Apr 04 2019

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

In The Color of Law Richard Rothstein lays out the case that segregated patterns of residence in every part of the United States are not the result of impersonal market forces, not just the result of patterns of individual choices among large numbers of people, but are instead the result, often the intended result, of policy and political choices at every level of American governance. The choices were made throughout the post–Civil War history of the United States. Very often these choices were made in opposition to existing law, up to and including defiance of Supreme Court decisions, not least by government institutions themselves.

Including lax oversight of predatory lending that targeted African Americans (Rothstein tends to write the term without a hyphen) in the run-up to the Great Recession, these choices continued through 2008. Including choices about zoning, school locations, industrial development and other details of local government, de jure discrimination against African Americans by public bodies very likely continues to the present day.

Although the problem of discrimination is by no means relegated to the past, Rothstein draws on the historical record to make his arguments. In a few instances, he supplements that with material from interviews that he has conducted, to add lived experience to the documentary evidence that he is supplying to buttress his contentions. Right away, he demolishes the idea that discrimination is in any way a regional issue, limited to the states of the old Confederacy, or perhaps those plus a few border states. His first chapter is titled, “If San Francisco, then Everywhere?” and his thesis is that if a city that’s regarded as one of America’s most liberal was the scene of official discrimination, then chances were good that it was practiced practically everywhere. I knew from reading Sundown Towns and numerous other books, even riffs on H.P. Lovecraft, that discrimination was everywhere.

In subsequent chapters Rothstein shows how public housing, mostly starting with housing for defense workers during World War II was built on discriminatory foundations. A recurring motif of the book is unoccupied units in designated white areas, and overcrowding plus above-market costs in black areas. That happened in publicly built developments and in private developments that had public support through infrastructure and preferential financing. Basically, anywhere that housing was built, African Americans were systematically kept out, steered toward sub-standard locations, packed into smaller areas, only offered rents that could only be covered by increasing the number of people living in a particular dwelling, zoned into areas bordering industrial sites, pushed out of mixed neighborhoods by the targeted construction of parks and highways, and more. The list of lengths to which white people were willing to go to make sure they did not have to live with or near black people is long and appalling.

Nor did the white people stop short of terrorism. This often had the support or at least the acquiescence of local police. Many years after we moved away from a Chicago suburb, my mom said to me that when we moved there, she was told that there weren’t any black families in town because if any tried to move in, their house would catch fire and the volunteer fire department wouldn’t come. Terrorism worked, too. Decades after white riots kept black people from moving in, Cicero, Illinois is still more than 95 percent white.

Rothstein’s final chapters consider what ought to be done to remedy this legacy. He does not come to any firm conclusions about specific actions, but he rightly asserts that the most important first step is for white Americans to know and acknowledge the truth about how state power has been used, and is being used, to discriminate against fellow citizens.

As a book, The Color of Law tends towards the dry. Hyperbole would not serve him, bare facts are enraging enough. Rothstein is not a synthesizer and storyteller as Isabel Wilkerson is in her brilliant work on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. He is a lawyer laying out his case. It’s not an enjoyable book, it’s just a terribly important one.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/04/the-color-of-law-by-richard-rothstein/

Apr 01 2019

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

I nearly set this one down about a third of the way through. The violence just seemed gratuitous, played for yuks (and for yucks), divorced from anything meaningful going on in the story. I stuck with it because I was curious about some of the characters and, to be honest, because the book isn’t that long and moves at a good clip.

Carolyn’s life was more or less normal for its first eight years. Then one day a fireball engulfed much of her neighborhood, incinerating her home, orphaning her and about a dozen of the other neighborhood children. They are all adopted by an eccentric neighbor, Adam Black, who turns out to be much more than he seemed. After that, things get weird.

Hawkins reveals her background piecemeal, after opening The Library at Mount Char with the visually arresting image of “Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78. Most of the librarians, Carolyn included, had come to think of this road as the Path of Tacos, so-called in honor of a Mexican joint they snuck out to sometimes. The guacamole, she remembered, is really good. … The obsidian knife she had used to murder Detective Miner lay nestled in the small of her back, sharp and secret.” (p. 3)

Clearly, these are not ordinary librarians. Nor indeed is it a normal Library. As Carolyn reveals in the opening chapter, each of the orphans has a special area of study. Hers is languages: all of them. Her adoptive brother David’s is war; Michael’s is animals; Jennifer’s is healing; Margaret’s is death. She’s not completely mad, but returning from the dead so many times has certainly taken its toll. Time flows differently in the Library, and though the librarians appear to be in their early 30s, each has had enough study to master their portfolios. One of Carolyn’s earliest lessons was a summer spent among the deer, learning the languages of the forest creatures.

Each librarian is a specialist, for their Father does not countenance learning outside of one’s catalog. Deviation is punished, and with resurrection readily available, death is not the harshest that he metes out.

