four stars ONLY because my way of doing things is to pit an author's books against each other, and Betty was a perfect book, so all others must bow tofour stars ONLY because my way of doing things is to pit an author's books against each other, and Betty was a perfect book, so all others must bow to it.
i really want to review this one, let's see if time and broken-brain allow that to happen....more
Privilege and tragedy. The perfect storm for any adolescent.
this is a big messy jewish-american family saga in which a couple is broughNOW AVAILABLE!!
Privilege and tragedy. The perfect storm for any adolescent.
this is a big messy jewish-american family saga in which a couple is brought together by tragedy, their triplets are brought into existence by science, and the five of them spin off into their own separate orbits before being brought back together by another tragedy, and the efforts of another science-birthed sibling.
the whole dysfunctional dramedy of the oppenheimer family is rooted in the sour soil of grief and guilt, with johanna first meeting future husband salo at his fiancée's funeral. twenty-year-old salo had been driving a jeep that crashed—killing two of his three passengers—and leaving him numb and "tumbling." meeting him again several years later at a wedding, johanna finds herself drawn to him and becomes determined to absorb all of his damage.
From this moment forward it was all going to be about our father, and the great purpose of her life would be to love him enough to relieve him of his great burden, and to free him from that one, terrible shard of time in which he was so unfairly trapped, and to salve at last that wound of his, that one that wouldn't heal.
for his part, salo shrugs into the relationship with no illusions, but also no great passion
But she knew what he'd done, and she was here anyway. Something inside him slipped into place: not love, not a sudden recognition of his own terrible loneliness, not even desire. Only he thought, looking at her, noting the obvious nervousness as she spoke and understanding that she wanted, for some unfathomable reason, his good opinion: Why not? Here was a pretty, amiable girl who seemed to have decided, apparently on the spot, that the redress of his great personal tragedy—for the record, not his own cosmic view of the matter—ought to be her purpose in life, or at least its priority.
Why not? is not the most promising beginning to a love story, but the two of them get along well enough and begin married life in quiet prosperity. salo finds more comfort in art than in other people, and he uses his considerable family wealth and unerring eye for emerging talent to amass a private collection that will continue to appreciate in value over the years. meanwhile johanna longs for a family to cement her distracted, emotionally unavailable husband more firmly into her life.
she struggles to get pregnant for years, consulting with fertility doctors and undergoing numerous unsuccessful procedures on her soul-crushing "infertility journey." in what is to be their final attempt, three fertilized eggs are implanted into johanna's womb while the final egg is frozen for the likelihood of a surrogate. but against all expectations, all three embryos "take" and johanna becomes pregnant with triplets.
as arduous a process as it was to bring her children into the world, their conception turns out to be the easiest part of achieving johanna's dream of the big happy oppenheimer family, and the time that harrison, lewyn, and sally spent together in utero is the end of their closeness. the triplets don't have any use for each other, and salo spends more and more time acquiring and admiring his art collection in its temperature-controlled brooklyn warehouse while johanna waits in vain "for the magical creative synergy of her happy children to fill the house."
she clings to her dreams of familial bliss, but their home life is nothing more than a collection of individuals quietly pursuing their own interests and her children have nothing but antipathy for each other.
The three of them might rise but they simply declined to converge, even if they happened to actually share some interest or preference...To call them individually, in their distinct ways, "quiet" or "self-reliant," for example, was to ignore the fact that Sally isolated herself to feel annoyed, Lewyn to feel wounded, and Harrison simply to escape the other two. So powerful was the force of their mutual aversion, and so ironic, given they had never actually been apart, that you might even have said it was the single thing they actually did share.
wanting domestic harmony is not enough to make it so; every unhappy oppenheimer is unhappy in their own way, and ultimately johanna understands that nothing she has done has saved herself or salo.
Finally, finally, the tiniest pinprick of reality came through the force field of her stubborn delusion, presenting Johanna with the first filament of an idea that it had all been a failure. They were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. They were five humans cohabiting. They were not, and never had been, a family.
as her children prepare to head off to college, johanna discovers a shocking secret about her husband, and—faced with an empty nest of unfulfilled hopes and purposelessness, she makes arrangements to use a surrogate and her long-frozen embryo to bring phoebe into the world, quadruplets separated by seventeen years.
what follows is a slow-burning story of a fragmented family unspooling through the triplets' college-years misadventures; three blood relations forging their own individual paths through the found families of mentors, friends, and love interests; trying on identities, shaping their values and seeking their purpose. although they have been blessed with every financial opportunity, they are nonetheless lonely and drifting; seeking connection, trying to grow into themselves untethered by the bonds of a family divided by petty jealousy, betrayal, and widely diverging sociopolitical worldviews.
but then there's phoebe, determined to wrangle them all back together.
it's a big satisfying chonk of a book full of all the good family drama stuff like infidelity, secrets, and inheritance, and it's dripping with juicy back- and side-stories where maladjusted and variously-unlikeable characters are forced to consider the world beyond their own privilege and education in matters of religion, sexuality, race, and ideologies. and chickens.
everything circles back tidily and somewhat conveniently, and although it's centered around broken, yearning people, it's not a disillusionment bleakfest and it is often very funny.
my only complaint is that, once the triplets leave home, johanna doesn't factor much into the story; she's central-but-absent from the narrative and their lives overall, which was disappointing to me, since she's the most proactive and interesting character. her stubbornness, sacrifice, and suffering are the catalyst for so many important plot points, and her choices have such profound consequences that it was a shame to lose access to her inner life so early into the book.
it's kind of a perfect summer-book-club-book, so if you have one of those, give it a whirl.
looking at the cover of this book, you might think, as i did, that this was going to be another domestic thriller/psych suspense-y kind NOW AVAILABLE!
looking at the cover of this book, you might think, as i did, that this was going to be another domestic thriller/psych suspense-y kind of thing, but this is something entirely different. there is a mystery at the center of the story, but it takes a backseat to a more robust, multilayered character-driven story centered around motherhood, marriage, and the secretive inner lives and desires of women.
it's the story of dolores (lore) rivera and cassie bowman; two women whose lives intersect when cassie—a true crime blogger with journalistic aspirations, discovers a juicy subject in lore—a woman whose secret polygamy was exposed decades earlier when one of her husbands was incarcerated for murdering the other.
people who lead double lives are inherently fascinating, and the first and most obvious question is always "how did they get away with it?" in lore's case, the mechanics of how she managed to keep her marital-double-dipping a secret is the least interesting part, although the way she maintains the precarious jenga-balance of her secrets is fascinating to watch unfold:
She hasn't yet told him an outright lie...and she doesn't want to start. Once she does, she sees how the lies will build, brick after brick into a fortress designed to protect, but protection means separation, means they will never be as close as he thinks or she wants, and one mistake, one misremembered detail, will be enough to take down the whole thing, burying them both beneath its rubble.
the real hook here is the novelty of a woman carrying on two separate lives, because the world is a little less forgiving towards women—towards mothers—trying to have it all:
Sometimes it still shocked me, the way Lore didn't seem to see what she'd done as unforgivable in the eyes of those she'd hurt. How did she learn to judge herself so gently in a world that taught women to nail themselves to the cross for any tiny infraction?
i know, right?
lore eventually agrees to be interviewed by cassie, against the wishes of her family, with the stipulation that she won't talk about the night of andres' murder. lore's story unfolds in a series of flashbacks of her past and what drove her to risk her happy life in texas with fabian and their twin sons gabriel and mateo by marrying andres in mexico.
during the course of these interviews, lore and cassie's relationship develops into a familiar quid pro quo dynamic; lore becoming a sort of lady-lechter forcing cassie to excavate and take a hard look at the shame she's been marinating in over the secrets of her own past—her alcoholic father, the death of her mother, and the brother she left behind—and both women are profoundly affected by the emotional clarity that comes from revisiting their life's most painful choices.
lore proves to be a somewhat unreliable narrator, giving cassie a version of the truth while holding on to some of her secrets. however, cassie is a highly motivated amateur sleuth, hoping this story will kickstart her journalistic career, and once she susses out the whole truth behind andres' death, she is faced with a difficult choice that makes her reevaluate her own long-held beliefs about her chosen profession.
