We Were Liars Review

This week's novel is We Were Liars, contemporary YA by E. Lockhart.

Two years ago, Cadence was in an accident on her family's private island, where they vacation every summer.  The accident left her with debilitating migraines and brain damage.  But this summer, she's back on the island with her tight-knit cousins (called "the liars"), determined to figure out what caused her accident.

I loved the writing in this.  Every so often, there would be carriage returns, turning the prose into verse with a lovely cadence.  Then there would be bits like this:

He had hired moving vans already.  He'd rented a house, too.  My father put a last suitcase into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started the engine.
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest.  I was standing on the lawn and I fell.  The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed.  Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure.  The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch.  My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.
Mummy snapped.  She said to get hold of myself.
Be normal, now, she said.  Right now, she said.
Because you are.  Because you can be.

Wow!

But now comes the tricky part.  Aside from its lovely language, (and "aww, you're so rich and privileged, that's so hard for you *pouty face*") I'm not sure how to talk about this book, because I think the summary on Goodreads did me a horrible disservice.  It's hard to talk about this disservice without doing the same disservice to you, so I'm going to put my rant behind a cut and tell you that if you're interested in this book, you should go read it without Goodreads ruining it for you.

Next week: The Brides of Rollrock Island, depressing selkie fantasy by Margo Lanagan

Firebird Mix Tape

I belong to the school of thought that mix tapes are very important.  I used to make actual cassette tapes by rummaging through my parents' and friends' tapes and CDs and calling into radio stations and requesting deep cuts, then sitting by my stereo and waiting.

My latest tape is for the Firebird story.  Lately I've been working on switching between not-writing-brain and writing-brain and making that transition time between them as small as possible.  I don't have a lot of time and I need to make the most of it.

So this is what I've been playing to get in the right mindset.  There's some overlap with my Necromancer mix tape, which makes sense since the Necromancer story was eaten by the Firebird story.

Listen Here!

1. What She Came For -- Franz Ferdinand
2. Gravedigger -- Dave Mathews Band*
3. Put Your Lights on -- Santana
4. My Mathematical Mind -- Spoon
5. If I Wanted Someone -- Dawes
6. 24 Frames -- Jason Isbell
7. Hurt -- Johnny Cash
8. Just Like Heaven --The Cure
9. Things Happen -- Dawes

*I'm using a live version that is not on YouTube

Bone Gap Review

This week's novel is Bone Gap, fantasy set in Illinois and prominently featuring corn, by Laura Ruby.  This one was on the magical realism recommendation list, which, if you haven't noticed, I'm slowly working my way through.

No one in Bone Gap believes Finn when he says he witnessed Roza's kidnapping.  He can't describe the kidnapper except for the unnatural way he moved, and everyone assumes she left the small town like everyone always does.  Finn spends the summer after Roza's disappearance getting to know Petey, the beekeeper's daughter; avoiding his brother, who's mourning Roza's absence; riding a magical black horse that shows up in his barn one night; and fearing the man who took Roza.

There is so much corn in this.  It whispers to people, knowing too much in an eerie, almost sinister way.

Like corn in real life.

There's an awkwardness here, because in the first section of the book.  The narration tells us that Finn is weird and the people in town know he's weird, but we get just Finn and Roza's point of view (and Roza is kidnapped and therefore not around, so she doesn't shed much light on the issue) and from inside Finn's head he seems to have his act together.  He acts rationally, and the strange things he says seem more snarky that clueless.  So it feels like the reader is being told something different than what they're shown, and it borders at times on frustrating.

But then we start getting some other points of view.  And it starts to become clear that Finn's world view is skewed in ways that don't come through in a written medium.  From Finn's view, he seems normal, and the reader doesn't get much hint that there's a problem.  When the problem comes to light, it feels like a brilliant use of the written word, the style, and a fascinating manipulation of the reader's natural inclination to fill in gaps while at the same time Finn is filling in gaps.  We see the world through his eyes and understand why he would never notice something was wrong.

All the themes here were fun--bees, corn, the night mare, some Orpheus and Persephone mythology-- but they never came together in a cohesive climax like I expected.  They hint at each other, but never have a huge moment of connection or purpose.  It bothered me that the corn never saved Roza or turned out to be evil or turned out to protect the town.  It was just there, a kind of magical red herring.  Maybe it bothers me because I really wanted the corn to be a focus, or maybe because the book set me up to expect there to be a purpose and I felt let down.  Maybe it bothers me because I don't know what to think about this lack of purpose.  Is it okay to have a neat idea in a story that doesn't support the main plot?  Where do you draw the line between a detail that clutters the narrative and should get the axe in an edit vs one that sets scenery or tone or characterization?

Things to think on!

