My least favorite book in a strong trilogy, about the lives of two Métis families in contemporary Winnipeg, connected by a terrible crime. It’s intereMy least favorite book in a strong trilogy, about the lives of two Métis families in contemporary Winnipeg, connected by a terrible crime. It’s interesting how different each of the books is, and how they connect to each other: The Break is narrow in time but broad in character, mostly following the victim’s family; The Strangers is narrower in character but covers several years, exclusively following the perpetrator’s family. The Circle again covers a short period of time but is extremely broad in its cast: each of its 22 chapters is from a different perspective, including both families and other people tangentially related.
Structuring a novel as a metaphorical restorative justice circle is a cool idea, though I was relieved that there isn’t a literal restorative justice circle, which is probably not a good idea for these people and this crime. At the same time, it has its pitfalls. Vermette does a good job of keeping tabs on the major characters through other people’s point-of-view sections, but limiting each character to a chapter does distance the reader a bit from the central players. And where The Strangers showed a strong ability to differentiate character voices even in the third person, the deluge here makes them all sound fairly similar.
Meanwhile, some of the new people don’t really have anything to do, and so their entire sections consist of talking to a main character (Waaban), or worse, talking about a main character to third parties (Izzy), or worse still, just thinking about a main character’s backstory (Larry). If this were a restorative justice circle, I can’t say I’d care to hear this much from people whose connection to the crime is being mildly inconvenienced by the struggles of someone more seriously affected, and with this being the only snippet we see, it can make the minor characters’ inner lives look overly focused on someone who isn’t actually that important to them. I found the format most successful in catching us up on recurring secondary characters, whose chapters are often quite poignant: Ben, adjusting to retirement after his wife’s death; Shawn, getting to know his biological father, who’s in a nursing home; Nevaeh, now a single mother with big plans.
There’s a sense in which this structure makes the whole book feel like an extended epilogue—especially since it’s fairly short; even the 240-page count is a bit inflated, as a couple of chapters are formatted as prose poetry with a ton of white space. But don’t let that epilogue feel lull you into a false sense of security, because it’s ultimately leading up to a new and horrible tragedy. There’s certainly hope, resilience and love here, but nothing is really over.
All that said, I did enjoy the broad range of characters, from different ages and generations, different walks of life, all written believably and with sympathy, even when they’re difficult. Vermette is clearly a writer who is fundamentally interested in people, and if the book feels sometimes pulled in different directions because she just wants to follow some new person home and meet their family and hear about their job and explore how they came to be who they are, I actually love that. These books have always been about a community and about how people negotiate the circumstances of their lives. So widening the circle makes sense. I didn’t love how outright preachy Vermette has gotten on social justice issues, which is a change from her earlier books, though these books are very much placed in the moment in which they’re written and her milieu has probably changed too.
Some commentary on specific characters and their endings below the spoiler cut:
(view spoiler)[- Jake! This kid’s death hurt. I wondered if he even knew how little Emily mattered to Phoenix as a person—that the rape wasn’t even about Emily, it was about Phoenix laying claim to her baby daddy, which made me think there was very little chance of Phoenix harassing Emily again. Although who knows with Phoenix. Also, any so-called defense lawyer who is pushing for a guilty plea to murder within a week of the supposed crime, the only evidence of which is that someone with a habit of running away has disappeared again, and all while refusing to investigate exonerating evidence, is criminally incompetent. Don’t be taken in by fancy clothes.
- As for Phoenix, she’s in pretty much the same place she’s always been: you can see she has the capacity for redemption, but all the stars will have to align and stay aligned for it to work and is that ever going to happen? I felt bad for Joe and his family—they might be better off if Phoenix “just” steals their truck and gets out of there.
- Cedar-Sage let me down a bit in this one: I don’t know whether it’s because of her growing up, or her not having much to do here, or from several of her appearances being through the eyes of people who sort of like her but also find her a bit pitiful (all this sitting at the window pining is a bit much) or from so much of the social justice preaching being put on her. In any case, reading about her wasn’t the emotional experience it was in the last book. And I wasn’t sure what Ziggy saw in her.
- Lou continues to annoy the hell out of me. The combination of her chapters being in first person when no one else is (except Cedar, who has youth and pathos and more central story importance going for her) and her always having the most banal and obnoxious romantic drama in the midst of a family tragedy, makes it feel like she thinks she is the protagonist in a work of women’s fiction when in fact she’s a secondary character in a literary one. This time I think the annoyance must be intended because it’s such a sordid affair, and with such awful results.
- Speaking of which, Tommy (now Tom) was a lot more sympathetic last time around—I wonder if Vermette soured on police in the interim, or just wanted a realistic story of someone who starts out idealistic and well-intentioned, then gets sucked into the system (and marries the wrong person, which has turned out exactly the way you’d have guessed).
- Alex pissed me off too. Not only for, you know, ordering a hit on a kid just trying to protect his family, but for his warped view of his own family dynamics. Alex can’t imagine how his brother and sister turned out so selfish! Well, for the record, by “selfish” he means not involved in the family gang business, and as for how Elsie and Joe turned out, Alex apparently does not realize that he was their abusive mom’s golden child. This book doesn’t even go into that, which had me outraged on their behalf—new readers might believe him!
