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| 0670016381
| 9780670016389
| 0670016381
| 3.44
| 15,778
| Jul 31, 2014
| Jul 31, 2014
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Elizabeth Little is Dear Daughter. Published in 2014, this debut novel is the first-person account of Jane Jenkins,
My introduction to the fiction of Elizabeth Little is Dear Daughter. Published in 2014, this debut novel is the first-person account of Jane Jenkins, an infamous society girl who spent ten years in prison for the murder of her wealthy mother. Exonerated due to mismanaged evidence and released, Jane sets out to find her mother's real killer, if there is one, Jane's memory a fog of drugs, alcohol and repressed memory. Web sleuths and the paparazzi are hot on her trail. This rollicking mystery was not a good match for me and I abandoned it on page 88/358. - Pop-culture addled narrator. If you love movie, TV, music and cultural references, you'd better love them on every page with this book. I'll give Little credit, she throws in a Beethoven reference and a Brown vs. Board of Education reference. I've never seen anyone whose liberal arts education paid such dividends as it does here. Problem 1: I didn't feel this was appropriate for a narrator who's been in prison for a decade and by her own admission, cut off from society. That's the author dropping these bon mots, not her narrator. Problem 2: It's goddamn annoying. Fortunately, I had some experience with this particular species. For the first fifteen years of my life I had been shuffled from tutor to tutor, learning all the things my mother thought ladies (or bastard children of petty nobility) should know--which as far as I can tell were gleamed directly from an Edith Wharton novel. I studied etiquette, music, antique furniture, napkin folding. I can spot a fake Picasso at a thousand paces; I dance the gavotte; I'm adept with a lemon fork, a butter pick, and a piccalilli spoon. My education was then rounded out with perfunctory attention to the more usual subjects, which were taught largely by mediocre or disgraced academics who were unwilling to cry uncle and find another field. I'm in awe of the cultural salad that is this paragraph. It's not that the writing is bad or I didn't find some of it funny. One of the frequent news updates or social media feeds that Little inserts between chapters made me laugh out loud. But all I needed was one quip or one reference to get the point here. Reminding me that the narrator was a culture junkie on every page was repetitive. - Narrator jumping back-and-forth (within the same chapter even) between the present and her past made an unsteady narration flying all over the place even more annoying to follow. - Narrator vastly overstating her celebrity or newsworthiness. Within a week of being released from prison, if that, the public would've forgotten about Jane and exhibited zero interest in her whereabouts. But Little has Jane running around like Dr. Richard Kimble, a fugitive from a chain gang, her face on every screen. She could've hunkered down in a hotel for a week and reemerged with zero attention. - Media overload. I've yet to read a novel deeply immersed in podcasting or cable news or reality TV or social media that I've enjoyed. One of the reasons I read is to get away from that noise. My phone is always within reach if I need breaking news, and I dislike novels that overdose on media. There was a more compelling story here that Little missed. Instead of a woman being exonerated for a capital crime and going in search of the killer, what if a woman was exonerated for a capital crime and with no prospects (Jane had no job before she was sent to the hoosegow) she's drawn into committing a crime? ("On the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook" -- Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.) The more interesting question is staring right at us: Even if Jane finds the killer, then what? What's she do with her life? Here's a dissenting, four-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Goodreads! Why not a five-star review? The most popular five-star review for this book only has 24 likes. Objection withdrawn ... Delee's Reviews > Dear Daughter ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2023
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Jul 10, 2023
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Dec 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0425264955
| 9780425264959
| 0425264955
| 3.72
| 743
| Apr 01, 2014
| Apr 01, 2014
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it was ok
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Imagine you have two friends. One is in trouble a lot. Let's call her "Angelina." She rebels against virtually every rule her affluent parents--both a
Imagine you have two friends. One is in trouble a lot. Let's call her "Angelina." She rebels against virtually every rule her affluent parents--both attorneys with little inclination toward parenting--could set for her, has been ejected from every private school she's been enrolled in and fired from every job she's ever held. Unsolved crimes such as destruction of property seem to follow Angelina around. Jail doesn't seem to intimidate her. She is a subject matter expert on death metal, dye-making processes and locks. Then there's "Anne." She is very well-behaved and always has been. Her parents are corporate middle managers who were very attentive to her growing up. Anne was a pretty good student who graduated from a fine public college and has opportunities to work in a legal or accounting firm, where by virtue of hard work and diligence she can earn a nice living, perhaps one day own property in California. Anne has a nice boyfriend she met at a trade convention, drives a Prius and treats others very nicely. Which of the following statements is more true for you? "I'd like to hear more about Angelina." Or, "I'd like to hear more about Anne." Unfortunately, the first novel I've read by Naomi Hirahara is all about Anne. Published in 2014, Murder on Bamboo Lane is about an LAPD bicycle cop in her early twenties who gets drawn into the homicide investigation of a former classmate. The bicycle cop's name is Ellie Rush, but she is "Anne" by any other name. Ellie doesn't drink, smoke, gamble, use profanity, sleep around or abuse her authority, what little of it she has holding the rank of "Police Officer II." This is very proper behavior for a rookie cop, particularly one who's aunt is Assistant Police Chief of Los Angeles. Good for Ellie. I did not want to hear any more about her. Hirahara is the author of two wickedly good short stories--The Chirashi Covenant and Number 19--which were among the very best of two different collections of Los Angeles noir I've read. Her novel isn’t a bad witch, it’s a good witch (yawn). Ellie is surrounded by family, a BFF, college friends, her supervisor and a dog who are all very good. There's a corpse, but no one Ellie or the reader will miss (thank goodness!). Other than chasing a sixty-year-old anticommunist down the Bunker Hill Steps (Ellie takes the escalator, thank goodness!) doesn't encounter physical or existential danger. I skimmed this novel from middle to end. Hirahara, who grew up in Pasadena, incorporates astute descriptions of Los Angeles, as well as introduces a multiethnic female protagonist (white father, Japanese American mother). History doesn't play the role it does in a lot of L.A. based mysteries, though Hirahara has written novels that take place in the past. I'd be willing to give one of those a shot. Murder on Bamboo Lane is so cozy, so glib (Ellie narrates the story in first person in a very casual manner) and so ho-hum I couldn't possibly recommend it. "Angelina" sounds vaguely like Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) from the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire. Cameron was a gifted computer programmer who helped clone an IBM computer, slept with her boss, designed games, launched one of the first online chat startups and departed her own company under dramatic circumstances. She was a Viking funeral who always perked me up when she came around. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2023
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Jan 02, 2023
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Dec 15, 2022
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B00IGVH9LI
| 3.96
| 257,774
| Sep 25, 2014
| Sep 30, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Caroline Kepnes and her debut novel Yo
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Caroline Kepnes and her debut novel You published in 2014. I was skeptical that this would be anything but a dumpster dive, but Goodreads users whose tastes I trust assured me it was good. You might be the best novel I've read since White Oleander two years ago. It's certainly my favorite so far in the Year of Women, surpassing all my expectations as a devilish psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train for my generation, which doesn't talk to strangers or ride trains so much as we share our lives on social media. Joe Goldberg is the thirty-year-old manager of Mooney Rare & Used, a bookstore on the Lower East Side. Easy on the eyes and often quick with a retort, Joe fixates on a twenty-four-year old shopper who floats in one morning: You are classic and compact, my own little Natalie Portman circa the end of the movie Closer, when she's fresh-faced and done with the British bad guys and going home to America. A self-educated literary scholar, Joe is impressed by her purchases: Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray and Desperate Characters by Paula Fox. They flirt a bit and she clarifies that though her credit card states Guinevere Beck, she goes by Beck. The uniqueness of her name and Joe's tenacity make Beck easy to spy on. Online journals have published her essays and poems, or as Joe calls them, her blogs and diary entries. The Internet gives him her physical address, a parlor level apartment in the West Village which Beck won in a lottery from alma mater Brown University. Her Twitter feed tells Joe where she's going to be. Observations he makes watching her apartment day or night inform him that Beck craves attention. He observes her invite some blond creep over to spank her and fuck on the sofa. In what amounts to one long love letter, Joe shares that he's learned patience. Before you, there was Candace. She was stubborn too, so I'm gonna be patient with you, same way I was patient with her. I am not gonna hold it against you that in that old, bulky laptop computer of yours you write about every fucking thing in the world except me. I am no idiot, Beck. I know how to search a hard drive and I know I'm not in there and I know you don't even own anything resembling a notebook or a diary. One possible theory: You write about me in the notepad on your phone. Hope remains. But I'm not gonna pull away from you. Sure, you are uniquely sexual. Case in point: You devour the "Casual Encounters" section on Craigslist, copying and pasting your favorite posts into a giant file on your computer. Why, Beck, why? Fortunately, you don't participate in "Casual Encounters." And I suppose that girls like to collect things, be it kale soup recipes of poorly worded, grammatically offensive daddy fantasies composed by desperate loners. Hey, I'm still here; I accept you. And, okay. So you do let this blond creep do things to you that you read about in these Craigslist ads. But at least you have boundaries. That perv is not your boyfriend; you sent him into the street, where he belongs, as if you are disgusted with him, which you should be. And I have read all your recent e-mails and it's official: You did not tell anyone that he was in your apartment, inside of you. He is not your boyfriend. That's all that matters and I am ready to find you and I am able to find you and I owe that to Candace. Dear Candace. I first saw Candace at the Grasslands in Brooklyn. She played flute in a band with her brother and sister. You would like their music. They were called Martyr and I wanted to know her right away. I was patient. I followed them all over Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. They were good. They weren't ever going to be top forty, but sometimes they'd have a song featured in a wretched show for teenagers on the CW and their website would explode. They didn't have a label because they couldn't agree on anything. Anyway, Candace was the prettiest, the lead of the band. Her brother was your standard drummer fuckup douche bag and her sister was homely and talented. You can't just bum-rush a girl after a concert, especially when the band's music is ambient techno electro shit and when her psycho controlling brother (who, by the way, would never be in a band were it not for his sisters) is always hanging around. I had to get Candace alone. And I couldn't be some guy hitting on her, because of her "protective" brother. And I was going to die if I didn't get to hold her, or least make a step toward holding her. So I improvised. Joe phones in a phony gas leak and bullshits the gas man into letting him inside Beck's apartment. He attends one of her readings to eavesdrop on her chat with two friends, Chana and Lynn. Despondent that the blond creep didn't show up, Beck drinks too much, and as Joe watches her fumble for her phone on the Greenpoint Avenue subway platform at 2:45 in the morning, he rescues her after she falls onto the track. He pretends he doesn't recognize her, making Beck feel like the stalker for remembering him from the bookstore. Joe loves it at his bookstore, especially the soundproof cage in the basement where rare editions are stored. Joe was a teenager when Mr. Mooney locked him in the cage for days to punish Joe for losing a signed first edition of Franny and Zooey to a shoplifter. No real friends, a mother who vanished when Joe was in second grade and an absentee father add up to Joe being on his own against the world and its cruelties. Beck is what he feels he needs to overcome it all. His subway chivalry has won him a prize: Beck's phone, which she assumes she