Sep 19 2020

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

The magic is still there, in The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. More than half a century after its publication, it’s still lodged partly in a timeless yet post-WWII America and partly in places whose times and locations are much more suspect, nearly pure mythical settings of village and unhappy kingdom and enchanted castle, leavened by characters such as Schmendrick the Magician (could a wizard have a more deflating name?) and the equally grounded Molly. And I suppose magic, enchantment, is one of the things that the book is about, if it has to be about anything beyond its story.

The Last Unicorn

At the point in the tale where Beagle picks it up — pointedly not the beginning, because he tells readers on the second page that unicorns are immortal — she lives amidst enchantment, unselfconscious of her magic, and just as unaware that she is the last. “…[S]he had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.” (p. 2)

One day, hunters enter her woods, looking for deer but talking of unicorns. One says they are long gone; the other says there is one left “good luck to the lonely old thing, I say.” (p. 3) The talk about what the books say about unicorns, about what their great-grandmothers said about having met one when they were very young. Then the hunters ride off, knowing they will bag no game in a unicorn’s wood. But their talk has disenchanted the unicorn:

The unicorn stood at the edge of the forest and said aloud, ‘I am the only unicorn there is.’ They were the first words she had spoken, even to herself, in more than a hundred years.
“That can’t be, she thought, She had never minded being alone, never seeing another unicorn, because she had always known that there were others like her in the world, and a unicorn needs no more than that for company. ‘But I would know if all the others were gone. I’d be gone too. Nothing can happen to them that does not happen to me.’ (p. 6)

The seed of doubt, planted, grows quickly. She wonders, she worries, she is under the spell of not knowing and finally decides to leave her woods, leave quickly without fully admitting it to herself, in the hope that she will soon return. When she emerges, she finds the world changed: paved roads, things the reader will recognize as automobiles. But those are not the worst differences for her.

‘How can it be?’ she wondered. ‘I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else—what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?’ (p. 11)

Magic seems to have gone out of the world. She wanders until one day she meets an eccentric butterfly whose speech makes only a modicum of sense, but who imparts important knowledge: “You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints. Let nothing you dismay, but don’t be half-safe.” (p. 15)

And with that what she had felt is confirmed. Something has befallen the other unicorns, she is truly the last, but maybe she can change that. The rest of the book that is her story is about whether or not she can. But not all of the book is about her. There is also Schmendrick the Magician, who seems to have no ability at all, but actually has more than anyone else if he can only find a way to consciously access it. There is also Molly Grue, who has been a bandit’s wife and who knows the way to Haggard’s kingdom that neither wizard nor unicorn would have known.

They are all seeking, and they all face fear and failure when they get close to what they have sought. There’s more, very much more all in a register halfway between Lyonesse and Schenectady. The book has kept its magic for half a hundred years now, and likely will for many more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/19/the-last-unicorn-by-peter-s-beagle/

Sep 17 2020

Department Store by Gail Gibbons

Decided to devote a full work-week’s coverage to kid’s books, since it looks like I’m on an unintentional roll!

My mother-in-law lives in the Virginia mountains, and is a longstanding frequenter/supporter of her local library. She also loves their library book sales, and brings bundles up to us in Maryland, primarily of books for the kids (since Heaven knows, I do not need more books!) I was poking around in my eldest son’s room the other day, trying to help him find his scattered Diary Of A Wimpy Kid novels, when I came across this volume. It was pretty unusual for me in that it had the full color cover illustration stamped on its hard binding. Most of the hard covers I’ve encountered usually limit themselves to a single contrast color with the background, but this book was published in the 1980s, so perhaps that accounts for it (plus, I’m pretty sure it never came with a slip cover, given the library stampings and lack of tape marks.) Drawn in by the cover, I paused my search for Jms’ other books and began to flip through.

Department Store is a fairly short book, a non-fiction depiction of the workings of your average department store, oddly reminiscent of the DK Discoveries series I’d devoured as a kid, tho the latter covered topics far further flung in history. To see that treatment granted to the department store in its heyday is like opening a wonderfully weird and layered time capsule here in 2020, not far removed enough to find department stores romantic as we watch them sink in real time to their grand dame ends, but close enough to remember when economies worked the way they’re depicted in this volume. The borrowing history of the book, which seemed to have been checked out several times a year on average from 1985-1991, till a last gasp in 1995 before it was weeded from circulation in 2013, follows that timeline, such that it feels odd to be holding this book now, like holding a wake for someone who isn’t dead yet.

