i am late to the...game on this one, but since retailers have trained us to start focusing on christmas the day after thanksgiving (or in SEPTEMBER, ii am late to the...game on this one, but since retailers have trained us to start focusing on christmas the day after thanksgiving (or in SEPTEMBER, if we're talking about michael's), i'm ignoring those heart-shaped boxes of chocolates that are already peppering the drugstore shelves and claiming an extension on christmas in t'other direction, without the panic and only the joy! joy! joy! of it. and, i suppose, also the murrrrrrder.
and if i buy some heart-shaped boxes of chocolates to munch on while i'm reading this, that's my own holly jolly business....more
ugggghhhh i JUST got this in the mail, and it comes out tomorrow, so i won't learn what is in soon i will KNOW about the ENVELOPES!
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ugggghhhh i JUST got this in the mail, and it comes out tomorrow, so i won't learn what is in these TEENY TINY ENVELOPES before pubday but i am DESPERATE to know!
Privilege and tragedy. The perfect storm for any adolescent.
this is a big messy jewish-american family saga in which a couple is broughNOW AVAILABLE!!
Privilege and tragedy. The perfect storm for any adolescent.
this is a big messy jewish-american family saga in which a couple is brought together by tragedy, their triplets are brought into existence by science, and the five of them spin off into their own separate orbits before being brought back together by another tragedy, and the efforts of another science-birthed sibling.
the whole dysfunctional dramedy of the oppenheimer family is rooted in the sour soil of grief and guilt, with johanna first meeting future husband salo at his fiancée's funeral. twenty-year-old salo had been driving a jeep that crashed—killing two of his three passengers—and leaving him numb and "tumbling." meeting him again several years later at a wedding, johanna finds herself drawn to him and becomes determined to absorb all of his damage.
From this moment forward it was all going to be about our father, and the great purpose of her life would be to love him enough to relieve him of his great burden, and to free him from that one, terrible shard of time in which he was so unfairly trapped, and to salve at last that wound of his, that one that wouldn't heal.
for his part, salo shrugs into the relationship with no illusions, but also no great passion
But she knew what he'd done, and she was here anyway. Something inside him slipped into place: not love, not a sudden recognition of his own terrible loneliness, not even desire. Only he thought, looking at her, noting the obvious nervousness as she spoke and understanding that she wanted, for some unfathomable reason, his good opinion: Why not? Here was a pretty, amiable girl who seemed to have decided, apparently on the spot, that the redress of his great personal tragedy—for the record, not his own cosmic view of the matter—ought to be her purpose in life, or at least its priority.
Why not? is not the most promising beginning to a love story, but the two of them get along well enough and begin married life in quiet prosperity. salo finds more comfort in art than in other people, and he uses his considerable family wealth and unerring eye for emerging talent to amass a private collection that will continue to appreciate in value over the years. meanwhile johanna longs for a family to cement her distracted, emotionally unavailable husband more firmly into her life.
she struggles to get pregnant for years, consulting with fertility doctors and undergoing numerous unsuccessful procedures on her soul-crushing "infertility journey." in what is to be their final attempt, three fertilized eggs are implanted into johanna's womb while the final egg is frozen for the likelihood of a surrogate. but against all expectations, all three embryos "take" and johanna becomes pregnant with triplets.
as arduous a process as it was to bring her children into the world, their conception turns out to be the easiest part of achieving johanna's dream of the big happy oppenheimer family, and the time that harrison, lewyn, and sally spent together in utero is the end of their closeness. the triplets don't have any use for each other, and salo spends more and more time acquiring and admiring his art collection in its temperature-controlled brooklyn warehouse while johanna waits in vain "for the magical creative synergy of her happy children to fill the house."
she clings to her dreams of familial bliss, but their home life is nothing more than a collection of individuals quietly pursuing their own interests and her children have nothing but antipathy for each other.
The three of them might rise but they simply declined to converge, even if they happened to actually share some interest or preference...To call them individually, in their distinct ways, "quiet" or "self-reliant," for example, was to ignore the fact that Sally isolated herself to feel annoyed, Lewyn to feel wounded, and Harrison simply to escape the other two. So powerful was the force of their mutual aversion, and so ironic, given they had never actually been apart, that you might even have said it was the single thing they actually did share.
wanting domestic harmony is not enough to make it so; every unhappy oppenheimer is unhappy in their own way, and ultimately johanna understands that nothing she has done has saved herself or salo.