- I was glad for Elsie’s hopeful ending though. This poor woman has been through the wringer her whole life and finally seems to have arrived in a good place, with a supportive and healthy community around her. I just wish she’d be more involved with Cedar, though I can see how feelings of inadequacy are keeping her away.
- I had some doubts about Emily’s identification with asexuality. She is annoyed that her mom and therapist suspect this is trauma-related rather than inherent to her being, but I was with them, given that, you know, her first and only sexual experience was a horrific rape at age 13 and she now lives holed up in her mom’s basement seeing practically no one. But I felt like we weren’t supposed to question her identification given the overall context of the book, its embrace of neopronouns and so on, and if the point here was to include asexual representation, could it not have been literally anyone else? Why is this the only one introduced in such a way that you can’t help but question it, while at the same seeming to scold anyone who does? Maybe it’s actually a good choice, to make readers think, but it irked me a little.
- It’s funny that out of all the prior POV characters still living, Stella—the one the first book’s blurb treated like the protagonist, though she wasn’t—is the only one not to reappear here. We don’t even really get an update. And she was in fact affected by the crime. (hide spoiler)]
At any rate, I had sufficient emotional investment in the characters that overall I did enjoy this. I think Vermette gets people, and writes well and with complexity about a marginalized community. But for new readers, don’t start here: begin with The Strangers or preferably The Break, which anyway are stronger and more cohesive....more
This is an incredible book, and an incredibly bleak one. If it works for you, it is pretty much the emotional equivalent of getting dragged through brThis is an incredible book, and an incredibly bleak one. If it works for you, it is pretty much the emotional equivalent of getting dragged through broken glass. But it is very well-written, very real, full of understanding and empathy for people usually dismissed and marginalized by society—so I hope people will read it, both for understanding’s sake and just because it’s an excellent novel. There aren’t too many writers these days who can get me this invested in their characters, even worrying about what will happen to them after the book is over!
The Strangers follows four Métis women living in Winnipeg, over about five years—three generations of one family, but circumstances have torn them apart so that they are now almost strangers to each other. Phoenix begins the novel in her late teens, giving birth in prison and struggling with rage and depression. Her bookish younger sister, Cedar-Sage, is in foster care, about to be sent to live with the father she’s never known and his new family. Their mother, Elsie, is on the streets, struggling with drug addiction and self-hatred. And in flashback chapters we also meet her embittered mother, Margaret, and see some of the origins of the family’s trauma.
This is a character-driven story, and Vermette takes real risks with the characters; the book presents such an authentic picture of high-crisis poverty and addiction and trauma, never taking the easy way out. But you come to understand these complex people and what made them and how in better circumstances they might have been completely different. Everyone will love Cedar-Sage of course, she has this combination of admirable determination and smarts with so much vulnerability and loneliness that you just want to hug her the whole book. I felt similarly about Elsie—Elsie is a mess, she’s a bit pitiful and I wanted her to be able to do better, but it’s also so very clear how she wound up this way. She’s a sensitive person who has had an awful life, beginning with her mother’s constant rejection and contempt and then with more trauma on top of (probably stemming from) that. Her chapters reminded me of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and its examination of how people wind up addicts. But it’s important to note—in her chapters, as in all of them—that this isn’t a hopeless book. There is warmth here, and possibility: the question is just whether it will be enough.
Phoenix is a tougher character: she has also had an awful life and you can see how she wound up in prison and how she might have turned out differently, and empathize with her current lousy situation. At the same time, she clearly has a violence problem and while I wanted her to get help, I didn’t exactly want her to get out. And then there’s Margaret, who is pretty much a textbook narcissist. She is impressively awful—as in, I was impressed Vermette was willing to write a major character this awful, while still feeling authentic and frighteningly relatable. (I think I need to re-examine my own tendencies toward annoyance and resentment after reading this character. Fortunately, I don’t have kids!) She’s not quite the villain of the piece—and under different circumstances she’d also have been a better person—but she seemed to me to have a much higher level of agency and malice than the others in her ruining her own and her family’s lives.