Because this book is gorgeously illustrated in brightly colored line drawings with a strong mid-century modern influence, it feels like a celebration, not only of department stores but also of the epoch in which they thrived. Gail Gibbons peoples her store with customers and employees of every color, in a delightful utopia of shopping pleasure. I turned the pages, admiring the craftsmanship even as I wondered “who is this for?” The answer, I’ve concluded, isn’t just for the kids in the past who wanted to know more about the workings of their economy, but also for posterity, for the future and the curious children who will look back and wonder about structures like these, just as I once obsessed over the workings of castles and frontier towns. It feels strange to be reading this book now — and I’m not sure my kids would appreciate it either — but I’m looking forward to handing it to a curious grandchild several decades from now who wants to know more about the pre-Internet world.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/17/department-store-by-gail-gibbons/

Sep 15 2020

Geeky Fab 5 Vol. 4: Food Fight For Fiona by Lucy & Liz Lareau and Ryan Jampole

This very cute graphic novel tackles a very serious subject in a truly accessible way. The Geeky Fab 5 are students at Earhart Elementary, four of whom have just begun their fourth grade class curriculum on nutrition. They’re also participating in a fundraising bake sale by putting together a rainbow volcano cake, and prepping for a field trip to a real farm. When new girl Fiona joins the class, their teacher Miss Malone knows to put her in the charge of the GF5, who will take good care of their new friend. But Fiona is hiding a troubling secret, and when the GF5 figure it out due to Fiona’s little brother Freddy, will they be able to combine their geeky skills and talents to solve a really big problem?

One of my favorite things about this book was the way the authors, mother-daughter duo Lucy and Liz Lareau, as well as editor-in-chief Jim Salicrup, went to great pains to stress that even tho being poor and hungry can make you feel small and not as good as everyone else, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, especially if you’re a child. In any country of plenty, the onus is on those who have more than enough to ensure that those with less are given a chance to thrive, not just survive. It’s easy to forget how many go hungry daily because of matters out of their control, and books like Food Fight For Fiona remind us of the necessity to pull together as a society and do what we can to help those in need. GF5:FFFF also includes a bunch of different suggestions on how everyone can contribute, from food drives to helping build modern-day victory gardens to seeing what local food pantries need in terms of infrastructure.

All this is presented in an adorable manga format that the cover simply doesn’t do enough justice to! I can be pretty iffy in my opinion of most manga, particularly in terms of panel-to-panel flow, but Ryan Jampole sidesteps all my issues, with perfect layouts that eliminate any possible confusion as to who is doing or saying what. I also love the diversity of the girls and their families, with the added bonus of there being zero chance of confusing characters with one another. Even though this is the fourth book of the series, it’s also really easy to figure out who is who and how they’re all related.

Overall, a terrific book to share with your middle-grade reader that comfortably discusses childhood hunger without sounding preachy, and offers concrete ideas for what to do to help feed those who need it. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of these volumes!

Geeky Fab 5 Vol. 4: Food Fight For Fiona by Lucy & Liz Lareau and Ryan Jampole comes out today from Papercutz and is available from all good booksellers.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/15/geeky-fab-5-vol-4-food-fight-for-fiona-by-lucy-liz-lareau-and-ryan-jampole/

Sep 14 2020

We Don’t Eat Our Classmates (Penelope #1) by Ryan T. Higgins

Since my kids started remote learning, I’ve been spending my days as their teachers’ assistant, making sure they are paying attention in class, have all the supplies they need for each lesson and are turning in their assignments. Despite my background in corporate training, my new job as paraeducator is exhausting. People frequently underestimate the benefit of peer pressure in a contained environment in getting little kids to stay on task and behave, so I have a lot of sympathy for the educators doing their best to corral a screen full of rambunctious kids when I can barely get my three to sit up straight and engage. I thought I hit my nadir last week when I was running from room to room, helping the teachers figure out what each kid needed even as another kid was yelling for help from where he’d sequestered himself, but then today my eldest dropped and smashed a light bulb on the kitchen floor while I was trying to ferry workbooks and crayons to where each twin was perched in the living and dining rooms. I’m fine in body but feeling considerably rumpled, to put it mildly, in spirit.

