3/8/2021 Two 5 star reads in a row?! This one was probably a little more of a personal rating but honestly, aren't they all? Full review tk tomorrow a3/8/2021 Two 5 star reads in a row?! This one was probably a little more of a personal rating but honestly, aren't they all? Full review tk tomorrow at .
3/9/2021 This might be one of my favorite romance novels ever, never mind a YA romance. And that's even with hating the guy around the beginning: he gets (a lot) better, and I'm really hoping the devil's advocate nonsense is something he grows out of because, you know, he's a teenager and it's understandable, if certainly still annoying, at that age.
The guy is Alexander Brougham, who totally busts our heroine Darcy Phillips as she's retrieving letters from school locker 49, out of which she runs an anonymous relationship advice business. He wants to hire her to help him get his ex-girlfriend back. Afraid that he'll expose her, Darcy reluctantly agrees. It isn't just that she doesn't want their fellow students to know that they've been taking love advice from a high school junior whose own love life is practically nonexistent. She's worried that if the truth ever got out, it would seriously jeopardize her relationship with her best friend and long-term crush, Brooke Nguyen, because she once did something seriously unethical to Brooke under the guise of dispensing advice. She's striven to make up for that ever since, making sure to dole out solid, thoughtful responses to the many people paying her to email them with solutions to their woes.
Darcy is eager to get Brougham, as he prefers to be called, and Winona back together again so she doesn't have to worry about him ratting her out, but Brougham is surprisingly close-mouthed about his relationship issues, given that he hired her to help him in the first place. An exasperated Darcy has to figure out not only how to fix his love life, but also what makes this infuriating weirdo tick. What follows is one of the most delightful takes on so many of the overworked (and in lesser hands, excruciatingly tiresome) tropes in romance today: miscommunications, matchmaker falling in love with her client, dislike-to-love. It's all So Good and So Sweet, with characters who have real problems and who sometimes communicate poorly but never stupidly.
And there is so much representation! Darcy is bisexual and worried that dating a straight guy will jeopardize her ability to be accepted as part of her school's small but close-knit queer community. Her older sister Ainsley is trans, and there's a healthy amount of racial rep among the school's student body and faculty as well. None of it feels forced, and all of it is so loving and accepting and kind that I burst into happy, relieved tears at one point while reading.
This is such a wonderfully compassionate novel, depicting the lives of flawed, lovable characters as they seek to navigate the vagaries of love. It is the Young Adult romance every bisexual person -- and the people who love them -- should read. Smart, funny and deeply touching, it's a wholly lovely book, and one I'll be coming back to whenever I need a fix of realistic sweetness (should there ever be a break in my reading schedule, that is.)
Perfect On Paper by Sophie Gonzales was published today March 9, 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including Want it now? For the Kindle version, ....more
3/6/2021 I'm not saying LARPers can't be trusted but... Full review tk at .3/6/2021 I'm not saying LARPers can't be trusted but... Full review tk at ....more
3/4/2021 To give you an idea of how much I hated the heroine, the first time she's in m3/3/2021 Terrible. Full review tk at .
3/4/2021 To give you an idea of how much I hated the heroine, the first time she's in mortal peril, I was hoping she wouldn't survive. When she unfortunately does escape the potentially fatal consequences of the (self-inflicted) accident only to be later gravely wounded by a villain, I literally shouted with laughter because I was so over her nonsense and wanted her to die.
Honestly, I can put up with a lot from my reading, but to have a heroine -- in this case Wren Southerland, a healer for the Danubian army -- start out stupid and just keep doing stupid things while holding on to the bizarre idea that her stubbornness and selfishness come from being emotional instead of being a moron was almost too much for me to handle. I had to put the book away at the 92% mark when the heroine does something so idiotic that I needed to just sit by myself and take deep breaths in order to handle the swelling in my breast of rage, both at the author and at my need to persevere to the end of this deeply ludicrous book.
I mean, any sympathy I might have had with this protagonist was strained very early on in the book. Wren and her hardass commanding officer, Major Una Dryden, are out on patrol when they scare a spy right out of a tree. The spy breaks his arm rather grotesquely and Una makes the questionable, on many levels, decision to shackle him to the tree by his broken wrist. Wren wants to heal the boy, protesting sepsis and the need to interrogate a living subject, but Una tells her not to be so soft-hearted (!) and to guard him while she goes off to scout.
At this point, I was all "only assholes torture prisoners" and I was super glad Wren disobeyed orders and went to magically heal him anyway... except that the only way this complete numpty could think of to do so was to free him altogether from his shackles, NOT restrain him in any manner whatsoever, and then be terribly, horribly surprised when he runs away as soon as she heals him. I was aghast at how this allegedly seasoned military veteran could make such a rookie mistake but thought to myself, well, her heart's in the right place, and surely the author is only having her start out daft only to redeem herself by learning to make good choices by the end...