When it's done right, true crime tells us who we are, who we should fear, who we are always in danger of becoming. Under a careful investigative eye, someone opaque briefly becomes transparent. Even if what's revealed is ugly, it's true. And nothing is more beautiful than the truth.
like so many books seem to be nowadays, the reader (and cassie) are invited to consider the sticky nature of our fixation with true crime as entertainment, commodifying other people’s secrets and blanketing epicaricacy-nosiness under the noble banner of truth.
and there’s the looming "there-but-for-the" of:
...someone who had killed under a set of specific circumstances. And couldn't that be true for most of us? If true crime had taught me anything, it's that if we never see that version of ourselves, it's only because we're lucky.
so it's basically two excellent character-studies smooshed together in a story of sacrifice and secrets, perspective and the justification for tiptoeing that fine line between selfishness and self-preservation.
lore is a deliciously complex paradox of a character—she loved her family, but felt that, given a different set of circumstances, she could have become a different kind of woman—she needed two separate lives to become the best version of herself. lore's was an extreme, unconventional form of personal growth—happy with her life, but inquiring what else what else
...it wasn't the recession or loneliness that brought her here. It wasn't that she no longer loved Fabian or wanted their marriage to end. It was a different kind of yearning. A nameless suspicion that there was more to herself than she'd ever accessed, and only by falling in love could she discover it, for only then do we become new to ourselves again.
instead of getting a room of her own she got a whole 'nother husband, and she felt she became a fuller person enriched by both of her lives.
...perhaps not every affair is about lack in the primary relationship; perhaps some are about a complement. Perhaps multiple relationships can illuminate different parts of the self, like a prism turned first this way, then that, toward the light. Perhaps to love and allow love from only one person at a time is to trap the self into a single, frozen version, and it's this that makes us look elsewhere.
however, there's always a price of a woman knowing herself, of wanting more than she has, and in her case, it was ruinous to both of her lives.
Lore had never been blameless to me. That was the point. She was so hungry to know her own heart she was willing to destroy those she loved most, including—paradoxically—her children.
this is a perfect summertime book—a richly descriptive slow-burning page-turner that delivers more to consider than the average suspense-genre novel. lore is a beautifully flawed character and cassie is a fine counterpoint to her larger-than-life personality. it is a spectacular debut full of deft insights that doesn't skimp on the rough fallout of domino-consequences.
i'll let lore play this review out with her musings on the cost of motherhood to a woman's sense of self:
Now the idea of more children is unthinkable. Lore lost herself in those early years with Gabriel and Mateo. If you'd asked her then what her favorite meal was, her favorite movie, her favorite hobby, she wouldn't have known. It was as if Lore—the person, the woman—had disappeared, consumed by Lore the mother. The idea of taking maternity leave again, molding her life around a baby's insatiable need while also making sure the cuates were fed and clean, their homework done, chauffeured on time to school and sports—and the house livable, groceries bought, bills paid, her marriage nurtured: quicksand. By the time she clawed her way out, she wouldn't recognize herself.
Motherhood is the thief you invite into your home.
this is the first book in a duology, and it certainly does the work of a first book in a duology:
1) setting up the who/what/why of the world: its histthis is the first book in a duology, and it certainly does the work of a first book in a duology:
1) setting up the who/what/why of the world: its history, key players, and whatever details specific to its makeup a reader will need to know.
2) preparing the reader for the second book's action.
it just...doesn't do much else. i rounded this 3.5 up because rory power is a local girl success story—RHODE ISLAND REPRESEEEENT!!! but for me, books in a series—whether long-running, trilogy, duology, whatever—should each contain a conclusive story before building up to the teaser-ending "coming soon" preview.
this one is really just setting the table for book two. something is certainly brought to an end, but we're not given much room for reflection before the second book's consequences come knocking, heralding what will certainly be an action-packed resolution.
In a Garden Burning Gold is a greek-inspired epic fantasy, in which a consortium of immortal-ish ruling families, each helmed by a monarchical representative called a Stratagiozi, control the innerworkings of the natural world: the tides, seasons, stars, the physical signs of aging; basically all the things affecting the lives and fates of regular mortal folks like us.
these powers are passed down through the bloodlines, like the generational wealth of the gods, and although ostensibly part of a federation with common goals, the families are all working their respective angles within this uneasy alliance, secretly making moves as they vie for power, territory, and influence over everyone else. it's stock epic fantasy, themed with political intrigue, magic, betrayal, and power grabs.
this story focuses on the argyros family of the country thyzakos, whose stratagiozi vasilis has four children: the twins alexandros (lexos) and rhea, and their younger siblings nitsos and chrysanthi. vasilis is a particularly powerful (and feared) ruler, because he controls death. rhea's powers are also connected to death: in her official role as Thyspira, she oversees the changing of the seasons by choosing a suitor from a selection offered up from each of the neighboring countries, wedding them, and killing them when it's time, say, to usher in spring. the chosen suitor's region enjoys some benefits for their sacrificial sons and daughters, so it's not completely barbaric, right? rhea's been doing this spouse-killing gig for centuries; her gift, her responsibility, and recently—her burden.
this is stock immortality predicament—their longevity distances them from the concerns of the mortals their actions affect; death is an abstract concept, and to rhea, taking a life has become casual, repetitious—she's rarely there to see the effect death has on the deceased's loved ones. still, it's beginning to take its toll on her, and in the aftermath of her most recent dead husband, who started developing feelings for her against all common sense, rhea's been having some moral qualms. and now it's time to get married again.
the novel's other POV character is rhea's twinsie lexos—and vasilis' second in command—a role that gives him a seat at the table but not much political power. both he and rhea, whose duties take her—briefly—to other countries, have seen more of the world than their younger siblings, but their lives are fairly constrained by maintaining the family's political power and protecting thyzakos from the other stratagiozi. all four children live in fear-love of their father, who is demanding and absolute, but his behavior is becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable, and an unstable person with his kind of power, well, we have seen—it can be concerning.
except for the details about how these families control the elements (many of which powers give rise to procedural questions in the readers' mind that have not been answered thus far), this is a pretty conventional piece of epic fantasy.
i'm not entirely sure why this title being marketed as adult, since her other books have all been YA and this one certainly reads like YA. the characters are centuries old, but their life-experience is limited, so they have the narrow, sheltered worldview and emotional range of adolescents, and it's ultimately a coming-of-age story about a younger generation pushing back against the power structures set in motion by their elders, paving the way for change, for progress.
this review is coming across negative, which is unfortunate, because i did enjoy the book, but if i'm being forced to consider it as 1) a standalone novel, and 2) an adult title, welp, i got some criticisms.
this would be a very good first half of a book. this would be a very good YA novel.
it's a straightforward narrative that doesn't ask much of the reader—and i am a reader, not some rigid writing 101 teacher, so i'm not gonna scrawl "show us, don't tell us" all over this, because in my opinion, telling is a perfectly valid way to write a story. there's a comfort in being carried and sometimes we just want to sit down and be told a story. this one carries—there's just one set of footprints in the sand, and even though it's not particularly challenging or unexpected, storywise, there are some standout scenes and really lovely descriptions.
i psyched myself out when i saw the massive list of names at the front:
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i slogged through the first 1/3 of the book, reading it in a very slow overcautious way to get my bearings, but once i got over that bullshit, this was actually very briskly paced. i'm intrigued to see where it's going, which seems to be "nowhere good," for team argyros, and i do hope chrysanthi gets to be more than just emotional furniture in book two.