So it’s always a bit of a treat to get to the reading portion of the day, when the 6 year-olds and I can sit down and watch a video of a picture book being read (while the 9 year-old is hopefully being productive on his own Chromebook.) We’ve done our fair share of Pete The Cats and other well-meaning, earnest kids’ books, so I was expecting more of the same from their latest social studies class, where we’ve been working on books about getting used to the new school year. But then teacher put on this video for Ryan T Higgins’ We Don’t Eat Our Classmates.

Y’aaaall. My jaw dropped as we followed Penelope the little T-Rex as she prepares for her first day of school. The other kids don’t like her because, as the title suggests, she keeps trying to eat them, and as the book progresses she learns a valuable lesson in empathy and self-regulation. It’s a short book and I’d rather not include any spoilers here, but I will say that I yelped with laughter as it was read (and only partly due to Awnie’s excellent narration.) The twins seemed less impressed, tho at least they sat through the entire thing, which is more than they often do with other titles. I loved it, tho, and only partly because it reminded me of Patrick Rothfuss and Nate Taylor’s hilarious The Thing Beneath The Bed. While that volume featured some delightful line drawings, I think I enjoyed Mr Higgins’ full-color illustrations even more, especially given the diversity of Penelope’s classmates (and one terrifying goldfish!)

But more importantly, WDEOC serves as a nice counterweight to all the titles that encourage kids to be proud of their individuality and to look for friends who will make them feel appreciated and supported. While those are important lessons, they don’t mean that your friends should be your doormats, especially if your behavior is truly harmful. WDEOC uses a humorous worst-case scenario to remind kids that actions have consequences, and that friendship is a two-way street. It’s a great picture book addition to any kid’s library, especially if that kid has a bit of a mean or selfish streak that you’re trying to train them out of. Best to teach them how to empathize as a little one, after all, than to try to do it years later, when it may be too late and they’re ranting against wearing masks around others or engaging in other appalling antisocial behaviors.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/14/we-dont-eat-our-classmates-penelope-1-by-ryan-t-higgins/

Sep 11 2020

Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Old School (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #10) by Jeff Kinney

“Mom,” my eldest child asked me the other night. “Were things better in the good old days?”

I looked up from my typing. Given my severe allergy to nostalgia-induced rose-colored glasses, I wanted to be sure to answer this carefully. “What do you mean “good old days”?” I asked.

“Well,” said Jms. “When you were my age.”

I thought about it. About being 9 and living in Malaysia and not having air-conditioning or the Internet and living on a limited number of books with a mom who thought I read too much. Contextually, I know he only cared about the air-conditioning (which is nice, but hardly necessary for survival) and the Internet (which is both very nice and necessary in this age of COVID-19.) So I answered honestly, “No, it was not better.”

Which led to me asking why he wanted to know, and he brought up the book he was reading, from a set I’d bought him earlier this summer when I was desperate for him to read something besides his otherwise terrific Dog Man books. Since his 4th grade teacher is encouraging parents to book club with their kids, we agreed that I ought to read Old School as well, despite it being the tenth in the series and my having never read any previous installments, so we could discuss it together.

In the tenth installment of the Diary Of A Wimpy Kid books, Greg Heffley’s mom is on a tear against modern technology. She’s even petitioning City Hall to declare a technology-free weekend, to the chagrin of the rest of her family. However, after an accident involving Grandpa and Dad’s car, Greg decides to escape his father’s wrath by joining his classmates on a trip to Hardscrabble Farm, a week-long camp devoted to “old school” living, which mostly consists of outdoor showers, lots of farm chores and some truly disgusting camp food. While suffering through the lack of modern conveniences, Greg accidentally stumbles across the secret of Silas Scratch, the long deceased farmer whose restless soul supposedly haunts the farm. Will living old school ever look the same for Greg again?

