The Return by Walter de la Mare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Standing face to face with the unknown” What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)! Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him! The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide. Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face. In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve. Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing-- *numinous descriptions, like “…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.” *vivid similes, like “His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.” *neat lines on human nature and life, like “Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?” But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean? The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world: “It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.” American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman. My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it. View all my reviews
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City of Bones by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Relics, Arcane Engines, Magic, and a Wasteland City Martha Wells’ City of Bones (1995) is a post-apocalypse steampunk alien contact archeological mystery fantasy featuring lots of action and lots of info dumping. The imagined world is vivid. Fringe Cities are scattered around a desert wasteland left behind by some past calamity, as the Survivors’ descendants try to regain the lost knowledge of the Ancients by studying their relics and trading with each other via caravans sent on dangerous journeys through the desert and its city castoff pirates and poisonous predators. Then there are the krismen, genetically modified by the Ancients to survive in the desert, sun proof, needing scant water, immune to poisons, and possessed of marsupial-esque reproductive pouches (a nice touch that plays a role in the plot). The City of Bones, Charisat, is the capital of the Fringe Cities. The city is eight-tiered, the eighth being the lowest, most impoverished and dangerous, the last stop before expulsion into the wasteland, the first being the highest, home to Patricians (aristocrats), Warders (mage warriors) and the Elector (ruler) and his Heir. The city also houses scholars (studying and teaching in the Academia), fortune tellers (burning bones to see the future), black marketeers (frequenting the Silent Market). The authorities consist of vigils, lictors, and the dread Trade Inspectors (who draconianly punish anyone interfering with trade or using verboten coins). Warder magic consists of things like reading minds or manipulating thoughts or “seeing” in the dark or suddenly appearing or safely landing from high falls. Warders risk going “mad” if they access such powers too frequently or deeply. The story concerns an ex-patriot krismen relic dealer called Khat and his ex-patriot foreign scholar partner Sagai living on the sixth tier, where the smell of sewage is not so bad. Their relics business is limited by the fact that as non-citizens, they must handle trade tokens (representing hours of artisan work) instead of coins. Being an outcast from his krismen Enclave (whose people scorn him for having survived capture by pirates) and shunned in Charisat (whose denizens view krismen as feral and soulless), Khat finds it difficult to trust other people, not unlike Murderbot. Also like Murderbot, Khat often thinks of doing bad things while acting ethically. Khat stays in the city because he likes books and relics and his partner Sagai (the relationship between the younger crismen and the older married scholar is neat). The story begins when Khat is hired to guide a veiled Patrician into the Wasteland to investigate one of the Remnants (structures made by the Ancients and left scattered around the Wasteland for some unknown reason). The page turning plot then involves steamwagons, pirates, Ancient relics (from illustrated tiles and cryptic books to painrods and arcane engines), a young female Warder, a charismatic “mad” Warder, a vengeful gangster, a creepy Heir, betrayal, a race to find two stolen relics, a hint of cross-cultural romance, a little torture, a couple murders, some fights, some Silent Market action, inimical aliens, and a timeless doorway. The climax is mind bending but (to me) disappointing, as Wells is writing a more traditional and less Adrian Tchaikovsky-like intercultural communication and acceptance story. Also, I found the novel a little longer than it needed to be with a few more infodumps (on bone takers, gates between tiers, veils, wind chimneys, the Silent Market, krismen pouches, etc.) than were good for narrative flow. Here’s an example. Khat is trying to get half of his fee before guiding the party into the wasteland, while an asshole party member is trying to avoid paying him, and suddenly in the midst of their interaction, we get this: “In Charisat and most of the other Fringe Cities, citizenship had to be bought, and noncitizens couldn’t own or handle minted coins unless they bought a special license to do