This Is Your Brain on Altruism

 In service to a discussion of charitable giving with a friend, I have been reading her book suggestion, The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer. The premise of the book is simply that basic decency requires pretty much anyone in the middle class (or up) in a developed country to give a decent amount, probably more than they're already giving, to the poor in the third world.

So I entirely agree with that premise, and I think a decent amount about my charitable giving and try to give a lot, and don't necessarily think I give enough. And still, reading through an explicit argument about it somehow engages, if not my actual hackles, then at least my argumentative streak. I want to quibble with him SO MUCH.

Some of my quibbles are pretty reasonable, I think. He comes from a philosophy background, but he uses arguments from both philosophy and social psychology to back his premise. He includes a lot more evolutionary psychology than I generally like to see in a good argument (as my son would say, evolutionary psych is suss), and even standard social psych studies always have me picturing how the undergrads who participated in the study do not in any way represent me. 

I'm sure part of it is that I just feel attacked; "you should give more" = "you aren't giving enough" = "you are doing it wrong," which will always coax a knee jerk out of me. Again, I went in agreeing that I should give more, and he has even convinced me of the point my friend was making when she suggested the book, which is that charitable giving to prevent people dying of poverty in other parts of the world is separate from the more feel-good charitable giving to more local, subtle, and/or optional improvements, like Planned Parenthood, ACLU, and local theater.

I think the key thing I want to argue about, though, are things that I think are missing from his list of "why people don't give." His reasons include things like the diffusion of responsibility, the sense that the problem is too big to solve, and the parochialism of caring about your neighbors more than people you've never seen. These are all real reasons that affect people, but they don't really resonate with me.

The problems I see with giving money to help people who are thousands of miles away are problems of trust and efficacy. When I give my money to a local organization, I have access to some amount of information about what it's doing, who is using it. I don't always look deeply into that information, and of course there can be corruption or mismanagement. But I know where my local food bank sets up shop, and I've sorted food at the regional hub. I attend shows at local theaters and listen to public radio; I follow the news enough to know what the ACLU is doing and I know plenty of people who have utilized the services of Planned Parenthood. 

So first, I have to trust that I am giving my money to an organization that is going to use it appropriately. Second, I have to believe that giving money to them will actually help the people at the other end of the transaction. Is the difference I hope to make going to be made? Does my money actually go toward food or medical care or clean water? I keep picturing the Sally Struthers commercials from years ago and feeling manipulated, not hopeful.

Marketing is what has ruined this. The only way to communicate how my help is needed is through marketing--junk mail, Save the Children commercials, etc. And I have learned enough of the world to know that marketing is mostly lies--or at least, enough lies that it's not worth paying much attention to. 

So when I'm offered to add a dollar to my purchase for a random charity, I say no, pretty much always. Because are they really going to get that money? And if they do, is that really going to help anyone?

That's why his arguments that are based on social psychology, where they ask test subjects to donate to a cause and look at what variables influence their decisions, don't resonate with me. I would say no, always.

And then I'd go home and give the money to the causes I've chosen. In case you're interested, I give to MercyCorps (because my friend who works with refugees identified them as people who have been on the ground helping her clients), Doctors Without Borders (famous and well-regarded enough that I have some idea of what they do), and Give Directly (endorsed by Peter Singer, the author of the book I'm reading, so presumably super well-researched).

And this book is convincing me that I should donate more. And that instead of totaling my giving to these places in the same category as my donations to local radio and theater, the PTA and my local library, political candidates and advocacy groups, that I should count those as two separate categories. Call them causes I support for the latter and basic obligations to my fellow humans for the former.

I am not religious at all, but I know how lucky I am in this world, and that a tithe is the least I can do.

Space Virus Cult

I've mentioned that I'm terrible about advance copies. In an effort to be less terrible, I'm reading books that came out last year that were given to me for early review. Retroactive responsibility for the win!

One that I'd been really excited about was Salvation Day, by Kali Wallace. The cover just screamed "space action movie" and the premise--"A lethal virus is awoken on an abandoned spaceship in this incredibly fast-paced, claustrophobic thriller"--promised the same. And it delivered very precisely on that promise.

In addition to "space action movie," we also get a layer of "heist" and "cult" in the plotting--again, all in space. Just catnip. Our two narrators are both on a shuttle that is hijacked in an attempt to board a floating relic--an enormous research ship that has been adrift in the solar system for a decade, since everyone aboard succumbed quickly to a virus believed to have been released by an angry, discredited scientist. One was the lone survivor of the virus as a child; the other is leading the hijacking on behalf of the Family, a group of outsiders searching for a permanent home.

This book would make an amazing movie. The flashbacks to Jas's memories of his childhood trauma; Zahra's determined loyalty to the wrong cause and moral struggles; the dorky tech nerd, the creepy, haunted ship. A lot of the strokes in the story are a little broad, especially the characterization of the other members of the Family, but in my mind, Zahra in many ways makes up for that. So many books about people in cults are about them being full of doubt, but Zahra believes in her mission. She's had a hard life, and the Family has genuinely saved her. But she's also smart, and when things start happening that require her to improvise, she starts thinking faster and faster. 

Jas was raised by his very powerful aunt and lives a life of privilege, but his relationship with his best friend, whose immigrant family suffered a great deal to get him everything he has gives Jas important perspective. He's got a lot of suppressed issues around, you know, his parents dying horribly. Being back on the House of Wisdom is bad news, especially when it looks like the virus didn't die with the crew.

This is all backstory, but I think the richness of all the details as they unfold really makes the story. It's fast paced, with chasing and hacking and fighting and parasites and explosions. The entire backstory unfolds as the plot does, which keeps the pacing from being too breakneck or too info-dumpy. There are some very cool action set pieces, and the virus is super creepy, but I think that the character and history unfolding are really what make this an above-average read.

Hogwarts Was a Dangerous Place

 I read a Tumblr post back when school started up in person that said something like "I used to that people sending kids to a school where they're likely to be eaten by a giant snake was implausible, but now I see it." 

I'm reading Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, about a school of magic where your job is just to survive while the school spends four years or so trying to kill you. Or rather, the beasties try to kill you while you're stuck in the school; "graduation" is just survival, and the rates are dismal.

This book is making me so happy I can't even tell you. I keep having to put it down because I like the cranky, grouchy, snarky narrator so much and every time she has a warm feeling she grouses about it and my heart explodes. 

It's one of my favorite kinds of books, which is a detailed, systematic look at how to go about living in a difficult situation. A big part of what I love is just the exposition, the ethnographic detail of how 1,000 teenagers do everything from negotiate status to use the bathroom without getting eaten by something out of the drain. There is so much worldbuilding and every bit of it is fascinating in both its creativity and its mundanity.

