, you've hunted him down with your guns and your knives before and shot him and stabbed him, etc.  It doesn't work.  So maybe you need another plan.  Maybe, if every time you try to shoot him, he doesn't die, continuing to try and shoot him is just dumb.

I think this might be the point of the story.  If not, it's even more annoying; if it is, then it's just...not very moving.  Like, he's still passionate about revenge for people who died 600 years ago, whose faces and voices he can't remember.  Like, he's caused his own horrible carnage trying to track this guy down.  Like, his whole plan is to try the same thing again and see if it works this time.  He's clearly addicted to the chase.  But those facts all just sit there--they don't come alive with any observations about the nature of addiction, or of revenge, or of time and the role of forgetting.

He's not trying to save innocent people, or end his own torment.  The task is truly Sisyphean, but without the incredibly important moment at the top, watching the rock roll down the hill, where you contemplate what is inevitable and what is a choice, and what a life is worth.

So, for anyone who's wondering if I give fair reviews...blah.

Kindle Crisis!

Guys, my Kindle is acting veeeeery hinkey.  Some of the touchscreen functions aren't working.  Like, I can't use the GoTo feature at all--not for chapters, not for places.  It's just not clickable.  I also can't switch it from Portrait to Landscape mode--which is weird, because I'd been reading on Portrait mode for a few months until just the other day.  After I started having problems, I tried a bunch of different functions, and it let me switch from Landscape to Portrait, but not back.

The top row of the keyboard doesn't work, which means I can't search for a book on the Kindle, which is insanely annoying.  The lighting selector doesn't work between 6 and 15, so I can either have it very dim or very bright, but not in between. 

And the weird part is, I don't think it's a hardware problem; the touchscreen seems fine.  If I pull down the dropdown menu, I get no response from certain selections, but if I remove the menu, I can easily turn the page by tapping that exact same part of the touchscreen.  The problem is definitely software.

Mike suggests a reboot to factory settings.  Which is all well and good except for the carefully curated collection of over 600 books that is sitting on there, and which I would then have to resend one by one from my account.  On one hand, this sounds like an insanely onerous task.  On the other, it sounds like a really, really fun way to kill a few hours. 

Eek, I can't decide.  As I notice more missing functions, though, it's getting tougher.  The keyboard might be what puts me over the edge; if I can't search for a specific book on the Kindle, it's kind of pointless to have 600 at my fingertips.  It's like having hundreds of books in my basement in boxes, but only six books in each box, and I have to open every box to find what I'm looking for. 

I am helpless without my Kindle.  Pray for me.

K.J. Parker: And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

I'm setting out to see how many K.J. Parker novellas I can read in the shortest time possible--or at least it feels that way.  But they're so good! And there are a bunch of new ones coming out! And Netgalley gave me some, and I haven't even STARTED his big ongoing serial yet!

Today's feature is another Netgalley ARC, and this one is exciting because it's about Saloninus, who was the protagonist of Blue and Gold, the first Parker book I read.  This one, The Devil You Know, has set itself a huge challenge: now that we know Saloninus is the greatest trickster in history--now that we've read Blue and Gold, how do you keep tricking us?  Can it be done?

Dear reader, never doubt! Saloninus is an old man, and he's set out to sell his soul. Our narrator is sometimes Saloninus himself and sometimes the agent who brokers the deal, who seems like a good egg, albeit with a bit of an unsavory job.  But he's also a fan of history's greatest trickster--read all his books, knows his deepest, darkest secrets--so he knows that there's probably a trick at work here.  Still, twenty years of youth, health, wealth, and any wish he might have, in return for his immortal soul.  The lawyers have been over it with a fine-toothed comb; the contract is airtight.  What could possibly go wrong?

You'll wonder that, too.  I was wondering.  What is our protagonist up to?  Can Saloninus out-devious the devil?  What are all the cutthroats and artists for? And CAN he turn base metals into gold?

