Nov 20 2020

An Interview with T. C. Farren, author of The Book Of Malachi

Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Book of Malachi evolve?

A. I was living at a remove from society, feeling outrage at human cruelty and a dark, desperate humor at the time of writing TboM. Our suburb was close to the sea but chopped off by concrete buildings and pavilions. Like Malachi I couldn’t see the sea but could sense it nearby and, like Malachi, felt trapped inside manmade anxiety, fretting about my children who were seriously sick from GM grains. We had paramedics rushing to the house every three weeks to help my baby to breathe while my daughter’s eczema was so severe she had to be wrapped in bandages like a mummy in hospital. Then there was the country. South Africa’s enormous, cruel split between the privileged and the poor make it place of high drama and homicide. In the year I started writing Malachi I was trying these amazing daily meditations where you gradually dis-identify with the ego and connect with your inner light. I think my dabbling might have kicked up a hugely brave, sage character who was big enough to take on love, genocide, and the neocolonial rape of the Africa.

Q. I loved how The Book of Malachi was almost entirely peopled by characters with strong ties to Africa. Did you make a conscious decision to showcase the diversity of the peoples of your continent in your book, or did that come about as a sort of natural evolution while writing?

A. I think it was a natural evolution for me. The cast is large and unconsciously reflects some of the people I have met or been stunned by in my lifetime. Malachi is a bit of a Mister Mandela figure but carries more wrath than Madiba did. I guess the book is a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission with Malachi presiding over it. South Africa is filled with gifted, often highly educated refugees like Malachi who arrive with their unbearable memories of trauma and loss. Many are illegal, many unwanted due to competition for jobs and despite their muteness, find ways stay dignified while taking shelter inside enemy territory. The unscrupulous bosses on the rig are mostly from China and the US, no different to the 17th century explorers who arrived with their ships and guns, stole cattle, annexed land and chained up Khoi Khoi kings to be their slaves. Then there are the killers. The prisoners all lived in Africa but hail from everywhere, representing people who’ve been unjustly accused, those crying out for forgiveness and those who are too dangerous to rehabilitate.

Q. One thing that really struck me with this novel is the very clear moral that we shouldn’t lose sight of each other’s humanity to the point where we treat one another like goods or animals, particularly in the carceral system. How did your thoughts on the current state of the prison system and reform influence your writing of this novel?

A. To me recidivism is a frightening thing. People commit dreadful acts, go in for 10 to 20 years, get raped and beaten in jail and come out even more twisted. As distasteful as it may seem to people who want pure revenge, forms of therapy that lets perpetrators encounter the goodness in them saves society endless suffering at the hands of these people. Although some criminals are irredeemably dangerous and should stay locked up until they die, I think programs that let inmates excavate through their shadows towards some form of light is the very first step towards making amends. I’m being serious when I say I’d love this book to go to prisons.

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Nov 19 2020

Star Daughter by Shveta Thakrar

From the very first pages, I was completely blown away by how lovely the prose of this novel is! In all honesty, pretty phrasing isn’t high on my list when it comes to what makes a novel entertaining, but Shveta Thakrar’s beautiful descriptive writing, coupled with her gift for presenting absolutely natural dialog and emotion, had me lapping up every single word of her gorgeous debut novel.

Star Daughter is the story of Sheetal Mistry from Edison, New Jersey, the daughter of an astrophysicist and an actual star. Not like Hollywood/ Instagram stuff, but a star from the firmament who took human form and fell in love with Gautam Mistry, then an obscure young academic. Charumati of House Pushya hid her divinity for nearly a decade before the Song of Stars pulled her back into the heavens, leaving behind her husband and young, grieving Sheetal. Adding to the trauma of being abandoned by her mother is the constant fear of discovery: the Mistrys know that exposing Sheetal as being half-human would invite curiosity, questions and worse. The only people besides Sheetal and her father who know the truth are Radhika, Gautam’s overprotective sister, and Minal, Sheetal’s exuberant best friend.

