"Of course we're allowed," Harriett replied. "Women are allowed everywhere these days. Go
NOW AVAILABLE!
"You're saying women aren't allowed?" Jo asked.
"Of course we're allowed," Harriett replied. "Women are allowed everywhere these days. Golf courses, nudie bars, the Racquet and Tennis Club. It would be scandalous if we weren't allowed. So instead, we're just not invited.
The fact that this wasn't news to Jo made it no less shocking.
"The truth of it is, I don't think most of them really question our intelligence or abilities—though they don't mind us believing they do," Harriett continued. "We're just turds in the punchbowl. We spoil their party. They don't want us hanging around."
i did not expect to like this one as much as i did. it sounded very much like The Power, a book i thought was o-kay, but i didn't love it as much as everyone else seemed to.
the success of the handmaid's tale adaptation opened the floodgates on paradigm-shifting feminist dystopias (and YEESH—this is either the perfect time or the worst time for me to finally get around to reading Red Clocks, right?), and the #metoo movement sparked a rise in empowering female revenge novels (with or without supernatural power-powers, but—it must be said—far too many witch-novels). i've read and liked several of books coming out of this wave, but with some others, i've found that the concept is strong but the execution is...not.
to use christina dalcher as an example, i have read two of her buzzy female-centric speculative novels—the "women have no power" Vox and the "women have all the power" Femlandia, and they were both pretty meh: too broad in scope, too facile in their treatment of their themes, and not addressing some fundamental questions in their constructed worlds. there was plot but no compelling message to the story. not that i'm expecting social fantasy novels to come up with a solution to gender inequality and the perils of the patriarchy, but it would be nice to walk away from a book with something more illuminating than flashy window dressing.
The Change is so much more than window dressing. for one thing, it's not trying to take on too much. it's a small-scale story where, instead of trying to loop in alllll of womankind, it's centered on three women who experience transformations triggered by menopause: nessa can see the ghosts of murder victims, jo can channel her hot flashes into pure metal-melting incandescence, and the stunningly confident harriett emerges from the ashes of her marriage and career as some sort of sensual nature-goddess, feral and giving zero fucks. (or, giving A LOT of fucks, but not taking any guff about...anything)
it's essentially a character-driven mystery novel in which these women become literally em-powered by THE CHANGE, using their gifts to obtain justice for a number of "expendable" young women lured, used, and brutally murdered within an exclusive long island enclave, their killers insulated by their wealth and power.
the three central characters are excellent and more than the sum of their powers. they are bright and lively, with half a lifetime of experiences stacked up in their respective backgrounds to aid in their amateur investigation, and a willingness to get their collective hands a little dirty seeking justice for the forgotten victims.
despite the dark situation, there's a lot of humor and light weirdness threaded throughout, especially in their dealings with particular kinds of men. all of them have endured men behaving like shits—been condescended to, groped, dismissed, passed over professionally (and the chapter where jo is applying for a business loan is GOLD), and while menopause may mark the end of their fertility, it is only the beginning of a new stage of womanhood, and things are gonna get ferocious.
Jo could feel the fire shooting through her veins and waves of energy traveling down her limbs. She saw heat ripples radiating from her skin and smelled the grass singing beneath her feet. She'd tried her best to control it. Now Jo closed her eyes and let go. Nothing had ever felt so good.
She knew then what she was meant to do. She knew why Nessa had found her. Nessa was the light in the darkness. Harriett was the punishment that fit the crime. She was the rage that would burn it all to the ground.
it's fun, compelling, fast-paced, and cheeky, but above all, fierce. and, since lady-cancer catapulted me into premature menopause, i'm expecting my powers to manifest ANY DAY NOW. best not piss me off, yeah?
…the problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessio…the problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessions and your ties to the world at the door and you like it inside and you don't want for your possessions or your ties and then, the book evaporates.
this was recommended to me by eeeeeveryone a few years back when it seemed a little cult was being formed around this book, and i'd been meaning to read it for a long time; so long, in fact, that i'd forgotten i had already bought a digital copy on my NOOK and then much later went out and bought a paperback copy like a fool. and when i found myself conscripted for jury duty and in need of something that was going to be entertaining enough to block out the noise of the game shows they play so loudly in the jury duty waiting room (WHY DO YOU DO THIS, JURY DUTY, WHYYYY??), i figured this would be a good choice, and i could finally see what all the fuss was about.
and it absolutely delivered what i needed - family feud did not stand a chance against this extremely immersive tale of obsession and crime and unpleasant people colliding.
however, all of you people who told me i was going to "fall in love with joe," you have officially lost all rights to set me up on blind dates should i ever require that sort of service. and if you yourself fell in love with him, i think i should stage an intervention on you. because while he is certainly … devoted to the object of his desire, he's pretty shitty boyfriend material. yes, i appreciate that he's a bookperson, and there's appeal to someone whose declarations of love are so in line with my own interests:
I want to bring you all the books in the world…
and i appreciate some of his observations and attitudes, but all the window-peeping and social media violations and kidnapping and murder and desperate neediness tied to email and text response-time - those are less attractive qualities when i'm looking for a mate.
although he's not wrong about some things, and we could probably be friends, if not lovers:
-Work in a bookstore and learn that most people in this world feel guilty about being who they are.
-If people could handle their self-loathing, customer service would be smoother.
-Life at IKEA is not like life at IKEA in the movies.
