The Forgetting Review

This week's novel is The Forgetting by Sharon Cameron.  This one was a page turner.  I was so absorbed in this that I didn't notice my son scribbling on the windows in crayon until there was purple on three different panes of glass.

Every twelve years in the city of Canaan the Forgetting takes place.  Everyone loses their memories and has to rely on books that they keep with them at all times, where they've written the truth of what happened to them and who they are, who their family is, where they live, and what their professions are.  Nadia is the only person who did not forget at the last Forgetting.  She knows how much people have lied to change their lives after the big reset.  For instance, her father isn't dead as it says in her family's books, but rather changed his identity to marry someone else and start a new family.  She knows that people go crazy right before the Forgetting, believing they can get away with anything.  She knows that no matter how much she loves her mother and sisters and anyone else, they will forget her, so she holds herself at a distance.  With the next Forgetting on its way, Nadia starts to uncover the truth of Canaan, desperate to find a way to protect her family.

It was a very well balanced mystery, where I figured things out at the same speed as Nadia.  I'm one of those people who usually figures out the twist on page twelve and then has to sit through the characters being slow, so this was refreshing and enjoyable.  It kept my interest by introducing several mysteries, some only related to each other, interconnected once I had every piece of the puzzle, some on the grand scale of the city as a whole and some more personal mysteries of why individual people acted the way they did.  All of these mysteries were answered in satisfying ways that fit together, fit with the world building, and fit with the characters' motivations.  The world building influenced the characters and the history, characterization influenced the characters' actions.  It all fit together beautifully.

And the characters were interesting and engaging.  One of Nadia's sisters doesn't like her and can be downright cruel in significant ways.  But instead of her being a two dimensional bitch, it comes out that she thinks that Nadia wasn't their sister before the last Forgetting, she doesn't belong there and she's a liar.  She thinks that Nadia's behavior is hurting their mother (which is arguably true).  She wants to protect her family, and she is willing to work with Nadia to achieve that goal.You understand where she's coming from and that she is her own person with her own sympathetic agenda.  And the book is full of these flushed out side characters, turning each characters' motivation into its own mystery that gets answered in "ah ha" moments.

It also kept my interest by never letting up on the conflicts.  As soon as one fire was put out (once literally), Nadia would have to run to the next crisis without time to revel in minor victories.  Every time one mystery was solved, it would reveal two more or her family would have a crisis.  I heard recently that thrillers follow a format of "yes, but..." and "no, and..." meaning that our hero succeeds in deactivating the bomb, BUT in deactivating it they alerted the terrorist to their presence and made the situation worse.  Or, the hero doesn't succeed, the bomb goes off, AND NOW half a building is missing and our hero has blown out his hearing.  This story does this really well, keeping the story clipping along and maintaining tension.

The other notable thing about this story is how it transitioned seamlessly from a second world fantasy where they live in a city surrounded by walls with limited technology, where one sun rising and setting lasts 150 "days" and everyone forgets everything every twelve years and carries around books to hold their memories.  That sounds like a fantasy setting to me.  But as Nadia investigates, she uncovers technology that's familiar to the reader, and she finds evidence that this civilization is set far in our future.  The boundaries between fantasy and sci-fi are ambiguous and arguable, but I found it really cool how this book slipped from the tropes and stylings of one to the tropes and stylings of the other.  It worked because the world as you understood it at the beginning made sense as a partial view of the world as you understood it at the end.  This story felt built from the ground up, with an understanding of the wider world, history, and conspiracy, and presented the world at the beginning as a product of that, rather than the sci-fi portions tacked on as a separate entity.

It was a lot of fun.

***

Next week: The Rithmatist, YA with chalk drawing, geometry magic by Brandon Sanderson.

Random Thoughts on Modernism

I've been thinking lately about the modernist lens through which I look at art, including novels.  Modernism was a movement in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and one of the hallmarks is that it focused on the method, the process, and the materials by which the art was created.  A Jackson Pollock painting draws attention to the fact that it was made by splattering paint on the canvas.  Post-modernism, on the other hand, has a skepticism of objective reality, meaning that since each individual approaches a piece of art from different situations with different beliefs and experiences, everyone will view the piece differently.  