lost. Purchasing a new phone, Beck remains unaware that Joe can monitor her text messages now. Joe encounters obstacles between him and his goal to make Beck his girlfriend. The first is Benjamin "Benji" Baird Keyes III, the blond creep, who Beck grows more obsessed with the more he ignores her for the organic soda company he launched. Next is Peach Salinger, a college friend of some undisclosed relation to J.D. Salinger. Beck introduces Joe to her at a party and he dislikes her instantly. The feeling is mutual. Peach wants to keep Beck to herself and stages drama to hold Beck in her orbit. Next on the hit list is Beck's therapist, a failed musician and married man in his mid-forties named Nicky Angevine who is not an MD and insists his patients call him "Nicky." There is no logical or technological reason for the fact that you have not called me or e-mailed me since returning from LC. It's been twenty-three minutes and thirteen days since Peach left the picture. The wound on my face is stubborn but there is progress and I'm less of a monster every day. And that's just another reminder that precious time is passing. I can't figure you out, Beck. You're not e-mailing with any new guys and you're not e-mailing your friends about anything romantic but you're writing about guys. The last story you wrote was about a girl (you, duh, they're always you) who goes to the doctor and learns that she has a penis stuck inside of her. She calls every guy she's ever been with to see if he's still got a penis. The list of dudes is gross long (an exaggeration, it has to be) and they all still have dicks. Finally, she admits there's one dude she didn't call because he's married with children. She doesn't want to give him his dick; she wants him to leave his wife and come and get it. As Blythe said in her e-mail critique, "There's no real ending, no climax, no point. I'm not presuming that this is based on something real in your life, but if so, maybe think of putting this story in a drawer and revisiting it once you've gotten some distance from your emotions." And naturally, I am concerned. You've been seeing this Dr. Nicky twice a week since you got back. And then you write this thinly veiled story about fucking a married guy. Of course I called to schedule an appointment with him. How else can I make sure that he's not taking advantage of you? And it's not like I'm the only one concerned. Chana: You just went to therapy. WTF? How do you even afford this? You: New priorities. No boozing, no shopping, just writing, journaling, growing. Chana: Okay, Beck. But remember Dr. Nicky is ... Dr. Nicky. I could see what Caroline Kepnes was doing and it didn't inhibit me from being taken in. A first person narrator with a unique voice can be exciting as all filters are removed between reader and narrator. Joe Goldberg makes a compelling one because he talks about books (this Goodreads list found 47 book references by Joe). What's special about You is that rather than bounce around in the thoughts of her narrator, Kepnes propels the narrative forward with action. Joe isn't just telling. He's in pursuit of something, always at risk of failure. Kepnes writes a man's voice supremely well and Joe convinced me that the most kind, thoughtful and honest person in the book was Joe. I wanted him to cut down everyone in his path and get away with it. I mean, based on Joe's observations, these are people begging to be taught a lesson. Kepnes made me an accomplice. There is this girl I fired a couple of years ago. Her name was Sare, which was irritating. Her birth name was Sarah but she wanted to be original and all that bullshit. Sare was a nightmare. She acted like she was doing us a favor by showing up. She suggested Meg Wolitzer books to everyone, even old Asian men. When she had to give change, she reluctantly offered a light fist of coins and made the customer reach over the counter to get it. People hated Sare. She ordered lattes extra hot and left at least three times a week to go back to Starbucks and complain even though an extra-hot latte is obviously not going to be extra hot after a ten minute walk in the cold. She had dreadlocks even though she was white. She kept a book on the counter to make sure that everyone knew she was reading Edwidge Danticat or whatever of-the-moment minority woman everyone was supposed to be so jazzed up about. And she read the New Yorker, which meant 98.9 percent of her small talk while cleaning up started with "Did you see that piece in the New Yorker ..." She never flushed the toilet when she peed, claiming that her parents taught her to conserve. But her pee reeked because she was a vegetarian who lived mostly on asparagus. She wore bullshit eyeglasses and had a boyfriend in med school and when she was at the counter she always curled up and wrapped her body in a shapeless wool cardigan, which made customers feel that they were imposing on her. When I fired her, I left her a note that her last check was in the bathroom. And I left her check in the toilet full of her asparagus-scented piss. She never came around again. She works for a nonprofit and married the doctor who must be the second-most annoying person on planet Earth simply because he married her. In terms of sheer annoyance, nobody I have ever known has compared to Sare Worthington, saver of the environment, native of Portland, Maine, forever wishing that she were from Portland, Oregon. Bitch should have just moved there. But I envied her, I did. She was so cool, so unflappable. She was never impressed by anything. We'd get a signed James Joyce and she'd shrug. She made me too aware of myself. I hated that I wanted to impress her and I hated that I was so easily impressed, sniffing the dead ink of the James Joyce. It might've been enough for Kepnes to write Joe as a showman psycho, like Robert Walker in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. But Joe doesn't just plot crimes and rant. As critical as he is of poor taste, he realizes he's alone in New York, orphaned, ignored, left to manage a dying business. To compensate for this unfortunate series of events, Joe seeks the devotion of a special woman. I laughed at this observations and thrilled at the lengths he was willing to go to attain his goal. Kepnes knows her characters and mines their quirks to terrific effect. She knows books and music and references these with delight. She knows how to write a great novel. Caroline Kepnes was born in 1976 and grew up in Barnstable, Massachusetts, the largest town on Cape Cod (Beck would correct me if I wrote "IN Cape Cod"). Graduating from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in American Civilization, Kepnes ultimately applied for a writing position with Tiger Beat, parlaying her love of the Backstreet Boys into a job. Accepting work with E!, she moved to Los Angeles, writing two episodes of the television family drama 7th Heaven on spec. Kepnes had written short stories for years, but You was her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 13, 2021
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Apr 16, 2021
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Jun 23, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0399167498
| 9780399167492
| 0399167498
| 3.54
| 2,396
| Jul 10, 2014
| Jul 10, 2014
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Tom Sweterlitsch is his debut novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and this is one of the most thrilling pieces of futuristic
My introduction to the fiction of Tom Sweterlitsch is his debut novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and this is one of the most thrilling pieces of futuristic science fiction that I've read. Published in 2014, Sweterlitsch shoots for a very difficult floor routine with his first book, aspiring to a hard boiled detective mystery set fifty or so years from today. This is far enough in the future to require true vision in portraying how certain technological and geopolitical shifts could transform American life, but not so far in the future that the author wouldn't need to ground his concepts in present reality. It's an ambitious play and the first-time author pulls it off. The story begins in Washington D.C., where research firm archival assistant John Patrick Blaxton investigates a claim for Hannah Massey, a Carnegie Mellon student who disappeared ten years ago, shortly before what the world comes to know as "Pittsburgh" occurred when an Islamic terrorist detonated a nuclear device in Katz Plaza, reducing half a million people and most of the Steel City to ash. Among those missing and presumed dead in the attack--Blaxton was spared while attending a conference in Columbus--were his wife Theresa Marie and their unborn daughter. To combat fraudulent life insurance claims, State Farm and others insist on proof of death, which archivists like Blaxton can track down in a virtual reality network known as the City-Archive, where surveillance or personal video footage have reconstructed virtually every foot of Pittsburgh as it existed months, weeks, days, hours, minutes or seconds prior to its annihilation. Blaxton enters the archive using his Adware, implanted wiring and retinal cams which allow consumers access to the world wide web, streaming data and video onto the cornea. The City-Archive allows survivors to immerse themselves in VR environments with loved ones before or even at the moment of their deaths. She loved walking here. On Walnut Street, in Shadyside. She loved window-shopping here--the Apple Store, Williams-Sonoma, Kawaii, e.b. Pepper--but her favorite place was an upscale general store called Kards Unlimited. Theresa died here--wearing blue jeans tucked into riding boots, an oatmeal-colored cardigan draped over her pregnant belly. I've stood with her outside of Kards Unlimited's picture window as she sipped an iced mocha from Starbucks, looking at the T-shirts on display. My Other Ride Has A Flux Capacitor. Llamacorn. The Folding Chair Parking Authority. A Clockwork Orange. I've watched her many times looking at these shirts, and have come to believe that at the end, at the very moment the world ended for her, she was reading a Mr. Rogers T-shirt, It's a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood. The sky burns. Cameras record. Theresa squints. Her hair catches fire at the tips, then flashes like a diadem across her head. She dies too quickly, I believe, to have felt any pain. Blaxton uses the City-Archive to locate Hannah Massey in a river bed, proving she was murdered prior to the attack. Haunted by ghosts he's tracked in the archives, Blaxton visits his cousin Gavril, a superstar installation artist whose Czech is translated to English by Adware. Blaxton has been using a stimulant called brown sugar to enhance his archive experiences and when one of Gavril's models slips him a pill laced with heroin, he's arrested in Dupont Circle for disturbing the peace, his fifth such offense. He loses his job and an eight-year prison sentence is waived pending his participation in a grief support group for men affected by Pittsburgh PTSD The support group leader, Dr. Timothy Reynolds, makes Blaxton an offer, matching the convict's skills set with a job for his mentor, Theodore Waverly, Ph.D, head of a consultancy firm called Focal Networks. Waverly is a good friend of President Meecham, a former Miss Teen Pennsylvania and sex tape star installed as U.S. president for life following Pittsburgh. Blaxton meets with Waverly and the tycoon offers to waive all of Blaxton's sentencing requirements in exchange for locating his daughter Albion O'Hara Waverly, a stunning redhead missing and presumed dead in Pittsburgh. For reasons unknown, someone has also deleted Albion from the City-Archive, killing her twice. Immersing himself in the City-Archive, Blaxton tracks Albion to Polish Hill, where she's been replaced by a model who calls herself "Zhou." Subsisting on Pepsi and Ho Hos, Blaxton connects Albion/ Zhou to a model named Peyton Hannover and to strange graffiti on her building. Before his search in the City-Archive gets far, Blaxton is confronted by a man calling himself Legion who threatens to delete Blaxton's wife from the archive unless he gives up trying to find Albion. Back in D.C., Dr. Reynolds threatens to gum up Blaxton's sentencing unless he stays on the case. Blaxton discovers that Waverly and Reynolds may be connected in the murder of Hannah Massey. Think. Load notes for case #14502 and resume my research where I'd left off for Kucenic and State Farm, tracking Hannah during her final hours before she was reported missing--on campus, at Carnegie Mellon, a few weeks before spring semester finals. She's slept late this morning, the night before a raucous double rehearsal for her acting troupe's Spring Carnival performance of Spamalot. Hannah's role is the Lady of the Lake, and in these final hours in the Archive she trudges through a late spring dusting of snow still singing the music she'd heard the night before, full-voiced despite the relatively early hour. In a few weeks, her troupe will stage Spamalot without her, dedicating the show to her, the missing girl, the stage festooned with flowers. The programs will feature her high school senior portrait and a tribute written by her friends, and after each performance the actors will stand among the exiting crowds taking up a collection to aid in the search efforts. But now, this morning, Hannah sings "Diva's Lament," a freshman Psych major in Barbie-pink boots and a camel hair coat, blonde waves tumbling from beneath her knit beret. She's effortless, burgundy sweatpants and a plaid sweatshirt, comfy stuff for a day shuffling between the library and her semester's remaining few classes. I've followed her this morning before-- Tomorrow and Tomorrow blew me away with how seamlessly Tom Sweterlitsch propels a 1950s-set pulp fiction into a vivid and eeriely palpable future one hundred years later in time. James Ellroy bleeds all over this; the exploitation and grisly unexplained murder of a beautiful ingénue in Hollywood is taken to its next step in a virtual reality world wide web, where beauty and fashion can lead to overnight stardom or anonymous death. As with Ellroy, beguiling ghosts go unavenged and haunt the detective, while the powerful are able to erase their crimes. Sweterlitsch's vision is mesmerizing, with Adware burying its users with data streams or advertising. A private Panda Electronics clinic in Chevy Chase. The showroom fills with spots for Panda Electronics, hallucinations of Chinese girls wearing cosplay lingerie and panda bear ears, cuddling with panda bear cubs, offering deals on personal devices. The clinician is dressed in Ralph Lauren, a polo shirt and white slacks--simple, but she's a stunner, black hair and pale, high cheekbones and vivid violet eyes. A plastic surgeon must have installed her Adware because the scarring cresting her forehead resembles the veins of a leaf rather than the haphazard gridding most people have. Her profile's set to public-- Agatha Kramer, a biocommunications major at Georgetown, a cheerleader for the Redskins, vids of her in mustard and yellow spandex, doing high kicks on the sidelines. Her profile pic's one of Gavril's "Street Fashion" series--so she'd been one of his impromptu models for the blog. She smiles as we approach. This novel worked its doomsday spell over me by prophesying things that are personally terrifying to me: nuclear apocalypse, invasion of privacy, assault with advertising, a monarch president. The way in which women are no more in control of their fates in the virtual world than the real one is unsettling. In Sweterlitsch's future, glamour, fashion and retail branding seem to dominate culture, and citizens seek the comfort of virtual reality to escape the mounting problems of the world. This scenario is not new to science fiction, but Sweterlitsch makes his future credible and the psychic trauma inflicted on his character seem real. Length: 92,982 words ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 11, 2018
