Dubious Creatures Episode 7: The Salamander Log

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 7: The Salamander Log

Dubious Creatures, Episode 6: Weekend Omens

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 5: Weekend Omens

Geekerella Review

This week's novel is Geekerella, by Ashley Poston.  I heard about it because, this was a nominee for Goodread's Choice Awards in young adult fiction for 2017.

Ella lives with her evil step-mother and evil step-sisters, she has a summer job in a vegan food truck called the Magic Pumpkin, and the only light in her life is Starfield, a twenty-year-old, cult sci-fi show.  The show is getting a movie reboot, and Ella is devastated to discover that for her hero, Prince Carmindor, they've cast Darien Freeman, hunky teen heart-throb from a soap opera that her step-sisters like.  Those girls aren't real fans!  Desperate to get away from her step-mom, she decides to go to a Starfield convention (the con her dad founded and where her parents met, and which she hasn't been able to go back to since his death), enter the cos-play contest, win the cos-play contest, and win the tickets to LA to see the movie premier, where she just won't get a return ticket.  Meanwhile, Darien has to deal with hordes of screaming girls, and having to protect his image by pretending he's not a huge Starfield geek.

I had insomnia the other night, and I read this entire thing in one sitting.  It's a fast read and an enjoyable read, even though I knew all the plot beats well ahead of time.  She works in a food truck called the magic pumpkin?  Okay, I know how she's getting to the con.  She's going to wear her dad's cosplay, but her mom's big, fancy dress cosplay is also kicking around?  Okay, so I know both how the climactic clash with her step family is going to go down and what she's wearing to the contest.  But even though I knew the beats, it was the way the story was filled in that kept me reading.  I liked the characters (especially Darien) and I liked seeing how they ended up where I knew they were going.  And there was a kind of parallel: I knew how it was going to end, but wanted to see it happen, while Ella knows how the movie's going to go, and she'll still watch it to see it happen.

I liked all the different sides of Darien and watching how he had to present himself differently in different situations.  My favorite part in the whole book is a moment when he says that Prince Carmindor meant so much to him because he was in command of a spaceship and also looked like him.  He's Indian (I think, it was never stated). And now he's playing Carmindor and it's a dream come true but he's not allowed to go on TV and talk about how much it means to him, and meanwhile the old fans hate him and his co-workers think the movie is stupid.  It was a gut punch.

There's some kind of painful fake-geek stuff going on.  Ella is really unhappy that a bunch of screaming girls are entering her space because they like Darien's abs and not because they love the show, but her part in this seems realistic and the narrative doesn't go out of its way to condemn or approve of her covetousness.  Darien is upset that he's not allowed to let his geek flag fly, so he gets accused of not being a real fan, and he's really hurt by that, because he is a fan!  He is a geek!  He just also has abs!  So it seems like it's going to be a story about the two worlds colliding and figuring out how to share and learn from each other.  And honestly, that would have been really easy if Darien had just started from the beginning, going on the media circuit saying, "This show means so much to me, and I'm thrilled to be playing this character."  That would have pulled some of the screamy-fan girls into checking out the show and seeing it wasn't just a geek thing, and it would have pacified the old fans.  But no.  The book has this firm idea that you live and breathe the show or you despise the show because it's a nerd thing and there's nothing in between.  Which is crazy, since Darien is clearly both a nerd and a heart-throb.  Instead, at the end, all the characters that are shown in a positive light are "true fans" and the people who suck are only in it for the money or the abs. 

So what if girls who wear makeup want to see a movie with an actor they like?  So.  What.  Oh my God.  It's upsetting. 

But it wasn't upsetting as I read it, only in retrospect.  And it honestly was a fun read.

It got me thinking about Cinderella stories and how the evil step-mom is portrayed.  It's in the fabric of the story that she sucks, so that's to be expected, but sometimes she's evil into the realm of caricature.  I stop reading a bunch of Cinderella retellings because I'm just rolling my eyes through the first chapter.  The step-family is soooooo meaaaaan for nooooo reeeeeeason, and Cinderella is soooooo opreeeeeeesed.  It often makes me hate Cinderella right off the bat.  And part of this is just that that's how the Cinderella story starts.  And part of it is that your step-mom is not your mom.  It's hard to tell where you stand with them and they do things differently from how your saintly, loving mother did them.  So they get a lot of resentment thrown at them.  And then part of it is that teenagers feel like their parents are completely unfair.  So introducing a character in that situation is a challenge. 

It got me thinking about if I've read or watched any retellings where I liked the evil step-mom or where she was shown in a positive light even while making Cinderella do chores and want to get away.  I can't think of any, but I liked Angelica Huston in Ever After because Angelica Huston is a goddess, especially when she's evil.  There's also a scene at the beginning where she holds her dying husband and cries, "Don't leave me here!" so I kind of got why she's so bitter.  Mostly, I want to see a retelling where Cinderella is a grumpy teen who hates her step-mom and her step-mom is a reasonable lady who is trying her damnedest to hold it all together with three kids (one of whom is new to her and hates her) and no help.  I've been thinking about that part in Labrynth where Sarah comes home and fights with her step-mom about the wet dog and her step-mom being unfair, and the step-mom says, "She treats me like the wicked stepmother in a fairy story no matter what I say."  

***

Dubious Creatures, Episode 5: Chaos

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 5: Chaos

Mr. Fox Review

This week's novel is Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi.  This was recommended to me, again, by my friend Eric.  So thanks, Eric!

Mr. Fox is a novelist in a marriage that is fizzling out, when Mary Foxe, a kind of muse who is a figment of his imagination and with whom he's infatuated, walks back into his life to tell him that he is a monster and his novels are monstrous, namely because he keeps murdering his female characters.  Interspersed with this narrative are the beginnings of stories that maybe Mr. Fox wrote (that's not definite, but that's the impression I got), most of which star himself and Mary with some cameos from his wife (who is usually dead).

This was a great book.  It had depth and the structure was deft and impressive.  The shorter stories are all unfinished (until the very end of the novel), just as Mr. Fox doesn't know how his situation with Mary or with his wife is going to end.  Is he going to change his ways and become a more loving, caring person, or is his avatar in the story going to murder Mary after several other female characters have been tortured for no real reason other than to make it gritty?  And on that point, this novel says so much about violence against women in fiction without ever going on a diatribe about it.  In the first few pages, Mary tells him, "You kill women.  You're a serial killer  Can you grasp that?" And that's all that's said of it directly.  But it sets it up so that everything that follows is evidence of Mr. Fox (as a writer) killing women (characters).  The reader is looking for it: if the women die more frequently than men, if they die with purpose, and it becomes clear that he's enacting some internal misogyny in his writing if not in the real world.  (But also in the real world.)  So you could say that the whole book is about pointing out the prevalence of these tropes in fiction and about how one instance is fluke but eight of them is a pattern.  But since none of that is spelled out, it may just be my interpretation.

But let me tell you about fairy tales.

Several of the smaller stories have the feel of a fairytale, which was unusual considering that several of them were contemporary (or at least, not set in a vague "long ago").  When I say that they felt like fairy tales, I don't mean they were retellings of well known fairy tales in a contemporary setting, I mean that they had a fairy tale's typical flatness and magical realism.