But that's a huge NOPE because Wren doesn't learn a goddamn thing as she bumbles her way through high treason, betraying her only friend and running away to a creepy house in the neighboring, neutral country, where she finds herself not only healing but falling in love with her nation's greatest enemy, Henry Cavill, I mean Cavendish, who is allegedly 19 years-old but talks like a hot, middle-aged British actor playing a particularly . It's not exactly instalove but she does get all "I've been waiting so long for you to say I love you" when they've known each other maybe three goddamned weeks at that point! Plus, he's an entire war criminal! Whose whole shtick is "I know I've done terrible things, but I'm sorry for them and will happily pay the price... once I've fixed my country and its relationship with yours, however long that takes, I guess." Anyone with half a brain knows that that is total avoidant bullshit that does not actually take responsibility for his heinous acts but plays into the authoritarian "only I can fix it" mentality that people need to stop having if they actually want to build civil societies! (Ofc, Wren thinks this makes him romantic and noble, because she would.)
The plot itself is riddled with holes, particularly around that ridiculous climactic scene, and tho I did enjoy the merging of the medical with the mystical, as well as the bi representation even if it was in the form of this hopeless ninny, I was just deeply incensed by the nonsense idea that empathy makes you stupid. Wren is self-centered and self-pitying, but none of that is due to her ability to identify with the feelings of others. If anything, her empathy is depicted as a physical pull bordering on pain, thereby making it a selfish choice for her to do something seemingly kind, if seemingly foolish, for others when it's really her way of remedying her own internal discomfort. Folks, that is not how empathy works in the real world! Empathy means offering what aid you can to those in need, not because you want to assuage your weirdly-placed guilt but because you know these people are suffering and you want to do what you can to alleviate their pain, not your own.
Absolutely infuriating novel. There was some good writing but it was otherwise a complete dumpster fire of dumbassery.
Down Comes The Night by Allison Saft was published March 2, 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including Want it now? For the Kindle version, ....more
1/22/2021 3.5 stars. I think you'd like this more if you were susceptible to cult mentalities to begin with. Full review tk at .1/22/2021 3.5 stars. I think you'd like this more if you were susceptible to cult mentalities to begin with. Full review tk at ....more
1/12/2021 Full review tk at if I don't fall over from exhaustion first.
1/12/2021 Whereas Emma Lord's debut novel Tweet Cute 1/12/2021 Full review tk at if I don't fall over from exhaustion first.
1/12/2021 Whereas Emma Lord's debut novel Tweet Cute updated You've Got Mail for the 21st century, her follow-up You Have A Match is a smart, modern take on The Parent Trap. Sixteen year-old Abby Day only takes one of those Ancestry-DNA-type tests out of solidarity with her best friend Leo, on whom she also happens to have a huge crush. Leo was adopted from the Philippines, and while his parents are supportive of him trying to find out more about his birth family, his sister Carla is far more ambivalent, hence his need for moral support. When testing turns up nothing for him but informs Abby that she actually has an older sister living in the next town over, she's absolutely flabbergasted. The eldest of four kids herself, she doesn't understand how it's possible that 18 year-old Savannah Tully could genetically be her full sibling.
Savvy, as she's known, is also everything accident-prone, academically-indifferent Abby isn't. A polished Instagram star with great hair and a wealthy family, she's just as confused as Abby, and insists that Abby come spend time with her that summer at Camp Reynolds so they can get to know one another better and figure out how all this happened. Abby is desperate for a break from her parents' strict regime of SAT tutoring, so she accepts the invitation while dodging summer school. Little does she know that Leo is going to be at camp as well, and that this is going to be a summer of revelations and heartbreak that could turn out to be the most important summer of her life.
I had pretty low expectations going into this book, but I was blown away by how delightful it was to follow these fallible, relatable characters as they desperately tried to figure out who they were and who they loved and what it means not only to be family but also to be friends. Abby is constantly saying the wrong thing -- forgivable in a 16 year-old -- but she's also extremely conflict-avoidant, and it was fascinating and heart-breaking to read how she reacted when she and Savvy finally confronted their parents, initially blaming herself for "tricking" them but exploding later in an anger born of an entirely understandable vulnerability. It's so nice how she feels like a real person, and not a zero to sixty stand-in for an author's grinding plot axe, as is unfortunately common in both the YA and romance genres to which this book belongs. It was also nice how Ms Lord presented Abby and Savvy's parents as people who'd made awful mistakes but who with time were capable of overcoming the past in order to mend broken relationships.
I really appreciated the side plot regarding Leo's attempts to learn more of his background and birth culture, as well. It's nice that he and Mickey, another Asian character, were never exoticized even as they played important romantic roles in the narrative. It was also pretty great how Savvy being lesbian was presented and treated so matter-of-factly. It's so heartening to think of this generation of kids growing up with one less thing to have to feel unnecessarily bad about -- it's a process, but if we're lucky, it'll keep being true for more and more people as time goes on.
Books like this give me hope for the future, that we can find family, make new friends and fix old friendships, while moving forward together with honesty, accountability and compassion. You Have A Match may not be one of the best YA novels I've ever read, but it's certainly a lovely, thoughtful YA romance that I greatly enjoyed. Bonus points for the hilarious callouts to social media and pop culture memes throughout.
