the less i am actually on/contributing to goodreads, the more giveaways i seem to win. are you courting me, gr?? make it fun here again and i swear i the less i am actually on/contributing to goodreads, the more giveaways i seem to win. are you courting me, gr?? make it fun here again and i swear i will come back to your embrace! ...more
also, i won this in the goodreads giveaways! which i forgot i had entered and had already bought a copy. but tha[image]
SPOOKTOBER IS ALL AROUND US!!!
also, i won this in the goodreads giveaways! which i forgot i had entered and had already bought a copy. but that just meant i was able to give MY copy away so now i am myself a giveaway program.
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone was interviewed by Barbara Walters at age twelve, cross-legged on a couch in a red dress
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
Maybe everyone has a story, but not everyone was interviewed by Barbara Walters at age twelve, cross-legged on a couch in a red dress and Mary Janes, skin still red from stomach acid, getting chastised for her wantonness. Not everyone was in a Western 45 Gun Company handgun ad just to pay the hospital bills. Not that I was the one who shot him. Not everyone is the fictionalized star of pedo-erotic-true-crime fan fiction and actual porn, posted on the deep corners of the internet, some version of me wandering around a subdivision in pigtails naked, save for a red-hooded cape.
this was a three-star-read for me, but it's a high three stars. not to be confused with three high stars:
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i love fairy tale retellings, especially when familiar stories are transplanted into contemporary times, forcing the modern reader to re-examine the messages we've been passing down unthinkingly through the generations, many of which are, as they say, problematic, even in their softened, disneyfied forms. lots of happy endings for women kissed sans active consent by powerful men whilst deeply comatose, ladies choosing to relinquish their power of speech to be with a man, women punished for their curiosity, for running late, for talking to strangers—fairy tales are not typically great for females.
i'm not sure if angela carter was the first, but she was certainly one of the pioneers in the "feminist reclamation of fairy tales" genre, which somehow, despite a finite pool of source material from which to draw, is still thriving as authors find inventive ways to build new stories on the canon's bones.
the creative hook to this one is centered around a therapy group for women who had once upon a time lived through a variation of a familiar fairy-tale scenario; girls who grew up to become women deeply scarred by their traumatic experiences, which are reclassed here largely as true crime stories: a woman married to a blue-bearded billionaire serial killer, a girl who saved herself and her brother by murdering the woman who kidnapped them, a girl seduced by a predator on her way to visit her grandmother.
because if anyone's gonna need some therapy, it'll be someone who was swallowed up (if only temporarily) by a killer masquerading as a trusted relative. and the formerly little red ruby's...not doing so well. her riding hood(ie) story is reshaped as an encounter with a sexual predator, flattered and manipulated by a wolfish creature in an interaction that reminded me very much of the highly uncomfortable must-read graphic novel Panther. here, we see her grown up to become a wayward substance-abusing cutter; sarcastic, self-destructive and self-effacing—always sweaty, always hungry, wearing a truly grotesque fur coat made of the wolf who consumed her and drawn to debasing casual sex with men drawn to her damage.
Emil and I have this on-again, off-again storage-closet romance. "Romance" is a strong word for it. He sometimes nonexclusively jams his junk down my throat over lunch breaks until I can't breathe.
Emil has the personality of a drunken pirate trying to clean up his act. For three weeks out of each month, he treats me like a siren trying to shipwreck him. When he's exhausted himself from abstaining, he'll reappear with that hungry, wanting look. Later, he'll pawn it off as a moment of weakness that was my fault, saying things like "Well, when you wear that dress" or "You finally washed your hair." We keep doing it, just like that, in a way that's annoyingly unstoppable, like how you find yourself singing along to a crappy pop song on the radio that you unfortunately know by heart.
ruby is just one of the women assembled into this group by the blandly inoffensive will—a therapist with an ulterior motive. well, two ulterior motives, and one icky, sticky secret. his (stated) objective is to provide a safe place for these women to share their experiences with others like them; survivors of unusual and horrific circumstances whose details were salaciously media-twisted, their lives raked over the coals of public opinion and spoiler alert—they are a judgy bunch.
"To be honest, I thought Gretel, of all people, would get it," says Ruby. "We both escaped being eaten for lunch, just to have the media eat us for dinner."
the women come to the group for their own personal reasons and hounded by their own personal demons, but will's sales-pitch-goal for them is empowerment—taking back their stories from the spotlight of their abusers and the media’s framing of them as complicit in their own victimhood, or presenting reductive versions of themselves defined solely by their trauma, their rescue, their proximity to real-world horror.
so, these are revisionist fairytales of women whose experiences were already revised by scandal-hungry media; their lives exploited for the titillation of viewers, news cycles splaying out their worst days before abandoning them, rapidly moving on to the next bleeding story without pausing to consider what happens to these individuals afterwards; the real people behind the true crime stories, the "where are they now?" survivors carrying on living after their experiences have been scrutinized and dissected into unrecognizable form: Sensational or sanitized, there's no middle ground.
this book is the middle ground.
the best backstories here are ruby's and bernice's, who is surrounded by the chattering voices of her blue-bearded husband's former lovers, now trapped in the objects he made from their bodies, finding herself guilty by association; lumped into the crimes she had no idea he had committed...until she did.