Dr. Lustucru's wife was not particularly talkative.  But he beheaded her anyway, thinking to himself that he could replace her head when he wished for her to speak...After a week or so old Lustucru got around to thinking that he missed his wife.  No one to warm his slippers, etc.  In the nursery he replaced his wife's head, but of course it wouldn't stay on just like that.  He reached for a suture kit.  No need.  The body put its hands up and held the head on at the neck.  The wife's eyes blinked and the wife's mouth spoke: "Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think there will be another war?  After the widespread damage of the Great War, it is very unlikely.  Do you think..." And so on.
Disturbed by this, the doctor tried to remove his wife's head again.  But the body was having none of it and hung on pretty grimly.

This section feels flat, by which I mean that it's a lot of summary and the shocking moments are presented in a deadpan manner that makes them ordinary.  Of course she could talk when her head was put back on.  Sure.  It also relies on architypes instead of flushing out the characters.  Dr. Lustucru is a crazy doctor and his wife is his wife.  The reader fills in the rest.  When the story is over, we can go back and shiver at the beheading.  We can muse on how the wife must have felt, why she's stuck in a loop about the war, what her characterization must have been for her to be both a non-caracter from Dr. Lustucru's point of view, someone he can put away and then make speak at will, and a woman whose dead hands clutch at her dead head and cling to her last, chilling words.  There's a lot going on here, but non of it is unpacked for us.

In contrast to some of the other stories told by Mr. Fox, which feel less like fairy tales.  In those, we are placed in a scene and we get dialogue and reaction and intersection.  There's a kind of depth, a flushing out of things, almost like it's been unpacked for us.  And at it's heart, this is what makes a fairy tale.  Because of their flatness, they're open to interpretation.  In a lot of fairy tale retellings, the writer has interpreted it and is presenting us with their interpretation.  They've done the unpacking and removed the flatness from the tale.  So my question is: Do those still count as fairy tales?  Is a fairy tale about the plot points or is it about the form?  Lately, I've been leaning towards thinking it's the form.

***

Next week: Geekerella, a retelling of Cinderella at a Sc-Fi convention by Ashley Poston.

Dubious Creatures, Episode 4: The Jackalopes

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 4: The Jackalopes

A Spark Unseen Review

This week's novel is A Spark Unseen, YA historical fiction with some steam punk by Sharon Cameron.  It's the sequel to The Dark Unwinding, which I talked about a few weeks ago.  I actually listened to the audio book of this one, because I just now realized I could do that.

Katherine has been running her uncle's estate for a few years when men sneak into the house in the night to kidnap her uncle, who is wanted by both the British and French governments because he knows how to build a torpedo that could give whoever controls it a dominant navy.  Her uncle's delicate constitution means Katherine refuses to hand him over to anyone, so they fake her uncle's death and escape to Paris to hide and search for Lane, Katherine's main squeeze who ran off to be a spy at the end of the last book.  Of course, it turns out that running off to France when the French are after them doesn't make them any more safe.

The change in setting means this novel is a lot less Gothic than its predecessor.  That's a bummer, because it was very well done in the last novel.  I suspect that this one might fit into a different genre like "Political Intrigue in Paris Novels", but if that's a thing, then I'm not familiar with it.  It's kind of a spy novel, but instead of Katherine being a spy, everyone around her might be and everyone's a suspect. 

It still has great characters.  I especially liked Henri, the wealthy French guy who sees right through everything Katherine does and acts as her interpreter for most of her search for Lane, helping her find her boyfriend while flirting up a storm at the same time.  There's also Mrs. Hardcastle, the busybody English neighbor, who used to be besties with Katherine's evil aunt.  The supporting characters are all given moments of surprising depth that are just as great as the first novel.  They were almost all new characters, and I still loved all of them.

***

Next week: Mr. Fox, literary fairy tales by Helen Oyeyemi.

NaNo Post Mortem

At the start of this NaNo season, my friends over at NaNoWriPod threw in the towel.  Most of them haven't succeeded at NaNo since I've known them, so having a podcast about it was getting too strange.  But they ended on the note that NaNo is kind of useless, since after a month, even if you win, you have a heaping pile of garbage that doesn't have an ending.

My reaction to this is OF COURSE YOU DO.

First drafts are heaping piles of garbage, especially first drafts of novels, where you had an idea half way through and NaNo wouldn't let you go back to edit, so you just kept going with it from the middle as if it had been there all along, leaving yourself nothing but a cryptic note in the margins for you to find in a month and puzzle over.

NaNo is for writing horrible first drafts, and the rest of the year is for editing.  If you only write during November and you only write a first draft, then, yeah, you're not going to get much done and you might not enjoy it.

The problem I ran into this year was that I was not in the right place in my writing cycle to write a first draft.  I had the second season of the podcast launch on November 16th, and I had a book proposal due to my agent at the end of the month.  That means I spent a lot of time editing and polishing rather than regurgitating first draft nonsense.  For the first half of the month, it looks like I participated in NaNo every three days, and that's basically what I did: writing a draft of an episode and then editing the next two days to get it ready.  The second half of the month, I would update my word count and the apparently not hit enter or something and I'd log back in the next day to see that they hadn't been counted, and then I was too lazy to go back and spend the time to figure out how many words I'd done.  Since I wasn't going to win anyway, it seemed kind of useless to even log in.

I really like NaNo.  I like the community.  I like the emphasis on vomiting out a first draft so you have something to work with later.  I like the emphasis on letting it be awful.  But I think that as you move forward in your writing cycle, it gets harder to set aside projects in progress to do NaNo in November and easier to cough up a rough draft without all the scaffolding that NaNo provides.


You know I'll sign up again next year.

Dubious Creatures, Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon

Brooding YA Hero Review

This week's book is Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.

This is the book version of the Brooding YA Hero twitter account.  Broody, the brooding YA hero, sets out to write a how-to book to explain how supporting characters can become main characters.  These how-to sections are interspersed with narrative interludes where his evil ex-girlfriend, Blondie, drags him around to meet various supporting characters in an attempt to get him to show some empathy.

A lot of what Broody says is repetitive, but that's the joke.  He also never answers the question or gives any actionable advice on how to become a main character, but this is directly addressed and is also kind of the point: he has no idea what he's talking about.

There is some pretty good stuff in here about how toxic the typical brooding YA hero is, how "not like other girls" is problematic, and how female characters who are assertive and know how to wear makeup are always antagonists.  IT doesn't go very deep, but it's based on a twitter account.

Power Writing

My friend Dani recently introduced me to power writing, which she learned from her professor, Goldberry Long.  Dani introduced it by saying that it sounds juvenile, but it's the most useful thing she picked up in grad school, so give it a try before judging it.

The rules go like this:

1. Write by hand.  You're not going to get the same flow, and you're going to back track too much if you're typing.
2. Set a timer.  I do 5 minutes. Dani does 16 minutes.  It doesn't really matter as long as it's not too long for you to keep it up and long enough for you to get something out of it.
3. You can't use periods.  A period ends a thought and you don't want to end a thought.  You want to keep going, just spewing ideas.  Instead of a period, you can use a comma and the word "and".
4. You cannot stop
1. You can write slow
2. No crossing things out, fixing, or editing.  You can say "That last bit should be crossed out" or "that's not the right word" or "No, no, I don't like that because..."
3. If you get stuck, you can repeat the last word or the last phrase until you know what to say next.

Power writing is not meant as a way to write your story fast.  Instead, it's an idea generator.  It's good to start with a kind of prompt.  So for example, the other day I power wrote on what my main character's job would be.  I rambled off options and wrote about the pros and cons, and by the end of five minutes, I had stumbled upon something that would work.  The next day I rambled about things that would change from one verse of a story to the next, and stumbled upon some things that were going to happen that I hadn't anticipated. 