so, which was almost as expensive as citizenship itself. And sometimes not worth the trouble, since Trade Inspectors paid special notice to sales made with minted coins. Trade tokens were a holdover from the old days of barter, and worthless without the authority of the merchants or institutions who stamped them. If a city became too crowded and faced a water or grain shortage, it could always declare all trade tokens void, forcing noncitizens to leave or starve in the streets.” The information is important for the story, but it could be delivered more entertainingly or more in the voice/mind of a character. On the plus side, the resolution is restrained, the characters are appealing, and the writing is clean, and there are neat places where (without explanations) we find out things like the people calling fish and ducks depicted on Ancient relic tiles “water creatures” and “water birds,” presumably because water is so scarce that there are no more fish or ducks. And Wells does effectively work in some world information by having Khat tell Elen, a young female Warder who’s forced by her master to work with him, about krismen, or she tell him about Warders. On top of all that, it's a rare self contained stand alone book! The audiobook reader Kyle McCarley is fine, really, but egregiously overdoes the NPC voices and gets a LITTLE too excited for action scenes. Fans of Wells (like me!) would enjoy the book. View all my reviews
Kalin by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witch Hunting and Spaceship Jacking, the Brotherhood and the Cyclan, Zardles and Zerds, Vendettas and Symbiotes Kalin (1969), the fourth entry in E. C. Tubb’s LONG Earl Dumarest series of pulpy space opera with teeth starts with a bang: Earl Dumarest is stopping over on a planet celebrating Bloodnight, an annual festival where everyone tries to kill their foes, rivals, enemies, and victims, and he and some other fellow passengers are safely watching from behind the guarded fence around the spaceport, when they see this red-haired, green-eyed, long-legged “girl” running from a rabid mob shouting “Kill the witch!” so Dumarest (naturally) intervenes: “‘Do we have to kill you to get her?’ ‘You could try,’ said Dumarest.” Ever chivalrous, he pays for her passage on his spaceship, soon discovering that Kalin (her name) is indeed a witch, having the ability to see the future, albeit somewhat vaguely. One of the interesting things about Kalin is that she fears seeing bad things that will happen and yet can’t help morbidly looking at them, despite Dumarest repeatedly asking her not to because seeing future calamities upsets her and because he doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen: “The temptation to use it, to be sure, against the temptation not to use, to retain hope. And how long could the desire simply to hope last against the desire to know for certain?” The short novel packs a lot into its story: an aged mercenary and his aged lover planning to hijack a spaceship so he can buy an army to rule a world and she can pay for an expensive operation to transplant her brain into a nubile body; a miraculous rescue in deep space; a trip to a dead-end slave-mining planet where the only hope to earn enough to buy passage off world is “by hunting a zardle and hoping to find a zerd” (!); the altruistic machinations of the Brotherhood of the Universal Church, whose monks want to help humanity by teaching us that “The pain of one is the pain of all,” and the malevolent machinations of the Cyclan, whose cyborgs think that without emotions they’re better equipped to run the galaxy than us; a vendetta world’s half-metal survivor of a five-year war between two families, looking for his daughter to carry on the family line; a pastoral planet’s House whose brothers’ horse breeding business is threatened by winged predators and a comatose sister’s medical care; a blinding and an eye operation; a stunning revelation featuring a symbiote that connects back thematically to the opening of the novel; and a genuinely unnerving and moving kiss. How Earl Dumarest connects all these plot strands (on five different worlds!) is exciting, surprising, poignant, tragic, and neat. And compact! People sure don’t write such punchy and concise less is more novels nowadays. Four novels into the series, we know that Earl Dumarest ain’t gonna end up with a lover, ‘cause he has to keep going on his Big Mission via countless spaceship rides to countless worlds, “Travelling, always travelling, always looking for Earth. For the planet which seemed to have become forgotten. The world no one knew. Home!” Frustratingly, most people he meets in the galaxy think Earth is a legend or a piece of nonsense: what planet would be called “earth”? And how could the myriad human beings on myriad worlds ever have come from a single planet of origin? I’m getting used to him meeting a new “girl” near the start of a novel, getting involved with her in the middle, and then losing her somehow in the end so he can go on to his next world/adventure/girl. He doesn’t want to love ‘em and leave ‘em! He really falls in love: ‘You are you,’ he said slowly. ‘If you were to have an accident, lose your beauty in some way, it would make no difference to the way I feel. I didn’t fall in love with a pair of green eyes, some white skin and red hair. I fell in love with a woman.’ In addition to his endless search for home, we learn a bit more about Earl in this book, like his traumatic childhood on Earth, as well as confirm his formerly established traits: speedy and ruthless fighting, loyalty to friends, chivalry to women, laconic speech, natural leadership, and resourceful and indefatigable survival skills. Tubb had a fertile imagination for SF devices: --Bank funds accessed by inserting your forearm into a device to read subcutaneous tattoos. --Dream Helmets that give you dreams while you sleep. --Books with animated pages (especially useful for porn). --Quick-time hypos to slow you down so time passes faster and slow-time hypos for the opposite. --Symbiotes that give you your desired dreams in return for a little nutrition from you. --Cyborgs. *But so far he has no interest in aliens. It’s not high literature, but Tubb wrote vivid, tight, pointed sf prose, like: “His eyes looked like holes punched in snow.” And “There was a head, bald, shining, creased like a mass of crumpled crepe, swollen to twice normal size. The eyes were thin glittering slits, the mouth a lipless gash and the chin was a part of the composite whole which was the neck. A sheet covered the body with its strange and alien protuberances. Pipes ran from beneath it and connected to quietly humming machines. Tanks and instruments completed the life-support installation. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’” Yes, there is neat stuff here about bodies (aged, diseased, injured, scarred, repaired, cybernetic, etc.). What happens to our mind/soul/relationships when our bodies are damaged or changed? There is alas late 60s sexism, like “Woman-like, she was indifferent to the comfort of others when a problem filled her mind,” but otherwise, Tubb’s novels seem rather timeless. I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series, wanting to find out what kind of trouble Earl and his new love interest get into. View all my reviews
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
A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dysfunctional & Ideal Families, a Statue, & Milton Sweltering summer. To celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (Head of Homicide for the Surete de Quebec) and his wife Reine-Marie are staying in the Maison Bellechasse, a former robber baron wilderness hunting lodge now the top auberge in Quebec. The only other auberge guests are members of the wealthy and dysfunctional Morrow family, there for a reunion to commemorate the placing of a giant statue of the deceased patriarch Charles (and to frostily ignore or nastily needle each other). This being the fourth Inspector Gamache novel, A Rule Against Murder (2008), the ninth chapter ends with an impossible killing by means of a rare murder weapon. Who did it? Gamache suspects someone from the messed-up family, Agent Jean-Guy Beauvoir focuses on a member of the auberge staff, while Agent Lacoste tries to stay professional. The overarching plot of the first three novels, involving Gamache’s enemy in the police hierarchy and spies on his team, has been resolved, and this novel is the first in the series to mostly occur away from the quirky and cozy village of Three Pines. Three Pines is represented in the novel, though. It’s just over the hill in the next valley from the ex-hunting lodge, and at the start of the first chapter, a postman carries an ominous letter of invitation to a house there… WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THIS NOVEL 1. Compelling Characters The Morrow family turns out to be more interesting and complex than at first meets the eye, and Beauvoir is surprisingly unpleasant for most of the novel. No outdoorsman, he is about the only character to hate wild nature, which he sees as pesky black flies; he almost xenophobically scorns “mad Anglos” and gets a charge out of telling people there’s been a murder, and he’s there to investigate it. Penny’s people feel real because they have flaws and complications and dark sides and sympathetic sides, and she’s good at gradually revealing them as she rotates her POV narration from among them. She thereby keeps us turning the pages not only to find out who dunnit, but also to find out how the characters came to act and feel and think as they do. At least as much as finding out the killer’s identity, I wanted to find out things like why Gamache can’t let his son name his baby after Gamache’s father, why Peter’s nickname is “Spot” and Mariana’s “Magilla,” who wrote “Julia gives good head” in the men’s room of the Ritz, why Irene won’t touch or be touched, what Bean’s gender is, and why Beauvoir is so attracted to the hulking past middle aged chef of the auberge! 2. Sensual Pleasures, Especially Food and Drink Sausages with maple syrup! Cucumber and Raspberry soup with dill! Barbecued steak sandwich with sauteed mushrooms and caramelized onions on top! After-dinner espresso and cognac! 