Jul 06 2021

Amok by Anna Tan

The world-building of this Nusantara-set novel is exemplary, seamlessly incorporating elements of all the cultures that meld and mingle in Malaysia and its neighbors to present a truly fascinating fantasy world. The main nation is Terang, a collection of three city-states, each with its own mystical focus. Suci, the holy city, is known for a priesthood that not only heads the worship of Kudus but is also gifted with the ability to instantly communicate over long distances. Impian is a town of lawmakers and historians, where the blessed have the ability to read the thoughts of others. And Maha, the capital, is headed by a Sultan who’s gifted with the divine Amok Strength which overflows from him to his people, granting them supernatural might to back their military prowess.

The Sultan as this book opens is a widower named Simson, whose courting of the neighboring kingdom of Bayangan’s Permaisuri is causing considerable consternation among the religious. Bayangan is a state of breakaway Terangans who refused to worship Kudus. Sultan Simson put them down some decades ago, taking hostages from their royalty and upper classes to ensure their fealty. His son Mikal is fifteen and has yet to come into his own Amok strength despite fervent prayers to Kudus and lengthy martial training sessions. As a result, Mikal spends most of his time outside the gelanggang sulking about not having the mystical powers to back up his training. He’s caught off-guard by what seems to him his father’s sudden interest in remarriage, and by the suddenly cagey behavior of his own body servant Yosua, a boy his own age who was born of Bayangan hostages in Maha.

When Permaisuri Layla finally puts into motion her long-simmering plan for revenge on Terang, Mikal finds himself taken prisoner and shipped across the straits to Bayangan. There, he’s left to the care and mercies of Yosua, who turns out to be far more than a simple serving boy. The friends will have to do everything in their power to reverse the acts of the cruel Permaisuri Layla, while trying to find a way to preserve their friendship and break the murderous cycle of vengeance between the nations that claim them.

Anna Tan has put a lot of thought into creating an entirely original fantasy world that incorporates the values, beliefs and cultures of Malaysia (I laughed when I figured out what “ayell” stands for.) The amount of flavor available to those who speak Malay a/o are already familiar with the area is extremely rich, tho sometimes a little too on-the-nose: by the time we get to the woman named Bintang being called a guiding star by one of the characters, I was like OKAY, this is less sly than verging on the painfully literal. Otherwise, I loved this setting so much, with its rich overtones of current societal norms blended with the distinctive flavor of historical tales.

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Jul 01 2021

The Case Of The Lonely One (Bad Machinery #4) by John Allison

Oh gosh, for Mother’s Day, my husband got me the first of John Allison’s new series Wicked Things, featuring a 19 year-old Charlotte Grote. Since I’m still working my way through my backlog of the Bad Machinery comics where she and her friends originally appear, I’ve been keeping that as a reward for when I finally have time to catch up on the series (which I don’t even own all of yet, ha. Sooon!) I actually accidentally read Book 5 before this one but have finally found a moment to catch up, at least to my current Bad Machinery reading timeline.

As The Case Of The Lonely One begins, our intrepid heroes discover that Lottie, with her bad grades and her inability to get her parent’s signature on the right form, won’t be in the same class as everyone else now that second form has begun. At least Lottie will have Little Claire to hang out with, as they wait for their form teacher, the mysterious Mrs Lord, to finally arrive. Our other five student sleuths are at the mercy of wound-tight Mr Sprink, who terrorizes them in the traditional manner of British schoolmasters since time immemorial.

When the kids notice a new student, Lem, they’re initially put off by his partiality towards eating raw onions. He lives on a nearby onion farm, but still! However, each of the friends slowly falls under his spell, which completely bewilders Shauna, the only one of the group who doesn’t automatically say “he’s a right good laugh once you get to know him” whenever the subject of him is raised. Convinced that something is amiss, Shauna recruits the only other unaffected students, the members of the RPG Club, to help her. But working together won’t be as easy as Shauna imagines, as Blossom, till then the undisputed head of the club, feels threatened not only by Shauna’s presence but by the attention she’s getting from Corky, another group member. Will Shauna be able to overcome the mystifying loss of her fast friends and her new lack of trustworthy allies in her quest to expose Lem for who, or perhaps what, he truly is?