There are things to quibble about here--although there are few characters in general, all the women but one are prostitutes in a rather ugly scenario--I can't help loving this.  Love love love, and always, always want more Parker.

What other novellas, you ask?  What's coming up next?  The Last Witness, followed by the first part of The Two of Swords, of course!  Then we dig deeper into his backlist.  Happy, happy, happy!

Jane Steele

Five stars aren't enough--can I borrow some from elsewhere?  Eight, ten stars, a dozen or more; Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele was so much fun.

So, the blurb I first read on Netgalley sells it as Jane Eyre meets Dexter, and while I only know the basics about Dexter, this both drew me in and made me skeptical.  The first couple of pages had me a bit worried, too, because the narrator talks about how she became a murderer early in life, and about her vile nature. But at that point, I had a review copy in hand, so I plunged boldly ahead.

Now, I'm all about a good antihero, but I also tend to think a lot about collateral damage in my media.  One of the things I loved about Daredevil and Jessica Jones is how it deals with the fallout of all the big battles from The Avengers.  One of the things that bugs me about a lot of fanfiction is how it glosses over how truly cruel and damaging the much-loved bad guys are when it wants them to get with our favorite love interests.  They're bad guys because they hurt people, and often don't regret it; I can enjoy them as characters without wanting them to get their way.

So I was worried from the beginning about whether I was going to like Jane Steele, but oh, Reader, did I ever.  It's true that Jane kills a number of people, but she is not a sociopath into whose head you're trying to see--she is a human being who is often in untenable situations, in a world where she has little recourse.  This is exactly the kind of moral complexity I love in a story.

If you wrote a very rough outline of the plot of the book Jane Eyre, you would have the bones of this story--brought up in a house where she is the unwanted cousin/niece, sent away to a terrible school, left with few options in life and fending for herself, taking a job as a governess in a house with a gruff, socially odd master...well, you see. 

But you only have to take a small step closer before the details change dramatically.  Jane is clever and practical, and she has her own strict code of ethics, even while she understands that by the morals of society, she is evil.  And on some level she believes herself so; this tension is one of my favorite parts of the book. 

There is lots of other tension, too.  The author does a marvelous job of teasing each twist, pointing out just where she should have let well enough alone, or enjoyed herself while she could.  Sometimes that kind of flourish bothers me, but here I had enough trust early enough that this just kept me running for the next of fate's cruel tricks.

Our heroine is also, in a rather charming twist, a huge fan of the novel Jane Eyre, which has just been published. She sees the parallels and chuckles over them, especially when Miss Eyre has an easier time of things than Miss Steele ever did.

When Jane finally meets Charles Thornfield (our cleverly-named Mr. Rochester stand-in, who is much less creepy and condescending than the actual Mr. Rochester), the plot becomes more concentrated, and the backstory of the other characters--all circling around the Sikh Rebellion and the wars in the Punjab in the mid 19th century--becomes the driving force of the plot.  By this point, though, Jane's heart belongs very straightforwardly where she's given it, and we are following her wherever she takes us.

And everywhere she goes is delightful indeed.  I love her clever pragmatism, I love her grit and fire, and I love how she believes herself to be bad but still finds herself doing good, almost without believing it.  This book was an absolute pleasure to read, and I've already added Lyndsay Faye's previous books to my to-read list.  You should absolutely read this book.

Three Thieves: The Dark Island

I have spoken before of my love for Scott Chantler's Three Thieves series, and I'm thrilled to tell you that there's a new chapter called The Dark Island that's just coming out in a few weeks.  I have read an advance copy through Netgalley, and I'm happy to report that it is everything I would have wanted it to be.  Dessa and her friends being awesome! Revelations and adventures! Heroism and friendship! Captain Drake being all stern and honorable! The only thing I might want from this book is for it to be twice as long, so we could spend a little more time lingering with these characters.

