Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Neat Concept and a Needed Subject, but too Much Summary and Febrile and Cliché YA Emotion Trans, gay, Latinx high school student Yadriel Velez lives in East LA with his family in an old, low profile brujx (witch) cemetery, caring for graves and spirits. It has not been easy for Yadriel to come out as trans and gay to his traditional family and community, especially because of their strict brujx (witch) gender divisions, with brujo (male) members sending spirits off to the next world by severing them from their “tethers” (key objects from their lives) before they hang around too long and become “maligno,” and bruja (female) members specializing in healing (and financially supporting their families by applying their secret witch powers to mainstream careers as nurses and doctors and psychologists). Yadriel’s mother accepted his starting to live as a boy at 14, but she died almost a year ago, and his father has been insisting that he cannot become a brujo because he’s a “girl.” Thus, the opening of Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys (2020) has Yadriel performing the ritual to become a brujo by himself—supported by his best buddy-cousin Maritza (a vegan bruja, which means she can’t heal cause she won’t use the required ritual animal blood). Yadriel succeeds, gaining the acceptance of Lady Death, the patron/deity of the brujx, but he also accidentally “summons” the spirit of Julian Diaz, a freshly killed (and “devastatingly handsome”) bad boy from his school. (Thus starts the hot ghost boy and sensitive trans boy romance of the novel.) That Julian was killed at about the same time as Yadriel’s well-liked older brujo cousin Miguel and that no one knows where their bodies are is a big mystery Yadriel and Maritza and Julian set out to solve. Then Yadriel can come out as a new brujo to his family and community, AND they can find out what happened to Miguel and Julian, AND Julian will let Yadriel send his spirit on to the next place. AND they only have two days to do it before Dia de Muertos. That situation is too often referenced and summarized through character dialogue and Yadriel’s thoughts. The novel could’ve been at least 1/5 shorter. I liked learning about brujx culture in a Latinx and transgender context! I liked the Dia de Muertos festival information, preparations, and descriptions. I liked the details on Latinx foods, language, familial relationships, countries of origin, and so on. I liked the few dashes of social criticism about things like the police not caring to look for a missing Latino boy living without parents, or parents of another missing Latino needing an interpreter to tell the police about him while fearing they’ll be deported. I wanted more of that kind of thing. I also really liked the transgender and gay stuff, as some of Yadriel’s experiences are poignant and interesting: he uses uncomfortable chest binders to hide his breasts; he feels great anxiety when using the boys’ restroom at school for the first time; he doesn’t like his high school yearbook photo, because in addition to not being able to afford gender alteration therapy or surgery, his family hasn’t been able to afford to legally change his name from his feminine birth name so that the name under his photo is not his real name. The novel features a few other characters in addition to Yadriel who are non-binary or gay or trans. Actually, given his apparent sensitivity, I expected Yadriel to face more criticism, teasing, and abuse, but people seem rather accepting of his gender and sexual orientation—California in the 2020s? Or maybe he’s too self-conscious and melodramatic? One moment we’ll read, “Yadriel had spent years feeling misunderstood by everyone except for Maritza,” and the next, “Yadriel felt that his uncle was the only one, other than his mom, who really understood him,” and wonder if Yadriel’s feeling too sorry for himself or if Aiden Thomas is trying too hard for reader sympathy. And there is WAY too much overwrought, repetitive, cliché, corny YA writing! Heat floods or blooms in Yadriel’s cheeks (nine times!) or claws up his throat; his skin/face grows hot/red (eleven times!); his heart sinks or hammers or leaps or thrashes; his skin crawls; his stomach plumets to his feet; guilt rips him in half. And creative metaphors aren’t always felicitous: e.g., “Exhaustion plowed into him like a truck.” And the climax and aftermath are way too quick and easy. All that said, there ARE some neat descriptions that feel like LA (e.g., “Hazy pollution and city lights washed everything in an orange glow, even in the middle of the night”) and Latinx culture (e.g., “Classically handsome. He looked just like the stone statues that adorned the alcoves of the church. An Aztec warrior reincarnated”). And some neat moments: “Am I dead?” Yadriel winced and gave a small nod. “Yeah…” Julian stumbled back a step, his body wavering in and out of existence for a moment, like a camera trying to focus. “Oh, Jesus.” He pressed both hands against his face. “My brother is gonna kill me.” And some pointed conversations: “He and his family are from Colombia,” Alexa went on, in a way that suggested a double meaning, but when everyone just stared at her, she added, “You know what they export from Colombia, don’t you?” “Coffee?” Maritza guessed in a bored tone. “Crack,” Alexa answered. “I’m half Colombian on my mom’s side, and none of us are drug dealers,” Letti pointed out. And some sweet romance: “Julian was the most alive person he’d ever met. Even as a spirit, he was bright and full of constantly moving energy. A sun crammed into the body of a boy. Yadriel didn’t want to see him without his light.” And I wanted to keep reading, partly to find out what would happen between Yadriel and Julian. And it IS great that Aiden Thomas wrote this book. I remember wishing that Holly Black had written The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2013) with a Tana as trans heroine instead of with just Valentina as trans supporting character. I imagine Cemetery Boys gives heart to many non-traditional gender kids, while making traditional gender kids more open minded about difference. View all my reviews