The power write is pretty much unreadable when you're done, but there will probably be one good thing in there that's going to make it into a story.  Dani suggests chaining your power writes, so the one jewel you got out of the first one becomes the prompt that you can use for a second power write.  I've found that after a power write, I can make an action plan, or an outline of what I'm going to actually write, so I spend a few minutes doing that.  Then I'm ready to go and make the most of the time that I have.

It's pretty cool, and you might want to check it out.

Dubious Creatures, Episode 2: The Gremlins

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 2: The Gremlins

Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Review

This week's story is Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Stories from the Wilderness, by Hal Johnson.  I read this for research, because I'm trying to find a second story about a squonk.  While it did have the one squonk story told in the most engaging way I've found so far, it didn't give me anything new.  It was, however, a fun read.

So this is twenty short stories about "fearsome critters" or cryptozoology of North America.  Most of them come from old lumberjack oral traditions, and they are all whacky tall-tales to explain why so-and-so disappeared in the woods.  I love lumberjack folklore, and this had the appropriate level of whackiness that captures the spirit of the tales told aloud.  A lot of the sources I've been through lately are...dry.  The animals are presented as they would in a beastiary, with basics about where they can be found and what they look like and what they do.  If the author was talking about an elephant, I'd call it factual, but when they're talking about a squonk...I don't know.  This was not like that, and it was a pleasant experience.

What this is is a set of short stories, each about a different absurd animal.  They are very short--maybe eight pages at most with big type and illustrations that glow in the dark.  Yeah.  It's that kind of book.  While the narrator is attempting to tell you about the animal in question, he usually does it by detailing an incident, and that incident was where there was a narrative aspect missing in a lot of written accounts of these animals.  The narrator also inserts himself into the stories more often than not, either as a main character or as someone whose opinion nobody bothered to ask or to compare someone in the story to his arch-nemesis.  He's the same narrator in each other the stories, so we learn more and more about him as we work through the book.  Not enough to piece together some sort of larger narrative, but enough to get to know him.

On an incident where a boyscout troop was eaten: "Five of these scouts were tenderfoots, and hardly missed, but the sixth, Beauregard Shugtemple, had earned the coveted merit badge in phrenology, and so search parties combed the area for weeks to no avail.  Beauregard Shagtemple was my nephew, and the young scamp had hidden the keys to my strongbox a week before disappearing, so it was particularly important to me that he be found..."

The thing I liked most about this was how it played with time and expectations.  Most of these stories come from logging days, where the world was much less connected and they didn't have the technology we have today.  So in a lot of writing about cryptozoology, the narrator is set in that time and is a kind of pseudo-scientist who didn't know any better.  Here, the narrator has all of those trappings, and he's often telling stories set back in the day, but then he'll throw in something modern, and the juxtaposition will be funny. 

For a beast in California: "We hired several native guides, mostly surfers and out-of-work actors..."

After a while his whole existence itself becomes strange.  He's a kooky anachronism, who studies animals that don't exist, except they...do?  And the Smithsonian recognizes them.  But still call the study of these animals cryptozoology.  This is not a nitpicky complaint or me pointing at continuity errors, but it's purposefully silly.

The whole thing is pretty silly.  At one point they're being chased by a monster, who can't penetrate a shield they've  finagled, so the monster turns around, shoots in the opposite direction, and the projectile goes all the way around the Earth and kills the guy our narrator is with.  At one point, he's describing an encounter with an animal that's half bear, half deer and confuses people into thinking that it's one or the other so they're not prepared to face both.  In response to being cornered by this beast, "But it could not have foreseen that I was not just a hunter but also a fly fisherman." And thus he escapes.  It's this level of absurdity that's present in the oral tall-tales that I've been missing in my other research. 

***

Next week, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a satirical look at YA heroes, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.

Totoros Are Everywhere

My son gets stickers as rewards.  He gets them for things like cleaning up and getting in and out of the bathtub without making a fuss. 

I'm the one who picks the stickers, so I got a pack from My Neighbor Totoro a while back.  They're high quality stickers, the puffy kind that have some heft to them, but not the slick puffy kind that are stiff, these are the mat puffy kind that can bend and curl.  We used to put them on a cardboard long box from the comic book store, but lately he's been peeling all the stickers off so that he can give them to himself again.  He sticks these stickers to his shirt and walks around the house.  And while the less hefty stickers get shed all over the place because they're not sticky anymore, the Totoro stickers get peeled off his shirt and put in strange places, where he presses them down enough and they are still sticky enough as to be hard to remove when he's not looking.

The other issue is that he saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time a few weeks ago, and his little mind was blown at the idea that Totoro exists outside of his sticker collection.  So he's been targeting the Totoro stickers in his re-stickering. 

This is a long way of saying that I've been finding Totoros all over my house, and have consequently started taking photos of them.

The Bathroom Floor

Bedroom

Living Room

My Desk

Inside His Crib

Hiding

My Closet

Dubious Creatures, Episode 1: The Wooded Island

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 1: The Wooded Island

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle Review

This week's novel is The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, by Janet Fox.

During the Blitz, Kat and her two siblings are sent from London to Rookskill Castle, where a distant relation of theirs has set up a boarding school.  Strange things immediately start to happen, when kids start disappearing, children who aren't part of the school wander the castle, acting strangely, and all the teachers and staff are confused or forgetful.  Practical Kat doesn't believe it's magic, but the evidence is starting to add up.

I liked how much Kat and her siblings missed their parents when they were sent away, and how they felt resentment that their parents were sending them away and guilt that they couldn't help the war effort.  They showed more fear and sadness and anger than usually shows up in books with this setting.  Maybe it's that I haven't read a lot of these books since I've been an adult and didn't pick up on it when I was a child, but I remember these stories being more about exciting, magical adventures in the countryside when no parents are around.  Then again, maybe it's that books written closer to World War II, wanted to sugarcoat it to protect the children reading the books.  "No!  You'll have a great time with Uncle Albert on the moors!  We'll just be doing boring grown-up stuff here.  Have a great time!"  This is all speculation and I haven't looked into it at all.

I also really enjoyed that the kids acted like kids.  Kat is twelve and trying to act mature, to be strong for her siblings and make her parents and her country proud.  Her brother wants to play with the swords on display in the castle so that he can help fight the Germans.  They all think Kat is bossy, and Kat bursts into tears a couple times because she's trying so hard and doesn't know what to do.  They act like kids, and that's pretty cool.

***

Next week, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Tales from the Wilderness by Hal Johnson.

A Dark Unwinding Review

This week's novel is A Dark Unwinding, YA Gothic by Sharon Cameron.

Katherine's aunt sends her to visit her uncle's estate so that she can declare him insane and her cousin can inherit the family fortune.  Katherine follows her aunt's instructions, knowing that if she deviates, her aunt will throw her out on the street.  But once she gets there, she finds that her odd uncle is an inventor of astounding clockwork contraptions, and he has employed almost a thousand people, who he plucked out of workhouses and who now live in a village on the estate, in order to run his gas works, forge, and workshops.  If Katherine has her uncle committed, her aunt will displace everyone on the estate.  The town both hates her and tries to butter her up, trying to convince her to lie for them.  And at the same time, strange things keep happening, everyone agrees the house is haunted, and Katherine starts to wonder if she's losing her mind just like her uncle.