This is a companion novel to The Break, but while there is character overlap, they feel quite different: The Break has a larger cast, a much shorter timeframe, and perhaps most importantly, the extended family featured in that book is in a much better place—emotionally, relationally, financially—to handle what life throws at them. One comes away from The Break feeling that despite everything, the Traverses will probably be more or less okay, which I can’t say about the Strangers. Unusually, though this book is set later, you could read them in either order without spoilers, though you’ll certainly have a different view of some of these characters if you read The Break first. For instance, The Strangers never tells us why Phoenix is in prison ((view spoiler)[rape (hide spoiler)]), or how Elsie came to give birth to her ((view spoiler)[also rape (hide spoiler)]). And the final line lands completely differently depending on whether you recognize the speaker: (view spoiler)[if not, this is a nice optimistic moment: Cedar’s moved into her college dorm, a dorm-mate is being friendly, maybe she’s finally finding her people? But if you do, it’s an ominous note: Ziggy is one of Phoenix’s victims, and I don’t think she and Cedar can be friends, especially given Cedar wants to keep Phoenix in her life. I think Ziggy will feel betrayed when she learns of this connection. I’m worried that Cedar will wind up ostracized in her dorm and with the whole campus knowing her as “that girl whose sister raped a 13-year-old with a broken bottle” because that’s a level of awful that nobody will ever forget. (hide spoiler)]
All that said, I was consistently impressed with the writing here. Though three of the four points-of-view are (wisely) told in the third person, they still each feel distinct, based in the voices of the characters. The dialogue also feels very real and true-to-life (I wanted to be annoyed by the long monologues from the prison mentor, but couldn’t because he sounds exactly like someone I know and it is adorable). The stories are compelling, both in the present and in the flashbacks, which I was always eager to read to see how this puzzle fit together. And of course the characters are three-dimensional and real; I believed in them far more than I usually do fictional people. If I have a complaint, it’s that their endings are so ambiguous. I want a third book to see what happens next!...more
A disappointing read. This has some fun elements but many others that are shallow, and the plot just needs some work, as the book struggles to keep thA disappointing read. This has some fun elements but many others that are shallow, and the plot just needs some work, as the book struggles to keep the tension up and relies heavily on “because otherwise it would break the plot” contrivances.
VenCo is an urban fantasy novel about a witchy road trip. Lucky is a 20-something Canadian working unfulfilling temp jobs and supporting her grandmother Stella, now in the early stages of dementia. When Lucky learns that she’s actually a witch, she and Stella go on a journey to find the final witch for a coven to which Lucky has been invited.
This book has a really slow start, which isn’t a criticism I often make; I don’t care how mundane the stakes are as long as they exist. Unfortunately, here they don’t quite. We spend 60 pages meandering through Lucky’s ordinary life and seeing flashbacks of her dead mom before she ever meets a witch—while Lucky has worries (her apartment building is going to be converted soon, affordable housing is hard to come by), she doesn’t do anything about them and so they don’t rise to the level of plot problems. We’re 100 pages in before Lucky learns that she’s met a witch. And we’re 200 pages in before the quest starts, because the second hundred pages are spent on the witches just hanging out and sharing their backstories, without any particular reason to be concerned for them.
The second half of the book is a little better as there are clear goals to pursue, but the villain is built up as highly dangerous only to come across as tame and easily foiled in his scenes with Lucky. Supposedly if this coven comes together it will somehow solve all the world’s problems—as in our world’s problems, climate change and so on—but how they are supposed to go from scrying and dream-walking (the only powers they seem to have) to saving the world is never addressed. Nor are many other basic questions: why is this particular coven so important, when there are others out there? Why would you make membership in this all-important coven dependent on finding long-lost souvenir spoons? Why is there a deadline on the coven getting together? So many arbitrary, nonsensical plot points ultimately make for an unsatisfying story.
As for the characters, I basically liked Lucky and Stella, and their grandma/grandkid dynamic was probably the best part of the book. There’s not much depth or complexity though—except perhaps in the villain, who is hilariously over-the-top and seduces everyone he meets—and the book introduces a dozen other witches only to give them nothing to do but lots of scenes in which they wring their hands over the progress of Lucky’s quest, while simultaneously failing to warn her about known dangers because they don’t believe in preparedness. Or because the author is terrified that any application of common sense would ruin the plot, I don’t know.
I do think this book will have more appeal to those who love girl power books, which aren’t quite the same as feminist books. While the women here have some power, thematically the book is quite shallow. It goes full-blown war-of-the-sexes, which as it turns out is still a war of the sexes when you include trans people, as all men with magic are apparently evil witch hunters while all the women are “yaaas queen!” Dimaline tries to drag historical witch hunts into this, and just comes across as uninformed—the coven’s base is Salem, where a third of the executed “witches” were men and the accusers girls (which the book definitely does not acknowledge as it would ruin the whole simplistic “history is all about men keeping women down!” line). She also claims that European witch hunts targeted women for being awesome (“smart, or queer, or loud”), rather than, say, old, poor, or mentally ill, which is much closer to the truth, but of course less glamorous and less likely to inspire smug superiority to the benighted past in its readership.
In the end though, I think this book cares more about glamor—for all its brief waving of the anti-capitalist flag, there’s a lot of materialism, a lot of drooling over antique this and bespoke that and attention to the quality of products. A lot of wanting its women to be powerful, without actually doing much, or to make change without making sacrifices; see the vague claim that women taking leadership roles in corporations is in itself “undermining the foundations of colonialism” (skeptics might prefer “selling out”). If you’re looking for nuance or deep thought this is not the book for you.
And it could have worked anyway—it has the makings of a fun, light urban fantasy read. I enjoyed the sheer modernity of it, the up-to-the-moment dialogue and product placement and the sprinkling of humor. With better editing, to tighten up the plot and raise the stakes and make them organic rather than contrived, it might have been great fun. But as is, I can’t recommend....more
A very slim graphic novel in which a troubled teen of Métis descent views scenes from Canadian history, specifically the Pemmican Wars of the2.5 stars
A very slim graphic novel in which a troubled teen of Métis descent views scenes from Canadian history, specifically the Pemmican Wars of the 1810’s. If you’ve never heard of this—essentially a violent dispute between two trading companies, which also roped in local tribes who did business with them—don’t feel too bad about it (though maybe you still should brush up on Canadian history), as the largest confrontation seems to have involved under 100 belligerents.
