Apr 27 2021

Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein

I found this book shockingly, uncomfortably relatable, and would fight anyone to defend its heroine, the precocious 15 year-old Gracie Welles. I, too, was sent to a “prestigious” boarding school at that age by a well-meaning dad who didn’t really understand the realities of what I needed to survive it, and I too spent countless hours while there listening to the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, which is an album that I can say with the utmost sincerity saved my life (along with Soundgarden’s Superunknown.) Luckily for me, I was even then possessed of the social graces that make it easy for me to make friends and get along, unlike sophomore Gracie whose main connections to the social life at her Florida boarding school are her rich jock roommate Georgie and her biology teacher Mr Sorrentino, on whom she has a completely inappropriate crush. When she discovers that her “soulmate” is engaged, she freaks out and starts skipping out on his classes.

Playing hooky one day finds her saving new kid Wade Scholfield from the violent attentions of popular senior Derek McCormick and two of his goon friends, using the titular weapon. When she and Wade are busted immediately after for not being in class and for being in possession of a weapon, they’re put on dining room clean-up duty together. Gracie doesn’t want to make friends despite Wade’s overtures, but the more time they spend together, the more she thaws. And soon their friendship is getting complicated, even before Gracie decides to take the terrible advice of ultimate Cool Girl, senior Beth Whelan. When Gracie almost inevitably loses Wade, how far will she be willing to go to get him back?

Other reviewers have called this book a cross between John Greene and Sally Rooney, and that’s a really good description. Slingshot unpacks the innermost thoughts of a complicated and vital fifteen year-old as she navigates her first real love and its realistic push pull. I can see why it’s being marketed as Young Adult — tho shudder to think that in the current marketing climate, classics like Bonjour Tristesse, The Lover and Rainey Royale would be labeled the same* — but it’s shorn of so many of the easy wins and comfortable tropes of the genre that it really feels deeper and harder, more Normal People than Paper Towns, and frankly better than both in my opinion. It’s honest about sex and love and the perils of coming of age for sensitive kids with fucked up parents and excellent taste in music. Had I been in a 21st-century American boarding school instead of the 1990s religious hellhole I went to, this could very well have been my story.

The only thing I didn’t find 100% plausible was the outburst Anju had at the end. A large part of me hopes that young women decades after my own adolescence are much more cognizant of their own social roles and might actually talk the way she did, tho I did appreciate Mercedes Helnwein’s wry observation that the speech does seem too good to be true. I also appreciated the inclusion of this playlist, not something I ordinarily care about in books, as well as the in-text recommendation of The Wipers, whose Up Front is one of my current favorite songs.

Even if Ms Helnwein didn’t rummage around in your personal history to craft this book as she did with mine, discerning readers will find a lot to like in this fierce and messy tale of growing up and finding your first love. The craft shown is impressive: the story folds back in on itself with parallels that feel more artful for feeling entirely natural. Slingshot is not a book for romantics — Gracie was much more forgiving of Wade’s letter than I was, but I hold grudges — but it’s by far one of the most realistic depictions of being a weird and lonely teenager I’ve ever read.

*and it’s not that I don’t think YA isn’t a worthy genre, it’s just that some of its superfans are nucking futs! I’ve read reviews dinging this book for lacking reality because the fifteen year-old heroine smokes cigarettes and curses out teachers without getting into too much trouble, like how petit bourgeoisie do you have to be to not know the kind of very rich or very poor kids who do all that as a matter of course?! And then the pearl clutching over the very normal plot thread of a teenager having a crush on a teacher! It’s only problematic if the teacher reciprocates! V sorry to break my rule on not commenting on other people’s reviews in my own but witaf: go meet some people outside your smug middle-class bubble!

Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein was published today April 27 2021 by Wednesday Books and is available from all good booksellers, including

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Apr 25 2021

Firstborn by Louise Glück

I have to confess that I didn’t get a lot of, or get a lot out of, Firstborn, the debut collection of poems from Louise Glück. It was published in 1968, when she was 25. Fifty-two years and a dozen or so collections later, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like my reading of Seamus Heaney, I’m interested in where a lauded poet came from, how she got started, what she was writing at the beginning.