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Jun 29 2021

When The Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson

This brilliant novel is as if you took the best parts of Blade Runner and Gorky Park and Vertigo and mashed them all together with the most tender empathy and an eye to not only singularity but also the meaning of godhood. My only complaint with this book is that I’d freaking love it if the showdown between Natasha and Sally had been expanded into an entire book of its own instead of being limited to a chapter and a half. I do hope Neil Sharpson considers doing that: even tho readers of this book will know how it ends, I think it would still be an utterly fascinating read, especially if it’s written with the same verve and heart as this book was.

When The Sparrow Falls is the story of State Security Agent Nikolai South, a man whose career and involvement in Party politics has been so perfunctory as to be almost suspicious in a country where ambition and paranoia are the norm. South lives in the Caspian Republic, the last bastion of unadulterated humanity, free of the corrupting influence of Artificial Intelligence. AI not only advises the rest of the world’s governments but also offers people an extension on their lifespans, allowing their personalities to be uploaded from their dying bodies into dataspace, then downloaded from dataspace into clone bodies. The Caspian Republic was formed on a revulsion at the idea of this, but the passing decades have moved it from an enclave of dreamers and philosophers (who casually ignore the genocide that allowed them to set up their nation) to a police state whose people are afraid to speak aloud their hopes and dreams.

When South is summoned to meet the acting head of State Security, he immediately fears that one of his indiscretions — warning a witness to hide before the thugs of Party Security can find him, not reporting graffiti or other petty crimes, being a less than enthusiastic Party member — is going to cost him his freedom, if not his life. Instead, Deputy Director Augusta Niemann has a job for him. The recent death of firebrand journalist Paulo Xirao was shocking less for how it happened than for the revelation that Xirao, whose stock in trade was unimaginative if fervent polemics against technology, was actually an AI himself, with registered citizenships in both America and Europe. His widow Lily wants to fly into the Caspian Republic to identify him. Feeling pressure from the outside world, Niemann is inclined to allow it.

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Jun 26 2021

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Let me just say up front that I loved all four main characters in Utopia Avenue and didn’t want anything bad to happen to them ever. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge, then, as that would have made for a dull novel. David Mitchell not only had the skill to create people who would tug so effectively at my heart-strings, but also the temerity to put them through bad things and the forbearance to let them make bad choices.

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Mitchell first introduces Dean Moss, bassist, late of Battleship Potemkin though the band threw him out for “revisionism.” It’s mid-1960s London, and Dean is chasing his musical dreams. Unfortunately, he has a bad day. He’s pickpocketed between the bank and paying his rent. His landlady throws him out on the spot (“Take your ‘gear’ with you … Anything still in your room at two o’clock will be in the Salvation Army store at three.” (p. 7)) and keeps his deposit. Dean tries to get his employer to advance him some pay, seeing as how he isn’t working between that day and payday anyway. The employer fires him on the spot and keep five days’ wages just because he can. Within a dozen pages, Mitchell has Dean well and truly down and out. He even loses what is probably his last sixpence in a gutter.

But his luck has already turned, though he does not yet realize it. The stranger whose question startled Dean enough to turn a coin toss into a coin loss is Levon Frankland, a talent manager currently looking for a new band, following “artistic differences” with an outfit called Great Apes. Levon says he wants Dean to see a band and give him his opinion about their potential. He’ll give Dean a place to crash for the weekend.