El, the main character, is a very gifted magician with a natural affinity for enormous acts of death and destruction. But she refuses to be a malificer. Unfortunately, that means working against her own magical affinity, and everything is twice as hard for her, and everyone still looks at her like she just might kill them in their sleep. Her whole life has been this way; she's used to it.

Then she meets Orion Lake, who is Not Harry Potter but is prone to wandering around the school saving random lives. He saves her life at an inopportune moment, and she snarks at him. Thus begins a friendship that is entirely incomprehensible to everyone at school, including El. 

El is an angry, brilliant delight. She is unlikable and knows it and has worked around it all her life, but god she's tired. She's very good at the strategy and tactics that are involved in the elaborate political and survival machinations in the school hierarchy, even though she's near the bottom of the pecking order. And as people start to really see her--for better or worse--she stays determinedly herself.

In the larger sense, the book is about power and privilege, and the parts of the power structure that you can only see from the outside. It's also about what makes a person a good person, or a worthy person, especially when driven to extremes. And it's about deprivation, and human contact, and friendship and strength and my heart is in a puddle on the floor again. I'm going to die because of how much I love this book. Five stars. All the stars. I might have to read it again.

Year In Review

2020, man, right? Whoa boy. 

 One of my goals coming back here is selfish: I like getting prepub books from Netgalley and they like when you review the books that they give you. So I've got a list of books that I got advance copies of--many from several years ago--that I did read and form opinions on. I'd like to post those opinions to get partial credit, even if it's way overdue.

I'd also like to start blogging what I'm in the middle of again, because within a few hours of finishing a book it becomes hard to talk about. I need to be right in the guts of it to really do that; I want to try it.

But let's take a moment to talk about 2020 as a reading year! I can't pick apart this year from other years, but I can tell you that I'm reading a lot more romance than I used to, that I have library books that are overdue by MONTHS, and that my book count would be significantly higher if I counted book-length works of fanfiction, but I'm far too reliant on Goodreads to pull that off.

I look back at the list of books I read and I literally can't believe this was all this year. This was the year I started reading The Innkeeper Chronicles? But...but that was in the Before Times! It was just in January? I am relying entirely on Goodreads for these records; if it tells me that I read The Rules and gave it five stars, I'm going to have to believe it, I guess.

Some exciting bests this year! The aforementioned Innkeeper books, which Sarah K. has been pushing at me for years and I resisted because the covers are pretty darned cheesy. But then my book club friends got into it and I gave it a try and now I am desperately waiting for Ilona Andrews to write the next book about Maud and I have a whole new breed of warlike spacefaring vampires to be weirdly fascinated by.

The Rules for Vanishing was one of the scariest books I've ever read; it is like someone took Tim Burton and stripped all the candyfloss and gave the script to, I don't know, Ridley Scott maybe to film. 

I already posted about Catfishing on Catnet and am absolutely chuffed to bits (as my son says in imitation of his favorite YouTubers) to have an ARC for the next one, which you'll hear about as soon as I read it. 

No real "worst" books of the year; a few 2-star outings, but none that I had high hopes for. Nothing unfinished and nothing hate-read, which is really for the best.

Oh, my book club is new this year! Or at least from the very end of last year. It's really quite the best. It was all over Zoom from the get-go, because the three of us live in different states, but we vacation together most summers (sigh) and we have nicely dovetailing taste in books. It's the first book club that so rarely feels like a chore, because we only pick books we're all excited to read, and our to-read lists have enough overlap that we'll never get through it all. 

And we chat about what else we're reading, which is usually things we all want to read, too. Sometimes we throw out two books just because we are all excited about them. It's just great to talk to L and E every two or three weeks. 

So 2020 was rough, but it was also the year of the book fairy and Camp Book Club, and the year I read three Penric & Desdemona novellas, reread the whole Murderbot series, and discovered the Innkeeper Chronicles. Whatever else is going on in the world, book-wise I can't complain.

Happy new year, everyone.

Over My Head

You know the thing where you're reading a book out loud to a kid and you start doing a bit--an accent, silly voice, or funny face for a certain character--but as the book goes on, you realize how much trouble you've gotten yourself in by starting this? Like you start reading the Batman comics with the Batman voice, but realize on page 3 that you're going to lose your voice before the end of the first issue if you keep trying this?

I knew I was stretching when I decided that the first person narrator of Mars Evacuees should have an authentic (lol) English accent. But hey, I can do a bad English accent for half an hour a night for a few weeks. It's easy!

It wasn't very far into the book, though, when the titular evacuees are gathered together from all over Earth and sent to Mars. And since I'm doing our narrator Alice's voice, I pretty much have to do the Australian accent that Carl and Noel have. Other main characters started flying at me--the Scottish scientist, the Swedish snob, several robots. 

But I've got in under control. Sure, switching from the Midlands to the outback repeatedly in a conversation is tricky, but I am an artist!

I even managed when we threw in an alien race whose language is mostly vowels and who extend all the vowel words in English. I'm pretty proud of that one, actually.

By the beginning of the sequel, Space Hostages, I'm an expert. Dr. Muldoon can talk about terraforming with Mr. Rasmussen (I'll admit, my Swedish accent leans a little German; luckily my kid doesn't know the difference), Thsaaa can develop a French accent (yes, this is canonical, they moved to the Alps) and I am PULLING IT OFF. 

And yes, they have introduced another alien race, who speak through mandibles in a language of mostly clacking. They call themselves the Krakkiluks, and that is actually very fun to say in an Australian accent.

I really thought I had hit Peak Readaloud Complexity. 

Today, we got a new species. They're kind of bat-people, and they speak a tonal language that appears to be a cross between birdsong and yodeling.

Can anyone recommend an online voice coach?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Book Fairy

I think I've found my calling.

It is my ultimate goal in life to drive around town leaving random piles of books on the porches of the good people of Medford, Massachusetts. That's right, I'm the book fairy.

It started when the Friends of the Library did an online book sale--we post bundles of books on Facebook every Thursday morning; first person to comment can buy the item, (offbrand) PayPal us the money, and either pick their books up at a central location or, for a purchase of $10 or more, have them dropped on your front doorstep. On Fridays, I drive all over town and drop off the books.

Then came the grab bags. Tell us who your reader is and what they like, and for $10 you get a pile of used books. Most of them are for kids--a 4 year old boy who loves vehicles and taking things apart; a 7 year old girl who's reading chapter books already, a 12 year old who likes history and adventure. 