I really liked this one.  It's historical fiction bordering on Steampunk, but the Steampunk isn't overwhelming.  It has all my favorite Gothic tropes done well. There's creepiness on the moors and a howling, eerie wind, but there's also household servants that despise Katherine and are probably up to something.  There's the question of if there's a ghost or if she's crazy, if she's being gas-lit or if the oppressive and antagonistic atmosphere is just making her antsy.  This last point is handled especially well.  There's a bit where her hairbrush keeps ending up in the wrong drawer.  There's a bit where her hat disappears and she finds it tied neatly to a point on the roof. There are secret tunnels and people popping into hallways only to vanish. There's how everyone keeps accusing her of being drunk, when we didn't see her drink anything or act oddly. Is someone moving around her hairbrush just to make her think she's losing it?  Is someone moving it because they're using her hairbrush for some weird reason?  Is she misremembering?  Is she lying to the reader?  It's creepy, and things like that keep happening, and happening in ways that sneak up on you.

I think part of why it works is because Katherine is very precise, so when her precision slips, it's jarring.  She counts everything.  A lot.  Like it seems obsessive compulsive at times.  She discovers that her uncle does this too, and they bond, but at the same time that this is exciting for her, it's also frightening, because she's there to have him institutionalized for doing things like that and maybe that means she is crazy too.  (As a note, her uncle is probably autistic, which clearly isn't catching and would have shown up in Katherine earlier if she was autistic too, but then maybe she's on the spectrum and then maybe she is autistic and no one has bothered with her and since it's from her point of view, maybe she doesn't know about it either, bringing us back to her being an unreliable narrator.)

I enjoyed the way the romance was handled here.  Dreamy Guy doesn't like Katherine since she's about to have him fired and then kick him and his family out of their house, but he also likes her because she's neat and he eventually starts to sympathize with her situation.  So when he blows hot and cold, it all makes a lot of sense and it's all upfront rather than him coming off as one of those heroes who's rude because he just has too many brooding feelings that he can't express because he's not good enough for her or blah blah blah.  As a result, there's never a time when she's confused about his feelings for her and they have a long, drawn out misunderstanding about how they do love each other.  Instead, the barriers keeping them apart are all rational, mostly because Katherine is rational to a fault.  And then there's what looks like might turn into a love triangle, but never really does, even when she's considering marrying the wrong guy.

At one point the grumpy cook/housekeeper said something amazing after being amazing for a whole novel, and I looked up, turned to my husband, and said, "I like everyone in this book."

I recommend it.

***

Next week: The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, British kids escaping the Blitz go to a haunted castle, by Janet Fox.

Central Station Review

Life's been insane lately, so I've fallen behind on the blog.  I apologize. 

This week's novel is Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.

Central Station has its base in Tel Aviv and lifts to a suborbital platform for people to come and go from Earth.  At the base of Central Station cultures collide, from Jewish people and Muslims, to the descendants of the workers brought in to build the station, to people passing through, to the mysterious Others.

The universe created here is thick.  There's so much going on.  There's the world you can see, then a layer of internet that everyone can access through the nodes put into their brains at birth, and then a layer of virtual reality.  The solar system has been colonized (a trope I love) and there are different cultures on different planets and asteroids and moons.  But this book takes it to a new level by having each colony or city started by a certain national or ethnic group, and then the cities act as diasporas.  There's a city on Mars called Tong Yun which is Chinese, but they're Tong Yun Chinese, separate from Earth Chinese, and separate from the Tong Yun Chinese from virtual reality.  There are cyborgs, there are different cyborgs, there are robots, there are sentient appliances, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness onto the internet as sentient code, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness into appliances, there are AIs that evolved on their own, there are AIs that co-habit a body with a human and give them super powers, then there are different people who also have super powers.  There are prehistoric aliens from Mars, regrown and attached to human hosts, there are aliens in virtual reality, there are people who've surgically added arms and dyed themselves red to look like the aliens on virtual Mars.  There are vampires who suck the data out of your node. 
There is a lot happening in this book.

The sense of wonder about all these many many things drives the story rather than a plot.  The book is a series of stories, each from a different point of view from a character in a completely different situation.  That way, we see a lot of the universe that has been created, but if there's a mystery about why or how or what will happen to any of the characters, those won't be answered because that's not the point.  The point is to marvel at the future.   This didn't work for me so much because there were questions I had and there were people I cared about, but they were dropped after their chapter.  I think if they were dropped completely and we never saw them again, if this was a collection of short stories all set in the same universe, it would have worked better for me.  But the characters I cared about kept popping back up in the periphery of other stories, rubbing it in that I wasn't going to get any answers.

There were a lot of cool ideas here, and I wanted a deep dive into any of them.  Instead, I was shown cool ideas, and that's how it goes sometimes.

More on Point of View

A while back, I got into a conversation with my critique group about when something is a 3rd person point of view that jumps and when something is an omniscient point of view.

We were looking at Ursula K. Le Guin's writing book, Steering the Craft, which we're reading together really slowly.  Le Guin talks at length about point of view.  Specifically, we were talking about her example from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, where the point of view shifts from one character to the next and back and around.  It's masterfully done, and most of my group agreed that trying it themselves just made a huge mess, and this was a lesson in sticking to the point of view of one character.

When I tried to write something like Woolf where the perspective shifts from one character to the next (and in my defense, I tried for about ten minutes and declared it good enough) I looked back on it when I was done, squinted at it, and said, "Well, that's just omniscient."

So that got me wondering, if you manage to make this work elegantly and smoothly, if you manage to change perspectives mid sentence without losing your reader, at what point is it still 3rd person and at what point have you moved to omniscient?

Feeling a sense of exasperation, Charlie Brown said, "Good grief," unknowing that Snoopy's activities were completely reasonable.

So we get information from Charlie Brown's point of view (he feels exasperated) and then information from Snoopy's point of view (his plan is reasonable, if you ask Snoopy).  So, without seeing any of the surrounding sentences, you could argue that this is in third person limited, but jumps from Chuck to Snoopy, or you could argue that this is omniscient and told by someone who knows what they're both thinking.  I think there's two things going on that lean towards one or the other. 

1. Voice.  If I did a better job of having the first half in Charlie Brown's voice and the second half being in Snoopy's voice, that would be evidence for a shifting third person POV.  If the voice is consistent through the whole sentence (which is not to say that there is no voice) that would be evidence for an omniscient POV.

2. Scope.  Or how far the camera that shows us the scene is zoomed in.  If this were a movie, and if the scene shows a wider view of the events, that's evidence for an omniscient POV.  So if the camera can pick up Chuck's exasperation and Snoopy's motives at the same time, it's like we have both characters in frame at the same time in a wider shot.  If the camera is zoomed in on Chuck, and then swivels or cuts to a close up of Snoopy, that's more like 3rd person POV.  I can't really tell if you could say which one this is from this example, so maybe that's not helpful here.  But one of my critique partners pointed out that an omniscient POV would be able to tell you something that the characters don't know themselves, and that seems to fit with this.

The Masked City Review

This week's novel is The Masked City, the sequel to The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman.

Irene is enjoying being the Librarian-in-Residence in a magical, steampunk world.  But when Kai (her student and secret dragon) gets kidnapped by Fae and brought to a high chaos world, Irene has to rescue him before the dragons declare war on the Fae, potentially destroying whole universes in the cross fire.