Finally, finally, the tiniest pinprick of reality came through the force field of her stubborn delusion, presenting Johanna with the first filament of an idea that it had all been a failure. They were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. They were five humans cohabiting. They were not, and never had been, a family.
as her children prepare to head off to college, johanna discovers a shocking secret about her husband, and—faced with an empty nest of unfulfilled hopes and purposelessness, she makes arrangements to use a surrogate and her long-frozen embryo to bring phoebe into the world, quadruplets separated by seventeen years.
what follows is a slow-burning story of a fragmented family unspooling through the triplets' college-years misadventures; three blood relations forging their own individual paths through the found families of mentors, friends, and love interests; trying on identities, shaping their values and seeking their purpose. although they have been blessed with every financial opportunity, they are nonetheless lonely and drifting; seeking connection, trying to grow into themselves untethered by the bonds of a family divided by petty jealousy, betrayal, and widely diverging sociopolitical worldviews.
but then there's phoebe, determined to wrangle them all back together.
it's a big satisfying chonk of a book full of all the good family drama stuff like infidelity, secrets, and inheritance, and it's dripping with juicy back- and side-stories where maladjusted and variously-unlikeable characters are forced to consider the world beyond their own privilege and education in matters of religion, sexuality, race, and ideologies. and chickens.
everything circles back tidily and somewhat conveniently, and although it's centered around broken, yearning people, it's not a disillusionment bleakfest and it is often very funny.
my only complaint is that, once the triplets leave home, johanna doesn't factor much into the story; she's central-but-absent from the narrative and their lives overall, which was disappointing to me, since she's the most proactive and interesting character. her stubbornness, sacrifice, and suffering are the catalyst for so many important plot points, and her choices have such profound consequences that it was a shame to lose access to her inner life so early into the book.
it's kind of a perfect summer-book-club-book, so if you have one of those, give it a whirl.
this is a gothic-historical science fiction rework of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in 1871-1877 and transplanting the broad outline oNOW AVAILABLE!!!
this is a gothic-historical science fiction rework of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in 1871-1877 and transplanting the broad outline of wells' classic tale of messin' with science to the yucatan peninsula, a region rife with conflict and rebellions.
carlota moreau has spent her whole life on her beloved father's property where, along with gloomy-drunk overseer montgomery laughton, she cares for the human-animal hybrids her father has created and she considers extended family.
these hybrids are not brute beasts—although their appearances are shocking, with their animal features and abilities, they are capable of speech and higher thought, and help run the estate; a beautiful, sprawling property, isolated for reasons.
dr. moreau's experiments are financed by his wealthy patron hernando lizaldes, who has supplied money to fund his own desire for workers more manageable than humans, but he is becoming frustrated by moreau's lack of progress in that department.
mistakes were made. secrets were kept. and when lizaldes' bratty son eduardo arrives, falling for carlota and getting in the way of montgomery's unexpressed, unrequited love for her, things are bound to go badly.
like Mexican Gothic, this is a spectacularly atmospheric character-driven set piece, and it contains many paradoxes—it's a fast read that builds slowly toward its conclusion, where it explodes with an unexpected, tho' somehow also inevitable, revelation.
if you're into retellings and genre mashups with sweeping social and psychological themes, this one's a keeper.
this is the third of blake crouch's "more science than u" books i have read, after Dark Matter and Recursion.
i am neither a science perNOW AVAILABLE!
this is the third of blake crouch's "more science than u" books i have read, after Dark Matter and Recursion.
i am neither a science person nor a science fiction person, but i'm fine to just roll with it, trusting that crouch has done enough research to make his science parts work, so i never get bogged down by the stuff i don't understand (i.e.—most of it), because he always manages to wrap a gripping human-interest story around the science-y bits for smol-brain folks like me.
and this one should be particularly comforting to dum dums; illustrating that even smart people don't always feel smart enough; with its hero logan ramsay (IQ 118; degrees in biochemistry and genetics), floundering in the intellectual shadow of his mother (IQ in the low 180s): All I had ever wanted was to follow in her footsteps. I'd been chasing them all my life, and acknowledging the limitations of his own comparatively flabby intellect: I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.
geniuses: they're just like us!
so once again i leave the facts and figures to crouch's research team—i'm here for the scientific ethics; that old mad-scientist jurassic park-y hubris around what we CAN do and what we SHOULD do. years before this novel opens, logan's genius mom miriam DID do something that had unintended consequences—while she and her team (incl. logan) were trying to eradicate a bacterial leaf blight in china, an unexpected mutation occurred that caused The Great Starvation; a famine that killed 200 billion people.
miriam died in a car crash before the full impact of the mutation occurred, and logan was imprisoned for three years for his part in the disaster. afterwards, he gave up on his dreams of becoming a geneticist, instead becoming a committed family man and working for the GPA (the Gene Protection Agency), an organization targeting criminal geneticists operating rogue gene labs creating new species as designer pets (!GIMMIE!), or using their knowledge to weaponize or enhance a human's DNA, which can be smuggled via—wait for it—BOOKS!