In my new neighborhood bodega, the cashier stared, then looked over near the window. I followed his eyes to a display of newspapers and tabloids. I picked up a paper where an op-ed headline read WHEN CURIOSITY KILLS, as if opening the door had been the real deathblow. A tabloid had a photo of me on the cover, on the day of the funeral, wearing a dark navy dress, almost smirking under a rainbow umbrella. TRUE BLUE! The headline shouted in bold lettering. The subheading: BLUEBEARD'S GIRLFRIEND STANDS BY HER MAN.
I was always a reference point for someone else. I was born into the last name of a father I hardly knew, in school I was always my sister's little sister, in the mansion Andrea had called me Taylor, and now I was the nameless possessive of some stupidly named serial killer.
"Wearing navy to the funeral," said one apparent expert in an unnamed field," suggests that she's still aligning herself with Bluebeard." They write about me as if I'd attended the funeral of a mistress I was complicit in murdering. They compared me to the smiling wives of cheating politicians and the adoring fans of death-row inmates.
i also enjoyed ashlee's story, an outlier in that she's not attached to a specific fairytale, but is kind of catch-all for every "happily ever after" princess story—the winner of a Bachelor-style reality dating show called The One, who got her prince but was emphatically not a fan favorite.
hers is a wonderfully caustic behind-the-scenes look at reality show production—the manipulation and grooming and sneaky editing. i have never seen The Bachelor because i am a monster who hates love, but the whole grueling process, the women blindfolded, sequestered, transported to undisclosed locations like prisoners of war was fascinating and also horrifying. and that "prince" was certainly no prize.
gretel's story was the weakest of the bunch and for whatever reason adelmann decided to be very cagey about disclosing raina's identity until the Big Reveal, so i'll respect that choice, but overall, while i enjoyed the witty observations and commentary, the parts didn't cohere into a satisfying whole.
the premise and the individual stories were great, but it needed more connective tissue to make the big-picture story work; to make this operate as a novel instead of a loosely-bound story collection. my issue isn't with the writing, it's with the construction. she's got a strong concept, it's funny and there are some sharp insights, but it mostly just scratches the surface of its themes of gendered power structures, identity, and the squickiness of true crime as entertainment without developing it into anything more than raised questions.
YMMV, of course, and my inability to be over-the-moon-wowed by this is probably because i've pretty recently read These Women and Notes on an Execution, where the whole "taking the narrative away from the serial killer to focus on the lives of his victims/survivors/women surrounding his story" offered much more thorough explorations of the theme, and More Than You'll Ever Know did an excellent job examining our obsession with true crime in general.
as far as this one goes: great cover, great moments, good book.
Your average happy person didn't last in Alaska. It was too much work not to die all the time.
i was going to do tI WON A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY!! HOORAY!!
Your average happy person didn't last in Alaska. It was too much work not to die all the time.
i was going to do that exhausting thing where i review all of the stories individually, but there are only eight of them, and since the collection folds over itself, visiting some of the characters at different points in their lives, it's more like a location-specific The Candy House-shaped book, where the stories are linked-but-standalones, so i'll just star-rate the stories separately and review the collection in toto.
short stories don't always do it for me, but i thought this was an excellent collection, and my ARC is now full of dog-eared pages signifying a phrasing or description i particularly liked. the stories are set across different points across time, tied together by the romance, the promise, the mythology, and the reality of living in alaska, and the types of people drawn to a life off the grid.
I have a radio. Bland, official fuzz from NPR informs me of Obamacare, Social Security, the new Section 8 housing the city is building. I do not know how to do any of this: what forms you fill out, what websites will prove you were alive before you blew off the edge of the world into human vapor. I am fifty-six, and no official trace of me exists.
when i read the synopsis of this book, i thought the whole "survival against the unforgiving wilderness" thing would be a more prominent theme, but it's more about emotional/psychological than physical survival; the conflicts are "anywhere" kind of problems—infidelity, loneliness, regret, scraping by—but the juxtaposition of alaska's stark and beautiful natural landscapes backdropping the tumultuous inner lives of the characters was a nice contrast. nature doesn't give a shit about your failing marriage—nature just quietly, stoically endures whilst you live out your comparatively tiny struggles. newman, whose characters manage to get by with limited financial, social, or actual, life-sustaining resources, also makes the most of her prose, conveying so much with succinct little phrasings:
A little dead light explodes in her heart.
or
Her face scrambled.
but she also gets to the center of her characters' hopes and disappointments with chewier prose:
"Think about it this way," said Benny. "We live or die together." I was nineteen by then and he was the age I am now—sixty-seven. I held on to his words as though they were special to our situation, not an agreement you enter into with every person you ever care about. Even just in passing.
and
She knew me so well...and still. I knew her so well...and still. Were these twin snowflakes of delusion the only reason we were even married—believing that one amazing day, either she or I would finally do something so unlike ourselves that we would finally make the other happy?
i mean, "twin snowflakes of delusion" is a bit much, IMO, but the way she unveils the weary resignation of that story's relationship is otherwise extraordinary.