The band is Archie Kinnock’s Blues Cadillac. “Within moments, Dean can see that not one but two of the Blues Cadillac’s wheels are coming loose. Archie Kinnock is drunk, stoned or both. … [The bassist, meanwhile, is lagging behind the beat. His backing vocals … are off-key, not in a good way. He barks at the drummer, ‘Too bleedin’ slow!’ in mid-song. The drummer scowls.” (p. 15) But those are not the two Levon has brought Dean to see. “The second [lead guitar] solo impresses Dean even more than the first. People crane their necks to watch the guitarist’s fingers fly, pick, clamp, pull, slide and hammer up and down the fretboard. How’s he even doing that?” (pp. 15–16)

During the break, Levon asks Dean’s opinion.

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Jun 25 2021

Life And Other Shortcomings by Corie Adjmi

This slim volume of short stories punches far above its weight class as it examines the lives of loosely connected characters in and around the turn of 21st century America. The opening story Dinner Conversation is one of the strongest, revolving around three couples out to dinner and the weight of expectations felt by the narrator Callie, who feels the pressure from all sides to look and act a certain way in order to be the perfect wife and mother. Tho it’s set in 1998, it feels deeply contemporary, a microcosm of all the brewing emotions that would set off a more mainstream female anger decades later.

The next few stories travel back to the 70s, to examine the childhoods and adolescences of young girls and their difficult, damaged parents. This part felt a little less successful, if only because it covers well-trod territory without adding anything particularly new to the conversation. The collection picks up again with Happily Ever After, which modernizes the fairy tale and recasts the would-be heroine as the villain in a refreshing take on the genre. Shadows And Partially Lit Faces continues this theme of subversion by centering Callie’s dire husband: he still sucks, but it’s hard not to empathize with his longing for space and something more, even if he’s satisfying both desires in the most obnoxious ways possible. Lucky, the examination of a couple trying to keep their marriage alive while caring for a terminally ill child, is both deeply empathetic and highly unusual in its depiction of flawed people falling apart over one of our society’s most difficult subjects to discuss.

Another of my favorite stories here comes next in the form of The Devil Makes Three (which, imo, is an unfortunate title for a really great story.) Revolving around Iris, a strictly observant Jewish woman in the 1990s who sneaks onto her son’s PC to use AOL, it’s a fascinating portrait of both a woman and her marriage as she and her husband try to reconcile their religious faith with modern life. I honestly hadn’t known about mikvehs or the extent of niddah before this story, and was thoroughly engrossed both by the subject and by Corie Adjmi’s luminous prose describing both Iris’ feelings and circumstances.

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Jun 24 2021

Star Eater by Kerstin Hall

This book feels like a metaphor in search of a meaning. There’s a lot of gorgeous, elaborate, haunting imagery, but it’s ultimately not put in service to anything besides a ho-hum quest story. I almost wrote down “coming-of-age” there for quest but the protagonist is ostensibly twenty-two years old, even though she acts much younger.

Said protagonist is Elfreda Raughm, an Acolyte in the Sisterhood that rules Aytrium (which is undoubtedly the most weirdly banal name for a fantasy planet I’ve ever read. “Atrium to where?” I kept wondering.) The Sisterhood is almost as much fussy bureaucracy as it is an organization of the genetically exalted. The Sisters can manipulate an energy called Lace into doing various body-centered acts of telekinesis and telepathy. In order to do so, however, they have to consume the flesh of other Sisters, usually their own mothers kept in a stasis called Martyrdom (there’s something vague inserted here about keeping the bloodlines pure or something.)

El hates having to feed off slivers of her comatose Mom but she hates having to go through Renewal even more. In order to keep the bloodlines going, Sisters are required to mate, but any man who has sex with a Sister runs a high risk of turning into an immortal zombie-demon. So male criminals are telepathically coerced into having sex with specially purified Sisters — it’s as awful as it sounds — then when the illness that turns them into immortal zombie-demons takes hold, are thrown off the edge of the world into the Void. The flip side of this, ofc, is that Sisters basically can’t have heterosexual relationships, not without eventually unleashing a monster on the populace.