A simplified way to think about it is that in modernism, the burden of creating meaning is on the author, and in post-modernism, it's on the reader.  A modernist could ask, "What did the author mean by this?"  While a post-modernist would ask, "What does that mean to me?"

I've been thinking about this because I had a conversation with my post-modernist friend where he said a writer can't create meaning, so--as a writer--instead of trying to create meaning, you need to leave space for the reader to create meaning.  His argument was that coming down too hard on what you intended, spelling it out too much will com off as preachy or disingenuous when it doesn't resonate with the reader.  

While I agree that a writer needs to acknowledge that their story will mean different things to different people and should accept that and not assume that their intention will be universally embraced, and while I do think that getting preachy about what you mean is obnoxious, I disagree with the assertion that the writer has no control of the situation and the assertion that the writer has no part in creating meaning save to give the reader opportunities to make their own connections.  I will almost always ask myself about the author's process or what they intended.  That doesn't often affect what I get out of a story, if I got something more out of it than they intended, if it resonates with a struggle in my life that the author couldn't have possibly known, that's great.  That's me adding meaning to what they already lay down.  But I will wonder things like, 

• This author is super proud of these details.  I bet they spent a year and a half researching this.
• This abusive relationship is weirdly romanticized.  I hope the author addresses that later.  I hope the author can recognize abusive behavior in their own life.
• Is the character misinformed about this fact, or is the author misinformed about this fact?
• I wonder if the author talked to any Indian people before writing this.
• This description of X is so visceral and accurate.  I am absolutely positive that this author has experienced it.

I look for the hand of the artist.  I can't help it.  Maybe it's because I'm analyzing everything I read, picking it apart to see how it all works so I can learn from it.  

Maybe it's that these aren't instances of the author creating meaning.  They're more factual.  For example: the author gets the concept of electro-magnetism wrong in their sci-fi story.  That wasn't a place they intended to elicit an emotion, but it created meaning for me and that meaning is "this author is wrong."

And maybe this is me making meaning.  I'm the one asking those annoying questions, the one guessing at the answers, and the one one whose enjoyment is affected by these answers.  My feelings about these answers is informed from my personal experiences.  But there's still something to be said about how the author put this out there first, they presented a work that had meaning to them, then I took that and laid my own meaning on top of it, that meaning informed by their meaning.  The interesting part here is the interaction between the author's intent and the reader's interpretation.  It's a two way street with both involved, a kind of dialogue.  Ignoring the author or ignoring the reader is dangerous.

I was talking about this recently when I elicited the "wrong" emotion in one of my readers.  I can do things to make it so she doesn't feel that way, but I can't change things to make everyone feel the way I want them to.  I can do things that will elicit certain emotions in large groups of people.  I have that power.  But, in true post-modern fashion, it won't hit everyone the same way because they're coming in with different histories.  

And maybe there's something to be said about me and my post-modernist friend's differences in reading preferences. He prefers literary fiction, and in literary fiction the reader is expected to do some heavy lifting to piece things together.  On the other hand, I read mostly YA genre fiction, where the narrative is purposefully transparent and the focus in more on the story than on the method in which the story is told. If you forget that you're reading, it's considered a good thing. So the reader creating meaning in literary fiction makes more sense, because the reader in YA genre fiction is (more often than not) sitting back and enjoying what they're presented with.

But then how do I justify wanting to see the hand of the author, which is especially visible in a lot of literary fiction, while also wanting to forget the author is there, which is something I enjoy in my reading choices?   Oh, what a big jumbled mess of meaning.

Every Day Review

This week' novel is Every Day by David Levithan.  Warning up front: this made me crazy uncomfortable and I'm going to rag on it, which I generally try not to do.

"A" wakes up every morning in a new body, borrowing someone else's life for the day.  They try to stay respectful, interfering in their host's life as little as possible.  But when A falls for Rhiannon, they break all their rules to try to be with her.

The neat parts of this book are the short glimpses into A's hosts' lives.  The situations are varied and interesting, despite or because of their brevity.  They range from the girl who has to cover for her brother's fist fight with his dealer, to the home-schooled boy who goes to the library to escape his overbearing mother, to the girl who was so hung over she couldn't remember what she did the night before to traumatize her parents, to the undocumented maid who cleans houses every day.  It's neat to see how all these different people live their lives and how an outsider deals with taking control of them.  I kept turning pages, wanting to read the next chapter, because each day ends either in hope that the next day would be better or disappointment that the day has to end.  I needed to know where A went next.