Probably the most interesting aspect of this graphic novel to me is just how little is explained: there’s no narration, no thought bubbles, and Echo—the protagonist—has no confidants, so there are many pages with no text at all and readers have to make their own deductions from the pictures. Perhaps the best part is how skillfully Echo’s isolation and depression is shown without a word being said, as she moves alone through her high school and foster home, fending off others’ attempts to reach out to her. That said, without knowing how Echo understands what’s happening to her, her repeated appearance in scenes from history is certainly open to interpretation. Mine is that these are dreams or perhaps visions, not time travel, given that almost no one pays her any mind when she appears.
The historical aspect is very weak though, with overly expository scenes that nevertheless fail to acquaint the reader with the larger picture (I followed up by reading some Wikipedia articles about the Pemmican Wars and I’m still not confident about what was going on). These scenes felt to me far younger than the YA book it’s sold as, probably most appropriate for the 6-8 age group—though admittedly, they might lack the context to interpret the modern-day scenes. But the book is so short, so simplified and so reliant on pictures that I definitely wonder why it’s advertised as for teens and not younger kids; I’ve read middle grade histories more involved than this.
As far as the art, it is perfectly fine and expressive though not exemplary—and I did notice one picture that was seemingly copy-pasted where it didn’t really make sense (all the other, adult bus passengers are in exactly the same positions on a subsequent trip?).
In the end, I think I read this in about 20 minutes and that was taking my time looking at the pictures and trying to puzzle out the chronology at the end, so it’s very little commitment if you are interested and don’t have to pay (or don’t mind paying) full price....more
An excellent novel, difficult to sum up. Broadly speaking, it’s the story of an extended family of indigenous Canadian women affected by a crime. A 13An excellent novel, difficult to sum up. Broadly speaking, it’s the story of an extended family of indigenous Canadian women affected by a crime. A 13-year-old girl is brutally sexually assaulted, and the book follows the aftermath and the investigation, mostly through the eyes of three generations of the girl’s older female relatives, as well as her best friend, one of the responding officers, and even the perpetrator. It’s often a dark book—set in the midst of winter in a crime-ridden neighborhood of what seems to be Winnipeg, among people who are all carrying some kind of trauma—but it also shows the love, community and purpose that help people carry on. And it does it all with nuance, never coming across as sentimental or too easy.
Interestingly, it seems to be common among indigenous debut novelists to center a large cast, with no single protagonist. This doesn’t always work for me (see for instance There There, which didn’t work for me at all, or Love Medicine, which I found middling), but here it does. All these people interact with each other and most are related, so it’s one cohesive story rather than many fragmented ones. And they’re all well-developed, with Vermette able to pack a lot of characterization and history into each character’s chapters, without spending too much time on any one person. Having many points-of-view also allows Vermette to showcase some impressive writing: although almost all of the chapters are in the third person, it’s inflected for the voice and vocabulary and thought processes of each character, which is sheer brilliance and fun to read. The dialogue is pitch-perfect as well.
I was also impressed by the book’s examination of themes, its refusal to accept easy moral judgments. The perpetrator is a very traumatized, messed-up person, born to a very traumatized mother, how many generations back does it go? The book doesn’t view this as an excuse, but it’s an explanation, and we can’t improve things if we don’t understand and seek to combat the causes. It probably helps that the perpetrator is (view spoiler)[also a girl, and sexual gratification has nothing to do with the assault (hide spoiler)] but there’s nothing gross or creepy about the inclusion of this perspective, nor any self-righteousness or wishful thinking about it. In fact, those chapters don’t explicitly deal with the assault at all, instead showing us what is important to this person and refusing to look away from their pain. It’s as strong a portrayal of trauma and the way it echoes forward through families and communities as any I have read.
My primary criticism of the book is that a couple of characters take up more space than their importance to the overall narrative seemed to merit. Stella seems close to the author’s heart, and I suspect Vermette identifies with her—Stella’s the one who got away, who got a college education and a career and has traveled internationally, though now she’s back and a stay-at-home mom and distanced from her family and community—but she ultimately seems pretty tangential for the degree of focus and emotion that her story gets. And it’s similar with Lou: I didn’t understand why Vermette set her apart by making her the only character (other than the great-grandma who gets one chapter) to have her sections in the first-person. Lou’s role in the story is as the victim’s tough aunt, the one who works in child protective services and has seen some shit, so it was baffling to me to introduce her in the midst of passively watching her relationship disintegrate, and center her entire first chapter around that—this creates a sad-sack first impression and gives her romantic drama more immediacy than it deserves.