Alcan, An Oral History is the longest story and the collection's standout piece—a swerving, heart-scooping emotional road trip that is, indeed, about the convergence of two differently-motivated road trips. it's long, but it still leaves questions tantalizingly unanswered. since so many characters pop up in multiple stories throughout the collection, i was hoping that some of these alcan-travelers would pop up again in a later story to fill in some blanks, but alas(ka), 'twas not to be.
i'm glad i won this through the goodreads giveaways, because if i hadn't felt the gratitude-fueled pressure to read it within a reasonable timeframe, it would likely have just sat on my shelf collecting dust, because i'm just never hungry for short stories, and on the rare-ish occasions i DO pick up a short story collection, it'll be one by an author i have already read and enjoyed, not some stranger-danger risky-read. so, thank you to the gr-gods for forcing this debut collection into my hands. if anyone is reading this, the book is NOW AVAILABLE because i am slow at reviewing these days. argh.
okay, i finished Snow and i have enough time to cram this one in before the demands of SPOOKTOBER bNOW AVAILABLE!!
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okay, i finished Snow and i have enough time to cram this one in before the demands of SPOOKTOBER begin, so crisis averted.
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oops, i did it again. i won a gr giveaway without reading the fine print.
i have read john banville before, but not any of the SEVEN quirke books he wrote as benjamin black, nor the previous st. john strafford book, and i entered this giveaway not realizing that this book features BOTH of those characters and i'm probably going to be SO CONFUSED!
how has this happened to me TWICE?
A 'HOLY SHIT' UPDATE
according to my virtual shelves, i have never, in fact, read john banville. i thought i had, and i certainly have a stack of his books in my house, but i guess i never have? so THIS means i can read Snow as my self-imposed obligatory 2021 challenge to read one book each month by an author i have never read despite owning more than one of their books and THEN read this one and that's one crisis averted!
"It is better," said the cat, "to accept what cannot be changed, and pee on it."
brief personal backstory: i slap every book i'm even cNOW AVAILABLE!!!
"It is better," said the cat, "to accept what cannot be changed, and pee on it."
brief personal backstory: i slap every book i'm even casually interested in on my 'to-read' shelf here, so whenever there's a giveaway for one of them, i get that notification email, and i enter all of them, even if i can barely remember the book in question. despite the sheer number of giveaways i enter, unlike in the olden days when goodreads was a small family operation, i rarely win—this year, i have only won TWO, this one and The Memory Theater.
so i was SUPER excited to get the email telling me i had won a giveaway, but when i clicked through to see which book i'd won, i was more apprehensive than triumphant.
obviously, i was drawn to this book because animals! but the synopsis gave me paws pause. i could see this going one of two ways; either some treacly The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse pap, or an Animal Farm reboot. neither of those two options appealed to me—the first because goopy sentimentality is not my jam, the latter because you don't mess with Animal Farm.
this ended up being closer in scope to Animal Farm, but on a simpler and more superficial level. which is not a criticism—it's not trying to be a scathing political satire, it calls itself a fable and it delivers exactly what it promises.
so, a dog, a horse, a grizzly bear, a cat, a crow, and a baboon walk into a clearing. these representatives have assembled to discuss what to do about the human problem. if you don't know what this problem is, read a paper. we broke the world. here, the world is even more broken: humans have caused an unspecified event known as The Calamity, and while only a few stragglers remain, humans nonetheless pose a threat—their potential to go forth and multiply and ruin everything all over again is a real concern, so the animals are taking it upon themselves to vote on a course of action: let the humans be or eat 'em all up.
you may notice that the species-representation is on the slim side, which highlights one of the problematic features of decision-making by committees, and this one has already experienced some challenges in establishing its quorum:
Each of the animals at the council was a species ambassador, chosen (some more democratically than others) by their fellows. It had been agreed that each would have an opportunity to speak before voting.
The order of speakers had been agreed at the previous meeting, after a venerable rabbit had been devoured over questions of procedure.
the baboon is the de facto leader of the council, and his attitude towards the proceedings seems pretty consistent with those in leadership positions:
"All of us are here. Anyone who is not here is not us. That's we. So we can begin."
"But if the others aren't here," said the bear, slowly, focusing on one bit of the problem, "how will they decide how to vote?"