So that’s all pretty cool, but it’s turned to the service of a story that’s not only fairly basic, but also populated by a whole lot of cardboard characters. Worse, the details of, oh gosh, nearly everything are kept deliberately vague. There’s this sense of Motherhood killing the Sisters but there are not only a ton of older Sisters, there are also a bunch of Sisters busy raising their own daughters (their sons are taken away and killed, however.)

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Jun 23 2021

Ivan the Terrible by Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff

Ivan IV, not yet known as the Terrible, ascended to the throne as Grand Prince of Muscovy at the tender age of three. His father, Vasily III, “was a mild-mannered prince, well-liked by the people. Unlike his more famous father, Ivan III, known to history as Ivan the Great, who conquered large territories and fought the Tatrs, Vasily III possessed none of the gifts of a conqueror. He had fought desultory wars against Lithuania, drawn Pskov, Smolensk, and Ryazan into his kingdom, and shown himself to be a cautious and sensible man who rarely permitted himself the luxury of showing his full strength.” (p. 1) Vasily died of a saddle sore, acquired on the first stage of a pilgrimage to pray for young Ivan’s recovery from a boil on his neck. The saddle sore grew, over some days of riding and hunting, into a huge abscess. Poultices and purgatives were of no avail, and the sickness became systemic. Vasily survived long enough to make a new will and be transported back to Moscow, but no more.

Ivan the Terrible by Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff

Ivan grew up in a court of powerful nobles intent on using their guardianship of the Grand Prince to advance their families’ fortunes and who might not have been above shoving him off the throne to put forth their own claims. The succession and the will of Vasily III were clear, but surely — so the argument ran — Muscovy should not be left in the hands of a child. As Payne and Romanoff put it, “Ivan was now ten years old. From his childhood he had known nothing but coups and countercoups, intrigues, treachery, the great princes continually attempting to seize power by surprise attacks on the Kremlin, by murder or by stealth. Sensitive, widely read, with a knowledge of political affairs far in advance of his years, Ivan was well aware of the dangers of his high position. Many of the tragedies of his reign have their source in his childhood fears and childhood terrors.” (p. 43)

Tragedies there were aplenty, and even more terrors. Payne and Romanoff (who was a grand-nephew of Nicholas II) write that Ivan committed his first murder at age 13 by ordering his Regent, Prince Andrey Shuisky, arrested and given to the keepers of the hounds, who promptly clubbed him to death and threw the body outside the Kremlin. “[Ivan] would learn that murder was an effective weapon, wonderfully satisfying in its speed and finality. … Machiavelli had observed that when a man seizes power, it is incumbent on him to be cruel, for otherwise the people will not grant him their untrammelled respect. Ivan had learned his lesson. Henceforth he would be murderous whenever he pleased.” (p. 58)

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Jun 22 2021

What You Can See from Here by Mariana Leky

Hey, Doug, I’m reading a novel translated from the German! Ably translated into English by Tess Lewis, who’s done a really good job, in particular, of getting the song lyrics from the 1980s not quite right when the characters are explaining them to one another.

What You Can See From Here is an interesting sort of book, a bit of a slice-of-life village novel with swirls of magical realism, following the life of Luisa, a young girl doted upon by her unconventional family and friends as she grows up, through tragedy and heartbreak, to discover who she’s meant to be. It’s quite a sweet book for being riddled with death, as the story opens with Selma (whom we’ll learn incidentally is Luisa’s grandmother) having a dream of an okapi, which always heralds a death in their village. The villagers react in their own idiosyncratic ways, depending on how superstitious they ordinarily are. Still, the death when it comes is shocking, and resets the course of village life for decades to come.

Fast-forward twelve years and Luisa is twenty-two, trying to set a course for her own life and unexpectedly falling in love. There’s heartbreak and healing and a lot of wise, bittersweet words as she spends the next few years coming into her own. I found myself crying almost in spite of myself at the last death in this novel, and think that overall this was very well done.  My only complaint is that I don’t necessarily think the book does anything to back up the claim Luisa makes regarding Marlies near the end. A quibble tho, in the otherwise deft plotting.