On the positive side, there are a lot of great characters here: the dynamic between the lazy, racist older policeman and the gung-ho, mixed-race young guy is occasionally excruciating but feels extremely real (I have doubts about beat cops investigating a rape case but it makes for good drama). Cheryl, the artsy grandma who believes in love, and her complicated romantic life and strong relationship with her best friend, is pretty excellent. And I definitely wanted to know more about the Stranger family (and to see a reunion between Stella and Elsie—the childhood best friends whose lives took opposite paths—even though it would probably be awful). So I ordered the companion book right after finishing this, which is probably the best recommendation I can give....more
This is a thoughtful and well-written memoir of an Israeli woman, about her childhood, her globetrotting young adulthood, and later settling 3.5 stars
This is a thoughtful and well-written memoir of an Israeli woman, about her childhood, her globetrotting young adulthood, and later settling down in Canada. I was so excited to read it that I overlooked key information—namely, that it’s a memoir in essays, several previously published in slightly altered form, which always feels slightly disjointed compared to a book composed as a cohesive narrative.
And I enjoyed the segments about the author’s childhood, family and home country much more than the middle chapters about her global wanderings, in which she documents her experiences traveling broke, doing drugs, and having many short-lived relationships. It feels odd to criticize a memoir for this because these years happened and form a crucial part of her life story, but these sections also felt less insightful and meaningful to me.
That said, I loved the chapters at the beginning and end. Tsabari writes insightfully about growing up in a large family of Yemeni origin, about losing her beloved father at a young age, about discrimination against Mizrahi Jews in Israel, about uncovering the hidden history of her great-grandmother from Yemen. There’s a fascinating chapter about her time in the Israeli Defense Forces, in which she acts out and has problems with authority, and now examines the reasons why. There’s a great chapter toward the end about her experience of being assaulted on a bus, her patchy memory of the event, and her resulting trauma. The later segments about her relationship to her family and its history upon becoming a mother herself are also interesting.
Overall, while this one dragged a bit for me in the middle, when I liked it I thought it was fantastic, and it’s certainly well-written. I remain interested in picking up the author’s short story collection, which is reputed to be better....more
Part literary and cultural criticism and part memoir, this book is engaging, readable and will certainly make readers think. I have arguments with manPart literary and cultural criticism and part memoir, this book is engaging, readable and will certainly make readers think. I have arguments with many of the author’s ideas, but to an extent, this type of work exists as a starting point for debate. It will probably be most valuable to those who either have a deep personal investment in these issues or who haven’t ever engaged with disability activism or thought about disability representation in media before, but despite not falling into those categories, I still appreciated the memoir portions and found the book to be worthwhile food for thought. That said, this review will largely consist of the arguments because those take up more words!
Leduc, who has cerebral palsy and has suffered from depression, has a lot to say about fairy tales and how they represent people with disabilities: often the disability is a punishment, or is magically cured as a reward for virtue, or is the source of special powers. From fairy tales the book wanders into Disney movies—Leduc is really into princesses—and also, toward the end, superhero movies and the Game of Thrones show (heads up: she spoils the end without warning). Moving away from fairy tales to make sweeping statements based on only a narrow range of media seems to me a weakness, though her fairy tale criticism generally strikes me as solid. There are indeed many unfortunate messages in those old stories.
But what Leduc really wants to see in media is the realistic portrayal of the dailiness of living with a disability, without the disability meaning anything, being related in any way to magical powers, or being cured at any point. And I couldn’t help thinking, as I read all this, “have you considered realistic fiction?” Which on the one hand is a bit dismissive—just because fantasy contains unrealistic elements doesn’t mean all elements of any given work should be unrealistic—but on the other, she actually writes, “As a disabled woman, I don’t know what it means to have your body represented onscreen in a way that isn’t somehow tied to magic.” Which suggests an extremely narrow range of media exposure. Since we’re going beyond fairy tales, I can think of a lot of fantasy fiction including disabled protagonists whose disabilities aren’t tied to magic—of books I’ve actually read (search for recommendation threads online and you’ll see many more), there’s A Game of Thrones, The Mirror Empire, and Flame of Sevenwaters, for instance. So I think a lot of the type of storytelling Leduc is seeking already exists, though she evidently hasn’t found it.
And just as the book seems to choose the media it engages with somewhat arbitrarily, its notion of “disability” is idiosyncratic, if broad. It includes physical, mental and cognitive disabilities; disfigurement, including scars; lack of physical attractiveness; and being turned into an animal, monster, etc. There’s logical connection among these, as all relate to having a body that diverges from the societal ideal, and it fits to engage here with the many ways imperfect bodies are used as shorthand for villainy in fiction. (This is so common with facial differences that a UK group actually started a campaign called “I Am Not Your Villain.”) That said, I question some of her examples—she takes major issue with Scar in the Lion King for instance, whereas to me, a scar that might have been gained in a fight seems like a fairly legitimate way to communicate a villain’s toughness visually, with other types of disfigurement being much more egregious. Meanwhile, in the mental health chapter she suggests that it’s too easy to map personality disorders onto villains. But personality disorders, to my understanding, aren’t actual illnesses so much as descriptions of patterns of behavior seen as disruptive or antisocial (medicalized for purposes of receiving therapy to change them)—and what is a villain if not disruptive and antisocial? There are stronger points to be made here, such as that Disney is apparently more likely to represent an evil old lady with a cane than a good old lady with one.