"They vote as we tell them," said the baboon. "Animals like that."
this is only one of the reasons why committees, while noble in theory, are frequently doomed endeavors. this one in particular is plagued by the usual petty disagreements; infighting and vote-switching as each creature puts forth their arguments, and the process is further tainted by bribes, secret alliances, and some munching-on of furry bystanders wanting their own vote in the matter.
it's not exactly a meeting of the best and brightest. the crow's contributions are particularly unhelpful:
"Hear the bird laws! On the full moon, no worms! On the seventh day, attend thy nest! Thou shalt not fly above the mountain, nor below the sea! Caw Caw Caw!
and though you may have disagreed with me in the past about the Evil of birds, remember i tried to warn you.
"Humans are a danger to The Egg," said the crow. "Kill them all!"
i was unsurprised that the crow was such a wing'ed monster, but i was pleasantly surprised to discover this wasn't just an "animals good/humans bad" story because i tend to bristle at being spoonfed simplified morality.
it's brief and quick (and illustrated!), probably a single-sitting gulp for most, and while i wouldn't call it an essential read, it was occasionally clever and funny, and there are certainly some insights to be gleaned, and i am, naturally, team cat.
Though the crows and the baboons had, per the agreement at the council, spread the word about the decision to eat all the humans, no other species had massed with them. The original baboon emissary, whom we came to know earlier, was frustrated by this, but finally he decided it did not matter. He was certain the baboons would finish off the remaining humans. They didn't need any other species' help! And he, personally, would be certain to approach the battle from the rear. Plenty of idiot baboons to go ahead of him. He started a chant, to rile them up:
"Eat the children! Eat the children!"
Other baboons joined in.
"Eat the children! Eat the children!"
Shocking?
But why should it be?
Why, indeed, the historian would ask, are we continually surprised by the rapacity, violence, and arrogance of those creatures who ascend to leadership? Do we not recall, throughout animal history, the despots and fools who have so handily outnumbered the saints? History is a dark tail that doesn't wag.
when the monkeys and the birds team up, we are all doomed.
wonderland-meets-neverland with more prescriptive scarification and cannibalism.
this is a fantastic read from a very dark imagination. the story-elemewonderland-meets-neverland with more prescriptive scarification and cannibalism.
this is a fantastic read from a very dark imagination. the story-elements are almost too bonkers to type out: dora is a girl who is sometimes a rock, birthed outta the earth for a wanna-be father who very quickly didn't wanna-be a father no more. abandoned & anomalous, she spends her days in the company of thistle, a boy she has come to regard as an adopted brother. thistle lost his true name when he was kidnapped from his/our world, led across dimensions and forced into servitude—an attendant to the masters of a twisted fairytale place known as the gardens. here, time stands still—for the masters, anyway—who enjoy a neverending cycle of croquet, feasts, and hedonistic revelries; never aging, never remembering anything beyond the pleasures of the moment. less fortunate are their mortal servants like thistle, who suffer horrible punishments for minor infractions and are killed when they get too old. and thistle, although doing his best to disguise it, is getting too old.
there's also a purple lady named ghorbi who trades and travels and makes wishes come true...for a price, porla the fish lady and her pet corpse, a kindly pair of vittra, a powerful librarian-entity, mysterious hooded beings who preside over the crossroads between dimensions, and a troupe of actors who perform the stories of all the worlds, empathy-chameleons* who can permeate their borders.
it's got all the traits and trappings of a fairytale—the creatures, the journeys, the tests, the power of names, and it's beautifully melancholic when it's not being a straight-up gleeful bloodbath.
augusta is a terrific villain who would be great friends with jill from seanan mcguire's wayward children series while dora was hanging out with the rock-narrator of The Raven Tower. and while i'm here recklessly namedropping other things, even though i stupidly haven’t read Piranesi yet, i get the sense that it might sorta be a gentler flipside of this story. we'll see how accurate my book-spidey senses are about this whenever i get around to reading it.
* figurative, although literal empathy-chameleons would fit right in here
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i won a book! but since it pubs on tuesday, you will probably get the chance to read it before i do, so no spoilers please!
I WON ANOTHER GIVEAWAY! THIS ALMOST MAKES UP FOR ALL THE BAD THINGS 2020 HAS BROUGHT!
although, full transparency, dumdum entered this thinking it wasI WON ANOTHER GIVEAWAY! THIS ALMOST MAKES UP FOR ALL THE BAD THINGS 2020 HAS BROUGHT!
although, full transparency, dumdum entered this thinking it was a book by Anna North, but perhaps it'll be a happy accident and i'll discover a new author i love?
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best mystery & thriller 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
"My Jane," he says, his voice low and rough,
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best mystery & thriller 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
"My Jane," he says, his voice low and rough, and I swallow hard, nothing feigned now, no illusion.