Firstborn by Louise Glück

I’m not in terrible company with my reaction to the collection. Glück herself writes, in the Author’s Note to The First Four Books of Poems, “Toward the poems of Firstborn, some written nearly 35 years ago, I try to cultivate an attitude of embarrassed tenderness.” Elsewhere in the same note, she writes, “the idea of revising old work seems odd to me, the spirit animating that work being no longer accessible. Some of the poems, chiefly those in Firstborn, might, in being reconstructed, evaporate.”

That said, a number of the poems in the first section, “The Egg,” are scorpion-shaped. There’s a sting in the end, the last line or two, that whips back at and sometimes into the reader. The first poem, “The Chicago Train,” is like that, as are, for example, “Labor Day” and “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” The second section, “The Edge,” brings more character studies and brief sketches. Glück’s first-person narrators in this section are more obviously persons she has observed or imagined, people in various places and times, and particularly people at other stages of life than a somewhat newly married woman in her mid-20s. Whether that’s “Grandmother in the Garden” or “Pictures of the People in the War,” Glück is trying on other lives, working to give readers moments or perspectives from a wider range of folks. Some, though, were completely opaque to me. “Seconds” falls into that category; I can’t tell who’s speaking, who they’re talking to, or, largely, what they’re talking about. Is it a few seconds of domestic violence? Child abuse? Something else entirely? I think the final line is meant to be another scorpion sting, but I don’t know where it’s meant to land. Not every poem is meant to be comprehended; some are meant to be apprehended. In any event, I am not the intended audience for every poem, and it’s fine for some to remain opaque.

The third section, “Cottonmouth Country” turns to places as the second turned to characters. Glück, though, is a nor’easter; real cottonmouth country is mostly beyond her range. “Meridian” neatly captures a languid summer afternoon on Long Island Sound. “The Tree House” catches a geography of memory rather than maps, while “Solstice” pairs place and time, whipping at the end from summer to winter’s icy sting. Glück closes with “Saturnalia,” a vision of Romans and empires ending, with people offering sacrifices for hoped-for future prosperity. Glück’s talent and writing prospered well past this initial collection, and I’m interested to trace more of her path.

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Apr 24 2021

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

Wasn’t this fun! Susan Arkshaw has grown up in a rural corner of southwestern England, with an absent father and a very absent-minded artist mother. Two minutes before The Left-Handed Booksellers of London opens — on May 1, 1983 — Susan turns 18. She’s also just had one of her recurring dreams, full of giant ravens and lizard things that ought to be the stuff of nightmares but leave her feeling strangely comforted. Susan has finished school and has a place at an art college waiting for her in London at the end of the summer. She uses birthday breakfast to tell her mum that she’s decided to go to London early, find some work and look for her dad. Her mum reacts with remarkable equanimity, telling her to be careful and insisting on receiving postcards with Trafalgar Square, and not quite finishing sentences about a particular “he.”

Susan waited for Jassmine to continue, but her mother’s voice trailed off and she was staring at the wall, whatever thought had been about to emerge lost somewhere along the way.
“I will, Mum.”
“And I know you will be careful. Eighteen! Happy birthday, my darling. Now, I must get back to my painting before that cloud comes over and ruins the light. Presents later, okay? After second breakfast.”
“Presents later. Don’t miss the light!”
“No, no. You too, darling girl. Even more so for you. Be sure to stay in the light. That’s what he would have wanted.”
“Mum! Who’s ‘he’ … come back … oh, never mind. …” (pp. xiii–xiv)