There's a cool thing going on here where the Fae get power from inhabiting leading roles in stories.  So the more stereotypical and overly-dramatic they are, whether they're playing villain or hero, the more powerful they are and the more easily they can draw random passersby into their story.  This leaves the humans in worlds controlled by Fae to act like puppets whenever a Fae walks by, shifting in and out of stories without any control at all.  Lesser Fae gain power by getting closer to the main plots and being less like side characters.  So you've got this culture where everyone is trying to be a main character, and everyone is trying to out-drama each other. 

The thing I like best is that Irene has to keep asking herself what role she's playing in a story.  If she's the villain, she's likely to be caught through unbelievable coincidence.  If she's the hero, she's likely to out maneuver the people chasing her.  It's a cool set up, and I wish more time was spent digging into it.  Aren't we all the heroes of our own stories?  And if so, how do two conflicting stories interact?  I would have liked to see Irene consciously grab the reigns of someone else's story, or I would have liked to see one of the lesser Fae rise up to become a main character.  I would have liked to see some investigation of genre or tropes.  I want to know more, because this is a cool idea.

As with the last book, I think Irene is neat.  She's collected and reasonable and she has sweet Librarian powers.  And as with the last book, I'm pretty ambivalent about Vale, the detective.  I outright got irritated with him when he showed up to announce that he'd figured out everything Irene had figured out, but more easily and stealthfully, plus he'd figured out the one thing she couldn't get.  On the one hand, it was fortuitous in the way that a story with Irene as the hero would be overly-convenient.  But on the other hand...shut up, Vale.  I don't need some dude coming in to make Irene look stupid and show that the last hundred pages or so of her investigating stuff was worthless because he'd already done it.

Shut up, Vale.

***

Next week: Central Station, sci-fi by Lavie Tidhar.

The Privilege of the Sword Review

This week's novel is The Privilege of The Sword by Ellen Kushner.  This one was recommended to me by my friend Dani, who thought I would like that the main character is a girly girl who has to learn to sword fight (and also probably thought I'd like the steamy parts).  She was correct.  This book was fun.

Katherine is a noble country girl, whose family has been in a legal battle with her uncle, The Mad Duke, for years and it is bankrupting them.  When her uncle randomly says he'll forgive all their debts and leave them alone if they send Katherine to him, Katherine thinks she's going to have a season in the city, living in an elaborate house and wearing beautiful, expensive gowns and going to parties to meet eligible young men.  Instead, her uncle decides that she's going to learn to be a swordsman, handle his duels for him.  He gives her very nice clothes, but they are clothes for a swordsman, and therefore involve pants.  Horrors!

Katherine was a fun character.  I appreciated the complex relationship she had with learning to sword fight.  She's resistant to it because it's typically a thing that men do and she's the girlie-est of all girly girls and it's going to ruin her reputation as a Lady.  But she's also honor bound to help her family the same way she would help them by marrying well, and her putting up with the Duke's whims is going to do that.  And then she starts being really good at it.  She takes it seriously and prides herself on learning.  Then she gets obsessive in a very teen girl way about a book about swordsmen, and she's drawn to the drama romance of her new profession, to the point of getting upset when it turns out that real duels are kind of boring and unintelligent and over less than heroic squabbles.  The push and pull is really interesting, as is her growth through the story.

It was also a really well put together queer narrative.  The Mad Duke is openly bi (I assume.  He never says how he identifies so it might be more along the lines of pansexual).  But more interesting than that is Katherine's sexual awakening.  She's also bi (again, I assume), and her discovery of that is really well handled.  In their pseudo-Regency society, no one has really talked to her about sex, so when she realizes she wants to kiss ladies, she has to simultaneously piece together all the innuendos that have been going over her head (which is an entertaining thing for a lot of the book).  She freaks out because she feels sexual attraction, not because she feels it towards women.  And she never feels guilty about it, which is really cool.  It's more of a light bub moment than a dread filled moment.

The other thing that stands out for me about this book is that it's fantasy because it's set in this word that's not ours and doesn't really exist.  However, there's no magic or monsters or supernatural forces of any kind.  It's people doing people things in a sort-of-Regency setting.  I find it gratifying how malleable the fantasy genre can be.

The narrative often shifted from Katherine's point of view to cover some side character or another, and I wondered why I should care about them and how they fit into Katherine's story.  They all come together in the end, but a lot of the time I felt as if I was missing something.

***

Next week: The Masked City, the sequel to The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman

Maplecroft Review

This week's novel is Maplecroft by Cherie Priest.  It was recommended by the Writing Excuses podcast as an example of an epistolary narrative.

A sickness has crept into the town of Fall River, where people hear an eerie call from the ocean, where they change to become unresponsive, sensitive to light, their bodies bloating and their skin becoming translucent.  They grow gills and move in jerks.  Eventually they turn against their families and escape to the water.  Unless their families defend themselves, which is what Lizzie did the night she killed her father and step-mother with an ax.  When the sickness returns, Lizzie--now a social pariah--is the only one who can protect the town.

This is a fictionalized retelling of the story of Lizzie Borden, who was charged and acquitted of killing her parents with an ax in a big brouhaha in the 1890s.  But I don't think that adds anything to the story and detracts from it a bit in that it's kind of uncomfortable to see a true crime portrayed as "no, monsters did it!"  I guess no one is really harmed by fictionalizing these events, but the serial numbers could have very easily scraped off, and I would have enjoyed it just fine.

The chapters are mostly diary entries.  They allow for candid discussions of what the characters feel, especially when they're being petty and delusional and unsympathetic.  The diary entries give rise to incredible honesty that I don't think the narrative could have achieved except through using a first person narrative and switching every chapter to a different character.  And even then, a diary is naturally a place for self-reflection, so the simple first person might not have dove as deeply.  It allows the characters to express jealousy that other characters don't pick up on.  It allows characters to slowly lose touch with reality or worry that they're losing touch with reality.

The main thing I looked at in this book was something I've been thinking about for a while.  I have a critique partner who's of the school of thought that people don't remember conversations verbatim enough to write them in a letter or a diary.  Whereas, I'm of the school of thought that of course I don't remember things exactly as they happened.  Who cares?  I'm going to fill in the gaps to make a good story, and whoever's listening will know that and get the gist of what really happened.  So I've been trying to find some middle ground where I can write like I want without my critique partner tackling me. 

In Maplecroft, the events toward the end of the book--the climax and leading up to it--are detailed in a way that my friend would probably flag.  However, early in the story the writers use qualifiers and only scattered descriptions of things they would definitely remember.  (And these make those details all the more powerful by contrast.  Like how the smell of the monsters is awful and there are long descriptions of what it smells like that make you understand, not just by the comparisons made, but by the fact that they're going on and on about it, that it's disgusting.)  As the story picks up, I was swept up in the horror and suspense enough that I wanted to hear about fight scenes in all their glory.  I wanted to hear the conversations that spelled out their working theories of the sickness.  I didn't notice when it became less realistically epistolary because it was giving me what I wanted.  It's the quick pacing that makes this work.  It's exciting and creepy and I wanted to keep reading.  In the end, I still had questions and everything didn't fit together neatly, but I was reading so fast that I didn't care.

Another thing the form has going for it that lets it push at the boundaries of realistic diary entries is that, even when they're being detailed about dialogue or action scenes or monster descriptions, the entires still have a sharp voice that's different for each character.  The voice is still there, and that roots us to the diary format.