But the biggest issue that troubles me with this vein of criticism is the “disabilities shouldn’t be healed in fantasy” argument, which Leduc endorses. Certainly, I see the issues with stories implying that only people with perfect bodies can be happy, or that if you have a disability, you must deserve it (or you aren’t working hard enough to “overcome” it). That said, I think Leduc goes much too far in claiming to speak for people with disabilities generally and then arguing that they don’t want their disabilities cured, they just want greater accessibility.
This is a complicated issue, and I suspect a more accurate summation would be, “Many people with disabilities are realistic about the fact that they aren’t likely to be cured, and find that other people’s behavior and lack of accessibility can make living with a disability much harder than it needs to be and in some cases is worse than the disability itself. Therefore, people with disabilities may find it offensive when able-bodied people focus on potential cures while overlooking issues of inclusion. Also, some people—especially those who were born with their disabilities and consider them part of their identities [for instance, members of the Deaf community, some people with autism, etc.]—do not want to change this part of themselves.” The author doesn’t take this more nuanced approach however, seeming to lump everyone together in her insistence that disabilities are barely a medical issue at all and should be embraced as is. Given that the preponderance of disabilities are acquired with aging and an awful lot of disability involves issues nobody wants—pain, fatigue, depression—I suspect this is an area where activists don’t represent the majority. Even from the author’s story, while after decades of struggle she seems to have come to terms with her limp, I don’t get the sense she’d necessarily reject magical healing if it existed (she really wants to wear high heels).
But I’ve seen authors do contortions to avoid exactly that. Take Flame of Sevenwaters for instance (I’m about to partly spoil it but it isn’t a great book). The novel features a teenage girl, Maeve, whose hands were severely burned in a fire when she was about 10, such that she can no longer use her fingers. She goes on an unrelated quest, and the fae ultimately offer to repair her hands. Maeve refuses, because “it would be too easy.” Um. Too easy for our current world perhaps, but just another treatment option in hers, and people typically view “easy” as a major plus in treatment options. It comes across as an author forcing an inorganic and unbelievable choice on a character to forestall reader criticism. Storytellers should of course respect their audience, but they should respect the integrity of their story too, and if you’ve created a world and a plot where this is a possibility (which is by no means true of all fantasy) maybe you need to let it happen—just because the real world isn’t so easy doesn’t automatically make something offensive. Plenty of fantasy elements are out of reach in the real world (her disability isn’t actually why Leduc isn’t a princess, after all. Money and power, however, are easily come by in fantasy).
There’s also a bit of goalpost-shifting in pursuit of criticism. For instance, Leduc takes being an ogre as a metaphor for disability, but is nevertheless displeased with the happy ending of Shrek, in which Fiona embraces her ogre form, because she needs Shrek to tell her she’s beautiful. Look, beauty is in the eye of the beholder—which is another way of saying that beauty is socially defined. Everyone needs to be told that they’re beautiful. It’s just that the closer someone is to their society’s ideal, the more they’ve picked up that message already and so may not need to hear it from their current love interest. Fiona has never had anyone react positively to her ogre form, so of course she needs to hear it, and I don’t see how this takes away from the ending. Leduc also seems to take issue with the whole notion of a happy ending, because not everyone’s life trends toward happiness—which is fair, but muddled since she also wants disabled characters to get them.
All that said, I did appreciate the book; considering issues of representation is worthwhile even if you don’t agree with everything a particular activist says, and it’s important to listen to different voices. This book didn’t convince me on every point, but the writing is good, it doesn’t take long to read, and I enjoyed the memoir sections. Probably most eye-opening for those new to disability criticism, to whom it should prove accessible....more
This was an unusual reading experience for me, in that I initially couldn’t stand Part 1, but rather than abandoning the book, skipped ahead to sectioThis was an unusual reading experience for me, in that I initially couldn’t stand Part 1, but rather than abandoning the book, skipped ahead to sections that interested me more. The book slowly grew on me and I wound up reading it all and appreciating it quite a bit, and it works fine out of order.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is the work of a Canadian medical doctor who treats primarily hardcore drug addicts, seeking to explain and contextualize addiction and change the conversation around it. It evidently has been quite an influential book and has been credited with helping change minds about the War on Drugs—which has taken a positive turn since this was first published in 2008.
This book’s goals go beyond policy arguments though, presenting an understanding of addiction as a continuum on which many types of dysfunction aren’t as different as we may think—from alcoholism and drugs to behavioral addictions (including those seen as respectable), as the brain processes seem to be similar. It also forwards a view of addiction that I think is much more accepted now than in 2008: not as a personal failing or genetic disease, but as a way of self-medicating trauma, dislocation and a lack of connection and meaning. Much of this wasn’t new to me, having read such excellent works as The Body Keeps the Score (about PTSD, in particular the long-term effects of childhood abuse and neglect) and Lost Connections (about societal causes of depression), but was still useful to see presented in a different context.
Part 1 tells stories from the author’s medical practice, and this part threw me, because I expected it to relate the stories of his patients in a more direct and sustained way rather than centering the doctor’s perspective. It recreates the experience of having large numbers of needy people cycling through his office in a limited amount of time, rather than picking individual patients to follow in-depth. However, another reader pointed out that focusing on his frustrations and day-to-day work may make a more palatable entry point for skeptical readers, with whom this book has apparently been successful, even if it isn’t the best means of preaching to the choir. This section certainly drives home that the most “hopeless” drug addicts are people who have faced extraordinary suffering in their lives, generally from early childhood on.