-What's the only thing more sexless than lunch? Brunch, a meal invented by rich white chicks to rationalize day drinking and bingeing on French toast.
although i had to HHMPH at his comment about rhode island:
(nowhere is far from anywhere in a state this small)
i also really like the fact that he has no illusions about beck; he acknowledges her many flaws and his 'love' for her is clear-eyed without any pedestal idealization:
-You tweet more often than you write and this could be why you're getting your MFA from the New School and not from Columbia.
-…I know you so well, Beck. You are charisma, you are sick, and for some reason you are a magnet for weak, spineless people...
the best thing about this book is its breezy tone. it's not an intense nailbiting horror story of an innocent woman victimized by a deluded stalker who believes they are cosmically meant to be. beck is such a shitty person, you never really see her as a victim, and since this is told in second person, through joe's perspective, it's easy to sympathize with him despite his many transgressions. even in its darkest scenes, it's a funny book, very reminiscent of bret easton ellis, who is winkingly referenced within the text along with many many other books; another reason this is so popular with all the booknerds. we do love our own kind.
apart from the humor and the booksnark, i enjoyed kepnes' treatment of social class and stratification. i know, zzzzzzz, right? and it's only a minor point, but i was struck by beck's sort of trickle-down slummery; she's from nantucket, known for inspiring rude limericks and, like most island or coastal locales in new england, home to a wildly uneven distribution of wealth between its townie and tourist populations. beck is one of the former:
You hail from farmers and you're fond of saying that you don't have "a place" on Nantucket, but that your family made a home there.
and yet her friendships and relationships are with those far wealthier; toxic people like peach and benji, who embody the "careless people" that populate The Great Gatsby:
You are the townie and Benji is the tourist who literally enters you and uses you as a vacation from the wear and tear of the artisanal club soda business only to dump you before Labor Day… Your emotional livelihood is a demented seasonal economy where Labor Day is every other fucking day.
and
He rents you out, the same way he rents loft space on SoBro (South Bronx to those of us who don't need to make up bullshit pet names for neighborhoods where we're not wanted.)
but with joe, the solidly middle-class beck is the one dating down - with a bookstore clerk from bed-stuy sneered at by peach for his humble background:
"I read that people are starting to move there," she says. "I hope gentrification doesn't destroy all the local color."
wealth isn't a major preoccupation in the book, but it surfaces in interesting ways, particularly for those of us all-too-familiar with the careless values of the easily-monied young new arrivals to these fine boroughs, foisting their pickleback shots and novelty club sodas upon us and steadily driving up our rents. and joe's… interactions with them are wholly satisfying and another reason to applaud this antihero.
it's a really fun book. i don't think i loved it quite as much as the rabid joe cultists, but it was very engrossing, darkly funny, surprising, and truly entertaining.
it was also much more erotic than i'd been anticipating, which became a bit awkward when i realized the woman sitting next to me in our jury duty limbo was totally reading along with me during one of these saucy parts and i wanted to shout "IT'S NOT PORN!! IT'S JUST THIS ONE PART!!! JUST WATCH THE FAMILY FEUD, YA PERV!"
yesterday i was in a discussion with some dude about teen fiction, and why it is so damn compelling and why we were lately reading it to the exclusionyesterday i was in a discussion with some dude about teen fiction, and why it is so damn compelling and why we were lately reading it to the exclusion of all other literature,despite our grown status, and his reason was because of the instant gratification of it - that the pacing is such that it can generally be read in one sitting and you want to keep reading it. and it doesn't mean that it is mindless, like a lot of adult page-turner fiction, but that it is frequently too exciting to stop reading. and i actually tend to be less indulgent with YA authors than adult authors, because if i feel they are trying to pull a fast one or get sloppy/lazy because of the age of their audience, i get pissed, so i am not just reading it without my critical faculties.
i like to think of myself as a discriminating YA reader with a narrow focus. take your love stories and shove 'em. i don't care about your divorced parents or your worries over college or your love for some long-dead sparkle of a boy.
i wanna see you survive. go on, survive for me.
i am so glad we are still in the end times/dystopian phase of YA lit. there is so much to read, i can barely keep up! and then tommy goes and gives me ARCs and i swoon with pleasure.
however. i will say that the pacing in this one really made me mad. i brought it to my jury duty, unread, thinking, i will probably be able to finish this before my servitude is over. and then i went and finished it with three hours left to go! fortunately, i brought a back-up book, but you try reading small-printed dense biography/history when the family feud is on in the background, a show which makes you stupider just by being in the same room as a television showing it. survey says: kill yourself.
i had not noticed the television at all when reading dark inside. i even read through that promotional video they make you watch about the role and responsibility of the jury bad juror.
this is like a YA version of david moody's hater and dog blood series. after a mighty earthquake, something is released that causes ordinary people to just start killin'. some people remain unaffected, and they are the hunted.
can you tell who is a killer and who is not??
um... sometimes. best be careful.
there are so many great scenes in here, none of which i can talk about because they are better left to be discovered by a reader. there is one supremely ballsy scene in which a character does something selfish but understandable and many people suffer because of it that i hope does not get softened by anything in the sequel. if this were australian YA fiction, i would not even question it. american YA... it would be likely that somehow things would still turn out okay.
canadian YA?? well, let's wait and see.
i feel like this should have been much much longer; there's like a big game-changing situation that happens 3/4 of the way through, and this "turn" happened so late in the book that it seems cruel to make readers wait for another book right when things started changing!
come on!
i resent you, ARC, because first i have to wait for this book to come out for you regular folk (heh heh) and then i have to wait for a whole 'nother book before i can be satisfied.
so for all my throes of excitement over the pacing of YA, it frequently just ruins my life. thankfully, there is a ton of the stuff out there. this one is just better than most.
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