***

Next week: We Were Liars, contemporary YA on a private island with secrets of all sorts, by E. Lockhart.

Mill's Mess

I'm researching juggling for the firebird novel.  Here's a peek.

Mill's Mess
Not as fluid as I want it yet, but a good start.

The Three-Body Problem Review

This week's novel is The Three-Body Problem, sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.

In order to investigate a series of odd suicides in the scientific community, a mysterious government group convinces Wang Mia, a nanotech engineer, to join the Frontiers of Science, an elite group who philosophize about the nature of the universe.  His investigation leads him into an apparently supernatural countdown, into a virtual reality game set on a world with three suns, and through the history of the Red Coast project (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence).  It all leads back to Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, who witnessed her father's public torture and murder during the Cultural Revolution, an event that leads to the end of mankind. 

This is some hard-core science fiction.  It goes deep into the science, to the point where I started to worry that it would say something incorrect about the cosmic microwave background radiation and I would have to get irrationally upset and this post would be all about how angry I am about inaccuracies in the portrayal of black body radiation.  Thankfully that didn't happen.  In the book, the cosmic microwave background radiation does behave differently than it does in real life, but the line between the real science and the fictional stretch of that science is clear, and I appreciate that. 

It tickles me that the book talks smack about COBE the way scientists talk smack about COBE.  In fact, the portrayal of the culture around scientific research as a whole fits with my experiences, even given the difference in culture between China and the US.

Though the big thing that I like in this book is a point when Lui describes the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and I got this chill of possibility.  Yes.  I could work at a radio telescope.  That.  I want to work for SETI.  That's what I want to do with my life.
...
Oh wait.
Because, you see, first of all I'm an adult and second of all I tried doing that with my life and disliked it.  But that feeling of opportunity, the excitement of exploration was familiar.  It was the feeling I got looking at images from the Hubble or watching Contact for the first time.  I haven't felt that feeling in a decade and that feeling alone would make me recommend this book.

There's an abundance of neat ideas here.  Maybe too many, but they're all fun.  Lui talks about science in the Cultural Revolution and what kind of political grammatical gymnastics they had to do to keep research alive.  Lui talks about a system with three suns and all the different ways the suns can align themselves to destroy an orbiting planet.  Lui talks about collapsing a proton into two dimensions and how a sentient proton could wreak havoc.  Then there are the parables of the shooter and the farmer:

In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters.  Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures.  Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: "There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters." They have mistaken the result of the marksman's momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.

The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys.  A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost over a year, makes the following discovery: "Every morning at eleven, food arrives." On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys.  But that morning at eleven, food doesn't arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

I don't have much to add to these ideas, nothing to wax poetic about or relate in any meaningful way to other aspects of my life, but they're fun to chew on.

My skepticism comes, strangely, not from the misappropriation of science, but from the reactions of the characters.  I'm skeptical of how many people would turn on the whole human race.  Even though the book is set up that I completely believe that Ye would do it, I don't get the same level of background to explain the motivations of the background characters, so any understanding I have for her disappears for anyone else.  I just can't buy it.  I'm also skeptical that an alien society repeatedly destroyed--to the point where intelligent species have to evolve--would retain any history from previous cultures.

As a warning, this is translated from Chinese and you can tell.  It's kind of like reading subtitles, complete with a bunch of "Do not misunderstand me"s.  I found it amusing.  The writing is definitely more focused on the science than on the prose.

***

Next week: Bone Gap, small town Illinois corn fantasy by Laura Ruby.

A Criminal Magic Review

This week's novel is A Criminal Magic, prohibition era fantasy by Lee Kelly.

Set in the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition has outlawed magic, meaning most magic shows and "shine" (an addictive drug created by magic) are controlled by mobsters.  Joan tries to support her family by working as a performance sorcerer at the Red Den, a club owned by the Shaws.  Gunn, who runs the Red Den has grand, vague plans about magic and reinvents the club into a grand immersive show every night, pushing his troupe of sorcerers to greater and greater heights.  Alex is an undercover operative for the Feds who infiltrates the Shaws to figure out what Gunn is up to.  Joan and Alex fall in love and begin to question their loyalties and how far they would go to protect what was important to them.

I enjoy the magic in this.  Magic can do a great deal--create illusions, or produce objects, or create portals--but these things only last for a day.  It's ephemeral, which works for creating a magic garden to hold a party, but causes problems when they try to distribute shine because in 24 hours it turns to water.  It provides a good balance so the magic isn't too powerful.