Honestly, this was a refreshingly light-hearted look at the life of a modern middle school kid, whose slightly eccentric family is probably not too different from yours (tho not every family has such a talented pet pig!) I loved how easy this volume was to pick up and enjoy even without any prior experience with the series — as my 9 year-old had assured me it would be — and how the humor, like the family, was relatable in a delightfully off-kilter way. I particularly admired the way Jeff Kinney wove the seemingly unconnected diary vignettes together to form a clever whole, as well as the light satire of Greg’s choice to perpetuate the nostalgia he disdained, for the same complicated reasons parents sometimes do.

I really need to find time to read the rest of these books with Jms, as he and I both enjoy them greatly and enjoy discussing them too. We did watch the first movie the other day — well, he watched it while I worked on my PC in the same room — so perhaps I’ll do a Page To Screen column on the series once I manage to consume it all, as well. Hopefully, he won’t have to nag me too hard to complete all this!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/11/diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-old-school-diary-of-a-wimpy-kid-10-by-jeff-kinney/

Sep 09 2020

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020 edited by Jonathan Strahan

With Gardner Dozois’ passing, science fiction lost not only a brilliant writer but also one of the most prominent editors in the genre. Since 1984, he’d presided over the premiere collection of sci-fi’s shorter works via his Year’s Best collections, which numbered thirty-five at the time of his demise. Two years on, Jonathan Strahan and Saga Press have stepped into the void to present 2019’s best for eager fans who’ve missed these definitive anthologies.

Mr Strahan’s inaugural volume starts off strong, from an introduction that champions diversity to several shorts that absolutely kick ass in delivering on that promise. My belief in Charlie Jane Anders’ talent was finally vindicated with her story here, The Bookstore At The End Of America. The volume opener isn’t exactly a subtle tale but it is both entertaining and thoughtful, and I felt it much more deeply than I have her other, more celebrated works. The next story, Tobias S Buckell’s The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex is a must for fans of Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo-winning LaGuardia, treading in the same far-future of extraterrestrial immigration. The Hugos are actually quite well represented here, with 4 of the 28 stories being nominees for either Best Short Story or Best Novelette. Tbh, I didn’t really care for any of those selected for this volume besides N. K. Jemisin’s terrific Emergency Skin, which has also been my favorite work of hers so far.

Continuing the theme of short stories that improved my opinion of the author compared to their prior works was Kali_Na by Indrapramit Das, whose debut novel The Devourers was firmly meh for me. In contrast, I was blown away by Kali_Na’s ideas of godhood and virtual avatars, a wonderful application of real-world sociology to the ways technology can transcend the mundane. I was also impressed by another Indian-set story that melded technology with psychology, Anil Menon’s The Robots Of Eden. While Saleem Haddad’s Song Of The Birds was set hundreds of miles away in Palestine, it was another excellent, and moving, examination of behavior modification technology. Crossing Asia in the other direction, we get to Han Song’s Submarines — translated for us here by Ken Liu, who also contributes an original story — about migrants on the Yangtze River. All four of these stories manage to evoke a sense of place that’s as vital to the narrative as their speculative natures are.

There’s a very similar feel to Sofia Rhei’s Barcelona-set Secret Stories Of Doors, as well as to the scathing critique of New York City’s upper class in E. Lily Yu’s Green Glass: A Love Story. Ted Chiang’s It’s 2059, And The Rich Kids Are Still Winning reads less like a story and exactly like a sociological treatise, only from the future. I almost forgot I wasn’t reading an article while enjoying it. Fonda Lee’s near-future comedy I (28M) Created A Deepfake Girlfriend And Now My Parents Think We’re Getting Married is also the kind of thing I could imagine reading on Reddit in ten years or less. Well, from the Twitter account AITA_reddit anyway; I’ve so far managed to avoid getting a Reddit account and am quite happy to keep it that way. Of the other far future stories, Rich Larson’s Contagion’s Eve At The House Noctambulus was my absolute favorite for sheer goriness (plus it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books, Gideon The Ninth.) Honorable mention goes to Alec Nivala-Lee’s At The Fall, which was like Homeward Bound meets Finding Dory, only with AI.