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

It’s good advice, and no mistake. The next time readers see Susan, less than a page and a half have elapsed before she’s seen a man crumble to dust after being pricked on the nose with a silver hatpin. Within another page and a half, she turns around to see “a bug the size of a small horse burst into the room and the young man stepped past her and fired three times boom! boom! boom! into the creature’s thorax, sending spurts of black blood and fragments of chitin across the white Aubusson carpet and still it kept coming, its multi-segmented back legs scrabbling and its hooked forelimbs snapping, almost reaching the man’s legs until he fired again, three more shots, and the huge, ugly bug flipped over onto its back and spun about in frenzied death throes.” (p. 4)

The young man — “slight … with long fair hair, wearing a pre-owned mustard-colored three-piece suit with widely flared trousers and faux alligator-hide boots with two-inch Cuban heels” (p. 1) — explains to Susan the importance of leaving the scene quickly. “Because we’ll both be dead if we stay.” (p. 5) Given the recent goings-on, Susan agrees and follows him out the upper-story window.

The young man is Merlin (“Like Merlin the magician?” “Like Merlin the wizard.” p. 5), one of the titular booksellers. He promises Susan an explanation of what he did to Uncle Frank (“He’s not your uncle.” “Well, no, but …” p. 3) as soon as they’re not in imminent danger. That takes longer than one might think. Or not, given the breakneck pace of the first few pages.

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Apr 23 2021

From Page To Screen: WandaVision

By the time I finally got around to watching Disney+’s WandaVision, I’d been thoroughly spoiled by the Internet as to what to expect. And not just because the Internet loves its reaction gifs, but because even when sources were being circumspect, my longstanding familiarity with mainstream and especially Marvel comics meant that I instantly understood what everyone thought they were only hinting at. It’s going to be hard to write the rest of this review without probably doing the same for readers who have yet to watch the show or seen the comics they’re loosely based on, so if you’re the kind of person who thinks spoilers necessarily detract from enjoying entertainment, please stop reading here (but also, I commend you for your skill in avoiding all the bountiful spoilers so far for both show and books!)

WandaVision is the clever title for this 9-episode series, with each episode lasting between 30-50 minutes, making for exceedingly bingeable viewing even if it weren’t so immediately absorbing. The first seven episodes are some of the best television I’ve watched in ages, anchored by Elizabeth Olson’s tremendous performance. At the end of the very first episode, she had me in inexplicable tears. I don’t know if her expression at the end of the episode was more poignant because I knew where all this was heading, or if unsuspecting viewers were similarly affected: all I know is that I was sobbing and completely hooked.

Most of the episodes are structured after classic sitcoms from the 1950s to the 2000s. In the first episode, patterned after The Dick Van Dyke Show, Wanda and Vision are settling into black and white suburban life in Westview, New Jersey. A misunderstanding over the calendar leads to a comedy of errors as Vision brings his boss and boss’ wife over for dinner on a night Wanda thought was meant to be a romantic occasion. Wanda must quickly whip up an appropriate multi-course meal with the assistance of her nosy but helpful new neighbor Agnes (No Prizes if you figure out who Agnes really is early on!) To add to the stress of the occasion is the fact that Vision must hide his android nature while Wanda must also hide her powers. Things wrap up happily, 50s sitcom-style, but several strange incidents intrude on their domestic bliss, and Wanda’s face as the credits roll is a mix of happiness and bleak terror that shook me to the core.

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Apr 20 2021

Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir by Eloise Greenfield & Lessie Jones Little

Background on why I picked up this book: apparently, it was one of the three selections available to my 10 year-old for an autobiography reading assignment he had for school. I’m not sure how he wound up with this book instead of the other two, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he had a really tough time answering the questions about it, typing in bizarre tautologies instead of thoughtful responses when he could even come up with anything, and I was at my wit’s end as to why… until I despairingly picked up Childtimes to skim through for answers/page numbers and found that a large portion of the assignment questions were completely irrelevant to the book!