You Have A Match by Emma Lord was published today January 12th, 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including Want it now? For the Kindle version, ....more
1/11/2021 2.5 stars. Feels like different people wrote different parts of the book. Full review tk at .
1/11/2021 It genuinely1/11/2021 2.5 stars. Feels like different people wrote different parts of the book. Full review tk at .
1/11/2021 It genuinely felt like this book was written by one person for the first 60% and another for the last 40%. Maybe this has something to do with the book being a reissue from 2015, telling the first chronological story of the Koa Kane Hawaiian Mystery series, and perhaps being updated for 2021. What I know for sure is that there's a definite cognitive dissonance from the first sixty percent, where Koa sounds like a moderately racist, moderately misogynistic white man in disguise, with the last forty where he wonders whether non-native Hawaiians have undergone sufficient sensitivity training in their professional fields for saying milder things than he himself has expressed or let pass without comment. I was certainly glad for the 180 in attitude, but it happened so abruptly that it made for really weird reading.
The story itself is alright: Koa Kane is a 40-something detective on the underfunded Hawaii police force, living with his seven years younger (tho the numbers get fiddly partway through the book for no discernible reason) partner, astronomer Nalani. He's worrying about budget cuts and a pinched nerve in his neck when a mutilated body is found in a lava tube on an army firing range. Investigations lead to such disparate factions as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, as well as to archaeological black marketeers and the scientists up at Nalani's workplace, the (fictional) Alice Observatory located on the slopes of Mauna Kea. It's a wide-ranging look at current Hawaiian society and politics that serves as a fascinating introduction to the area. Did you know that Mauna Kea in winter features sub-arctic temperatures and snowfall? I sure didn't! In fact, I actively doubted what Robert B McCaw was telling me for the longest time because he did not acknowledge that snow is not something you'd expect in fricking Hawaii of all places! I don't expect to have my hand held in real world narratives but I do expect some awareness of out-group perspectives, tho I guess the constant disparaging allusions to an ob-gyn as a "baby doctor" (like, why is that disreputable? He helps bring children into the world. Is it because he does this by helping people with uteruses and heaven knows, those people aren't to be taken seriously?) after also saying, "The army probably killed his relatives during the war. At least, I hope so" about a Japanese-Hawaiian person who dislikes the military, are indicative of blissful lack of same. And then there's a weird bit in the afterword where I wondered whether somebody needed an explanation as to how sex can lead to pregnancy. I still also don't understand why Kane was so hostile to the sovereignty groups, likely because their aims are never really explained in comparison to the amount of scorn heaped on them. I'm fairly certain sovereignty groups aren't advocating for Hawaii to cut off all its electricity, as claimed in the book.
Trouble is, it's always important -- and especially when writing outside of your culture -- to make sure you have a firm grasp of all the perspectives you might be encountering and to present them all ethically, lest your writing fall on the side of propaganda. You don't have to be sympathetic to differing points of view, and you're certainly under no obligation to keep your personal views quiet, but you still have to explain key cultural/political motivations in your own narrative if you have any hope of making the reader understand what's going on. As far as I could gather from this novel, sovereignty activists want to go back to the old days by cutting off electricity but are hypocrites for... wearing cowboy boots? What cartoon villain nonsense is this?
I also feel that this would have been the kind of book which benefits from the author reading the dialog aloud to hear the naturalness of it or otherwise. I wasn't a huge fan of the pacing either: while nothing happening then everything happening all at once is realistic in terms of real life police work, it doesn't make for the most interesting reading, especially with an internally inconsistent main character. Maybe this series gets better as it goes, but in the meantime, if I'm looking for a Hawaiian police procedural, I'll probably stick to Debra Bokur's : she might also be a haole but at least her writing feels reflective of actual Hawaiians (and of women: good grief, the one-dimensional nature of the female characters in Death Of A Messenger!) Honestly, I would love recommendations for contemporary Hawaiian literature written by people born a/o raised in Hawaii, especially in the mystery genre. Comments are open, as always!
Death Of A Messenger by Robert B McCaw was published January 5th, 2021 by Oceanview Publishing and is available from all good booksellers, including Want it now? For the Kindle version, ....more
1/4/2021 The thing about Stina Leicht's latest novel, Persephone Station, is that it12/30/2020 3.5 stars? Full review tk at .
1/4/2021 The thing about Stina Leicht's latest novel, Persephone Station, is that it's remarkable not for what it does but for what it is. The story itself is bog standard: a ragtag group of misfits is hired to defend an outpost of innocents against a group of corporate marauders whose vengeful leader has complicated reasons for the attack. In space! There are a few interesting twists and turns, but the pacing served to kill all suspense for me as we rocketed along to the ending. It's a perfectly serviceable, perfectly fine space Western/opera with several cool but hardly groundbreaking ideas about sentience and aliens and what the future might look like.