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i have had an E-ARC of this since november and a physical ARC of it for a month, but with all of life's perfect storms, i've only been able to get to it now, five days before pub date. i hope to have it reviewed by then, because GRATITUDE, but there're always more storm clouds, aren't there?
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIXTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2020 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that's still a work-in-progress. however, because i don't have a lot of time to waste, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap 'em again.
i am doing my best. merry merry.
DECEMBER 24: PIGEONS - NIBEDITA SEN
it's christmas eeeeeve so i only have time to listen, and whaddya know—this story has TWINS and BIRDS so it's just like that other time jack skellington halloweened xmas and made it full of SHRIEKS and HORRORS!
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebrating by listeninSPOOKTOBER DAY ELEVEN
welcome to my spooktober audio advent calendar, where, each day during the month of spooktober, i will be celebrating by listening to a free audio short from nightfire's Come Join Us by the Fire series, and you can join ME by following the links. let's all be scared together!
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it's weird how things synch up sometimes. i am in the middle of reading Cuckoo Song, and i chose this story for my daily audio short and while they are not similar in any other way, both feature sisters experiencing a peculiar...porousness in an encounter with a movie screen because sometimes the darndest things do happen.
more sad than scary (although triggering my personal TWINFEAR), this is definitely eerie, and if it turned out that this was only a prelude to a longer story, i would be down to read the rest of it. it's intriguing, and i like my horror a little saddish, so bring it on!
val chesterfield is a renowned linguist whose crippling anxiety disorder has forced her to turn down numerous opportunities to study rarNOW AVAILABLE!
val chesterfield is a renowned linguist whose crippling anxiety disorder has forced her to turn down numerous opportunities to study rare languages in the field.
dead languages are her special passion, and her life is quiet, lonely—the act of translation satisfying the frisson of human connection that others derive from a more traditional social life.
I felt safest in my office, alone with my books, charts, runic symbols, and scraps of old text; and when I deciphered a chunk of language—even a word!—a thrill of understanding juddered up my spine. The distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased. It was as if someone were speaking to me, and me alone.
those who cannot travel, teach, and val's sent many students off on the scholarly linguistical indiana jones adventures she wishes she could pursue. she is finally coaxed out of her academia-swaddled comfort zone by wyatt speeks. the ornery climate researcher is requesting her expertise on a hush-hush project: a young girl's body was discovered frozen in a glacier off the coast of greenland, hundreds of miles from any known indigenous population. miraculously, she has been thawed out alive, but she is speaking a language no one can decipher.
the offer's secondary lure is that wyatt is the last person to have seen val's beloved twin brother andy alive before his inexplicable suicide five months earlier, and val's nonagenarian father—crankily installed in a nursing home with lung cancer, diabetes, and a grudge against andy's mentor wyatt—encourages her to buck up and go off to one of the world's most remote locations to find out what really happened to his favorite twin.
it's set in nuunyviak—an uninhabited island off the northwest coast of greenland—where val, wyatt, and the girl named sigrid wedge themselves into tiny buildings made insignificant against the massive nothingness of nature along with the mechanic/cook jeanne, and the married polar marine scientists nora and raj chandra-revard (who offset everyone else's gloomy loneliness with their chirp chirpy-love). val makes some progress in communicating with the girl, but the endeavor goes from "interesting academic pursuit" to "matter of great urgency" when sigrid starts getting sick and val can't figure out what sigrid is so desperately trying to get across in order to save her.
it's atmospherically superb—as claustrophobic inside the research facility as it is outside, although it's too slow-paced to be the thriller it claims to be. there's a pretty significant action sequence chonk at the end—so cold and harrowing, however, the story has a softer, more emotional texture than a typical thriller; containing themes of grief and healing, of forming a connection to the earth and to other people, of love, nature and vulnerability, and a leetle touch of magic.
there's also a lot of lovely, lovely language stuff
The word in Inuktitut for climate change translates to "a friend acting strangely"—what a personal and beautiful way of describing a relationship to the natural world.
but also a reminder about how bewilderingly complex language can be, flashing my dusty brain back to my ONE undergrad linguistics class:
I'd forgotten the complexity of West Greenlandic, which is a polysynthetic language, meaning the words are composed of multiple elements called morphemes, word parts that often created "sentence-words"—the longest of which is over 200 letters long. Nouns were inflected for one of eight cases and for possession. Eight moods as well as the number and gender of both the sentence's subject and object inflected every verb. Countless subdialects sprang like weeds. On top of this, most things had two names, the common one and the word used for outsiders—white people, called Qallunaat—to confuse them.
i mean, it's a wonder any of us can communicate with anyone anywhere anytime but it does make me feel better about writing such an inarticulate review.
the takeaway here is that i need to be sent off to the arctic circle in a tiny little hut so everyone will leave me alone and i can just get things done.
Something is happening and it's not what I thought.
that line sums up my experience with this book; hell, it sums up my experience with NOW AVAILABLE!!
Something is happening and it's not what I thought.
that line sums up my experience with this book; hell, it sums up my experience with catriona ward, after last year's The Last House on Needless Street:
Something is happening and it's not what I thought.
this is another elaborately-wrought story about which the less said the better, but in broad strokes, it's about a woman named rob who, yearning for a normal, unremarkable life after an...unconventional upbringing, has painstakingly created the home of her dreams; designing, renovating and decorating her safe little suburban nest, but her domestic life is in shambles—her marriage is almost theatrically toxic,* her eldest daughter callie is a death-obsessed and bullying daddy's girl, while sweet young annie is fragile and sickly.
rob seems extraordinarily passive; accepting irving's numerous infidelities, his violent rages and threats, studiously not-reacting to callie's sly insinuations with the calm patience of a saint, but you know what they say: still waters do not fuck around, and when rob finds callie's secret bone collection and has reason to suspect annie's bones might soon be added to that collection, she takes callie on a road trip to sundial; her childhood home deep in the mojave desert for some tough love, hard truths, and difficult choices.
and—oof. tough, hard, difficult, those words are understating the vibe, as rob sits callie down for the creepiest mother-daughter bonding session ever, sharing the story of her childhood growing up with her sister jack isolated from the world-at-large on sundial's sprawling compound, where their father falcon and stepmother mia were a pair of hippie scientists—if you can wrap your head around that juxtaposition—studying animal behavior by conducting research experiments on dogs. so many dogs.
that's enough to entice you, yes? because this one is a haunting slow-burning doozy that'll break your heart and give you goosebumps at the same damn time.
it's a credit to her writing that i was caught so off-guard by this one. after an extended period of "WTF is going on?," it's one twist after another, but i should have seen that first sucker-punch coming after reading The Last House on Needless Street and that's all i will say about that. shame on me, indeed.
it's another masterful, delicious striptease of a novel, and while it probably plays too rough for sensitive readers (so many dogs), it's a tremendously effective piece of psychological horror that, like The Last House on Needless Street, made me want to read it all over again immediately.
in conclusion:
Something is happening and it's not what I thought.
* this is some vicious marital sparring, boy:
"I'm going to wait," he said. "For when this fighting is over, and we're happy again. We'll go to French restaurants like we used to. We'll fall back in love. So deeply in love that it burns us to be apart. Then, one day—maybe we'll be having breakfast, maybe we'll be watching a movie. Something normal. But you'll look over to me to make a joke, ask a question, and I'll be gone. Then you'll look for Callie, and she'll be gone too. I'm going to leave you when you least expect it, and I'm taking her with me," He looms over me and plants a kiss on my forehead, light as a dry leaf. "I'm smarter than you," he said. "I've got endurance. I can wait long enough to make it really hurt." He picked up his glass of water from beside the night table and hurled it at the wall. The sound was like the world opening. Glass flew like diamonds. Irving smiled at me. Then he got into bed and a moment later he was asleep.
