Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Zombies, 19th-Century MAGA, and an Intrepid Heroine Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation: Rise Up (2018) is a little like The Walking Dead crossed with The Hunger Games by way of Bring the Jubilee. The year is 1880. The Civil war was interrupted when, during the Battle of Gettysburg, the dead woke up and started eating both armies, after which Americans had to adjust to living in a USA inundated by zombies. Except for California, the west is unsettled; the east consists of walled cities; and the south is a patchwork of plantations reminiscent of the former slave system. The Native and Negro Reeducation Act opened schools to train Indians and blacks in combat so they may be employed killing the dead. Even in the north, the best career opportunity for African Americans is to become obedient bodyguard “Attendants” to wealthy whites. Luckily, the dead, called shamblers because the older they get the less coordinated they become, can neither talk nor reason. Or can they? Something must explain their conglomerating in ever larger herds. The political situation involves a cold civil war between pacifist Egalitarians who want all colors to live together in modern unity and racist Survivalists who want to return America to its former glory and to god’s order: white people being served by people of color (MAGA for the 19th century). Our guide into that world is Jane McKeene, an intrepid 17-year-old student in Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls outside Baltimore. Jane has self-described “hair like sheep’s wool and skin the color of dirt.” In the attention grabbing first lines of the novel she recounts her birth: “The day I came squealing and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me. . . It was the midwife that tried to do me in. Truth be told, it wasn’t really her fault. What else is a good Christian woman going to do when a Negro comes flying out from between the legs of the richest white woman in Haller County, Kentucky?” We come to learn, however, that for Jane, “The truth and I are uneasy companions at best,” and one of the best parts of the novel is discovering what is true or false in her background story. The novel puts Jane in increasingly dangerous situations involving her ex-boyfriend Red Jack, her frenemy Katherine Deveraux, shamblers, and a MAGA utopia. Apart from being set in an alternate past instead of the future, the novel is a somewhat typical YA short-chapter first-person present-tense girl’s action dystopia like The Hunger Games and Divergent. Multiple handsome young men for our heroine? Check. Too special to be true heroine? Check. Jane perfectly recalls anything she reads; she’s the smartest person her street-smart ex-beau Red Jack knows; she’s the best close quarters fighter and markswoman at the school; she’s braver than anyone else; she’s the mysterious “angel of the crossroads” who saves people assailed by shamblers in the woods; she has “a great destiny.” Her only flaw is cool: lack of respect for authority and bullies: “Aunt Aggie used to say I was like as not to poke Satan with a stick just for fun.” Girls must eat it all up. But Ireland’s novel has some neat things absent from The Hunger Games et al, especially concerning race. The dedication to the novel reads, “For all the colored girls. I see you.” Jane and Katherine are both mixed-race. The imagining of a society in which slavery is over but not really and in which the Survivalist party is gaining power spotlights racial inequality, white nationalism, and regressive nostalgia in the contemporary USA. The racism in the novel is vile. Although Jane is quite aware of skin color—one of the first things she tells us about people she meets—she lacks prejudice. She is attracted to handsome and intelligent guys regardless of race. No matter how generic parts of the novel are, it is refreshing and cool to read a YA novel in which the main characters are kids of color. Ireland also nods to the LGBTQ community by revealing that Jane once had a romance with an older student at her school. During the novel Jane is mainly attracted to guys, but her friendship with the gorgeous golden-skinned Katherine (who doesn’t want to marry) has the potential to become something more than friendship in future. Another virtue of the novel is the excerpts from letters that close each chapter, Part One featuring Jane writing to her mother and Part Two her mother writing to her. The letters form an ironic or moving counterpoint to whatever’s happening in the story, for to avoid worrying each other Jane and her mother relate falsely cheerful information. The steampunk side of the novel seems forced and underdeveloped. A dash of steampunk fashion, as female attendants wear trousers under Victorian dresses. A dollop of steampunk tech, like the “iron ponies” (coal or steam carriages) that replaced horses in the east after the shamblers ate them, and a young Edison-esque “tinkerer” in a mad scientist lab working on a shambler vaccine and tapping a grotesque Faraday machine for electrical power. Race and zombies overshadow the steampunk. Sometimes Ireland loses her grip on her late 19th-century idiom and writes contemporary vernacular, like, “Hi there, Professor Ghering” and “I’m good, thank you.” But she also often writes in Jane’s era, like, “She is sorely vexed.” And I enjoy Jane’s voice, combining African American idiom with big vocabulary: “What? He’s dead. He ain’t gonna be needing it anymore. Besides, this is a quality bit of haberdashery.” There’s also plenty of humor, as in “Kate? Take off that damn corset. We’re going out to face down a horde, not to a ball.” Or There’s nothing white folks hate more than finding out they accidentally treated a negro like a person.” The reader Bahni Turpin is fine: voicing southern and northern, black and white, male and female, young and old characters fine. Her Jane is spot on. Readers thirsty for alternate history YA fiction with girls of color kicking zombie and MAGA ass should enjoy Dread Nation. View all my reviews