Occasionally, though, I get my favorite--an adult who wants funny memoirs, smart romance, thrillers and sci-fi and YA and I get to pick out all my favorites, make a big pile of books I wish I could read again for the first time, or the ones I can't wait to read because all the reviews are SO GOOD. 

And I drop them on someone's porch. Can you imagine, a big bag of fun books just appearing on your porch? Even though you ordered them, even though you paid for them, it's still the dream, right?

I'm the book fairy; I'm getting my business cards made up tomorrow.

A Touch of Romance

After an intense book club read (if anyone would like to discuss Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, I have almost too many thoughts to organize coherently), it was time to downshift into something fluffy and fun.

My waiting ARC of The Boyfriend Project, by Farrah Rochon, was the perfect choice. Beautiful, competent people meet and are wildly attracted to each other, pursue a relationship despite obstacles, overcome pitfalls, and kiss on a lovely fade to black.

The best parts about this book are around Samiah and her awesomeness. She kicks butt and takes name, owns it at work, has goals and meets them. At the beginning of the book she's involved in a viral video with a couple of strangers who quickly become the friends she's been missing as she focused on her work. This new friendship is delightful and charming and I can't wait for the inevitable books about Taylor and London that I certainly hope are coming.

The workplace stuff is also great--watching Samiah navigate idea-stealers and potential promotions is competence at its finest, but watching this company be full of competent, happy people who are treated well by their managers and enjoy their work. I've had a job like that and it was brilliant, and this very much captures that feeling of excitement and teamwork that goes along with that. It's very much a story about a fantasy workplace.

Daniel is also very hot and delightful, and their mutual attraction is full of delightful flirting banter and longing looks.

The reasons Samiah had for not wanting to get serious (because isn't a romance mostly about why they can't just fall for each other smoothly) are pretty thin, but she's a person who's all about control, so it made sense for her character, if not strictly necessary.

Daniel's reasons to resist their attraction are clearer; he's taken his new job as part of a government investigation, and he's here to get the information he needs and get out. Falling for one of his new coworkers was not part of the plan, and the lies he has to tell to sustain his cover story make him uncomfortable, even as he is being his sincere self in falling in love.

This book has an admirable sense of the difference between privacy and lying, because Samiah is a pretty private person, and doesn't expect all Daniel's details. It could be much worse. But the fact is that there are a lot of lies throughout the book, and then at the end, when the reckoning comes, while the apologies are believable, there is maybe not quite enough groveling for me. I feel like some of the angles of his deception that bothered me were not the ones that bothered Samiah, nor the ones Daniel was apologizing for. I wanted a little more nuance in his apology.

BUT: he remains charming and hot and brilliant and nerdy, and a book where the capitalists are not all evil and the "police" presence is after white collar crimes was just the light touch I needed right now. I definitely recommend this one; if you like the cover, this book will definitely deliver.

Catfishing on CatNet

The first thing I need to acknowledge is that the title and cover of this book are pretty awful. I would have had ZERO urge to pick this up based on either of those, and they do not really give you any hint of the facts or feeling of the story you're getting into.


Ignore that.

I book talked this one so aggressively at work that all the YA librarians have read it and are spreading the gospel of Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet. This is a book for people who love heartwarming stories about finding friends and family who will take care of you when the world gets scary.

You might have heard of Naomi Kritzer recently because she wrote a pandemic story a few years ago that was so prescient it's been getting a lot of notice--"So Much Cooking." But what I first read by her was the story "Cat Pictures Please," which is the story on which this novel is based. Go ahead and read it first, if you want--it doesn't give anything away. It's just about the character; the book introduces a bunch of people and problems.

The main character and heart of the story is a sentient AI that knows all about you. It knows everything about everyone--it is basically comprised of all the information on the internet. Mostly what it loves and wants are cat pictures, so it started a chat room for people to post cute animal pictures. It acts as a mod and calls itself CheshireCat, and it chats with friends, reposts pics, and studies human nature.

One of CheshireCat's friends is Steph, a teenager on the chatroom. Steph and her mom live a life in hiding, running from her scary dad. She's finally making IRL friends in the new town they've come to, though, so she'd really like to not have to run again. But when Steph's problems start getting bigger, the AI and her friends might need to save Steph from IRL dangers that might be over their heads.

Ugh, I'm not a blurb writer. Two big selling points here: one, everyone in this story is lovely. Well, not everyone. There are bad guys. But the big group of online friends and friends at Steph's new school are just all great. The show up for each other, and trust and respect and believe in each other. They roll with each others' weird home situations, changing pronouns, romantic confusions, and new attempts to understand humanity. Some of the bad guys are scary, and those bad guys come after them, but this story is full of people taking good care of each other, without being perfect.

Point two: watching an AI figure out how people work will never not be fun. CheshireCat is sweet and well-meaning, but only knows the internet parts of life--which is a lot, but not everything. Watching it navigate interactions with a combination of expertise and bafflement is just so heartwarming and charming and funny.

I loved this book. And the Amazon page says there will be more CatNet books, about which I am super excited. So please ignore the cover and give it a try.

(Welcome to post 2 of my dreck writing. I apologize. I make no quality promises for at least a month.)

Thank you Netgalley for sending me an advance review copy of this book before it came out months and months ago.

New Kindle, New You

I have a full dozen unposted drafts, because I haven't written in so long that everything I write is dreck. See this? This is dreck.

But the only way out is through, so from now on I'm posting a tiny bit of dreck all the dang time. I've got a backlog of reviews to do (literally years of neglected ARCs) so let's make this happen.

So the book I currently haven't quite finished is called Nothing Can Hurt You, by Nicola Maye Goldberg. I was expecting a straight-up standard thriller or mystery--you've got a murdered girl in the woods outside a small college town and her loving boyfriend, high on LSD and mood stabilizers. Is it open and shut but-we-were-wrong? Is it going to be a courtroom drama, where the clever defense attorney will put the police to the test? Will the other serial killer arrested just a few weeks before in the same town be related?

Whatever I thought I was getting, this is not it. This whole novel is a series of vignettes, barely interconnected, all about people tangential to the events. It's very well written, and I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's such a strange beast of a book that I am having trouble imagining its market.

The book opens introducing a woman who moved to the small town because of a strange medical condition, whose marriage is on the rocks. We follow her through entertaining her husband's coworker, a fight with her husband, an angry walk in the woods--when she finds a body--Sara's.