I was looking for rigidity in the pages, signs they'd been wet at some point, infinitesimal circular stains. Vast amounts of DNA, or plasmids, could be hidden on the pages of a normal book—dropped in microliter increments and left to dry on the pages, only to be rehydrated and used elsewhere. even a short novel like The Stranger could hold a near-infinite amount of genetic information, with each page hiding the genome sequence for a different mammal, a terrifying disease, or a synthetic species, any of which could be activated in a well-equipped dark gene lab.
so cool. what is NOT cool is that, while on a job, logan is exposed to something that modifies his genomes. like, all of his genomes. after his nonconsensual genetic upgrade, he's become a brainy-bourne: stronger, faster, smarter, more resilient, with increased bone density, perfect recall, and oh my god—the ability to speed-read two books at once (!GIMMIE!).
it's not all great, though—post-exposure, logan is held against his will; a government-caged secret for observation purposes, and his wife and teenage daughter have been told he's dead, so that's a drag.
however, logan wasn't the only one exposed to this instant-evolution process, and he gets broken out of science-jail by a fellow-upgrade and, after some complicated family baggage is dragged into the light, he finds himself tasked with a daunting mission: to save humanity from itself.
it's a pretty big ask, and, faced with this difficult decision, logan is naturally conflicted about his next steps; a little science-shy over the ethics or consequences of bringing the human race up to his new level, which is already proving to have its downsides: his transformation has made him more efficient and intelligent than everyone around him, but consequently more impatient and less empathetic with normies.
additionally, he's still grappling with his mommy-issues: he's finally reached, maybe surpassed, his mother's intellect, but is hesitant to make the same mistakes she made.
We had gotten so much right. And too much wrong. The future was here, and it was a fucking mess.
Upgrade is a delicious blend of action and ethics, rich with family drama and redemption, where the real hero of the piece is emotional intelligence.
We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.
it's just as fun and thought-provoking as his other books, but i gotta say, some of logan's genius-level observations sound pretty close to the insights of college stoners:
We walked back to the hotel under a deep navy sky bejeweled with stars.
In the center of the plaza, a choir was singing. They held quivering candles, and their voices lilted icily into the sky.
I didn't see the moment. Not really.
I saw the story behind the moment—a tale passed down over two thousand years that told of a child of a superbeing sent to save the world.
Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers.
Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.
stoner-geniuses will save us all. but should they??
fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one ARC each month i'd been so excited to get my hands on and then...never read
this is an excellent book-clubby debut fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one ARC each month i'd been so excited to get my hands on and then...never read
this is an excellent book-clubby debut about the secrets lurking beneath even the most close-knit, nearly claustrophobically-knit families; a multilayered family drama for fans of Ask Again, Yes, Celeste Ng, The Nest, or The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes <-- TIL there is a SEQUEL to that wonderful, underread gem of a book, Below the Big Blue Sky, and i immediately PURCHASED it.
the brennans have always been a Big Deal family in their irish-catholic neighborhood-enclave in westchester. big house, big family, big success, and—evidently—big secrets: infidelity, financial difficulties, and only-daughter sunday's BIG-big secret; the one that caused her sudden departure to los angeles five years earlier, leaving behind a bewildered family and a broken engagement to childhood sweetheart/honorary brennan kale.
when she crashes her car after a too-boozy night out, sunday's brother denny convinces her to return home to recuperate from her injuries, and, with all the brennans back under one roof again, the dynamics burgeon predictably into a messy emotional stew of love, loyalty, protectiveness, grievances, unanswered questions, old feels, and DRAMA.
...Sunday knew a thing or two about that: the terrible fallout that came with hiding shameful secrets from the people who mattered most.
and there will be fallout.
the strength of the story isn't in its originality, but in the ease of its storytelling, the lively characters, and the confident flow of the writing. structured as a series of rotating POVs between six of the characters (sunday, denny, mickey, kale, jackie, vivienne), we get a wide range of perspectives and a peep into the interior lives of individuals directly and indirectly involved in the various dramas unfolding.
i especially enjoyed the way chapter transitions are handled here: each character-POV chapter closes with a line of dialogue from a different character, which same line of dialogue is then used to open the next chapter, introducing the arrival of the next POV sorta like that fella announcing guests at royal balls and suchlike.
it's a big warm story and it's lovely to spend time with characters who feel complex and authentic, even though this book does that thing i hate specifically because of its inauthenticity—where ONE CONVERSATION is avoided for a flimsy reason, and everything falls apart as a result. i'm side-eying YOU and your dang letter-eating rug, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
still, despite that tiresome contrivance, i loved the novel's overall easy-breeziness and i'm looking forward to her next one with GUSTO!!!
this is a story about a prestigious family-owned ballet school in the run-up to their big holiday season production of The Nutcracker;NOW AVAILABLE!!!
this is a story about a prestigious family-owned ballet school in the run-up to their big holiday season production of The Nutcracker; the atmosphere crackling with the energy of anxious parents and tiny dancers; hope, excitement, and disappointment mingling in the air.