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when a glitchy thing happens six times in an ARC by a notoriously tricksy author, you have to wonder whether it's a recurring typo or if you're Miss.ing something.
i will wait and see
conclusion: typo. and a lot more than 6 times.
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dammit—i really wanted it to MEAN something. still—a badass-wonderful book.
perhaps you remember how—despite that cover, i wasn't crazy about For the Wolf, which promised dark-fantasy-riding-hood vibes only to baNOW AVAILABLE!
perhaps you remember how—despite that cover, i wasn't crazy about For the Wolf, which promised dark-fantasy-riding-hood vibes only to bait-and-switch a beauty-and-the-beast-romance on an unsuspecting me.
however, after all the trembling jaws and darkening eyes were dispensed with; after all the smooches were smooched, the book veered abruptly, ending on a darkish note for a darker character, which seemed to presage a more interesting (to me) second book.
SO, i went into this cautiously optimistic, hoping that maybe it was a 2 books/2 sisters/2 tones juxtaposition: where the first one was romancin' redarys and the follow-up would be necromancin' with neve; the "jagged thing" unlikely to waste any time on flirting and swooning and last seen in a location and situation unlikely to contain a flourishing romance plot.
but somehow there was MORE romance in this second book! so many couples, so much sighing and pining*, so many characters murmuring against each others' lips, where everyone's so overcome by emotion all the time that their voices are forever 'rough' and 'harsh' and 'bladed' and i'm already rolling my eyes at these recurring motifs and then we learn that magic is most efficiently transferred between people by kissing and—oh, brother, that's me realizing it ain't gonna go the way i'd hoped.
and that's on me, obviously. people who loved the first book will love this one. regular readers who aren't all bleh about romance themes and tropes and vocabulary will surely love it.
it's just not for me. it took me ages get through the thing because i just wasn't feeling it, and i'd reach for it during "designated reading time" and feel...unenthusiastic and reach for a crossword puzzle book instead. in fact, one day i read a cookbook on the subway home because i just couldn't face one more hitched-breath, emotion-suppressing standoff.
HOWEVER, i did finish it and i will say that neve is more appealing to me than her twinsie red, who was content to just drift along thru book one without doing anything or asking anything, dragging the reader along through hundreds of pages of easily-remedied ignorance. neve is far more proactive, and there was at least one time where i said "oh my god badass" out loud. because she was. super badass.
it's still a romance-fantasy, which is still not my thing, but i'm glad i gave it another shot, because despite all the stuff i find a little silly, the story makes more sense, there are more answers, and it's certainly darker and creepier than For the Wolf when it's not busy being distracted by someone's cheekbones.
*...speaking of pining, ...he tasted like cold, like the space between winter pine trees. this is where i dropped the book onto the floor and said "no he fucking didn't." and i apologize to the person i've promised this ARC to because now it's hella damaged.
All of them loved like burning, no thought for the ashes.
this is me, being thrown to the wolves.
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we know wolves are tricksy creatures—those bigAll of them loved like burning, no thought for the ashes.
this is me, being thrown to the wolves.
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we know wolves are tricksy creatures—those big baddies huffing and puffing and salivating in your granny's jammies, tucked in her bed and ready to wolf you down. we know what to expect from wolves, and so we avoid them. but even tricksier are the wolves in the sheep's clothing of deceptive cover design; the marketing campaigns who cry wolf dark fantasy, making you think you're gonna get a tooth-baring rework of little riding hood only to reveal it’s really beauty and the botanical-beast under that red cloak, all the better to deceive you with, my dears.
let's make one thing perfectly clear—this is not dark fantasy. this is romantic fantasy. and i do not like romantic fantasy.
this review will reflect my displeasure, but if YOU like romantic fantasy, you'll enjoy this book more than my review.
redarys (red for short) and her twin sister neverah (neve) have grown up knowing what fate has in store for them: neve, the firstborn, will eventually ascend to the throne, while red, as the second daughter, is destined ‘for the wolf,’ which means when she turns twenty and a special mark appears on her arm, she will be brought to the wilderwoods as an offering to the mysterious wolf, in the hopes that he will be so pleased with this sacrifice that he will release the five kings, who have been imprisoned within the wilderwood since olden times. it's all very shrouded in mystery, since it's been hundreds of years since a second daughter has existed to be sacrificed, and no one ever came back from the woods, daughters or kings or etc, but traditions are traditions and must be upheld.
from the synopsis, we know that nothing is as advertised:
But the legends lie. The Wolf is a man, not a monster. Her magic is a calling, not a curse. And if she doesn't learn how to use it, the monsters the gods have become will swallow the Wilderwood—and her world—whole.
and that’s all true, but what the synopsis doesn’t tell you is that the reason red doesn’t know how to use her magic is because the wolf, the man—eammon, as it happens—is not particularly forthcoming about explaining her role in any of this—the nature of her responsibilities or her purpose now that she's essentially trapped in the woods with him.
since she can't go back home, red drifts aimlessly through her days, occasionally assisting eammon in his efforts to maintain the balance of the wilderwoods, but in a limited capacity due to all the withheld information. there are other people living on this side of the woods, all equally perplexed by his decision to keep her from fulfilling her duty, and with nothing to do, the story gets dull and repetitive and obscure because eammon’s not giving her any guidance or agency, so it’s no wonder, really, that she spends most of her time just staring at his eyes and his throat and his hands, describing his features and mannerisms over and over, to the extent that while we don't understand the magic of the world or the importance of the kings, boy do we know how eammon's hair curls and how he smells. spoiler alert: he smells like a library. which, here, doesn't mean that he smells like the BO and dust of an actual library, but that he smells like paper. paper and coffee and the cinnamon smell of leaves, whatever that means.
meanwhile, we have neve's storyline back home, in which she is ALSO told “things are not how you thoooooought,” but given a THIRD explanation slash half-articulated course of action by a different cadre of agenda-concealing parties, whose actions are seesawing the balance away from whatever eammon's doing from inside the wilderwoods.
and it’s all too much. too much to keep straight, not knowing what’s true and what’s manipulation and what's the math on how many half-truths equal one reasonable explanation?
red's side of the story is boring. for at least two-thirds of the book she has no idea what she's doing; she'll stumble into something and it'll seem like a reasonable time for an explanation to be forthcoming, but then it will retreat back into meaningful looks and innuendo and careful not-telling and there's only so much snorting and sighing and amber eyes ringed with green a reader can take before wanting something a little more...substantive.
it has everything i don't like about romance—it's swollen with blasons repetitively inventorying every part of the love interest's physical self, and so much of it is exaggerated and cartoony, like everyone's afflicted with tardive dyskinesia: eyes are always widening, hands are always spasming, breathing is always ragged or hitching, voices are always hoarse, smiles are always quirked, brows are always arched, fingers are always crooking, backs are always arching, throats are always working—it's a goofy parade of twitching tics like nicolas cage at a wall street coke party in the 80s, and it's all so contrived and uninspired it bums me out.
actually, forget mr. cage—toss a pacifier and some adidas in the mix and this reads exactly like a couple leaving a rave at 6 am coming down offa their ecstasy high:
Still, Eammon paused next to her, a muscle feathering in his jaw, a swallow working down his throat. Pain carved lines beside his mouth and made his shoulders stiff—the roots knotted around his spine tightening, pulling him back toward the gloom of his forest. It might let him go, on its northern border, but it wouldn't let him forget where he belonged.
Her lip worked between her teeth.
it's hard for me to accept as a romantic figure some guy who won't give a girl a straight answer.