A jumps through races and genders and socioeconomic stats with some neat things to say about how at the heart of it people are all the same.  A identifies as genderless, of course, and is attracted to any gender regardless of the body they inhabit.  There's a great moment when they jump into the body of a trans boy and there's so little drama about it that it's fantastic.  There's a great moment where they jump into a severely depressed girl, and there's a statement about how depression is an ailment of the body rather than an emotional state, so A can feel it. 

The jarring exception to this is when A jumps into an overweight boy and not only is the whole day about how overweight the guy is, with no other signs of a life outside of that, but Rhiannon is disgusted and A is disgusted, and A looks into the kid's memories and determines that the kid is overweight because he's lazy.  Just...Whoa.  I'm not informed enough on this issue to comment at length, but this feels wrong.

Then there's the love story.  

Aww geeze, the love story.  It is so uncomfortable, I can't stand it.

First, A falls in love immediately, even though they've sworn to keep everyone at a distance to avoid getting too close to people they'll never see again.  (I call bullshit on this pledge of non-interference, because in the 40 odd days this book covers, A drastically derails at least seven people's lives, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.)  And the part that gets under my skin is that A is attracted to Rhiannon after seeing that she's downtrodden.  She tries to make herself smaller, and she defers to what other people want. It's gross that A is drawn to that.

A then proceeds to show up at her school uninvited because they "need to see her."  Come on, A!  That is stalker level crazy!  And you "need to see her"?  Well, she needs to go to class, but I guess her education and attendance record come in second to whatever you want to do at the moment.  (And this is not even getting into how A has whoever they're possessing at the moment skip half of school and come home late to dinner so they can drive a couple hours to where  Rhiannon lives.)  Even when Rhiannon expressly tells A that she needs space to think, A shows up or demands she meet them, repeatedly derailing her life and not listening to her.  Just pushing and pushing and pushing, ignoring that she's uncomfortable.

Rhiannon also makes it clear that she's only attracted to boys, but A keeps insisting that she should look past that, and that they're the same on the inside no matter what the outside looks like.  She just needs to open her mind!  No.  This feels a lot like "if you just tried harder, you could not be gay!" and that is unacceptable, because sexual orientation is not a choice.

There's a point when A asks the girlfriend of the person they're possessing at the moment if she would still love them if they were in a different body every day.  She responds that she would love them if they were male or female or weighed a thousand pounds or had horns.  Instead of taking from this that there are people out there who would love them, A takes it as proof that Rhiannon could change if she just tried.  No.  Just no.  Stop that.

A is genderless, but they are such a bro.  

It's so gross, and it's so dangerous to romanticize a toxic relationship like this.  A lot of the harassment A pulls in this HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE to REAL TEENAGERS and it is NOT OKAY.  It's especially awful since the narrative is set up to try to make the reader sympathize with A and feel annoyed that Rhiannon is being so difficult.  

Ugh.  I'm going to go take a shower and find out if Quantum Leap is on Netflix.

***

Next week: The Forgetting, YA fantasy/sci-fi by Sharon Cameron.

Puzzle Box Stories

This week my critique group talked about puzzle box stories.  Puzzle box stories have a mystery--or puzzle--at their heart, but the reader is okay with the mystery remaining unexplained in the end because the journey was what was important.  When you have a puzzle box, just looking at the beautiful way it's carved is more important than solving it.  Now, my analytical mind immediatly rejects this analogy, because there's no way I'd buy a puzzle box I couldn't solve just so I could look at it.  However, I can think of examples where this happened, so I understand the idea.

My friend, Eric, brought up two examples, both of which are TV shows that I'm going to spoil by telling you they're puzzle box stories: The OA and Lost.  At this point in the conversation, I got all squinty eyed and skeptical, because while the ending of The OA left me fulfilled and was so beautiful that I cried, and while I have the first season of Lost on DVD because it's great, the ending of Lost was a disappointment and a half.  I think telling you that The OA is a puzzle box story is okay because it really is the journey that matters there and telling you that the mystery doesn't get solved is not going to affect your enjoyment (plus, if you're familiar with Brit Marling's other work, you already know the end will be ambiguous).  Telling you that the mysteries on Lost don't get solved feels more like a warning to not get your hopes up and to pretend the show got canceled when the world building falls apart.