but this is megan abbott, so it's gonna dig deep under that banal sugarplum premise to unearth the gothic drama lurking just beneath the festive girl-glitter, removing the pretty pink toe shoes to expose the mangled dancer's feet within—blackened toenails sprinkling off, reminding you, as she always does, how beautiful things could be all broken inside.
ballet is the logical next-step in abbott's progression of novels spotlighting the gritty underbelly of ostensibly pretty, "girly" pursuits (cheerleading in Dare Me, gymnastics in You Will Know Me); the brute physicality and athleticism required to compete at the highest levels of these largely female-dominated spheres, and the psychological fortitude; the drive and ambition, the sheer willpower and sacrifice it takes to succeed.
ballet illustrates all of this perfectly in its juxtaposition of fragility and power—physically demanding, dancers achieving strength and flexibility by breaking and reshaping their bodies, the sheer amount of pain that goes into creating the illusion of lightness, effortlessness, in a performance.
We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It's our friend, our lover.
When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means?
What, they'd ask every time.
You're no longer a dancer.
megan abbott is the absolute queen when it comes to panning all the dark bits out of the sugar and spice of the adolescent female experience; ambition, rage, desire, obsession, the space where childhood loyalty gives way to self-interest, and most especially, the power of young bodies—the exhilarated flush of training, of winning, the freedom and power in the strength of their limbs, the invigorating discovery of their sexual currency, her characters a-quiver with invincibility and the possibilities of life before them.
although the bodies in this one are grown, the characters have lived so narrowly that they are emotional adolescents in many ways, and as ballet teachers, they are surrounded wall-to-wall by young bodies, the book claustrophobic with 'em: stretching, posing, arching, aching, yearning. it's sweat and effort and pushing beyond limits, and it is her most frankly erotic work thus far. even when it's not explicitly about sex, it's using the language of sex to create this kinda sensual fog that permeates everything:
Long summer nights, the click of the beetles, the soft grind of the cicadas, all those crickets rubbing their legs together, the low moan of the mosquitoes at the screen.
yeah, megan abbott just made bugs sexy, and the eroticism jamboree doesn’t stop at the wanton moaning of insects, flip to any page and there’ll be a passage like that; something oblique or overt making it very warm in here, indeed. let’s try it!
The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.
They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.
you can play this game yourselves at home, very soon.
plotstuff: sisters dara and marie durant were raised in a ballet-bubble, indifferently homeschooled by their dancer-mother while their father worked long stretches away from home, his occasional presence in their realm almost an intrusion:
Every evening when he wasn't traveling, he'd come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara's or Marie's eager hands on it, their mother's voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.
their childhood was sheltered and friendless, with nothing but dance and each other, but they were happy in their female cave, wearing leotards all day and dancing until their feet went numb, learning lessons about life and love and dance from their glamorous-feline mother.
the female-energy-dominated sphere changed when the girls were teenagers and their mother's star pupil charlie moved in with them. their bubble expanded to absorb him; a boy, but still a lithe-bodied member of their tribe, training all day together, the foursome piling into their mother's bed at night to watch performances; inseparable, the boundaries between them blurred, and soon dara and charlie begin sleeping together.
abbot's depiction of the highly-charged atmosphere within their "Hansel and Gretel house" with its "rotting gingerbread trim" is *chef's kiss* perfection. even before charlie's arrival, their lives were characterized by a careless, nearly claustrophobic intimacy—growing up on top of each other, always half-undressed, sweating their leotards sheer, their days spent focused on their bodies—legs, hips, posture, and the pleasurable pain of delicate things tearing—a hothouse of sensuality where the girls discovered the secret pleasures of their bodies separated only by the partition between their bunk bed, casual and even somewhat competitive about masturbation and their orgasms, dara having sex with charlie while marie lay awake above them; the whole house a warm pink erotically-charged dynamic bonding them together. the three became inseparable, and after the girls' parents are killed in a car accident, charlie and dara get married and the three of them continue to live together in their childhood home, running their mother's studio. marie, the younger, softer sister instructing the beginners, while dara whips the older ones into hardcore dancers, and charlie, his body broken after a years of injuries and surgeries, manages the business side of things and everything continues as it always has.
It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn't. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.
the fire (which, i know i've been going on and on with too many words and blah, but most of this is backstory and the fire takes place on page 29, so we're not even close to spoilertown) destroys a portion of the already-rickety studio, but the bigger consequence is that it brings derek into their lives; the swaggering contractor and unlikely suitor who nevertheless becomes marie's lover. dara can't understand why delicate marie is drawn to this man; so loud and blunt and emphatically masculine as he invades their space; the wolfish, brute sexuality of him leaving marks on marie's skin. his arrival is the catalyst that challenges their whole small stunted world.
it's slow-burning sinister; a gothic suburban drama—grey gardens with a splash of vc andrews—featuring insular and codependent characters drifting between a crumbling house and a crumbling studio, bloody toe shoes strewn about; a story of submission and power, obsession and mental fragility, everything obscured by smoke and family secrets...it's so very deliciously megan abbott and soon it can will be yours.