Next we meet a totally different character a thousand miles away. We get to know her in rehab, and why she's there, and about her life and personality. We get a little invested in her rehab, and are concerned about the crush she develops on a fellow patient, who is rumored to have killed his girlfriend. Which he admits to; he was high on LSD.

And then we jump forward. We flash around, meeting the dead girl's half-sister, who barely remembers her, 15 years later. A reporter covering the murder trial, whose section is mostly about her fraught relationship with her mother. A teenager who Sara used to babysit for, whose lonely high school life leads her, in a sideways fashion, to a correspondence to the other murderer who was active in the town at that time. The guilty boyfriend's nanny, many years later when he has children of his own.

There's no mystery here; we know who did what and when. We even know why, because mental illness and contraindicated drugs leave it pretty obvious. We're not angry, necessarily, but we are maybe as befuddled as all these people who are trying to make sense of a world that has such a horrible crime in it.

I liked this book very much--which is impressive for a book that is carried so heavily on its writing. Each section is a really thoughtful dive into a character, sympathetic and clear-eyed. There are no bad guys here; everyone's doing their best, although some of their bests aren't very good.

But it's so far from what I expected when I picked it up, and from what I think most people expect when they look at a book about a murdered girl in a small town, I worry that it'll have a hard time finding its audience. This is a book for people who know that a murder like this isn't something that disappears after the show ends in an hour--it changes everyone around it, in every kind of way, for the rest of their lives.

Thank you to Netgalley for a review copy of this book.

The Returned

Hi, guys! Miss me?

Been reading a bunch, of course; lots of stuff to talk about. Also realizing as I open Blogger for the first time in over a year that I'm not sure I remember how to put words together to form thoughts and say...things...with them. So let's see how this goes.

Here and now, I just finished The Return, by Rachel Harrison, which, whatever its literary merit (read: lack thereof), absolutely sucked me and would not let go.

But I don't know if I can properly review it. See, going in, I only knew what the cover copy told me: Julie went missing two years ago, and by now she's presumed dead by everyone except her best friend Elise. So Elise is the only one who's not surprised when Julie turns up on her own front porch with no memory of where she's been for the past two years.

Now Elise and Julie and their other two best friends, Molly and Mae, are getting together at a Catskills hotel for a girls' weekend, to get to know each other again and maybe try to figure out what really happened to Julie.

That was all the info I had. Somehow, I had it painted in my mind as a domestic-thriller type of book, where it's probably the gorgeous and sweet-seeming husband hiding a dark secret, and probably all these women are various flavors of rich suburban white ladies.

I was very wrong.

I don't think it's a spoiler to get more specific, because I've seen other reviewers doing it, but if you would like to go in blind, here's the spoiler-free version:

the book is about a bunch of 20-something post-college women who are not very good at being emotionally mature people. While each one was definitely a trope (Molly wears no makeup and takes no bullshit; Mae is a rich personal stylist in NYC wearing weird, fashionable clothes and always sweet as candy; Elise has a dead end job and can't keep her life together), and they were all seriously not emotionally healthy.

I have rarely felt so much affection and hope for characters just like this. I generally have no use for 20-somethings who are aimless and whiny and not so much bad at self-examination as unaware that it exists. People who are miserable and not trying to fix it; people who are only into appearances and feel hollow; people who are prickly and rude and treat it like a badge of honor. These are my nemeses.

But what the author captures here in such an amazing way is their friendship. The kind of friendship that is most like a good sibling relationship--where you can doubt each other and lie to each other but still love each other, still always come back to each other. A friendship based on living as one organism with four bodies for the crazy, charmed years of college, so you know each other's strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. A friendship where years may pass but your new, older selves click right into place together.

So: portrait of a friendship, not what I expected. Not great literature, but very readable.

Now for the spoilers.

You are warned.

XXXXXXXXXXXX

This is actually a horror novel. There's some haunted house tropes, some standard hotel-in-the-woods stuff, but in the end it comes down to body horror, and BOY HOWDY is it horrifying.

For so much of the book you mostly get hints. Heavy hints--like, it's really damned obvious hints, but the characters don't know they're in a horror novel, so maybe it's just the lighting that makes her hair seem thinner last night than today? Probably that's rusty condensation dripping from that vent, not some...other red stuff. Your suitcase totally didn't move by itself; you're remembering wrong. REALLY IT'S FINE.

Friends, it is not fine. And while, looking back on the book, there are many unexplained weirdnesses, many hints dropped that in the end don't actually go anywhere, by god I don't care. I spent most of the book looking up every half hour saying, "vampire? zombie? werewolf?" I finally came up with "wendigo," which is also not quite right but closer than anything else.

If your idea of fun is sitting in a hotel room with your besties, reality TV in the background, pouring liquor into half-full soda cans and knowing that you are the funniest, snarkiest, people you'll ever meet...and you don't mind the rattling in the walls or the occasional spurting gouts of blood....this one's for you.

Book-A-Day May: Results

As expected, I did not read a book a day in May. Not even close, really. But I do think it worked as a proof of concept, and that I could do it next year with a little planning.

1) Stockpile novellas. I ran out of novellas I was excited about, but they fit the bill very nicely.

2) Earmark time.  The best part of this plan was that I actually spent a couple of afternoons reading for hours instead of puttering around getting not much done. It was motivating! And productive! It worked really well for that and I want to harness it sometime.

3) Stockpile comics and kids books. Adam thrust several books upon me in the past week that would have been great book-a-day reads.

[Very Important Aside: My kid is now spontaneously coming up to me sometimes and saying, "Mom this is a really good book. You should read it." PARENTING ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: 1,000,000 POINTS!!!!]

4) Plan end-of-April reading to trail off into May.  I counted books I finished in May, even if started in April. For the longer stuff, start it in April, to make a dent.

So this May I actually read 6 novellas, 5 graphic novels, and 4 novels, totaling 15 books, for the purpose of this experiment.  And this was during a month that included a Friends of the Library book sale, which is about my busiest week all year, and some intense volunteer commitments.

So look out next May, I'm planning ahead this time!

Stand-out book from the month: Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, by Mira Jacob. It's the graphic memoir of a Southeast Asian American woman, framed around her trying to answer her young biracial son's questions about racism and Donald Trump near the election of 2016. The story spans the author's life, and it covers everything from being a child of immigrants to her marriage to a white Jewish man and relationships with her in laws, to goofy parent stories and trying to make it as a writer in New York.

It's a wonderful book about the experience of being brown in America and how that's changed over the past 40 years, and about being a parent and trying to make sense of a world that doesn't actually make sense, and then break it down into words a six-year-old can understand--especially when the six-year-old alternates between being scared of racism and pretending he's Spider-Man.