3. Art and Literature References Relevant to the Plot, Characters, and Themes Rodin (the Burghers of Calais), Milton (Paradise Lost), Sir Walter Scott (“Breathes there the Man”), John Gillespie Magee (“High Flight”), Pegasus, Pandora, etc. 4. Canadian/Quebecois Culture Canada Day, the 1960s Quebec change from Anglophone to Francophone, bad swear words like “tabarnak,” indigenous people making hunting lodges for robber barons, etc. 5. Interesting Plot-Relevant Tidbits about Nature Twenty-five-year-old black walnut trees kill everything around them; honey bees can only sting once, etc. 6. Vivid Descriptions “She looked like a bird or a withered angel as she approached.” “Then an old hand, like twigs stripped of bark, reached out and held the gaily patterned sun hat.” 7. Insights into Human Nature The truth *about yourself* will set you free. Emotions like anger and hatred may in time turn into murder. Above all, “The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” Penny movingly develops this with the Morrow clan, the auberge staff, Beauvoir, and Gamache. 8. Armand Gamache The presiding deity of the novel, almost too good to be true. Poetry quoting, art referencing, human nature revealing, “monster” (murderer) exploring, self understanding, smelling of safety and calm (rosewater and sandalwood!). He’s the ideal husband and father and teacher and boss. His chief flaw is a fear of heights (which Penny is sure to flog him with now and then). 9. Ralph Cosham The perfect audiobook reader for this series. WHAT I DISLIKED IN THE NOVEL 1. Unbelievable, Unnecessary, Almost Absurd Action Scene Penny can’t resist putting Gamache in thrilling but excrescent and unconvincing action scenes in the climaxes of her novels! 2. Unfair Point of View Narration As Penny rotates among the points of view of her various characters, she commits the crime (which should be banned from the mystery genre) of doing some narration from the point of view (in the mind of) the killer that leaves out things the killer would surely be thinking about. Sneaky point of view tricks enable her to prevent us from guessing the killer’s identity. 3. Something Too Easy for This Reader to Figure Out Relative to the Ace Detectives Via little hints given too early, Penny makes it too easy for this reader (no kind of detective) to figure out how the murder was done well before Gamache and company figure it out. Embarrassing. 4. Too Much Mystery Solving Explanation and Absence of Vital Information Finally, Penny doesn’t really explain just how certain things relating to the timing of the crime and the positioning of the victim were made to work according to the killer’s plan, and she finesses this via misdirection via Gamache’s final Genius Detective Explanations. Finally, Penny’s strengths are character development, interaction, and insight, not violent action, and she should write her mysteries more fairly re point of view and more convincingly re method of murder. I really liked this novel and couldn’t put it down and will continue with the series, but I felt disappointed by the climax and resentful at the revelation of the culprit. View all my reviews
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Slices of Harlem Apartment Life: “Is it despair or prevail?” Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022) is a set of eight slice of life tales depicting various inhabitants of Banneker Terrace apartment building in Harlem: Mimi, a young single mother trying multiple strategies to come up with $350 for rent, hindered by her sweet lead poison brain damaged little son Fortune; Swan, the boy’s father still living in his mother’s apartment realizing that despite a black president he and his freshly out of prison friend will never really change; Ms. Dallas, Swan’s mother trying to earn rent money while working two jobs, one as “para” chaperoning a special needs child at the precarious Sojourner Truth Middle School; an anonymous girl living in Clinton and mutely falling under the spell of Kandese, who, after being expelled from Sojourner Truth, stays the summer with her grandmother; Dary, a young gay man trying to become a hairdresser while not becoming a prostitute; Najee, a twelve-year-old writing a letter explaining how he came to start dancing for money on trains and cause a tragic accident; Neisha, an ex-gymnast and university dropout returning to Banneker to work on the Committee of Concern connecting a lawyer to residents on the eviction list (including the childhood friend who ruined her gymnastics dream); and Mr. Murray, a philosophical old man who likes keeping a low profile and sitting on the sidewalk playing chess with passersby. Many of the stories end abruptly without our learning how the protagonist is going to be. We get hints as to that when characters from earlier stories are referenced in later ones, but the stories are not linked plot-wise. In Swan’s story, he never mentions his son or Mimi; in Najee’s story, he doesn’t really mention Kandese; in Ms. Dallas’ story, she never mentions her grandson or Mimi). It’s not a composite novel. The stories mostly lack epiphanies and metamorphoses and often end on a note of quiet devastation. The characters