Carolyn hates him, and has determined to kill him, with a plot so subtle that she dare not even think about it much, lest he or David glean what she is up to and put a gruesome stop to it.

The librarians are not quite human anymore, and their half-comprehending interactions with contemporary America provide much of the book’s humor. It’s also fun to find out how far their powers extend, and the deadly competition among them provides much of the book’s tension. There was also enough horribleness going on that I considered not continuing.

What I liked most about the book is that it does not end where one would expect it to. The Library at Mount Char reaches that point, and then it keeps going. The most interesting part of the book is not the resolution of its main conflict, but what happens afterward. The main struggle is full of fireworks and twists, but structurally it’s also very straightforward, and you either enjoy the ride or you don’t. After, though, is what I did not expect, and what made me most glad that I had not set it down when it looked like it was just going to be a weirdly giddy gorefest.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/01/the-library-at-mount-char-by-scott-hawkins/

Mar 30 2019

My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

This was so great.

Told in short, easily digestible chapters that skip between past and present, My Sister, The Serial Killer is narrated by Korede, a nurse in Lagos whose younger sister is developing the unsettling habit of killing off her boyfriends. The first death had a panicked Ayoola begging her meticulous older sister to come to her rescue. Korede had never liked that boyfriend anyway, but that was beside the point: Ayoola needed protecting, and Korede has never failed in providing that, or valiantly trying anyway. But by the time the third boyfriend shows up dead, Korede is starting to wonder whether her beautiful, frivolous sister is truly the victim she keeps claiming to be.

Things come to a head when Tade, the doctor Korede is too reticent to admit she loves, meets and falls head over heels for Ayoola. Korede is torn between her loyalty to her family and her own hopes and dreams… but perhaps the decision to expose Ayoola will be taken out of her hands by circumstances well beyond her control.

This was not only a really terrific look at modern Nigeria, its heritage and customs, but also a sharp commentary on the complexity of gender relations and family ties. I’m still not sure how I felt about that ending. Korede is almost desperately lonely throughout the book, and it certainly didn’t look like that was going to change by the end of it. I wanted her to find happiness, but that’s a sign of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s talent: that Korede’s uncertain future is still an acceptable, and wholly plausible, fate. It’s honestly hard to believe that this is a debut novel. It’s so well written, so well constructed that it feels like the effortless work of an experienced master of the field. Ms Braithwaite is definitely an author to watch.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/30/my-sister-the-serial-killer-by-oyinkan-braithwaite/

Mar 28 2019

Firefly: The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove

What a sheer delight of a book. Better even than its predecessor, Big Damn Hero, it hits all the fan favorite beats while managing to avoid more adroitly the issues I had with the first book. Captain Mal Reynolds’ annoying mouthiness gets put on the backburner, as does the glorification of the losing rebel army that hearkens far too closely to the racist American Confederacy. It helps that The Magnificent Nine is centered on my favorite crew member, Jayne Cobb, in all his imperfect blockheaded glory. In this novel, he receives a distress call from an old flame and persuades the crew of the Serenity to fly to the backwater planet of Thetis to help defend the town of Coogan’s Bluff from a band of marauders who style themselves The Scourers, under the leadership of purported former Reaver Elias Vandal.

Upon arrival, the crew is surprised to discover that Temperance McCloud, as she’s now known, has a daughter named Jane, born several months after she abruptly ran out of Jayne’s life. Jayne, of course, is the last to suspect that Jane might be his daughter, but when he does… Let’s just say that this book confirms my choice of Jayne as The Best. I totally cried at the ending, and I very much loved how deftly the issues of parenting and abandonment were handled here. I also very much preferred the main conflict here, of our heroes and the town against the Scourers, versus the vengeful kidnappers of the last book (but also, more Jayne is preferable to more Mal, in my book.) I did guess the big twist, however, which made none of it any less touching.

Now I’m really curious to see where the next book, Generations, goes with the canon. I did enjoy getting to know Mal and Jayne’s backstories, and I’m really interested in everyone else’s too. Well, maybe not the Tams as much, since we know a lot about them already. Speaking of, they were both handled really well in this novel, as was Shepherd Book, who I’m dying to learn more about. The blurb for Generations seems to head off in a different direction however, but honestly, I’m here for it.