My best friend, on hearing me rant about generic questions that don’t seem to understand the material they’re examining, wryly noted that it seemed pretty early for class material to be teaching my kid how to bullshit his way through assignments: save that for college, no? But after I’d gotten poor Jms sorted with his homework — we left the tautologies as is: if teacher is going to ask irrelevant questions, teacher should expect ludicrous answers — I figured that since I’d already scanned through the book twice, I might as well sit down and read it through properly, my own crushing reading schedule be damned. And I’m so glad I got to read this, because it is a truly wonderful look at the lives of three generations of Black women growing up in late 19th to mid 20th century America.

Beautifully illustrated with black and white line drawings by Jerry Pinkney, as well as with old photographs of several of the people from its pages, the book describes scenes from the childhoods, or “childtimes” as they call it, of Pattie Ridley Jones, her eldest daughter Lessie Jones Little, and her granddaughter Eloise Greenfield. Ms Jones’ section, while told in the first person, was lovingly put together by Ms Little and Ms Greenfield from manuscripts, their own memories of her stories as well as interviews with other people who knew her. Born in 1884, Ms Jones’ narrative describes growing up in North Carolina and all the good and bad of her childhood, including tales of her own mother. Ms Little’s section continues the story of their family from her childhood perspective, covering World War I and the Spanish influenza pandemic as well as the ups and downs of her parents’ marriage. Ms Greenfield’s third of the book describes her family’s move to Washington DC while she was still a kid, and how hunger and World War II affected them and their neighbors.

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Apr 19 2021

Astro Mouse And Light Bulb #1: Vs Astro Chicken by Fermín Solís

In the absurdist tradition of Sergio Aragones comes the work of his compatriot Fermín Solís, who goes forward in time instead of back a la Aragones’ Groo to bring us the adventures of Astro Mouse, a mouse who’s an astronaut, and his companion Light Bulb. The comic starts off quite cleverly, as our heroes are on a strange planet and realize that their lack of hunger and other bodily urges is both unnatural and potentially deadly. But that original bit of sophistication eventually leads to the introduction of, sigh, their pet poop, translated here by Jeff Whitman as Caca.

Kids who are at the stage of best appreciating gross-out humor will love this, but I admit to being too grossed out to fully appreciate the humor in their initial adventures. While Mr Solís has the excellent point that every parent thinks their kid is cute and everyone thinks their farts don’t stink, that doesn’t mean I want to look at the poop of others! By the time Astro Chicken rolls around in the second half of the book tho, I guess I’d gotten used to having Caca around, as I quite enjoyed that more traditional tale of Astro Mouse and Light Bulb butting heads with the domineering chicken who has come aboard to boss them around. The way they resolve their conflict with him is cute and, eventually, wholesome.

The art isn’t incredibly detailed, but adequately conveys the story. It’s definitely on the cartoon-y side, and seems to undergo a subtle change between the halves of the book. While the first part displays a traditional hand-drawn style, complete with visible art marker strokes, the second half employs more digitized effects. The art marker strokes are still visible, but the backgrounds are better filled in and the colors both more vibrant and more smoothly gradated. Interestingly, the line work suffers a bit for it, losing sharpness for several pages before balancing out better as the book closes.

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Apr 16 2021

Malice by Heather Walter

This book was such a struggle to get through, and I might not have done it if I hadn’t been grimly determined to see how Heather Walter made good on the terrific premise of Sleeping Beauty’s true love actually being the dark fairy who cursed her. In the land of Briar, bordering on the fae land of Etheria, a long-ago treaty between humans and fae made it so that Graces are born whose golden blood can produce elixirs that enhance the abilities of their fellow humans. Briar, being a roundly stupid place, squanders this gift primarily on petty vanity.

When our heroine Alyce is discovered as a baby, it’s readily apparent that she’s half Vila, the magical race of once-fae whose corrupted powers led to their seeming extermination. But some Vila have apparently survived, and after a nightmarish childhood of testing and torture by humans and fae alike, Alyce is finally given the role of Dark Grace, whose green blood is used to enchant elixirs of physical misfortune for clients who wish semi-permanent harm to their rivals.

