Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Home, by Toni Morrison

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:08:28 GMT

In her novels Toni Morrison usually tells two stories at the same time.

One is the story of the named characters: Sethe, Pecola, Milkman, Joe Trace.

The other is the story of storytelling. Its characters are Writer, Reader, Book.

Toni Morrison became the author I most venerate when I realized that Jazz is not only the story of love and longing in the lives of Joe and Violet Trace, but also the love story of Book and Reader.

Home is very much a story about storytelling. In fact, I think that in Home, this kind of story is even more important than the story of Frank Money, its named protagonist. Frank's story is so simple that its entire trajectory fits easily on the inside flap of the dust jacket.

So I'm putting my review under a cut, but this is the sort of book for which I think it's not so important to be cautious of spoilers.

( A review )

***

There's another thing I want to mention, which didn't fit above. About Cee's experience: to describe in brief what happens,

the jacket is correct to call it "medical abuse." In fact Cee goes to work as the assistant of a white doctor, who manipulates her into allowing him to experiment on her. She is nearly fatally injured, and when she recovers she is said to be infertile.

Morrison chose not to write any scene in which this is actually occurring; much is only implied, or revealed as Cee is healing. However, there is a scene from Cee's perspective as she is entering this dangerous situation. She is light-hearted and optimistic, but any reader who knows what Eugenics means can't be. I don't read horror on purpose, but I think this scene is perfect horror writing.

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Sherry Thomas, Beguiling the Beauty

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:02:07 GMT

Beguiling the Beauty is a romance novel set in 1896. It's the first in a trilogy about three women -- this novel's heroine, her sister, and their sister-in-law. Beguiling the Beauty came out last week and the other two will also be published this year.

I actually enjoyed most of the experience of reading Beguiling the Beauty. At first, I rated it three stars (out of five) on Goodreads. Then I started writing my review. Thinking harder about what I didn't like about the book, I took off one star, then another. The part of me that said, "Damn, this is a pretty terrible story" defeated the part of me that cried "But the dinosaur fossils! The boundary negotiation! The way the ending is like the ending of a play!" It was a strange experience, and somehow disapproving of this book doesn't make me any less devoted a fan of Sherry Thomas.

Here's most of my review from Goodreads -- I've just left off the first couple of paragraphs, which complain about the cover art.

...if someone had told me that the next Sherry Thomas book would involve two people who grow affectionate towards one another thanks to their shared love of paleontology, I would have been ecstatic.

Then, if someone had told me that it was going to have one of those plots that I'm a bit sick of -- the kind where the hero tricks the heroine into falling in love with him because he actually hates her (or someone close to her) and he's just using her emotions to get revenge -- except with the gender roles swapped, I would have been cautiously intrigued.

What I actually knew is the beginning of the back cover blurb: Duke blahdiblah meets mysterious Baroness soandso while traveling, hot passionate affair, then she disappears because she's secretly "a proper young widow," YAWN. Good job I already love Sherry Thomas's writing!

Despite the dinosaurs, however, I did not love this book. Well, I loved the dinosaurs (look, in this story, the act of sending a massively heavy set of fossilized dinosaur footprints to the other person is highly fraught with emotional significance), and Thomas as always has her moments of very beautiful prose. But it's hard to really get into a romance if you dislike the people who are having the romance.

It turns out that switching the gender roles doesn't really make me like revenge plots anymore. ( Spoilers from here on down )

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Dhan Gopal Mukerji: Kari, the Elephant, and Hari, the Jungle Lad.

Thu, 10 May 2012 18:02:36 GMT

11. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Kari, the Elephant.

Adventures of a boy, his elephant, and their monkey. The plot rather rambles -- I'm not sure you could even say it has a plot, as such -- but if you're looking for fantasy fodder of having your very own elephant (and who isn't?), this works very nicely.

Written in 1922, and very much falls into the genre of the old-school boys adventure novel, which is a genre that I have always enjoyed. Each chapter is more-or-less a separate adventure, where "adventure" can variously be defined as "something I tried to train Kari to do," "trouble Kari and Kopee and I got into," "that one job we took," "yet another time that Kari was a hero," and "when Kari fell in love." I would have eaten this up when I was a kid. As an adult, I still eat it up, I just use a spoon and napkin while I do.