Sheetal is sixteen when she meets and falls in love with Dev, a talented, handsome young musician. Were she fully human, this wouldn’t be a big deal, even to their conservative Hindu families; being half-star, however, adds a distinct layer of complication. Sheetal is torn between opening up to Dev and trying to keep her secret, a task made harder by the insistence with which the Song of Stars has recently been calling to her. When Sheetal finds out a shocking secret about Dev’s heritage, her overwhelmed reactions will set into motion a journey that will see her travelling to the heavens themselves to seek aid from her mother, a journey that could have dire consequences for not only herself but for the rest of humanity as well.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/19/star-daughter-by-shveta-thakrar/

Nov 17 2020

These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights #1) by Chloe Gong

So there are some really good bits in Chloe Gong’s retelling of Romeo And Juliet, set in 1920s Shanghai and featuring the scions of two rival gang families needing to team up to defeat a supernatural threat to the city. First and foremost is the lived-in character of Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlet Gang, whose position is threatened by her brash and, more importantly to some, male cousin Tyler. Repeatedly sent away to America for her education, Juliette adopts a Westernized persona as her signature pose, even as she bitterly resents the Western European interests that seek always to undermine local rule.

Her nemesis/true love is Roma Montagov (which is a totally nonsense name,) heir to the White Flowers, a gang descended of Russian refugees who fled the Bolsheviks and assimilated to Chinese life. I honestly loved how the White Flowers were considered native Shanghainese compared to the British and French, primarily because they weren’t there to colonize but to survive, and understand that that means respecting and absorbing local traditions and mores. Unfortunately, Roma is wildly underbaked as a character compared to Juliette, or even to her maternal cousin Kathleen Lang. Honestly, if this book had been about Juliette and Kathleen running around having adventures and defeating bad guys, as well as grappling with what it means to be a cis woman and a trans woman respectively in a patriarchal society, I’d have loved it a lot more, but I guess you can’t have an R&J retelling without Romeo. So there Roma is, and he’s… fine. He’s a pacifist, a cinnamon roll who has to be tough in order to preserve his place as heir to the White Flower leadership. I just found it silly towards the end that he didn’t quit when faced with the quandary that originally divided him from Juliette, but teenagers are a lot more tied to their parents than they want to admit.

And that’s honestly the main trouble with this book, that it’s about teenagers, none of whom are too bright, running around being violent. Whereas the original play was teenagers being melodramatic and self-destructive, These Violent Delights has them dial down the drama — it honestly is far more sensible about the romance than its inspiration — but turns the violence outward and amps it up. Which is fine, if you’re into having protagonists that aren’t particularly clever, in a plot that doesn’t particularly make sense, with, barring Kathleen, awkwardly written supporting characters who often serve more as plot devices than actual people, running around killing others with little to no consequence. The occasional paraphrasing of Shakespeare is neat, but doesn’t make up for the atrocious grammar that I’m hoping gets edited more stringently in the finalized version of the book (I read an ARC, natch.) While I can forgive the overuse of the verb surge, I’m pretty sure Ms Gong has never broiled anything in her life, given the way she constantly uses the word as a cross between “boil” and “roil” when it is like neither of those things. I get wanting to expand the limits of language, but words have meanings. Don’t even get me started on the use of exhale and inhale as nouns, in just another egregious example that seems to be endemic to the YA genre recently. Ffs, editors, do your jobs.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/17/these-violent-delights-these-violent-delights-1-by-chloe-gong/

Nov 16 2020

X-Venture Xplorers: The Kingdom Of Animals #1 Rage Of The Kings by Slaium, Meng & the Black Ink Team

Somehow, I overlooked this book in all the shuffle of recent months, but was so very pleased to finally be able to crack it open and discover that it was written by a Malaysian team! Reading the book made me feel like a kid again, sneaking my comics away from my mother’s disapproving eye, much like countless other young Malaysians whose parents thought comics were lowbrow entertainment. In fact, I’m pretty sure that attitude was behind this comics team’s emphasis on how educational X-Venture Xplorers: The Kingdom Of Animals is meant to be, complete with a preface on the subject, numerous factual interludes on the various feline species, as well as a quiz at the end. “See, parents,” it seems to claim, “Comics aren’t just mindless fun! You learn important facts and figures too!” Rigid parents will hopefully be fobbed off with same while avid readers are allowed to enjoy both the educational aspects as well as the just plain fun story being told in these pages. And don’t get me started on all the things readers learn that aren’t just “scientific.” God, I hate when people are snobs about comics. For the record, while my mom was sniffy about them, my dad encouraged me, recognizing my voracious appetite for reading as the hallmark of a mind hungry for a broader range of knowledge that what the received wisdom deemed suitable. My dad rocks.