This was such a great, relatable, warm-hearted book, and I really loved getting to know Mira Jacob. Highly recommend.

Book-A-Day May

I had this brilliant idea, because I finished two books in the first five days of May.  News flash: the math does not work out.

BUT! But I love the way it sounds, so I'm going to dream for the next couple of weeks. I figure if I keep plugging away I might get halfway there, which a) will still be an amazing reading month for me, and b) will set me up to make this A Thing and maybe really read 30 books in a month next May! (Or are there 31 days in May?)

This just might work because anything counts. I've read graphic novels and novellas. I counted a Kindle single. I'm counting books I started in April and finished in May. It's about courting success! I'm only not counting the picture book I read, because that would be just too easy; I could be done in a day.

And we're doing it by averages. I don't have to actually finish one book a day--three one day offsets a couple of days plugging through something longer.

So, without further ado: Book-A-Day May so far!

 1) Ragged Alice, by Gareth L. Powell. A Tor.com novella and an ARC I received; full review to come, but generally a neat little mystery with touches of horro.

2) In the Thrill of the Night, by Candice Hern. The anachronistic pun title alone brought me out, along with what I assume was a good review on SBTB, because I live there now and read all the romance and I'm not sorry. I liked the romance in this story very much, but I was very grossed out by a lot of the hero's behavior when he got jealous. There was a lot of lying in this book, and he thinks he's doing it for a good reason but it turned me off of him entirely for a chunk. I forgave him, but I wish there'd been more comeuppance. Still, charming.

3) I'm a Therapist and my Patient is Going to be the Next School Shooter, by Dr. Harper. This is on Amazon as an ebook so I'm counting it, though I read it on the author's website. Don't be fooled; it's not even pretending to be an account of therapy; I'd love to read a fictional account of good therapy. It's a kind of horror/thriller in which a horrible therapist does a bunch of things that I think I'm supposed to find heroic but maybe not? And a bunch of weird stuff happens and it doesn't make much sense. It's all conspiracy and terrible therapy, and by the end I think that the author knows this and is kind of critiquing the main character, but mostly not. Mostly it's salacious stuff that I wouldn't believe on an episode of Criminal Minds.

4) Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, by Mira Jacob. Indian American author Mira Jacob addresses what it's like to be a daughter of immigrants and a brown woman in the U.S. The framework is trying to explain things to her son--a boy who looks like his Southeast Asian mother more than his White Jewish father--in the time leading up to the election in 2016. The true and nuanced answers she and her husband try to give to the boy's difficult questions just felt so important and relatable to me. How can you explain to your child how messed up and awful the world is without scaring him too much or letting him be callous about it? How do you address his real fears about who the good guys and bad guys are?

And the parts about her relationship with her in laws--who have been lovely and welcoming for years, but who are still Republicans--and with her husband--who is entirely on her side but still moves through the world as a White man--are just so moving and complicated. Basically, this story takes some incredibly complicated, messy issues and lays them out in such personal, honest, and nuanced ways.  I want everyone to go out and read this book.

5) Penric's Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold. How have I not finished the Penric novellas yet? Dopn't worry, I'll be done with the rest by the end of May. As always, this one is delightful and charming and I loved it.  Penric is clever and humble and Desdemona is brilliant and sassy and they have dangerous adventures and are incredibly competent and meet a lovely woman.  Five stars, will read more ASAP.

6) Permafrost, by Alastair Reynolds. Another Tor.com original and my first Alastair Reynolds book. This was great. It's a time travel story, and the mechanisms and rules behind the time travel are, I think particularly well thought out and explained.  It's about paradoxes and saving the world (naturally), or at least about giving the world a sliver of hope.  What I found especially interesting was how the narrative dealt with changes to the narrator's memories. It seems like it shouldn't have worked with such a straightforward first person laying out of changes, but it really did.

I found that parts of the revelation were kind of glossed over, or rather infodumped near the end, but before that I had been admiring how well the story dealt with imperfect knowledge and the fact that we know that history might be changing, that a lot of the things we're finding out are secondhand, and that Valentina does not have perfect knowledge of the situation at the times when she has to make choices.  In the end, we learn all the things she didn't know so that we can evaluate everything from a distance, but I rather liked how she pushed through in the thick of it, trusting who she trusted and believing in the mission.

7) By Night, Volume 1, by John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern. I picked this up because John Allison writes Giant Days, which is the best thing in the world. This has the same flavor in dialogue as Giant Days, but it hasn't quite found itself yet. The premise involves two former best friends living in a down-and-out town exploring an abandoned industrial complex and finding a portal to another world.  They decide to make a documentary about it; Heather's coworker and Jane's dad join them on the adventure.

There's a lot of charm here and the dialogue is snappy, but I don't fully get the characters yet. I feel like Heather's irritation and Jane's urgency don't always make sense. I do love their green horned tour guide, though, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes. It'll be interesting to see how John Allison's plotting skills are; Giant Days is very character-driven, which he clearly does well, but this promises to be a big adventure, and it'll be interesting to see how that works.

So, that's May so far! Aren't you proud of me? Aren't I accomplished? If I squish in a bunch of comics and a couple more novellas, I might just make a good showing in Book-A-Day May!

Read Good Talk. Seriously.

On Finding Romance

I feel like I'm finally figuring out what I like in a romance novel and how to pick one that might appeal to me.  At the very least, I know that Christina Lauren is my favorite contemporary romance author and that I will always read what she writes, forever and ever amen.

I was so excited to get The Unhoneymooners from Netgalley, and I was right to be, because it was deeee-lightful. The premise is very simple: Olive's twin sister won a fabulous all expenses paid honeymoon, but food poisoning put her, the groom, and almost everyone else at the wedding in a position where no one could go on the trip.  But Olive's allergic to shellfish and the groom's brother, Ethan, doesn't trust buffets, so they're healthy and the bride insists that someone is going to use the nontransferable honeymoon tickets.  So off go Olive and Ethan, who don't really like each other, to Maui for ten days.

Can you guess what happens? Yeah, that's what happens. Their arguing has always looked a little like flirting, but it gradually gets more flirty and less fighty and so on. The thing that makes this book--and most Christina Lauren books, I think--is the flirting. It's the part where two clever people are being clever and charming at each other and they're having fun and you're having fun with them and everything is just right with the world.