"I'm not yours," I manage to say. "I'm free as a fucking bird."
now, this is a jane eyre i can get behind. you may groan and growl, with your do we really need another retelling of Jane Eyre?
and i say YES!
it’s a breezy adaptation, set amongst alabama's idle rich, whose gossipy tongues start wagging once the help—their neighborhood's plain-jane dogwalker—catches the eye of the recently-widowed eddie rochester (a terrible boating accident involving his wife bea—née bertha—and her bestie blanche), quickly making herself right at home in his spacious mansion.
It’s been two weeks since I more or less moved in with Eddie, two weeks of soft linens and sinking into the plush sofa in the living room in the afternoon, watching bad reality shows on the massive television.
I’m never leaving this place.
however, that final sentence becomes a bit ominous to those of us who have read Jane Eyre and are familiar with the fact that sometimes, a wife isn't "dead" so much as 'locked up in the attic, and pretty unhappy about the whole situation."
it's a surprisingly fun and twisty bit of domestic suspense; there's plenty that stays true to the original, with little references dropped throughout, but jane is a lot more modern, a lot less willing to endure her station in life—coming up in the foster care system has taught her that in this world, you gotta take what you can get and keep moving.
jane isn't even her real name, she's changed it after fleeing an incident in her last foster home; embarking on the path towards carving out a rage-to-riches story on the strength of her own grit, determination, and calculated manipulations, with some light kleptomania along the way. "jane" has a strong personality and a potty mouth, but she's learned how to survive by playing the game, coveting so badly what the rich take for granted.
I had no idea you could spend over a thousand dollars on fucking solar lamps that look like gaslights.
But here I am, loading up packages of those lights into the back of Eddie’s SUV, his credit card practically smoking in my wallet. He won’t care, I know—he told me to get “whatever it is Emily has decided she can’t live without”—but I was eating ramen and cereal for just about every meal only a few months ago, so hearing the cashier at Home Depot say, “That’ll be $1023.78,” as I checked out with nothing more than lights made my chest hurt.
My first week on the Neighborhood Beautification Committee is obviously going really well.
it's a story about class, identity, and secrets, and jane isn't the only one here with skeletons in her attic.
and speaking of that attic, (view spoiler)[i get the justification for why there’s a bed in the panic room (wakka chikka wakka chikka), but there’s a shower in the panic room, too? there’s such a big deal made of bea thumping the bed on the floor to try to get jane’s attention, but would no one hear the pipes and water? (hide spoiler)]
in any case, it's a fun spin on the original, bringing some much-appreciated lightness, humor, and female ferocity to a story that used to be about how great it is to be patient and is now about how great it is to be proactive.
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i keep winning so many gr giveaways because 2020 is like the one who broke your heart and then tried to win you back by giving you lots of gifts. keep 'em coming, 2020; maybe you'll get lucky.
Is this where we're at? Finding joy in the prospect of slightly diminished atrocities?
is there any better quote to sum up 2020?
this iNOW AVAILABLE!!!
Is this where we're at? Finding joy in the prospect of slightly diminished atrocities?
is there any better quote to sum up 2020?
this is a single-night sf/horror bloodbath tale of biotech hubris gone explosively wrong. it's being marketed as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War meets Stranger Things, but it's also got lovecraftian tentacles and cronenberg body horror. most succinctly, it's "what if john hughes made splatterporn*?"
it'd be this: a sinister nightmarescape in smalltown oregon featuring outsider teens banding together to fight off the zombie-like attacks of the richie-rich kids who'd long tormented them with the human brand of mindless cruelties, now taking "mindless" and "cruel" bullying to whole new levels.
it's a gorefest tempered with unexpectedly heartwarming elements—love and loyalty and sacrifice and all the verybest qualities of humanity, even when sometimes the most merciful, human thing you can do is put someone out of their misery with a wrench.
if you are the kind of person who needs trigger-warnings, who quivers at the thought of reading about people and animals suffering any physical and emotional trauma, whether it be racist namecalling or serial dismemberment, this ain't your book, but if you want to read about a badass brown orphan girl's enviable courage in the face of extreme circumstances and SO MUCH eye trauma, this will surely tick your boxes.
on a personal note, i probably didn't do myself any favors reading this at the same time as bingewatching BrainDead—a show about outer space insects eating the brains of DC's politicians and taking over their bodies toxoplasmosis-style, with more messily exploding heads than any of michelle and robert king's other shows, but we all gotta live with our decisions, or die trying.
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* and if he acknowledged the existence of races other than caucasian.
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jeez louise.
review to come.
