Freddy and the Bean Home News by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Freddy, World War II, and a Media War The tenth Freddy the Pig book, Freddy and the Bean Home News (1943), begins mildly on the Bean farm, with Charles the Rooster feigning a cold to make his wife do the early morning wake-up crowing and Freddy giving a speech to the animals of the farm and environs to make them do “their patriotic duty” by joining a scrap metal drive to support the war effort. (This is a WWII novel: in addition to the drive, it features a well-timed blackout.) When Freddy visits Centerboro to give a story about the drive to the town newspaper, the Guardian, he finds a new regime there: the wealthy Mrs. Humphrey Underdunk has bought the paper because she was offended when the editor ran a story about her luncheon party next to a story about Freddy’s birthday party, and some people confused the photos of woman and pig, so she has replaced the editor Mr. Dimsey, a friend of Freddy’s, with her animal-hating brother Mr. Garble. Freddy thus decides to start his own paper, The Bean Home News. Soon, the pig’s energy, writing ability, personality, and extensive pool of “reporters,” (including keen-eared town mice and a curious hen who lives with a curious woman who provide Freddy with more news than he can—or should—use) are helping his paper outsell the Guardian. Mr. Garble starts printing anti-Freddy, anti-animal fake news, and such is the power of print and Mrs. Underwood’s money, that she gets a law passed by which any animal appearing in town without its owner may be repossessed or shot, and Freddy becomes a menace to society, a wanted pig sought by state troopers and private detectives. Freddy’s friend the Sheriff counsels him to tell his side of the story in print, so he starts fighting back in his paper with the truth. Mr. Bean has warned Freddy that “Politics … ain’t news,” but when the Guardian targets the Sheriff (who’s so humane that he provides the jail inmates with ice cream, picnics, and games, to the point that they try to stay in jail after their sentences end), Freddy defends his friend to help his chances to win the next election. Will Freddy’s disguise as a little boy called Longfellow Higgins clad in a sailor suit really work? Will he be able to continue publishing his paper while in hiding? Will he win the battle for public opinion? Will Old Whibley the owl successfully defend him in court? Will the Bean animals win the scrap metal drive? Will Freddy resist the tempting offer of a job on the staff of Senator Blunder? Will he ever write a poem that does not feature a pig? Will he ever purr like Jinx the black cat? The story answers such questions with aplomb. The illustrations by Kurt Weise are a big part of the charm of Freddy books like this one. The pictures are clean and realistic compared to “cute,” anthropomorphized Disney animals. Although Weise depicts the animals doing things animals would not really do (like writing poems), he usually draws them anatomically correct. And he usually chooses good scenes to illustrate. In Brooks’ fictional world animals (including birds and insects) can speak with each other and with humans (though they try to remain silent around most people to avoid startling them). According to his moral system, anyone who feels superior to animals or mistreats or insults them is punished, while anyone who likes animals and tries to help them is rewarded. Pompous bullies like Mrs. Underwood and Mr. Garble had best beware… *Brooks’ treatment of the situations that arise when Freddy and his animal friends are or aren’t invited to certain events or permitted to do certain social things signal that the books may be read as a pre-civil rights era racial allegory with animals representing people of color (though I bet kids wouldn’t notice it).* This is a fun book written in clean, demotic English (the black cat Jinx is downright slangy) aimed at least as much for adults as for kids. It features plenty of humor (ranging from slapstick and bickering to quirky “facts” about animals and ironic wisdom about people), some porcine poetry, a media war, a courtroom drama, and a neat new character in Jerry Peters, a keen, argumentative, lazy loner ant with a miniscule pet beetle. When Jerry, “no fool,” explains why he wants Freddy to teach him to read, he says, “Because I like things that aren’t any use to me,” which makes the pig defensive: “Reading is the—h’m, the gateway to knowledge. It opens up the—ha, the portals of wisdom. It permits you to share the thoughts of all great thinkers of the past—” “Such as what?” said the ant. “Eh?” said Freddy. “What thoughts?” said Jerry. “What are some of these great thoughts? You read a lot. Give me just one great thought you’ve got out of your reading.” “Well, naturally,” said Freddy, “you can’t just offhand pick out one. There’s Shakespeare, for instance, whose Complete-Works-in-One-Volume I possess. Shakespeare is full of great thoughts—” “Such as?” said the ant. “If you want to know these things, learn to read and then read them for yourself.” Brooks uses Freddy and Jerry to poke fun at pretentious people who collect and push “literature” without understanding it, while ultimately telling kids they should read. Freddy’s conflict with Underwood and Garble over the newspaper and animal rights is amusing and pointed, and the novel has plenty of the usual virtues of Freddy books, being a fusion of whimsical talking animal fantasy, realistic animal behavior, exciting action, sophisticated irony, and social, literary, and human satire, but this one seems slighter than the better ones. Anyway, it’s a pity that although the Freddy books were best sellers in the middle of the twentieth century, they are not so popular today. Perhaps they are too literate while looking too childish? On the bright side, they are mostly back in print as physical or kindle books. I’m really enjoying rereading the several Freddy books I first read fifty years ago and reading the others for the first time now. View all my reviews
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The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sublime SF and Human Choices, Changes, and Relationships Ken Liu says about The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020), “Rather than worrying about which stories would make the ‘best’ collection for imaginary readers I decided to stick with stories that most pleased myself.” Is that why I ended up preferring his earlier collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)? The more recent collection makes a neat “meta-narrative,” as its nineteen well-written stories coalesce around ghosts, identity, memory, morality, technology, civilization, nature, and families, but the result is less varied than his earlier collection. 1. Ghost Days Three times, places, and protagonists: 2313 Nova Pacifica and a "human" girl bioengineered to suit her toxic world; 1989 East Norbury CT and a Chinese immigrant trying to fit in to high school; 1905 Hong Kong and an anglicized young man trying to understand his father. Past and future, parents and children, immigrants and aliens, story and authenticity: “Digging into the past was an art of comprehension, making sense of the universe.” 4 stars. 2. Maxwell's Demon During WWII, the US authorities force a Japanese American woman to “defect” to Japan to spy on Japanese scientists, one of whom hopes to find a “demon” to separate fast moving air molecules from slow ones to get more energy. Can or should Takako train the ghosts of Chinese slave laborers killed by the Japanese? “No matter what she did people would die.” 4 stars 3. The Reborn Aliens who conquered Earth are now seemingly benign immigrants marrying cooperative earthlings. The human protagonist’s job catching vengeful xenophobic humans leads him to upsetting questions about his past, memory, and identity. 