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Gallant by V.E. Schwab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The stuff of fairy tales or something darker” Fourteen-year-old Olivia attends and lives in Merilance School for Independent Girls, “an asylum for the young and the feral and the fortuneless. The orphaned and unwanted.” The matrons of the school try to give the girls a “practical” education to help them survive in a society that doesn’t want them. Olivia has taught herself her most useful skills: drawing and picking locks. Partly because she is the only mute in the school and has a bad temper (when angered, she’s capable of breaking things and throttling foes), Olivia is friendless, feared by the other girls and disciplined by the matrons. She is a sensitive girl; in fact, she’s the only person in the school who can see ghouls (ghosts), which does raise the question (for a while) as to whether they are real or products of her imagination, whether she can see them because she has heightened sensitivity to them or is suffering from mental delusion. Olivia’s prized possession is her mother’s cryptic journal, written to her father, whose untimely death while her mother was pregnant with her apparently drove her mother mad. The last page of the journal is addressed to Olivia and says, “You'll be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.” Thus, it is with happiness and dread that Olivia learns that her uncle has located her after long searching and has written a letter summoning her “home” to Gallant. The bulk of V. E. Schwab's Gallant then features a rambling old mansion, a family curse or duty, a hostile cousin (“I am the last Prior!”), a pair of kind mixed-race lover-caretakers, a lot of melancholy ghouls (ghosts), an intricate clockwork sculpture featuring a replica of Gallant and a kind of shadow replica of it, a big garden invaded by creepy gray weeds and punctuated by a disturbing ruined wall with an ominous iron door, and a malevolent white-eyed “Master” from the other side of the wall. Despite the fraught secret history, unpleasant cousin Matthew, and her new scary dreams, Olivia desperately wants to have found a true home at last. The story is, then, a Gothic YA horror mystery, as Olivia gradually learns the deal behind her parents, her family, Gallant, and so on. Perhaps Schwab gets a bit too much into YA short sentence/paragraph/chapter cliffhanger page turning mode as the novel progresses. It belongs to the current stylistic trend of much young adult fiction (it’s even narrated in the present tense, though blessedly not first person). And I wish the clock-house sculpture did something integral to the story instead of just looking cool. And as is usual with horror stories and mysteries, this one is more interesting before we find out what’s going on and what kind of evil monster Olivia must contend with. If in her orphanhood and unique sensitivity, intelligence, and isolation Olivia seems like a typical YA heroine, the book does interesting things with dreams and death and ghosts and communication, her muteness is affecting, and it’s nice that there is no romance angle for her. And Schwab is a good enough writer of vivid and tight enough prose to make us care for the girl and so to feel great suspense on her behalf. And there is lots of neat writing in the novel. Neat creepy fantasy: “Not a ghost, exactly, just a bit of tattered cloth, a handful of teeth, and a single, sleepy eye floating in the dark. It moves like a silverfish at the edge of Olivia’s sight, darting away every time she looks. But if she stays very still and keeps her gaze ahead, it might grow a cheekbone, a throat. It might drift closer, might blink and smile and sigh against her, weightless as a shadow.” Vivid similes: “Something wriggles inside her then, half terror and half thrill. Like when you take the stairs too fast and almost slip. The moment when you catch yourself and look down at what could have happened, some disaster narrowly escaped.” Neat descriptions: “… the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth.” “They [some drawings] are strange, even beautiful, organic things that shift and curl across the page, slowly resolving into shapes. Here is a hand. Here is a hall. Here is a man, the shadows twisting at his feet. Here is a flower. Here is a skull. Here is a door flung open onto—what? Or who? Or Where?” I am thankful that Schwab apparently wrote this as a compact stand-alone novel and not as the first in yet another trilogy or longer series, and I will probably read another book by her, although I'm not eager to embark on one of her young adult fantasy trilogies. View all my reviews
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Mercy was more frightening than murder because it was harder” Eighteen-year-old (or so) Katsa is a Graceling, possessed of a special gift (Grace) like a superpower in X-men or Heroes, in her case, a preternatural ability for killing. She is far less subject to fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst, cold, sickness, injury, and so on than normal (Graceless?) people and far quicker and stronger and more dexterous, resourceful, and creative etc. in fighting, hunting, swimming, etc. Not having any parents, she has been exploited for several years by her uncle King Randa as his attack dog-thug, being sent on missions to intimidate and physically punish any lord or commoner who dares cheat or diss the King. But lately she’s started chafing at that service, refusing to harm basically innocent people for Randa and starting the Council, a secret society spreading throughout the Seven Kingdoms to protect powerless people from the powerful. And such is the virtue of her cause that she has brought into the Council King Randa’s own spy master Oll, his own son Prince Raffin (a cool possibly gay guy into science, medicines, and his assistant Bann), and one of his most important young lords Gidden. When the first novel in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm series, Graceling (2008), begins, Katsa is on a Council mission (unknown to King Randa) to rescue this Lienid grandfather prince from the dungeon of the King Murgon, so we get a good glimpse of her formidable fighting skills as she easily knocks out several dungeon guards and a dozen or so castle guards—until she almost meets her match in the person of Greening Grandemalion (call him Po), a handsome, be-ringed young Leinid prince not much older than she and apparently Graced with fighting ability (because he sure knows where each of her lightning-fast blows is going to land and act accordingly to avoid them…) The novel will develop the relationship between Katsa and Po in rather convincing, interesting, and moving ways