With a big Thank You to Titan Press for sending me this gorgeous hardbound copy. My only complaint is that Jayne’s eyes look brown on the cover instead of blue, which I ordinarily wouldn’t complain about except it’s kind of a plot point. The rest of the physical book is an absolute treasure, tho.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/28/firefly-the-magnificent-nine-by-james-lovegrove/

Mar 23 2019

You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt

This is another novel whose story I could have easily wandered in and out of, with just a minor tweak or two. Sarah Zuckerman, the protagonist of You Are One of Them, works for an English-language newspaper in Moscow in the mid-1990s. My newspapers were in Budapest, and I didn’t relocate to Moscow for another decade and a half, but the book’s opening rings true nonetheless: “In Moscow I was always cold. I suppose that’s what Russia is known for. Winter. But it is winter to a degree I could not have imagined before I moved there.” (p. 1) Like Sarah, I had known numerous winters in Washington, DC; unlike her, I had not a few in Munich and the nearby mountains, and I had taken to heart the German adage that there is no bad weather, just unsuitable clothing. It was put to the test, though, as was my notion, born of growing up in the sub-tropics, that eventually you just hit a point of cold, and after that you don’t notice any differences. Ha-ha, not so. You feel a drop of three or five degrees way down below freezing every bit as much as you notice the difference between a pleasantly balmy afternoon and one that’s just a tad warmer than comfortable.

But Sarah has not come to Moscow for its brisk winter walks, and the climate does not play much of a role, except to drive Sarah and her expatriate friends into bars to drink, which, to be honest, they were quite likely to do anyway. I know I did, over in Central Europe. “I laughed with them, but I knew that eventually these mistranslations would be corrected, that Russia would grow out of its awkward teenage capitalism and become smooth and nonchalant. You could see the growing pains in the pomaded hair of the night-club bouncers, in the tinted windows of the Mercedes sedans on Tverskaya, in the garish sequins on the Versace mannequins posing in a shop around the corner from the Bolshoi Theater. … Everyone in Moscow was ravenous, and the potential for anarchy—I could feel its kaleidoscopic effect—made a lot of foreigners giddy.” (pp. 2–3) By the time I lived there, many of the translations had indeed been corrected, a great deal of local smoothness had been applied, but the potential for anarchy was still there, still strong. And it wasn’t just the foreigners who were drawn to hungry Moscow. The slightly dodgy IT company where I worked had people from the Altai, from the southern steppes, from all across Russia.

But Sarah has also not come to Moscow for the thrill of the big city or the wild East. She has come to exorcise a very particular spirit, the second great loss of her childhood. Or perhaps to meet a ghost.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/23/you-are-one-of-them-by-elliott-holt/

Mar 22 2019

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Rocannon’s World was Ursula K. Le Guin’s first published novel. It contains some of the forms of a fantasy story but takes place in a science fictional setting, part of the Hainish universe that she developed in several of her later novels, including The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and The Dispossessed. The Hainish universe is not one of those tightly constructed future histories in which plots unwind across many volumes and vast swathes of time. Indeed, some of the novels contradict each other on key points, and there are inconsistencies among many of them. This didn’t bother Le Guin, and it needn’t bother a reader particularly. She was working things out while she grew as a writer, and I’m glad that she didn’t feel the need to retcon a bunch of things, or bend later novels out of their natural shapes to fit notions laid down in earlier ones.

One constant through the stories is that humanity was dispersed among a great many worlds a long time ago and has continued to evolve along what become parallel paths on all of the different worlds. Eventually different human worlds attain interstellar travel, and a loose collection of worlds is knit into something resembling a polity. The early books call that polity the League of All Worlds; later ones, the Ekumen. In many of the stories, interstellar travel is still slower than light, but in Rocannon’s World, inanimate objects can travel faster than light, while living beings cannot; superluminal communication exists, but the devices capable of transmitting between the stars are vanishingly rare (the two fleets that appear in the book have only one each). They echo with the anthropology that Le Guin grew up around, distancing both narrator and reader from the actions she describes, but allowing them to partake simultaneously of science and myth, reporting and religion.

Rocannon’s World begins:

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/22/rocannons-world-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Mar 21 2019

The Awkward Squad by Sophie Hénaff

Delightful. It’s a bit as if Mick Herron’s superlative Slow Horses were instead a group of washout French cops, though with a far less bleak outlook on life. Commissaire Anne Capestan is in charge. She’s a highly competent, seemingly level-headed professional who has, unfortunately, a tendency to go homicidal when faced with criminal cruelty. Returning from a six-month suspension, she’s gifted with leadership of a squad of misfits and trouble-makers that the police force can’t fire but would rather like to quit. Unlike their British spy counterparts, the Awkward Squad is actually given a purpose: to go through stacks and stacks of cold cases in an attempt to finally close them all. It’s thankless, inglorious work, until the squad members discover two seemingly unrelated murders hidden in the files and find themselves hot on the trail of corruption high in the police ranks.