3 stars. 4. Thoughts and Prayers A family falls apart when a mass shooter kills one of two daughters, and the mother has a VR documentary made about her daughter’s life, so internet trolls target her despite her digital “armor,” all highlighting memory, reality, technology, and American “freedom” and guns. 5 stars 5. Byzantine Empathy Virtual reality, crypto currency, human disasters, charities. Liu tells the story from the point of view of two women who were university roommates and now have very different ideas about how to make the world a better place based on empathy or reason. 4 stars 6. The Gods Will Not Be Chained Bullied at school, Maddie is missing her deceased father when she’s contacted via chat window and emojicons by his digitally uploaded consciousness. Will such post-humans be content doing the same work they did when human? (Liu imposes a dramatic limit on his digital mind stories: consciousness cannot be uploaded without destroying the original.) 4 stars. 7. Staying Behind A small number of mortal human beings refuse to have their consciousnesses uploaded to join the digital post-human colony of immortal minds. What happens when the mortal narrator has to deal with his daughter and her boyfriend making a different choice? 4 stars. 8. Real Artists Satire on the use of computers and technology in making movies that strike emotional chords with the audience. Are the movie makers artists? Or is the software the artist? 3 stars. 9. The Gods Will Not Be Slain An unseen digital war: resentful uploaded post-human gods decide to destroy human civilization by goading mutually hostile countries into starting wars, while some uploaded post-human gods like the father of Maddie from the earlier story try to thwart them. 4 stars 10. Altogether Elsewhere Vast Herds of Reindeer Real Earth reverts to flora and fauna as 300 billion “human beings” live in a data center as uploaded consciousnesses, communicating via thought and designing multi-dimensional worlds. A mother takes her daughter on an eye-opening real world day trip: “Anything real must die.” 4 stars 11. The Gods Have Not Died in Vain Maddie and her cloud-born digital sister Mist (“a creature of pure computation, never having existed in the flesh”) try to prevent the uploaded “gods” from returning to life, but life in a data center without bodies, death, or rich/poor is appealing after a world of scarcity. Aren’t we all just electric signals anyway? 4 stars 12. Memories of My Mother A strange and moving relationship: a 25-year-old mother with two more years to live makes time with her daughter last longer via lots of fast space travel, so that, while not really aging, she meets her daughter when she’s a little girl, 17, 33, and 80. 4 stars 13. Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts A wealthy hermit philosopher floats around on “Old Blue” (earth) above Sunken Boston after all the ice caps have melted and drowned most of the cities. Humanity’s capacity for adaptation to and exploitation of nature: “We dare not stop striving to find out who we are.” 3 stars 14. Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard In the far future, a midden-miner sifts through the detritus of the ancients like plastics and electrical circuits, until to save her brother she becomes a hero wererabbit in a world where godlike wereanimals abuse their powers as they rule over and exploit the common people. 4 stars 15. A Chase Beyond the Storms Not a story but a cliffhanger appetizer from the third novel of the Dandelion Dynasty: princess Thera of Dara and her fiancé prince of Agon make it past the wall of storms only to discover they’re being pursued by an enemy city ship equipped with flying dragon-cows. 2 stars 16. The Hidden Girl A general’s daughter from 8th-century Tang Dynasty China is stolen by a nun who trains her to be a multi-dimensional super assassin. Morality and power and ramifications. What will the girl do when told to kill a governor as her graduation test? 4 stars 17. Seven Birthdays The narrator’s relationships with her “mad scientist” mother and her own daughter through birthdays, from age seven to age 823,543 (!), when digital post-humanity has spread throughout the galaxy terraforming worlds and turning planets into giant solar-powered computers. “There is always a technical solution,” but there’s also always human darkness. 4 stars 18. The Message A father who’s never met his 13-year-old daughter Maggie (Liu’s third red-haired Maggie, including The Paper Menagerie stories) takes her to work with him, recording 20,000-year-old alien ruins and translating their message on a planet soon to be blank-slated and terraformed by humanity. The neat ideas on alien human “contact,” uranium, and parental responsibility cross into contrivance and sentimentality. 3 stars 19. Cutting A prose poem story: for generations some monks have been cutting “unnecessary words from their holy book so that over time it has come to look like lace, “like a dissolving honeycomb,” and only words like “experience,” “is,” and “forget” remain. 5 stars In his stories Liu pushes human boundaries and explores ways in which technology transforms society, relationships, and identities. What will happen to humanity if we abandon our bodies to become digital minds or expand throughout the galaxy terraforming planets? He views such issues from multiple sides, making it difficult to decide what we’d do. And his relevant ideas and sublime sf are grounded in human relationships (e.g., parents and children) and experiences (e.g., losing loved ones to time, work, or violence). The four readers of the audiobook are all fine. View all my reviews
The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Compact, Pulpy, Gritty, Philosophical, Political, and Bleak Space Opera Mark Monday’s fun reviews of the early books in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series made me dive in. The first book, The Winds of Gath (1967), is a compact space opera: pulpy, sexy (a little), tricky, philosophical, political, imaginative, violent, and bleak. The novel starts with Earl Dumarest waking up from being “doped, frozen, ninety per cent dead” in one of the many “coffin-like boxes” in “the steerage for travellers willing to gamble against the fifteen per cent mortality rate.” He learns that he didn’t reach his contracted destination world because a powerful party had the ship rerouted to planet Gath. This is a problem because whereas his target world had a viable economy that would enable him, a “penniless traveler,” to earn the money to go elsewhere, Gath is a tourist planet famed for its winds blowing through mountain caves, rumored to sound like voices from people from your past. Will Dumarest be permanently stuck on Gath? Tubb distinguishes between tourists, who have the money to space “travel High,” which is safer and easier, and sightsee rather than work, and travelers like Dumarest, who have no savings and need to “travel Low,” which is unhealthier and riskier, and work hard wherever they go to scrape together enough money to travel Low to another world. In addition to Dumarest, numerous point of view characters propel the story. There’s Dumarest’s hapless acquaintance Megan (“Man, am I sorry to see you!”) who’s been stranded on Gath for over a year and is on the verge of