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GOODREADS GIVEAWAY WINNNNNNERRRRRRR IS MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
There was a sign against the fence that read: COVER YOUR HANDS. COVER YOUR MOUTH. DON’T LAUGH. And below that: PUBLIC LAUGHTER IS A CRIME. OFFENDING M
There was a sign against the fence that read: COVER YOUR HANDS. COVER YOUR MOUTH. DON’T LAUGH. And below that: PUBLIC LAUGHTER IS A CRIME. OFFENDING MINORS WILL BE DETAINED; THEIR PARENTS FINED. The empty swings swayed in the wind in a ghostly kind of way that gave her the creeps and made her think of Then again. How weird to think there was a time when parks like these rang out with the sound of giggling children.
oh, man—imagine if there was ever a disease that shut down all the places people went to unleash their kids, making the sound of children playing a Thing of the Past?
oh, wait.
somehow, without even setting out to do so, i read three pandemic-y books during quarantine: Survivor Song, Malorie, and this. i was going to read my ARC of The End of October, but then i said MAYBE ANOTHER DAY FOR YOU, SIR!
pandemic lit is nothing new—it’s been a wildly popular subgenre for aaaages, and one i’ve personally been into, but it was such a weird experience to be reading ARCs of outbreak-themed books during the early days of an actual global outbreak, knowing that by the time they published, the scenarios wouldn’t be entertaining “what-if” escapist funtimes for many readers, and that many of the details would seem all-too-familiar.
Malorie is a bit like Station Eleven; taking a look at *dramatic gesture* humanity in the long-term aftermath of a species-decimating event, and we aren’t there (yet) in either severity or retrospectivity. Survivor Song takes place during the first 24 hours of an outbreak, and a lot of those details bore out—maybe not in so short a timeframe, but it still felt eerily documentarian in nature, at least for me here in merry olde queens.
this one, in some ways, feels the most prescient, the most relevant of the three i read. it is set in a quarantined african city seven years into an outbreak of a highly communicable disease called the Laughter because it begins with hysterical, uncontrollable laughter and ends with patients’ bones disintegrating, their organs turning into soup.
oh no.
on the one hand, it’s the most fantasy of the three, because of its many supernatural elements, the black market for stolen human ponytails, the bars where you can pay to fight people dressed up in costumes, and the general energy of its broad neo-dickensian details—an orphan investigator, a pet hyena, underground (literally) data dealers, secret libraries, mysterious nuns, foodist cults, etc.
but in its smaller, more specific behavioral details, it really gets how people react, psychologically, in unstable times with uncertain futures, and some of the details, all written pre-covid, have become Part of Our World.
in sick city, people wear masks and gloves wherever they go, A few suckers even started drinking diluted bleach, thinking it would cure them from the inside out, people have become paranoid and violent, suffering from restrictions, from being cut off from the world, and conspiracies about the disease’s origin run rampant:
”New word on the street is that it’s the Yanks. That they shipped the Laughter in through vaccine drives. Said it was vaccines for polio and measles they were giving us—for free, from the goodness of their big red-white-and-blue hearts—but that was just a cover-up. ‘Cause it’s way cheaper and quicker to stick their needles into us way down here in Africa than into rats or monkeys in their fancy labs—which could take years of testing and jumping through legal hoops. If the vaccines worked, these big pharma snakes could go into production much faster and make fat wads of cash by selling them to the US military. The plan, they say, was to use them on soldiers who would go into war zones and spread the Laughter. All the while being vaccinated against it themselves. Pretty clever, right? Wouldn’t be surprised if our own government was in on it, too—giving those in power the opportunity to cordon off Sick City and invoke martial law.”
as well as conspiracies about the disease’s very existence:
”Say,” said Sans. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to infect you?…It doesn’t faze you one bit?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t believe in it.”
“Believe in what?”
“The Laughter, of course. The whole thing is just a big old population control experiment by Western imperialists who are lining the pockets of our government to turn a blind eye.”
“That’s crazy. Don’t you see what’s happening all around you? What about the deaths? The bodies? How do you explain those away?”
while i don’t understand holocaust deniers, who have their own bias-bullshit going on, i do understand the impulse to treat the sources of *some* accounts of verylongago historical events with healthy and curious skepticism, but i don’t get how people can deny a global pandemic when it is happening all around them. i’m sure there’s all sorts of shit regular folks aren’t being told, and numbers being fudged up or down for reasons, but americans politicizing a health crisis by refusing to wear masks or take other precautions, endangering people because this is just some "libtard hoax" or whatever? i do not understand your logic. it’s a thing. it killed john prine. fuck you.
and even though it’s not 7:00 right now, respect:
”…all this paranoia and fear-mongering only make our job, and the job of every single poor damn health worker in this city—who are putting their lives on the line to help everyone, I might add—harder!”
there are other perfectly-expressed subtleties woven into this novel, about how constant mask wearing—VERY NECESSARY MASK-WEARING—is alienating and depersonalizing, and how wearying it is to live under the constant threat of catching or spreading a disease.