I absolutely love the art here, which is so simple and clean and yet so perfectly expressive.  The story cuts sharply back and forth between two threads--in one, Dessa and her friends have found a floating island--hovering, really, above the ocean--and are getting ready to explore it; in the other, her pursuer Captain Drake has found a boy he's sure is Dessa's long lost twin, for whom she's searching.

Now, this is the point where I have to admit that I was so excited to read this one that I didn't go back and do any rereading at all; I will say that the series would be better served if I had.  It was pretty easy to pick up the visuals, but this story started to bring together a lot of elements of the previous five volumes, and I think refreshing on those details would have been worth it.  And I'm having to look up a lot of characters' names for this review--Dessa is the only one I actually remember.

So Dessa and Topper and (quick glance at the book) Fisk make their way to the island and start to figure out what's going on.  I won't give too much away, but we start to get a sense of what Greyfalcon is up to here.  At the same time, Captain Drake is chasing Jared, and we (and Drake) learn a bit more of what Greyfalcon has been up to for years.

I've found Drake to be the most interesting character here for a while.  I love Dessa for her quick, bold bravery, and oh, I love Fisk for his protective loyalty (and Topper because he's hilarious, and because someone has to be pragmatic in this family of idealists).  But Drake is the one whose story really calls out to me.  He's the tragic knight, whose loyalty is showing itself to be at odds with his morality.  It's an old story, but in the stark way it's laid out here, you can't help but wonder what side he's going to end up on.  I'm hoping he doesn't pull a Ned Stark on us.

I think I'm going to go back and start from the beginning on this one, and maybe bring Adam in on it--he's old enough now, at seven, to follow it and enjoy the story.

I read on the website that there will only be one more volume, so things are coming to a head.  The second volume should be out this year, too.  I'm excited, both for the rest of this story, and to see what Scott Chantler will do next!

Sorcerer to the Crown

Oh, how I wanted to love Sorcerer to the Crown.  Because of all the amazing reviews.  Because I enjoyed other things I've read by Zen Cho.  I was waiting for it to come out, and then Netgalley sent me a copy, and I started it right away, and....

Well, actually, what happened was that I ran into a problem reading the Netgalley copy on my Kindle, because it was a PDF, and the cropping made the font very tiny and hard to adjust.  My eyes aren't great, so the tiny font was kind of a dealbreaker--I read a few pages at a time with a kind of grim determination, but petered out fairly quickly.

But then I managed to figure out how to crop the PDF so it read a little easier, and I started going further, and....no, it was still too small to read comfortably (seriously, guys, my eyesight, I'm not even kidding).  By this point, I'm 2/3 of the way through the book, and it languishes for another month.

Finally, though, I got my hands on a print copy from the library and, for the first time in probably months, sit down to read an actual book in actual hardcover.  Maybe this was the solution, because the last third was by far the most interesting. 

But alas--I didn't love this book as much as I wanted to.  I found it slow; we spent far too much time with the staid, upright, rather boring Zachariah and not nearly enough time with the confident, no-nonsense, cocky Prunella.  We spent too much time having the same conversations in different drawing rooms, rather than (best) adventures or (a decent second) different conversations in really whichever drawing rooms, would be fine.

But there WAS so much to love about the book, and I will tell it to you now.  Aside from the obvious and unusual focus on non-white people in this type of Regency novel (I don't actually know what Regency means, but suffice it to say England between 1700 and 1900), the details of how these characters are dealt with are so lovely and real.  Zachariah's internal conflict between love for his mentor and adoptive parents and resentment that they forced him into all kinds of roles he didn't want to play; his mentor's true love for him contrasted with the low-grade, unthinking racism of his time; Prunella's status as somewhere between white and not, somewhere between gentlewoman and not.  The subtleties of living in a world that claims not to hold things against you but, on one level or another, does.  All of that is brilliantly done.

Prunella herself is such a delight to read about.  She's intensely competent, determined in her goals (whatever they may be), and a gifted player of the game.  I was quite shocked by the ending, actually, and the calculated, somewhat ruthless choices that she makes, but that only made her a better character.  She moves through a world that will never be easy with an indifferent ease, and it's hard no to love her for it, even if it makes her feel somewhat distant much of the time. 