as the plot (full of concise world building, exciting action, surprising reveals, complex romance, grueling adventure, and a boss villain with a scary Grace) puts them through the wringer and challenges Katsa’s understanding of herself, her Grace, and her lover. Interestingly, although the novel was published in 2008, the audio book version didn’t get made til 2022, so it is another example of a book that was first published before audio books were so popular and that has benefited from the popularity of audiobooks. Reader Xanthe Elbrick really enhances the story. The novel recalls Robin Hobb’s earlier Assassin’s Apprentice. A young highly trained, skilled, and effective killer for a king; the conflict between doing the dirty work for a demanding master and wanting to be free to live your life; the ethics of killing; etc. But of course Katsa is a she, and everyone knows what she is and what she can do, which is part of why they shun her, while in Fitz's case it's because they know he's a bastard without having any idea he's a highly trained spy assassin. And Fitz doesn't start his own "Council," but stays more a tool of the Farseers. It also reminds me a bit of The Murderbot Diaries, because although Katsa refers to herself as a monster, she’s really a human survivor-savior. Cashore’s novel indulges in a bit of YA Special Princess Heroine Overkill, in that Katsa is a beautiful orphan, she complains of having no friends but really has several good ones, she has a really cool love interest, she’s basically not one princess but two, she’s a great fighter (the best in her kingdom), and (so far) her unique Grace is countless Graces rolled into one. Because there is (so far) no explanation for the Grace system, where the abilities come from, how they actually work, who gets one, why it manifests as it does in a person, why Graced people have one eye one color and one eye another (apart from being cool), and so on. This permits Cashore to come up with any kind of Grace with any kind of rules needed to suit her plot. And the climax is over too quickly. However, I had such a great time listening to the audiobook, which was funny, exciting, suspenseful, moving, surprising, and so on (and has some great stuff re to marry and have kids or not and how it'd be to be close to someone who can basically read your thoughts), so that I really had to kind of flog myself to find flaws because I just wanted to enjoy the ride to the end. I also appreciate that apparently each Graceling book can stand by itself. Will I go on to listen to other books in the series? Hmmm…… 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
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “A hairbrush is NOT a gun!” First, I love the voice(s) and manner of audiobook reader Bahni Turpin, who really enhances Angie Thomas’ YA family romance race novel The Hate U Give (2017). The story is told (in de rigueur YA present tense) by 16-year-old Starr Carter, whose home is in the Garden Heights “ghetto,” where shootings, robberies, and drugs are common and normal jobs, well-equipped schools, and social services rare. When she was ten, her best friend Natasha was shot and killed while playing at an open fire hydrant, after which Starr’s parents put her and her younger and older brothers in the mostly white Williamson Prep school in the mostly white (and largely gated) Riverton Hills community 45 minutes away. As a result, Starr has been dividing herself into two personas in two worlds, Garden Heights Starr and Williamson Prep Starr, unable to speak her natural language or show her true feelings to her school friends. In the beginning of the story, she loses another childhood best friend, Khalil Harris, her first crush, when a white policeman pulls them over after a party and shoots Khalil three times in the back as he’s reaching for his hairbrush and asking Starr if she’s OK. The traumatic experience sends Starr wrestling with her guilt over having abandoned Khalil after going to the white school, with her awakening social conscience, and with her desire to keep a low profile as the only eyewitness to the shooting. As she watches the ensuing protests and riots over the killing (called “the incident” by the police, “the murder” by an activist attorney), gets interviewed by the police and the DA, and deals with her family members and friends, she finds it increasingly difficult to keep her two worlds separate. Will the merging of her two worlds be a wreck or a metamorphosis? Will she use her voice or remain safely anonymous? Will Khalil get justice, or will his killer get off scot-free? Will her father let her mother move the family out of Garden Heights to be safe or insist on staying to improve the community? Will their Garden Heights grocery store remain untouched by the riots? Will her complicated family grow closer or implode? The way Thomas answers such questions makes for a page-turning novel that is topical with the police killings of black people while staying universal with the relationships between family members and friends of highly wired teenagers. The novel depicts African American culture and human nature while dealing with interracial problems and enrichments. The book is not an anti-police diatribe, as Starr’s beloved surrogate father Uncle Carlos is a cop who genuinely wants to help Garden Heights and regrets temporarily assuming the worst of Khalil after he’s killed. Moreover, there’s lots of humor throughout, especially in the conversations between Starr and her family members and friends, which Angie Thomas writes with a fine-tuned ear for how kids and adults think and talk. There are funny scenes, like when Starr’s ex-gang banger and ex-con Black Panther and Malcom X idolizing father explains why Harry Potter is about gangs or discovers her *white* boyfriend Chris (“Y'all act like this dude been around a minute”), or when Starr and company tell Chris strange white behaviors so he tries to tell them strange black behaviors. And Starr’s salty grandmother steals any scene she’s in. While telling a realistic story about race, violence, and voice, the novel presses a lot of YA buttons, channeling a bit of Harry Potter (with the commentary on Rowling’s series and the outsider at school setting), a bit of the Hunger Games (with the first-person present-tense narration and themes relating to media and image), and a bit of Twilight (with the high school romance between apparently mismatched but ideally suited couple). Unfortunately, Thomas