So that's about half the book--just falling in love in Maui, like you do. Part of that plot revolves around how bad Olive is at lying, and the fact that the vacation is firmly non-transferable. So to a certain extent, Ethan and Olive have to pretend to be married.  There are some comical scrapes this issue--running into exes and bosses and such--and those just shot my anxiety level through the roof. I don't always hate lying, but I hated it here, I think because Olive hated it so much. Luckily, these bits were short; there were never extended periods where you had to squirm waiting for chapters/days to see how awkward things would get. 

Then we depart Hawaii, returning to normal life in the bleak, frozen northlands of the Twin Cities, where there are complications that are real and realistic and that I liked a *lot*.  It's nothing melodramatic, all very realistic and normal, but there are a bunch of little moments that feel very relevant and important--misunderstandings based around "oh, you must have misinterpreted him" and "you are putting the worst possible spin on" an experience that is pretty cut and dried if you were there but is hard to describe.  It's a perfect depiction of this kind of thing, and while it's fairly small, I loved it a lot.

Just the best. Witty and charming and sexy and real. I have been reading Christina Lauren for a while, but it's time for me to catch up on the ones I haven't gotten to yet. They're very much worth it.

Review copy received from Netgalley; the book will be published on May 14, 2019.

Dooce Treatment

Remember dooce.com? The LA party girl blogger turned mommy blogger turned blogging industry? I followed her for years, mostly writing about parenting and her struggles with mental illness. She's a really good writer, and I enjoyed the blog a lot.

Her name is Heather Armstrong and her new book is called The Valedictorian of Being Dead. It's about an experimental treatment for depression that she underwent--experimental as in she was patient #3 in the trial--after an 18-month depressive episode that nothing else could touch.

It's really hard for me to review this book apart from my feelings about Heather herself--isn't that always the case with a memoir? I have fairly strong opinions about her work, and it's kind of hard not to have strong opinions about her life, too, when you've read years and years of detailed accounts about it. 

One of the pivot points of my reaction to dooce is the idea of honesty, straightforwardness, and self awareness in a personal blog. Just because you write a blog about your life doesn't mean you owe your readers any particular details. I don't have any right to know more about the facts that fall in the gaps I see in her storytelling, the places where I want more detail. I want it, but I'm not entitled to it, and I know that.

But am I entitled to the truth about the parts she does write about? Nobody promised me nonfiction, did they? And then again, what is "the truth" when you're telling your life story? There are plenty of stories I tell myself and mostly believe until I don't and I realize they were never true.

Take the divorce. That's about when I stopped reading the blog; that's about when I realized that the people I thought I was reading about were personas. (It's reality TV. No one believes reality TV, right?) I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure that pictures of her on a date with someone else (selfies, not any kind of blogger-paparazzi shots) showed up on her Instagram just a couple of days after the separation was announced. What that said to me was either a) cheating, or b) a long-term rift that there had been no hint of in the storytelling. To the point where, in my memory, there was a "my husband is the best husband" blog posts fairly current before the split was announced.

The specter of her ex-husband, Jon, hangs over the book. He doesn't appear, having moved to New York since the split, but one of the driving factors in the book is her fear that if he finds out about the severity of her depression, he'll take the kids away.

I have complicated feelings about that, too. She spent 18 months very, very depressed. Hiding in the closing crying on the phone to her mother about wanting to be dead. Weeping and leaving the room because the fight to make her daughter practice piano was too much. I have felt this--the tyranny of the neverending list of things that need to be done that she describes so, so poignantly. Her ability to explain the feelings of depression is amazing.

But also, maybe she wasn't doing her kids any favors by plowing through this? Not that her ex was the solution--he appears to be a "two weeks in summer and one holiday a year" kind of parent, which, eugh. Who is that guy, and who was the guy I knew on the blog? So no, I don't necessarily think he should have taken her kids. But maybe someone should have been looking at whether they were okay through this?

Ugh, I don't want to dump on her. I really don't; this is a great, interesting memoir of this particular treatment, and it does an excellent job with almost everything it's trying to do--her relationship with her mother and stepfather, her father and her siblings, the family history of mental illness, the experience of the treatment, the nature of her depression, all incredibly well-painted. 

I guess it's more that I don't entirely trust her to be an authentic reporter of her own life. Whether it's for reality TV reasons (in service of the story), or for standard memoir reasons (to protect the real people who are out there in the world living this life), or because her tragic flaw is the need to be the valedictorian of everything, including memoirs, and so everything is cured and sewed up into a neat little package--when I read her book, I am very aware of everything that must be there but is not being said.

One thing that gave me pleasure, though, was how, as the treatment starts to work and she starts to reconstruct her life, she realizes that she has to build it in such a way as to not trigger her anxiety. This is something I have learned myself in the past few years--that part of keeping myself emotionally healthy and strong is to build a life that does not press on the places where I am weakest. There are things that are harder for me than they are for other people--it is not weakness to work around those things instead of trying to do them anyway because I "should." Having a job that you can do competently without getting panic attacks is more important than having a prestigious job; I've learned that, and I am only, endlessly glad that Heather did, too.

I guess that's the other part of reading this book, the good part. In spite of my doubts about whether I'm getting a whole and accurate picture of this person's life, the story she is telling--her suffering, her family's support, her hope--all resonated with me, and I was rooting for her all the way.

Missed you, dooce.  Best of luck with everything.

On Trust: The Stillwater Girls

I know I've talked about this before--the difficulty of reading a new author when you're not sure if you're supposed to trust the characters or not.  The Stillwater Girls, by Minka Kent, is a perfect example of this, and I'm trying to pick it apart.

For the first half of the book, you're reading two stories in alternating chapters from two narrators. One is from Wren, who lives in a cabin in the deep woods with her sister Sage, and whose mother left weeks ago to take their youngest sister Evie to a hospital. Wren has never been off their homestead, and if Mother doesn't come back, they might starve.

The other story is about Nicolette, who lives in a lonely part of upstate New York with her photographer husband, whom she loves deeply but suspects might be having an affair. They have been unable to have children (and I'd include some content warning for infertility struggles) and this has put pressure on the marriage. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other for a very long time.

Now, my objective opinion is that it took too long to bring the two stories together. Wren's story was compelling in its own right, but Nicolette's didn't grab me, and I was mostly waiting for her to have something to do with Wren. This is partly a pet peeve of mine; I have zero interest in whether anyone's husband is cheating on them.  If he's murdering people or conspiring against her, I'm on board, but if he's just sleeping around, even if he's working really hard to hide it, I'm sorry, that is nowhere near thrilling to be even  source of tension in a thriller.