Warning for animal harm. (skip spoiler)

Training Kari to get along with dogs doesn't work out so well for the dogs; big game hunting; and in the set-up for the sequel, Kari is abused by Englishmen, and the boy can't put a stop to it.

Also, available from Project Gutenberg, if you like such things.

12. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Hari, the Jungle Lad.

Sequel to Kari the Elephant, written fifteen years later. Mukerji grew as a writer in that time. This one has a plot! And characterization! In all other respects, it is very much in line with the first.

Hari is the lazybones son of a fairly well-to-do farmer: when we meet him, he is shirking work, hiding up under the eaves, pulling out the roof's thatch in lazy-day boredom. Then the village and the farm are destroyed, his life is saved by a mysterious elephant, and Hari and his father take to the jungle to make their living as hunters. The elephant, of course, is Kari -- the most famous and wisest and best elephant EVAR (um, did we read the same prequel?) -- and the novel gradually becomes a quest to reunite Kari with his boy/owner/trainer from the first book.

There are things in Hari that make me go hmm a bit. Hari's mother is killed when the village is destroyed, and her death seems to have no effect on Hari and his father. Me, I don't much like the trope of Killing Mom So That Adventures Can Be Had, and the effortlessness of her disposal rankles a bit extra. Furthermore, Hari has a deeply-entrenched case of hero worship for his father; normally that wouldn't bug me, but his father is unfailingly portrayed as ACTUALLY REALLY THE BESTEST AND WISEST AND MOST KNOWLEDGABLEST AT EVERYTHING EVER FOR ALWAYS. I keep poking at the characterization of the father, not believing that he could really have been as perfect as all that. Also, some of the hunting and jungle lore makes me wonder if Mukerji actually knew anything about hunting? Or if maybe the hunting lore is rooted in the same heroic non-reality as Jack London writing about sled dogs? Of course, people who know more about India than I do (many!), might find more things that they go hm about.

...but if you can put the above aside: lions and tigers and elephants and buffalo and sleeping in trees and sekrit jungle knowledge and quests and ADVENTURES!

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Catching-up post: Jemisin, Love, Okorafor, Swee-Lin Price, Franklin

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:09:05 GMT

I haven't posted here in a long time, but I've been reading! I have a few longer reviews to post later, but this is a round-up of books I didn't have much to say about.

N.K. Jemisin, the Inheritance Trilogy: Delightful, with reservations. Folks have already posted a lot about these novels in this community, so I'll just link to my rather inadequate written reactions on Goodreads for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of the Gods.

Jeremy Love, Bayou, Volume 1: Why doesn't my library have Volume 2? From Goodreads,

...the LIGHT. Underwater. Yellow sunlight. Red-orange sunset. Pink dawn. The black of a jail cell. Murky brown at the bayou. Blue to carry a shotgun across the field.

This is a beautiful story to look at, often at the same time it's horrifying.

I want to claim that Bayou, at least as of this first volume, isn't fantasy as much as magical realism. The fantastic elements aren't part of normal life (except insofar as they're the gigantic iridescent shadows of normal life) but neither are they more terrifying or abnormal to Lee, the protagonist, than those parts of her reality that she must deal with at the side of her father or other adult relatives.

My favorite pages are those on which we see Lee through Bayou's eyes. In one, as she prepares to do something Bayou hasn't the courage for, she isn't wearing her patched dress but a flowing gown and gold around her neck and in her ears and hair. Later, when she cries for Bayou to help her, he sees her straining against a chain. Whom is Bayou remembering?

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch: Enjoyed greatly, but I've seen so many other people's writing about this book that I couldn't think of much to say for myself. On Goodreads, comparing Akata Witch favorably to Harry Potter.

Fiona Swee-Lin Price, Success with Asian Names: This is a reference work for people with English as their first language who encounter people with Asian-language names professionally. Since I'm in the target audience, I have no idea how accurate the information is, but it seems very helpful! My post here mostly just explains what kind of information the book contains.

John Hope Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988: My review is rather dull, but I <3 <3 <3 John Hope Franklin and definitely recommend checking this book out from the library and reading the essays that seem interesting to you, if you're into U.S. history or historiography.

There are accounts of Franklin's experiences as a historian, from conducting research while being racially segregated to helping to shape public policy that ended segregation. There are several very interesting essays that deal with the historiography of the Reconstruction period and popular ideas about the South. There are essays that show how history can help us evaluate current political questions, and there are essays that delve into the minutia of minor historical figures' lives.