also indulges in the YA genre’s Righteous Punch of the Asshole, when Starr has had enough of her self-centered, manipulative, defensive, racist Williamson friend Hailey. Starr’s three-day suspension and her mother’s, Just-because-someone-says-something-you-don’t-like-doesn’t-mean-you-should-punch-them, are drowned out by the approval she gets from her father, brother, “sister,” friend, gang members, and author. In addition to referencing much popular culture (e.g., Starr’s beloved Jordan basketball shoes, Drake, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, IHOP, Tumblr, Taco Bell), the novel depicts much African American culture, from Black Jesus, Huey Newton, dap, and “the Talk” about how to act when the police stop you if you’re black, to spicy Black English and slang like “a’ight” (all right) and “You just mad he threw you out,” “Loud-ass music,” “Giving Denasia Allen some serious stank-eye,” and “It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.” She also writes some neat figures of speech, like Rosalie is “an African queen, and we are blessed to be in her presence,” “Suddenly I'm Eve in the garden after she ate the fruit,” and “’Love you’ isn’t as forward or aggressive as ‘I love you.’ ‘Love you’ can slip up on you, sure, but it doesn’t make an in-your-face-slam dunk. More like a nice jump shot.” And life wisdom, like “What's the point of having a voice if you're going to be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?” “People make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them,” and especially Tupac’s, THUG LIFE: “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” Maybe Starr’s family is a little too good to be true. She says at one point, “Embarrassing dancing and dysfunction aside, my family is not too bad,” and despite their arguments, they are (almost too) ideally supportive. I wonder how the novel would be if her family were truly broken like Khalil’s. Although I like the presence of Chris, who gives white me an outsider’s view of the black culture of the novel, I also think that Thomas takes the easy way out by not writing any scenes with his white parents. On the other hand, I think Devante (a Khalil-like Garden Heights youth from another broken family) is an unnecessary distraction during the climax. Anyway, overall, Thomas tells a suspenseful, moving, funny, and necessary story, and I’d like now to read her more recent Garden Heights novel Concrete Rose about Starr’s father when he was a teen. View all my reviews
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I ain’t gonna be part of his science experiment!” The premise of Deathless Divide (2020), the sequel to Justina Ireland’s 19-century alternate history zombie apocalypse race relations novel Dread Nation (2018), is that during a Civil War battle for some unexplained reason the dead rose up and started attacking, eating, and turning the living. To kill the “shamblers” you must generally remove their heads, hence the preference among experienced fighters for bladed weapons (though they’re also proficient with firearms). African Americans are made to do the dirty work of putting down the dead, while whites stay out of harm’s way, though when an entire town is overrun by a horde, no one is safe. The southern and eastern states have been lost. With its protective mountains and deserts, California has resisted the worst of the shambler plague, but “Eventually, the dead will come walking.” The narrator Jane McKeene, now about 18, explains that at Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls near Baltimore, she and Katherine Deveraux started off enemies, but that their adventures, culminating in an escape from the white nationalist “utopia” Summerland when it was overrun by a shambler horde at the end of the first novel, have made them best friends. Jane thinks she’s getting her ex-boyfriend Jackson back, until a shambler ambush and a past marriage destroy her hopes. Acompanying them are Jackson's little sister, an orphan boy, and some prostitutes. Jane also reveals her attraction to Gideon Carr, a white scientist-inventor. Jane et al decide to try for the Great Plains African American town of Nicodemus, where they hope to find some Miss Preston alumni. Jane’s ultimate goal is California, where she hopes her mother and aunt are waiting for her in an idyllic community called Haven. While Dread Nation was narrated solely by Jane, here she and Katherine take turns narrating chapters. Their different voices, personalities, and experiences complement each other. Their chapter epigraphs come from Shakespeare (Jane) and the Bible (Katherine). Jane is more violent, reckless, and down to earth, Katherine more ladylike, careful, and polite. With her golden skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, Katherine can pass for white, while Jane is obviously black. While Jane has loved both boys and girls, Katherine has never needed a lover. One moment, she’ll say, “A good pair of swords is always the best accessory,” the next, “I take a deep breath, enjoying the reassuring grip of the corset on my ribs before I set out.” Katherine fills us in on Jane killing the hateful sheriff of Summerland at the end of the first book. Ireland writes other interesting characters, like Jackson, who becomes a resentful but helpful haint haunting Jane; Gideon, who is driven to continue his experiments on living (especially black) people as he tries to perfect his anti-shambler serum so he can (he hopes) make up for causing the deaths of untold people; and Daniel Redfern, a Native American “survivor” who won’t risk his neck to help anyone. The first part of the novel takes place in the Great Plains, the second in California, morphing into a hardboiled zombie western, as Jane’s character transforms from the Angel of the Crossroads (shambler scourge) to the Devil’s Bride (human bounty hunter), saying things like “Killing a person who needs it is like making a garden. It's hard work but the result is pleasurable.” Gone are the days when she worries about crossing the line from survivor to killer. Katherine also changes in the second part, determining never again to pass for white, abandoning her corset, and becoming a shrewder observer of men. Jane’s part-two chapters start with epigraphs from books of sensational “true stories” of the “wilding west,” Katherine’s with quotations from travelers’ accounts of the wonders of California. Ireland imagines a fallen world of misery, loss, and