The way Faith figured, the masks people wore these days weren’t just physical. And there were many of them. Somedays it felt to her like there wasn’t a single true soul left. Like every single person in this town was just a series of masks over masks over masks with nothing real left underneath. Not that there was anything anybody could do about it anymore. She couldn’t help wonder how much of who people were and who they became was really up to them? It was like the Laughter had flipped a switch. Even if you didn’t catch it, it changed you. Remade everyone. Faith couldn’t even remember who she was before all this…
here in former-epicenter NYFC, i tested negative (knock wood), but i was not unaffected. i got ’rona wuz here 2020 carved deep into my psyche. the human death toll is too enormous for me to even wrap my head around, but the smaller notes—all the local business that won’t be reopening, the number of taxis in my neighborhood with “for sale” signs on them, all the pets who starved to death in apartments while their people were hospitalized, not knowing when i will see my own people again, scattered as they are—these are comparatively small tragedies, but they’re like little experiential contrails affecting my everyday, and whenever i think any bigger-picture than that, i either freeze or hyperventilate. so, yeah, consider me remade.
the specifics here that don’t hit too close to home were appreciated—public laughter is forbidden, so comedy clubs become the new speakeasies, and, in a masked society, lip porn becomes a thing. which i totally get—whenever i see someone in public without a mask it feels…indecent, and not just because they’re ENDANGERING US ALL. i have not myself become attracted to maskless strangers, but i do understand how humans tend to eroticize the taboo.
me, i’ve already amassed about thirty or so reusable masks, and it's made me even more fashionable.
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anyway, i enjoyed the book. it’s a debut, and it was a little messy at times—lots of different characters, lots of different plot-threads that maybe needed a bit more rigorous corralling early on, but once it found its bearings and the various stories started converging, it was a very fun read. sometimes sad-fun, but that's the best we can expect these days, yeah?
looking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the monthlooking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the month, and i hope they will find new readers!
A mistake is a lesson, unless you make the same mistake twice.
ugh, i loved this book. i thought it was a debut, but apparently cosby wrote My Darkest Prayer a few years back and it slipped right past me. so, MY mistake, lesson learned, and i will be grabbing a copy of that ASAP to make things right.
this one is crime fiction in the grit lit/country noir tradition, about beauregard montage—that’s BEAUREGARD MONTAGE, PEOPLE—the flawed but decent son of a wheelman whose own skills behind the wheel once made him a valuable asset to criminals in need of a speedy getaway. apart from his formidable driving skills, his reliability, discretion, and willingness to get his hands dirty earned him an excellent professional reputation and enough money to open his own auto shop and go straight, determined to leave that dangerous life—and his father's legacy—behind.
"bug" devotes himself to becoming everything his father wasn't—an attentive husband, a responsible parent, and a respectable small business-owner. although he struggles to make ends meet, due in part to a competing garage offering lower prices and whiter mechanics, he is able to ensure his family's safety and be a present, positive role model to his sons. however, when his financial situation abruptly worsens and his terminally-ill mother is about to be evicted from her nursing home, he allows himself to be coaxed into taking on ONE LAST JOB!
and you know how that goes.
the first chapter is perfect—it's self-contained enough to be a short story, and it lays out everything you need to know about bug montage: his mind, his skills, his temperament, his achilles heel, while also establishing the motifs of cars and cons and pride and payback that’ll drive (no puns, please!) the rest of the book.
and it’s so gooooood!
cosby's writing plants him on the literary side of the genre, with a good balance between character development and action. there is excellent heist and con and double-cross criminal mastermindery stuff here—it’s tight and twisty and surprised me more than a couple of times, but i am a reader more drawn to character work, so for me it was all about bug’s story—the layers of what shaped him into who and what he was, his values, regrets, self-reckonings etc. it's a very classic noir-structure, but the details make it feel very fresh, and that little jab where a good deed done sours into the worst kind of regret, ahhhhhh delicious.
the writing is vivid and dynamic, and it does occasionally strain a little too hard under its own descriptive weight, The bitter taste soon gave way to a languid turgidity that moved through her body with a stealthy determination &etc, but that's a minor complaint to the flipside of a major compliment—that it hooked me through parts that i ordinarily would have glossed over. because this book is much more…vehicular than anything i’ve read before—all drag racing and car chases and engine modification etc, which should have made me disengage, but didn’t. i have zero interest in cars in life or as entertainment—i’ve never had a driver’s license, and i’ve never been able to follow car chase sequences in movies, whether they are the "emo boys drive fast" ones (drive, baby driver) or the “tough boys drive fast” ones (the rest). i usually just zone out until the confusing parts are over and use the bodily and property damage as context clues to figure out who won. so you would think that reading a car chase sequence would be even duller to me AND YET—i both followed along and was genuinely invested. there are several cars-going-zoom situations, but one in particular felt very harrowing, and for the first time ever, it was fun to me.
and if we're dream-casting this movie, i am nominating mike colter in lemond bishop mode (which is as crackerjack a character name as beauregard montage), although he’d probably have to lose some of those luke cage muscles for this. i have been using some of my sheltering in place time to rewatch the good wife/fight, and am smitten anew with his simmering facial expressions and how easygoing and affable he is—the very picture of businessman respectability until you fuck with his money or his family, and then oh, the danger under that smile...he's got my vote.