dying there. There’s the octogenarian Matriarch of Kund, who’s guarded by taciturn, masculine women, rules over a system of worlds, and has diverted Dumarest’s spaceship to Gath because her ward Seena Thoth, a lovely, naïve young lady, has been the target of assassination attempts. The Matriarch’s advisor Dyne is a “Cyber,” ostensibly giving objective and rational counsel because he was modified at an early age: “He was a coldly logical machine of flesh and blood, a detached, dispassionate human robot.” Cybers belong to the Cyclan, a “gestalt” of telepathically linked brains with long-term plans for ruling all inhabited worlds, because, being freed from emotion, they think they’ll do a better job than humans can do. Indeed, the decadent “Prince of Emmened who had ruined a world by his whims and would ruin more unless stopped by an assassin,” is a malign tourist who gets his jollies from ravishing young ladies or watching his trained fighter Moidor (!) kill strangers. Luckily, the Church of Universal Brotherhood sends monks out “striving to turn men from what they were into what they should be,” and one of them, Ely, is humane and shames the slimy authorities of Gath for exploiting travelers. Tubb complicates his “good” figures, though, so the monks travel High and hand out communion-like wafers treated with euphoric drugs whose effects wear off, so Megan regularly attends their services to maintain his wafer high. The plot has Dumarest trying to survive till he can work up the money to get to another planet and other characters preparing for the winds of Gath while tending to murky matters. It proceeds to an apocalyptic climax with sanity compromising wind voices, multiple assassination attempts, a magic mirror, a tricky coffin, a foiled plot, a damsel in distress (with frostbitten feet), and more. Throughout, Tubb’s writing is lean and able, capable of sublime flights and lurid fancies, and endowed with the less-is-more ethos of 1960s and 70s SF. Dynamic description: “It came with a continuous rolling of thunder which tore at the ears and numbed the senses. The lightning was a web of electric fire across the sky, stabbing at the ground, searing wetly into the sea. The rain was a deluge, pounding the ground into mud, turning the air almost solid with its moisture.” Neat SF writing: “With shocking abruptness, the universe slowed down. It hadn’t, of course. It was just that his own metabolism, reflexes and sensory apparatus had suddenly begun operating at almost forty times the normal rate. The danger lay in accepting the illusion of a slowed universe as reality.” Corny dialogue: “You will wear earmuffs at all times. Do you understand? You will not attempt to listen to the noises of Gath. Now go!” Tubb’s characterization is rudimentary, but the Matriarch has depth (e.g., “A man, dust for over eighty years, now talking and breathing at her side, his voice, his beloved voice, soft in her ears”). And in hardboiled Dumarest’s past lurk a beloved father figure and an unidentified lover, though “He was not a man who regretted the past. Not when the future looked so black.” He can kill at a pinch, but although he opines that “In combat there are no rules” and will kick your knee if he can’t reach your groin, he’s no sadist. He helps people in trouble and not only to win favors. He has a goal: rather than aimlessly traveling around from planet to planet, he’s moving “deeper and deeper into the inhabited worlds” as he tries to find Earth, his home. To other people, Earth is a myth, to Dumarest, a “desert, a barren wilderness in which nothing grows. It is scarred with old wounds, littered with the ruins of bygone ages. But there is life, of a kind, and ships come to tend that life.” In addition to the dying Earth, the novel boasts plenty of SF stuff: various worlds of various cultures, including (gasp!) at least two Matriarchies; space travel; the ability to slow down or speed up time for individuals; cybernetic advisors; exotic weapons like vibratory darts. Some of it smacks of hyper 60s western culture, like the many drugs, the great medical care for the rich, the tourism industry, the admen, and the fear of (or attraction to) strong women in charge. So far, much on income gaps: “There was a romance clinging to the concept of slavery which appealed to the rich.” So far, no alien aliens, just a variety of human beings. So far, no people of color or LGBTQ people: Dumarest and Seena are very white hetero. There are interesting moments where characters muse on human nature and life, like the paradox between people being animals but having higher selves, the “perversity in human nature which gloried at the bestialisation of its own kind,” the belief that “Life is a lottery,” and the hope that “the travellers might take a hand in their own destiny.” There are loose ends: vanishing characters, telepathic animals, Dumarest’s past, etc. But you gotta love a space opera that ends: “A gust of wind swept from the mountains and he heard the music of Gath. Deeper now, slower, but quite unmistakable. The empty sound of inane, gargantuan laughter.” If you like Jack Vance and especially Barrington J. Bayley, you should try Tubb. I’m on to book 2 in the series! View all my reviews
Les Poisons de la couronne by Maurice Druon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Long and Glorious Reign of Louis X the Quarrelsome? Les Poisons de la couronne [the poisons of the crown] (1956), the third novel in Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits [the cursed kings] series, starts in 1315 shortly after the second one ended. The death of the Iron King Philippe le bel (the Fair) thrust his son Louis X onto the throne facing many challenges: the French barons are reasserting their independence, the Flemish are getting uppity, the Conclave still can’t choose a new Pope, the family feud between Mahaut (aunt) and Robert (nephew) d’Artois is boiling over, the people are starving, the country is rain-soaked, and the treasury is dry. Good luck, France! Clueless Louis ended the previous novel imagining that marrying Clemence of Hungary would lead to a long and glorious reign, but on route from Naples to France the Queen-to-be is beset by ill omens, including an apocalyptic storm at sea and a serious injury to her “friend” and escort Guccio Baglioni on the dock. What will happen if Clemence—a deeply religious and empathic person—discovers that her new husband had his first wife strangled in prison? Like the first two novels, this one is peopled by vivid, compelling, flawed characters who, if not always likeable, are always interesting to observe. Louis le Hutin (the Quarrelsome) is a bad king: sickly, hysterical, fickle, malleable, callous, incompetent. His Mud Campaign against the Flemish is an absurd debacle. Will marriage to Clemence turn him into a good person and a holy king? Well, as the narrator puts it, “It is generally wrong to divert people from their nature. Better to leave a villain to his villainy than to turn him into a sheep; kindness not being his business, he will use it deplorably.” Soon, the “new” Louis is granting amnesty to criminals, leading to a surge in crime. Yet Druon makes even Louis sympathetic: “Am I then damned, am I then cursed, for not being able to be loved by whomever I love?” Louis’ younger brother Philippe is kinglier than the King. He forgives his wife Jeanne for aiding and abetting adultery and handles the feuding d’Artois nobles with gravitas and skill. His martial camp in the muddy mess of Flanders is clean and organized, and he passes the time there by having a knight entertain