So I was pretty dismissive of Nicolette. She seems very normal, maybe a little shallow and spoiled. And I've realized that I've been trying to figure out whether this is a quality of her character or a judgement I'm making. Does she seem shallow because I am quick to judge people as shallow, or because the author is painting her as shallow?  I struggled with this for a lot of the book; if the author is painting her as such, it's actually pretty subtle and well done, because it's not enough to turn me against her or make me doubt her, but I've definitely noted it.

If I knew the author well enough to feel confident, I would be creeped out by how uneasy the character makes me. But writing this, I realize that I have had another piece of important information that I was ignoring; Wren. The other point of view character has a very different voice and a very different life and personality. But there's no hint in Wren of any reason to doubt her judgement, in spite of her isolation and ignorance. 

In fact, after the two stories intersect, Wren offers a check on Nicolette's observations. The language Nicolette uses about Wren doesn't quite jibe with the character we know from Wren's chapters; a good deal of Nicolette's shallowness comes through in how she perceives Wren (as "little" and "innocent").

I'm nearing the end of the book now, but I think I've talked myself around to trusting the author. Which has me excited to get back to it and see what's going to happen; I'm pretty sure we're coming up on a big twist.

I stand by my assessment that there are some pacing problems with the first half. But there's also a compelling story in there, and now I very much want to know how it ends.

Contagion

I started reading Contagion, by Erin Bowman, a few months ago, but it wasn't the time.  The time was now and it was actually a great read for the same reason I had to put it down.

See, late last year I got really into a series of audio dramas from Audible based on the Alien franchise. They're really great, full cast productions of stories about other encounters with the xenomorphs from the movies.  One story is the backstory of Newt from Aliens and the details of what happened to that colony. Another involves Ripley's shuttle being found between Alien and Aliens, with some serious retconning to resolve all continuity issues.  There was even a convincing Sigourney Weaver imitator playing Ripley.

The thing is, I listened to them all in a row, and they're very similar.  Group of people come to a remote, deserted planet inhospitable to life to investigate something ominous, they find strange and fascinating sights--weird eggs, alien ships--and are inadequately frightened.  They investigate, in spite of barely being able to breathe the air, in spite of the fact that there are probably people missing, so there's reason to be wary.  But no, we'll just check this out. 

Then the aliens hatch and are chasing them, and the people are running, getting picked off, trying to find their way to some kind of escape. We learn more about the aliens and wait to see how many people will actually make it, knowing it won't be many, in some cases knowing the answer will be "just Newt."

Don't let my being jaded stop you from listening; any one of these is a really great story and very well-produced. Maybe don't listen all in a row. But I was glutted on these when I picked up Contagion.

Contagion is the story of a science crew sidetracked to answer a distress call at a mining outpost called Black Quarry. (Point: could you give your mining outpost a more ominous name?) It's an ominous planet, inhospitable to life, and a survey team Died Mysteriously there years before (except for one child who survived). But there might be a source of McGuffin--excuse me, corrarium--on the planet, so another team is investigating. But now they've gone missing, and a team is sent to investigate.

The team consists of: the child survivor of the first mission, now much older. Her teenage intern, scrabbling her way out of a lifetime of institutional foster care. A young pilot who washed out of the military because of a very slight peripheral vision problem. A too-young, too-cocky captain.  A few red-shirts.

So they get to this inhospitable planet, and they start investigating, and it's very mysterious, and they find things that don't make sense, and then ominous things start to happen.  The first half of the book was very much like the part before you find the aliens.  Which is actually great; it's about the nitty gritty of conducting a rescue mission on a dangerous world, with some extra interpersonal conflict and military/political drama thrown in. 

When I came back to it recently, I was all fresh, and it started at a good clip. I think the cover gives away enough information that I can safely tell you without spoilers that there is a zombie virus involved, and leave it at that.

Too long; didn't read: awesome space horror; can't wait for the next one.

More Wayward Children

I thought Beneath the Sugar Sky would be the last of the Wayward Children series, but then In an Absent Dream appeared magically on Netgalley, and they were so kind as to share it with me, and a big ol' thank you for that.  Of course, they gave it to me months ago and I read it months ago, but by gum here I am, raving about it now.

Remember Lundy from Every Heart a Doorway? She was Eleanor West's right hand girl at her Home for Wayward Children, a middle aged woman in the body of a child, somewhat prim and devoted to mapping the nature of the worlds her charges have visited.  This is her backstory, where she went and how she came back and how she came to be the Lundy we know at the school.

Because, of course, once she was just a little girl named Katherine Lundy, who liked to read and to think, who liked rules and logic, but who found that the world wasn't quite fair, even by its own standards.  And when she stumbled into another world--the Market, where everything has a value and it is always, always fair--she knows that she's home.

I think what I loved most about this book is that it is addressing a completely different problem than the others in the series.  In this book, while Katherine doesn't much like the way this world is, she does actually love her family.  This is a book about choices, and about how choices are a part of life, and you can't clever your way out of having to sometimes give something up to get what you want. Some resources--like the hours in your life--are finite.

When Lundy finds her way through a door into another world--a world that feels like home to her--there are things she's leaving behind.  And when her new world and new friends demand things of her--giving is wonderful, but what are the limits? Giving generously to your friends can complicate relationships, and your judgement of what they need might not be theirs.

I love how the idea of a world that is always fair is explored here, and how this perfect world--which even makes room in fairness for people's ability and knowledge and freedom--is not enough to be everything to every person. 

In the end, this story brings Lundy from a mysterious, distant figure into a full, fleshed-out character. Knowing her back story, her later life is even more interesting. I wonder sometimes if Seanan McGuire ever regrets that her first book in this series was a murder mystery in which so many interesting characters died; I would very much like to read the story in which that one girl finds her way home through the spider queen's tiny portal.

Oh, the Whammy

I was putting down books left and right this month, so I didn't blame the book itself when The Witch of Willow Hall failed to hold my attention and I ended up setting it aside. A coworker read it, though, and when we started discussing it, I decided I wanted to finish it so we could have a full conversation.

So that's what the last to days have been--aggressively skimming this what-a-crockery and texting outraged observations to Library Lily. Comments like "that's not how duels work" (her reply: "that's not how life works") and "All she had to do was yank the letter out of his hand when I shouted at her!" I ended up reading the climactic scene out loud to my family because it made so little sense.

Great cover, though, right? I had some hopes. It's 1821 and our heroine, Lydia, arrives in the present tense in New Oldbury, a stupidly named town (upon which the narrator remarks) in western Massachusetts. Her father's going to start a mill and ignore his family, and the rest of them are going to flee the scandal that has been hovering over their good name.