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Sep 16, 2018
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Aug 11, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0062444131
| 9780062444134
| 0062444131
| 4.18
| 158,777
| Jul 29, 2014
| Jul 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Becky Chambers is her debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which was self-published in 2014 with fundi
My introduction to the fiction of Becky Chambers is her debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which was self-published in 2014 with funding from a Kickstarter campaign by the author. Her book was republished the following year by Hodder & Stoughton, which negotiated a first edition print run with Harper Voyager. Not only was I impressed by Chambers' path to publishing, but this is one of those uncommon books I was all-in on what the author wanted to do and how she went about it: a space opera from a female point of view, balancing astrophysics, speculative technology, multiculturalism, action, sex and humor into an inclusive and exciting read. Humans have evacuated a toxic Earth, fracturing into Solans who've colonized Mars or other bodies in the solar system and live on ground, and Exodans who've spread across the galaxy as refugees, working and living peacefully in space. Grounders and spacers. Humans were recently asked to join the Galactic Commons, an interspecies alliance regulating trade and defense, as well as transportation. Long distance travel within the GC is made possible via wormholes drilled by tunnelers who can poke through a sublayer of space using an interspacial bore. The patched-together Wayfarer is a tunneling ship and as the story begins, its blue collar crew grows to nine. Rosemary Harper is a grounder from Mars who joins the Wayfarer as a certified clerk, bringing with her a secret. Captain Ashby Santoso is an enterprising but sociable Human spacer, making him pacifist by nature. Sissix is the pilot, an Aandrisk female with feathers on her head and quasi-reptilian scales and claws. Corbin is a fussy Human male, the algaeist who makes the ship's fuel. Ohan is navigator, a Sianat, a plural-entity species infected by a virus that enables them to see far but die young. Dr. Chef is ship's physician and cook, a Grum, a six-limbed species nearly extinct after centuries of intraspecies war. Kizzy and Jenks are Human techs, a manic female fond of shrimp spice and a scruffy male in love with the ship's communications inferface. Her name is Lovelace and while sentient, she is AI not recognized as a person under GC law. There were other Lovelaces out there, of course. Her core software platform could be purchased through any AI dealer. There were probably dozens of versions of her traveling through the galaxy--maybe hundreds, who knew. But they weren't her. The Lovey that Jenks knew was uniquely molded by the Wayfarer. Her personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they'd been, every conversation they'd shared. And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn't the same be said for organic people? Weren't they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along? In Jenks' eyes, the only real difference in cognitive development between Humans and AIs was that of speed. He'd had to learn to walk and talk and eat and all the other essentials before he'd begun to have a sense of identity. Lovey didn't have to worry about those things. There hadn't been a need for her to spend years learning how to monitor systems or switch off circuits. She had started life out with all the maturity and knowledge she needed to do her job competently. But in the three standards since she'd been installed, she'd become much more than just a ship's AI. She'd become someone wonderful. The Commons Parliament has voted to grant GC membership to the Toremi Ka, a vicious clan whose species have been at war for centuries and shown little interest in others except to send them back in pieces when they trespass Toremi space, circling the core of the Galactic Commons. A sublayer tunnel will need to be drilled to connect the small, angry planet of Hedra Ka with the GC and Ashby's skilled crew are awarded the contract. This worries Ashby's lover, cargo runner Captain Gapei Tem Seri, an Aeluon woman with silver skin, long neck and soft eyes regarded by Humans as the most attractive species in the GC, as well as most formidable in combat. Rosemary adjusts to the rigors of punching through space as well as spacer dietary staples like red coast bugs, insects rated high by Exodans due to their economic, protein rich and space-friendly qualities. She gets to know her crewmates, forming the quickest and strongest bond with the striking Sissix, whose Aandrisk species are noticeably tactile and affectionate even by warm-blooded Human standards and have complicated lineage distinguished by hatch, feather and house families. Rosemary learns all about these when the Wayfarer ultimately stops for R&R on Sissix's home planet of Hashkath. A resupply stop on the magnificent moon of Port Coriol permits Jenks a visit to a black market tech district, where he's interested in obtaining a body kit which would allow him to implant Lovey's consciousness into a carbon body, illegal and also questionable morally, but a transition that Lovey is agreeable to make for Jenks. As for their job, Ashby brushes off Pei's concerns about the Toremi, confident that the GC has guaranteed their safety. The crew find their new trading partners hostile toward disagreement, even homicidal to dissent, and yet, the same arguments were made by the Commons Parliament against granting membership to Humans at one time. My point, fellow representatives, is that Humans are a fractured, limping, adolescent species that has branched out into interstellar life not by merit, but by luck. They have not moved beyond interspecies chaos. They have skipped the vital step the rest of us had to make on our own. By granting them membership in the Galactic Commons, we would be providing them not with a new life, but with a crutch. What meager resources they have to offer us are not worth the risk posed by allowing such an unstable element into our shared space. The GC has already spent too much on helping this minor species to escape the hardships they brought upon themselves. I ask you, what benefit is there in making Humans one of us? If not resources, or knowledge, or military strength ... then what? The recipe for a novel like The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is complicated and the result could have easily been distasteful for me. Becky Chambers does a gourmet's job in her first novel balancing intergalactic derring-do, speculative technology and humor. Too much of any ingredient (Edgar Rice Burroughs action, Neal Stephenson tech, Douglas Adams jokes) and I wouldn't have been able to swallow it all, but the novel is remarkably well balanced. Chambers seems primarily influenced by Star Trek and Firefly but she doesn't deliver a spoof or a rip-off. TV series were never on my mind while I was reading. And I was delighted throughout. It was pure chance, of course, that Aeluons so often managed to check all the boxes on the list of Things That Humans Generally Find Attractive. On a galactic scale, beauty was a relative concept. All Humans could agree that Harmagians were hideous (a sentiment the Harmagians heartily returned). Aandrisks--well, that depended on who you talked to. Some people liked the feathers; others couldn't get past their teeth and claws. The Rosk, with their skittery legs and jagged mandibles, would still be the stuff of nightmares even if they weren't in the habit of carpet-bombing border colonies. But Aeluons, by some weird fluke of evolution, had a look that made Humans drop their jaws, hold up their palms and say, "Okay, you are a superior species." Aeluons' long limbs and digits were alien, no question, but they moved with fascinating grace. Their eyes were large, but not too large. Their mouths were small, but not too small. In Ashby's experience, it was hard to find a Human who couldn't appreciate an Aeluon, even if only in the most objective aesthetic terms. Aeluon women didn't have breasts, but after meeting Pei, Ashby had found that he could do without. His teenage self would've been horrified. Chambers does two wonderful things that male science fiction authors neglect and might appeal to readers who don't enjoy sci-fi. As opposed to adventurer heroes or fighting naturalists who've crewed ships throughout time, Chambers' characters are blue collar. The Wayfarer crew work for a living and like co-workers I've known, argue, drink tea, eat junk food, fuss about their tools, gripe about their pay and party too hard on R&R. I could identify with that. The other wonderful thing Chambers does is declare that space is open for everyone regardless of gender, sexual orientation, species or whether or not you're carbon based. I had such a fun time exploring her universe and look forward to returning. Length: 121,967 words ...more |
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Jan 16, 2019
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Jan 23, 2019
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Feb 14, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0316231053
| 9780316231053
| 0316231053
| 3.10
| 25,855
| Jun 17, 2014
| Jun 17, 2014
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it was ok
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My "Girls Girls Girls" jag concludes with The Fever, the 2014 thriller by Megan Abbott. This is my fourth venture into the fiction of the Edgar Award
My "Girls Girls Girls" jag concludes with The Fever, the 2014 thriller by Megan Abbott. This is my fourth venture into the fiction of the Edgar Award winner who alternates between 20th century noir and between mysteries set in the present day, where high school girls use cell phones to destroy their enemies instead of a .45. This novel proves again that Abbott can write psychologically nuanced and compelling teenaged characters without being slave to the brain dead conventions of the Young Adult genre, but in tackling an outbreak storyline, baits her hook with lures that I wasn't biting on. Deenie Nash is a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore in Dryden, a town of perpetual cloud cover that hints at the tempest brewing within its young women. Deenie's brother Eli is a popular hockey player with a parade of freshmen groupies. Their father is a well-liked chemistry teacher at their high school. Deenie's two best friends are Gabby Bishop and Lise Daniels. Gabby is a cello player who obtained a certain star power when her mother survived a brutal attack by her cocaine addled, claw hammer wielding father, while Lise is a chubby gigglepuss who dieted, lost her baby fat and turned into a goddess overnight. The most remarkable thing about Deenie might be her lark to let a hockey player from Star-of-the-Sea High School she works with at a pizza parlor give her a ride home and parking in the woods, give her her first time. Deenie avoids Lise at school the ext day in shame. Seated next to Deenie in class, Lise goes into a seizure and falls to the floor. Two football players help carry her to the nurse's office, where Lise remains lucid, but bites the arm of the school nurse. She's retrieved by her protective mom. Hoping to share her news with Gabby, Deenie is unable to pry her friend away from a bohemian named Skye Osbourne too cool for school with plenty of pet theories on Lise. No one said anything for a moment. Skye was somehow to be trusted in these matters. It was part of her mystique. That white-blond hair and thrift-store peacoat, the slave bracelets and green vinyl cowboy boots. Sunny, the artist aunt she lived with but whom Deenie had never seen and who let Skye's ex-boyfriend sleep over, even though he was supposedly twenty-six years old, though no one had actually seen him either. The rumor was he'd been one of her aunt's students, even her boyfriend. After they broke up, Skye wore his coat, a long leather Shaft duster, to school every day until a hard winter rain shredded it. Encouraged by Gabby to cut class, Deenie attempts to visit Lise at home. She discovers that her friend has been transported to the hospital