What sets PS apart from the rest of its sci-fi brethren tho is how the vast majority of characters are female or nonbinary. It's not merely a gender swapped sort of story, tho it certainly prompts the reader to consider how men are usually the default in, not just books like these, but most adventure stories. Each woman or nonbinary person is a whole character with an agenda, back story and motivations that make sense for them, and they're created with such a decisive female-centered gaze that you almost forget most books aren't like this. It's really weirdly refreshing. It's not that the gender roles are reversed, or that men are diminished or nonexistent: it's just a tale of female and nonbinary adventurers fighting and/or protecting each other, kicking ass and taking names. Men exist in this universe, but in this tale, they're supporting characters who are peripheral to the storylines, as Ms Leicht deliberately focuses on everyone else.
I'm not saying that this is the kind of book I want to read all the time, but I did enjoy how quietly subversive it is for a space Western/opera to remind readers that you don't need guys to make for an interesting story. It's okay to not have guys be a motivator or otherwise important part of a narrative, fictional or otherwise. It's okay for them to shush so that everyone else gets a turn to be the hero or bad guy or best friend or secretive boss. Even the male love interests are only on for a few pages so we can get back to the meat of the story. And it's all dealt with so matter-of-factly that you probably wouldn't even notice how few guys there are till the end, and you likely wouldn't care.
PS is a nice way to reset one's reading in this new year of 2021, to gently expand your frame of reference to include women and nonbinary people as capable of playing all roles in a story. Bonus for that story being a rollicking space opera, hardly the most female-dominated field.
Persephone Station by Stina Leicht will be published tomorrow January 5th, 2021 by Saga Press and is available for pre-order from all good booksellers, including Want it now? For the Kindle version, ....more
9/8/2020 3.5 stars rounded up. Full review tk at .
9/9/2020 With Gardner Dozois' passing, science fiction lost not only a bril9/8/2020 3.5 stars rounded up. Full review tk at .
9/9/2020 With Gardner Dozois' passing, science fiction lost not only a brilliant writer but also one of the most prominent editors in the genre. Since 1984, he'd presided over the premiere collection of sci-fi's shorter works via his Year's Best collections, which numbered thirty-five at the time of his demise. Two years on, Jonathan Strahan and Saga Press have stepped into the void to present 2019's best for eager fans who've missed these definitive anthologies.
Mr Strahan's inaugural volume starts off strong, from an introduction that champions diversity to several shorts that absolutely kick ass in delivering on that promise. My belief in Charlie Jane Anders' talent was finally vindicated with her story here, The Bookstore At The End Of America. The volume opener isn't exactly a subtle tale but it is both entertaining and thoughtful, and I felt it much more deeply than I have her other, more celebrated works. The next story, Tobias S Buckell's The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex is a must for fans of Nnedi Okorafor's Hugo-winning , treading in the same far-future of extraterrestrial immigration. The Hugos are actually quite well represented here, with 4 of the 28 stories being nominees for either or . Tbh, I didn't really care for any of those selected for this volume besides N. K. Jemisin's terrific Emergency Skin, which has also been my favorite work of hers so far.
Continuing the theme of short stories that improved my opinion of the author compared to their prior works was Kali_Na by Indrapramit Das, whose debut novel was firmly meh for me. In contrast, I was blown away by Kali_Na's ideas of godhood and virtual avatars, a wonderful application of real-world sociology to the ways technology can transcend the mundane. I was also impressed by another Indian-set story that melded technology with psychology, Anil Menon's The Robots Of Eden. While Saleem Haddad's Song Of The Birds was set hundreds of miles away in Palestine, it was another excellent, and moving, examination of behavior modification technology. Crossing Asia in the other direction, we get to Han Song's Submarines -- translated for us here by Ken Liu, who also contributes an original story -- about migrants on the Yangtze River. All four of these stories manage to evoke a sense of place that's as vital to the narrative as their speculative natures are.
There's a very similar feel to Sofia Rhei's Barcelona-set Secret Stories Of Doors, as well as to the scathing critique of New York City's upper class in E. Lily Yu's Green Glass: A Love Story. Ted Chiang's It's 2059, And The Rich Kids Are Still Winning reads less like a story and exactly like a sociological treatise, only from the future. I almost forgot I wasn't reading an article while enjoying it. Fonda Lee's near-future comedy I (28M) Created A Deepfake Girlfriend And Now My Parents Think We're Getting Married is also the kind of thing I could imagine reading on Reddit in ten years or less. Well, from the Twitter account AITA_reddit anyway; I've so far managed to avoid getting a Reddit account and am quite happy to keep it that way. Of the other far future stories, Rich Larson's Contagion's Eve At The House Noctambulus was my absolute favorite for sheer goriness (plus it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books, Gideon The Ninth.) Honorable mention goes to Alec Nivala-Lee's At The Fall, which was like Homeward Bound meets Finding Dory, only with AI.
Despite the vast majority of these books dealing with planet Earth and humanity's secrets, there were several stories that traveled off into space. Of these, my favorite was Karin Tidbeck's The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir, which deals with a very unusual form of interstellar travel. Overall tho, there was less of a focus on outer space and more on the planet we're living in and what we're doing to it, an understandable change of emphasis given the ways we're beginning to reap what we've sown on this planet. Which isn't to say that this is a depressing book: on the contrary, many of the stories here speak of resilience, resistance and optimism, in the finest tradition of the genre.