"I don't know if you're trying to protect me, or if you just don't want to bother telling me anything." Her hands curled and released, loose fists that held nothing. "But I can only help you as much as you let me, Eammon."
that is on page TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE. we are 165 pages from the end of the book and our heroine is still in the dark. every time we're close to getting an explanation of How This Works, it's buried in unnecessary, unearned sexual tension:
"In order to keep the Shadowlands from leaking through—in order to keep the wall strong—we have to put the sentinels back where they're supposed to be. When we heal them, they return to their place."
"So how do we heal them?"
"Directing magic to drive back the rot."
"Through touch, I assume." She didn't know why it came out so low, so hoarse.
Eammon's shoulders went rigid, his own answer graveled. "Yes."
okay, but what about them sentinels, though? so, sometimes they're healed by magic and sometimes by blood? can you speak more about these shadowlands and shadow-rot and kings and why you're all full of plants inside? we get that you're hot for each other and resisting it, but can we get a little more clarity about anything else? it's confusing and also unhygienic—the magic of keeping the evil at bay involves eammon and red cutting themselves; slicing their hands and grinding their lacerations in the dirt because magic, but what about the magic of infection? so much time is spent rhapsodizing over eammon's scarred hands and how their rough texture feels against red's softgirl skin, but maybe if you care about someone, you sacrifice your scar-fetish and offer them some antiseptic ointment or cream for their filthy bleeding wounds?
the romance is just...dumb. childish.
"I dug through the storerooms and found an old pair you can have. I left them by the fireplace." He glanced over his shoulder, brow quirked, then faced the tower again. "They won't fit, but that didn't stop you with my shirt."
"It was too cold to be naked."
He didn't turn, but his hand spasmed by his side, and he made a choked noise. Behind him, Red grinned.
it's hard to comprehend how this centuries-old being is completely undone by some cheesy flirtatious sass, yet he's always blushing and flushing and stammering, color flaring across his cheekbones &yadda.
i mean, the whole thing is basically a virginity metaphor—red is filled with this powerful dangerous magic (passion) that she doesn't understand, that she suppresses every time it tries to come out of her, lest it consume her and blah blah restraint until this man (eventually) shows her how to use it but oh no consequences and cannot-be's and yearning and blah.
and i could have overlooked a lot of this if the rest of the story was scary or dark or...lucid. it's really confusing; there are too many variables to this structure, too many conflicting mythologies underlying the wildwood, and it gets muddled as fuck.
that's another thing. there's fantasy-realm-specific swearwords, where characters cuss by saying, "kings" or "shadows," but they also say "fuck" and "shit," and sometimes combine them, i.e.: "Kings on shitting horses." it is so perplexing. what is this world???
having said all that, and complained so much, i am still likely to read the sequel, because the one-chapter teaser offered at the end of this book is focused on neve, whose situation at the end of this book is a much more compelling scenario than anything happening with red.
i didn't much like this one because my tastes are incompatible with the genre. i'm giving it a low-three because it's not the book's fault that i get impatient with romantic tropes and how much time is spent resisting and dillydallying before the inevitable romance-stuff occurs.
but i understand that the slow-burning 'will they or won't they?' tension is appealing to readers who crave the deliciously drawn out tease of a love story.
here's your self-test. do you like this, yes or no?
"It's far more complicated than that, Redarys." Eammon's eyes were stern. "Chasing the shadow-rot out of a person is dangerous. It takes more power than I have anymore—"
"But you aren't doing it alone." Red shook her head. "You don't have to do everything alone, Eammon."
His mouth was a tight line, hair shadowing his eyes. There was something waiting in the space between them, something vast and terrifying, but it narrowed down to this: the itch in her fingers to smooth along his jaw. The certainty that her palm would never feel right again unless it swept his hair off his forehead.
Red dropped her eyes; his were suddenly too much for her. "Let me help you, and we can help Bormain. We can at least speak with Valdrek about it."
He searched her face, lips slightly parted, as if looking for something he was both eager and terrified to find. Then he turned sharply, headed for the other side of the square. "Have it your way, Lady Wolf."
if yes, read this book! if no, read a different book! it's the easiest decision of all time!
i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned i've never read anything by sally hepworth before, although The Mother-in-Law has been recommended to me by several people. despite their impassioned "you need to read this!" beseechments, i never felt any urgency to pick it up. it seemed like it would probably be fine—middlebrow domestic suspense, maybe a decent twist, but there wasn't anything about it that struck me as special.
but hell, i've misjudged a book before.
if this hadn't shown up at my house in a box FAR too big to ignore, i probably wouldn't have picked this one up, either, but since i can be easily bought off with a trowel, i dug in (chortle), and i wound up having a great time with it! the mystery elements were fairly predictable*, but i absolutely loved fern, and there was much more depth and nuance to her character than i'd expected, as well as more humor and some genuinely moving moments.
plotstuff: fern and rose are twins, but they are as different as two strangers who got off an elevator on the same floor, and hepworth reinforces their differences with how she shapes their alternating POVs: fern's is a standard, although digressive, first-person narrative, while rose's version of events is relayed through a series of journal entries.
fern has sensory-processing difficulties; she is hypersensitive to touch, and when faced with crowds of people, excessive or sudden noises or lights, she becomes overwhelmed into a sort of panic attack. she's also neurodivergent, which can make the interacting-with-patrons part of her job as a librarian a little precarious, but also very funny. and for me—neurotypical but small-talk averse and impatient with imprecise queries, wincingly familiar. additional fern-and-karen samesies are that we are both excellent at the readers' advisory parts of our jobs and both suspicious of/confounded by the computers-and-printers aspect.
not a spoiler, just a delightful but overlong passage you may or may not choose to read.
...it takes me several seconds to register the woman with pointy coral fingernails who has appeared at the desk, clutching a stack of books against her hip. I roll my ergonomic chair slightly to the right so I can still see the children...but distractingly, the woman moves with me, huffing and fidgeting and, finally, clearing her throat. Finally, she clicks her fingernails against the desk. "Excuse me."
"Excuse me," I repeat, rolling the statement around in my head. It feels unlikely that she is actually asking to be excused. After all, patrons are free to come and go as they please in the library, they don't have to ask for the privilege. It's possible, I suppose, that she's asking to be excused for impoliteness, but as I didn't hear her belch or fart, that also seems improbable. As such, I conclude she has employed the odd social custom of asking to be excused as a means of getting a person's attention. I open my mouth to tell her that she has my attention, but people are so impatient nowadays and she cuts me off before I can speak.
"Do you work here?" she asks rudely.
Sometimes the people in this library can be surprisingly dense. For heaven's sake, why would I be sitting behind the desk—wearing a name badge!—if I didn't work here? That said, I acknowledge that I don't fit the stereotypical mold of a librarian. For a start, at twenty-eight, I'm younger than the average librarian (forty-five, according to Librarian's Digest) and I dress more fashionably and colorfully than the majority of my peers—I'm partial to soft, bright T-shirts, sparkly sneakers, and long skirts or overalls emblazoned with rainbows or unicorns. I wear my hair in two braids, which I loop into a bun above each ear (not a reference to Princess Leia, though I do wonder if she found the style as practical as I do for keeping long hair out of your face when you are a woman with things to do). And, yet, I am most definitely a librarian.
"Are you going to serve me, young lady?" the woman demands.
"Would you like me to serve you?" I ask patiently. I don't point out that she could have saved herself a lot of time by simply asking to be served.
The woman's eyes boggle. "Why do you think I'm standing here?"