with a seizure. Reporting to the hospital with her father that night, Deenie learns that Lise suffered a cardiac arrest and hit her head on the coffeetable. Sneaking into Lise's hospital room, Deenie isn't convinced that the girl in the bed is Lise. Her philandering mother having moved to another town some time ago and her father difficult to confide to, Deenie loses her pillar of strength when Gabby collapses into a seizure during an orchestra recital. A video of the attack goes viral and Dryden begins to become unhinged with hysteria. Eli encounters Lise's mother on their driveway at the crack of dawn, babbling about "the dangers our girls suffer at your hands." When Lise goes to visit Gabby, she finds Skye there with another hanger-on named Kim Court. During their visit, Gabby's jaw goes into uncontrolled convulsions. Lise's mother blames the mystery illness on the HPV vaccine that the school district recommended for its teenaged female students "before sexual debut," while Deenie has started to think more about Dryden Lake, a dead body of water with algae blooms that has drawn its swimmers, including Deenie's mother before she left them, and more recently, Lise, Gabby and Deenie. When Kim Court is wheeled out of school in a gurney, Deenie is able to rule out the HPV vaccine as the perpetrator because Kim never received the shot. Kim posts a video of herself in the hospital and casts suspicion on Deenie, the common link between all the girls who are falling ill. State health officials begin to investigate while all parents and their paranoid teen daughters can do is speculate about the lake, the groundwater or something poisonous in the school. Deenie's sleuthing reveals that Lise was fooling around in the bushes by the school with a boy who Gabby believes was Eli. Deenie's brother, meanwhile, has misplaced his phone and become an object of affection for Skye. As he approached the classroom, he saw another girl lurking, but this one didn't seem sickly or afraid. It was Skye Osbourne, wearing a long scarf the same color as her mouth, like those dark figs that hung from the tree by the practice rink every fall, the ones that split under your skates. And this time it felt like she was looking for him. "Ditch with me," she said, nodding her head toward the double doors. He stopped, headphones still on. "Why?" "Because," she said, a slanting smile. "I'm pretty." Funnily, Eli wasn't sure Skye was pretty. If he saw her without all that hair, which looked like it'd been stripped from a corncob and massed thick, and without all the things she draped over and on top of herself, the scarves and snake rings and coiling bracelets, he wondered if he'd recognize her at all. "What's the point of here," she added, waving something in her hand, a joint, a white Bic. What's the point of here, he thought, looking at that fig mouth of hers. Megan Abbott has all the pieces to deliver a compelling outbreak drama with The Fever. Her characters are distinguishable in both behavior and dialogue and most of them have qualities that cut more than skin deep. Deenie, Gabby and Lise are believable teenagers, as is Eli, and I was ready to be emotionally invested in them as doomsday set in. I'm always grateful to find a teenage heroine in fiction who is sexually active and not treated like a pariah by her author. I'm also distrustful of plot and grateful that Abbott didn't try to write a medical thriller, but her novel is killed by ponderous existentialism. One of my favorite writing tips comes from Trey Parker & Matt Stone, creators of South Park. Casual observers might not think the long running, crude animated series was a master course in narrative, but Parker's advice that every scene in a good story outline should end with the words "but" or "therefore" and lead into a new scene applies here. Stone's observation is that scenes concluding with "and then" before going somewhere else have been responsible for more messy movies than not. Novels too, like this one, which is one long "and then ... and then" after another. I grew disconnected and typing out my review summary, struggled to stay awake. At the point in The Fever when the story needed to progress--with a quarantine, a race against the clock, a siege--there is instead too much wondering, speculating, reassuring. And repetition. I lost count of how many times characters stood around muttering, "Everything's going to be all right". Abbott was inspired by (view spoiler)[the Le Roy incident in western New York in 2012, in which 18 teenagers were afflicted by a psychogenic outbreak of tics (hide spoiler)] and this choice seems like one much better suited to a short story than a novel,. I'm enamored by Abbott's skill at plundering the insecurities of teenage girls and expressing it through powerful, imaginative writing, but these girls deserved a more compelling story than this. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 27, 2018
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Feb 2018
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Aug 30, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1608868036
| 9781608868032
| 1608868036
| 4.05
| 18,240
| Apr 05, 2016
| Apr 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** My first experience reading a graphic novel has been Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson. My reviews of Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy a
**spoiler alert** My first experience reading a graphic novel has been Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson. My reviews of Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy and Vol. 2: Friendship to the Max can be found here and here. The four chapters comprising the second volume--in which the Greek gods Artemis and Apollo visit Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Vol. 3: A Terrible Plan is a return to the character driven comedic fantasy I enjoyed in chapters one through four. Written by Noelle Stevenson & Shannon Watters, chapters nine through twelve peel back the ink on each of the main players, dug a little deeper into the whimsical mythology of the camp and introduced some variety by having eight different illustrators lend their styles to different segments of the book, which anyone who hasn't read Vol. 1 or Vol. 2 should be able to pick up and enjoy as a cohesive whole without reading the previous two volumes. [image] As the story opens, our Lumberjanes--Ripley, Molly, Mal, April and Jo--surround a campfire under the supervision of their cabin leader, Jen. The hardcore lady types take turns earning their If You Got It, Haunt It badges by telling scary stories. To my delight as a reader, each story is illustrated by a different artist and in addition to breaking up the style of the series, I found this to be a wonderful way to explore who each of these characters are. In "Wrong Number," Jen's responsible decision making proves anticlimactic with the scouts. In "Ghost Girl," the arts and sciences inclined Jo goes back in time to tell of a popular girl who vanishes before her family's eyes. In "Bad Candy," Ripley, an idiot savant, tells of a girl who eats some cursed candy and is ensnared by a monster before her pets rescue her; the illustrations of this segment are a window into Ripley's mind I never wanted. [image] In "Lonely Road," Mal subverts expectations with a true horror story of a young couple whose car stalls in a snowstorm and are terrorized by strange noises in the night. In "Tailypo," Molly tells of a hungry woodsman and his dog who come upon a ferocious animal who does not appreciate having its tail chopped off and made into a stew. In "Old Betty," April tells of abandoned house rumored to be haunted by the spirit of its vanished owner. April is very theatrical and I get the impression that she's read Henry James as well. The ghost story device propelled Mal to the top of my list of favorite characters. Her "based on an almost true story" displayed the most sophistication. We later find out she plays in a garage band back home and though the authors are subtle enough not to identify her as "lesbian" or "gay" her character clearly is. Her girlfriend Molly earns her badge with the story of the tailypo. Later in the book, we learn that the athletic Molly doesn't have many friends at home. In spite of her golden looks, she seems to have learned to go within herself a lot. Maybe I'm projecting here. [image] The rest of Lumberjanes, Vol. 3: A Terrible Plan involves a Free Day at the camp in which the scouts are allowed to do whatever they want. Mal and Molly go off together on a picnic date, while April, Jo and Ripley find themselves enormously bored without any monsters to fight. Mal and Molly cross paths with the mysterious Bear Woman and follow her into a magic outhouse, discovering this is a portal to a land of the lost populated by dinosaurs and carnivorous plants. They learn more about each other as they attempt to find a way home. Meanwhile, April, Jo and Ripley compete for Lumberjane badges in activities which brings out the best, and worst, in their natures. One of the pleasures of Lumberjanes is how strong and smart young girls are depicted without the authors patting themselves on the backs or promoting Girl Power. These attributes are just accepted. Without boys around to expose their weaknesses or make them second-guess themselves, the Lumberjanes are permitted to develop their own voices and skills, gain knowledge and experience, and strengthen the bonds of their friendship. The comedy in this book is less joke-based and very rooted in the characters. And I can't say enough about the artwork, with Carolyn Nowak illustrating the chapters, and Britney Williams, Aimee Fleck, Faith Erin Hicks, Rebecca Tobin, Felicia Choo and T. Zysk contributing a ghost story along with Nowak. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 29, 2016
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Jun 30, 2016
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Jun 07, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1608867374
| 9781608867370
| 1608867374
| 4.15
| 24,326
| Oct 13, 2015
| Oct 13, 2015
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really liked it
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My first experience reading a graphic novel has been Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson & Grace Ellis. My review of Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy can be
My first experience reading a graphic novel has been Lumberjanes by Noelle Stevenson & Grace Ellis. My review of Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy can be found here and while I remain enamored by the wit and whimsy on display in this series--in which five Lumberjane scouts learn naval gauging, anagram solving and monster hunting at summer camp--I don't like having to review four chapters at a time. I've said everything I need to say about this book without going into detail about what "junk" April, Jo, Molly, Mal and Ripley encounter in Vol 2: Friendship To the Max. Capture the Flag, friendship bracelets and Greek deities are involved. So is my favorite character, Jen, the put-upon scout leader of Roanoke cabin stuck supervising five girls who seem to attract river monsters, three-eyed foxes and hipster Yetis. If you're looking for a summer adventure for juveniles told with greater imagination and wholesome restraint than The Goonies--that much loved, obnoxious, mean-spirited '80s kids adventure movie produced by Steven Spielberg that had me rooting for the booby traps--I highly recommend giving this girl-centric series a sample, even if graphic novels aren't your thing. Onward to Vol. 3 ... ...more |
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Jun 27, 2016
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Jun 28, 2016
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Jun 07, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0670026328
| 9780670026326
| 0670026328
| 3.85
| 88,251
| Sep 02, 2014
| Sep 02, 2014
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really liked it
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The fifth novel by Tana French and #5 in a series narrated by a detective of or working with the Murder Squad in Dublin has the author racking the foc