Despite the vast majority of these books dealing with planet Earth and humanity’s secrets, there were several stories that traveled off into space. Of these, my favorite was Karin Tidbeck’s The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir, which deals with a very unusual form of interstellar travel. Overall tho, there was less of a focus on outer space and more on the planet we’re living in and what we’re doing to it, an understandable change of emphasis given the ways we’re beginning to reap what we’ve sown on this planet. Which isn’t to say that this is a depressing book: on the contrary, many of the stories here speak of resilience, resistance and optimism, in the finest tradition of the genre.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction Vol. 1: The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020 edited by Jonathan Strahan was published yesterday by Saga Press, and is available from all good booksellers.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/09/the-years-best-science-fiction-vol-1-the-saga-anthology-of-science-fiction-2020-edited-by-jonathan-strahan/

Sep 08 2020

Robert B. Parker’s Fool’s Paradise (Jesse Stone #19) by Mike Lupica

Embarrassingly, I totally had Robert B Parker mixed up with Richard Stark because of the latter’s Parker novels. I’m starting to wonder whether I do, in fact, read too many books. And, given this title, whether I watch too little TV, as I’ve definitely watched a wee bit of the Stone Cold adaptation but never had the time to get through an entire Jesse Stone movie. I’ve still watched enough to totally envision Tom Selleck as the lead of this engrossing 19th(!) installment of the long-running series tho.

Since I haven’t actually read any books by Mr Parker, my faulty recollection notwithstanding, I have no way of telling how true Mike Lupica is to the style of the author whose mantle he’s picked up. What I can safely say is that he writes a wildly entertaining small town police procedural that any crime novelist would be proud to call their own.

Jesse Stone is the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, and a recovering alcoholic. When a body is found near the lake, Jesse is surprised to discover that the victim was a man he’d just met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting a town over. Paul, as the victim had introduced himself, is in death devoid of wallet, ID or cellphone, so it looks like this could have very well been a mugging gone awry. But a check with local cab companies reveals that Paul was last seen being dropped off at the gates of the wealthy Cain family’s estate quite a distance away.

Despite Jesse’s friendship with matriarch Lily, the Cains pretty much stonewall his inquiries, claiming to have never met Paul either on the night he was murdered or at any point beforehand. Jesse and his loyal deputies, Molly Crane and Suitcase Simpson, begin their painstaking detective work into Paul’s background but are soon distracted by seemingly personal attacks with very different MOs. Could these have anything to do with the mysterious Paul or has someone from the past shown up with a grudge against the Paradise PD?

I really enjoyed getting to know Jesse and his crew, and honestly didn’t feel at all confused by any of the complicated interpersonal relationships inherent in reading the latest in a 19-book series. Mr Lupica does a terrific job of keeping things accessible for the new reader while also writing a fine mystery that incorporates tons of characters series fans will easily recognize, including the luminous Sunny Randall. Given how even I, a relative newcomer, enjoyed the callbacks to prior events from the series, I can only imagine the delight of long-time readers.

I’m definitely putting the Jesse Stone series on my To-Read list despite my own worries about too much reading. One can never enjoy too many solid mystery novels, I believe. Besides, there’s no way I’m ever mistaking Jesse for Parker, entertaining as both protagonists can be! I’m only glad I finally had the chance to learn to differentiate between the two and between their authors.

Robert B. Parker’s Fool’s Paradise by Mike Lupica is out today from Putnam Books, and is available at all good booksellers.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/08/robert-b-parkers-fools-paradise-jesse-stone-19-by-mike-lupica/

Sep 05 2020

Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

Ideally, of course, I would take the time to live with Death of a Naturalist for a good long while, absorbing the images, being surprised by new readings, seeing more levels of meaning on re-reading, having some poems shift from mild interest to true favorite, having others fade only to be rediscovered later and seem as fresh as on the first reading. And maybe some of that will happen. I can imagine that I will return to this collection, as I have to his Nobel lecture, Crediting Poetry, or as I do to Philip Levine’s collections (most notably What Work Is). I’ve recently ordered Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf, though it will take some time to arrive in Berlin, and so I may go back to Heaney’s translation, which I remember enjoying back when it was new. And I think I know where my copy of Jan Kochanowski‘s Laments is, a masterpiece of Renaissance Polish writing, which Heaney translated along with Stanislaw Baranczak, and which once upon a time I could more or less manage in Polish with the English alongside.

Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

All of which is to say that back in January when I was writing about Stepping Stones I was not quite right when I said that I was coming to his poetry sideways but definitely right when I said I would be glad to read a full collection of his original works. I followed the Frumious motto in selecting Death of a Naturalist, and as much as I want to keep getting more from this volume, I am also looking forward to his second, Door Into the Dark.

Death of a Naturalist is a short book of short poems: 44 numbered pages, only one poem more than two pages long, most of them fitting on a single page. The collection was published in 1966 when Heaney was 27, and though he writes without referring to a specific time, he draws on the rural Ireland of his childhood, youth and young manhood. As he describes those years in his Nobel lecture, “In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other.”

And so the poems are, at least in part: intimate, physical, featuring the occasional creature but far from proofed against the outside world; instead starting from that close space and reaching out into a wider world in both time and space. Here’s Heaney announcing himself in the very first poem, “Digging”:

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/05/death-of-a-naturalist-by-seamus-heaney/

Sep 03 2020

Parachutes by Kelly Yang

I am absolutely wrung out after reading Parachutes by Kelly Yang. I cried — which is a given considering the subject matter — a lot — which is not. Ms Yang crams into one book so many of the traumas that I’ve either endured or been adjacent to by virtue of being or having been a young woman, Southeast Asian, an immigrant, a debater, a fashionista, someone who hated the school she was sent away to, someone prejudged and dismissed as being either too rich or too poor, someone people feel safe confiding in. Ms Yang cuts through the protective mental gauze I’ve packed my wounds in with a thousand incisive, almost off-hand lines and moments in her narrative, until I felt as raw as I did each time I originally felt the blow. Yet as painful as the experience of reading Parachutes was, it was also cathartic, to be known and seen so vividly, to be empathized with. “All this,” she was saying, “happened to me and my friends, too. I survived and so did you and we are okay. We are a sisterhood and I have your back. I believe you and I believe in you.”

This powerful book revolves around the experiences of two young women thrown together against their wishes in a California high school. Dani de la Cruz is a Filipina-American scholarship student at American Prep, who helps her single mom with cleaning jobs to make ends meet. She’s a debating champ who’s pinned her hopes on attending an elite competition scouted by Yale. Getting into Yale would change her life, she believes, for the better. So when her debate coach, Mr Connelly, offers her some personal training, she jumps at the chance to learn more at the feet of the main father figure in her life.

Claire Wang is a rich Shanghainese teenager whose rebellious ideas on taking personal responsibility for the content of her exam essays — i.e. she refuses to parrot her tuition teacher’s sentences — land her in hot water. Her parents decide to send her to American Prep, but since neither wants to live in California, have her board with the de la Cruz family. A series of misunderstandings puts Claire and Dani at odds: Claire quickly falls in with the Crazy Rich Asians crowd while Dani’s response to Claire’s rich-girl obliviousness is to passive-aggressively seethe. And then they both start falling for the same boy.

If this was just the story of a rich girl-poor girl love triangle, it would already be pretty entertaining, but it’s also, for better or worse, a book on how hard it is for women to avoid being sexually assaulted and harassed. The tone of Parachutes is almost unbearably oppressive as we start to wonder which of these girls (Claire, Dani or their classmate Ming, to name just three) is the one who’s going to be subjected to the worst of the sexual violence, as they each endure increasing amounts of unwanted attention. In this sense, it is a hard book to read. I spent chapters hoping against hope that none of the girls would be raped, and am only glad that Ms Yang approached every single aspect of sexual trauma with sensitivity and grace.

Ms Yang also did an amazing job in depicting each character as a real person with real flaws and not just a cut-out. I think most people who know me would assume I identified more with Dani, and while we had loads of experiences in common, I was not down with her jealousy. I definitely shared more personality traits with “I have to do my own laundry?” Claire, but overall I felt very much as if each girl had been cleaved from parts of me. Which is why what happens to them hurt so much but was, in the end, doubly cathartic, as they vow to keep trying for justice.