"There are an infinite number of reasons," I reply. "You are, as you may have noticed, directly adjacent to the water fountain, which is a high-traffic area for the library. You might be using the desk to shuffle documents on your way over to the photocopier. You may be admiring the Monet print on the wall behind me—something I do several times a day. You may have paused on your way to the door to tie your shoelace, or to double-check if that person over in the nonfiction section is your ex-boyfriend. You might, as I was before you came along, be enjoying Linda's wonderful rendition of 'The Three Little Pigs'—"
I have more examples, many many more, but I am cut off by Gayle, who approaches the desk hurriedly. "May I help you there?"
although fern's sensory sensitivities make her life challenging, she has developed routines and strategies to manage them and she has rose to help her through any tricky situations that may arise.
rose is an efficient, take-charge kind of woman, married with a successful career as an interior designer, but she always makes time for fern—they have dinner together several times a week, and she involves herself in every detail of fern's life. rose established herself as fern's protector when they were children, even before their mother overdosed, and she is the only person who knows fern's darkest secret and the reason she needs to be protected from herself.
because of this secret, fern has always gratefully deferred to rose for guidance, and her side of the story is liberally sprinkled with rose's advice and opinions, like so:
I try to avoid conversations about things other than books, although I'll occasionally indulge Gayle in a conversation about her garden or her grandchildren, because Rose says it's polite to do this with people who we like.
when rose's desire for a baby is thwarted by her own biology, fern decides she owes it to her sister to conceive one for her. she meets a man 'named' wally who understands and shares some of her idiosyncrasies, and as their relationship develops into more than just a means to a procreational end, rose becomes a bit territorialconcerned with fern's newfound independence from her, and wally has his own concerns about the sisters' relationship.
fern may have difficulty with everyday social cues, but she nails the complexities of sororal dynamics:
Sisterly relationships are so strange in this way. The way I can be mad at Rose but still want to please her. Be terrified of her and also want to run to her. Hate her and love her, both at the same time. Maybe when it comes to sisters, boundaries are always a little bit blurry. Blurred boundaries, I think, are what sisters do best.
anywhooooo, this is a much longer review than i meant to write when i sat down, and very few people are bothering to read this far so i guess this is a private enough place to confess that i had myself one of those rare misty moments during the scene where fern is riding the bus to the clinic and sits in the pregnant-passenger seat. not a full-on cry, but since it's so rare for me to even get that tight-throat pre-cry feeling when reading, i'm gonna fib a bit and put it on my "books that made me cry" shelf and hope that this is the beginning of a whole new me; a me who is able to be moved to tears (and, more importantly, to be SCARED) by books like everybody else.
an observation interesting to no one:
between this one, the murderbot series, and The Maid, i've read quite a little cluster of books lately whose main characters, for various reasons, struggle with human interactions: navigating social cues, wrestling with idiom or subtext, defaulting to literalism, developing coping mechanisms—putting so much effort into understanding and being understood. and either authors are getting better (more sensitive and thoughtful) about writing these kinds of characters, or i'm losing my curmudgeonly edge, because in the past, these character types came off annoyingly twee and inauthentic, and yet these recent few have not rubbed me the wrong way at all. bonus points for lessons in how to human better:
Asking questions is a tactic I use when small talk is required—it makes you appear interested while simultaneously putting all the effort of the conversation on the other party.
on it.
additional observation interesting to no one:
if you read this book or the spoiler passage i laboriously typed out, you will know that sartorially, fern is rita:
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in conclusion, hepworth's cover designer is phoning it in.
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tl;dr—sisters. secrets. schemes
* REAL SPOILER (view spoiler)[i mean, sheesh—they're twins—they always make one evil at the twin factory, so no surprise there! (: (hide spoiler)]
fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.
Almost anything is tolerable, provided it's not for ever.
hey, that's how i felt about reading this book!
okay, that was just a cheap laff but real talk—this book went way over my head. i read it in february and now it's may and i have zero memory of it, but honestly—if you'd asked me what it was about back in february, i would probably still have been unable to answer you.
and it's such a shame because i adored Follow Me to Ground enough to import this one into my country and when it arrived, i gasped at how beautiful the cover was—can you see the glittery sprinkles?
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i can't seem to capture it, but seriously, it's like this:
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and it's gorgeous.
and everything i loved about that one is in this book, too—the lovely poetic prose and dark ambiguous tone, but with Follow Me to Ground, while i didn't understand everything that was going on, i understood enough. with this one, i had to stop a couple of times to read the flap synopsis just to remember what this was supposed to be about.
it's a cult and twins and one is diurnal and one is nocturnal because cultrules, and their mom abandoned them, leaving them behind with koan, the cult's leader, and there's a situation like a plague turning biological entities red and that's bad and shameful and people with the red need to be killed and i think someone gets killed who shouldn't have been and there's twincest and some of the plot occurs before the red and some after and the early stages are marked by people obsessively succumbing to pleasurable impulses, which are not necessarily sexual in nature but become so in the giving oneself over to them—a man begins to purr because he likes the way it feels and this is...bad?
I know what I know The mouth is an orifice that should not weep red. Old men should not purr.
it didn't really come together for me, plotwise, but the prose is so sharp and striking and beautiful:
Feeling of being a bowl of broth someone wants to eat before licking clean the spoon they ate you with. Thinking If I'm to be eaten best make sure I'm scalding hot, best make sure their tongues are blistering.
but it wasn't ultimately enough—i need a story. Follow Me to Ground was a weird-ass story, but i could follow it, this one i just could not and it makes me feel bad about myself.
i can handle a slowburning book where you don't know what's going on...until you do, but here i never got that moment of clarity that lit up the surroundings. this seems like obfuscation for obfuscation's sake and that doesn't work for me—for a long time i felt like i was just turning pages instead of reading and nothing really got absorbed because nothing was solid enough to hold on to, it was just one slippery scene after another.
trying to review this book is breaking my brain so i'm going to abandon ship and let her drive.
Slow sun today, taking its time in rising and setting and so my knees feel torn with the drawn-out devotion. Down to where the grass turns crisp with the sea and then further to where the wolves sometimes do their savaging, the soil there reddy with little cubs' bleeding. The wolves will die out if they're not careful, killing off their young. But then all they're doing is all any of us can do, which is the thing that makes sense at the time.
*****************
This is how we grew up: living inside a mistake until someone told you otherwise, and then living inside the shadow the mistake had made.
*****************
People overcomplicate Nature because they think her driven by something crude and fallible, something akin to human logic, and so they detect false errors and instances of cruelty.
The simplest answer, the route most direct: that's what we must look to.
What we know: when an interior, biological shift occurs within a species it is in response to an alteration in that species' environment.
What else we know: this new environment is proving more hostile to some of us than others.
She’s touching things a lot lately. I let her touch me. She’s relearning all those colors and edges and sounds and textures the way an infant does. Sh
She’s touching things a lot lately. I let her touch me. She’s relearning all those colors and edges and sounds and textures the way an infant does. She’s putting that together. She keeps getting better. She’s started dropping things. I know it’s on purpose. She drops and then she looks. They don’t know how much better she’s going to get but I do. Wanda will get well.
a long time ago i read this author's short story collection After the Apocalypse, and this free tor shortie reminded me how oh-so-good she is. it's a smooth, rich story, and you can just ignore the science parts if they make your brain hurt because the human elements are lovely and haunting, ditto for the octopus parts, and that "cover" image is already giving me nightmares. it's not a terribly long story, but you feel full after reading it—plump and satisfied.
i would very much enjoy reading the further adventures of claude the octopus, as long as they weren't too sad.
fulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
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book two! okay, so if you've read my GIF-heavy review offulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
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book two! okay, so if you've read my GIF-heavy review of In the Hall with the Knife, you will understand that Clue is my all-time favorite movie, so this series was bound to find its way into my hot little hands.
i read the first one with the highest expectations, but although i bought the rest of the series the day each of them came out, i've been sitting on 'em without feeling any urgency to dive back in. however, since one of my 2022 goals is to finish some of the series that've been sitting on my shelves unread, here i am, dutiful AF.
both books are fine YA murder mysteries, but if i'm being honest, a lot of the affection i feel for them is being carried over by my love of the movie, which is a double-edged sword knife in the conservatory. i know this series isn't intended to be a muppet babies kind of thing and these teenversions of the characters have no connection to their cinematic predecessors, but try telling that to my brain and my heart. these characters have been in my bones for nearly forty years, so peterfreund's new coke versions are somewhat jarring to this old dog. i mean, obviously some character tweaks were necessary to keep it YAppropriate—after all, a teenage procuress would be pretty dark for a light murder romp—and kudos to the author for updating and diversifying the cast, but—although she's CLEARLY established that these characters are WHOLLY distinct from that iconic ensemble of yore, she's gotta know that, thanks to her, some of us readers are over here picturing (view spoiler)[christopher lloyd and martin mull making out, which is not the fanfic the world needed. besides, any real Clue fan knows where the sexual tension's at, and it's between mustard and green. obviously. (hide spoiler)]
and since orchid and no-connection-to-Clue-whatsoever vaughn are pretty much the series' focal points, it's just one more obstacle standing between me and my potential for loving this series.