The fifth novel by Tana French and #5 in a series narrated by a detective of or working with the Murder Squad in Dublin has the author racking the focus and interfering with the quality control that have made her series such a success. Opening one of French's novels is an act of treasure hunting, of thrills and wonder, like finding an old wooden chest in an attic and unlocking it to discover intimacy, secrecy, history, betrayal and redemption hidden inside. French's themes are back in black this time and a couple of artifacts await, but adjustments in her narration and ambiguity about who the protagonist was this time around left me somewhat wanting. In this follow-up to In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place and Broken Harbor, French continues a beguiling pattern of retrieving a supporting character from previous novels and casting them as the narrator of the sequel. Published in 2014, The Secret Place focuses on Detective Stephen Moran, "first in my family to go for a Learning Cert instead of an apprenticeship." Moran has been promoted with rapid succession and at the age of thirty-two, is working on the Cold Cases squad in Dublin. Ambition is one of Moran's strengths, as well as his greatest potential weakness, and the lad has his laser sights set on Murder. Opportunity knocks when Holly Mackey, the sixteen-year-old daughter of undercover detective Frank Mackey, pays Moran a visit. Six years ago, with events depicted in Faithful Place (my favorite French novel so far, by a nose), Moran was plucked out of the floater pool by the devious Mackey to update him on Murder's investigation into the death of Mackey's childhood girlfriend. In return, Moran took the collar (usurping the lead Murder detective) and received a recommendation for promotion by Mackey. The case required Moran to prep Holly as a witness for trial. Holly now brings Moran fresh evidence in the murder of sixteen year old Chris Harper, student at a boys' boarding school adjacent to St. Kilda's, the girls' school where Holly attends classes and boards during the school term. One year ago, Harper was found by nuns on the grounds of St. Kilda's with his skull bashed in. One of the detectives on the case, Antoinette Conway, questioned Holly and the rest of the students at St. Kilda's; no one saw anything, no one heard anything and no explanation for Chris Harper being on the girls' campus was ever determined. Inside a clear plastic envelope is a plain white card and a thumbtack that Holly removed from a noticeboard outside the art room. Known as the Secret Place, the board allows the students of St. Kilda's to post anonymous notes as long as names are kept off. The card is a photo of Chris Harper with words cut out of a book. The note reads I know who killed him. A cop's kid to the bone, Holly tells Moran that she discovered the card this morning, cut it off the board with a balsa knife and was careful not to leave her prints on it. Holly has told no one. Holly wishes to keep it that way. Seeing his big ticket to Murder, Moran goes for a talk with Detective Conway. Rough, my mam would have called Conway. That Antoinette one, and a sideways look with her chin tucked down: a bit rough. Not meaning her personality, or not just; meaning where she came from, and what. The accent told you, and the stare. Dublin, inner city; just a quick walk from where I grew up, maybe, but miles away all the same. Tower blocks. IRA-wannabe graffiti and puddles of piss. Junkies. People who've never passed an exam in their lives, but had every twist and turn of dole maths down pat. People who wouldn't have approved of Conway's career choice. Quick-tempered when it comes to the boys club and their banter, Conway has been ostracized by the men of the Murder Squad. She has no steady partner and no intention of taking on Moran as one. He's insistent. "You said yourself you got nowhere with Holly Mackey and her mates. But she likes me enough, or trusts me enough, that she brought me this. And if she'll talk to me, she'll get her mates talking to me." Hearing something in his accent or maybe what he has to say, Conway agrees to let Moran tag along as she returns to St. Kilda's to ask some questions. The novel forks away from Moran & Conway to move back in time to the months and weeks leading up to Chris Harper's murder. Holly Mackey is thick as thieves with her three best friends and roommates, the odd crowd. Julia Harte is the smart arse and boss of their outfit. Selena Wynne is the dreamer, an emo beauty. Rebecca O'Mara is headstrong with a strong case of arrested development. Led into battle by Julia, the girls have made enemies of St. Kilda's queen bees, the cool crowd, a group of robots they refer to as the Daleks: Joanne Hefferman, Gemma Harding, Orla Burgess and Alison Muldoon. On the drive to St. Kilda's, Conway brings Moran up to speed on her interviews. Joanne snitched that prior to his murder, Chris had been going out with Selena. He was found with a condom in his pocket and the likely theory is that he sneaked onto the girls' campus to score with someone. His head was split nearly in two by someone using a long handled instrument with a sharp blade. Selena and her mates denied she was with Chris and Joanne offered no evidence. No calls or texts were recovered linking Chris to a girlfriend. His mates, if they knew anything, weren't helpful. "Sixteen year old boys," Conway remarks, "you'd get more sense going down to the zoo and interviewing the chimp cage." The detectives receive token assistance from the school's headmistress, Miss Eileen McKenna, whose priority is to protect the reputation St. Kilda's and keep parents from spending tuition money at another school. Conway & Moran determine that eight students had access to the art room and could've placed the note on the Secret Place: Julia, Selena, Holly & Becca or Joanne, Gemma, Orla & Alison. Having botched the initial interviews when her then partner insisted they be held in McKenna's office, Conway picks the art room and agrees to let Moran do the talking, casting him as Good Cop, with Conway's Bad Cop poised to take over if she thinks he's making a bollix of her case. In the wake of Chris' murder, Holly warns her mates what to expect under questioning. "This isn't going to be like Houlihan going, 'Ooh dear, I smell tobacco, have you girls been smoking cigarettes?' and if you look innocent enough she believes you. These are detectives. If they get one clue that you know anything about anything, they're like pit bulls. Like, eight hours in an interview room with them interrogating you and your parents going apeshit, does that sound like fun? That's what'll happen if you even pause before you answer a question." One of the reasons to keep returning to Tana French are her interrogation scenes, which are in a league of their own. I hope I'm never interrogated or have to interrogate anyone, but am fascinated by the similarities between a gifted interrogator and a performing artist; they both dress a set, put on a costume and play a character, varied from play to play, with the artistic license to say anything if it might compel someone to offer up information. French knows that. Her dialogue is razor sharp and she has the confidence to let these scenes play out without rushing forward from one plot point to the next. The Secret Place crosses the Murder Squad up with their fiercest adversaries yet: eight teenage girls. "Maybe she didn't lie to me," Conway tells Moran, "But girls that age, they're liars. All of them." In many ways, this novel is one intense interrogation, staged on the campus of St. Kilda's over a twelve hour period as the truth of the girls' relationships with each other and with Chris Harper is revealed. Another thing French does artfully well in this novel is explore the nature of a developing partnership, as two detectives, a woman and a man, are pitched together and over the course of the day, learn each others games and determine whether or not they can trust each other. Still giving orders, but her tone had changed. I'd passed the test, or we had: the click was there. Your dream partner grows in the back of your mind, secret, like your dream girl. Mine grew up with violin lessons, floor-to-high-ceiling books, red setters, a confidence he took for granted and a dry sense of humor no one but me would get. Mine was everything that wasn't Conway, and I would've bet hers was everything that wasn't me. But the click was there. Maybe, just for a few days, we could be good enough for each other. What stops this novel from total satisfaction is French's decision to use Moran as a first person narrator of the even numbered chapters and to switch to a third person narrator for odd numbered chapters, which foreshadow the murder. This is something new for French and not only is it a major departure, it's blue balls. Chapter after chapter conclude in anti-climax, with French pulling the reader away from the investigation to hang out with her suspects, like mixing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit with Law & Order: Criminal Intent. French is a skilled enough to gradually invest me in her suspects (even with"OhmyGod" or "Whatever" being fired like tennis balls), but at the moment of climax, she returns to the cops. What French does excel at once more is crafting an intoxicating murder mystery that's more than the sum of weapons or suspects or motives; the story resonated with me emotionally. French returns to a theme she first explored with In the Woods: the elusive nature of friendships. She remembers teenagers and she knows adults. And she's aware not to fix what ain't broke, bringing back the character of (view spoiler)[Frank Mackey (hide spoiler)] to threaten the detectives; the move is similar to introducing a tiger into a gladiatorial pit fight and poses a physical threat to Conway & Moran that teenage girls don't quite muster. Like much of French's work, it's a thrill, but one that doesn't wear off after the murderer is revealed and the plot is over. ...more |
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Dec 20, 2015
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Dec 26, 2015
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Dec 04, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 4.07
| 545,099
| Aug 26, 2014
| Sep 09, 2014
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it was amazing
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I knew Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 apocalyptic bestseller Station Eleven well when I raced through it over three days in February 2015. My thoughts w
I knew Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 apocalyptic bestseller Station Eleven well when I raced through it over three days in February 2015. My thoughts were ripe and I'm convinced my insights were brilliant. Then came judgment day, in October appropriately, when Goodreads tricked me into deleting my review because the book was still marked "to read" in my reading docket. Now I find myself struggling to pick up the pieces and recreate what was the best I can, without cannibals chasing me. The story begins at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, where a fading film star named Arthur Leander holds stage as the lead in King Lear. The actor collapses and in spite of efforts by a fast thinking paramedic trainee seated near the footlights named Jeevan Chaudhary, the actor dies. Shaken by the tragedy is one of Leander's co-stars, an adolescent named Kirsten Raymonde. Jeevan leaves the theater more elated than saddened, convinced that after years of unfulfilling work as a paparzzo, he's found his true calling. Jeevan receives a phone call from a friend, a doctor at Toronto General Hospital. He reports that what the news media has labelled the Georgia Flu looks like a real epidemic and has come to North America, courtesy a flight from Moscow and a sixteen year old girl now in critical condition with flu-like symptoms. 200 patients have since presented at the hospital with the same symptoms, fifteen dead. Jeevan's friend calls back to tell Jeevan to get out of the city. Jeevan instead heads to a supermarket and fills two shopping carts with provisions. He hunkers down in the high rise apartment of his wheelchair bound brother Frank. Meanwhile, Arthur Leander's attorney calls the actor's oldest friend, a corporate consultant named Clark Thompson, with news of the actor's death. It falls on Clark to phone each of Arthur's ex-wives, beginning with Miranda Carroll, a shipping company executive currently working in Malaysia. Mandel slips back from the edge of the apocalypse to introduce us to Arthur as a young man in New York. Notified by family that someone who grew up with him in the same British Columbia town has moved to the city, Arthur has dinner with her. Miranda is introduced working a clerical position and trapped in a bad relationship with a painter. Miranda holds artistic aspirations of her own, spending every moment of her time working on a graphic novel about a physicist named Dr. Eleven orbiting the earth in a space platform consisting of small islands. It's a world Miranda calls Station Eleven. Mranda's marriage to Arthur and their life in L.A. end badly, culminating in a night when Jeevan sneaks a photo of Miranda walking in the nocturne. Before the world can embrace Miranda's magnum opus, the Georgia Flu wipes out 99% of the world's population. One of the survivors is Kirsten, who falls in with a troupe of actors and musicians calling themselves the Traveling Symphony. Circling the Great Lakes region and singing for their supper one settlement at a time, Kirsten's skills with Shakespearean tragedy have been eclipsed only by her skill with a knife, and one of her most prized possessions are two issues of a comic book an old co-star gave her called Station Eleven. The novel Station Eleven is one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I've read. I'd place it shoulder to shoulder with The Dog Stars by Peter Heller; The Stand by Stephen King towers above them both like Mount Doom by virtue of its imagination and size alone. I'm always a prospective customer when it comes to apocalyptic novels or tales of survivors, but Station Eleven moved some fresh air through the corridors. Mandel puts the word "fiction" in the "science fiction" category. The "science" or action isn't skipped out on here. I have a two-step plan for surviving a zombie apocalypse, a call for action I've developed after reading a lot of apocalyptic novels, and step one of my plan is lifted directly from this novel. I learned more about how to survive the end of the world than I did reading I Am Legend or watching Will Smith hunt deer from a Ford Mustang for sure. Better still is Mandel's facility with language, which really elevates the book: AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while util the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. More more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but not, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runaways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were fled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plessetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars. Mandel's strength lies in "character" first and foremost, which Stephen King would probably endorse and I always value. It's a testament to her ability to create red blooded women and men, documenting their passions, their vulnerabilities and their will to live, that I didn't go to fidgeting during the chapters set before the Georgia Flu. I would've been fine with a novel about these characters without the end of the world at all. The decision to use an unpubished graphic novel, nothing more to the characters than paper and ink by an unknown artist, to tie both of Mandel's eras together and say something about the things worth living and dying for, was something I don't usually find in these sorts of books where survivors are being chased by mutants. Maybe it's a testament to my love of Spaceman Spiff and Bill Watterson, but I found myself agreeing with Mandel and a bittersweet when the novel ended. ...more |