The Year's Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020 edited by Jonathan Strahan was published yesterday by Saga Press, and is available from all good booksellers....more
It's been so long since I've read a traditional British police procedural that starting this book was just like slipping into a n3.5 stars rounded up.
It's been so long since I've read a traditional British police procedural that starting this book was just like slipping into a nice hot bath. I mean, I've read my fair share of British crime novels with DCI protagonists in the years since I first picked up my dad's copy of Martha Grimes' Jerusalem Inn, but lately they've been more thriller than cozy-adjacent. Perhaps the most recent traditional was Anne Cleeves' back in 2017, tho The Nidderdale Murders, for someone new to J. R. Ellis' work, was a much better introduction to the series than Ms Cleeves' had been to hers.
The Nidderdale Murders finds DCI Jim Oldroyd called in to the small Yorkshire village of Niddergill to investigate the bizarre shooting death of local landowner Alexander "Sandy" Fraser. A former judge who'd retired to play at gentry and run a grousing moor, Sandy had no shortage of enemies, due in large part to his high-handed manner. When an eye witness sees him shot point blank with a shotgun by Alan Green, a local handyman, it seems like it ought to be an open and shut case. Only Alan had no seeming motive to shoot Sandy, and has since disappeared into thin air.
While local police go on the hunt for the missing murderer, DCI Oldroyd begins asking uncomfortable questions of the people who knew Sandy in life. He's the sort of thorough, thoughtful investigator that is far too rare in policing, fictional or otherwise. It's refreshing to see him not merely take the word of a single person in order to embark on what could be a fruitless manhunt, but cover all his professional bases. So when a local shopkeeper is murdered by a shotgun at point blank range, again by someone with seemingly no motive who proceeds to vanish, he's caught less off-guard than a more single-minded, less intellectually curious detective might be.
I actually gasped out loud at the who/howdunnit reveal, so lulled was I by J. R. Ellis' clever prose. Admittedly, there is something lulling about painstaking police information gathering -- the book did feel like it dragged towards the middle as DCI Oldroyd interviewed every single person connected to the case. I also found his Detective Sergeants to be more annoying than interesting after a while, since they seemed to be there only to express admiration for how intelligent their boss was when not serving as middling comic relief. The rest of the cast of characters was pretty interesting tho, quietly defying stereotypes in ways I enjoyed. It's nice to see so many people cooperative with the police, but I suppose that just indicates the higher level of trust in British policing than American.
This was an above average introduction to the Yorkshire Murder Mysteries, and I know I'll definitely be turning to this series the next time I want my fix of smart, entertaining police detection in the vein of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series, with the added bonus of some really lovely depictions of the Yorkshire area. Gosh, I miss being able to travel: luckily, this book helped whet my appetite for that, too, if only for a little while....more
Greek myths have been my jam since I was a little girl. I knew the entire pantheon by heart by the time I was 8, and to this day feel that two of the Greek myths have been my jam since I was a little girl. I knew the entire pantheon by heart by the time I was 8, and to this day feel that two of the best gifts I've ever received were an illustrated version of The Odyssey when I was 14 and the Penguin Classics translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses from my mom just after college. I've devoured modern updates, with undoubtedly the best being the child-friendly Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan and, for adults, Ted Hughes' incomparable, bloody-minded Tales From Ovid. So when Chronicle Press, out of nowhere, offered me an advance copy of Stephen Fry's Heroes, there was no way I was saying no.
Having dealt with said pantheon and the creation myths in his first volume, Mythos, Mr Fry turns his eye to the mortal Greek heroes (or at least the ones who started out as mortals) pre-Trojan War, whose names and stirring exploits continue to echo down the centuries. I appreciated the fact that "hero" is used in a gender-neutral fashion, as Mr Fry notes that it was originally a female name anyway, and that Atalanta gets her own chapter here. Aside from the fleet-footed princess, Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason, Theseus and Oedipus all have their adventures narrated, or reimagined rather, in Mr Fry's distinctive voice. The tone is so very British, with droll wit and a view of heroism that is by turns stirring and self-effacing. It's well-researched, with terrific footnotes, an index and a pages-long cast list of characters. The illustrations are gorgeous and appropriate. Younger me would have loved this book so hard.
But older me can't help reading even this modern adaptation and thinking of the damage these myths, so foundational to Western civilization, have done to millions of people over the centuries. Actually, I should say that that dread influence never really hit home till I read this book in particular. From heroes threatening each other with the wrath of their daddies; to the excuses given for crimes including murder; to the casualness with which rape is handled, contrasting with the pervasiveness of the false rape claim, it's hard to read these stories of Greek heroes, these paragons held up for generation after generation of classical education, and not shudder at the way that toxic masculinity has been enshrined, through them, from an early age in the bosoms and brains of Western readers. I'm not sure if it was Mr Fry's intent to underscore how really shitty classical Greek culture could be, and how millennia later we're still suffering from the nonsense mindsets it espoused, but that was absolutely my main takeaway from reading this.