Furthermore, there's also something to be said about this being set in the 1890s when everyone was an avid journaler, and that most of the characters are scientists striving to record their observations in as much detail as possible.

***

Next week: The Privilegeof the Sword, YA fantasy by Ellen Kushner

Their Fractured Light Review

This week's novel is Their Fractured Light, the last book in the Starbound trilogy by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner.

Sophia, who left the haunted swamp planet of Avon in the last book, is now a con-artist with the aim of killing Roderick LaRoux for his crimes on Avon.  Gideon is the universe's best hacker.  They get thrown together, fall for each other, and then must overcome their mutual betrayal and distrust of each other to save the universe from LaRoux's evil plans.

This series has a structure that I've been seeing a lot lately where each book focuses on a different couple, adding characters and expanding the universe as it goes.  It's a good way to show different sides of an issue, different experiences in an expanded universe, and how far reaching one conspiracy can grow.  However, I have a couple problems with it. 

First, by the last book, when everyone's together, I'm overwhelmed with how many shmoopy couples are in the same room.  Even though I'm rooting for each of the couples, and I want to see them be schmoopy, all together it's a lot.  There are just so many straight people.

My other issue is that (and I think I've said this before) I loved Lilac and Tarver from the first book so much that I put off reading the second book, because I knew that the narrative turned away from them, and the thought of that made me sad.  I then loved Lee and Flynn from the second book and put this book off because the narrative turned away from them, even though Kaufman and Spooner have shown me that they'll make me love new people.  I'm a big, grumpy, stick in the mud, and I don't like change!  But then a weird thing happened. 

The weird thing is not that I loved Sophia and Gideon.  And I love Sophia and Gideon.  The first half of this story is a sexy spy-vs-spy where they're both keeping secrets and both have trust issues and are both using each other.  And there's this neat tension, where the reader (who is getting both Sophia's and Gideon's points of view) understands exactly how much they've hurt each other without even knowing it way before Gideon and Sophia figure it out.  So you're waiting in suspense for the last shoe to drop.  They have great chemistry and exciting escapes and it's fun in the way that satisfying heist stories tend to be.

The second half of this book draws the series to a close by bringing the other two couples onto the team.  And this is where the weird part is: I wanted them to go away so I could spend more time with Sophia and Gideon in their story.  Because it stopped being their story at that point and became an ensemble story, but at the same time it stuck with Sophia and Gideon's alternating points of view.  So a lot of the time I felt like other characters were having a more interesting character arc, but we could only see it from the outside.  So not only was Sophia and Gideon's story hijacked so we viewed a different narrative as outsiders (one where Sophia's skill set wasn't all that useful anymore) but the characters I loved didn't feel like they came back.  I wasn't in their head anymore the way I was when I fell in love with them.  They felt like they were passing through in a cameo appearance. 

I really have to hand it to Kaufman and Spooner.  They outdid themselves with lovable characters in every book in this series. 

***

Next week: Maplecroft, epistolary supernatural horror by Cherie Priest.

All the Birds in the Sky Review

This week's novel is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders.

Patricia is an outcast middle schooler, who one day runs into the woods away from her sister, where a bird tells her that she's a witch.  Lawrence is an outcast middle schooler, who would rather program AIs and build robots than be outdoorsy like his parents want.  To pacify them, he makes friends with Patricia, who spins stories for his parents about all the time they supposedly spend outside.  The more outcast they become, the more their reputations bring each other down, and they're repeatedly tempted to abandon each other, finally splitting after Patricia saves Lawrence from military school and runs away to magic school.  They reunite as adults, with the world on the brink of collapse, both with ideas of how to save the world.  But their ideas conflict with each other and bring about a war between science and magic.

I really like the first third of this book where they're in middle school, and I had trouble with the last two thirds.  After thinking about it, there are two reasons for this.

First, when they're children, Patricia's magical achievments and Lawrence's technological achievements look like coping mechanisms, like stories they're telling themselves that aren't based in reality because their realities suck.  Lawrence builds a "two second time machine" that moves the traveler two seconds into the future--just far enough to skip over a punch.  Now, in the world of the novel as we see it, it seems unrealistic that time machines exist, that a kid can build one, that everyone doesn't have one, and that they're being used for relatively trivial things, all of which points to this not being real.  And then there's the deniability aspect: two seconds is such a short amount of time that it could be that Lawrence is just cringing through those two seconds and playing a game where he convinces himself that he didn't experience them.  He could convince himself that this game is real, as kids are prone to do.

Then for Patricia, there's a tonal shift the moment magic comes into the picture, as if she's flipped a switch in her mind and now we're in the land of make believe.

"I found a wounded bird," Patricia said.  "It can't fly, its wing is ruined."
"I bet I can make it fly," Roberta said, and Patricia knew she was talking about her rocket launcher.  "Bring it here.  I'll make it fly real good."
"No!" Patricia's eyes flooded and she felt short of breath.  "You can't!  You can't!"  And then she was running, careening, with the red bucket in one hand.  She could hear her sister behind her, smashing branches.  She ran faster, back to the house.
...
Patricia paused in a small clearing of maples near the back door.  "It's okay," she told the bird.  "I'll take you home.  There's an old birdcage in the attic.  I know where to find it.  It's a nice cage, it has a perch and a swing.  I'll put you in there, I'll tell my parents.  If anything happens to you, I will hold my breath until I faint.  I'll keep you safe.  I promise."
"No," the bird said.  "Please!  Don't lock me up.  I would prefer you just kill me now."
"But," Patricia said, more startled that the bird was refusing her protection than that he was speaking to her.  "I can keep you safe.  I can bring you bugs or seeds or whatever."

There's also the extremes with which the bullies in her life are presented.  Her parents' dialogue doesn't sound like adults speaking, but does sound like a pre-teen relaying a conversation with her horrible parents. 

"What Roderick is saying is that we spent a lot of money to send you to a school with uniforms and discipline and a curriculum that creates winners," Patricia's mom hissed, her jaw and penciled eyebrows looking sharper than usual.  "Are you determined to blow this last chance?  If you want to be garbage, just let us know, and you can go back to the woods.  Just never come back to this house.  You can go live in the woods forever.  We could save a large sum of money."

We're pretty clearly in Patricia's mind, which makes the reliability of the story questionable.  So when the guidance councilor has an elaborate backstory about being an undercover assassain sent to kill Patricia and Lawrence, and failing that at least to turn them against each other, it's reasonable to think, "Oh, this kid does not like that guidance councilor."

It's charming and whimsical and heartbreaking, and I really liked how it was clearly from a kid's point of view without using childish syntax or vocabulary.

But the we jump to when they're adults, and other characters are witches and other characters have two second time machines, corroborating that what I thought was escapism was actually happening.  You could say that this is an interesting play on my expectations, or that it says something about believing children, but I really liked my expectations, damn it!  Showing that I was wrong to think what I thought wasn't delightfully surprising, but rather disappointing.

Secondly, when they're adults, the background of the world falling apart comes into play.  Global warming and climate change are going to make the earth uninhabitable, and Lawrence is trying to invent technology to evacuate.  The apocalypse is a kind of low rumble in the background, a kind of dark cloud over everything, which makes it oppressive but also means it stays low key for most of the book.  The pivot point comes when there's a super-storm that floods DC and New York, displacing people in a huge evacuation.  Not really what I needed to read this weekend.  So there was a combination at work where I was simultaneously thinking "a hurricane isn't going to destroy civilization.  You need like three hurricanes to destroy civilization," and "Oh God, it's happening."  Which made it an unfun read.