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1
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Feb 24, 2015
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Feb 27, 2015
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Oct 18, 2015
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Kindle Edition
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| 1616961716
| 9781616961718
| 1616961716
| 3.74
| 4,381
| Jul 21, 2014
| Aug 12, 2014
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Daryl Gregory is We Are All Completely Fine and this is another case of a good writer with lots of imagination who s
My introduction to the fiction of Daryl Gregory is We Are All Completely Fine and this is another case of a good writer with lots of imagination who seems to have published a rough draft of an unfinished novel. Published in 2014, it comes in as a novella, at an estimated 37,500 words. Imagine nine-tenths of Stephen King's It, which is 444,414 words, being cut, along with the character backstories, mythology of the town and history of the monster--in other words, everything good--all gone, and you get this book, which is spooky in places and gets points for creativity, but feels awfully incomplete. The conceit here is that five patients--three men and two women--are assembled for a weekly group therapy session under the guidance of their psychiatrist, Dr. Jan Sayer (a woman). Each patient suffers from what the doc has coined "Supernatural Victim Delusion," each crediting their trauma to boogeymen of some kind. Harrison Harrison (or, Harrison Squared) is monster detective now in his thirties who survived some sort of calamity that destroyed the town of Dunnsmouth; his adventures have inspired a movie on the Syfy Network and brought him fame and fortune and trauma. Stan lost two forearms and a leg to a family of cannibals known as the Weavers in the 1970s. Martin wears dark glasses that keep him immersed in an augmented reality RPG which he believes allow him to see intradimensional creatures not in the game called dwellers, one of which told a homeless man to kill Martin, whose three male roommates were murdered instead. Barbara was abducted in the '90s by a psycho named the Scrimshander, who sliced her skin to the bone in five places and carved messages, the content of which remains unknown. Greta is a teenager who survived an all-female cult called the Sisters who perished in a ritual intended to bring on the devil. The monster crosses into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it's no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster's final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn't dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It's the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims. For better and for worse, We Are All Completely Fine reads like a manuscript passed to me by a friend with the disclaimer that it's only a work in progress and what do I think. It's not bad, but it's not done. There's a point of view problem; Harrison tells the story here or there but a third person narrator is employed for most of the book. The title is bad; even Supernatural Victim Delusion would've been better. The dialogue is not particularly good and the psychobabble seems rudimentary. And Gregory lets a terrific boogeyman slip through his fingers; what little is shared about the Scrimshander is frightening, but he menaces the characters only as a vague memory. Stories about characters in a room are so difficult to pull off and I've yet to see one in a group therapy environment that wasn't a mess. I don't want to hear characters taking turns talking about their pasts or their problems, I want to see them solving their problems through action. My recommendation would've been for the author to focus on the psychiatrist as she treats a patient who claims they were attacked by a boogeyman who's Still Out There. Allowing the reader to question whether the patient is sane or nuts would've generated suspense, which this draft does not have. It's ideas, not a finished book, and one I can't recommend. Who thinks that It would've been better without Pennywise the Clown and with the Losers Club in therapy? I'm not a fan of the crazy long, crazy odd boat anchor by Stephen King, but did like the 2017 film a lot. More spooky than scary, the filmmakers did a fantastic job with the casting. I wanted to spend more time with the kids and even with the evil clown. Derry feels eerily real as well and we get to see a lot of it in the staging of various encounters with Pennywise. The screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman omits the weaker material from the book while adding new scenes that feel like King wrote them. [image] Length: 44,725 words ...more |
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1
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Sep 09, 2018
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Sep 10, 2018
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Apr 20, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1416596135
| 9781416596134
| 1416596135
| 3.16
| 3,389
| Sep 30, 2014
| Sep 30, 2014
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it was ok
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Consumed is the debut novel by filmmaker David Cronenberg, whose body of work includes such landmark films as Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The
Consumed is the debut novel by filmmaker David Cronenberg, whose body of work includes such landmark films as Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. This novel, published in 2014, might satisfy fans of the Canadian director, those who thrill at bizarre, often gruesome studies of mutation and the fusion of biology with technology. I found it as sterile and nauseating as watching a surgery and seeing more than I wanted to. It's less of a novel than it is a bad dream brought on by spicy foods. The story concerns Information Age freelancers Naomi Seberg and Nathan Math, who practice yellow journalism at its most sensational. Naomi's specialty is crime. Nathan's is medicine. Professional partners as well as sexual, the couple are obsessed with buying discounted consumer electronics and camera equipment in airports. We meet them as Nathan phones Naomi from Budapest, where he's missing a 1055mm macro lens he needs for a story on a black market organ clinic. Naomi, who borrowed the lens, is in Paris, where she's meeting a clandestine contact for information on a grisly murder rocking the news. The victim is Célestine Moreau Arosteguy, a sixty-two year old French philosopher and national treasure along with her husband, sixty-seven year old philosopher Aristide Arosteguy. Célestine's remains were found in the couple's apartment and cannibalism is believed to be involved. Arosteguy left France for a lecture tour of Japan three days before his wife was found. His location remains unknown. Naomi's contact is a French bad boy named Hervé Blomqvist, one of Célestine's former students and lovers. Stripping for Naomi to model his peculiarly bent male anatomy, she refuses to sleep with him, but does allow Hervé to put her in touch with someone in Japan who can get her to see Arosteguy. In Budapest, Nathan observes a rogue surgeon preparing a multiple lumpectomy on a Slovenian patient named Dunja, whose breast cancer is being radically treated by radioactive pellets. Following the procedure, neither Dunja's sex drive or Nathan's morality prevent them from engaging in unsafe sex, with the patient confident that Nathan's fetish for disease makes her desirable to him. Meeting Naomi in Amsterdam, Nathan's mind drifts into fantasies of Célestine Arosteguy and eating Naomi's breast. She takes some photos of his penis with her iPhone and departs for Japan. Nathan receives a call from Dunja notifying him that she's tested positive for an STD she calls Roiphe's Disease. En route to Japan, Naomi receives a call from Nathan, who's in Toronto with a new story. His subject is Dr. Barry Roiphe, who diagnosed the STD bearing his name in the '60s and faded into obscurity after it was (supposedly) eradicated. Nathan mentions that he's probably contracted Roiphe's and given it to Naomi. Her anger with Nathan as well as her attraction to "Ari" prompts Naomi to surrender to his seductions and move in with the man who may or may not have eaten his wife. Nathan accepts an offer from Dr. Roiphe to move in with him and his beguiling daughter Chase, who was a student of Arosteguy's. Nathan and Naomi learn their stories are part of one big story. Keywords for Consumed include: -- Marxism -- Cannibalism -- 3-D printing -- Venereal disease transmittal -- Cannes Film Festival -- North Korea -- Nikon products -- Apotemnophilia (sexual attraction to amputees) -- Noodles and shrimp (Japanese cuisine) -- Misshapen penises I'd like to be a David Cronenberg fan. I gave it another shot here. I want to be able to say that Dead Ringers is a grossly overlooked film. I'd like to be able to report that I watched Rabid and dug it. It's not only that Consumed is quite often bizarre and occasionally sick, but worse, it's boring. There's a clinical aloofness and tech obsession to it that I'd expect from a nutritionist, or maybe a navigation app, but when it comes to movies or books, that's really not my thing. I want a narrative where each scene resonates emotionally with the last and the sum of those scenes make me think or feel something I hadn't before. There's a catastrophic info dump in this novel, pages 176-233, where Cronenberg shifts the narration to Arosteguy as this character tells Naomi whether he killed his wife. And it absolutely kills the book. Arosteguy tells us about Cannes, tells us about insect religion, tells us about North Korean agents and talks about intellectuals with diseased minds and access to too much Internet. The telling goes on and on and on and you know what: If Marvin the Martian is watching Earth and examining human beings who in any way resemble David Cronenberg characters, he's right, we don't deserve to survive. Blow me up. Put me out of my misery. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 30, 2016
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Sep 2016
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Jan 18, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0544340116
| 9780544340114
| 0544340116
| 3.72
| 5,365
| Aug 05, 2013
| Jan 06, 2015
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really liked it
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Vivian Apple at the End of the World is a breezy apocalyptic read that I appreciated, but came up short of loving. Published in 2014, the novel focuse
Vivian Apple at the End of the World is a breezy apocalyptic read that I appreciated, but came up short of loving. Published in 2014, the novel focuses on a model seventeen-year-old who not only watches freakish weather and economic recession rampage across the U.S., but witnesses the rise of the Church of America, whose half-baked gospels instruct an alarming number of Believers how to be raptured into heaven on Judgment Day, while all others will be set on the road to damnation. When her parents appear to be taken up by God and the apocalypse is at hand, she's left to fend for herself. The author succeeds at hitting all the right notes, but the tune itself never grabbed me. Opening in Pittsburgh (in a refreshing change of pace from cities glamorized on TV), honors student Vivian Apple is introduced at a party thrown by her best friend of late, the wild Harpreet Janda. The girls have been become inseparable Non-Believers as one calamity after another--an earthquake in Chicago, a terrorist bombing at a Yankees game, the extinction of the U.S. bee population--have led to the rise of Beaton Frick, a wingnut from (where else?) Florida who claims to have spoken to Jesus at Starbuck's. Frick's business scheme, the Church of America, has grown massively popular as national crisis deepens, hopelessness surges and its forecast for Rapture Day grows nigh. While Vivian and Harp have rejected the Book of Frick and the Believer parents who've attempted to convert them, the party host implores her friend to live like the world is ending and chat up a cute boy. Quiet and intense, Peter Ivey is in the mood for a conversation, which Vivian is sure she's failed at when he excuses himself. Vivian's social ineptitude is nothing compared to her shock the next morning to find that her parents have disappeared, leaving behind two holes in the ceiling. She's joined by Harp and her brother Raj, Raj's boyfriend Dylan and Dylan's seven-year-old sister Molly, all apparently orphaned after roughly three thousand Believers in the U.S. vanish at once. I help make Molly a fort out of couch cushions and pillows; I throw open the kitchen cabinets and laugh when my friends' mouths fall open at my hoard. The food is all Church of America brand; in addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multi-million dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these--bottles of Holy Spring Water, a bland SpaghettiOs knockoff called Christ Loops. For a long time I took a moral stand by not consuming them but now the Rapture has come and I'm starving. We eat cold Christ Loops out of the can, even though the electricity still works, for now. Though her high school has been mostly empty her junior year (public education derided by the Church of America as "harbingers of secular terrorism"), Vivian walks to class on Monday with a sledgehammer over her shoulder for self-defense. Remaining students have filled the classroom of her history teacher Ms. Wambaugh, but the last adult in Vivian's world and her peers offer little more than progressive platitudes for rebuilding society with no plan of action. Harp always has a plan but before the girls can formulate one, Vivian's sophisticated maternal grandparents arrive to take custody and return with her to New York. In the Big Apple, Vivian is quarantined in her grandparents' apartment in Central Park West. Electricity is out, the university where her grandfather teaches