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No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The point is there ain’t no point” You might think that if you’ve seen the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007) you don’t need to read Cormac McCarthy’s original novel (2005). If all you care about when you read a book is the plot, you might be right, because the movie is a faithful adaptation of the story. But if you appreciate laconic wit, grim and bracing philosophy, and poetic and apocalyptic prose, you should read the novel, or better yet listen to the audiobook read by the ideal McCarthy reader, Tom Stechschulte (though Richard Poe is a great McCarthy audiobook reader, too) After Ed Tom Bell, a melancholic veteran sheriff, introduces the novel’s 1980 action, McCarthy shoves us into a bloody opening: psychopathic assassin Anton Chigur (“a true and living prophet of destruction”) brutally murders a young policeman in a small station, strangling the guy with his handcuffs, which cut the victim’s neck to the bone. Chigur is equipped with serene blue eyes like stones and an exotic weapon used for both lock blowing and skull breaking: a cattle-stunning air gun that ejects a high velocity metal bolt two inches. Vietnam sniper vet Lleywellan Moss, meanwhile, is out poaching antelope in the Texas wilderness when he happens upon a scene of carnage: three heavy-duty pickup trucks and several dead men all shot full of holes. He finds a load of drugs and leaves it. He finds a still living man who asks for water, but he has none to give. He finds a briefcase satchel that turns out to have 2.4 million dollars in unmarked 100s in it. He takes it. He drives home to his young wife and then in the middle of the night goes off to do something stupid: take water to the dying man. Thus begins a tight, page-turning, suspenseful, and unpredictable plot featuring Lleywellan’s attempts to avoid Chigur, Chigur’s attempts to find him, and Bell’s attempts to find both men—as well as to confront his having been awarded a Bronze Star during WWII and to make sense of the increasingly violent world of 1980 (which, I suppose, makes the 2005 America when McCarthy wrote the novel look even worse, for old men in any era tend to find their presents less idyllic than their pasts). McCarthy depicts the craft with which the three men do their things with a fascinated attention to detail. Needless to say, life (or fate or chance symbolized by the toss of a coin) often intervenes to mess up the best laid plans. The supporting characters consist of earnest and hapless deputies, ruthless and hapless hit men, good and hapless women (like Bell and Lleywellan’s wives Loretta and Carla Jean), and clueless and hapless victims of collateral damage. Though we surely do root for him, Moss is a less interesting main character than the lawman and the killer, though he does have some good lines, like, “I ain’t making no promises. That’s how you get hurt.” Unlike the vet and the sheriff, Chigur lacks mercy, humor, and love. He does make philosophical utterances, like “Every moment in your life is a choosing.” For his part, Bell has decency and humor and loves his wife and his deceased father. He also offers plenty of life wisdom, like “You fix what you can fix and let the rest of it go.” Being a kind man, Bell has an apt idiosyncrasy, saying “kindly” instead of “really,” as in, “That kindly surprised me,” or “Kindly in a hurry about it, too.” The novel is often funny, especially in the dialogue: “It’s a mess, ain’t it Sheriff?” “If it ain’t, it will do till a mess gets here.” The novel features McCarthy’s vivid, biblical, apocalyptic descriptions: “Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abcission of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That God lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away.” I suppose some readers might be upset by the ending. It upset me. But I started appreciating it the more I thought about it: so genre jarring and unwilling to satisfy. I found No Country for Old Men to be more lurid and moralizing and less poetic and magnificent than Blood Meridian, Suttree, and The Road, but if you liked those novels you’d probably like this one too. After all, “Do the best you can do and tell the truth.” But then, “If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?” But then again, “A man would have to put his soul at hazard, and I won’t do that.” And finally, “One good thing about old age. It don’t last long.” View all my reviews
Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets by John Woolf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Entertaining, Informative but Busy Documentary Listening to Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets (2018), written by John Wolf and Nick Baker, read by Stephen Fry, and performed by several actors, is like listening to a spicy BBC documentary series in which the witty host goes time traveling in the 19th century to introduce us to some sensational examples of odd features of the Victorian era. Here are the twelve episodes: Episode 1 “Family Secrets” is about secrets relating to race and legitimacy: “Families could protect against shame by keeping secrets, so secrets became the glue bonding the family together.” Episode 2 “Buckingham Palace Freak Show” relates the Victorian appetite for freaks like Tom Thumb and the Last Aztecs: “Buckingham Palace gates were revolving doors for freaks.” Episode 3 “Pornography, Pleasure, and the Press” demonstrates how the Victorians, far from being uptight prigs about sex, were pretty open about many aspects of it (and even thought that the female orgasm was necessary for good conception). Episode 4 “Forty Elephants and Other Dangerous Women” focuses on the opposite figure to the Victorian Angel in the House: the dangerous woman like Mary Carr, the leader of a gang of forty female thieves whom the police finally put away by framing her for a fake child kidnapping. Episode 5 “Afro-Victorians” points out that anti-slavery didn’t mean anti-racism and depicts black people in England as exotic entertainer outsiders. Episode 6 “Victorians Underground” is fascinating and fun, being all about sewers and cemeteries, water closets and earth closets, and cholera epidemics and premature burial fears. Great stuff on the “toshers,” crime gangs sailing the sewers, their scavenger work hazards (gases, vermin, collapses, and mazes) and rewards (coins, spoons, jewelry, metals, etc.). Also relates the work of the “night soil men” and the history of toilet paper and why women’s drawers are called drawers and why the British call the toilet the loo. Episode 7 “Beauty and the Beards” demonstrates the exaggerated differences in appearance between Victorian men and women, with men pressured to grow beards (to be manly for the empire) and women pressured to stay beautiful forever (via dubious beauty products). Episode 8 “On the Wilde Side” focuses on male homosexuality, one of the secretest of Victorian secrets because in much of the Victorian era buggery was punishable by death or transportation. Much of the homophobia of the era was connected to the fear that homosexuality left untreated would infect and topple the empire. Episode 9 “In and Out of the Asylum” reveals that on the one hand the Victorians had some progressive attempts to care for the mentally ill, building big facilities for them in which to feel better by working and getting fresh air and enough food), but that on the other hand in the myriad private hospitals doctors and orderlies were free to do whatever they wanted to patients, including horrific treatments, punishments, and abuses. Episode 10 “Woman to Woman” covers homosexual love between women, beginning with a unique example in Ann Lister, who, in the very start of the Victorian era was “the first modern lesbian” in the sense of having a series of female lovers and never feeling guilty about it. She did, however, recount her sexual relationships with women in her four million plus diary words in code (that was not fully cracked till 1980). Interestingly, for Victorians, lesbianism didn’t exist, so there were no laws against it, unlike for male homosexuality. Episode 11 “Séance, Science, and Messiahs” is about the spread of mesmerism, spiritualism, and Messianic fervor in the Victorian era. Episode 12 “Secret Sherlock” is the least interesting one for me, because I’m somewhat familiar with the great detective. But it was neat to find out just how rampant drug use was in the Victorian era, with 1 in 4 men being addicted to morphine, cocaine being the drug for exotic brainy types like Holmes, and people relying on opiates for pain relief (aspirin wasn’t invented till 1899), with 26,000 sellers of opium in the UK in the 1850s and local countryside communities growing their own opium crops, etc. To immerse us in Victorian England, the audiobook uses many sound effects: people being hanged in public, crowd noises at a circus, scissors cutting hair, ghostly knocking noises, seagulls crying, etc. Unfortunately, the background piano music is pretty constant and distracting. The voice actors playing the different historical personages are fine. Fry as narrator is entertaining, but at times he tries a little too hard to be arch, pregnantly pausing or exaggeratedly emphasizing, his voice assuming an unctuously winking quality. To be something of a documentary, the audiobook also features several American and British Victorian era scholars who pop in and out to say their relevant and interesting research findings and informed opinions. In each episode, I found Fry (and or his authors) jumping around from this topic to that topic and back too much. I guess the intent is to avoid boring the listener by focusing on any one thing for very long, but it gets a bit frustrating. Experts in the Victorian era may not find so much of interest here, but people relatively new to it or very interested in it should spend an entertaining and informative time with this audiobook. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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