death for all, and not only because of the zombies. At least as deadly for people of color are the pervasive white supremacy, racism, and discrimination. In San Francisco Katherine finds the same “greed and exclusion” as everywhere else in America, but here it's the Chinese running things, the whites paying for their labor and goods, and the negroes getting burnt out of their neighborhoods. Black people are “illegal” in the Oregon Territory, and criminals only get prices on their heads for crimes against whites. The absence of justice for black people in the novel’s alternate history reflects today’s USA. The sketchy steampunk elements introduced in the first novel remain underdeveloped here, with cameos by a “pony” (a steam-driven ironclad wagon) and a limited railgun. Ireland should leave such things out. And there are some unconvincing, lazy plot developments when for suspense Jane and or Katherine get snuck up on and put in tight spots there’s no way they would permit, given their trained, experienced, and capable characters. And the climax is too quick and tidy after so many chapters leading up to it. Nonetheless, the novel is exciting, moving, relevant, and funny. It’s exciting to read a book in which strong, capable, and charismatic young heroines of color have adventures and pursue justice in dangerous, unjust world. LGBTQ people are fully represented, too, even as Ireland resists de rigueur YA love triangles. And the writing is enjoyable, as in the following lines. “You and this corset are a recipe for disaster.” “My voice is as flat as the Great Plains themselves.” “God aint’ got nothing to do with this. It is the province of man.” “A mouthy Negro girl without any kind of sense? I am the world's most perfect scapegoat.” One sign of the strong writing is that, although audiobook reader Jordan Cobb irritatingly overread the overwrought Song of Wraiths and Ruin, she was OK reading Katherine’s half of this novel (though her “refined” English voice is egregious). When Katherine’s chapters read by Cobb feature Jane’s dialogue and when Jane’s chapters read by the *prime* Bahni Turpin feature Katherine’s, it’s not as jarring as it could be in less careful hands. The themes re race, revenge, survival, and identity are potent, the resolution satisfying, and Jane and Katherine appealing, so if Ireland writes a third book set in their world, I’ll read it. View all my reviews
A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars I wanted to like it! But the writing… The world could use more African-themed fantasy novels, so I was eager to like Roseanne A. Brown’s debut novel A Song of Wraiths and Ruin (2020). And the world building on one African-esque continent is fine. A thousand years ago, the oppressive Egyptian analogue Kennouan Empire was replaced by the Zirani Empire, which for 250 years has been occupying and exploiting the “backwards” Eshrani people. There are ballads about legendary figures like Bahia, the first sultana of Ziran, and her traitor husband the Faceless King. And a religion with a Great Mother and seven animal deities and their seven elements. And tangible or intangible magic and “grim folk” like wraiths. And a mix of African and fantasy animals, from zebras and lions to chipekwe and serpopards. Blessedly, the narration is not first-person present tense, but third-person past, chapters alternating between two complementary teen protagonists, Malik, an impoverished Eshrani refugee, and Karina, a sad, over-protected Zirani princess. Malik has traveled across the desert with his older and younger sisters to the wealthy city-state Ziran, hoping to earn enough money there to send for his mother and grandmother. Ten years ago, Karina’s beloved father and big sister died in a fire, and as the only heir, she isn’t allowed to do anything dangerous, so, thinking that her mother hates her, she sneaks out at night with her trusty maid to best bards in song competitions in dirty downtown dives. Like other YA teen heroes, Malik and Karina are separated from parental supervision, unappreciated by their families and communities, endowed with special gifts (Malik for stories, Karina for music, both for magic), and good looking (Malik with “tawny brown skin” and “night dark eyes,” Karina with dark brown skin and silver hair in coils). Oh, and they’re drawn to each other while being made to think they’ll have to kill each other! There’s a Hunger Games vibe here. The week-long Solstasia festival held every fifty years when a comet appears above Ziran includes three challenges for seven champions representing the seven deities, losers being eliminated until one winner remains. Each champion has a support team, nice clothes, and fans who cheer for, bet on, and dress like them. In addition to having their patron deity preside over Zirani culture, the winner (even if it’s the sole female champion) will marry Princess Karina. Brown tells a page turning story. There are neat scenes, like when Malik tells a folk tale about the trickster Hyena, when Karina and Malik find a forgotten necropolis full of animated slave corpses working in time-worn rags, and when Karina serves “poisoned” tea to some uppity viziers. Similes are apt, like “Grinning a grin that would put a hyena’s to shame.” There’s vivid description, like “Hidden in a chasm longer than the tallest tower in Ksar Alahari was a city that glittered like a gold gash against the dark stone.” And Brown introduces relevant issues like immigrants, discrimination, and war profiteering. (The novel’s not about race, as Zirani and Eshrani are only told apart by accent and manners.) Unfortunately, Brown’s writing ejected me from her story. Plot contrivance abounds, from the minor (Malik letting his verboten mobile magic tattoo appear anywhere on his body instead of always safely hiding it on the bottom of his foot) to the major (Karina deciding to use a forbidden necromantic rite from the dread Kennouan Empire to resurrect her mother, though it requires cutting out the heart of whoever marries her). Action scenes don’t feel real, as when twelve fierce bush dogs let a champion kill them one by one instead of attacking him all at once. The main characters are by turns unconvincing or unappealing, prone to panic attacks, temper tantrums, and self-castigations, like, “Failure. Failure. Failure” (Karina), and “Let Driss beat him to death. He deserved it” (Malik). One moment Karina is wailing, “This is all my fault,” the next vowing, “This ends tonight.” One