Franklin was a rather dry writer, and it took me a very long time to finish all of these essays. But he's also capable of deep and extended irony, especially when discussing rationalizations for slavery and segregation. Some of these passages come from his addresses to various historical societies. I would have liked to hear him deliver these speeches.

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Book 8: 暖床人 Nuan Quan Ren by 三千界 San Qian Jie

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:27:55 GMT

Title: 暖床人 Nuan Quan Ren (The person who warms the bed)
Author: 三千界 San Qian Jie
Author Nationality and race: Chinese
Language: Chinese
Genre: Fiction
Length: novel
Subject: M/M romance
Summary: Losing his lover, Zhen wanders to another dimension and accidentally chooses him to warm his bed. Zhen warms his heart, and he warms Zhen's in return.
Review: I really like this author's style because it reads so relaxing and steadily paced. The development of the relationship feels very natural to me.
Link: Original site

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Jeremy Love, Bayou

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:39:52 GMT

10. Jeremy Love, Bayou.

Lee Wagstaff swims down into the supernatural land under/behind/through behind the bayou, to save her Daddy from being lynched by the white mob who believes he murdered Lee's white playmate, the playmate who was actually snatched and swallowed whole by Cotton Eyed Joe, one of the residents of under-the-bayou.

I made a couple starts at this -- the beginning is grim, grim, grim -- but by the time Lee goes off to rescue her Daddy, I was thoroughly snagged. Gonna have to go track down Volume 2 now.

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Reflections: Portraits by Beverly McIver

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:10:17 GMT

(note: McIver is pronounced m'KEE'ver, not mc'EYE'ver, or so I was told by the person who sold me this catalog.)

I'm behind on posting about my reading here! However, I'm going to skip ahead to the book I read yesterday, because it's the catalog for an exhibit that you might want to check out if you're going to be in Raleigh or Charlotte in the next few months. "Reflections: Portraits by Beverly McIver" is on exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina until June 24, and then it will be at the Mint Museum Uptown at the Levine Center for the Arts, which I think is in Charlotte, NC, from July 14 to October 21. (Admission is free at the NC Museum, but if you pay $10 you can also see the exhibit of works by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist, which I cannot recommend enough.)

My review of the exhibit catalog and the exhibit is under the cut, but I'll say here that Beverly McIver is African-American and so is Kim Curry-Evans, who wrote the second essay in the catalog. The third (only two pages long) is by Beverly McIver and the first is by Jennifer Dasal, who is curating the exhibit. She doesn't identify her race, but I think she is white. However, since the artist herself and one of the other two contributors of text to this book are people of color, I would like to consider this a POC-authored work for the purposes of 50books_poc. Mods, if you judge differently please let me know and I will remove this post!

( Review: includes discussion of ableism and death from cancer )

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Jingle Dancer; Saltypie; A Boy Called Slow

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:24:13 GMT

Three picture books. The first is for a younger age group than the later two, but I'm not the best source for age estimates.

7. Cynthia Leitich Smith, illus. by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu, Jingle Dancer.

I've seen Jingle Dancer get high, high praise from various places around. It deserves all of it and more.

Jenna daydreams of being a jingle dancer, just like her Grandma Wolfe. Her Grandma is willing to help her make her dress, but there isn't time to mail order enough tins to make the jingles. And so Jenna practices her bounce-step, and then dances the four directions to each of four family members and neighbors, asking if she may borrow enough jingles to make a single row for her dress -- but only one row each, because she does not wish to silence the voices of their dresses! And each, of course, agrees, then asks if Jenna would do something for them: dance for them at powwow, since they each had already had a reasonthat they wouldn't be able to jingle dance that day themselves.

...and really, this is the sweetest book imaginable. Jenna and her family and neighbors positively glow in the illustrations -- such beautiful smiles they all have for each other! Jenna is loved. She is a treasured part of her community -- it is there in everyone's faces, everyone's words. And she, in her turn, understands herself to be a vital member of the community, capable of contributing to it, and finding joy in doing so.

And there's thematically subtle stuff in here -- more than what I summarized above, with the four directions and all. Some of it is explained in the author's note and glossary at the end, but some of it is simply there: it is not so much a book about a culture, as a book designed to be relevant within the culture, while still accessible and enjoyable from outside the culture. This is what I hope to see in children's books about Native people, and don't see nearly often enough.