I did very much enjoy his afterword, even if my conclusions differ somewhat from his. While he wonders at the literalness of the myths -- was someone actually cursed by a god, or was it just bad shit happening? -- I prefer to think of myths as the explanations of those who didn't have the linguistic, perhaps even intellectual and certainly experiential, capacity to explain real-life events. I have no doubt that Heracles' rages came from a medical condition such as PTSD, and weren't actually delusions sent by a jealous goddess, but how politic is it to claim, in a civilization that relied on warfare in order to expand, that violence and fighting could fuck with your head? Better to claim it a curse from the goddess of domesticity, whose constant maligning is a whole other kettle of fish altogether.
Myths and stories are continuously shaped and molded by their tellers over time. I believe that these heroes once existed as ordinary people who did extraordinary things that, over the centuries, got jumbled up with one another, with the details being embellished or forgotten to suit the storyteller, and that metaphor was often taken as literal once eyewitnesses began to die off and their children could only know things at secondhand at best. And for all that I have a very dim view of the negative legacy of the ancient Greeks' machismo -- tho in their defense, it certainly wasn't they who downplayed the almost ubiquitous bad end that came to each of our heroes -- I cannot deny the charm and wonder, and even instructional merit, of these tales. Mr Fry has done a tremendous job of highlighting each in a highly entertaining fashion. I just don't know if I'm meant to feel so sad at the end of it all, from seeing how damaging to our psyches our long veneration of these myths have been....more
2/26/19 This starts out as a stunningly impressive display of teenage emotion, bringing together three kids -- Crisp, the2/25/19 Full review tomorrow.
2/26/19 This starts out as a stunningly impressive display of teenage emotion, bringing together three kids -- Crisp, the biracial overachiever; Glynnie, the privileged white wild child, and JJ, the street kid doing whatever it takes to survive -- on a night of reckless camaraderie that turns into a really bad time when adult criminals get involved. The cops looking, at first separately, into the disappearances of Crisp and Glynnie, have their own compelling stories, but for some reason the book gets bogged down about two thirds of the way through, in what was up till then a taut thriller of intertwining narratives. I'm not sure if it has more to do with the muddle of Crisp's dad knowing Dante, or with the absolute ludicrousness of the up-till-then sympathetic Detective Lex Cole freaking out about his boyfriend's whereabouts, but it feels like the story spins out of control, at least tone-wise. It's a little bit like the disorienting feeling of having to go back to one's responsible daily life after a night-long bender, where you kind of hate everyone and just want the day to be over with so you can go to sleep. Somewhat fitting given the events of the book, but not the most pleasant reading experience.
I was actually pretty surprised to dislike Lex after his awesome role in the first book, A Map Of The Dark. Some jealousy is understandable, but his reaction at the end was just petty. I'm hoping the next book features Det Saki Findlay and dives into how her unusual mind works. And I'm really, really glad that the book ends the way it does, because it would have absolutely broken my heart if (view spoiler)[any of those kids had been damaged beyond repair (hide spoiler)]. Karen Ellis is really good at getting you to care about the kids who are the main focus of this series, and I can't wait to read more....more
Insofar as flawed protagonists go, this was a surprisingly satisfying novel. At "only" 290 pages, it isn't a dense novel, which works in its favor, hoInsofar as flawed protagonists go, this was a surprisingly satisfying novel. At "only" 290 pages, it isn't a dense novel, which works in its favor, honestly, as it keeps the plot moving. I can't help but compare and prefer it to Tana French's mystifyingly overrated Dublin Murder Squad series. Sure Ms French has moments of delightful prose, but her mysteries, when she bothers to solve them, feel inorganic, and the actual procedural parts are so annoyingly bad as to be almost laughable. Her characters are also lamentably stupid. Flawed is one thing, dumb as hell quite another.
Karen Ellis isn't quite as good a prose stylist as Ms French, but she's 100% better at story and characterization. A Map Of The Dark follows FBI Special Agent Elsa Myers as she's pulled away from her dying father's bedside to consult on the case of a missing girl. The police officer who originally caught the case, Detective Lex Cole, has specially requested her expertise, as something doesn't feel right to him about Ruby's disappearance (and let me tell you, it's super duper nice to read of different jurisdictions coming together with very little friction to stop criminals and save lives. For this and quite a few other reasons, Lex is awesome.)
Elsa tries to focus on the case, but her father's illness and the recent sale of her childhood home are bringing up unwanted memories of the abusive mother she adored. Her relationship with her younger sister Tara and her niece Mel are also tested as Mel insists on helping to find Ruby, even as the stress of the situation begins to affect both Tara and Elsa in ugly ways.