Magic is often used to create scenery--beautiful and fantastical scenery, but still scenery.  The most impressive immersive magic show that the troupe puts on at the Red Den is a sunrise.  Now, I've seen some pretty great sunrises, but using magic to create something that doesn't have a finale or a surprise seems like a let down.  I call this The Night Circus Problem: the magic is atmospheric, but leans more towards eerie than shocking.  I also think about it in terms of lack of a Prestige (from The Prestige (and, yes, I know there's a book)).  A magic trick has three parts: the pledge where you say you'll make a rabbit disappear, the turn where the rabbit disappears, and the prestige where the rabbit reappears.  If you end the trick after the turn, the audience is left waiting, thinking, "But...where did the rabbit go?"  Here I wondered, "Okay, the sun rose like they said.  But...is the sun going to explode?"  It felt incomplete, or like a waste of talent, especially here where a handful of their tricks have that finale moment.  Joan makes feathers dance, then at the end turns them into a dove. 

This is probably just me and my adolescent need for fireworks and glitter cannons.

The story is told from alternating points of view: one from Joan and then one from Alex.  In the first few chapters, Alex digs my opinion of him into a hole by being a dipshit.  He never climbs out of this hole.  He continues to be a dipshit.  What was interesting, was that when Joan interacts with him in her chapters, he doesn't seem like a dipshit.  All his internal dialogue about his disdain for everyone and everything is stripped away, and besides that he's on his best behavior around Joan.  A similar thing happens to Joan to a lesser degree.  When she's shown through Alex's filter, all her self doubt is stripped away and the lengths she goes to to make herself the best she can be pay off since Alex doesn't pick up on any of it.  Since the reader gets these two views that don't quite align, they pick up on the fact that the characters don't know each other that well way before the characters start to understand it.

The characters also don't describe themselves, but are described by the other point of view character.  This delay in giving the description would usually bother me, but here it works because it made sense that neither character would feel the need to describe themselves.  I never felt uninformed.  What they looked like mattered more to the other character (because they're dreamy) than it did to them.

The plot is fun and exciting, with lying and scheming and evil plans and juggling who knows what.  But a lot of it feels like really bad planning.  Alex talks the mob boss into getting hooked on a drug that causes paranoia.  Joan agrees to figure out how to do impossible magic that centuries of sorcerers have attempted by Wednesday, because she won't let you down.  Even though the troupe is essential to his plans, Gunn works them so hard that they start talking of mutiny.  And then there's Gunn's theory that seven sorcerers working together are more powerful than any one sorcerer working alone, and they have to trust each other and work together, a theory proven by the success of the troupe.  But then he goes and forms rifts in the troupe by giving some members extra privileges.  It just doesn't make a lot of sense.  A lot of the characters shoot themselves in the foot in this.

But they don't shoot themselves with glitter cannons.

***

Next week: The Three-Body Problem, Sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.

The Best Research Ever: Pie

While I was pregnant, my focus and attention span shrunk to the size of a walnut, and it seemed the only thing I was able to write about was food.  I wrote long descriptive passages about smell and texture, flaky baked goods and tender meats and tart cherries and salted butter.  An emphasis on food made its way into the firebird story, and for the first draft depictions of smells and taste and color worked fine.  But now in the second draft, I'm shifting toward how it feels to prepare the food: the texture of pie filling before it sets and the strain in your shoulders as you roll out dough.  I didn't know about these things first hand.

That meant it was time for The Best Research Ever.

I started making pie from scratch.

Apple Pie July 13th	Cherry Pie July 23rd
Strawberry Rhubarb August 25th	Mixed Berry September 1st

This is the fruit pie phase of my research, where I learned to make pie dough, tried a couple of different top crusts, and learned about fruit filling.

Making and rolling out pie dough was not that bad once I knew what I was doing.  You can make dough with lots of different kinds of fat: butter, shortening, straight up lard, or a combination of those.  Butter is delicious, but shortening makes the dough easier to work with, so people usually go for a combination of the two.  However, I don't know where they keep the shortening at the grocery store, so I just used two sticks of butter.  The first attempt (the apple pie) was a mess of trying to roll it out, starting over and pressing it back into a ball, trying to roll it out, and starting over and pressing it back into a ball, but when I finally got it, it was amazing.  Oh my God!  I can make pie crust and it's really good!

The second attempt (the cherry pie) I got on the first try.

• The King Arthur Flour cookbook (which is great) told me that I needed to roll the dough out, rolling "in the same direction," so as not to confuse the yeast...WHAT DOES THAT MEAN???  How do you get a circle rolling all in one direction?  How does yeast get confused?  I figured out that it meant not to roll back and forth (roll it one direction, pick up the rolling pin and put it back at the start and roll again), and it's okay to roll up, then roll to the left, then roll down, then roll to the right to get a circle.  But I still don't know what they're talking about with the yeast.
• "Lightly flour" is bullshit.  I also think the concept of putting just enough water into the dough so it's almost falling apart is bullshit.  I'm doing it wrong and grandmothers everywhere are waving rolling pins at me.  But, these two changes to the instructions work together, because the massive amount of flour I dump everywhere probably evens out the extra tablespoon of water I put in.
• The King Arthur Flour cookbook also says to fold your pie crust into quarters, for easier transfer from the kitchen counter where you rolled it out, to the pie tin.  That sounded like a great idea, but it went horribly wrong.  There were big creases in my dough and then a quarter of it fell off and I had to patch it back together.  Instead, if I roll the pie crust around the rolling pin, I can roll it out straight into the pie tin without threatening the crust's structural integrity.