Really, it's beautifully done. Beautifully written, beautifully illustrated, and simultaneously obvious and subtle. I can't recommend it enough.

8. Tim Tingle, Saltypie: A Choctaw Journey from Darkness into Light.

Another book that I've seen get praised highly, and which deserves a substantial chunk of that praise. I don't unreservedly fangirl Saltypie like I do Jingle Dancer, but there's still a lot about it for which I'd recommend it.

This is a family memoir about the author's grandmother, ranging in time from when the author's father was a baby to when the author was a college student. Timewise, it jumps around quite a bit: adjacent pages might be minutes apart or forty years apart, and it doesn't keep its flashbacks and flashforwards linear, nor does it neatly contain them. All that feels very much like family stories to me: some stories are told as set pieces, but many times you learn the contexts and interlinkages for those set pieces in bits and drabs, sometimes years apart from each other. Saltypie's narrative style feels like growing up in a family rich with its own history, and the way that history gradually comes together over the course of your life. For that alone, I would recommend this book.

Oh, and about "saltypie" -- it's a family in-joke, turned into a commiseration-word for the way trouble comes and finds one.

It's a way of dealing with trouble, son. Sometimes you don't know where the trouble comes from. You just kinda shrug it off, say saltypie. It helps you carry on.

There's not much that I can say without spoiling things I was happy to not have spoiled, but I did want to discuss disability as it appears in the book, so I'll put that under cut-tag: ( disability discussion )

...so, I have some reservations from a disability perspective. However, none of those reservations are so strong as to keep me from giving it to a kid. In fact, there are aspects of this portrait that I like a lot, and would want a kid to see. YMMV.

Oh! And I almost forgot to say: the author's note at the back is refreshingly candid. It's addressed to white readers, all about the process of deciding what to share with said readers and what to withhold. And not the "this is private, not for outsiders" decisions, but "If we tell you as much as we want to tell you, would you keep listening?" decisions. There's a part of me that wants to rec the book for the author's note alone.

9. Joseph Bruchac, A Boy Called Slow.

Narrative of the boyhood of Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, framed around his being given his boyhood name and coming to earn his adult name, and what those events say about him as a person and his relationship to the Hunkpapa.

As you'd expect from Bruchac, solidly done. I came across this while looking for material about Tatank Iyotake's later life, but the characterization that Bruchac puts forth here -- slow and considering, but bold and decisive once Sitting Bull makes his decisions -- is nice fodder for considering his later life.

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Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:40:27 GMT

6. Emory Dean Keoke (Lakota) and Kay Marie Porterfield, Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World.

...or, as I've been calling it, The Dual-Purpose Cluebat. (It is big and heavy and hardbound! Also, full of clues!)

A few years ago, I reviewed the five volume, upper elementary grades, narrative version of this work: I adored that series (and still do!), but was frustrated by the lack of where-to-find-out-moreness of it. This version is in encyclopedia format, aimed at high-schoolers or so, and every article ends with a list of sources and further reading. (Yay!) If you want to know more than what's in the text, the next link in your research trail is right there at the end of the article. There's also liberal cross-referencing; a glossary; a chronology of contributions (up through mid-20th century); lists of entries by subject, geographical culture area, and tribe (oh, but I could have used this during that classroom slapfight about the Shoshone [1] a few years back!); and an index. Just in case you wanted to know what entries Lewis and Clark [2] or the D.E.A [3] appear in, f'rinstance. If you like being able to trace and cross-reference your facts, you want the Encyclopedia, not the five-volume series.

The preface outlines the American and European intellectual traditions that have made this book so necessary (not-at-all-ironically, that Mark Twain quote about the Shoshone that underwrote the slapfight above makes an appearance), then works through the logic of the authors' definition for "contribution to the world" and their explicit rejection of the usual western-civ assumptions about such things:( because ethnocentrism and colonialism, yo )

My first several random browse-throughs, I was only reading articles that I knew little to nothing about (lighthouses, plastic surgery, electricity): most of those articles are about either the Aztec or Incan empires, or the Mesoamerican and Andean cultures that preceded them. Then I started methodically working my way through the entries associated with a specific tribe or culture area (which is positively lovely cross-referencing to have), and thus found myself reading articles that I had skipped on earlier browsings -- after all, I had already known lacrosse was originated by American Indians. But for almost every one of those articles, Keoke and Porterfield managed to include some new and interesting aspects of the topic: even with topics I had thought I had known very well, I learned something new. Oh, there are some fascinating stories in here, people. (Well, assuming you're the sort who likes to read encyclopedias. But us encyclopedia-readers are legion: I know you're out there.)