have their dreams, but we know (and they mostly come to know) they ain’t coming true. The rap-like “Intro” ends, “Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale/ Question is: Is it despair or prevail?” And Fofana’s people rarely “prevail.” So I wince whenever a character says something like, “Imma get a job and buy a house for my mother.” I also get frustrated at key moments when the sensitive but often passive characters know they should say or do something but end up staying silent or watching. Author Sidik Fofana is showing how the difficult and stressful lives of people of color drain positive vigor from them, and it often makes for depressing reading. On the plus side, some of the characters have an impressively uncompromising pride and ethical standard. Although when pushed to it Mimi will charge double to do her friend’s daughter’s hair and use her son’s backpack to shoplift diapers, she will NOT move back home with her tail between her legs to live with her mother and four sisters on welfare; although Dary will have sex with a stranger in a DC hotel room, he will NOT take money for it. Small moments of resistance and integrity if not victory. These are stories FROM the tenants, so seven of them are first person, one second person, and each has a distinctive, savory, demotic, AAVE voice talking to the reader, like in this excerpt from the first story, “Rent Manual—Mimi, 14D”: “Banneker Terrace on 129th and Fred Doug ain't pretty, but it's home. Until now, it's been the same since you moved here when you was pregnant with Fortune. One long gray-ass building, twenty-five floors, three hundred suttin apartments. Four elevators that got minds of they own. Laundry full of machines that don't wash clothes right. Bingo room that the old folks hog up and a trash chute that smell like rotten milk.” Fofana writes conversations without quotation marks: You gonna go over there and live by yourself? Your ma asked. That’s what I said, Ma, didn’t I? Chase after a man that don’t want nothin to do with no baby? And how you gonna make for rent? Imma get a job like responsible people. I heard that before. And he writes lots of the n word and lots of the mf word and lots of slang and expressions like “be like that's what I'm tryna say,” or “I know suttin that make you happy,” or “big-ass pot.” The distinct voices of the character-narrators are enhanced by each story having a different—excellent—audiobook reader. My favorite is Dominic Hoffman as the old chess playing Mr. Murray (what a savory voice!), but Bahni Turpin as Mimi is also great. There is some telling social criticism, like about liberal white people naively thinking they can enrich ghetto kids’ lives by making them read literature* or about the trend in companies forcing low-income residents out and renovating apartments to get higher paying ones and upscale restaurants replacing older ones. *Actually, young and white Mr. Broderick, who constantly boasts about graduating from Harvard, force feeds Steinbeck and Shakespeare to the poor Sojourner Truth kids, and unfairly resents and scorns Ms. Dallas is a little too clueless to believe. As I am white, grew up comfortably, and only once temporarily got a mild taste of poverty (living on a TA’s salary in graduate school) and disappointment (having my cv rejected 300 times), it was illuminating, moving, and sobering to read these stories. I would read another book by Fofana. View all my reviews
Freddy and Mr. Camphor by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Freddy the Caretaker, Rat Art Critics, Patriotic Insects, the Man with the Black Mustache and his Dirty Faced Boy, a Rich Man and His Butler, and Proverbs “It’s because you’re too fat,” said Jinx, the cat. “Golly, it makes me hot just to look at you, pig, sitting there grunting and mopping your face.” Freddy the Pig wants to escape a hot spring and his duties as Editor of the Bean Home News and President of the First Animal Bank, so he leaves the Bean farm for a cushy summer job as caretaker of the wealthy Mr. Camphor’s estate: for keeping an eye on the place, Freddy will get fifty dollars, meals, and lodging in a well-appointed houseboat on the lake. Furthermore, as Mr. Camphor and his butler Bannister hope to write a book disproving proverbs like “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” the rich man will pay Freddy $10.00 for every saying he can test by experiment. This leads to humorous moments like when Mr. Camphor complains, “Money is the root of all evil,” only to have Bannister point out, “If you really believed money were the root of all evil, sir, you’d get rid of all your money!” It all goes well for caretaker Freddy, lounging on Mr. Camphor’s houseboat (“I’m a lucky pig!”), until some old antagonists from previous books show up. Simon the rat and his clan have moved into Mr. Camphor’s mansion and don’t take kindly to his attic-stored “family” portraits (“Why, it’s our artistic duty to chew ’em up”), while the Man with the Black Mustache and the Dirty Faced Boy drive noisily in and try to muscle (and frame) Freddy out of his job (“It needs a man around the place”). A WWII subplot runs through this