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me getting my hands on this ARC is the best thing about 2021 so far. review to come...
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
this is the second book i have read by tayloroooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
this is the second book i have read by taylor jenkins reid, and while her books may not be literary-award great, they are great fun—fast-paced and frothy, but underneath the pure escapist pleasure of them are layers with real emotional texture.
this one is similar to Daisy Jones & The Six in a bunch of ways—the dual shiny/pointy nature of fame with its various perks and temptations, female characters whose raw talents are sidelined or overshadowed by the media's fixation on their sex appeal & relationships, the unsuitability of musicians as romantic partners, etc etc.
but this one is set in the eighties!
i keed, i keed—the differences outweigh the similarities, and this is a far more immersive and satisfying read than Daisy Jones & The Six. it's not without its flaws, but the parts that i liked i liked a LOT.
the novel unfolds over the 24 hours making up august 27, 1983; the day the four rivas siblings will host their annual end-of-summer party, which we are told right from the first page is going to end in literal flames that'll burn the whole damn place to the ground before spreading down the entire malibu coastline.
so we know what’s gonna happen, and if we’re paying attention, we know who’s responsible for the fire pretty early on, but this isn’t a mystery novel (if it was, it would be an investigation into the mystery of why people throw parties because even before all the property damage starts, this party sounds terrible)
having told you right off the bat how it'll end, the book can then take its time getting there, a slow temporal striptease doled out in one-hour intervals—each chapter covers a single hour of the day, but it also dips back into the past providing roughly thirty years of backstory about the rivas family.
long story short is: boy meets girl, boy becomes a famous singer and can’t hack the monogamous family man thing very long, leaving his wife and four kids behind to ride the MICK RIVAS fame and fortune train, never contacting them or sending a dime their way.
so june moms up, raising her children beautifully on her own until her demons force her oldest daughter nina to sister up and take care of jay, hud, and kit on her own, their lives shaped by sacrifice and disappointing men; being let down by unreliable fathers and husbands and seeing life’s early promises derailed.
not so much for mick. he gets to have all the toys.
anyway, the siblings grow up living in the shadow of fame cast by a father they barely remember, rise from their humble beginnings into their own successes and their own fame, all beautiful, unusually close-knit and down-to-earth; their lives filled with surfing and tennis and golden california sunshine, and every year they throw a party. over the years, this party acquires a reputation as the Event at which to be seen, attracting celebrities (actual and made-up famous people) and leechy hangers-on as well as everyday local folks and every year it gets a little bigger and a little more out of hand: bigger names, harder drugs, worse behavior.
to be honest, character-wise i was really only invested in june and, to a lesser extent, nina. kit could have been one of the most interesting characters: the baby of the family too-often treated like a baby, desperate to prove herself equal to her older, more accomplished siblings, discovering who she is and what she wants out of her life on her own terms, but she was a little one-dimensional on the page, which was kind of a let-down.
the story gets a little haphazard, particularly towards the end where POV shifts rapidly as the story winds to a close and the party builds to a nightmare, flitting from character to character, many of them sideline people crammed into the party and the narrative—where some of them are or will become significant but others are just taking up space. the ending is very montage-y—which i liked and where—yes—many of those brief interludes with rando guests pay off, but the whole energy of the end is a little distracting and frenetic. which is meant to mirror the energy of the party, but still.
for the most part, though, it's an enjoyable and frequently poignant look at family and legacy and love; at what we give up, or what we refuse to give up, when all of those things collide.
good for beach reading, good for snow days and probably rainy spring or fall days, too. don't get bossed around by the weather!
i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned "you need to read this!" beseechments, i never felt any urgency to pick it up. it seemed like it would probably be fine—middlebrow domestic suspense, maybe a decent twist, but there wasn't anything about it that struck me as special.
but hell, i've misjudged a book before.
if this hadn't shown up at my house in a box FAR too big to ignore, i probably wouldn't have picked this one up, either, but since i can be easily bought off with a trowel, i dug in (chortle), and i wound up having a great time with it! the mystery elements were fairly predictable*, but i absolutely loved fern, and there was much more depth and nuance to her character than i'd expected, as well as more humor and some genuinely moving moments.
plotstuff: fern and rose are twins, but they are as different as two strangers who got off an elevator on the same floor, and hepworth reinforces their differences with how she shapes their alternating POVs: fern's is a standard, although digressive, first-person narrative, while rose's version of events is relayed through a series of journal entries.
fern has sensory-processing difficulties; she is hypersensitive to touch, and when faced with crowds of people, excessive or sudden noises or lights, she becomes overwhelmed into a sort of panic attack. she's also neurodivergent, which can make the interacting-with-patrons part of her job as a librarian a little precarious, but also very funny. and for me—neurotypical but small-talk averse and impatient with imprecise queries, wincingly familiar. additional fern-and-karen samesies are that we are both excellent at the readers' advisory parts of our jobs and both suspicious of/confounded by the computers-and-printers aspect.
not a spoiler, just a delightful but overlong passage you may or may not choose to read.
