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.
August 29, 2017
August 26, 2017
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.
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.
August 22, 2017
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.
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.
August 15, 2017
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.
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.
August 8, 2017
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.
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.
August 1, 2017
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.
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.
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