eleventh of Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig books, Freddy and Mr. Camphor (1944). As the patrons of the First Animal Bank are withdrawing all their money to invest in government war savings stamps, the spider Mr. Webb is holding patriotic mass meetings to persuade insects to refrain from eating farm vegetables for the duration of the war: “we are still all good Americans… Are we not?” Threatening the spider’s campaign is an obnoxious horsefly called Zero who points out that spiders don’t eat vegetables and scoffs at the patriotic agenda. A few other Freddy books also reveal their WWII era provenance, but less earnestly and intrusively than this one. The fate of Zero after losing a political debate (in which “calling names is entirely permissible”) is disturbing because the novel approves of it. Most villains in Freddy books, from needlessly destructive rats to animal-hating robbers, are defeated, humiliated, exiled, arrested, and/or reformed. But because Zero (a reference to the Japanese fighter aircraft?) is “unpatriotic,” his epitaph is “So perish all traitors!” And maybe because I dislike patriotism, the busybody Mr. Webb, who spreads his patriotic no-vegetable eating movement from farm to farm, and calls his wife “Mother” (even though they apparently have no children), is irritating, and I found myself unusually not wholly enjoying the novel. The story also has some loose ends. Brooks never explains how Zero became able to spin webs and leaves the proverbs sub-plot unfinished. Luckily, there are plenty of the usual virtues of the Freddy books here: humorous scenes and conversations, concise and vivid descriptions, quirky wisdom, nonsensical animal “facts,” formidable foes, savory friends, and, of course, the protean pig Freddy, who, while serving as Mr. Camphor’s estate caretaker, finds time to don a smock and beret and do a little painting restoration on the side. I love Brooks’ quirky nuggets of wisdom, like “For pigs understand boys pretty well, perhaps because they are so much alike. If fathers and mothers who have trouble with bad boys would consult pigs oftener, they would profit by it.” And his straight-faced animal facts, like “Even a cat cannot see anything in complete darkness, although all cats pretend that they can,” and “Fleas are so nearly invisible that they find it easy to get away with things that wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment in larger creatures.” And his wide range of registers, including Jinx the cat’s demotic English (“Hi, old pig! … We thought the old sausage grinder had got you at last”), Simon the rat’s unctuous English (“Well, well . . . fancy meeting you here, pig! What a small place the world is, to be sure. Well, don’t you recognize me? Haven’t you a warm handshake for your old friend, Simon?”), and Breckenridge the eagle’s “high-flown” English: “Your young friends, with a fortitude out of all proportion to their size, descended by way of the chimney. They found much to criticize in the housekeeping, I am given to understand. But after a prolonged search they discovered large quantities of plunder—much of it merely heaped up in the bathtub. Which indicates quite sufficiently, I feel, the character of this Mr. Winch and his offspring.” By the way, as I’m reading my way through all twenty-six of Brooks’ great, too much forgotten Freddy the Pig books, I realize how much adult targeted verbal humor they have and recall that when I read several of them as a boy, I thought they were serious talking animal adventures and never dreamed they were funny. But now! Brooks was writing children’s novels for adults. Another interesting point in this novel is a minor touch that, I believe, E. B. White took and flew with in Charlotte’s Web: a spider writing English messages in its web! Here it’s Mr. and Mrs. Webb writing signs in their webs announcing the patriotic rallies. Both E. B. White and Brooks worked at The New Yorker, and I’ve been noticing other things from the Freddy books that may have inspired White with his classic children’s novel. The illustrations by Kurt Weise are top notch: monochrome; more realistic than Disney; showing choice moments from the text (like when a troop of fleas attack some pesky rats or like when Freddy dresses in some of Mr. Camphor’s clothes to pass for a burglar). I did notice a few typos in the Kindle version. Anyway, if you can stand the patriotic subplot, this novel should be amusing for you, but Freddy the Detective, Freddy the Politician, and Freddy and the Poppinjay are much better. View all my reviews