...it takes me several seconds to register the woman with pointy coral fingernails who has appeared at the desk, clutching a stack of books against her hip. I roll my ergonomic chair slightly to the right so I can still see the children...but distractingly, the woman moves with me, huffing and fidgeting and, finally, clearing her throat. Finally, she clicks her fingernails against the desk. "Excuse me."
"Excuse me," I repeat, rolling the statement around in my head. It feels unlikely that she is actually asking to be excused. After all, patrons are free to come and go as they please in the library, they don't have to ask for the privilege. It's possible, I suppose, that she's asking to be excused for impoliteness, but as I didn't hear her belch or fart, that also seems improbable. As such, I conclude she has employed the odd social custom of asking to be excused as a means of getting a person's attention. I open my mouth to tell her that she has my attention, but people are so impatient nowadays and she cuts me off before I can speak.
"Do you work here?" she asks rudely.
Sometimes the people in this library can be surprisingly dense. For heaven's sake, why would I be sitting behind the desk—wearing a name badge!—if I didn't work here? That said, I acknowledge that I don't fit the stereotypical mold of a librarian. For a start, at twenty-eight, I'm younger than the average librarian (forty-five, according to Librarian's Digest) and I dress more fashionably and colorfully than the majority of my peers—I'm partial to soft, bright T-shirts, sparkly sneakers, and long skirts or overalls emblazoned with rainbows or unicorns. I wear my hair in two braids, which I loop into a bun above each ear (not a reference to Princess Leia, though I do wonder if she found the style as practical as I do for keeping long hair out of your face when you are a woman with things to do). And, yet, I am most definitely a librarian.
"Are you going to serve me, young lady?" the woman demands.
"Would you like me to serve you?" I ask patiently. I don't point out that she could have saved herself a lot of time by simply asking to be served.
The woman's eyes boggle. "Why do you think I'm standing here?"
"There are an infinite number of reasons," I reply. "You are, as you may have noticed, directly adjacent to the water fountain, which is a high-traffic area for the library. You might be using the desk to shuffle documents on your way over to the photocopier. You may be admiring the Monet print on the wall behind me—something I do several times a day. You may have paused on your way to the door to tie your shoelace, or to double-check if that person over in the nonfiction section is your ex-boyfriend. You might, as I was before you came along, be enjoying Linda's wonderful rendition of 'The Three Little Pigs'—"
I have more examples, many many more, but I am cut off by Gayle, who approaches the desk hurriedly. "May I help you there?"
although fern's sensory sensitivities make her life challenging, she has developed routines and strategies to manage them and she has rose to help her through any tricky situations that may arise.
rose is an efficient, take-charge kind of woman, married with a successful career as an interior designer, but she always makes time for fern—they have dinner together several times a week, and she involves herself in every detail of fern's life. rose established herself as fern's protector when they were children, even before their mother overdosed, and she is the only person who knows fern's darkest secret and the reason she needs to be protected from herself.
because of this secret, fern has always gratefully deferred to rose for guidance, and her side of the story is liberally sprinkled with rose's advice and opinions, like so:
I try to avoid conversations about things other than books, although I'll occasionally indulge Gayle in a conversation about her garden or her grandchildren, because Rose says it's polite to do this with people who we like.
when rose's desire for a baby is thwarted by her own biology, fern decides she owes it to her sister to conceive one for her. she meets a man 'named' wally who understands and shares some of her idiosyncrasies, and as their relationship develops into more than just a means to a procreational end, rose becomes a bit territorialconcerned with fern's newfound independence from her, and wally has his own concerns about the sisters' relationship.
fern may have difficulty with everyday social cues, but she nails the complexities of sororal dynamics:
Sisterly relationships are so strange in this way. The way I can be mad at Rose but still want to please her. Be terrified of her and also want to run to her. Hate her and love her, both at the same time. Maybe when it comes to sisters, boundaries are always a little bit blurry. Blurred boundaries, I think, are what sisters do best.
anywhooooo, this is a much longer review than i meant to write when i sat down, and very few people are bothering to read this far so i guess this is a private enough place to confess that i had myself one of those rare misty moments during the scene where fern is riding the bus to the clinic and sits in the pregnant-passenger seat. not a full-on cry, but since it's so rare for me to even get that tight-throat pre-cry feeling when reading, i'm gonna fib a bit and put it on my "books that made me cry" shelf and hope that this is the beginning of a whole new me; a me who is able to be moved to tears (and, more importantly, to be SCARED) by books like everybody else.