This is a library copy and thus needs to go back, but I really need to get my own copy. Partly so that I can have my cluebat right at hand when I need it, but also because there's a chunk more articles in here that I haven't read yet. Like-need-want, yes!

[1] asepsis, animal and bird calls, oral contraception, medical treatment of eyes, indigestion medications, insecticides, botanical mints, orthopedic techniques, place names, toys.

[2] blueberries, maps, steam rooms, tobacco, toys.

[3] coca, peyote.

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Beaver Steals the Fire; Arctic Memories

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:46:41 GMT

Two picture books!

4. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Beaver Steals Fire. Told by Johnny Arlee (Salish).

Pushing the bitter end of the appropriate season for this story...

Traditional Salish story of how the animal people, led by Coyote, stole fire from the sky people. Beaver may officially get credit in the title -- and to be sure, he was brave and fleet! -- but it was very much a group project. Everyone else worked together to make sure that Beaver could get away clean, and that the sky people wouldn't thereafter be able to extinguish their newly-stolen fire. (Well, they mostly worked together: Grizzly was so greedy that he was too busy goofing up to be useful, and Bull Snake... Well, never send Bull Snake and Frog on a recon mission together, 'kay? Just... don't.)

The illustrations are simple but lovely (I especially like Prairie Chicken shelterng the fire from the rain), and there are excellent cultural notes at the end about Salish uses of fire, and the effects of the past century of fire suppression on traditional Salish lands. (Really, I can't rec that "Note to Teachers and Parents" enough.) Additionally, there's a second section at the end on the Salish alphabet and its pronunciation: in the text, all the characters' names are given in both Salish and English.

Very highly recommended. And gosh, but it makes

5. Normee Ekoomiak (Inuit), Arctic Memories.

Felt applique and embroidery artwork (as Ekoomiak learned from his grandfather) depicting scenes based on Ekoomiak's childhood on James Bay, with narration of each piece in Inuktitut and English. "Scenes based on his childhood" is very broadly defined: some of these are scenes of daily life, some are illustrations of stories he learned as a child, some are illustrations of Inuit spiritual beliefs (including how those beliefs are sometimes synthesized with Christianity), and so on.

The art is gorgeous -- I only wish that many of the reproductions had been larger or more detailed. A few pieces have both a detail and an overview shot, but I wished for more detail shots than we were given. The narrations are strong, and accumulate deeper meaning over the course of the book. For instance, the first time Okpik, the snowy owl, is introduced, we are told that he watches over the people and the polar bear; in later pieces, we see him warning people that a polar bear is approaching (so that they may take in their drying fish, thus saving both the humans and the bear from a clash). In another piece, he watches over the Nativity. One story ("The Curse") is deeply shocking to me, and would be my only reservation in generally recommending the book. Altogether, however, this book is strongly evocative of a particular time, place, and people, and would make a nice companion to Danielle Corriveau's The Inuit of Canada.

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Raven Steals the Light; Octopus Lady and Crow

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:45:29 GMT

2. Bill Reid (Haida) and Robert Bringhurst, illus by Bill Reid, The Raven Steals the Light.

Paired traditional Haida stories and art, opening with the famous "Raven Steals the Light", and ending with "Dogfish Woman," a character for whom art is extant but the story is not, which stands in as a marker for the many Haida stories that have been lost. It is lovely to have tight pairings between story and art like this: a single artwork may reference the full span of a story, and knowing the story encourages the meanings within the art unfold and unfold again.

Oh, and the stories! I grew up on the Puget Sound, significantly south of Haida Gwaii, but the sense of home I get off these stories! When the narrator speaks of a girl who was "as beautiful as hemlock fronds against the spring sky at sunrise," well, let me tell you, a western hemlock is beautiful indeed. If you are walking in a PNW coastal forest, and think to yourself, "That is one graceful tree," and then you need to stop for a moment to watch the lines and lace of it? You are probably looking at a western hemlock. (I have just now tried to find a photo to show you, but photos of hemlocks are like photos of waterfalls: that's not what they look like, not really.) So: hemlocks and seaslugs and clams and tides and dogfish and home.