the men with recitations from Dante’s new poem The Divine Comedy, especially verses castigating his own royal family (in addition to interesting footnotes about the Hospitallers, Templars, and unicorns, Druon provides one about Dante’s hatred of the Capetians). If only Philippe had been born first! Charles Valois, Louis’ uncle, is awful: vain, greedy, and ambitious, he manipulates Louis while hoping something will happen to the King so he can become Regent. Mahaut d’Artois is a larger than life widow-countess-peer who wishes she could go to battle in armor and is dauntless in her scorched-earth feud with her nephew Robert for control of the d’Artois lands, castles, and incomes. When cornered, she can be devious and ruthless with potions and poisons. What’s goes for Mahaut goes for Robert d’Artois, minus the potions and poisons. Aunt and nephew are so alike that they gigantically hate each other: “This hatred which excluded any agreement, any transaction, exceeded its object, and one could wonder if there was not between the giantess and the giant a kind of passion in reverse, unknown to themselves, and which would have been better appeased in incest than in war.” I don’t know if Guccio, the young Lombard, is a real historical figure, but he’s neat: friends with Boccaccio’s father and full of youthful passion, enthusiasm, and recklessness. He performs dashing deeds and fabricates exaggerated accounts of his exploits and quickly believes them. What the proud, impoverished aristocratic brothers of Guccio’s beloved Marie would do to him if they found out that he, a money lender-usurer, is planning to marry their sister, I tremble to think. Tolomei Spinelli, Captain General of the Lombards in France, is wise, spicy, and crafty, advising his nephew Guccio about his romance with Marie while keeping an eye out for any way to make money and to get more French nobles in his debt. And Eudeline, the linen maid ex-lover of Louis, has come to hate the King but to love Clemence. “All her emotional forces were turned towards the queen, her friend. And if Eudeline was suffering at this moment, it was from Clémence's suffering.” She shows that there are some good people in this history and the world. As in the first two books, Druon is ever a fine writer. Great moments: “But Jeanne could not contain herself. Look! She had been doing nothing else for eight days since she was released. Like a starving person gorging herself on food without believing that she will ever be able to be satisfied, she regained possession of the universe through her gaze. The leaves on the trees, the light clouds, a steeple looming in the distance, the flight of a bird, the grass on the banks, everything seemed to her to be exhilaratingly splendid.” Vivid historical descriptions: “Hospitaller brothers, in long brown robes, passed ceaselessly between the bays of beds, sometimes to go and sing the services, sometimes to give care or distribute meals. The exercises of worship were intimately mingled with therapy; the rattles of pain answered the verses of the psalms; the scent of incense could not dominate the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was offered as a public spectacle. Inscriptions, running around the walls in tall ornate letters, invited to prepare for death rather than healing.” Witty lines: “I believe in the virtue of poisons to get rid of an enemy, but hardly in potions to win an adversary.” Pithy wisdom: “Of all human functions, that which consists in governing one's fellows, although the most envied, is the most disappointing, for it never has an end, and allows the mind no rest.” Foreshadowing bombs: Behind Louis X rode his brothers Philippe and Charles, as well as his cousin Philippe de Valois. Before fourteen years, the crown would have rested on their three heads.” Druon writes the complexity of the human mind, as when Clemence’s grandmother watches the ship carrying her beloved granddaughter away to France and Louis: “The large ship … represented at the same time … the triumph of her policy and the melancholy of things completed.” And his history shows how past actions influence the present and future, cursed gifts that keep on giving, as in his reminders of what the Iron King did to the Templars. The overall movement of the series is the decline of France as a world power in the early 14th century, because of their rulers’ cruelty, stupidity, selfishness and superstition. On to the fourth novel! View all my reviews
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars How People Around the World and in the US Do Death The funerals and cremations of my Japanese wife’s parents were unforgettable experiences that forcibly remind me that Japan is—even after I’ve lived here for thirty years—a foreign country. My in-laws’ last rites were smoothly managed by funeral home companies but also incorporated plenty of family participation: we helped to prepare and view her parents’ bodies, touched their calm cold faces, put drops of water on their lips via a leaf, covered them with fragrant flowers in their coffins, burnt incense and prayed and listened to Buddhist monks chanting while periodically ringing brass bowl bells, went to the crematorium together, said good bye to her father and mother before their ovens, and finally used chopsticks to choose the bones we wanted to keep. Nothing like a funeral to show you the culture where it takes place! So I was keen to read mortician Caintin Doughty’s book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2017), to see what she’d make of death in Japan and other countries. Because the “corporatization and the commercialization of death” has made America fall behind other countries in the handling and processing of death, Doughty wants us to rethink it by showing how people in other countries and or special situations treat it. She organizes her compact, absorbing, moving, and funny book into chapters depicting her travels to communities and countries like-- Colorado, Crestone The history and operation of a unique open-air crematorium in a rural Colorado community; some history of cremation (including 42,000-year-old cremated bones found in Australia); and details on how difficult it is to try new (cheaper) ways of treating death in America because of the powerful funeral home industry. One of the interesting facts she presents is that cremation has become the most common way to deal with the dead in the USA. Indonesia: South Sulawesi A remote region in Indonesia: the Holy Grail of corpse interaction, where families live with their mummified “deceased” loved ones for months or years, sleeping with them, dressing them, standing them against the wall, and so on, and then after the dead go into grave houses, families annually undress them, clean them, dress them in new clothes, and celebrate them. Mexico: Michoacan How compared to Americans Mexicans have a “gay familiarity” with death and the history and description of their Day of the Dead festival. Painful digressions on the dispossession of Mexican American families from their homes in Chavez Ravine to make room for Dodger Stadium and her friend Sarah’s finally coming to some terms with the death of her unborn son by getting in touch with her Mexican heritage with Frido Khalo as gateway. North Carolina: Cullowhee Recomposition, the new green alternative. Put a body in high carbon setting and let its nitrogen molecules transform as it decomposes until ideally after 4-6 weeks all that’s left is a rich soil the family can use in their garden! Details on how bodies (even a dead whale) and a conclusion pointing out that