an observation interesting to no one:
between this one, the murderbot series, and The Maid, i've read quite a little cluster of books lately whose main characters, for various reasons, struggle with human interactions: navigating social cues, wrestling with idiom or subtext, defaulting to literalism, developing coping mechanisms—putting so much effort into understanding and being understood. and either authors are getting better (more sensitive and thoughtful) about writing these kinds of characters, or i'm losing my curmudgeonly edge, because in the past, these character types came off annoyingly twee and inauthentic, and yet these recent few have not rubbed me the wrong way at all. bonus points for lessons in how to human better:
Asking questions is a tactic I use when small talk is required—it makes you appear interested while simultaneously putting all the effort of the conversation on the other party.
on it.
additional observation interesting to no one:
if you read this book or the spoiler passage i laboriously typed out, you will know that sartorially, fern is rita:
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in conclusion, hepworth's cover designer is phoning it in.
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tl;dr—sisters. secrets. schemes
* REAL SPOILER (view spoiler)[i mean, sheesh—they're twins—they always make one evil at the twin factory, so no surprise there! (: (hide spoiler)]
fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.
this wasn't an appropriate book for this particular challenge, but i will nestle my explanation 'bout that beneath a spoiler tag for easy skippability because i know it's pretty self-indulgent to dwell on such an irrelevant matter, but i am powerless to resist my need to justify my LIFE CHOICES. come into my confessional, or don't.
so, this book was supposed to come out in 2021 and was delayed until 2022, which was frustrating to me because i loved The Book of M so much
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and then we hit 2022 and i started to panic again because there was so much conflicting information about the pub date—i was obsessively checking the dates on bn and ingram and amazon and william morrow—some said march, some said june or july, and it was unclear whether the US edition would come out with this (excellent) cover
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or this yukky one
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unable to get a consensus about pub date or cover, i ended up preordering it from book depository, which listed it as march with the cover i wanted. and then it turned out to be pubbing in the US in march with the cover i wanted AND the copy i got was a US edition ANYWAY, somehow, so there we go. even though this goal is meant to get me reading books that have been sitting here unread despite the WANTING of them being so great that i went to the effort and expense of importing them, and this one was only waiting here for a month before i could get to it, my intentions were good, since i thought i was getting it several months early, and i regret nothing. (hide spoiler)]
okay, that's sorted. now to the book.
i initially gave this five stars, but i brought it down to a four because five stars puts it on the same level as The Book of M, which it is not.
it's a completely different beast than my very-beloved The Book of M, which is haunting and measured and examines huge themes of identity, community, and memory. The Cartographers is more of a romp—very fast-paced and zippy, very light in tone. and at first i appreciated its zippiness as a contrast to the gravitas of The Book of M, because it showcases the breadth of shepherd's range. but while i'm sad to see so many negative reviews of this, i can't disagree with some of the points being made against it. this one doesn't go so deep. and the relationships between the characters are not particularly complex. and there are, perhaps, too many characters. and it leaves itself open to a lot of questions about why characters did or didn't do things that seem like pretty obvious ways to avoid decades of headaches. it's a breezy adventure story, and i loved that about it, but it doesn't ultimately stick to yer ribs.
still, although the character motivations and decisions are somewhat murky and invite "why, though" scrutiny, that's true of any fairy tale fantasy, which is how i'm choosing to think of this one—just a sparkling bit of magical realism that you can enjoy on that level. dissecting this one won't bring you any joy. i'm not saying people shouldn't have questions or are wrong to want something with import and resonance, and to them, i can confidently say that The Book of M will scratch that itch. this one is a bit more surface-level enjoyment, and i'm okay with that.
it's light, it's lovely. there are some sad bits in it, but there's no time spent on emotional fallout—each setback is briskly dealt with and the story's energies are refocused on the obsessive hunt, the discovery, the drive towards answers.
The Book of M is weightier, more profound and sad and oozing with meaningful themes. i recommended it to a friend recently and she started to read it, but said it felt too close to home, quarantine-wise, and she had to put it down. which i get. this is the opposite of that—it's an adventure story built out of pure escapist wonder, imagination, and possibilities, which is the kind of thing i appreciate more in the nowtimes, when i find myself craving something swift-but-satisfying that'll relieve some of the pressure of existing in a world on fire.
i love the idea of paper towns—imaginary places included by cartographers on their maps to prevent other mapmakers from copying their work—and shepherd's afterword, in which she divulges her inspiration for the idea of a paper town becoming real is some absolutely charming real-life magic.