But I did really like the first third, and I probably would have liked the last 2/3 if I hadn't just read the first third and I hadn't read it during hurricane season.

***

Next week: Their Fractured Light, the final installment of the YA sci-fi Starbound series by Amie Kaufman and
Meagan Spooner

Strange the Dreamer Review

This week’s novel is Strange the Dreamer by Lani Taylor.

The story goes that there's a magical city of riches and knowledge in the desert.  But 200 years ago they stopped sending out caravans, and 15 years ago its name vanished from memory, replaced only with "Weep." Lazlo Strange, an orphan raised by monks and a librarian at the university library, is so obsessed with stories about Weep that that he earns the nickname "Strange the Dreamer."  Sarai, a girl who has spent her life trapped in Weep's citadel after the massacre of her family, is able to control dreams, and uses her skills to bring vengeance on the people below.  But she's starting to question if the torture is justified.  Together, they're put in an impossible situation of keeping everyone alive.

This book is gorgeous.  The prose is vivid and magical, and I was sucked in from the first page.  The characters were complex, as no one was purely good or evil to the point where I sympathized for everyone even as their actions were reprehensible.

I was also impressed with how the reveals were handled.  I knew what the twists would be before they were explained, and I was on the verge of disappointment.  But every time, it turned out that the explanation--or what I hesitate to call a twist--was not the shocking part, but the way it was revealed was where the surprise came in.  There was always a measure of awe or wonder that made the reveal magical, that made it rewarding, that made it so I only knew the skeleton of what would happen ahead of time.  It was almost like Taylor knew that the reader knew the twist, and she was unconcerned with keeping her secrets, which was a great call since it allowed her to put her effort into presentation instead of obfuscation.  And the presentation was--again--gorgeous.

For example, Lazlo is in suspense about the problem Weep is facing, while the reader knows from Sarai's point of view chapters that the citadel is looming over the city as a reminder of centuries of oppression.  So when Lazlo discovers this, it is not surprising for the reader.  What is surprising is what the citadel looks like, and it is impressive and surprising enough that the reveal as Lazlo comes over the hill to see the city is delightful.

Taylor also plays with tension in a neat way.  In the prologue, a girl falls from the sky.  Eventually, as you read, you realize that this event wasn't in some distant past, but it's coming up, and I was waiting for the moment when a girl would fall from the sky.  The anticipation grows as you start to understand the enormity of the situation of a girl falling and you start to understand that the consequences are going to be catastrophic.  So whenever things start looking up, the fact that it's all going to come crashing down still looms over you.  There are scenes that would otherwise have little tension, but I was braced through them, thinking, "Ooooooh, this is it.  Someone's getting pushed off this balcony any second now."

I can't recommend this one enough.

***

Next week: All the Birds in the Sky, magic and sci-fi in an oncoming apocalypse by Charlie Jane Anders.

The Black Butterfly Review

This week's novel is The Black Butterfly by Shirley Reva Vernick.

When Penny's flaky mom runs off to spend Christmas trying to photograph ghosts in Idaho, Penny is shipped off to an inn belonging to her mom's estranged friend on a tiny island off the coast of Maine.  There she makes friends with Rita, the chef, falls for George, the inn keeper's son, and meets two honest to goodness ghosts, one of whom wants to kill her.  She ends up uncovering not just the ghosts' past, but also her own.

This book was silly.  I read it in about three hours, which was nice and which gives it a lot of leeway in the silly department, because it's not like it stole any of my time.

The best parts of this book are the descriptions of food and cooking.  It was tremendous and I loved it and I wish this was just Penny and Rita and George cooking, because I would have read the hell out of that.  I would have read that twice.

I also really liked that when George decided to be charming, he really was suave.  The kissing is very good here and George is super cute.  But this begs the question of why he was a jerk at the beginning (which he was), which is answered with a flippant "he has migraines sometimes," which is such a weird explanation (I know migraines and that didn't look like a migraine) that I assumed it would turn out to be an excuse covering up something darker.  But no.  It's never mentioned again.

A lot of the book was like that.  I was expecting things to come back and mean something or to pay off.  I expected everyone of hiding things and trying to manipulate Penny.  But no.  Like, I was sure Nice Ghost was trying to kill Penny and had killed the random handy man that shows up once.  I was sure Rita was going to be evil in a big twist at the end where she'd give Penny a speech about how she had been hoping that she wouldn't have to poison her, but Penny just kept snooping.  I was sure the crawl space was super haunted and maybe where Bad Ghost lived and the climax would take place there.  I was sure the family knew there were ghosts and they were trying to cover it up.  I was sure George's migraines (if they existed) were from brain damage from when Bad Ghost threw him down the stairs in the crawl space.

I was continuously searching for layers and trying to make it more complicated.  Maybe this was me being too wound up.  Maybe it was that the characters' actions only made sense to me if there was something else going on.

I thought everything would be tied up at the end, but I'm left with a lot of questions.  Why does George like her if she's distant and self-conscious and awkward until after they make out?  Why is Rita making huge, elaborate meals when it's the off season and the inn has no guests and the family doesn't seem to eat?  How does Nice Ghost know "shaman stuff"?  What is Bad Ghost's goal here?  Why, when Penny's hypothermic, do they solve that by putting her in the hot tub, and why does she not die of shock?  Shhhhhhhhh!  Shut up, Carolyn.

Anyway.  It was silly and enjoyable.  And I didn't really put it down.

***

Next week: Strange the Dreamer by Lani Taylor.

Antarctic Research

In doing research for an episode of the podcast for season 2, I wandered onto a very exciting website.  It's the Australian Antarctic Division. 

They talk about the history and geology and wildlife and climate, but my most favorite part is that they have weekly updates about what the researchers are doing socially.  They say whose birthday it was an what special meals they had to celebrate.  They had descriptions of the Antarctic Film Festival, where each of the four research stations spread across the Antarctic had 48 hours to make a short film with particular criteria.  They talked about their darts competition. 

I think what made it especially neat was that the effort they put into organizing activities made ti really clear that the researchers were dying of boredom and loneliness, and the government is active in trying to keep them busy.  It's both wacky and eerie. 

I was watching videos and looking at pictures, trying to get a sense of one of the stations well enough to set part of a story there, and I was having some trouble getting a sense of it as a place rather than as a penguin documentary.  But then I saw the "Contact Us" button.  I narrowed my eyes at it a little bit, and then thought "Why not!" and I wrote them an e-mail asking about weird sensory information.  "What does the air smell like?" kind of thing.

The amazing part is that they wrote back.  And their answers were amazing.  They really went into how bad is smells (there is both a penguin colony and an elephant seal colony).  They described the colors of the hills and the clouds.  It was visceral and authentic and raw and perfect.

So thanks, Australian Antarctic Division!  And remember, if there's something you don't know for a story, there might be some very bored expert who would love to answer an e-mail for you.

One Hundred Years of Solitude Review

This week's novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This is the story of the Buendia family over the course of six generations, from the time they found the town of Macondo until the town collapses along with the family.  The matriarch, Ursula, and her husband are cousins and Ursula is convinced that their children will be born with pig tails.  They aren't, but the family is cursed to tragedy, solitude, and repeated instances of incest, to the point where Ursula thinks they might as well have been born with pig tails.  Their family expands and is wiped out just as the town grows around them and then falls  into ruin.