moment fretting, “She was a fool to ever have thought he [Malik] had feelings for her,” the next preening, “If she were Tunde, she'd be in love with herself too.” Malik, who has no romantic experience and is cripplingly shy, says to a rival, “Me talking to her isn't a problem, right? I mean, since the two of you aren't involved anymore.” (The de rigueur YA love triangle isn’t compelling.) Brown turns the emotional volume up too high, as when “true terror filled Karina’s veins” before she faces her estranged mother. Teens are histrionic and volatile, but Malik and Karina’s exaggerated and cliched emotions deafened and distanced me. Hearts hammer, millions of questions race through minds, a door takes two lifetimes to open. “Fear screamed at Malik.” “He wanted to curl up into a ball and hide.” “Karina's heart dropped down to her toes.” “Her rage was a living creature beyond her control.” And so on. Brown even uses “literally” nine times to authenticate excessive emotions, e.g., “Karina would have quite literally bitten anyone else for laying a finger on her without permission,” and “Malik was quite literally running in circles.” Finally, the dialogue is too formally stilted (e.g., “I am humbled by your hospitality,” and “On the contrary, I think it is in my own best interest to see how much of a ransom Haissa Sarahel is willing to pay for her only daughter”) or too casually slangy (e.g., “I'm good,” “Show your love to the newest Life champion of Solstasia,” “What the hell is going on?” “You owe me big time, Princess,” and “Come on you guys… We have a princess to find”). Is this an African folktale fantasy or an American TV show? The male and female audiobook readers who read the alternating chapters of Malik (A. J. Beckles) and Karina (Jordan Cobb) over-dramatize the already febrile text. Worse, it’s jarring when Beckles reads the speech of characters in the Malik chapters who also speak in the Karina chapters read by Cobb, because the same characters’ voices sound so different. Beckles’ Karina is more high-pitched and less cool than Cobb’s, Cobb’s vengeful spirit Idir less malevolent and more cartoonish than Beckles’. Cobb speaks American English for all Zirani like Karina—except for Commander Hamidou, who has an African accent. Maybe Malik should have an African accent, because his Eshrani accent threatens to reveal his origin, but even to his sister he only speaks American English like Karina. And then Cobb gives a pseudo-British accent to an Eshrani servant! The readers don’t enhance the story. I was impressed by some cool surprises and intense developments in the climax, wherein the “evil” nemeses reveal interesting motivations, unlike generic dark lords. However, I spent most of my time with the novel listing flaws with bitter relish and can’t imagine going on to the sequel to see how Malik, Karina, and Ziran grow. View all my reviews
The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Come help me stir the pot” Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (2017) is a well-written collection of six fairy tales set in her secondary world of the “Grishaverse.” Each story is a vivid and clever modern adaptation (pot stirring) of a different kind of fairy tale. Bardugo likes to trick the reader with twists wherein she revises or reforms traditional fairy tales by, for instance, making the apparent monster a protector and the apparent victim a monster. The stories have some gruesome bits but mostly feature relatively happy endings (though the reader can’t get TOO comfortable). Here is an annotated listing of the stories. “Ayama and the Thorn Wood” might be called, “Ugly and the Beast.” OK, Ayama is not really ugly, though people (including her family) treat her as such, maybe because her voice is hard on the ears. The story is reminiscent of Angela Carter’s reworking of “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Tiger’s Bride,” with some Scheherazade action for good measure (featuring three stories, not 1001). The story features a pair of overlooked second siblings, a slimy king, a greedy grandmother, a forest full of thorns, and an enchanted pool. The point of the story is that truth rules, especially in stories, so feel free to change the traditional lame happy endings according to your own experience of life. “The Too-Clever Fox” begins as a beast fable and ends as a human monster hunt from the point of view of animal victims. The story features a scrawny, ugly, clever fox (Bardugo likes telling stories about physically unattractive, intelligent, and plucky protagonists), a helpful nightingale, a super hunter and his mournful sister, and a scary revelation and climax. “The Witch of Duva” plays with Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel, featuring a long famine, a serial killer of girls, a shape-changing spirit, a witch in the woods, and a daughter who says she wants to go home. It has delicious listings of foods and some creepy gingerbread and crow magic. “Little Knife” revises the traditional fairy tale where the ruler (here a duke) sets increasingly impossible tasks for his daughter’s suitors to perform before he’ll let anyone marry her. Add to this scenario an obedient but finally independent daughter and a helpful but finally independent river and some selfish men who won’t listen to good questions, with even a dash of Shel Silverstein’s *appalling* The Giving Tree, and you get an idea of this tale. “The Soldier Prince” is an interesting take on the Nutcracker fairy tale, featuring a clocksmith who makes marvelous human automata who do bad things, a dreamy tea merchant’s daughter who wants to live in a world of fantasy, and a nutcracker who has trouble thinking of himself and his own desires (until he’s visited by the Rat King). It has a satisfying resolution. “When Water Sang Fire” is a vivid adaptation of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” or rather is an origin story for a key character in that story. The themes about the creative and destructive power of desires as well as the imagination of the undersea world of the merfolk and their relations with mortals ashore and the climax are compelling, though I lost patience with the protagonist a few times. Bardugo writes potent descriptions, like “Her throat was dry as burnt bread,” “The night their second son was born, the full moon rose brown as an old scab in the sky,” and “Weeks in the sun had turned his skin gold, his hair white. He looked like a petulant dandelion, gathering