most of the drivers of this new method are female, after men pushed women out of death by industrializing it at the start of the 20th century. Spain: Barcelona A cutting-edge funeral home, where families come to be with their deceased and watch the cremations, but always with layers of protective glass separating living from dead; details on the little embalming done in Spain (or Europe) and on cemetery plots being rented for five or so years to permit decomposition, after which bones are put in mass communal graves. Japan: Tokyo A corpse hotel where families spend time with their deceased before cremation; stats like 99.9% of Japanese funerals ending with cremation; a typical cremation with family members using chopsticks to pick up bones and deposit them in an urn; the Japanese mix of new tech and respect and love for the dead getting people to love the body and to spend enough time with it to process grief, unlike in the US where the funeral industry is ever reducing the time families spend with the deceased, the fear of the body in America increasing with the rate of cremation. Boliva: La Paz “Natitas,” sacred-magical more or less mummified skulls that people keep to use as intermediaries between the living and the dead, so that the living can consult them about problems about health, education, finance, lost pets, and the like. The skulls are celebrated each November 8, the Festival of the Skulls, and the Catholic Church has to grin and bear it and even bless them. Doughty sees women getting some power in the face of the Catholic Church. “Skulls are technology for disadvantaged people… no person is left behind.” California: Joshua Tree Natural burials in a tiny area of the National Park in the desert, and Doughty’s desire (which she knows can’t be fulfilled, given California’s conservative laws re death) to have an air burial for her corpse, with birds eating it. “I spent the first 30 years of my life devouring animals, so why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?” In the Epilogue, Doughty urges us “to create a protective ring around the family and friends of the dead, providing a place where they can grieve openly and honestly, without fear of being judged.” We as family members have to “show up” by going to the cremation, going to the burial, applying lipstick to and cutting a locket of hair from the deceased. “Do not be afraid. These are human acts, acts of bravery and love in the face of death and loss.” In addition to being engaged with death, Doughty is witty about it, as in lines like “It makes you uneasy when you see a body where it's not supposed to be, like seeing your chemistry teacher at the supermarket.” Perhaps in her desire to shock us into rethinking death, Doughty may over-emphasize the sensational aspects of the different cultures she’s visited and de-emphasize the quiet ones. In her Japan chapter, although she does mention the post-cremation chopsticks custom, she spends way more time on rare and quirky aspects (like the LED Buddha columbarium light show) and doesn’t mention less entertaining things about the Japanese funeral like Buddhist monk chanting, money giving (to the family), and gift giving (to the attendees). That makes me wonder if similar highlighting and downplaying is going on in other chapters in the book. As for the audiobook, it’s a pity that it’s missing the enticing appendices of the physical book, like “How to Be a Good Thanotourist” and “Fill-In Fun: Your Death Plan!” At least Doughty is a clear and enthusiastic reader. My only kvetch is that at times she uses the currently all-pervasive valley girl question intonation, as in “If I were the westerner? with the telephoto lens? who scared off the vultures? I'd have to leave myself out for the birds as well.” I recommend this book to anyone interested in or afraid of death. View all my reviews
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars When Racism More Pernicious than Lovecraftian Horror In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) the eight stories make a composite novel about the African American Turner and Berry families and their friends as they encounter the malign Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, an organization of white natural philosophers (call them wizards or alchemists at your peril) scattered across the USA in big cities like Chicago and tiny towns like Ardham (not Arkham!). The Turners et al have to deal especially with the descendants of the Order’s 18th-century founder, Titus Braithwhite, namely the amoral mad occult scientist Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb (pretty “likeable for a white guy” but may be the devil incarnate). Each story features a different point of view protagonist and a different supernatural challenge. Initially bemused by the supernatural, the characters quickly accept it and try to deal with it. After all, they have grown up in Jim Crow America, always having to be very careful around white people, whose natural dangers have prepared them for the supernatural ones. Here is an annotated list of the stories: The novella “Lovecraft Country” reveals to Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old African American Korean war vet, the existence in 1954 Jim Crow America of weird things like those he’s read of in H. P. Lovecraft stories: a mysterious silver car, an unseen powerful noisy thing in the woods, a community of serfs living around a manor house, an occult cult of natural philosophers, and a portentous ritual. But maybe the scariest and most dangerous things are everyday white people like racist policemen. In addition to Atticus, the story features his wise uncle George Turner (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide!), his feisty childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and his spicy father Montrose. 4 stars. After Letitia buys the very haunted Winthrop House in a white neighborhood in Chicago in “Dreams of the Which House,” she then stubbornly attempts to get the white ghost if not the neighborhood to accept her (You don’t want to play poker? How about chess?). This real estate deal can’t have some connection with Caleb Braithwaite, can it? 4 stars. “Abdullah’s Book” concerns a notebook of back wages (plus interest) owed a family slave ancestor, Caleb Braithwaite, a scary and comedic Chicago Museum of Natural History heist of an occult Book of Names attempted by some members of the Prince Hall Freemasons (including George, Montrose, Atticus, and a small and eager dentist), and a surprising and almost satisfying conclusion. 4 stars In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” Hippolyta, “a giantess and a negress” and a scout for husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide, as well as an amateur astronomer, visits Warlock Hill in Wisconsin to check out the observatory of the somewhat deceased Order of the Ancient Dawn member Hiram Winthrop and finds herself looking through a telescope at another world and then having to decide whether or not to jump through a “doorway” into it. Some strange, sublime sf: “She steadied herself and turned around, to find Ida staring at her from several feet and thrillions of miles away.” 4 stars In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Letitia’s sister Ruby (an accepting and deferring doormat) comes in for some serious temptation by learning firsthand how much easier her life would be white. Is the mysterious and creepily clean-cut Caleb Braithwhite “the devil”? Or just “a man who knows what he wants and how to get it?” The story is my least favorite, partly because I can’t believe pious Ruby would do what she does in it. 3 stars “The Narrow House” is devastating. Caleb B makes another offer that can’t be refused, sending Montrose and Atticus to find Hiram Winthrop’s son Henry Winthrop, who ran away to be with a black maid, with whom he had a son of his own, so they can retrieve some potent books from the guy. This story highlights “the horror, the most awful thing, to have a child the world wants to destroy it to know you’re helpless to help him” in the context of racism and the horrifying Tulsa Massacre. 