Subsequent sections walk readers through the science of addiction: how particular drugs affect the brain, why they’re addictive, and also how childhood abuse and neglect themselves affect the brain so as to make it vulnerable to addiction in the first place. Maté emphasizes that it isn’t the drugs themselves that create addiction (most people who try drugs don’t become addicted, or are readily able to shake it when changing environments), nor is addiction an inescapable genetic fate, but rather, a condition heavily influenced by traumatic stress, especially on the developing and even prenatal brain. He also discusses societal trends that predispose their citizens to addiction (generally, societies focused on external and ultimately meaningless endeavors such as the creation of wealth, and which lose touch with more important values), and the type of environment that can promote healing.
Unsurprisingly, there’s some heavy criticism of the War on Drugs, which while failing to prevent access to drugs, has marginalized drug users, making it harder for them to heal while also rendering them unproductive in society. The discussion of the economics of all this was new to me and particularly interesting: drugs are sold in North America (Maté lives and works in Vancouver) at an enormous markup over their actual cost to produce, due to the cost and risks of smuggling and the consequent limitations on supply. Because drugs therefore become expensive, hardcore addicts wind up organizing their entire lives around making enough money to buy their drugs: generally through illegal means, including stealing items which they usually sell at an enormous discount, being stolen goods. So they might steal a $2500 bicycle, sell it for $25, steal a ton of other stuff at similar markdowns, and use the money to buy $1000 in drugs that only cost $20 in their country of origin! (Seriously: at the time of writing, apparently $150,000 of heroin in North America only cost $3,000 in Pakistan.) Maté argues for making drugs medicinally available to the addicted through supervised injection sites to solve this problem, and the data he cites about their success is promising. Essentially, drug users will get the drugs anyway, so we might better improve society by eliminating the criminality around drugs instead.
Unfortunately, the U.S. has spent decades exporting its dogma about drugs to the rest of the world, not only creating an enormous black market but also discouraging other countries (including Canada) from experimenting with different solutions. I would like to think that’s changing—it is no longer true that most U.S. prisoners are being held for drugs, for instance—but so far the changes seem minuscule in comparison to the problem.
So, certainly a heavy topic, though Maté does as much as he reasonably can to inject some hope. Absolutely worth a read for a better understanding of addiction, and I’m glad I pushed on despite the rough beginning....more
The title story in this volume is fantastic. The slow unfolding and peeling back the layers of the story, the host of well-realized and belie3.5 stars
The title story in this volume is fantastic. The slow unfolding and peeling back the layers of the story, the host of well-realized and believable characters bumping up against one another, the historical Canadian setting, and the surprise ending: I loved it all, and am not at all surprised that a movie was based on this 50-page story. It’s better than many a novel.
And there are a couple other stories here that I liked. “Comfort” is about the death of a husband, a severe biology teacher who fought the incursion of religion into the curriculum. I enjoyed this mostly for the husband’s story, and was less interested in the wife’s grieving and found the end to peter out. The last story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” follows a philandering but loving husband whose wife develops dementia and embarks on a nursing home romance. This one is poignant and its situations interesting, though I didn’t ever feel I knew enough about the wife and their relationship to completely engage.
The remaining six stories seemed to me to be variations on a theme, and it’s a theme Munro fully developed in The Beggar Maid, which I previously read and enjoyed. The protagonist is a woman who is searching for herself, who has an unsatisfying marriage; some of the stories focus more on the marriage, others on her life before or after. Sometimes she leaves, although this was an uncommon choice at the time these stories are set, while other times she contents herself with a fling. Her family background includes a dead mother and remarried father, living in some small town she has left behind. Her story involves learning about herself or about life and how to live in it.
These aren’t bad stories, but they didn’t particularly speak to me. In some cases I felt like perhaps I was a generation too young to appreciate the societal influences on these women and how those influences shaped them. The way the women fail to assert themselves in their relationships and make their needs known, the way their marriages often seemed to be strange and independent creatures rather than partnerships negotiated by the people involved, even in a world not too far removed from the modern one, left something of a blank for me. And because these are quiet, character-driven tales, it’s hard to appreciate them if they don’t speak to you.
All that said, of course these are very well-written stories, as one would expect from a Nobel Prize winner. I didn’t enjoy them all as much as I’d hoped; I wish Munro had included more along the lines of the first story. But it’s good literature, and I’m happy to have read it.
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A question for those who have read more Munro than I: is this collection specifically thematically focused, perhaps to fit its title, or does all her work focus on these same preoccupations? What Munro collection should I read next if my goal is finding one that doesn’t feel repetitive after The Beggar Maid and this book?...more
This is my first Alice Munro, and it clearly deserves its literary accolades. It’s a short story collection that follows the same characters more or lThis is my first Alice Munro, and it clearly deserves its literary accolades. It’s a short story collection that follows the same characters more or less chronologically through their lives: a girl and later woman named Rose, and her stepmother, Flo. The characters are certainly believable, and I became more engaged with it in the latter 2/3 of the book, as Rose becomes an adult living her own life and making adult choices – many will disagree with me on this point, but to me there’s only so much that can be done with child protagonists.