breath to throw a tantrum.” The best similes she writes are suited to the settings or situations or personalities of her characters, as when the sea folk prince Roffe tells Ulla, “I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.” Some stories have effective morals, like “to use a thing is not to own it” and “sometimes the unseen is not to be feared, and sometimes those who should love us most do not,” and “There is no pain like the pain of transformation.” The stories in the printed book feature lovely marginal illustrations, and each story has a color code, red or blue, for both illustrations and font. The audiobook obviously lacks the colors of the physical book, but does feature a capable reader in Lauren Fortgang, who does some neat voices for some extreme characters (like the Beast and the Rat King) and doesn’t try too hard to be male for male voices and enhances the stories. I hadn’t read anything by Leigh Bardugo before but may try more after this. View all my reviews
Sin Eater by Megan Campisi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “I guess I'm not a washerwoman anymore.” Needless to say, the worst job in Megan Campisi’s Sin Eater (2020) is being a sin eater. Only women can do it, “since it was Eve who first ate a sin: the Forbidden Fruit.” Sin eaters are shunned and feared: “Unseen, unheard.” If you touch one, you’re cursed; if you talk with one, you approach the ur-sinner Eve. Sin eaters hear (via Recitations) and then Eat (via particular foods) the sins of every dying person and then bear all those sins in silence until they die when, if they’ve been good, they might be able to join the Maker. Although some of the food representing the sins is appealing, like bread (original sin) and cream (envy), some is appalling, like a lamb’s head cooked in ewe’s milk (the rape of a child) or pig’s heart (a murder in wrath). Apart from obvious disadvantages, like never being able to touch or talk to anyone and having to live in the dirtiest, smelliest, and poorest part of town, the occupation provides some advantages, like constant free food and the ability to go almost anywhere and to listen to anyone’s conversations. Apart from sin eating, Campisi’s alternate Tudor world is only slightly transformed from our historical one, as most of the major Tudor players and features appear with slightly different names (e.g., King Harold/Henry and Queen Bethany/Elizabeth, Eucharistian/Catholic, the new faith/Anglican, the Maker/God, Angland/England, and so on. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are modified: Hans and Greta are lost in the woods and find an old sin eater’s house, while Jack falls in the well and drowns so Jill eats foods for his sins. Foreigners are called strangers, anyone becomes anyfolk, and panto boys pantomime news events in public spaces. The fundamental things are the same, like “virgin” queen surrounded by suitors, harsh life for the hungry poor, superstition, sins, religion, intolerance, and misogyny. Well, Christian misogyny is enhanced, as Eve plays the role of our Satan: when you die, you’ll either go to the Maker or to Eve (“purest evil. Even worse than Judas, who betrayed the Maker's son”). Our first-person present-tense narrator May Owens (WHY is it almost ALWAYS present-tense first-person narrators now?), an illiterate 14-year old orphaned washerwoman, is arrested for stealing bread and sentenced to become a sin eater, having a bronze collar with an S on it locked on her neck and an S tattooed onto her tongue and becoming apprentice to the current sin eater, a middle-aged plump woman who slaps May whenever she tries to speak. May follows her mistress on her rounds, attending Recitations and Eatings in the houses of dying people (e.g., a baby, a teenage girl, an old woman, a rich merchant). The only thing May can say is the prayer to begin each Recitation: “The unseen is seen, the unheard is heard, your sins will be mine. When the food is et your sins will be mine.” The plot gets going when May and her mistress (who have bonded into an “us”) attend the Recitation for the queen’s poisoned old nurse and find that for the Eating a deer’s heart indicating a murder has been put among the sin-foods, though the old woman did not confess to having killed anyone. May’s mistress balks at eating the wrongfully placed food item, is accused of treason, and is taken to the dungeons. At a loss, May eats the deer’s heart, but afterwards thinks that she must tell someone at court about the mistake. But she’s supposed to be “Unseen, unheard.” But her mistress will be pressed! Desperate and naive, May tries to tell the Queen’s favorite, her secretary “Black Fingers,” only to have him try to cut her throat. What began as a Christian misogyny dystopia story has morphed into a court murder mystery, with May the amateur sleuth analyzing clues from Recitations and eavesdropped conversations. We root for the lonely May! She has an observant eye, a sympathetic heart, and an imaginative mind, hearing objects, insects, and animals talk. She’s feisty, nicknaming people Mush Face, the Country Mouse, and the Painted Pig. She tells a good story. She idealizes her da and hates her mother’s vile rogue relatives. She is at first passive (“I follow, because where else can I go?”) and has low self-esteem (“I'm monstrous”). Will she be able to grow and achieve something in her occupation and world? She shows signs of self-empowerment when she starts wielding her ostracization as a weapon/banner (“I am a curse!”) and taking pleasure in making people get out of her way. Campisi’s writing is vivid and marked by impressive similes, like “The others, whose faces had earlier opened to me in wonder, encouragement, and envy, drop away like leeches full of blood.” The bleak, bizarre concept of the novel gives rise to neat lines like, “Can I be forgiven for eating an unrecited heart?” But the book has some flaws... First, Campisi misuses lay a couple times, as in “I lay again on the grave of my da.” (It’s a lost cause, but this is a present tense novel, so please write, “I lie again on the grave ...”) Second, the climax verges on absurdity. (A bucket of two-day-old piss, an outdoor festival, a jakes, a voodoo doll, a red herring, Black Fingers and minions, a chase, a sprained ankle, costumes, a play, a chase, a burn victim, a serious fleshhook, a hot cauldron, a confession—And is this a Christian misogyny dystopia or a slapstick mystery?) Third, given the vital role played by sin eaters in Angland, there’s no way a large town containing the Queen's castle and court would have only one or two of them. (It wouldn’t be possible for one or two to deal with all the Recitations and Eatings, and if the sin eaters got sick or died, how could the dying be absolved of their sins?) Fourth, people wouldn’t be so cruel to a person playing such a vital role for their salvation as a sin eater. (They'd be bad to lepers and beggars and maybe strangers and Eucharistians, but they’d not risk antagonizing someone who’d someday have the power to send them to Eve when hearing/eating their sins; Campisi must REALLY want to isolate May and show how horrible misogyny is.) Fifth, that said, by introducing several “squatters” into May’s empty home—a leper, an ex-actor, an actor, etc.