Feb 14 2020

Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London #7) by Ben Aaronovitch

I have a weird confession to make: I’ve loved every single one of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London novels but I’ll be darned if I could, today, explain the plot of even just one of the first six books to anybody who asked. Okay, maybe Midnight Riot since that was the foundational text, and then there’s a book with an FBI agent and a book about Isengard and then stuff with fairies? Like, I have a general sense of what’s happened so far but I can barely even recapitulate, much less explain it all. Part of this is because the novels are so darn dense, with Mr Aaronovitch throwing big meaty ideas into the mix as our hero DC Peter Grant runs around London mostly, trying to investigate and stop magical crimes. Another is that details relevant to the overarching plot/world are included in non-book format, whether via comics or short stories (maddening, but understandable: an author’s got to make money. Mr Aaronovitch claims that you don’t have to read the extra stuff to enjoy the mains, but on this one thing I refuse to believe him.) But honestly, the main reason I can’t quite grok everything that’s going on is because lots of things tend to remain unexplained, and it is to Mr Aaronovitch’s unending credit that that is perfectly acceptable to me as a reader. He just gives you so much to think about, to be entertained by, with such confidence and skill and, frankly, realism, that it seems almost churlish to demand explanations given that our first person narrator, Peter, barely knows what’s going on half the time himself.

And THEN comes the seventh book in the series, which neatly ties everything up and finally, finally, tells you who the eff Mr Punch really is. This was a really great arc ender, dealing with the bad guy(s), tying up a bunch of loose ends but also pointing to a fresh direction forward for the series. By no means read this if you haven’t already enjoyed the first six books. I’m lucky enough to be reading this while holding an advance copy of book 8, False Value, so even my sieve-like memory won’t lose too much detail while segueing from one to the next. Is this review really just me boasting about already owning a copy of the next book in the series? Not entirely, tho I will say that readers should by all means binge books 1-7 to get a complete, satisfying story. Also, it’s rather hard to describe without giving away details. Lies Sleeping is basically about bells and ancient rituals, but honestly about so much more. If you haven’t already, start at Midnight Riot and settle in to enjoy a witty, magical police procedural set in a modern-day London that actually feels modern-day. You can thank me later.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/14/lies-sleeping-rivers-of-london-7-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Feb 12 2020

The Story of Flamenca: The First Modern Novel, Arranged from the Provencal Original of the Thirteenth Century by William Aspenwall Bradley

What a delightful thing to read in the lead up to Valentine’s Day.

Being both thrifty and impatient, I actually read the online copy for free at The Hathi Trust digital library, as the original came out in 1922 and is yet unavailable for e-reader. Since I’ve been listening to Rosalia’s El Mal Querer on constant repeat these past few weeks, I wanted to experience the text that had inspired this terrific flamenco-fusion album, or at least the most conveniently accessible English translation.

After reading the quite short novel(la?) I was genuinely surprised it isn’t more widely known. Perhaps because it was originally written in Occitan and is thus less accessible than other, more famous romances. Of course, it isn’t devoid, at least in this somewhat abridged translation by William Aspenwall Bradley, of the problems that plague other stories of the time. But even writers of our era trade in insta-love and in the diminishing of the seriousness of sexual assault. Flaws like these are almost easier to forgive in older works, because the choices of the authors and translators can be more clearly viewed through the lens of the intervening years.

Anyway, this is the story of the beautiful Flamenca, whose father, Count Guy of Nemours, would rather she live as a nearby chatelaine rather than become the monarch of a far-flung court. So he decides to marry her to Archambaut, lord of Bourbon and one of the best knights of the age. Flamenca and Archambaut meet and are impressed by what they see, so consent to marry. After a days-long wedding feast in Nemours, Archambaut rushes to Bourbon to prepare another feast to welcome his new bride home. He asks the King and Queen of France themselves the honour of escorting, with their many knights, Flamenca on her journey to him.

Unfortunately, the King proceeds to show a little too much favour to Flamenca, and by the time the royal party have left Bourbon, Archambaut has worked himself into a right fervor of jealousy. Over the next few weeks, anything she does or says is fuel for his paranoia. Soon, he has her cloistered in a tower with her two ladies-in-waiting, Alis and Margarida, letting them out only for church services. The years pass and no one does anything to help her or her ladies (thanks, Dad!) till a young knight named Guillem learns of her plight. Struck by the idea of Love, he travels to Bourbon and puts in motion a plan to meet her and win her love.