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mrs. white appears as a significant side character, which i appreciate, but swapping out mrs. white for dr. orchid in any Clue-related property is not appreciated.
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if the crime is "stealing my heart," mrs. white will always be the one whodunnit.
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so even though i want to love these books more than i do, i will finish the series, because every time there's a little referential easter egg, my heart soars.
I did not believe in love, in marital love, in righteous men or justice.
this book is cold and sharp, but it’s a little janky in its construction.
i’veI did not believe in love, in marital love, in righteous men or justice.
this book is cold and sharp, but it’s a little janky in its construction.
i’ve had a pretty good track record with nigerian fiction, so i was really looking forward to this debut, HOWEVER, while there are many positive aspects to applaud, like its compelling themes, strong writing about uncomfortable topics, and some admirably unflinching character work—rich and complex individuals with all of their flaws on display, the way the novel was structured kept pulling me out of the narrative and ultimately left me struggling to see it as a fully-realized novel rather than a series of occurrences that only occasionally communicated with each other.
the story is told in the alternating first-person POV experiences of four siblings; twin sisters and their two younger brothers, taking place over the course of 19 years as their family experiences financial hardships and they are abandoned first by their mother, and shortly thereafter by their father, leaving them in the care of their grandmother. the book depicts their individual struggles on their paths to adulthood, however, the time spent with the characters is uneven—the novel is broken up into four big chunks in which each sibling is given their own smaller chunk, until the fourth and final chunk, which is sisters-only, no boys allowed!! i’m not sure why the brothers were left out of the final part, but even when they were present, the sisters’ stories are more prominent (and more interesting), and the brothers’ voices weren’t really well-differentiated; they kind of blurred into one male blob for me, much more so than the sisters who were, you know, actually twins. i also had difficulty with the time jumps, they were a bit disorienting, and i found myself struggling with trying to pinpoint the characters’ ages and also struggling with how these stories fit together into one cohesive story. it reads very episodic, there’s very little interaction between the siblings, and not much overlap between their stories. there are some similarities between the sisters’ stories, centered around the specific difficulties females experience, but there’s no clear through-line here, it almost reads like an outline of a novel, missing all the transitional bits and narrative connectivity.
there’s a lot of meat here to chew on: poverty-based hardships, predatory men, transactional relationships, religion and hypocrisy, abuse of power, weakness and ruthlessness, but it felt discordant—a series of small meat-plates rather than a satisfying or focused meal.
however, there are some gut-punch moments that are absolutely worth your time:
I was a parentless teenage girl living with my grandmother in the slums of Lagos. Beauty was a gift, but what was I to do with it? It was fortunate to be beautiful and desired. It made people smile at me. I was used to strangers wishing me well. But what is a girl’s beauty, but a man’s promise of reward? What was my beauty but a proclamation of potential, an illusion of choice?
All women are owned by someone, some are owned by many; a beautiful girl’s only advantage is that she may get to choose her owner. If beauty was a gift, it was not a gift to me, I could not eat my own beauty, I could not improve my life by beauty alone. I was born beautiful, I was a beautiful baby. It did not change my life. I was a beautiful girl. Still, my life was ordinary. But a beautiful woman was another type of thing. I had waited too long to choose my owner, dillydallying in my ignorance, and so someone chose me. What was I to do about that?
so, not outta the park just yet, but definitely a writer to watch.
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awaroooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best historical fiction 2020! what will happen?
THIS HAPPENED:
CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER! goodreads choice awards best HISTORICAL FICTION 2020!
There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.
i know it looks like i’m over here five-starring a lot of books in a row all of a sudden, but it’s not so much that i’ve lucked into a run of excellent reading choices as it is me finally sitting down to review books so good it's been intimidating me to even think about reviewing them.
ALTHOUGH—if we’re being super-duper honest, Blacktop Wasteland and Betty were both 4s going in (but 4.5s in my heart) that got bumped up to fives when rereading them for the review made me remember how dingdang good they were. this one was a five out of the gate.
it’s so good i don’t even know where to start. it’s a family saga that takes place over the course of forty or so years, beginning in 1938 with the birth of twin sisters stella and desiree vignes in the town of mallard, louisiana; a black community with an unusual beginning:
The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.
the residents embraced their founder’s dream of a more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before, and by the time the vignes girls—his great-great-great-granddaughters—are born, his bloodline has been bleached into “creamy skin, hazel eyes, [and] wavy hair," none of which attributes protect them from racism; from seeing their father lynched in their home when they are little girls, or from race factoring into their lives and shaping their opportunities when they run away from home as teenagers.
they live together in new orleans for a few years before stella abruptly cuts ties with her sister and disappears into a new life that she will live as a white woman—marrying a wealthy white man and raising a daughter who has no idea she's anything but white. meanwhile, desiree will leave the abusive father of her own daughter and move back to mallard, her child's exceptional darkness there unexpected, unwelcome.
eventually, three generations of paths will cross, secrets will be discovered, everyone'll have to address their choices.
honestly, i don’t want to blah and blah about plot—i always spend way too much time on silly reviews, writing 20-page dissertations on minutiae that nobody cares about but meeeee before deleting all of it anyway and i need to stop being foolish with my time and learn to do things in miniaturized efficiency when i’m not getting paid.
but i will say that this is a tremendous second novel after a really impressive debut and bennett writes beautifully about family and grief and identity and being deeply, unbearably lonely—the loneliness of the estranged twins, the self-othering loneliness isolating stella from her old life and in her new one, the loneliness of growing up dark in a colorstruck town etc etc. i'm doing it again so i'm gonna shut myself up now because i loved every little bit of this novel and we could be here all day if i don't put a stop to it now.
“This is weird, Madison. You want me to raise your husband’s fire children.”
i won this through the gr giveaways but i didn’t read it right away—choosi“This is weird, Madison. You want me to raise your husband’s fire children.”
i won this through the gr giveaways but i didn’t read it right away—choosing instead to read ARCs of books that were coming out before this one, then delaying it further for my horror-only october bookplan. i thought i had plenty of time before it pubbed because i saw this on the side of the ARC:
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and misunderstood it to mean it was pubbing on the 19th of november instead of in november 2019. which i now realize is a monday—wait, no it's not but ANYWAY THE POINT IS i put off reading it and the book came out before i began reading it and the joke’s on me because i liked this so much more than most of the books i read while i wasn’t reading this one.
THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD
before this, i’d only read one other book by him, Perfect Little World. i liked it fine, with some reservations, which was probably another reason i dragged my feet in favor of books i thought would be more slam-dunks in my heart.
but this one—good lord, i couldn’t read it fast enough; it grabbed me right from the start, and i never put it down without feeling a little tug of regret that i had to go do other things. i am someone who folds over pages in my books when lines are pleasing or memorable, and i was already a-folding by page two. all of it—the characters, the story, the conflict, it is brisk and funny and warm and wise and heartpunchy; it’s a perfect book about imperfect people; of love and family and responsibility, and you better believe i cried. <— and that? that is a thing that just doesn’t happen.
i’d been drawn to this one initially because spontaneous human combustion is rad, even if this is not quite SHC, because the h’s that are c-ing spontaneously are physically unharmed by the experience; they’re just two little kids who burst into flames when they have temper tantrums.