Anyhoo, Jake and Louis are long-time rivals in the Xplorers teams, a group of children mentored by Dr Darwin, a renowned zoologist and biologist who isn’t above getting even louder than the kids in order to end their ridiculous fighting. Sherry is the lone girl, the peacemaker between Jake and Louis. Bean is the small, shy genius of the group, and Kwame is the one with the most actual experience out in the wild. When Dr Darwin sets the kids the task of completing an Encyclopedia Animalia, they must split into two groups to not only track and chart their first animal family, Felidae, but also settle the argument that Jake and Louis have been having: whether the lion or tiger is the more powerful animal king.

It’s basically Pokemon but with real animal stats and super cool holographic composites showing what a virtual fight would look like. It reminds me a lot of the Who Would Win series of books pitting similar creatures against one another that my eldest child loved in first grade. The kids are cute and obnoxious and silly and sympathetic: no one’s actually a bad guy, everyone’s just a person with strengths and flaws. It’s very much an Asian manga (from 2012!) translated into English for the American market. There are panels that could raise Western eyebrows, when the languages of minority characters in communicating with animals are depicted as gibberish. It’s hard to explain how that isn’t as offensive to continental Asians as it is to those who’ve grown up in colonizer cultures, who have a history of belittling the foreign as part of their methods of conquest. Asians don’t see making weird noises when doing supernatural things as a value judgment: it doesn’t make the (minority) caster seem savage or dirty or unsophisticated when it’s everyone else who can’t understand what the caster is saying.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/16/x-venture-xplorers-the-kingdom-of-animals-1-rage-of-the-kings-by-slaium-meng-the-black-ink-team/

Nov 15 2020

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I read Between the World and Me a lifetime ago, in early summer when it was strange to leave the neighborhood again after so many weeks of stillness. It is a hard book, not because of the difficulty of language or of its concepts, but because of the hardness of its subject: how to live and be Black in America. It is hard because of the unflinching clarity of thought that Coates brings to his question. Clear writing comes from clear thinking, and Coates’ writing is very clear indeed.

Drawing on James Baldwin’s 1962 “Letter to My Nephew,” Coates structures Between the World and Me” as a letter to his son:

I write to you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniform pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of the road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held accountable. (p. 9)

Many names, too many names, have been added to the list since the book was published in 2015. This summer, after a policeman named Derek Chauvin killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while other police officers looked on, a large wave of protests pressed for change. Will there be change? If so, how much? No one knows, and in the meantime, Coates, his son, and millions of Americans have to live with Coates’ question every waking moment.

I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream [of white American innocence], is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. (p. 12)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/15/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/

Nov 13 2020

The Book of Malachi by T.C. Farren

I’m still thinking about this cleverly constructed fable set fifteen or so years in the future. Thirty year-old Malachi is hired to essentially be the groom for a stable of murderers whose bodies are being used as part of a top-secret organ-growing project run by Raizier Pharmaceuticals. The nutrients fed to the prisoners cause their nails to grow far faster than usual, and since the wardens would rather their cash cows didn’t hurt themselves, someone must be given the daily task of clipping their claws (if you’ll forgive my bag of mixed metaphors here.) Malachi is the perfect candidate, in large part due to his muteness. In addition to the usual remuneration, Raizier offers to graft on a new tongue for him in exchange for a little over half a year’s work. Lonely Malachi, seeing not much of a future at the chicken processing plant where he currently runs quality control, readily accepts.