has been closed and on the streets, a youth movement calling itself the New Orphans rails against Frick. Her grandparents remain in denial but as a massive hurricane heads for the Eastern Seaboard, Vivian decides to steal their car and return to Pittsburgh. Before she initiates her first act of rebellion, the house phone rings in from a caller in San Francisco. No one speaks when Vivian answers, but she is left with the feeling that her mother was on the other end of the line. Vivian ventures to Lawrenceville where Raj and Dylan lived to find Harp, drunk. She reports that a mob of young men lured Raj and Dylan to a football field, shot Raj and returned his body for them to bury. Dylan took Molly to New Jersey while Harp remained to be scorned by a second wave of Believers who feel their entrance to heaven hinges on punishing the sinners. Harp has contacts in the New Orphans and takes Vivian to meet their communications director, Peter Ivey, the boy who Vivian embarrassed herself with at the Rapture Eve party. Vivian shares her California phone call and Peter reveals that Frick might have a secret compound there, where the "Raptured" could be hiding. Vivian, Harp and Peter hit the road to find out. Their first stop is the holy site of Mount Rushmore. The Book of Frick claims that in the late 1970s Jesus personally appeared to Frick in a powder-blue Chrysler convertible that had the power to travel instantly through space and time. Jesus used the vehicle to usher Frick to seven different spots in the United States that were personally blessed by God for one reason or another and at which Believers and Non-Believers alike could expect to find redemption. The list includes everywhere you'd think it would: the Grand Canyon, the Pentagon, Wall Street ("For God saw that Americans were industrious and made money in His name, and he saw that it was good.") It's one of the many parts of the Book of Frick that make you wonder whether or not Frick was just straight-up on 'shrooms when he was writing it; make that accusation to a Believer, however, as I did to my parents in their mission to convert me, and they will whine that "it's only a metaphor!" and imply that your inability to grasp nuance is a large part of what ensures your eternal damnation. Katie Coyle strikes a clinically precise balance between lighter and darker elements in Vivian Apple at the End of the World. Her frequent references to the Book of Frick are droll, but her exploration of how religious gospels interpreted at their most literal extreme are the antithesis of humanity are potent. There is violence and terror in the story, but they remain mostly in the background rather than imperiling the characters. The same could be said of the novel's sex, drug and alcohol content, which Coyle suggests that Harp partakes in and does exist in the world of her teenagers without being described graphically. Coyle recognizes that readers of Young Adult fiction tend to be open to the truth and the author takes advantage of it. Her running satire on the cult-like aspects of a religion are admirable, as well as very creative. She even creates new vocabulary words: "Magadalene" being parlance for the indoctrination of a Non-Believer female by a wholesome Believer male, with Harp considered vulnerable to considering her fetish for clean-cut boys. The writing is creative and the characters endearing, but it never grabbed me by the collar and threw me across the room the way a great apocalyptic novel would. It hits all the right notes as a satire, but I didn't believe it. What kept me from being engaged with the doomsday scenario Coyle conjures up are the pages that lapse into melodrama. Vivian has at least one heart to heart meltdown with each character and each of those characters has an emotional breakdown with Vivian or someone else, grinding the story to a halt while people talk it out. There's too much talking about the end rather than showing how the characters plan to survive it. Theatrics are a recurring feature of this genre but it's one that holds the novel between three or four stars rather than between four or five. It's a very well written novel, but one I thought more about that felt. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 27, 2017
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Dec 03, 2017
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Jan 03, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316216828
| 9780316216821
| 0316216828
| 3.59
| 23,332
| Jul 31, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
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it was ok
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If I'm ever asked, "Name an otherwise sane novel that went completely bug fuck nuts for you in the end," I can now answer, Broken Monsters by Lauren B
If I'm ever asked, "Name an otherwise sane novel that went completely bug fuck nuts for you in the end," I can now answer, Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes. I do not want to write a bad review of this book. I can put it off for a while because for 374 pages, this is a terrific police procedural and thriller, with well-drawn characters, solid dialogue and strong atmosphere. Published in 2014 on the heels of The Shining Girls, Beukes cuts glass with her research once again. The acknowledgments read like an expert witness list for a major criminal case. Broken Monsters gets off to a bang with Beukes introducing her major characters in unusual, intricately examined settings: -- Gabriella Versado, "Gabi," is a veteran DPD detective and a divorced mother of one teenage girl. She doesn't give nearly enough attention to her daughter Layla because she spends all her time on the job, investigating things like the body of a 14-year-old black male discovered in an alley, his torso cut in two and his upper trunk glued to the hind legs of a fawn. -- Jonno Haim is a recent transplant in Detroit, a freelance journalist who sabotaged his career and his love life in New York and is looking to renew himself in a city of industrial ruin. He ends up in the bed of a braided DJ named Jen Q he meets at a party and believes this could be love. Using his new girlfriend's connections in the Detroit arts scene, Jonno launches a news service. -- Thomas Keen "TK," is a homeless vagrant with a hundred different hustles to stay alive, one being to enter foreclosed homes or businesses and salvage all he can for cash. Convicted of first degree murder in the shooting of the man who beat and killed his mother, TK never adjusted to life on the outside, but working with a local shelter, is trying to do the right thing. -- Layla Versado reads Shakespeare for fun and is a self-described colossal dork. Active in theater arts, the teen spends most of her time with her best friend Cassandra, a cool white girl new in town who actively rejects the popular kids in school for Layla's friendship. Layla's relationship with her father, an ex-cop turned private security consultant in Atlanta, has turned brittle. -- Clayton Broom is an artist working manual labor jobs when his work isn't selling. Age 53, work isn't as easy to come by any more and Clayton fixates on a woman he spent one night with named Louanne, who's returned to Michigan and is living out of her car. The two-year-old traveling with her is likely Clayton's son. After two weeks, he's able to track them down to a Wal-Mart parking lot in Traverse City. In the first of several touches I really liked, Beukes gives each chapter a title. Bambi. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. The Detective's Daughter. The choice of Detroit as a setting feels unique and Beukes wisely channels the local antipathy for hip outsiders drawn by a desire for "ruin porn" or rumination of the failed America into a New Yorker who shows up and falls for all those cliches initially. The story unfolds like a police procedural, with an emphasis on character. Gabi takes lead investigator on that bizarre homicide her team code names "Faline," after Bambi's girlfriend. Gabi's colleagues are sharply drawn in a way that indicates Beukes spent more time around real cops than movie cops. The choices reminded me a lot of Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, with Beukes just as interested if not more interested in the lives of her characters outside their relationship with the serial killer. Beukes seems to know serial killers frontwards and backwards and can write killer descriptions too, screenwriter's descriptions. These propel the story forward at all times and made it come alive in my imagination: Luke Stricker looks even more brutish since he shaved his head, the kind of guy you would expect to be on the other side of the handcuffs. It complicates matters having him on this, but he's one of the most competent cops on the force. And competence is very attractive. Especially now. Beukes is able to jump into different characters with quite a bit of skill. A detective and single mom. A petulant teenager who can't live without her phone. A homeless ex-con. A male artist losing his grip on reality. A writer looking to reinvent himself. The serial killer stuff is okay, not on the level of Hannibal Lecter, but I didn't mind because the characters were so well defined and I was invested in them. Beukes finds an ingenious way to crash her detective, detective's daughter, tabloid journalist, homeless ex-con and artist into each other. I was on my way to becoming a fan of this author, signing up for her mailing list and everything. And then ... Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the donkey they rode in on. In the last sixty pages, Beukes completely switches gears, starts writing a different novel and the chain flies off the bike. I've yet to encounter a climax that fails as monumentally as the one in this book does. Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist comes to mind, but that unraveled into an incoherent mess early, at 60 pages. Here, Beukes aced 374 pages before collapsing. I will reveal why for the curious: The police procedural turns into (view spoiler)[a rejected spec for The X-Files, with the serial killer transcending space and time to lure the characters into waking nightmares, like Solaris on LSD. The killer, for reasons unexplained, seems to have been possessed by some entity or force that gives him supernatural powers, like making crows burst through the body of Jonno's girlfriend. (hide spoiler)] This switch in gears is completely unannounced. There are no seances, no indication that the serial killer we're dealing with is Doctor Strange. No doors are opened into the world of the unexplained. Beukes grounds the story in reality but like her killer, splices something foreign onto the hind quarters. I'm at a loss to explain how this book was allowed to go to galleys with the ending that it has. The Shining Girls dealt with magical realism, so perhaps there was pressure to couch the follow-up in the same sub-genre. This novel deserves a recall. Pull it from shelves and rewrite the last 60 pages in a sane manner, please, one that honors and respects the characters and the world the author built. I'll revise my rating accordingly. Until then, I have to slap this book with the lowest rating I can for one I finished. What a major disappointment. ...more |
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1
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Oct 17, 2015
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Oct 22, 2015
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Nov 28, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 184866415X
| 9781848664159
| 184866415X
| 3.76
| 17,445
| Jul 03, 2014
| Jul 03, 2014
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it was ok
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There's a good book buried deep in Only Ever Yours, a debut novel by Irish author Louise O'Neill published in 2014. Set in a Euro-Zone where ecologica
There's a good book buried deep in Only Ever Yours, a debut novel by Irish author Louise O'Neill published in 2014. Set in a Euro-Zone where ecological catastrophe has reset human civilization into a patriarchy, where women are genetically engineered and socially conditioned to serve men upon graduation from an all-girls finishing school at the age of 17, the book caters heavily to Young Adult readers. Where its target demographic might find this relatable, eerie and thought provoking, I found it repetitive, unimaginative and dull. I plowed through to see what O'Neill's idea of a worst case scenario for humanity would look like, and was hugely disappointed. The novel is the first-person account of frieda, a sixteen-year-old "eve" we're introduced to ten months before something called the Ceremony is to take place at School (the novel's capitalization schemes are tiresome, with all the female characters' names printed in lower case). frieda is best friends with isabel, who has been ranked #1 in their class for 12 years on the basis of votes her foto garners by the men of the Euro-Zone. frieda was recently #3, but as their final year begins, she finds herself unable to sleep, increasingly addicted to the SleepSound medication doled out by the Chastities, the nun-type instructors who run the school. Her restlessness drops frieda's ranking to #5 while isabel has become so withdrawn she drops out of the top ten altogether. The top ten are destined to be Companions, wives and male-bearing mothers for the Inheritants, the top ten most eligible Euro-Zone bachelors their age who will select their eves in a draft process during the Ceremony. The other eves will become Concubines or Chastities. frieda is unable to get through to isabel, who would normally be at risk of being sent to the Underground for disciplinary action due to her weight gain, but who seems to be under protection of the chastities. To survive, frieda becomes friends with the new top eve, megan, a mean girl set to go #1 at the Ceremony at all costs. When megan is annoyed, her already irritating fake Americas-Zone accent takes on a nasal quality. Unfortunately megan gets annoyed a lot. Mainly at mealtimes. I have a theory that she views her need for food as her only flaw. 