"How are they still alive?" I asked.
"It doesn't hurt them at all," she said, shrugging to highlight how dumbfounded she was. "They just get really red, like a bad sunburn, but they're not hurt."
"What about their clothes?" I asked.
"I'm still figuring this out, Lillian," she said. "I guess their clothes burn off."
"So they're just these naked kids on fire?"
"I think so. So you can understand why we're worried."
which is all very striking an image, but it is so much more than the novelty of that situation. quick aside: i was at the bookstore the other day and this little girl was just LOSING HER MIND and through all the shrieking and wailing and snot and tears, all i could think was “welp, at least she isn’t on fire.”
the “children on fire” angle is the hook, but at its heart, it is about lillian—a woman trapped in the smallness of her own life after her chance to rise up out of her working-poor upbringing was stolen from her by the betrayal of a friend. as a teenager, lillian worked her ass off to win a scholarship to an elite boarding school where she met her roommate madison billings—a wealthy girl with just as much weirdness to her as lillian. the two became close friends and teammates—basketball phenoms who were inseparable until madison got into trouble, her father paid off lillian’s mother for lillian to take the fall, and lillian was expelled and sent back to her hometown in disgrace. the bribe money—meant to be put aside for lillian's college tuition—was instead quickly spent by her mother on her own comforts. without the challenges and opportunities of the rich-kid school, without the possibility of a college education, lillian just sorta sunk into herself and stopped trying.
Everything was so easy, and nobody cared, and I lost interest…I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.
fifteen years later, lillian is twenty-eight years old and still right where she started: she's been living in her mother’s attic, plodding through long aimless years of smoking pot, living paycheck to paycheck, defeated and angry but still in madison’s thrall; maintaining a periodic correspondence-based friendship with her—madison’s letters filled with tales of one cushioned success after another; the ease of wealth enabling a charmed life only getting more charmed as she grows older.
when madison writes to lillian, asking for her help, lillian doesn’t hesitate: I tried to think of a time when I hadn’t done what Madison had asked me to do. That time did not exist.
what madison needs from lillian is her loyalty and discretion; to take care of—and keep out of sight—her husband’s children from a previous marriage; ten-year-old twins bessie and roland who have just lost their mother and are afflicted with this unseemly fiery rage. madison’s senator husband jasper is in the running for secretary of state and flaming children would disrupt their picture-perfect family image: a beautiful, wealthy couple with a young son of their own who doesn’t burst into flames.
despite having zero training or experience with children, much less with “fire children,” lillian accepts the position and becomes their governess and sorta-jailor, which puts her once more in madison’s charismatic orbit—living on the grounds of their sprawling estate in tennessee, doing her best to keep the twins calm, extinguishing them when necessary, and sensing in them kindred spirits, an affinity unexpectedly kindling (heh) her unexplored maternal instincts.
Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.
the children have been uprooted and are full of raw emotional pain; grieving their mother, resentful of their sudden displacement, their long-absent father and his pretty young wife, their pampered half-brother, and this stranger being paid to care for them. the situation is not ideal, but the three soon find their footing and begin to form their own outsider version of a family, their trust built through honesty and candor, and lillian’s transition from reluctant foster parent into fierce mother bear is beautifully written.
They were me, unloved...and I was going to make sure that they got what they needed. They would scratch and kick me, and I was going to scratch and kick anyone who tried to touch them.
i feel like i could go on and on about this book, typing out lines from the oh-so-many folded-over pages, and all the ways in which lillian’s situation—of squandered promise and self-disgust; feeling defeated and giving up, the anger, frustration, and shame of poverty—was so horribly relatable to me as i was reading it that i just wanted to howl.
Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard not to fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing, not even food or air. And if I wanted nothing, I’d just turn into a ghost. And that would be the end of it.
And there were these two kids, and they burst into flames.
And I had known them for less than a week; I didn’t know them at all. And I wanted to burst into flames, too. I thought, How wonderful would it be to have everyone stand at a respectful distance?
this.
the book simply crackles. it is all flames and fire and emotional damage but it is also hope and purpose and human connection, and even though i am not typically an emotional reader, this one got me right in the feels. i'm sorry i didn't read it the moment it fell into my little hands, but i'm extremely glad i won a copy, because i probably wouldn't have read it anytime soon without the guilt-prod i feel every time i win or accept a free book. maybe this glowing review will be your prod. if not, maybe this overlong quote'll do it, the single best description of the oncreep of love i have ever read:
Sometimes, when the kids were invested in something, when they didn’t look entirely blasted by how shitty their lives had been, I’d try to truly look at them. Of course, they both had those bright green eyes, like you’d see on the cover of a bad fantasy novel where the hero can turn into some kind of bird of prey. But they were not attractive children, the rest of their faces soft and undefined. They looked ratty. I hadn’t even tried to fix their cult haircuts. I feared that fixing them would only make the kids more plain. They had round little bellies, way past the point when you’d expect a kid to lose it. Their teeth were just crooked enough that you could tell they hadn’t been handled with care. And yet. And yet.
When Bessie managed to get the layup to bank perfectly off the backboard, her eyes got crazy; she started vibrating. When Roland watched you do anything, even open a can of peaches, he looked like he was cheering you on at mile marker nineteen of your marathon. When Roland put his fingers in my mouth in the middle of the night, when Bessie kicked me in the liver and made me startle awake, I did not hate them. No matter what happened after this, when the kids moved into the mansion with Jasper and Madison and Timothy, no one would ever think that they were really a part of that immaculate family. They would always, kind of, belong to me. I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to earth, smashing into the ground like asteroids, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I’d hold it. I would.
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i missed out on this at BEA, but i won it through goodreads - hooray!
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and it came with a squishy flame-shaped stress thingie.
y’all can keep your highly esteemed oscar-winning period pieces and your obscure arthousNOW AVAILABLE!!!
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clue is my favorite movie of all time.
y’all can keep your highly esteemed oscar-winning period pieces and your obscure arthouse fillums—i’ll be over here watching this movie where the chick from the go-go’s and the dude from fear both get murrrrderrrred. in a house. with a weapon. <-— no spoilers here!
when i first heard about this book, it was as though the heavens opened up and rained down jellybeans: a book based(ish) on my favorite movie, written by the lady who brought killer unicorns into our lives? yes and please. and THEN, when i walked into the ABA galley room at BEA to find A GIANT STACK of these just sitting there for meeeee (and, i suppose, other ABA members, but mostly just ME), oh how those jellybeans POURED.
much like the storm that stranded the characters in this book!
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this is an all-new story, not a retelling of the movie, but all your favorite characters are here—in name, anyway, muppet-baby-style:
headmaster boddy,
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beth “peacock” picach,
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vaughn green,
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sam “mustard” maestor,
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finn plum,
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scarlet mistry,
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mrs. white,
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and… orchid mckee.
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i do not know why peterfreund decided to separate mrs. white from the others by making her an adult character and filling her role with some non canon gal, but i’m sure she had her reasons. (p.s. please tell me your reasons)
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the plot here is no surprise—it is the plot of the movie and the point of the board game: there is murder! who has done it? and although the murder weapon is never in doubt (HINT: it is part of the title of the book!), other clue-weapons do pop up in the darndest places.
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here are plenty of winky-nods to the movie, and there are secret passages
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and secret agendas
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and secret letters
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and…secrets.
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IS this the best locked-room mystery i have ever read? no. but DOES it explicitly reference the most iconic scene from the best movie of all time?
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yes.
three and a half stars, rounded up and i will continue happily with the rest of the series.
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