I’d also like to note that I really appreciated that Ms Yang totally avoided the cliche of girl-on-girl betrayal in order to advance social position. It mattered a lot to see the themes of sisterhood affirmed — tho perhaps the lack of backstabbing in this case comes from the clique of likely suspects being Chinese, and less susceptible to American style mean-girl machinations (yeah, I’m looking at you, Dani!)

Parachutes is an amazing book written by one of the most talented authors writing today, IMO. Ms Yang’s debut novel Front Desk was a middle-grade masterpiece, and its sequel Three Keys comes out on the 15th! Is it possible for this novelist to come out with three five-star books in a row? I’ll hopefully find out sooner rather than later!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/09/03/parachutes-by-kelly-yang/

Sep 02 2020

The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #2) by Seth Dickinson

On the one hand, this sequel to The Traitor Baru Cormorant isn’t quite as filthy with forensic accounting as its predecessor in the series was, but it’s still one of those intellectually challenging fantasy novels that I know won’t be for everybody, more’s the pity. Our heroine, the titular monster after her villainous role in the first book, has been spirited off to The Elided Keep in order to be vested in her new powers and responsibilities as Agonist, the newest Cryptarch of the Falcrest Empire. Her patron Itinerant is bursting with pride at her accomplishments even as three other Cryptarchs hate her guts. Hesychast and Durance despise her because they’ve taken the opposite side of Itinerant’s game, but Apparitor has wholly personal reasons for his ire: Baru is coming into this level of the game without a hostage, and that deeply offends Apparitor on many levels (granted, Durance also has personal reasons, but she’s also Team Hesychast, so fuck her. Which isn’t to say that Team Itinerant is much better but at least it doesn’t believe in biological determinism.)

Games and gamesmanship form a very large part of the machinations for power here, with our Cryptarchs even playing an incredibly complicated type of RPG on room-sized maps in order to predict the future using known sociopolitical and economic facts and trends. But when the Imperial Navy, spurred by Baru’s earlier sacrifice of their ships and crews, begins to burn down Cryptarch holdings while seeking to arrest her — all carried out by a “mutinous” admiral hellbent on revenge — Apparitor, Durance and Baru must flee The Elided Keep and execute the next steps in determining the outcome of Itinerant and Hesychast’s ongoing power struggle. Meanwhile, Baru’s once and perhaps still best friend, naval Lieutenant Commander Aminata isiSegu, is finding herself drawn into the game even as the prospects of her ambitions toward captaining her own ship dwindle, subsumed by her growing reputation as the ruthlessly efficient Burner Of Souls.

The Monster Baru Cormorant treads brand new territory in this sequel as our Cryptarchs hunt for the secret of immortality allegedly preserved by the Oriati Mbo people, the last independent nation bordering the Ashen Sea. While there’s a bit of virtuoso economics at play in Baru’s manipulation of the poor Llosydanes, TMBC focuses more on sociopolitics with the occasional, and occasionally nasty, deep dive into medical philosophy. It is, as the kids say, A LOT. And it doesn’t help that most of the characters are freaking geniuses interacting with other freaking geniuses: while this book isn’t quite as textbook-y as TTBC, it is still an intellectual exercise that is not for anyone looking for a little mindless escapism. Which, frankly, is a good thing. Seth Dickinson is critically examining the engines of empire from any number of uncomfortable angles, and quite frankly doing an amazing job of wrapping that into a fantasy tale of exotic locales, intrigue and derring-do.

The only thing I didn’t really care for here was Tain Shir, who reminded me of the actor George Bluth would hire in Arrested Development whenever he wanted to teach his kids a lesson. I liked her background, but honestly think her stalking of Baru is a bit silly and self-indulgent, when she’s meant to be serious and sinister. Or perhaps Mr Dickinson is showing us how people who take themselves that seriously always wind up looking like absolute asses? I presume we’ll find out in the final book of the trilogy, which I’m very much looking forward to reading now that it’s out, wheeeeeee!

Also, to all procrastinators including my husband, OPEN YOUR DAMN MAIL. (This is definitely a theme of the book and not a complete tangent, I swear.)

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