4 stars To get intelligence on his mother, in “Horace and the Devil Doll” the Chicago branch of the Order targets Horace, the sweet, creative, imaginative, and asthmatic twelve-year-old son of Hippolyta and George Berry. It features a nasty spittle curse and a creepy pygmy African witchdoctor devil doll. Can Caleb B help? At what cost? 3.5 stars 8. The Mark of Cain This story depicts the climactic showdown between rival members of the Order of the Ancient Dawn from Chicago and Ardham trying to wipe each other out, with Atticus as the prize, without reckoning on the formidable interference of the Turner and Berry and Dandridge families plus a few of their friends. I found it a bit over the top, unconvincing, and convenient. 3 stars The audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly does a fine job without over-dramatizing his voice for kids or women or old people or white or black people. He understands the story and reads it with enough enthusiasm and intelligence to enhance it. I enjoyed the book: it’s scary, funny, moving, and exciting. Ruff writes a straight-forward page turning story with teeth and heart. I like the references to Barsoom, Bradbury, and Lovecraft et al. (“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”) I got a kick out of Horace’s homemade comics about Orithyia Blue (inspired by his mother). I like the main characters and their relationships. The descriptions are vivid, the plots tight, and the dialogue often funny, especially via Montrose, like when he nails John Carter for being a Confederate officer or says things like, “You want me to go to Philadelphia and pick up the trail with my special Negro powers?” I like (painfully) the touches about racism in the US, which was worse in pre-Civil Rights era USA (e.g., in 1921 and the Tulsa massacre, which shaped the Turner and Berry families, and in 1954, when the story takes place, and, for example, black realtors couldn’t join the national realtor association) and which Ruff (as a white guy) has researched and thought and felt and imagined a lot about, and which also tell us a lot about how it’d feel to be a person of color today, because although things are better now, they are definitely not fair or equal either. By the way, in its depiction of a world in which the supernatural horrors are not worse than the discriminatory dangers the characters of color face in the USA, it resembles Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation books, though Ireland, unlike Ruff, is African American, and she’s writing supernatural alternate history while he writes supernatural historical fiction. And Victor la Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is more Lovecraftian in spirit than Ruff's novel. View all my reviews
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Necromancers and Cavaliers in an SF Mystery Romance “In the Myriadic Year of Our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019) starts with the 86th attempt 18-year-old Gideon has made to escape from the House of the Ninth: Keepers of the Locked Tomb, House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals, where reanimated skeleton servants outnumber the living, who paint their faces like skulls, use soap made from human fat, eat snow leaks, and do without weather or sunlight. Gideon’s life as an indentured servant in the decayed necromantic House (“high on ancient shitty treasures but low on liquid assets”) buried in “the darkest hole of the darkest planet and the darkest part of the system” has been boring and gloomy and lonely. When Gideon’s anonymous mother dropped in, dropped Gideon, and died, all 200 children of the Ninth then present quickly succumbed to some virus that somehow spared Gideon and her lone enemy-playmate-mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Heir to the Ninth House. Well, no wonder Gideon wants to abscond to join the army! This time she’ll surely succeed, won’t she? Alas, 17-year-old Harrowhark foils Gideon’s attempt at the last second to inflict maximum pain on her long-time whipping girl, whom she then informs must become her cavalier, her sworn swordswoman/companion of the “one flesh, one end” variety, which means that she has to take a crash course in manners and fencing (after growing up fighting with a two-handed longsword) and paint her face skull white, all in order to enter with Harrowhark an unprecedented competition to be held at the First House among the top necromancer adepts and their cavaliers from the Second to the Ninth Houses. The winner is to become Lyctor, “an undying necromantic saint” and disciple to the Emperor. If Harrowhark wins, she’ll ostensibly set Gideon free from the Ninth House. Gideon decides to play along. After Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the beautiful, dilapidated, labyrinthine site of the competition, the novel speeds up, as they meet a variety of strange and savory “people,” including the priest-host Teacher and the competition: the Second House’s martial discipline pair, the Third’s twin adepts (one gorgeous, one wan) and snide cavalier, the Fourth’s naïve and jumpy fourteen-year-old boy and girl, the Fifth’s hospitable middle-aged couple, the Sixth’s ultra-cool library-medicine experts, the Seventh’s dying adept and hulking cavalier, and the Eighth’s puritanical young uncle adept and stolid old nephew cavalier. Except for being advised not to open locked doors, the competition has no guidelines or rules. Muir does employ rules for her magic system, based on Thanergy (death energy) and Thalergy (life energy), which enable Bone, Flesh, and Spirit magics. One neat touch is that because the void of space has no life and hence no death, travel between planets is risky for necromancers, because they can’t do their usual stuff then. Another neat touch is Harrowhark’s ability to conjure up skeletons from bone fragments: “From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress, a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her.” Although the novel at first looks like a standard YA story about an unappreciated and unloved orphan who is super talented and Destined for Big Things, albeit set in an necromantic solar system, it morphs into an And Then There Were None murder mystery and a Hunger Games last one standing challenge and even a cracked romance. And in the end Muir bracingly feels no need to fulfill reader expectations. I enjoyed reading this book because I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what would happen and who would survive and who was the villain and why. I especially loved the hostile odd-couple relationship between Gideon (“Griddle” or “Nav” to Harrowhark) and Harrowhark (Harrow or “my crepuscular queen” to Gideon). They are contrasting and complementing frenemies whose banter is amusing and whose backgrounds reveal unexpected depths. Harrow is a brilliant, stick-like, unhealthy (sweating blood and passing out when overdoing the necromancy), adept heir, Gideon a muscular, physical (“thinking with her arms”), instinctive, cavalier orphan. Can