Chance encounters lead her first to a possible mentor who informs her that everything she’s learned about the Vila is wrong, as well as to Crown Princess Aurora, beautiful and doomed to die on her 21st birthday if she’s not released from her curse by true love’s kiss. A procession of royal male suitors is brought in to “save” her, but as Aurora and Alyce fall in love, they begin to wonder if there isn’t another way.

Great premise but told in a way that’s infuriatingly dull when not making idiotic narrative choices. First of all, it’s glaringly obvious that Alyce being employed by anyone other than the Royal Court is complete nonsense. I also found myself annoyed at the idea that the Briar Queens all gave up their power to their kings throughout generations. As a metaphor for female complicity, sure I get it, but it also ignores the fact that most women don’t willingly hand over power but have to have it taken from them, even moreso in monarchic structures. Sure you’ll get the occasional queen who will broaden her consort’s powers, but for every Mary II, you’ll have Elizabeths and Anne and Victoria firmly putting their men back in their places. And not out of any feminist belief — Lord knows Victoria was notoriously misogynistic — but because vested power in a ruler does not like to be divested. It was also weird to me how Alyce lamented Briar’s lack of military strength, given their heritage, but then clutched her pearls that King Tarkin was trying to restore said strength. Like, what did she think that strength was for?

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Apr 15 2021

Thao by Thao Lam

This is a beautiful children’s picture book that tackles a topic very near to my heart, seeing as I’m only now embracing my own Asian-inspired name in favor of the Anglo one I’ve used professionally since I started getting paid to review books. In my case, however, the Asian-inspired name is a weird mess my parents made up, hippie-style: even they caved and have been calling me Doreen for as long as I can remember. My real first name, Edaureen, is distinctive and, IMO, looks pretty on the page. It’s pronounced ee-DOW-reen but not even my best friend from grade school could get it right, so I’ve never minded being called Doreen, since that is essentially what I’ve been called since birth. Plus, it kinda stings whenever people pronounce it wrong (or when they think it’s a variant on Eduardo, like, wat?) so I actively encourage the nickname in social settings.

It’s my last name I’ve always felt bad about eliding. My parents shortened it from Muhamad Nor (my dad’s given name, as is tradition in my culture) to just Nor when I enrolled in American kindergarten, and I’ve pretty much gone by Doreen Nor when in the west, sometimes adding M as a pretend middle initial, a defiant reminder that I’m Muslim even if I don’t look it. I adopted Doreen Sheridan as my professional name after I married, tho I never changed it legally. Being both Muslim and Malaysian, the patriarchal adoption of a male spouse’s family name feels like an unnecessary erasure of my own identity. I was willing to go along with name changes socially and professionally, but legally just felt like too much of a negation of who I am, where I come from and what I believe.

Which is why I found this book exceedingly relatable. Telling the autobiographical story of the author as a little girl, trying to get people to call her by her actual name instead of a weird or even racist variant, this book is gorgeously designed and presented in a way that makes it easy for young readers to digest and empathize with. I’ve always been a fan of Thao Lam’s collage art, and love the incorporation of her own childhood photos here.

But I found it baffling that she doesn’t actually explain how to say her name. In the book, she shows a lot of the mispronunciations — several of which I’d guessed were how I was supposed to pronounce her name — but not the actual way to say it. And that’s a huge letdown. The name Thao and its correct pronunciation are uncommon knowledge. Readers likely picked up this book because they’re open to learning how to say it correctly. I get that Ms Lam might not have wanted to go into greater detail here about how to have that conversation in general — tho that’s a hugely useful topic for young readers, IMO! — but there’s a weird undercurrent of “if you can’t say my name correctly then you’re the one who’s deficient, not me.”