I really enjoyed how Elsa's past was slowly revealed as the search for the missing girl progressed, and how the kidnapper's own hideous childhood came into play. Elsa's conflicting feelings were moving and wholly convincing. I did have qualms about what she did in her showdown with the kidnapper, but the final revelation as to her past went a long way towards explaining her drastic (view spoiler)[and highly illegal (hide spoiler)] reaction. I also enjoyed the authorial tricks with perspective, even if I couldn't call myself truly surprised by any of the plot twists. Still, a very entertaining novel that is more than competently written, and honestly head and shoulders better than some of the more acclaimed thrillers out there. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel soon!...more
Hands down my favorite fantasy novel of 2018 so far. In large part because it isn't a fantasy novel or, as I described it to Bookclub chat, is really Hands down my favorite fantasy novel of 2018 so far. In large part because it isn't a fantasy novel or, as I described it to Bookclub chat, is really a meaty sci-fi novel in a delicious fantasy shell. It's smart and witty and heartfelt, and I laughed and cried and gasped in sheer astonishment in turn. It is a terrific book, easily one of the best fantasy novels of all time (and if the sequels are just as good -- or even better -- whoo boy, are we in for a treat!)
To be perfectly honest, I wasn't too enamored when I first started reading it: street urchin is a skilled thief by virtue of having special spooky secret powers, who gets sent to steal something so super secret, she's not supposed to look in the box to see what it is she's stolen. We know how that always goes, and I was just flipping pages, nodding along, when Clef enters the scene and all of a sudden, I realized that this was not the book I thought it was. Clef is hilarious, and has been described by the author as a fantasy version of the hacker on overwatch talking in the hero's ear as she navigates an unknown and probably deadly area. There are, as a matter of fact, a lot of decidedly tech-based story angles given their fantasy analogues here, set in a city-state where capitalism has evolved into its worst possible structure, where people are seen as commodities and justice is a privilege extended only to the rich. Foundryside tackles tough political and social topics with the kind of verve you usually find in sci-fi a/o thriller novels. The last time a fantasy novel moved me with its philosophy and ethics was Vic James' terrific Gilded Cage but even that is a pale shadow to the yummy intellectual and ethical goodness that is Foundryside.
To start, nearly everyone is a person of color. The romances are handled deftly and there is terrific non-heterosexual representation. Old people aren't relegated to thin supporting roles with no or inactive personal lives. The bad guys, while still being obviously evil, are complicated and interesting. Friendship is important. And that ending is so enormously satisfying while still making me want the next book right now. Barring the first bit, this is an almost distressingly perfect novel.
I've now added Robert Jackson Bennett to my list of must-read authors, and just bought a Kindle omnibus edition of his other fantasy series for $3! Speaking of Kindle, his notes on Foundryside here on ŷ are a delight. I have a crush, for sure....more
3.5 stars that I'm taking the uncommon step, for me, of rounding up to 4.
It's not too often that I pause while reading a book to admire the writing. I3.5 stars that I'm taking the uncommon step, for me, of rounding up to 4.
It's not too often that I pause while reading a book to admire the writing. I mean, just the craft, the way the words are put together: I really enjoy the way Dathan Auerbach writes. The writing falls apart a bit as the book progresses -- you can almost feel the deadline looming, the way the transitions go from smoothly turned to unintendedly jarring -- but this is still a solidly written horror novel. Set in the 1980s in the Florida panhandle, Bad Man is the story of Ben, a young man who is a teenager when his little brother goes missing on a trip to the grocery store. Five years later, Ben's family is still barely coping with Eric's loss. Ben himself has hardly recovered from the twin disasters of his brother's disappearance and an earlier car crash that seriously weakened his leg. Desperate for work, Ben accepts a position as stock boy at the same grocery store where he last saw Eric. Spending long nights there, often alone, has him starting to believe that the place holds sinister secrets, and that if only he can uncover them, he'll be able to discover once and for all what really happened to his brother.
Bad Man is a terrific exploration of guilt and longing and memory in small-town America, far removed from bucolic romanticism and nostalgia. I would have liked more of an explanation of the particulars of Eric's abduction: I assume he was lured away but the details otherwise are elided a little too much for me. I want to know why his abductor did it ("crazy" is not a good enough reason for a book that isn't afraid to dive deeply into Ben's psyche,) and more about Blackwater and the blond kid. And, I dunno, I didn't really like the ending. I can sorta get over what happens to Ben, but I think it could have been linked back to the beginning better. I also didn't really get the point of the interludes, which I imagine are a story told by (view spoiler)[the blond kid to Eric (hide spoiler)]. Again, I felt like it was something that could have been linked back more tightly to the main narrative.
Overall, however, I quite enjoyed the way this book dealt with the horrors of child abduction and its lingering aftereffects on everyone involved. Going back to the subject of craft, there were so many set pieces that begged for a visual adaptation that I'm kinda hoping this makes its way to a screen somehow. I don't usually like horror movies, but I'd definitely consider watching that one....more
So I was trying to explain to a friend why I think this book is important for the generation of YA readers who may encounter it, thinking, much like GSo I was trying to explain to a friend why I think this book is important for the generation of YA readers who may encounter it, thinking, much like Gilded Cage's Abi does (and I did, tbh, when I first picked it up,) that it'll be a romantic Upstairs/Downstairs sort of novel with magical powers, with dystopian overtones to give it all a frisson of Seriousness. And maybe I haven't read enough dystopian YA, maybe I'm underestimating the average reader, maybe they're smarter and more aware than I am. But reading that very first chapter where the reality of slavery comes crashing down on the very white, very middle class, very Anglo Hadley family, where all their hopeful expectations get violently trampled upon: my body reacted even more than my mind did, upset to my stomach at the horrific violation of their humanity, no matter how voluntarily they surrendered their rights. Because, despite being brown and politically aware (and oh my God, irrevocably middle-aged now with this last birthday,) the framework of my mind and life experiences are traditionally British schoolgirl, a vestige of my upbringing, and while I always knew and felt and believed that slavery was evil, it's not often that the reminder of it acts like a punch to the gut. And that's just in Chapter One!