In the end, I think this is the review I related to most, even though I actually enjoy authors like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, in their own right.  I don't feel as apologetic as she does, but I did find the language a slog, and I found that it felt like I was being put at a distance from the story, rather than drawn into it the way that the original books or even my favorite imitators (Joan Aiken, say) do. 

So close to being my book, really, but in the end, sadly, not my book.

The Wave

Work book club!  It's been ages since we've met, before Christmas I think.  Vacations and then illnesses and then one thing and another.  Finally we just said that we'd have to sit down and do it.  Turns out that one of the main things that was slowing us down was that nobody really liked the book.

Which is a shame, because it was full of potential.  The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean is about, as it sounds, crazy-big waves.  This is one of those science topics that I know nothing about, so pretty much any angle you want to take on this, you have a chance to tell me interesting stories from some little corner of science and/or history.

But I don't think I ever realized before how much skill goes into making a book like this.  There's a lot of good raw material here, but the author, Susan Casey, is a sports writer, and she doesn't know how to use her material to its best advantage.  What I think happened is that she had a great idea, but the more research she did, the more she realized that the science is either really complicated or largely unknown, and she bloundered.

From the end of the first chapter, I was itching to restructure the book, ask for big additions and rearrangements.  The first chapter is about surfers, which was a good approach--get interested, watch waves in action.  The second is about scientists at a wave science conference. Somewhere in one of these chapters, there should have been a breakdown of how waves word--what makes them break, what the difference between a breaking wave and a non-breaking one is, where the energy comes from.  I looked some of this up on the internet and it's fascinating--how the momentum of the wave is interrupted underwater, causing the top to move faster and break over the bottom.

So many questions I'm left with.  What's the difference between a regular giant wave and a tsunami?  How does a surf ride on a big wave work--how do you get off (barring a fall), what's it like in the foam, what is "the drop" that you keep talking about?  How big are the "normal sized" waves at one of the big surfing areas that she discusses--not the days that bring out the pros, but the regular days in between?

The structure of the book was basically switching back and forth between surfing and other wave stuff.  So every other chapter was about surfing.  Now, I can envision a really good book about pro surfers, but this wasn't quite it.  Every character is described with a one-sentence physical description, every one of them is level-headed and humbler than your average surfer, and I couldn't tell any of them apart.  There are tiny hints at the darker parts of the scene--when she describes how one of her calm, humble friends beat a guy up in a bar because he told everyone where the waves were (leading to overcrowding), when we meet one female surfer at the surfing awards (and she gets ogled and catcalled), when one of these great guys who's really in touch with life flies halfway around the world while his wife is nine months pregnant because he won't miss a wave.

There are all these moments that I interpret as kind of awful, but not only won't she pass judgement on them, she seems to be trying to make them seem okay.

There are a lot of really interesting bits.  The chapter on Lituya Bay, in Alaska, was fascinating; the world's largest tsunami was there only a few decades ago, and there were witnesses and evidence.  There's a lot of great info on how and why that happened.  There's a story about a ship that was caught for days in an enormous storm and, being a research ship, got some amazing readings.  There's a chapter on salvage companies in South Africa, and how they rescue ships and people and cargo when the ocean gets to be too much.

But there was no throughline, and no real episodic structure (as a Mary Roach book might have had).  The story had no spine, no buildup, and it was hard to tell what was going on when in one chapter, 20 foot waves are causing havoc and in another, 40-footers are being dismissed by the surfers as not very special. 

I kind of want Mary Roach to go out and write this book now--take this as a starting place, take all of Susan Casey's notes, and go write the book I wanted this to be.  It's not the charming digressions or the funny (often raunchy) side observations.  What's missing is the sense of there being something to be learned, something to be understood, even if you never do figure out exactly what.