So, this is a strong literary book. It’s very well-written, with enough packed into even short sentences to warrant (and reward) re-reading. The characters are engaging, and their decisions and the ways they are affected by their lives are entirely credible. I did not have a strong emotional connection to the book or find myself thinking about it when not reading it, so maybe it wasn’t the best choice for me; maybe one of Munro’s more recent collections would have inspired a stronger reaction. But I’d certainly recommend it to those who are interested....more
This is an enjoyable collection of 19 linked short stories, of the sort of urban fantasy that mixes the ethereal and mundane. Just right for nighttimeThis is an enjoyable collection of 19 linked short stories, of the sort of urban fantasy that mixes the ethereal and mundane. Just right for nighttime reading.
De Lint is a prolific Canadian author who has written many books set in the fictional city of Newford, of which this is the first; most of the stories were originally published in magazines in the late 80s and early 90s. They tend to feature bohemian types – artists, writers, musicians – and street people, encountering magic beneath the surface of everyday life. Many of the stories feel like modern fairy tales. For the most part I found them very satisfying reading, hitting all the right notes: sympathetic and believable characters, good writing and interesting plotlines that come to satisfying conclusions. Not every author can write a complete story from beginning to end in 20 pages, much less create reader investment in such a short time. De Lint can. It doesn’t hurt that some of the characters recur, but although every story can stand alone, I did not find the re-introduction of characters too repetitive.
The majority of De Lint’s protagonists are female, and although one begins to notice similarities (waif-like beauty, tragic or mysterious pasts), they are interesting characters who form friendships with each other and don’t revolve around men – indeed, Jilly, the closest the book has to a protagonist, isn’t attached to a man at all. De Lint does less well with minority characters, however; the one black character is a mute fortune-teller, and the story with a Latina narrator is full of forced and awkward uses of Spanish words and cultural references. My least favorite stories, however, were the two originally appearing in horror anthologies; that’s simply not my cup of tea. And another story beats readers over the head a little too hard with the “child abuse is bad!” stick. Finally, there are occasional mistakes that one more pass by a copyeditor could have corrected.
Overall, this gets 3.5 stars that could easily be rounded either way. I enjoyed this book, with its mix of bohemian life and the supernatural, and would consider reading more De Lint in the future....more
**spoiler alert** Someone Knows My Name is a compelling read, and covers some historical events I hadn't heard about before. The characterization, tho**spoiler alert** Someone Knows My Name is a compelling read, and covers some historical events I hadn't heard about before. The characterization, though, leaves something to be desired.
This book is the fictionalized memoir of Aminata Diallo, who's kidnapped from her Malian village at 11 by slavers. It's interspersed with brief chapters from her "current" life, as an abolitionist in London in the early 1800s, so little of what happens is really a surprise, but it's well-written enough that that makes little difference. And Aminata has an interesting life. The book starts with her childhood, striking a good balance between showing that it was a good one and not overidealizing. I especially liked that she comes from a Muslim family: this might be a remote village, but they're not so primitive and cut off from the world as people might think. Then there's the slave-novel section; it certainly has its ugly parts, but isn't viscerally awful like some other slave novels (Aminata gets comparatively lucky). Then Aminata finally becomes free, and you think: wait a minute, already? Don't slave novels end happily as soon as the protagonist makes it to New York City or Canada?
Not this one. The book goes into some really interesting history dealing with the Black Loyalists and their migrations to Nova Scotia (which didn't work out all that well) and later Sierra Leone (which wasn't a whole lot better). I was fascinated by these sections because I'd never heard of any of this before. And this is where the book's themes really come together: rather than dwelling further on the horrors of slavery, Hill shows us the long-term effects of the slave trade on people who can never really go back home. The best they can do is to get by, and even that isn't easy.
Where the novel doesn't do as well is with the individual characters. Aminata's a survivor, but after spending 470 pages with her I can't say much about her beyond that. Some of the secondary characters (and everybody else in this book is secondary; perhaps part of the problem is that the entire supporting cast changes whenever Aminata moves on) are interesting: particularly so the ones who have moral qualms with slavery, but practice it anyway, like Solomon Lindo. But for the most part there isn't much depth in the supporting cast either. And Aminata's love life is a definite low point: she loses her husband for decades at a time, and yet it never once occurs to her that she might move on or be attracted to anyone else, and then when he returns their relationship is still perfect. The fairytale aspect just doesn't work with the rest of the book.
Finally, the novel is in the first person. Hill does a credible job of writing as a woman; what isn't so credible is that Aminata is a product of the 18th century. Her voice is thoroughly modern, both in its style and its substance. Would an elderly woman living in London in 1802 really have described sex with her husband in such intimate detail? Maybe someone with Aminata's cultural background would, but if so, the author failed to bring any of that to light. Nor is there anything else in Aminata's worldview that grounds her in the 18th century; she could have walked straight out of the 21st.
I did enjoy this book, and it tells a good story. Even so, I can't quite bring myself to give it 4 stars....more
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