Older sister Catherine is gorgeous and flirty and in trouble. Little Emeline is Lydia's closest friend. Mother drifts through the house in a haze. There is theoretically a brother named Charles off somewhere. Lydia meets Mr. Barrett, her father's young, handsome business partner. There are maybe ghosts.

The pieces start to line up all right, but when they all come together, it collapses into a hot mess. This book includes such thrilling details as incest, death of a child, and miscarriage, but spends most of the time on the page describing the physical locations of people in the room, their expressions, postures, seated positions, and state of their dress. The story cannot carry off the gravitas required by the themes.

Lydia makes literally no choices and takes no action on any subject at any point. She does not tell anyone how she feels about anything, even when they ask, for reasons that don't make much sense. She spends a lot of time trying to pretend nothing is happening--sometimes more than once on the same page (if she doesn't open her mother's door she can pretend her mother isn't sick; if she doesn't open the book, she can pretend she doesn't have any need of the information in it).  This lasts right up till the very end, when she does one thing in the last scene (which doesn't go very well) and we're supposed to be impressed.

Catherine would have made a much better main character. She's scheming and conniving. Much of her behavior doesn't make emotional sense, given the shallow characterization--but maybe it would have made sense in her head. Her aggressive attempts to flirt her way to a husband are at least practical and well-planned, unlike literally anything Lydia undertakes in the whole novel.

Everyone in this book behaves so erratically, with so little human feeling or common sense. There was a good idea here--girl with latent powers moves to haunted house--but what I ended up reading was, disappointingly, the least lurid incest book ever.

I got an ARC of this book from Netgalley for an honest review.

Speaking of Bad...

See, some books are just so silly that I have no problem giving them a big ol' raspberry. Darcey Bell's A Simple Favor is one of those books. I picked it up because I had seen a preview for the movie with Anna Kendrick, whom I find oddly charming, and Blake Lively, whom I find oddly offputting, and figured what the heck?

What the heck indeed. This book is mostly just Not Good.  I'm not 100% sure why I read through to the end, except possibly that A) I hoped there would be a really twisty twist that set all that came before on its ear (spoiler: newp), and B) I was baffled by the idea of Anna Kendrick playing Stephanie.

I knew from the movie trailer that Stephanie (Kendrick) was the boring one whose best friend, Emily (Lively) is all amazing and glamorous but turns out to have Secrets.  That's about all I knew.

But it turns out that Stephanie is not just the square one (which Anna Kendrick can do quite nicely, thanks), she's the frumpy one.  She runs a mom blog in which she frequently talks in broad, saccharine generalities about moms.  Like, "Moms have amazing mom powers, and their mom strength holds them together through a crisis.  The amazing community of moms etc. etc."  She's very uptight, sure, but also pretty dim.

Emily, on the other hand, is a glamorous PR manager for a fashion company in New York City.  Stephanie is a widow, but Emily is married to a gorgeous husband.  Their sons are the same age and they're friends.

The simple favor is to watch her son for a few hours after school.  The drama starts when Emily doesn't come home. The police get involved, and is there foul play, and where is Emily?

It's the most Gone Girl plot since Gone Girl itself, but it is not anywhere near as clever or shocking or gritty as Gone Girl.  As the plot unfolds, it starts to look like literally  no one in this book is actually all that smart, and instead of having fun watching an evil genius pull the strings of all the regular people around her, you're watching a sneaky stupid person play childish games with a dopey stupid person.

And, insult to injury, the major plot twist hinges on one of the classic daytime soap opera twists.  Think "amnesia!" only even cheesier.

So yeah, I read the whole thing.  I'll probably even watch the movie when it's available to stream, because Anna Kendrick is a dear.  But whoo nellie, this one was pretty dang cheesy.

Why I Stopped

Not why I stopped blogging; I'm not self-aware enough to write about that, and it's not very interesting.

But why I stopped reading this book that I had been excited about and that seemed to be giving me everything I always ask for when I talk about books. I've been thinking a lot about why the book I just set aside, Beneath the Citadel, didn't work for me, and about what to say about it.

Self-conscious aside: writing a negative post about a book that I didn't actively dislike but that just didn't work for me feels mean. I often just skip those--I'll write a pan of something that was amusingly bad (foreshadowing; watch this space), but a book that I have some respect for but that didn't work for me--taking the time to pick it apart feels kind of petty.

But the question of why I felt that way is interesting, and it's what's been on my mind. So my apologies to the author, and all of my respect for the good work that went into this book that ended up being not for me.

First, let's say that the cover is glorious. I stared at the cover for a long time before I got a chance to start reading (when it was on my desk at work), and it brought me a lot of joy. The first chapter was also truly excellent; four young rebels appear before a tribunal and are sentenced to death for breaking into the citadel. We learn their characters, get some great moments, and spend some interesting time inside the head of the Chancellor, who is surprisingly sympathetic for the head of the government against which we're going to be rooting.

This is just what I ask for--start me in the middle of some action.  Not the climax, but I have so little patience for a first page that is mostly descriptive.  Don't start me with the weather or the landscape; start with our characters doing something, so I can learn about them by watching them interact with the world.  Perfect here.

Then they're taken into the dungeons, to be executed tomorrow. They execute an unlikely escape, which is pretty cool and impressive, and they flee into the catacombs that are, appropriately enough, beneath the citadel.

Now, I read the first quarter of this book, over 100 pages. The entirety of this section was our four main characters on the run.  Aside from one very important plot driving incident, not much happens in this run.  They are finding their way through the catacombs; there are soldiers chasing them, sometimes closer sometimes further away.

What's really happening in this section is backstory. And there's a lot of it--you've got four characters to meet, to learn how they ended up here and how their relationships with each other work. We also have a huge amount of world-building--who are the rebels, and against what are they rebelling?  We have to learn about how the visions of the seers have governed this world, how the rebellion arose and was put down, where these characters fall in the hundreds of years of political backstory this represents. 

There are a lot of gaps to fill in, and there's a lot of explaining to get us caught up to date. There are scenes from the past, but there's no tension to them, because the outcomes are all foregone conclusions--here is how Cassa and Kestrel met.  We already know they'll become best friends; watching it happen doesn't have the tension, the chance of the unexpected that keeps me reading.

I think what I'm seeing is that, while the book so far has a decent amount of things happening, there is not nearly enough surprise. There is almost no change at all, not even small moments of surprise, at this point in the book.  On a different day, the writing and the characters might have kept me going; I suspect it's going to change shape soon.

But today, I'm antsy and impatient, and I'm lost.  I still want very much to go back and read this author's previous book, Iron Case, which I've heard is excellent.  But here and now, I'm just going to have to shift gears.