—Campisi softens May’s isolation too much. (I’m glad for May, but it makes me wonder if Campisi lacks the courage of her Christian misogyny dystopia convictions.) Sin Eater has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, but the ambiguity in the ending of Atwood’s book makes Campisi’s look like the YA mystery novel that it finally is. View all my reviews
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Perfect Conclusion to a Great Trilogy The concluding book of Ursula K. Le Guin’s first Earthsea Trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), begins with Arren, son of the prince of Enlad, gone to Roke, Isle of the Wise, there to get counsel at the famous School for Wizards for the troubles in his home island: magic is dying, joy fading, luck failing, and disease spreading. Arren is a boy not quite yet a man, not exactly a pampered prince, but thus far in his life a facile player of games. But Arren’s name means sword, and he’s descended from the legendary Morred and Elfarran, and when he meets the middle-aged Archmage Ged, the most powerful man in Earthsea, he takes “the first step out of childhood… without looking before or behind, without caution, and with nothing held in reserve,” falling in (hero-worship) love with the Archmage. And when, “awkward, radiant, obedient,” he offers his service to Ged, we sense that some important destiny has been set in motion for the long-kingless archipelago. Because the disturbing situation on Arren’s home island has been occurring throughout Earthsea, Ged decides to take the youth on a voyage to seek the cause of the draining of the magic from life and world. Told from the point of view of Arren (as A Wizard of Earthsea is told from that of Ged and The Tombs of Atuan from that of Tenar), The Farthest Shore becomes an increasingly metaphysical sea-road story, as Ged and Arren visit a series of islands (including a trade island, a craft island, a hostile island, a raft island, and a remote island) in their attempt to locate the source of what’s wrong with Earthsea. For the reader, Arren is a perfect travel companion for Ged, being eager, brave, and ignorant--providing opportunities for the older man to dispense Le Guin’s gnomic wisdom, about balance and imbalance, being and doing, life and death, good and evil, nature and humanity, and more, as in the following exchange: “Nature is not unnatural. This is not a righting of the balance but an upsetting of it. There is only one creature who can do that.” “A man,” Arren said, tentative. “We men.” “How?” “By an unmeasured desire for life.” “For life? But it isn’t wrong to want to live?” “No. But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.” Such stern lessons wax poetic and bracing: “To refuse death is to refuse life” “Lebannen, this is. And thou art. There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.’” “That there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.” And Arren learns: “I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?” The pair’s journey is not easy. There are dangers: slavers, madmen, drugs, dragons, and above all, the tall man in Arren’s dreams, the king of shadows, the great enemy standing in the dark and beckoning with a pearl of light. There are devastating developments, as when Arren becomes estranged from Ged, or when Ged realizes that something he did when younger is responsible for the current draining of magic and life from Earthsea. Set in the dry land across the wall, the last chapters comprise a harrowing sequence. Arren poignantly becomes the leader and Ged the follower: “I use your love as a man burns a candle, to light his way. And we must go on.” The climactic “boss” confrontation is less surprising than that in A Wizard of Earthsea but is just as sublime and more shocking in its ramifications (developed in Tehanu: The Fourth Book of Earthsea). As the first novel in the trilogy is about accepting our light and dark parts so that we may mature and live good lives, and the second is about choosing the light and life rather than the dark and death, this third one is about being fully aware of life and death and accepting both. Moreover, because the releasing of Ged’s shadow into Earthsea in A Wizard of Earthsea and the opening of the hole in Earthsea in The Farthest Shore both derive from Ged’s having acted in anger and vanity, the third novel bookends the first, and by extending the effects of such ill actions from Ged’s self to his world, it perfectly concludes the original trilogy, which as a whole expresses the idea that our actions influence our lives and world in unexpected ways. Despite being a quest novel, The Farthest Shore demonstrates that being is superior to doing and that even young people—who have much to do and must learn from their mistakes and should achieve big things—should understand that fully aware being is the “greater kingdom.” Or “Dragons do not do. They are.” The book also says that life is wonderful because it ends, that the price we pay for life is death, “That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea,” and that we have sufficient immortality in being part of the natural cycles of the world. The audiobook reader, Rob Inglis, is prime, but I can’t help but feel that he’s reading The Lord of the Rings, with, for instance, Ged talking like Gandalf, and I wish that they’d found an equally fine American reader for the book, like George Guidall or Jonathan Davis. Like all of the Earthsea books, this one is marked by concise, vivid, poetic prose, with each word and each sentence being just right, like this: “The living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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