they get in formation to win let alone survive the competition? Or will they just act all “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you” and “I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun”? Lots of exciting violent action: blades, bone constructs, duels, boss fights, and the like. The climax is full scale and the resolution surprising and moving. And it’s well written—I found myself constantly cracking up and jotting down great figures of speech or lines or descriptions, like-- Similes: “Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.” “So with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted.” “… eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat's asshole.” “Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake...” “Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost.” Lines: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.” “She wouldn't have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out.” Dialogue “Your vow of silence is variable, Ninth.” “I'm variably penitent.” Description: “It was just simply suddenly there, like a nightmare, a squatting vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily, trailing jellyfish stingers made-up of millions and millions of teeth, all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.” The boss fight goes on a little too long. And it is improbable that with their 10,000-year history, including lots of scientific and necromantic research and interplanetary (at least) space travel and space shuttles, they’d no longer use guns. But it was a great read, a little like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), but with compelling characters, amusing conversations, and moving revelations, and I’m looking forward to the second book. Especially as it’s read by the splendid Moira Quirk. View all my reviews
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Manners, Emotions, and Identity in a Colonial Context Ancillary Sword (2014), Anne Leckie’s second Imperial Radch Trilogy book, begins a week after the end of the first novel, Ancillary Justice (2013). A civil war has broken out between two factions of the myriad clones of Anaander Mianaai, the three-thousand or so year old Emperor of the far-flung Radch empire. One is bent on constant expansion and annexation of ever more inhabited worlds, while the other wants to shrink the military, stop expanding, and stop making ancillaries for their sentient AI ships. (Ancillaries are human prisoners taken from annexed worlds and used as replaceable soldier/crew puppets by AI ships.) The protagonist Breq has aligned herself with the more pacifist Lord of the Radch, who has given her a new connection as a supposed relative, a new role as Fleet Captain, a new ship (the Mercy of Kalr), and a new mission: go to Athoek Station and secure it, its gate, and its planet for the “good” Emperor faction. Accompanying Breq are the experienced Lieutenants Seivarden and Ekalu and the “baby” Lieutenant Tisarwat, a teenager added by Anaander Mianaai at the last second. Breq senses something inconsistent in Tisarwat’s personality: the “good” Emperor couldn’t have given Breq Trojan Horse, could she? Breq is an interesting character, being a two-thousand-year-old former AI space warship (the Justice of Toren) who once had (at least) hundreds of ancillaries to enter and control at will but is now limited to a single “human” body, albeit with implants and enhancements permitting nearly instant access to ship and station AIs. Twenty years ago, the “bad” Anaander Mianaai faction destroyed Justice of Toren and all her ancillaries but one, Breq, who says things like, “I could almost forget that I wasn’t a ship anymore,” hums or sings songs from different cultures, and feels very human. Because she can access the sensors and data of the AI ship Mercy of Kalr and of the AI of Athoek Station, has two-thousand-years of experience with various human beings and aliens and their cultures, and is sensitive, observant, thoughtful, careful, and wise, Breq is a semi-omniscient first-person narrator who hears and sees and feels what everyone on the ship or in the station is saying, doing, and feeling at any time, limited mainly by her respect for other people’s privacy. It leads to moments like, “As she spoke I knew Seivarden was in stage two of NREM sleep. I saw pulse, temperature, respiration, blood, oxygen, hormone levels. Then that data was gone, replaced by Lieutenant Ekalu, standing watch. Stressed—jaw slightly clenched, elevated cortisol.” Leckie also plays a compelling narrative trick with gender, as the Radch no longer distinguish between genders, using female pronouns for everyone. And because Breq never describes anyone with our gender markers, we read most of the novel never knowing what gender the characters are! The only clues come when Breq interacts with people from Radch annexed worlds whose locals still notice gender. At one point, she refers to such a person as “she” in her narration but as “grandfather” when talking to “her,” and at another, she is corrected to understand that such a person has a “brother.” Similar clues in the first novel reveal that in our culture Breq may physically be female and Seivarden male, while some clues in this one reveal that Tisarwat may be male. But nothing they do confirms or refutes our idea of their gender. When Breq learns that one member of a couple is an abusive bully while the other is a compliant victim, we categorize the former as male and the latter as female based on our culture’s gender lens, but both characters are referred to as “she.” The net effect is similar to reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: you forget about gender for long stretches and see people as people rather than as men or women. Once Mercy of Kalr arrives at Athoek Station, Breq immediately sets about improving the lives of the scorned and exploited locals and workers. As Athoek (the planet) is famous for producing the tea so vital to Radch culture and as the Radch authorities and tea plantation owners look down on the annexed people and treat them unequally and brutally, we realize that Leckie is using the Radch to comment on the British Raj and human empires (and on the American slave system). As one character says, “You murder and rape and steal and call it civilization.” A side element of Breq’s mission to Athoek Station concerns Basnaaid Elming, the younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was a Justice of Toren officer loved by Breq, who was forced to kill her by direct order from the “bad” Emperor, which was the trigger for Breq to align herself with the “good” one. Basnaaid lives and works on the station, and Breq wants to protect and aid her. Another wrinkle is that Breq has a secret super weapon, a gun that will shoot through anything in the universe, given her by the alien Presger, an advanced civilization of obscure aims and fearsome technology. For most of the story, in addition to trying to improve the life and work of the annexed denizens of the station and that world, Breq is trying to find out who’s smuggling bodies and artifacts, but she and Mercy of Kalr never really engage enemy Emperor faction warships. Although the climax involves violent action, it’s over pretty quickly and doesn’t feel so convincing, so I suspect that Leckie prefers depicting fraught conversations than graphic fighting. The novel is intensely emotional and psychological, Breq detailing people’s emotions: “I could see, almost feel myself, the thrill thrumming through Lieutenant Tisarwat at Basmaaid’s presence.” Leckie writes some devastating lines on empire and human nature, like “I can’t fix every injustice” and “We are all of us only human. We can only forgive so much.” She also asks interesting questions about identity. Who is the real Lord of the Radch? Are you committing treason no matter which faction you support? And “How much can a person change and still be the same?” The audiobook reader Adjoa Andoh has a great voice and British accent and perfect manner—but she overdoes the voices of the contemptuous and contemptible types (cocky sword ship AI, entitled plantation owners, corrupt governors, etc.). What they say is bad enough without needing it said in exaggeratedly obnoxious voices. I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy! View all my reviews