'I'm sick of eggies. They're disgusting. Why isn't there any other lo-carb option available?' she argues with the buffet, as if it could talk back. liz and jessie are murmuring encouragement, ignoring the line of hungry girls behind them waiting to be served. 'I'm starving,' a tiny girl in front of me whispers to her friend. She's about four feet tall, waist-length butterscotch hair tied neatly at the nape of her neck with a cerise ribbon, skinny elbows poking out of a cerise-and-navy striped polo dress. 'I'm sorry, did you say something?' megan spins around and places her hands on her knees, bending until she is eye level with the younger girl. 'What's your name then?' There are ominous signs throughout the novel that things will not end well for the eves, even the ones chosen as Companions and even the girl who goes #1 in the Ceremony. The top-seeded Inheritant named Darwin later visits School and proves quite the dreamboat, the six-pack racked son of the Euro-Zone judge who also seems to be nice in a non-rapist, non-glutton way. To megan's displeasure, Darwin becomes fixated on frieda, who gradually draws information out of her future husband, like the fact that homosexuals have been marked as enemies of the state. frieda keeps her confidence with Darwin until megan manipulates her into betraying it, threatening her future. Only Ever Yours has three major flaws, all of them critical: 1. A novelist unable or unwilling to muster one description or one line of dialogue that forces me to stop reading and scribble it down has failed somewhere, in my opinion. I read fiction to feel something I hadn't when I opened the book or think about things that hadn't occurred to me before I started reading. I am just not the demographic for nice, effortless and non-threatening stories that reinforce emotions or thoughts I already held. O'Neill's inability to provoke me as a reader, to contort her language or surprise with her dialogue, was evident throughout. 2. The author doesn't know where to begin. By setting the novel within the confines of School it settles into monotonous repetition. Carbs, clothes and TV (O'Neill's conceptualization of the future can be summed up by the social media network the eves use: MyFace) are discussed ad nauseam. Seating arrangements in the cafeteria become as integral as duels in an Alexandre Dumas novel. This is all backstory mistaken as story. A story would've been an eve sold into a marriage in the Euro-Zone, stripped of her support network and immersed in the world for the first time in her life, where she searches for clues to her existence. It also would've corrected the third flaw ... 3. Here we have another Young Adult novel in which the mission for the heroine is to get a boy. frieda is shown to care for isabel very much and makes efforts to help her friend, but her primary goal is the personal validation that would come by manipulating the affections of Darwin. She expresses no thoughts the boy doesn't approve of, no opinions the boy can't give her and no self-worth she discovers on her own as a young woman. According to this novel, females need the protection of the cutest, most powerful male, and even though O'Neill ultimately hints that the reverse actually might've been true, the behavior championed here is co-dependent and sick. This novel was a gift from a friend who is a bookseller in Cork, Ireland. She not only resent me a copy when the first was lost in international mail, but gifted a copy to me signed by the author, which I value as a rare book regardless of how I felt about the material. This is a beautiful looking book printed and bound in Great Britain, with beguiling cover design by Nicola Theobald. I intend to make it a permanent addition to my library and plan on sending my copy of East of Eden purchased at the Steinbeck Institute to Cork. That is the only similarity the novels have in common, this being Young Adult fare that neither challenged or satisfied me in any way. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2016
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Nov 22, 2016
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Aug 17, 2014
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Paperback
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| 055341884X
| 9780553418842
| 055341884X
| 3.66
| 31,991
| Oct 06, 2014
| Oct 28, 2014
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it was amazing
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The Book of Strange New Things, the 2014 science fiction novel by Michel Faber, is one of those books that sealed me in a barrel, rolled me down a hil
The Book of Strange New Things, the 2014 science fiction novel by Michel Faber, is one of those books that sealed me in a barrel, rolled me down a hill, off a cliff, into rapids and over a waterfall. I feel dizzy having just been let out of the barrel by the author. Faber jettisoned me across the galaxy to an alien planet but instead of painstakingly building a new world, relocated me to one where the more things change, the more they stay the same. Instead of describing fantastic creatures, intricate politics or elaborate technology, the book is restrained, enigmatic and pure. The story begins with a couple in their mid-thirties en route to Hethrow Airport. Peter Leigh is a pastor. His wife Beatrice is accompanying him on the beginning of a Christian mission sponsored by a corporation they refer to as USIC. Peter passes a hitchhiker and wants to give him a lift, but Beatrice implores her husband to pull off the road to make love to her in the backseat. Peter does his best to make his wife happy but begins to realize the two of them are on different pages and dwells on his sexual performance under the conditions. His mind on the journey ahead, he has no preconceived notions of what awaits him, though Beatrice shares her vision of how his mission will begin: "I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake. It's night and the sky is full of stars. On the water, there's hundreds of small fishing boats, bobbing up and down. Each boat has at least one person in it, some have three or four, but I can't see any of them properly, it's too dark. None of the boats are going anywhere, they've all dropped anchor, because everyone is listening. The air is so calm you don't even have to shout. Your voice just carries over the water." Peter stops in Florida and has one last conversation with Beatrice through a garbled cellular phone. The reader is given a narrow aperture by which to view the world of the future: Peter is bound for another planet to spread the gospel to the natives. USIC has purchased Cape Canaveral. The corporation subjects its job candidates to a rigorous psychological screening. Peter recalls his interview in a London hotel, where a petite American and her team of interrogators pelted him with questions. While Peter passed his interview and was awarded the mission, Beatrice, who'd hoped to join her husband, failed. She remains in England with their cat. He promises to write her every day. Recovering from the hallucinogenic effects of the Jump, Peter tours the USIC base on a planet christened Oasis. His contact is pharmacist Alex Grainger, a woman whose arms are covered with cutting scars from her youth. He's introduced to the climate, with humidity that transforms his denim into a soggy dish rag. Peter replaces his western clothes with an Arab dishdasha. Grainger, whose tasks include deliveries of medicine to the Oasan settlement in a trade for food, is no help with questions about the people, as Peter calls them. Aliens, she calls them, adding that they enjoy their privacy. Peter learns that the previous pastor, Kurtzburg, disappeared, and a linguist named Tartaglione later followed suit, but the Oasans have insisted on a Christian pastor with some urgency. The creature--the person--stood upright, but not tall. Five foot three, maybe five foot four. (Funny how those imperial measurements--inches, miles--stubbornly refused to be left behind.) Anyway, he, or she, was delicate. Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, an unassuming presence--not at all the fearsome figure Peter had prepared himself to confront. As foretold, a hood and monkish robes--made of a pastel-blue fabric disconcertingly like bathtowel--covered almost all of the body, its hems brushing the toes of soft leather boots. There was no swell of bosom, so Peter--unaware that this was flimsy evidence on which to base a judgment, but unwilling to clutter his brain with unwieldy repetitions of "he or she"--decided to think of the creature as male. Initially shocked that the Oasan's face resembles two fetuses, with no eyes, nose or mouth, Peter is elated that the envoy is hungry for the New Testament, which he/she/it refers to as The Book of Strange New Things. Returning to the USIC base, Peter notes that there are no soldiers, no law enforcement, no supervisors of any kind; the technicians simply work together to get the job done. Communicating with Beatrice through interstellar email referred to as the Shoot, Peter learns that a tsunami has wiped out the Maldives Islands and killed three million, but no one on the base seems concerned. There are no news broadcasts, only golden oldie tunes by the likes of Patsy Cline, Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby. On Grainger and Peter's next visit to the Oasan settlement, designated C-2, or referred to as "Freaktown," Grainger leaves Peter with his hosts for five days. He's greeted by seventy to eighty Oasans who serenade their new pastor with "Amazing Grace." His initial Oasan contact insists on being called "Jesus Lover One," and the rest of the flock a subsequent Jesus Lover number. Peter learns to distinguish his flock by the color of their robes; personalities or physical appearances are indistinguishable. He begins work on a translation of the New Testament which the Oasans can both recite and identify with easier. Health and diet slip his mind, as does his life on Earth. Beatrice's messages to her husband reveal a world spinning out of control--freak weather, economic collapse, food shortages, gang violence--and she confides that she's pregnant. Peter's replies become less frequent and shorter; he badly wants to return to the field. Grainger notices similarities in Peter's insular behavior with that of Kurtzburg and Tartaglione before they vanished. She reveals that (view spoiler)[USIC has screened its technicians to be calm, cool and collected--zombies--to make progress in building a suitable colony that Earth's super rich will be able to pay their way off of (hide spoiler)] but that she passionately wants to return to be with her family. Peter is confronted with a similar choice. I've been critical about science fiction or fantasy set on alien worlds, and with reason. I can see how this novel might not feature enough derring-do or interstellar titillation, depending on the reader's mood, but The Book of Strange New Things captivated me for several reasons: 1) Faber doesn't fall in love with his technological, cultural or political musings of the future. He doesn't detail how interstellar travel is possible. He never even mentions the year. In other words, he doesn't clutter the story with garnish. His vision of the future seems like the present in most respects. The same narrative economy holds true for Oasis. Faber doesn't spend pages describing how the planet was discovered. Aspects of the alien culture, as well as the culture of the USIC base, remain shrouded in mystery, with the right amount of information supplied at just the right time. 2) Stories about extraterrestrials tend to be gloriously dumb to me. This is okay for space opera like Star Trek, but stories reaching for plausibility fall apart once aliens start walking around and talking. This holds true for abduction reports, by the way, as well as science fiction. I can't imagine a conversation with an alien proceeding any differently than a conversation with a feral cat and most conversant ETs seem equally ridiculous. Faber gets around this by withholding information on the Oasans. The less revealed about the alien world, the less far-fetched it all seems. 3) Any novel that prompts me to stop every twenty pages to scribble down a nugget of wisdom or bit of wit is doing something right. I love books that reveal the secrets of life or make a clever observation on it and one with the title The Book of Strange New Things didn't disappoint me. Faber's handle on spirituality, matrimony and humanity are all appropriately thought provoking. His dialogue is spare but strong. His characters are enigmatic; they're souls I wanted to get to know better. 4) Atheism is a blinking red light in my life at the moment. I'm stopping and looking around. The more I hear Neil deGrasse Tyson speak, the more I want to roll past the blinking yellow light of agnosticism and ignore the religions of the world like billboards. While Faber didn't change my spiritual views, he did make me see missionaries in a new light. It occurs to me that many born again Christians--like Peter and Beatrice--were not always believers. They're not walking caricatures. These are wounded people whose recovery was made possible through indoctrination by the Gospel. 5) Another mark of a great novel: My sleep patterns were altered. Faber generates an intense amount of suspense through Beatrice's messages to her husband, which not only hint at a world falling apart, but a marriage falling apart. Again, we're only shown the tip of the iceberg. My imagination was left free to roam with what was really going on beneath the surface, and before I could allow myself to nod off, I had to know how Peter and Beatrice's story would end. This is what I want in a science fiction novel, not techno gimmicks so much, but a story. This is a hell of a story and one of my new favorite novels. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2016
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Jul 16, 2016
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Jun 30, 2014
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Hardcover
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