Beauregard knew there was no honor among thieves. Boys in the game only respected you in direct proportion to how much they needed you divided by how much they feared you. There was no doubt they needed his skill.
And if they weren't a little bit afraid of him then that was their mistake.
do not underestimate beauregard montage. or s.a. cosby. this one's a winner.
********************* this is an excerpt from the little author-letter slipped into the book and it's perfect.
I believe in toxic masculinity and the harmful patriarchal hegemony that it engenders. But I also believe in tragic masculinity. A self-flagellating mindset that diminishes men by inches even as we believe it is protecting us. Tragic masculinity injures us on the inside and leaves behind scars that are felt, not seen. Blacktop Wasteland is about the hereditary disease that is poverty, but it's also about the violent inheritance that damaged men pass on to their sons. Not just physical violence but the emotional punishment that we inflict on ourselves.
It's also got a badass cherry 1971 Plymouth Duster in it. And cousin that motherfucking dog can hunt.
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MY FIRST GOODREADS GIVEAWAY WIN OF 2020 WOOHOOOOO!
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awaroooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HISTORICAL FICTION 2020!
There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.
i know it looks like i’m over here five-starring a lot of books in a row all of a sudden, but it’s not so much that i’ve lucked into a run of excellent reading choices as it is me finally sitting down to review books so good it's been intimidating me to even think about reviewing them.
ALTHOUGH—if we’re being super-duper honest, Blacktop Wasteland and Betty were both 4s going in (but 4.5s in my heart) that got bumped up to fives when rereading them for the review made me remember how dingdang good they were. this one was a five out of the gate.
it’s so good i don’t even know where to start. it’s a family saga that takes place over the course of forty or so years, beginning in 1938 with the birth of twin sisters stella and desiree vignes in the town of mallard, louisiana; a black community with an unusual beginning:
The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.
the residents embraced their founder’s dream of a more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before, and by the time the vignes girls—his great-great-great-granddaughters—are born, his bloodline has been bleached into “creamy skin, hazel eyes, [and] wavy hair," none of which attributes protect them from racism; from seeing their father lynched in their home when they are little girls, or from race factoring into their lives and shaping their opportunities when they run away from home as teenagers.
they live together in new orleans for a few years before stella abruptly cuts ties with her sister and disappears into a new life that she will live as a white woman—marrying a wealthy white man and raising a daughter who has no idea she's anything but white. meanwhile, desiree will leave the abusive father of her own daughter and move back to mallard, her child's exceptional darkness there unexpected, unwelcome.
eventually, three generations of paths will cross, secrets will be discovered, everyone'll have to address their choices.
honestly, i don’t want to blah and blah about plot—i always spend way too much time on silly reviews, writing 20-page dissertations on minutiae that nobody cares about but meeeee before deleting all of it anyway and i need to stop being foolish with my time and learn to do things in miniaturized efficiency when i’m not getting paid.
but i will say that this is a tremendous second novel after a really impressive debut and bennett writes beautifully about family and grief and identity and being deeply, unbearably lonely—the loneliness of the estranged twins, the self-othering loneliness isolating stella from her old life and in her new one, the loneliness of growing up dark in a colorstruck town etc etc. i'm doing it again so i'm gonna shut myself up now because i loved every little bit of this novel and we could be here all day if i don't put a stop to it now.
i'm always attracted to carol goodman's books—they look good and they sound promising, but now, after dating three of them, i can empirNOW AVAILABLE!!
i'm always attracted to carol goodman's books—they look good and they sound promising, but now, after dating three of them, i can empirically report that we just aren't meant to be. it's for all the usual reasons relationships don't work out—there's no chemistry, no meaningful communication, we're looking for different things; i want to settle down, she's just looking for something casual, although i for sure have cheated on her with numerous other books.
i give all authors three chances to woo me, and it seems we're just not meant to be. to use a TV-reference to explain the way i feel about her books, they are 100% the medium place.
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they aren't the literary crime fiction masterpieces of authors like Tana French, and they aren't 'leave 'em at the lake house' vacation mass markets that aren't even trying to impress. they're...fine.
it's a good effort, but overall, her situations aren't relatable, the characters' behaviors aren't convincing, many dramatic complications could've been avoided with a head-clearing deep breath and a conversation; her books live in that space that's slightly less soapy than a lifetime movie and they just leave me feeling beige.
which is a shame, because sometimes she'll come out with something really evocative and promising that gives me hope:
Built in 1811 by hardy Congregationalists, the Haywood chapel is a plain white clapboard meetinghouse. Entering it, I always feel like I'm about to be tried for witchcraft. I bring my students here when we read The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter and ask them to sit in silence for a few minutes, to imagine that there is nothing outside the little circle of houses but wilderness and the sea. If you're cast out of here, there is no place for you to go.
but it's never enough to make up for the disappointing stretches that border these moments, and i'm forced to consign her to friendzone status.
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