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars To embrace or reject your inner malificer What’d you do if you were a disliked almost ostracized student in a magical school for future wizards and couldn’t access malia, the shortcut to mana power, because malia is sucked up from living creatures, which will turn you into a malificer (dark magician) and because your magical “affinity” is “laying waste to multitudes,” and you are doing your best not to become the uber-dark queen (“I can blaze a trail to Mordor anytime I want”) enchantress destroyer of worlds? You’d do a lot of situps, pushups, and jumping jacks, with some frustrating crocheting on the side, because physical and mental stress accumulate mana more safely (if more slowly). Thus, 17-year-old junior Galadriel Higgins (call her El but never Gal) is in great shape. Which is another problem, because the stronger she becomes by exercising, the more exercising she has to do to gather mana from her effort! The “Deadly Education” of the title of Naomi Novik’s first Scholomance book (2020) turns out not to refer to what the students of the magical school *learn* but to what traditionally happens to at least half of the students in any given year, with especially high mortality rates for seniors at graduation, the most dangerous part of their educations. The Scholomance is built into a magical void, with only the gate the students walk through at graduation connected to the real world, which is why graduation is so dangerous--the most powerful malefecars (magical demons called mals for short) infesting the school have eaten the weaker ones as they wait at the gate for the graduates to walk through. Novik asks us to believe that magical children from age 13 to 18 would be in greater danger of being eaten by mals out in the world going to schools for “mundanes” (i.e., muggles) than they are when gathered together in the Scholomance, which, unlike Hogwarts, doesn’t have a single teacher or adult wizard in charge on site. We have to accept that those in charge would toss thousands of kids into the school without any adult supervision and without any (recent) attempt to clean out the myriad mals lurking in every nook and cranny, so that to try to reduce the risk of mals eating them the students have to maintain spells of protection on their dorm room doors and go in groups to meals and snack-runs and classes and study sessions and showers (one reason why they smell rather ripe). It develops that enrollment has been increased by including kids whose parents don’t belong to elite, powerful, and wealthy magical “enclaves,” so the riffraff may serve as soft-target gazelles to increase the chances that the enclave kids will survive. But still… Anyway. Novik entertainingly imagines how such a school might function and how students would choose majors (artifice, alchemy, or incantations), attend classes, study, submit homework, get library books, eat meals, trade (spells, artifacts, homework, clothes, etc.), form cliques and alliances, and so on. She also imagines a large number of different mals, including soul-eaters, mimics, sirenspiders, and groglers, each with different methods for catching and eating young wizards in training. Unlike in Harry Potter, magic here is not a free and unlimited resource but is based on power that the magic users have to get from somewhere. El must exercise to generate the minimum magical energy she needs to get by, because she refuses to go the malia route and comes from a mundane commune instead of from a magical enclave, whose kids can access mana pools. Novik checks off (too?) many of the boxes for popular young adult fiction: first-person narrator (blessedly not present tense), protagonist who is a uniquely powerful outsider forced to hide her power, fraught romance, dangerous competitions, sarcastic banter, food details, absence of parental supervision and support, etc. From the catchy first line (“I decided that Orion needed to die after the second time he saved my life”), the plot, which takes place during about two or three weeks near the end of the school year, is page-turning, as it reveals the details of the magical school and world (El is an expert guide to the Scholomance, saying things like, “Breakfast isn't half as dangerous as dinner, but it's still never good to walk alone”) and develops El’s character (from an excess of “negativity of spirit” to something a little more trusting). Although Novik’s magical world is hetero so far, she does write a wider range of races and cultures and languages than Rowling does in Harry Potter, including El, who is half-Welsh and half-Mumbai Indian and has a Chinese friend, an African friend, and a white friend, Orion Lake, the silver-haired do-gooding combat magic affinity boy from the New York enclave who goes around the school saving other students’ lives, including El’s, much to her chagrin. At her best, Novik writes fine fantasy passages, like this vivid, witty one: “What came flying out of the void in answer was a horrible tome encased in some kind of pale crackly leather with spiked corners that scraped unpleasantly as it skidded to me across the middle of the desk. The leather had probably come off a pig, but someone had clearly wanted you to think it had been flayed from a person, which was almost as bad, and it flipped itself open to a page with instructions for enslaving an entire mob of people to do your bidding.” She writes spicy dialogue, like: “Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.” “I'm not most people… Also the seating arrangements *are* an act of war.” But there are also some places that try too hard to be YA snarky, like: “In your dreams, rich boy. I'm not one of your groupies.” “Yeah, I didn't notice.” And Novik via El inaccurately disses a great book: “However many literature classes might try to sell you on Lord of the Flies, that story is about as realistic as the source of my name. Kids don’t go feral en masse in here. We all know we can’t afford to get into stupid fights with one another.” This is a misreading and a misapplication of William Golding’s novel. The reader of the audiobook, Anisha Dadia, inserts pauses even when the text has no punctuation, especially after the first key word of a sentence, which got on my nerves. “Her scream [pause] had already been cut off into a dying gurgle.” Otherwise, she’s a good reader. (Well, El and Orion don’t sound so Welsh and New York.) People who like Harry Potter type fantasy but for/about older kids, like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, should like this book. (There is a frank talk about birth control.) Will I go on to read the second and third entries in the trilogy? Probably, but not as audiobooks! View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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