Then there's the filling

• The worst part of making apple pie is peeling the apples.  I used the biggest knife I could find to make myself feel better.
• When the instructions say to spoon the filling into the pie, they know what they're talking about.  I just poured the cherry filling into the pie tin, and all the juice and sauce escaped down the sides and made a huge mess.
• If you don't know what a rhubarb is, it's tart so the strawberry and the ice cream we added mellow it out.  It looks like celery except it's red and you even cut it an peel it the same way.  It's available frozen at most grocery stores.  I didn't know what to do with frozen rhubarb, so I called around to likely places and asked if they had fresh rhubarb.  Those were fun conversations.  Whole Foods had both organic rhubarb and regular rhubarb.  This pie was unanimously voted the best pie.
• I thought I had this down and went to make a mixed berry pie because the baby loves strawberries and I feel the need to mix it up a bit for him instead of giving him an adult sized plate of chopped strawberries for lunch every day.  But then they threw me a curve ball.  For the cherry and the rhubarb pie, you mix the filling and then let it sit for a half hour for to thicken from the presence of the tapioca.  I was expecting the same thing for the berries, but no.  Now I had to simmer the mixture until it thickened even though I'd put the tapioca in.  WTF?  Why is it different?  Aww, Geez, did I do this right?  Ack.

Then there's the top crust.  I didn't get fancy on the first attempt.  I put down a regular old top crust on the apple pie, cutting plain slits in it to vent it.  For the cherry pie, I tried a lattice, which looked wonderful, but was not nearly enough crust for my crust loving family.  So for the strawberry rhubarb pie, I tried a tighter weave, and also tried a plaid design.  For the mixed berry pie, I dove into the realm of cookie cutters.  The top crust is made of a hundred or so stars that I cut out of the dough.

• Beaten egg yolk gets the two crusts to stick together.  I learned that I should brush it on the edge of the bottom crust BEFORE I put down the lattice.  I had to peel up the edges of the lattice and brush underneath and tempt fate that my lattice wouldn't crumble apart.
• Keeping the bars of the lattice even is tricky.  I got out a pizza cutter about half way through the cherry pie top, but my strips ended up thicker on one end than the other.  I saw people on the internet using a ruler and scoffed.  For the strawberry rhubarb, I got out a ruler.
• There's a point after you mix the dough where you pat it into two disks and stick it in the refrigerator for a half hour so that it will stay round when you roll it out.  The book said "at least a half hour" so I figured I could mix the dough during the baby's morning nap, then stick it in the fridge and roll it out during his afternoon nap.  No.  That is not how it works.  It got way too hard and cold in the fridge and it had to thaw for about an hour before I could roll it out, and when I did it had a lot of trouble staying round and kept falling apart.  This was the strawberry rhubarb pie where I attempted a fancy top crust because I'd had such luck with my previous attempts and I was feeling good about myself.  It did not go well.  If that picture looks like a Pintrest Fail, that's because it is!  It still tasted good though, and I totally think I could pull it off next time.
• Apparently, you are supposed to inherit cookie cutters from your grandmother or something, because I looked all over the place for little cookie cutters and couldn't find them.  We had to make a trip to a fancy kitchen store on the north side.  There they told me that pies are an autumn thing, so all the cookie cutters for pies are autumn leaves and pumpkin shaped and and themed for holidays.  I was trying to make a mixed berry pie and looking ahead to the key lime and lemon meringue I want to make later, so this autumn thing didn't make a lot of sense to me.  Oh well, I got some mini cutters that have stars and hearts and moons, and a set of autumn leaves, one of which could pass as a lime leaf, so we're all good.

My endeavors have shed light on what I still need to find out.  I'm making changes to the instructions for what works for me, but what would experienced bakers say about that?  What's the deal with confusing the yeast?  Why did I simmer the berries and not the cherries?  I have a bunch of books coming into the library about the science of baking, but I've realized lately that what I really want to study is the superstitions of baking.  The rituals.  The traditions.  I want to know how a grandma would do it, even the parts that don't have an effect on the outcome of the pie.  Like throwing salt over your shoulder if you spill some, or "clean as you go," or where to leave the pie to cool, or all the other things I don't know about.

More research is necessary.