This version of the tale ends with the lovers happily fooling the awful husband. The original text in verse continues a little longer before petering out abruptly, though not before granting Flamenca a little more freedom. I understand Mr Bradley’s choice to end his adaptation cleanly, tho I still rather wish I had greater access to the original. Fortunately, Mr Bradley’s introduction is quite good, explaining his choices and scholarship, as is the story overall. The problematic bits actually stand out less than the progressive bits, with at least one really terrific part considering the nature of Fear, Shame and Love. I was honestly prepared for something much more depressing, given the themes of Rosalia’s album, but each work of art is good, and deeply satisfying, in its own way. You could do much, much worse than to check out either.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/12/the-story-of-flamenca-the-first-modern-novel-arranged-from-the-provencal-original-of-the-thirteenth-century-by-william-aspenwall-bradley/

Feb 11 2020

M Train by Patti Smith

I loved Just Kids — it was one of my very favorite books of 2014 — so why didn’t M Train do much for me?

Smith gives a bit of a warning in the book’s very first line, “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (p. 3) The speaker is a cowpoke who is in a dream of Smith’s that she relates. They converse a bit more about writing and whose dream it actually is before she wanders out of the dusty café and wakes up. Is M Train really about nothing? An ornery cowpoke could surely make the case. After that first dream café, Smith visits many more cafés over the course of the book, and she drinks a lot of coffee. She relates mundane details of her life, notably including a tendency to lose material objects, when she feeds her cats, and dreams she has. She also goes on quite a bit about the detective shows she likes to watch on TV.

M Train by Patti Smith

But Smith is enough of an artist that she can’t stick to the mundane. Despite considerable effort, she can’t make her life seem boring. Odd, distant, maybe even disconnected, but not boring, though at times I wondered how much she realized how different her life was from most people’s. Early in the book, she is catching up on her mail and discovers that one of the items that she has let sit idle for several weeks is an invitation to give a talk on a subject of her choice in Berlin at a meeting of a slightly eccentric club that she is a member of. She had been invited to join because she had wanted to photograph the boots of a particular Arctic explorer, whom the club commemorates. At the group’s 2007 meeting, in Reykjavik, she winds up having a clandestine midnight meeting with Bobby Fischer, at which they sing Buddy Holly songs until just before dawn. Late in the book, she decides she wants to visit Tokyo again, so she takes up what had been a standing invitation from her Japanese publisher. I suppose when you are the person Bob Dylan chooses to accept the Nobel Prize in his stead, you may view going to Tokyo on just a little more than a whim with the same equanimity as you do going to the corner café. Or perhaps the causality runs in the other direction. Who knows?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/11/m-train-by-patti-smith/

Feb 08 2020

Shatter the Night (Detective Gemma Monroe #4) by Emily Littlejohn

All that Cedar Valley Police Detective Gemma Monroe wants to do is enjoy her infant daughter’s first Halloween, but a trick-or-treating stop at an old friend’s place of business soon brings work back to the fore. Retired judge Caleb Montgomery has been receiving threatening letters for five months now but has only just decided to report them to the authorities. Gemma is immediately concerned and promises to make investigating the threats a priority, but figures she can start doing that in the morning. She and her family have only gone a short distance away from Caleb’s law offices, however, when a bomb explodes, shattering the night.

At first, the mountain of suspects looks overwhelming: it’s hard not to make enemies during a lifetime of overseeing criminal cases, after all. Gemma and her team think they’re narrowing the field down, following leads involving the questionable conviction of a serial killer as well as the vandalism of a local theater, when another shocking murder takes place. There seems to be no connection with Caleb’s death, until Gemma finds a crucial piece of evidence linking the two. Further digging indicates that the homicides might have their roots in her town’s murky past. Does she have a copycat killer on her hands? Worse, will the murderer continue a pattern of slayings that will surely take more lives?

This novel had some of the best foreshadowing and red herring management I’ve ever seen! I spent a lot of time worrying that the plot would zig, only to have it zag in thrilling new directions. I was also impressed with Emily Littlejohn’s willingness to explore some of Colorado’s near-lawless history, as the past comes back to haunt even law-abiding citizens like Gemma’s grandfather Bull, here in conversation with our heroine:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/08/shatter-the-night-detective-gemma-monroe-4-by-emily-littlejohn/

Feb 04 2020

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front by Serhii Plokhy

With Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front Serhii Plokhy delivers on his subtitle, “An Untold Story of World War II.” Not literally untold of course, but one that lived on mainly in the archived files, official histories, and small print runs of participants’ memoirs. Plokhy’s most useful source from a major publisher was The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia, which was put out by Viking in 1947 and can stand as a reminder that a wider variety of works and perspectives were printed in the war’s immediate aftermath than is present in popular memory.