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Jun 21 2021

Kyle’s Little Sister by BonHyung Jeong

Oh, man, I remember being middle school-aged and what an absolute mess my friends and I could be, falling out with each other over things that seemed insurmountable back then but are such trifles in retrospect, and preferring to jump to (usually depressing, dramatic) conclusions instead of actually communicating with one another. I do not miss those days at all, and have probably sublimated more than I recall, but oh how memories of that time came roaring back to me while reading this sharply observed graphic novel of a 12 year-old trying to get out from under her popular big brother’s shadow. Thank goodness I was at least the eldest, and didn’t have to suffer that indignity on top of all the rest of the drama!

Grace Bailey is two years younger than her older brother, handsome, athletic, popular Kyle. All her life, she feels like she’s been playing second fiddle to him. Even her parents have a mostly unconscious bias toward their gregarious, sunny older child. Grace is an introvert who mostly likes playing video games and hanging out with her two best friends, Jay and Amy. Amy is the little sister of Andrew, one of Kyle’s best friends, and is obsessed with KPop bands. Jay, the quietest member of their trio, loves board games. She’s also nurtured a huge crush on Kyle for years, and Amy is super enthusiastic about finally pushing the two of them together now that they’re all in middle school. Grace is significantly more lukewarm to the idea, mostly because she thinks her brother sucks and doesn’t deserve sweet, reserved Jay.

A sleepover of both Baileys’ friend groups at Amy and Andrew’s house ends in a huge fight between the girls. Things are spoken that can’t be unsaid. The girls stop spending time together, leaving Grace especially feeling lonely and bereft. But when Grace is adopted by a popular older classmate, Cam, she thinks things are starting to look up for her social prospects. She even winds up confiding in Cam how she and Amy fell out, leading Cam to engage in several questionable mean girl tactics against Amy. Grace is too relieved to have a new friend to say anything, even tho she knows that what Cam is doing isn’t right. But what will she do when she discovers Cam’s real motivations for befriending her?

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Jun 20 2021

North by Seamus Heaney

It’s funny that Dennis O’Driscoll begins his interview of Seamus Heaney about North by quoting a description of it as “a very oblique and intense book” because I found it not nearly as oblique as Wintering Out or Door Into the Dark. Heaney divided North into two parts, “a first section that has poems full of linguistic burr and clinker, and a second section full of more discursive, at times unbuttoned, things such as “Whatever You Say Say Nothing.” (Stepping Stones, p. 160).

North by Seamus Heaney

Heaney opens and closes the first part with poems about Antaeus, serving notice that there will be wrestling, and rootedness, and indeed wrestling with rootedness. The discussion with O’Driscoll notes that Heaney was writing North when he and his family had returned from California and moved from Northern Ireland to County Wicklow in the Republic. He had lifted himself from his native soil, the very material he’d announced in “Digging” that he would work with, and he must at times have wondered whether he would prove to be Hercules or Antaeus. He’d left the relative security of teaching and was making an attempt at freelancing. “I’d got myself to a point where there were no alibis. That much was clear the first morning I took the children down to the school in Ashford and the headmaster wrote “file“, i.e., poet, in the column of the rollbook where he had to enter ‘Occupation of Parent’. No more of your ‘lecturer’ or ‘teacher’.” (Stepping Stones, p. 156) There were advantages, too. “I have an especially happy memory of writing ‘Bog Queen’ because it was the first time in my life, believe it or not, that I’d spent a whole uninterrupted workday on a poem.” (Stepping Stones, p. 158)

In North, Heaney both lifts and digs, and lifts up what he has unearthed. The title refers not only to Ireland’s north, as might be expected, but to wider reaches of northern Europe. The title poem, for example:

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