The prisoners, he is told on the long journey by both car and helicraft, are the worst of the worst, rapists and killers who are being given a chance to give back to society for their misdeeds by having their bodies be used as vessels to grow extra necessary parts. After these parts are harvested, the criminals will be sent back to prison to finish out their terms. Upon arrival at the offshore rig where the prisoners are being kept, Malachi discovers that all the other staffers he’ll interact with — the non-medical staff, essentially — have also been promised organs for their loved ones: a heart here, lungs for another, arteries for a third.

The reality of the holding cell is the first shock for our new prison warden. Forty naked prisoners are held in plexiglass enclosures in one large room through which he must travel with his trolley of grooming items. Handsome, gregarious Tamba, his new roommate, oversees from the console room above, while Meirong, their cold supervisor, checks in from time to time to make sure that no one is communicating with the prisoners. Apparently, Malachi’s predecessor had made that mistake, but Raizier is confident that hiring an illiterate mute will circumvent any future issues.

Trouble is, Malachi isn’t actually illiterate, tho he’s feigned so for years as part of a self-imposed penance for the crime that cost him his tongue. As the prisoners begin to tell him their stories, however, Malachi discovers that not all crimes are created equal, and that perhaps the greatest one of all is the injustice being perpetrated on his new charges. But what can he do, a lone, mute man on a rig in the middle of the ocean?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/13/the-book-of-malachi-by-t-c-farren/

Nov 12 2020

Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know by Samira Ahmed

I am very grouchy about this book, even though I was very excited at first to finally get my hands on this YA novel featuring feminist Muslim heroines. Samira Ahmed’s Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know marries an intriguing high concept with a narrative that prefers to tell instead of show and relentlessly strikes dramatic poses with little depth or substance to back them up. I should know by now that mysteries diving into art and literary history are almost always going to disappoint me, but I keep holding out hope that this next one will be worth my time. MB&DtK, alas, was not.

The concept was undoubtedly v cool: French-Indian-American-Muslim Khayyam Maquet is spending the summer in Paris, as she has every of the 17 years of her life so far, in the apartment her academic parents inherited from her father’s side of the family. She’s feeling pretty glum, as she’s just spectacularly crashed and burned in an art history essay meant to impress the Art Institute of Chicago, on the possible connection between writer Alexandre Dumas and painter Eugene Delacroix. Plus, her maybe boyfriend Zaid is off to college in the fall and has been taking lots of up close and personal Instagram selfies with any number of their good-looking female mutuals back home in Illinois while she’s away.

So when Khayyam has a meet-cute with an actual living descendent of Dumas who also happens to be his very good-looking, very age-appropriate-for-her namesake, she can’t help feeling that life is giving her a sign. Alexandre is intrigued by her ideas regarding his ancestor, and the two soon embark on a semi-legal journey to uncover the truth, one that seemingly involves a raven-haired woman named Leila. Along the way, Khayyam revenge posts a few selfies of herself and Alexandre being adorable, causing Zaid to reconsider his inattention to her. Interwoven with Khayyam’s story is Leila’s tale, offering subtle parallels to the 21st century shenanigans.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/12/mad-bad-dangerous-to-know-by-samira-ahmed/

Nov 10 2020

She Lies Close by Sharon Doering

Y’aaaaall.

I’ve read plenty of books with unsympathetic narrators but this is one of the perishing few where I could sympathize with our protagonist even as I lacked any empathy for her. Grace Wright is, in temperament, my exact opposite. She has a fixed idea of how things should be, and reacts poorly when things go wrong. She’d rather take medication than undergo therapy, and is an enthusiastic helicopter parent who resents her kids, especially since divorcing the husband who cheated on her. She’s overwhelmed even before she discovers that her neighbor is a suspect in the disappearance of five year-old Ava Boone. Sleep-deprived and constantly scouring the Internet on a quest for how to fix everything in her life, she’s a mess. And then she thinks she sees Ava in the window of the house next door.