The Awkward Squad is an immensely charming tale of modern French culture, policing and bonhomie. The solving of the murders is given its due gravity — when you finally find out why, your heart breaks a little for everyone involved — but the proceedings otherwise are treated with flair, as Capestan positions everyone to work to their strengths, turning seeming personality flaws into squad advantages. It’s a droll, heartfelt tale of (mostly) good policing against the odds, with plenty of insight into modern France. I’m so excited to be able to read the sequel next!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/21/the-awkward-squad-by-sophie-henaff/

Mar 20 2019

The Door by Margaret Atwood

Morning In The Burned House is one of my favorite collections of poetry but I took my time getting to Margaret Atwood’s latest because her recent output of fiction (i.e. pretty much everything after Alias Grace) has been not great to terrible. The Door, sadly, doesn’t reach the heights of MitBH but is still a readable collection, with several standouts. The title poem is my runner-up, with Heart being, unsurprisingly, my favorite. There are good meditations on war, aging and the creative process but the dead cat poems are meh and the collection as a whole doesn’t quite have the cohesiveness, much less power, of her earlier work. I’d still rather read this than any of her more recent output by a long shot tho.

Oh, wait, I forgot Hag-Seed was pretty good. So there is hope.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/20/the-door-by-margaret-atwood/

Mar 17 2019

Ruin’s Wake by Patrick Edwards

Gosh, idk why that took forever to read. I think my brain finally needed a break from the speed with which I’ve been reading lately, and took it out on this novel, which is a quite good dystopian sci-fi jam-packed with ideas that extrapolate quite beautifully from our present-day tech and, to a certain extent, politics, to present us with a nightmarish future that’s equal parts Stalinist Russia and turn of the 21st century North Korea.

The action takes place, for the most part, within the Hegemony, a nation-state that’s vaguely European but, according to its politicians, spans the known Earth. My brain actually kept stumbling over this sense of place because of my predilection for mapping fictional locales to known areas, and with the chalk cliffs and the relative proximity to permafrost, even after climate change leads to environmental disaster, I kept thinking Europe, close to Britain. Anyway! Three different people are drawn together to, essentially, work for the rebellion: a disillusioned former soldier looking for his son, an abused wife desperate to preserve the illicit love that is one of her only joys, and the imperious researcher who stumbles across technology she’d never dreamed of. There’s action and romance and betrayals — lots of really good, fun stuff, and some really sweet sci-fi tech. But I felt like the pacing could have used more work and that, overall, the book could have used more details when it came to the personal lives of both Kelbee and Sulara. It’s hard for me to see how Kelbee’s cowed housewife could turn so easily into a confident, purposeful woman. I also felt that the transition of the hilarious (if somewhat hateful) Sulara of her journals to the accommodating resistance ally was a bit too abrupt. There wasn’t enough depth to how these women grew through the novel. My personal favorite character was the netick-ally enhanced Syn. Every time he showed up on the page, there was a little more verve to the narrative, and I could have honestly used more of him.

Frankly, and this is something I don’t say every often, I could have used more writing. While, on the one hand, I can definitely appreciate a stand-alone sci-fi novel, I also feel that Ruin’s Wake would have benefited from more detail, more characterization, more explanation as to the hows of the whys. Cale was written well, as was Syn in his capacity as a supporting character, so it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that Patrick Edwards could do the same for Kelbee and Sulara and even Derrin, whose messy motivations were far too tidily presented.

Overall, a fun debut that promises even better to come in the author’s future. This is one author I wouldn’t mind reading a multi-book series from, so long as it gives me more details to all these otherwise intriguing premises.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/17/ruins-wake-by-patrick-edwards/

Mar 12 2019

The Near Witch by V. E. Schwab

V. E. Schwab’s first novel reads very much like a first novel. Her writing is terrific, as always, but eeesh, the plot. Or, rather, the insistence on using idiotic reactions to further the plot. Our heroine, Lexi, is a teenage girl in the town of Near. Her father died three years ago, leaving her, her mother and her beloved younger sister, Wren, under the Protection of his brother, Otto. Protection with a capital P because Otto is Near’s Protector, a title given to men who protect the isolated town from… well, from possibilities, I guess, because nothing ever seems to happen there. The arrival of one entire stranger causes great consternation, especially when kids start disappearing from their beds soon after. Most of the town seems ready to blame the stranger, but Lexi isn’t so sure. No prizes for guessing that the stranger is a good-looking teenage boy, or what happens between him and Lexi next.

The prose is gorgeous, tho, and fans of Ms Schwab will find this a nice addition to their collections, especially since it includes The Ash-Born Boy, a short story set in the same world. I also give kudos to the atmosphere of the book, which is decidedly creepier than most fantasy tales, treading the border with horror in a quite delicious way. I just wish Lexi wasn’t so predictable in making dumb errors in order to move the plot along. Fortunately, this plot contrivance isn’t a problem I’ve had with Ms Schwab’s later, more celebrated books, so get this if you’re a fan (and if you can, get it in hardcover because it’s a gorgeous volume) or if you like easy-reading fantasy-horror, but don’t expect too much from it otherwise.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/12/the-near-witch-by-v-e-schwab/