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

What is this tale that has been ignored down through the decades? For a short time in 1944 and 1945, there were American air bases inside the Soviet Union. Hundreds of B-17s flew in and out of Soviet Ukraine on missions to bomb targets in Germany and in Axis-occupied (or Axis-allied) Central Europe. These targets would have been out of reach if the planes had had to return to their bases in Britain or Italy, and striking them effectively was beyond the abilities of Soviet air forces, which never built much of a strategic bombing capability. A series of missions under the code name Frantic started in England or Italy, attacked targets in Central Europe, and landed at airfields near Poltava, Ukraine. They then refueled, reloaded, and attacked Nazi-held targets on the way back to their home bases in Western Europe.

The plan was conceived when Stalin was keen to see commitment by the Western Allies to opening a second front in Europe. Lend-Lease was crucial to the Soviet war effort, but Stalin wanted a firmer commitment and feared that the Western powers might be content to let Nazism and Bolshevism bleed each other. The Americans looked past the defeat of Germany and wanted eventual Soviet assistance in defeating Imperial Japan. Despite the Axis Pact, and the US-UK-USSR alliance, Japan and the Soviet Union were not at war. Indeed, Plokhy describes American envoys’ shock at encountering Japanese diplomats in wartime Moscow. The Soviets wanted a demonstration of earnestness by the Western Allies, the Americans wanted a basis for future cooperation in the Far East, and all of the Allies wanted the ability to hit parts of the Nazi war machine that would otherwise have been out of reach. Win-win-win, right?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/04/forgotten-bastards-of-the-eastern-front-by-serhii-plokhy/

Feb 02 2020

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll

So now I want to read all of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. I want to start with Death of a Naturalist and see what set him apart from other poets getting started. I want to follow him up North to see how he both did and did not address the Troubles of his native Northern Ireland. I want to see the sets of sonnets that seemingly sent themselves, hear how he took up a longer story of Sweeney, make out the light of The Haw Lantern, travel a new line with District and Circle, and all of the others before, after and in between.

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney

It will be a sideways entry to his poems. I read and loved his Nobel lecture, Crediting Poetry, when it was new, and I have gone back to it again and again through the years. I have also read and enjoyed his Beowulf, yet I have never read a volume of his original poems. That will soon change.

Stepping Stones is a book-length set of interviews between Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll, a fellow Irish poet who was 15 years Heaney’s junior. They were conducted over a series of years and, at Heaney’s request, “principally in writing and by post.” (p. viii) Some items from 2003 and 2006 originate from conversations that O’Driscoll and Heaney had in person, the latter before an audience in London. Stepping Stones is also the closest that Heaney came to leaving an autobiography. After two introductory chapters about Heaney’s early life, O’Driscoll organizes the rest of the conversations around published collections of Heaney’s poetry. “I wanted to avoid a slavishly chronological approach; collection-centred questions fostered variety and flexibility, allowing for a blend of contemporaneous commentary and retrospective recollection.” (p. ix) O’Driscoll and Heaney work through the collections chronologically, but within the chapters they range back and forth through time, and across many different themes.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/02/02/stepping-stones-interviews-with-seamus-heaney-by-dennis-odriscoll/

Jan 31 2020

The Bride Test (The Kiss Quotient #2) by Helen Hoang

Some books are like a long cool drink of water on a hot day: to be consumed greedily because it just feels so good going down. Obviously, since I brought it up, one of these books is Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test, which has just dethroned its predecessor, The Kiss Quotient, as my favorite contemporary romance novel, shoot maybe even favorite romance novel, of all time.

The Bride Test follows My, a half-Vietnamese half-American hotel cleaner who dropped out of high school when she got pregnant with her beloved daughter, to the dismay of her ultimately supportive single mom and grandmother. It’s while cleaning a hotel bathroom that she runs into Nga, a Vietnamese-American who’s come back to the motherland in search of a bride for her autistic son, Khai. Nga thinks that My would be the perfect candidate for daughter-in-law. My isn’t as into the idea but her mother persuades her that a no-strings summer in America getting to know a handsome if aloof single dude will also give her time to look for her father, who left Vietnam before My was even born. And so My reinvents herself as Esme and prepares for three months in a brand new world.