What follows is a hallucinatory descent into, if not quite the madness, then the definite temporary psychosis of a modern woman trying to keep it all together, to be the woman she thinks she’s “supposed” to be even as her mental and emotional health degrade, in no large part due to her own reactionary choices. Grace has little impulse control and cannot stop from making bad decisions, spurred on by a social milieu that tells her she shouldn’t compromise, that she only needs to lean in, to try harder while depriving her of the supportive framework to do that. Confused and anxious, she chooses paranoia at every turn. Frankly, she’s a QAnon cultist waiting to happen — certain passages, particularly the ones about falling down Internet rabbit holes and being obsessed with protecting children from strangers, remind me of profiles I’ve read of true believers.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/10/she-lies-close-by-sharon-doering/

Nov 09 2020

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

It is entirely possible that any reader of this review has in their pocket a computing device more powerful than the one whose design and initial construction are the story of The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. That machine, code named “Eagle” in the book, would eventually be sold by Data General as the MV/8000. It was a big as a good-sized kitchen appliance, and needed a separate television screen (definitely a cathode ray tube screen at the time) to manage input and some forms of output. Why read a book that is nearly 40 years old about a device that’s hilariously outdated in a field that is notoriously fast-moving?

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

First, Kidder brings the process to life. Someone far from the business might think that the design of a new computer is a bloodless affair. Kidder shows the decisions, the drama, the fights, the passion and the humor that go into the construction of a machine that, at the time, aimed to set the standards of what engineering and science could do within the constraints involved in creating a minicomputer. Sometimes the engineers had disinterested discussions about the best way to address a question; at other times, the choices they made were the result of knock-down drag-out arguments about fundamental views on how people could and should work. There was even the occasional bit of skulduggery.

Second, Kidder shows people giving their all for a project that they believe matters. They worked crazy hours, they worked in shifts, in their off hours they thought about the problems it raised, they offered their creativity, they pushed each other, they stretched their capabilities. “The Eclipse Group and the many others who had worked on the machine — including, especially, Software and Diagnostics — had created 4096 lines of microcode, which fit into a volume about eight inches thick; diagnostic programs amounting to thousands of lines of code; over 200,000 lines of system software; several hundred pages of flow charts; about 240 pages of schematics; hundreds and hundreds of engineering changes from the debugging; twenty hours of videotape to describe the new machine; and now a couple of functioning computers in blue-and-white cases, plus orders for many more on the way. Already, you could see that the engineers who had participated fully would be looking back on this experience a long time hence. It would be something unforgettable in their working lives.” (p. 276)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/09/the-soul-of-a-new-machine-by-tracy-kidder/

Nov 06 2020

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

In short: neurotic weirdo falls in love with a big ball of red flags.

One of the main reasons it took me years to come back to reading contemporary romance novels is that it infuriates me when the central premise of the book is based on a woman lapping up clearly abusive behavior from some shitheel whose main feature is his good looks. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, he’s also rich, for an injection of glamour and hopefully some expensive parting gifts for our heroine once she figures out she needs to dump the asshole. With some encouragement from Romancelandia, however, I’d recently discovered the joys of reading Helen Hoang and Alisha Rai, with neither writer promoting that kind of toxicity. But too many of the books I’ve read by other authors since have veered closer and closer to it… and then we come to The Hating Game by Sally Thorne.

So our heroine Lucy Hutton is a 28 year-old doormat with no social life because she’s always picking up the slack for her underlings at the publishing house where she’s executive assistant to the arty boss, Helene. Her nemesis Joshua Templeman is the brooding, regimented executive assistant to the business-side boss, Richard. Lucy and Joshua share an office in front of their bosses’ offices, and for the past two years (I think? Overdrive took the book back, so I can’t look it up) have been quietly feuding, engaging in any number of games of one-upmanship with few clearly defined rules. Mostly it’s a bunch of immature behavior that takes up so much time, it’s a wonder either of them gets any work done at all. Plus, they’ve run to HR complaining about the other on numerous occasions, which makes me feel like they’re actually seriously transgressing against one another and not just playfully joking. When a chance appears at a promotion that would put one in charge of the other, their simmering tension boils over and romance ensues because, as Ms Thorne puts on the very first pages of this book, there’s a fine line between love and hate, which is a line I used to torment a set of romantic nemeses back in grade school but has no business being a maxim by which to conduct adult relationships.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/06/the-hating-game-by-sally-thorne/