First of all, some really upsetting things happen in this book, the most egregious of which were child molestation and a mass murder that's covered up by the foreign banana company.  However, the way that the story is written makes it less awful than it could have been.

The story is full of magical realism like a plague of insomnia that attacks the whole town, a rainstorm that lasts almost five years, and a character who is followed by butterflies.  It has the feel of an exaggerated family story, where you know it probably didn't really rain non-stop for five years, but you get the gist that it rained a whole lot for a long time.  So at one point, one of the brothers decides that he's going to marry a beautiful girl...who is nine-years-old.  That's horrifying.  But at the same time, I got the impression that this was another exaggeration: his wife was very young and family lore exaggerated the story to say she hadn't reached puberty.  So this is what I mean about it not feeling as awful while I was reading it as it sounds if I were to summarize it.

The impact is also lessened by the fact that the entire story (and it is not a short book) is told in summary (as opposed to in scenes) with an omnipotent narrator who jumps around to the different members of the family and who is not involved in the story and does not pass judgement.  While it has the voice of family legends about family members long gone, which is one of the book's great strengths, the voice also puts an emotional distance between the reader and the action, which is one of the book's greatest weaknesses.  The two come hand in hand.  I've talked before about how the flatness of fairy tales makes it hard for characterization to shine through, and that definitely happened here.  I didn't have a grasp on what any character would do or say in any particular situation, and I remember characters based on their greatest sins, which (again) is kind of how I think about my family members that I haven't met, so it makes sense.

This book is bonkers, and it was magical, and parts of it were really fun.

***

Next week:  The Black Butterfly, a YA ghost story by Shirley Reva Vernick.

Update

Horror of horrors, I did not manage to finish One Hundred Years of Solitude in a week.  I am enjoying it and I know what I'd say about it in a blog post if I stopped right now and pretended I finished it, but who knows what will happen in the next 200 pages and I like to think I'm better than my high school English self these days.  So I'm taking a pass this week on the book reviews.  I don't feel too bad about it because I haven't missed one in a while.

On top of the brick of magical realism I'm reading, I had a crazy week.  My son turned two.  There were day job fires and night job fires.  And then you might have heard the podcast mentioned on NPR.  Not to brag, but my phone exploded with notifications.  And then I felt the guilt I should have had about my slow reading but instead was about how season 2 isn't ready yet.  So hello to any new people who were sent here from that.  Sorry it's a dry week on the blog. 

I'll be back this weekend.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown Review

This week's novel is The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black.  I went for this one because I like Black's writing and I'm slowly working my way through her novels.

In an alternate history, about ten years ago, a rouge vampire wen to n a biting spree, changing vampirism from a secret society with strict rules to a full blown, unmanageable epidemic.  With one bite from a vampire, a human becomes infected or "Cold," becoming violent and craving blood.  Once they taste human blood, they become a vampire.  In response, the United States has set up Coldtowns, walled off quarantined cities for vampires, the infected, and humans lured in by the video feeds of the vampires' glamorous parties and hopes of eternal life if they can get a vampire to bite them.  When Tana wakes up after passing out in a bathtub at a party, she finds that vampires got into the house during the night and slaughtered everyone except her, her newly infected ex-boyfriend, and a vampire boy in chains.  Together, they head for Coldtown to submit themselves to quarantine.

Black does a fabulous job of showing different points of view, from those that fear vampires to those who worship them.  Coldtown is never-ending, extravagant parties with ball gowns and booming house music and open bars, and Coldtown is homeless kids who barter batteries for rat tacos.  Vampire celebrities are famous, with highlights of their parties shown on television along with reality TV shows about vampire hunters.

The other thing I was impressed with is how Black implies a wider world.  The humans who come to Coldtown willingly participate in wider on-line groups where they share strategies and assistance.  There are little stories mentioned throughout about people who were bitten and how their families tried to hide them instead of sending them to Coldtown, about scientists who infected themselves to study vampirism, about Coldtowns across the country and how they function differently, and how Europe hasn't set up any Coldtowns at all.  The details give the impression of a wider, rich world which we only see a part of through Tana's eyes.

The way mass media is portrayed here helps both of these points.  People inside Coldtown blog their experiences and post videos that get thousands of followers, but these people generally have a rose tinted view, and that's the view that gets projected out into the larger world.  At the last rest stop before Coldtown, they sell touristy T-shirts with slogans like "Corpsebait" and "I take my coffee with your blood in it", which would get the wearer beaten up in Coldtown and probably repel vampires, who want to keep the human population in Coldtown human so they can have a steady food supply.  They're choosy about who they bite (who they bite without out-right killing).

I'm also impressed by the structure.  It alternates chapters between the main story and short flashbacks to Tana's past when her mom was infected.  I might spend some time going through this to see how it all fits together.

***

Next week: One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magical realism classic by Gabriel García Márquez.

The Paper Menagerie Review

This weeks book is The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Lui.  It's a collection of short stories, mostly sci-fi but with some fantasy magical realism, about Chinese or Chinese American experiences.

The titular story "The Paper Menagerie" is the story of a biracial young man learning about his Chinese mother's past after he has rejected everything Chinese.  His mother used to make him paper animals that come to life, which may have been his boyhood imagination and may have been magic, but either way the animals no longer move.  It also includes the line, "Son, I know that you do not like your Chinese eyes, which are my eyes. I know that you do not like your Chinese hair, which is my hair,"...and I'm crying again.  It was simple and brutal and so so true and lovely.  It's no wonder this story won the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Award.  But then it's also interesting that within the collection, it comes right after "The Regular," a sci-fi novella cybernetic enhanced private eye who has artificially removed her emotions tries to solve the murder of a prostitute in Chinatown.

"The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary" was another of my favorites.  The basis of this story is that if you have a powerful enough telescope that will let you see activity on another planet, you would actually be looking back in time due to the time it takes light or the images of what's happening to travel.  If we sent a telescope that travels faster than light way out into space and looked back at the earth, we could look at history.  (This part is true.)  It then posits that there is a sister particle to those photons sent out into space, particles that stay here where they were created and which we can observe without going into space or moving faster than light.  The problem is (and this part is based on real science too), once you look at a particle, it "collapses its wave function" which basically means that once observed, it ceases to exist.  Therefore in this story, by viewing parts of history, you destroy them so no one else can ever observe them.  Can you hear my particle-physicist heart fluttering?  But then Liu takes it further.  The main character and time traveler wants to send people back to witness the atrocities of a Japanese concentration camp in occupied China, setting off a conversation about who owns history, about taking responsibility for past crimes vs moving on since so few of the actual perpetrators are still alive, which is a powerful and complicated topic when dealing with this period of history especially.



I also very much enjoyed "State Change," where people's souls are physical objects that can be used up, like cigarettes or coffee grounds or an ice cube.   And "Simulacrum" about a man who invents a way to make holographic copies of people that think for themselves in ways that person would think, about his strained relationship with his daughter, and how he's stuck in the past.  And "Good Hunting" about a girl who can turn into a fox and how the coming of the railroad is sucking away the magic.  It turns from a fantasy with magical creatures and ghosts, what seems like it's going to be a typical "technology hurts nature" story, into a steam punk story about adapting and thriving.

It was a powerful collection.  Liu boldly talks about dark eras in Chinese history, shares honestly about the immigrant experience, and beautifully uses science-fiction elements.

***

Next week: The Coldest Girl in Cold Town, YA vampires by Holly Black.