The Book of M lives in a very special place in my heart that this didn't come close to approaching, but i enjoyed the hell out of reading it and knowing now that shepherd can write ALL KINDS OF BOOKS is thrilling to me, so i'm excited to devour whatever she comes up with next.
**************************** oh my god, when did this cover drop? it is gorgeous and almost makes up for the yearlong publishing delay.
The thought crossed my mind that I should have been a bit more wary before climbing into a helicopter and flying to God knows where wi
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
The thought crossed my mind that I should have been a bit more wary before climbing into a helicopter and flying to God knows where without an escape route.
this. this a thousand times.
i used to read a lot of monsterporn because it was so much fun to review, and one of the things that always struck me was how agreeable the human participants always were, how easily they adapted to the situations in which they found themselves; able to go from zero to "i am having sex with two gargoyles" without asking any of the sensible, albethey mood-killing, questions one ought to consider before accepting a foreign object (so VERY foreign) into oneself.
while this book is not monsterporn (view spoiler)[(although it's not NOT monsterporn, either) (hide spoiler)], there's a similar breezy detachment to its heroine, a sort of nonchalance in her decision-making, and her attitude of sitting back and letting events occur as though she's a spectator rather than a participant in all of it might take readers who aren't used to such a laissez-faire gal a minute to adjust.
in order to appreciate this book, which is a perfect rainy-day suspense-fun read, you need to accept that this character operates as a leaf on the breeze, passive and incurious, taking whatever comes her way obligingly.
it's all very on brand for traditional gothic lit*—the submissive female who asks zero questions before throwing herself fully into the abyss, in this case jumping on a on a private plane bound for a foreign country the very same day she receives a letter in a language she cannot read telling her about the inheritance of a family she never knew about, and never mind she doesn't have a passport, all will be arranged for her by trust-us strangers and then she's up in the middle of nowhere in an italian castle in the mountains with no way to contact anyone back home and huh, where did my husband go and hmm, has it been a week already up here in isolation and boy, where does the time go?
if you can get on board with that, you will enjoy this—it's a fun book that cleaves pretty closely to the "where you thought it was going" path for a time before abruptly spiking your punch with lsd and taking you...somewhere else, completely off the rails but in the best possible way.
3.5 rounded up because whaaaaaaaaat??
* and not that newfangled victorian gothic you kids are all about these days, with all the wuthering and the stubborn little governesses.
i enjoyed The Summer that Melted Everything a bunch, but Betty; a standalone with spillover into TSTME, has so much more weight. i remember bits and pieces from The Summer that Melted Everything—i remember the language being striking, i remember the framework and a few details in particular, but this one is going to stay in my brain for a lot longer, and there are specific scenes i know are with me for life; not as fond memories of a book i enjoyed, but as straight-up reader scars.
for me, that’s a good thing, but some people’ll be too gentle for this book, and they will read it and low-star it because it made them too sad or uncomfortable but when you consider it's a family saga inspired by the life of mcdaniel’s own mother, it becomes like that joke about the man and the boy walking through the woods, where the boy says “hey mister, it’s getting dark and i’m scared.” and the man says “how do you think i feel, i have to walk back alone.”
[‘course, in this case, it would be a girl—there are so many ways a girl can hurt. and if A girl comes of age against the knife isn’t just begging to be tattooed across all the clavicles of lilith fair, i don’t know what is.]
in any event—i don’t know what is hand-on-bible truth here, or what has been inflated for dramatic effect, but even if everything in this book was conjured up out of the clear blue sky, day after day this world reminds us it is full of horrorshows and people who have survived things others are too lily-livered to even read about. and that, to me, seems insensitive.
this book is sad. it is SAD. it is beautiful and broken and filled with tenderness and love and cruelty and neglect and it is SEARING. i cannot emphasize enough that, like life, it is a mixture of sad and lovely. although, also like life, for every sad you see coming, there’ll be two that’ll catch you off guard.
i will admit, it took me a minute to get into it. the language isn’t as engorged as it was in The Summer that Melted Everything, but there was something a little fiddly and twee to the beginning that didn’t grab me right away but once it did, i was thunderstruck, rapt, unable to look away &etc. i belonged to it.
mcdaniel has excellent control of the narrative, handling foreshadowing and discovery like a boss, and making you care about (almost) every member of this family, even at their least sympathetic.
a loud recommend for this book. it did things to me.
”God hates us.”
“The Carpenters?” I asked.
“Women.” She dabbed the lipstick against my lips, using her pinkie to smooth it into the corners. “He made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ‘em so deep, no one knows about ‘em except for them and us.”
With a delicate step back she looked at me, her eyes cutting where they landed.
“My, my, Betty girl.” she smiled. “Red is not your color, darlin’.”
*oh and p.s—whatever landon's “pudding pie” is; this wondrous magic of “multicolored gelatin cubes suspended in pink gelatin,” i want the recipe.*
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