Khai, of course, is completely horrified when his mother tells him what she’s done. It isn’t so much that he protests the idea of an arranged marriage as that he hates the idea of marriage altogether, not out of any absurd hatred of the institution but because he’s convinced that he’s incapable of love. So he’s completely thrown for a loop when he meets the delightful Esme and finds himself increasingly drawn to her. Guys like him, who’ve been accused of being stone-hearted all their lives because they don’t display emotions the same way neurotypical people do, can’t fall in love… can they?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/31/the-bride-test-the-kiss-quotient-2-by-helen-hoang/

Jan 28 2020

Diamond City (Diamond City #1) by Francesca Flores

Man, I dig a morally ambiguous lead character as much as the next person (V. E. Schwab’s Villains series, the badass coven of Hannah Capin’s upcoming Foul Is Fair) but this was waaaaay not that. Aina Solis is an orphan whose parents were killed for practicing their pacifist religion in Kosin, the titular Diamond City. After years of living on the streets and sniffing glue, she’s recruited by the Blood King, Kohl Pavel, to became a member of his crew, more specifically an assassin known as a Blade. Fast forward six years and Aina has become Kohl’s right hand. He promises her permission to open her own tradehouse (basically, her own gang) if she completes one last lucrative job for him: assassinate Kouta Hirai, one of the richest men in the city.

Naturally, things go wrong, and Aina soon finds herself discarded and worse by the man she’s always looked to as a role model and object of affection. Determined to prove herself to him, she enters into a treacherous alliance with Ryuu, Kouta’s youngest brother, to fulfill her mission and regain Kohl’s trust and the future he’s promised her.

I mean, if this is meant to be a book about not trusting people who promise you whatever you want in some hazy future so long as you accept abuse in the present, then I guess it’s job well done (tho it legit boggles my mind that she thinks he’s going to allow her to set up a rival shop in the same city. Maybe in another city, but in the same one? There’s just no way.) And there are moments of reflection that are truly insightful, into the welter of teenage emotion and romance and class consciousness. But oof, the lack of rigor that went into building, well, everything else.

First, Aina is a terrible assassin. She’s hyped up as this super badass but all you see in this book is her botching mission after mission while Kohl’s often conflicting advice plays in her head. But she’s given incredibly stupid opponents to make her look better, like the guy who comes looking for her in the bar. No way in hell would a guy who runs a gambling den a) do his own dirty work, especially if b) he doesn’t even know how to use the gun he’s waving around. We keep being told she’s awesome despite evidence to the contrary, which is just as annoying as her constant musing over whether her “life is sacred” parents would be proud of her work as an assassin. I’m gonna guess that’s a hard no, Aina!

And she wears a scarf that she constantly dyes in the blood of her victims like that isn’t super disgusting, both stink- and hideous brown-grey color-wise. She wanders around in it and no one gags and points at her all “wtf?!” Instead, she actually gets compliments over the color, which is mind-boggling to anyone who’s ever had to stress over period stains. Actually, a lot of the attitude to dress here makes no goddamn sense, as she pretty much swans around in the same outfit whether crawling through sewers or attending a high-class ball, all in the same night, and no one fucking says anything! The world-building details also make no goddamn sense, especially in the technology: photography is rare but used for cleaning crew ID (but not security guard ID?!) and plastics are used primarily to make the bags that addicts use to sniff glue. Oh, and she can dodge bullets. No bog-standard human, no matter what setting, can dodge bullets, not without some sort of physical augmentation. The world-building is entirely one of convenience for the protagonist’s journey, and it makes me livid. Just because it’s a fantasy novel doesn’t mean the laws of logic don’t apply.

Also? I found Aina’s sense of tribalism incredibly off-putting. She kills dozens of people, innocent or otherwise, in this book but the only time she shows mercy is when her intended victim either shares a background or religion with her. That is literally as gross as a mass shooter not wanting to hurt someone because they’re also white.

Diamond City tries for edgy but just ends up flat and unbelievable, to the point of ludicrous. The writing itself isn’t terrible, and there are some decent ideas in there, but someone really needs to hold Francesca Flores to a minimum standard of sense-making.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/28/diamond-city-diamond-city-1-by-francesca-flores/

Jan 26 2020

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson has all of the receipts. Setting out to understand the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South and into other regions of the country, she drew on scholarship, she drew on hundreds of interview, she drew on the archives of dozens of organizations, and she arrived with a great work of synthesis, a book whose pages encompass the most significant domestic migration in the history of the United States. It is, she writes, “three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, each of whom led a sufficiently full life to merit a book in his or her own right and was thus researched and reported as such. The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.” (p. 540)

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson not only interviewed a vast swathe of people before selecting her three protagonists, she “confirmed or clarified [the protagonists’] accounts through interviews with the waning circle of surviving witnesses, cohorts, and family members, through newspaper accounts in the South and North dating back to 1900; and through census, military, railroad, school, state, and municipal records. (p. 541) She spoke with the people “for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours, most of the interviews tape-recorded and transcribed.” (p. 541) She not only spoke with as many people as she could find to tell and corroborate the stories she relates, “I then reenacted all or part of each subject’s migration route, devoting most of my time to the migration of Robert Foster.” (p. 541) She has been there and done that, seen every bit of the journey, gotten it all down and made as much sense as one person can of a movement so vast that it touched practically every corner of a continent-spanning nation.