So this got me thinking about what the two shows did differently that makes one fulfilling for me and one not.  It may be an example of "your milage may vary," but there has to be something more.

First, although the mystery drove the story of both examples, it did so in different ways.  In The OA, solving the mystery brought the characters together.  I wanted to watch them figure out the mystery and see how the process of learning changed their lives.  I kept watching because I wanted to know what happened to the characters.  On Lost, however, I kept watching because I wanted answers to the mysteries.  I wanted the characters to solve those mysteries not so they could know but so I could know. I wasn't watching to see what any of the characters would get up to unless it was hoping they'd open the hatch and show me what's in there.  Looking back, the weirdness of the island affected the characters' actions (run away from the smoke monster), but didn't affect their characterizations.  The supernatural elements were a hook and they were an obstacle, but not something that informed on a character arc.  Their interactions and growth came mostly from the non-supernatural hazards of getting along and surviving on a deserted island with limited supplies.  (So-and-so is sick.  How do we get water?  Did you steal my stuff?  How can we send a message to get help?)

I was watching these shows for different reasons, and if my reason for watching is curiosity about mysteries, I'm going to feel betrayed when those mysteries don't get solved.  This is exacerbated by the fact that the Lost show runners regularly gave interviews saying that all would be explained and everything was connected and it was going to be mind blowing.  There were promises made that were not fulfilled.

Second, I believe that in the early seasons of the show, Lost fully intended to tie everything together and explain it all.  They just hadn't sat down and planned it all out yet because they didn't know how long it would run and didn't want to solve everything and then have to do another season.  However, I believe the building mass of mysteries that they accumulated, ones that contradicted each other, ones that were forgotten, ones that lost their horror over time, developed so much weight and built so much suspense that the writers had backed themselves into a corner.  There was no way they could write something satisfying enough.  There was no way they could answer everything in the limited time they had.  So they didn't answer things.  This ending was not because the writers knew better and gave the viewers what they needed rather than what they wanted.  This ending was not for the viewers who needed to not get the answers, but for the writers who needed to not give the answers.

Underground Airlines Review

This week's novel is Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters.

In this alternate history, the Civil War never happened and slavery is still legal in four states.  "Victor" works for the US Marshall Service, tracking down runaway slaves who have fled North, finding them before they reach Canada.  His latest case, which takes him to Indianapolis, is a weird one, with pieces missing from the file and mysteries that keep piling up.  Victor infiltrates the Underground Airlines, begrudgingly makes friends with a white woman and her biracial son staying at his hotel, and suppresses his memories of his early life as a slave.

The outstanding part of this novel is the world building.  The repercussions are well thought out, extending into international politics, the economy, and technology, which then extends into how those affect normal people's every day life.  Most of Europe and Japan want nothing to do with a country that upholds slavery, and as a result, everyone has cars from South Africa or Pakistan.  You can feel how the country is struggling in a hundred little ways.  The social repercussions are also well thought out.  If parts of the South haven't moved past slavery, then parts of the North haven't moved past institutionalized segregation.

The only time I was knocked out of the story was when it explained the Texas War, a messy, unpopular civil war when Texas decided to secede on moral grounds, at which point President Johnson said some rude things about Mexicans.  I have a lot to say about this, but it mostly boils down to, "that's not how we do things in Texas."  And although I buy that in this alternate history, LBJ--along with everyone else--would be more racist, as a graduate of LBJ High School, my gut instinct is to go, "But he pushed for Civil Rights!"  It's good world building, but I don't like it.  They needed something analogous to the Vietnam War, and since the US was not a super power and had no moral ground to go after communists and no power to back up an invasion, the Vietnam War didn't happen.  That's good world building too.

There's a great deal of depth about court cases and slavery and discrimination acts, and I couldn't tell where the history ended and the alternate history began, making me feel like a bad ally for not knowing.  What made me feel even more like a bad ally was when I couldn't tell where the reality of discrimination ended and the alternate reality began.  Surely it's not this bad...but of course it is.  Surprisingly, in a novel about slavery, this was the most effective way to make me check my privilege.