The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars If only-- If only the self-serving Genoese, Venetians, and Pisans weren’t always fighting each other and trading vital martial slaves and material to the Mamluks. If only the military orders (Templars and Hospitallers etc.) weren’t always treating each other like rivals. If only the heads of the Crusader states could all get on the same page. If only the European countries were not always at loggerheads with each other and or the different Popes. If only the Mamluks were (finally) less organized, less united, and less proficient at treaty loopholes, military logistics, and drum and trumpet walls of sound. Then maybe Acre might've carried on Christian for a few more years (but THEN what?). The catchy main title of Roger Crowley’s The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades (2019) conjures up images of repeated foiled Muslim attempts to take a particularly stubborn and vital tower, but actually the final siege of Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land does not really hinge on this one tower among the many defenses of the city, and the “accursed” appellation doesn’t really have any particular application to the history Crowley relates. Really the book is about its subtitle. The first seven chapters—occurring from 1200 to 1290—set the historical and cultural context for the siege, including Crusader debacles in Egypt, the influential advent of the Mongols, and the increasing importance of the Mamluks of Egypt, with the Outremer Christian cities and castles getting captured or sacked one after the other in the thirteenth century, till the siege of Acre ends the two-hundred-or-so-year Crusader attempt to maintain a Western Christian presence in the Holy Land. The next six chapters relate the last siege of Acre led by the Mamluks from about April 10 till May 28 of 1291. The fourteenth chapter cleans up the last loose Crusader ends thereabouts, and the Epilogue gives a glimpse at the Acre of today superimposed over the Acre of a thousand and more years ago. I found this book less suspenseful, absorbing, detailed, and informative than Ernle Bradford’s The Great Siege: Malta 1565 (1961), but I did get some interesting points from it: --The disastrous disunity among the Christians. Through much Crusader history, the Muslims were not much more unified, but they got their act together in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Mamluk sultans like Baybars. --The effective use by the Mamluks of religious fervor, booty lust, defenses mining, trebuchet engineering, Greek fire, kettle drums (mounted on camels!), and treaty loopholes. --“A sixty-day siege [by an army of 25,000 men] would need the removal of a million gallons of human and animal waste and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste,” which is probably one reason the Mamluks catapulted their waste into Acre! --The inherent unsustainability of Crusader satellite states so far away from Europe, and the precarious way they lasted as long as they did via trade with Muslim states. I appreciated that Crowley quotes from a fair number of Muslim sources and seems even-handed in his depiction of the attackers and the defenders of Acre. His Epilogue made me want some day to visit Acre (in today’s Israel…) About the audiobook… If only a better reader than Matt Kugler read it! Although he reads clearly, he also reads like a sensational documentary narrator, too often overly dramatically emphasizing what he sees to be key words or syllables, such that he numbed me to the impact of the truly important key words: “the Sultan’s SENior engineer” (why is it so important that we know this is “the Sultan’s SENior engineer”?) “the equally imposing COMpound of the Knights Hospitallers.” (why is that syllable stressed so much there?) Etc. In short, Kugler is no Simon Vance! (Vance intelligently reads The Great Siege: Malta 1565, which must be one reason why I so prefer it to Crowley’s book.) I’m not sorry to have listened to The Accursed Tower, but I didn’t learn enough or have a good enough time to recommend it highly, and probably other books by Crowley like 1453 and Empires of the Sea (read by better readers) would be better. View all my reviews
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
La Louve de France by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The body of France was sick Yikes! Maurice Druon sure doesn’t coddle his reader. At the end of the fourth novel of his Les Rois Maudits (The Cursed Kings) series about the early 14th century decline of superpower France, the time of “punishment” is coming, partly because Prince Philippe (son of Philippe Le Bel) has benefited from two regicides to become King of France. The prologue to the fifth book in the series, La Louve de France (1959), then skips forward five years to announce that Philippe is dead! Despite Philippe being good king material and having a solid enough position vis-à-vis his barons and the Pope, his reign ran into a buzz saw of adversity, ranging from famine to a Templar-inspired pillaging of towns and churches by huge bands of roving youths. In short, after being the main, mostly appealing player in the fourth novel, Philippe is forgotten in the fifth, for which Druon shifts his focus to thirty-three-year-old Queen Isabelle of England, nicknamed by her foes the She-Wolf of France (la Louve de France) because she’s the feisty daughter of Philip Le Bel. In the first novel, Isabelle was already estranged from her husband, Edward II, who preferred spending his time and love on men, and by the time of the fifth book, things have gotten so bad that Isabelle is being kept under a rotating house arrest, spied on and isolated and stolen from by the King’s