What Wilkerson is too modest (and too smart) to remark in her notes that discuss how she put the book together is that the stories she chose are riveting. Wilkerson is aware of the scholarship and draws on it, but as she writes, “I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve.” (p. 539) She describes three goals for the book: to describe when the Great Migration took place, to depict where it occurred, and to show some of the people who comprised it. “I wanted to convey the intimate stories of people who had dared to make the crossing. I wanted to capture the vastness of the phenomenon by tracking unrelated people who had followed the multiple streams of the Great Migration over the course of the decades it unfolded.” (p. 539)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/26/the-warmth-of-other-suns-by-isabel-wilkerson/

Jan 24 2020

Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune by Roselle Lim

I picked this up thinking it would be a sweet romance featuring Asian-American characters who cook, and while it definitely has the latter, the former is merely an uninteresting subplot featuring the dreaded insta-love. This is definitely more contemporary fiction than romance, which made my genre-loving heart sad. Actually, a lot about this book made me sad, but before I get there, a quick description of plot:

Natalie Tan always wanted to run her own restaurant but her agoraphobic single mom did everything to discourage her teenage dreams. Natalie rebelled by saving up money to go to culinary school, but after flunking out in her first year, took off to travel the world and gain culinary experience by cooking in order to fund her travels. When her mother unexpectedly dies, Natalie returns to their home in San Francisco’s Chinatown to discover that she’s been left her grandmother’s legendary, and long-shuttered, restaurant. At first mistrustful of the neighbors whom she believed neglected her and her mother as she was growing up, she comes to realize that she’s a necessary part of the neighborhood and strives to help rebuild it, saving it from gentrification through flights of magical realism.

Sounds amazing, right? My first clue that something was off about this book was the fact that the food descriptions did absolutely nothing for me. I am a reader highly susceptible to writing-induced food cravings, so to only feel a slight stirring of “hmm, I should go get dim sum” towards the end of a book about Asian cuisine, the food I grew up with and crave most, is disquieting to say the least. I also found myself irritated with the chef’s recipes included. It’s fine that they don’t include measurements, but to then insist that any one recipe will make a set amount of food is disingenuous at best. I don’t know how much experience Roselle Lim has with working in a restaurant but, food aside, some of the stuff in here was utterly mind-boggling. By the time I read that Natalie didn’t think she needed anyone but herself (no waitstaff, no host, no dishwasher) in order to run her admittedly small restaurant, I was absolutely done with the culinary aspect of this novel.

So what about the fantasy aspects? Could they save the book from its astonishing lack of food realism? Alas, too much of the fantastic stuff felt strictly by-the-numbers. Natalie cries tears of salt crystal that her mother collects in a bowl, but aside from that and the one big plot twist towards the end (well, “twist” if you don’t read much speculative fiction,) no one sees the admittedly cool effects except for Natalie herself. That’s less magical realism than a vivid imagination.

But the worst thing about this book was the fact that the characterization made no sense. It was truly shocking to me that no one line read this book and pointed out the many inconsistencies. Like, I get giving a pass to the cooking, since not everyone has cooked professionally, and the magical stuff, since not everyone magicks professionally either, but honestly trying to make us believe that Miranda Tan, Natalie’s mother, was her biggest cheerleader when she’d done SO MUCH to make her kid not believe in herself? I appreciated the depiction of Miranda’s agoraphobia and depression and how little understood those are in Asian culture, but being mentally ill doesn’t automatically make you a strong person. Being a restless perfectionist like Qiao, Miranda’s mom, doesn’t make you a strong person either. I understand Natalie wanting to forgive her mother and get to know her grandmother better via the writings they left her, but her antecedents were mildly interesting at best and seriously problematic at worst. It also bothered me that Natalie got so much shit for sticking up for herself. As an Asian-American, I understand the guilt that comes with leaving the nest but maybe it would have been nice to see an acknowledgment of reciprocal culpability from the people representing Asian culture around her, and not in the form of an extremely unlikely speech from the worst of them?

Maybe I’m being too hard on this book, but I’m just so disappointed. I was really rooting for it because it boasts all the elements I love but it kinda sucked.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/24/natalie-tans-book-of-luck-and-fortune-by-roselle-lim/