In this alternate reality, the British monarchy was overthrown not by Roundheads but by people with magical abilities called Skill, who set themselves up as a ruling gentry called Equals. Everyone not an Equal must serve a ten-year term of slavery in order to keep the apparatus of economy going. Abi and Luke Hadley are teenagers who go into their slavedays with the rest of their family, thinking they've figured out a way to ride out their terms in relative comfort. Boy, are they in for a surprise! And so are we readers, as the book twists and turns both in plot and in emotion, presenting the complex realities of not only abolition but what it means to be an ally. I can't overstate the importance of that last enough or, unfortunately, say much more without going into spoilers, but it was extremely refreshing to read, particularly in the current political climate.
I want this book to sell millions of copies because, much like Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, it tells a very important story (tho, tbh, I did prefer that Vic James got to the point faster instead of waiting till a third book to explicitly state her central message, as Ms Collins did.) The only thing that stopped me from giving this book 5 stars on ŷ was the writing itself, which could use a bit more polish. It serves to get the (very important) point across and tell an entertaining story, but it feels very often bare bones. I'm hoping Ms James builds on this terrific debut and am looking forward to reading more, of this series and of her writing in general, as she's definitely got terrific narrative and ethical instincts, and only needs to work at the wordsmithing to be truly exceptional....more
I would likely have given it just three stars, if not for that thoughtful, bittersweet ending. I thought it was entertaining overall, but at times it I would likely have given it just three stars, if not for that thoughtful, bittersweet ending. I thought it was entertaining overall, but at times it felt a little too self-consciously political. The Hunger Games trilogy trod that line (mostly) successfully when dealing with its anti-war and anti-propaganda narratives in books 2 and 3, but Material Girls navigates it less gracefully in discussing labor rights, possibly because fear of war and death are far easier to elicit sympathy for than fear of being an unemployed teenage has-been. Perhaps contrarily, I kinda wish Ms Dimopoulos had spent more time exploring the politics and economics of the world she'd built: more time incorporating them into the story might have made it feel less awkward for me. Otherwise, a not-altogether-unconvincing view of a dystopian future, with clever underpinnings to its seemingly frivolous exterior....more
So few books deserve the title "literary mystery." Often, that phrase is given to books where ponderous writing and a quasi-mystical theme are draped So few books deserve the title "literary mystery." Often, that phrase is given to books where ponderous writing and a quasi-mystical theme are draped over a poorly constructed plot, as if the fact that the book itself is so unenjoyable is some testament to how smart the reader must be to not only finish but like, or at least pretend to like, the damn thing. Pretentious intelligentsia are the bane of my reading existence, I tell you.
Fortunately, Dark Prayer is one of those elegant, if not overly complicated novels that fully deserves its accolades as a literary mystery. Natasha Mostert knows what she's taking about when she discusses memory and mysticism, and the underlying murder plot is briskly and, more importantly, credibly constructed. She wasn't afraid to mine the emotional depravity that so many other of her less accomplished cohorts think they can substitute mere sexual peccadilloes for. I thought her writing really shone, though, when she was describing the thrills of parkour. The passages of physical grace and athleticism were a terrific counterpoint to the murkiness of the mind and emotions....more
Hunh, I experimented with rating this from my Kindle and was surprised not to be able to add a review from there, though I could respond to comments. Hunh, I experimented with rating this from my Kindle and was surprised not to be able to add a review from there, though I could respond to comments. Go figure.
Anyway, this book eked out a four-star rating despite being, I thought, the most uneven of the Rachel Knight series. On the one hand, you had the heart-pounding, heart-wrenching descriptions of the shootings themselves, and the terrible grief in their aftermath. And, as always, you had smart, sassy Rachel and her friends and frienemies. This book seemed unnecessarily ponderous, though, bogging down in the psychological discussions of what makes a psychopath. It seemed almost as if Marcia Clark was struggling for answers which, while great because this isn't a problem with easy solutions, was also frustrating in that it came out in the writing, making it a rougher read than I'm used to with her. I also thought the identity of the mastermind was pretty obvious, as was his final target(view spoiler)[(and the transition between the scenes at the high school and the memorial wasn't as deft as usual.) (hide spoiler)]
Right now, I'm kinda worried that the series is about to start its decline, as so many others of its ilk do around this point (Patricia Cornwell and Chelsea Cain being authors of series that immediately come to mind.) I'm sincerely hoping that isn't the case, though The Competition definitely wasn't as tight, in the end, as its predecessors. Still good, though, and I'm hoping Ms Clark can buck the trend and continue writing awesome mysteries....more
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