***

Next Week: Every Day, YA meets Quantum Leap with a toxic romantic relationship by David Levithan

Midwestern Literature

At a meetup with some writers on Friday, one of them mentioned going to a talk about Midwestern Literature.  This caught my interest, and she proceeded to be unable to answer any of my questions because "honestly I got there late and missed most of the talk."

Like What is Midwestern Literature?  Does the landscape or the culture have to be the driving force like Garrison Keillor or Carl Sandberg?  Is it just anything set in the Midwest?  Is it the voice?  Like Vonnegut, who wrote Cat's Cradle set mostly in a fictional Caribbean nation, or  Slaughterhouse Five set in Germany and space, but still have a Midwestern voice.

Does it have to be rural, or do things in Chicago and St. Louis count?  Big cities are melting pots with populations that move in from New York or the South with other regional literary traditions that are more cohesive.  The cities have more diversity, and does diversity have a place in Midwestern Literature (because it should)?

Can speculative fiction count?  The Dresden Files in urban fantasy, and Divergent is YA dystopia.  Bone Gap is set in Illinois and has a Midwestern voice, but there's magic corn.  

It doesn't seem like Midwestern Literature is a genre that can be pinned down.  There's so much cultural variation across the region and there's not a uniting force that brigs us together, except maybe shoveling snow?  Corn?  Unsolicited advice to lost tourists?  Saying "Aww, geeze," sighing, and doing the thing even though it's unpleasant?  

I want to know more about this.

Six of Crows Review

This week's novel is Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.  When I last asked my mom if she had any book recommendations, she first told me she was reading something that I didn't want to touch, and then said she'd just finished this.  She didn't mention if she liked either of them.  So this ended up on my to-read list, and I'm glad it did.

The merchants in charge of the city of Ketterdam recruit Kaz (called Dirtyhands because he has so few scruples) and his street gang to travel to the country of Fjerda, break into the Ice Court, rescue an imprisoned scientist, and bring him back to Ketterdam.  The scientist has invented a new drug that gives Grisha (people with magic powers) frightening, unimaginable strength at the expense of killing them either from withdraw or from the toll it takes on their bodies.  The drug can't fall into Fjerdan hands. Kaz does not care about world politics, Girsha rights, or a super powered Grisha army, but he does care about the exorbitant about of money that the merchants offer him.  He puts together his plan, puts together his crew, and then has to make sure they don't all kill each other before they get paid.

The characters and their interactions give this story its heart.  It's a wonderful ensemble piece where each character has a specialty and a weakness covered by the specialty of someone else on the team.  (Kaz has a bum leg, but Inej is an acrobat who can climb walls and sneak along rooftops.)  Then instead of everyone just being friends, every character has a different relationship with every other character.  There are different levels of trust and prejudice and friendliness, giving a richness to their interactions and tension to their teamwork.  (Nina is a Grisha and Matthias was the Grisha-hunter, who caught her.  They fell in love and then she got him thrown in prison.) (Jesper knows that Kaz isn't telling him the whole plan, and suspects that Kaz is ruthless enough that if at any point Jesper fails to be essential, he'll be abandoned in Fjordsom without hope of rescue.)  They all have different motives.  (Inej wants to buy her freedom.  Jesper wants to pay off his gambling debts.  Matthias wants a pardon.)

The world building mirrors this, with each country and culture rich and detailed and different, and with each one rubbing against the other cultures with variable friendliness and disgust.

The way everything--the world building, the characters, their past circumstances--fits together makes the intricate plan of their heist like a brilliantly fun clockwork machine.  It was fun to read, fun to guess where and how it would go wrong, and fun to guess how they would get out of it.  I guessed wrong, and that makes me happy.

My only problem with this was that I didn't know going in that this is the first in a series.  Furthermore, the acknowledgements--the clear signal that the book was over--came out of nowhere when I was 86% of the way through the book.  I was expecting there to be a whole other section.  Instead there was a sneak peek at a different story.  This probably wouldn't have been a problem had I been warned, so I am here to warn you so you have a better reading experience.

***

Next Week: Underground Airlines, alternate history where the Civil War didn't happen by Ben H. Winters.

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

I'm excited to announce 

the first season of 

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Modern Monsters 

Coming this April.