favorite Hugh Despenser and his people. She fears for her life. This fifth novel introduces new historical figure-characters, like the feckless and irrational Edward II, doomed to become kingly only after it’s too late, and Roger Mortimer, Edward’s ambitious and implacable foe and Isabelle’s would be lover, who begins as a political prisoner in the Tower of London (much of this book takes place in England), while reacquainting us with various remarkable characters from past novels: --Robert d’Artois the giant nephew and Mahaut d’Artois the giantess aunt, STILL locked in their bitter long-running family feud and still formidable political players; --Charles Valois, younger brother of Philippe le Bel, ambitious and reckless, would be Holy Roman Emperor and de facto ruler of France through his weak nephew King Charles IV; --Spinello Tolomei the wizened Lombard banker, who for many years has funded most of the disastrous wars waged by France; --his nephew Guccio Baglioni, still resentful that Marie Cressay rejected him and still ignorant that she had to in order to raise the heir to the throne of France as if he were their son; --Hugues de Bouville, rotund, soft, sensitive, and in need of a good Confession about sacrificing the baby of Guccio and Marie to save the heir to the throne and hiding his identity; --and Pope John XXII (Jacques Dueze), no fool, wise to Valois’ extortionary practices and curious about Guccio and Marie. Druon often changes our perceptions of such characters. We begin this novel loathing Edward and Hugh and sympathizing with Isabelle (for the first time) and Mortimer and Robert and end by sympathizing with Edward and Hugh and loathing Mortimer and (to a lesser extent) Isabelle. Druon doesn’t achieve this simply by making characters suffer (though that helps), but by writing their points of view and ennobling them via suffering. Even the self-serving Valois, who, after diverting a Crusade to free Armenians from Turkish oppression in the holy land to a French invasion of a French populace in Aquitaine, just the latest instance of his life-long ambitious scheming, is forced to confront his mortality earlier than he’d imagined and more movingly than we’d expected. Soon Valois is talking with, praying for, and loving Enguerrand de Marigny, whom in an earlier novel he had executed on false charges: “Each man who dies is the poorest man in the universe.” The overall effect is to show that people, even famous historical figures, are people. “The saintly are never as saintly, nor the cruel ever as completely cruel as others believe.” Druon’s eye for irony is ever keen, as when Guccio takes “his” son to see Clemence, widow of the poisoned King Louis Hutin, and the woman has a pang of envy at seeing “Guccio’s” healthy boy, while neither she nor Guccio have any idea that the child is Clemence’s and the rightful King of France. Or in a line like this: “One went from war to tournament and from tournament to war. Ah! What pleasures and noble adventures!” Nothing alienates us from medieval France and England so much as the horrific public humiliations, tortures, and executions they performed on criminals: “And all these knights who had sworn by Saint George to defend ladies, maids, the oppressed and orphans, rejoiced, with much laughter and joyful remarks, at the spectacle offered to them by this corpse of an old man cut in two halves.” Though their disposal of the parts of an important deceased man is also exotic: “The entrails, as Valois had disposed of them, were transported to the abbey of Chaâlis, and the heart, enclosed in an urn, given to his third wife to await the moment when she herself would have a burial.” Druon, as ever, however, makes many dry, incisive insights into human nature that resonate with us today, like “Nothing is more repugnant to a woman than the sweat of a man she's stopped loving,” and “But the proud easily have a pure conscience.” And he writes wonderfully vivid, historically transporting descriptions: “La Réole, built on a rocky spur and dominated by a circle of green hills, overlooked the Garonne. Cut out against the pale sky, enclosed within its ramparts of good ocher stone gilded by the setting sun, displaying its bell towers, the towers of its castle, the high framework of its town hall with its openwork bell tower, and all its roofs of red tiles pressed one against the other, it resembled the miniatures which represented Jerusalem in the Books of Hours. A pretty town, truly.” One thing to keep in mind when reading Les Rois Maudits is that Druon may sometimes present rumors as facts. For instance, in the third book Mahaut poisons King Louis Hutin and his baby son, when Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says Louis probably died of illness and doesn’t say anything about how his son died. Similarly, in this fifth novel a red-hot poker fatally shoved up a royal anus is now seen as propaganda by historians. So Druon is writing historical FICTION, not history. That said, his novels make psychological sense and are absorbing and powerful. 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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