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Apr 14 2021

Genghis Khan by Leo de Hartog

I’m glad that Leo de Hartog did not title this biography A Life of Genghis Khan because there is astonishingly little life between its covers. I would have thought the biography of someone who rose from a tribal noble to rule the largest land empire this world has ever known would be positively gripping, but no. Reading along, I first found myself dozing, then skimming, then skipping vast swathes of the book. This is by no means a complete review, because by no means did I read the whole of it. And I’ve even been to Mongolia! Flew in on MIAT’s flagship airplane, no less; it is of course named Chinggis Khan.

The main reason for the staid text can probably be found in the first sentence of the preface: “The study which forms the basis of this book began in 1941 when I was a prisoner of war in Colditz.” Though de Hartog published the book 48 years later, its premises, approach and style are all from a much earlier era. It was probably outdated and was definitely old-fashioned even when it was first published. A quick perusal of the bibliography showed fewer than a dozen sources published within a decade of de Hartog’s book, and far more sources from the 1930s and 1940s.

This biography offers a recitation of facts as dry as the Gobi, with no sense of contending interpretations or controversies and extremely little sense of the personalities involved. De Bartog is also clearly enamored of the Mongol ruler, speaking often of his brilliance, his excellent judgment of character, his wisdom, and so forth. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a biographer having a high opinion of the subject, but even in the few chapters I read, this struck me as jarring and unbalanced.

The maps are stuck in the back, hand drawn, lacking useful detail, and clearly not updated for the 2004 paperback edition. They might as well date back to the time when de Hartog began his studies.

This biography’s greatest virtue is probably its brevity. Less than 200 narrative pages separate the intrepid reader from its ending. After trudging through the first four chapters, which covered Genghis Khan’s early life and rise to ruler of the united Mongol tribes, I dipped back in here and there, and read most of the penultimate chapter, “The Mongol invader in Europe,” because I was especially curious about the encounter with the early Russian principalities. The chapter fit with the rest of the book by draining all zest from an epic collision of peoples. Alas.

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Apr 13 2021

Love In Color: Mythical Tales From Around The World, Retold by Bolu Babalola

I finished this book of romantic short stories and thought to myself “why on earth did I think this was going to be more about myths than romance?” And then I copied the full title for this review and realized that it was because Love In Color has been marketed as such. Which is a bit baffling to me since, barring one story in this collection of thirteen, every single one of these tales ends in a Happily Ever After or Happily For Now, often in a significantly different manner from the original story. The original tale of Attem, for example, ends with our heroine, her lover and her servant being made truly gruesome examples of: the version here is definitely an improvement that still hearkens back to the folktale without losing any of the source material’s richness.

Arguably, that story, like the others in this book, is made richer by emphasizing female agency and the romantic aspects of each tale. Even the retelling of Scheherazade, with the only non-HEA/HFN ending here, is significantly less grimly patriarchal than the Thousand And One Nights original. Bolu Babalola determinedly reinterprets the stories, often setting them in modern milieus, and about half of the time it works. The stories of Yaa, Naleli and Zhinu are lovely subversions of their source material, with the questionable parts shorn off and female agency and love celebrated instead. More importantly, they feel like complete short stories, instead of ideas for longer works as almost all the rest of the folktale-based stories here do. Attem and Nefertiti’s stories, in particular, felt like outlines for dynamic novels of adventure and intrigue that I am interested in reading. As shorts, however, they taste less like appetizers than amuse bouches. It’s odd, too, how certain stories feel like just enough while others feel like too much. Psyche feels like an entire romance novel crammed into a short story sausage casing, while Orin — one of the original stories here — is perfect as is.

And yes, there are three stories collected at the end that are not founded in mythology. Tiara, the story of a woman reunited with the man who left her for his career, is the first and least successful in my opinion, though yours will likely vary based on what you think of long-distance romances. Orin and Alagomeji are both really terrific, and the fact that the latter is based on the lives of Ms Babalola’s parents is incredibly touching, ending the book on a note that perfectly matches the author’s heartfelt opening declaration as to her belief in romantic love.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/13/love-in-color-mythical-tales-from-around-the-world-retold-by-bolu-babalola/