And then there are stories that open like this:

The Raven, most powerful of all the creatures who lived in the mythtime, whose whim could light the world and bring the lakes and rivers to Haida Gwaii and fill them with fish, the great transformer of himself and of the universe, the distillation of the essence of the clever, complex, devious, ingenious restless Haida—and, for that matter, of all the contradictory human race—why is he always walking along some beach, hungry, dissatisfied?

I smirk this big.

Of course these aren't my stories, even for all the homesickness they invoke. There are a few stories in here that don't quite make sense to me: they are told to other storytelling logics, and I don't hold the keys that would make sense of them. That's fine. They're not supposed to be for me.

This is a lovely collection, and I enjoyed it very much.

(Note to taggers: Robert Bringhurst is white.)

3. Johnny Moses (Tulalip), Octopus Lady and Crow and Other Animal People Stories of the Pacific Northwest.

I'm invoking the "book-like things" clause here: this is a recording of Johnny Moses telling traditional stories from the Nootka, Snohomish, Cowichan, Spokane, Samish, Tulalip, and Skagit peoples. The dialogue in each story is bilingual, with Moses first delivering the line in an indigenous language before repeating it, still in character, in English. The liner notes were too sparse to know what languages Moses is using in the different stories, but he speaks eight Native languages, so it's conceivable that he is using the original language for each story?

Ditto what I said above about the story characters speaking of home to me: there are slug people in these stories! And Moses pulls out all the stops in his characterizations. (I had never imagined Slug Man to be quite so spitty!) Also, I very much enjoyed the bilingual tellings -- partly beacause I'm strongly in favor of language preservation and keeping stories tied to their original languages -- but also because I'm learning a language that shares many phonemes with the languages on the recording (phonemes that anglophones tend to struggle with), and it's a pleasure to hear them spoken lightly and easily.

The audiocasette is out of print, unfortunately (although if you're interested, I might be able to help), but from the looks of it, Moses tells many of the same stories on this DVD available from oyate.org.

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The Trickster and the Troll

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:11:32 GMT

1. Virginia Drivink Hawk Sneve (Lakota), The Trickster and the Troll.

A "Siouxwegian" story about a Lakota and a Norwegian folk hero meeting on the Great Plains circa 1880, and their turning to each other for comfort as their respective peoples begin to turn away from the old ways, the old stories, and them.

Sneve is explicitly drawing parallels about the homogenizing effects of American society on two peoples -- Norwegian immigrants and the Lakota -- and the cultural losses that each people incurred. (Note to white Americans who claim they have no culture: this is where your culture went. Go find it.) Yet Sneve is also explicit about the differences in those two processes: assimilation did not happen at gunpoint for European immigrants, and the immigrants were not neutral players in the Lakota's cultural losses. It's a fine line to walk, especially in a book for fairly young readers, but she walks it, and walks it well. Ultimately, there is quite a bit here about needing one's people for one's survival and meaning and about turning back to the traditions of your own people for your healing, but also something about the intertwining of two people's futures. (skip spoiler)

Iktomi and Troll both find places with their peoples again, but now they are friends with each other, too, and returning to their own peoples (oh so important and necessary!)-- Well, the story doesn't say. But I note that it was loneliness for Iktomi that eventually returns Troll to his own people, as it was jealousy over Troll meeting a Nisse that sent Iktomi in search of his.

(In the coda-in-my-head, after their initial joy in being reunited with their respective peoples, they find time for their friendship again, too.)

(Although Sneve is probably less worried about the future of their friendship than I am, given that her kids called themselves "Siouxwegian" when they were young.)

Oh, and as a side note: this was something of a hard read for me, despite its size (small) and reading level (easy). Which perhaps is not too much of a surprise: the 1880s on were not kind years to the Lakota. (Oddly, perhaps, it wasn't the massacre-at-a-distance that made me put the book down and walk away for a bit, but the moment that I realized that we would be talking about the theft of the Black Hills, too.) But this is an Iktomi story, which means that there are comic elements in it, too.

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Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday and William Dufty

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:07:01 GMT

As posted here on Goodreads:

It's very difficult to know what to say about this memoir, since it wasn't exactly written by Billie Holiday, but by her friend William Dufty, who based it on interviews and other conversations with her. This review at the San Francisco Chronicle says that the book is full of "factual inaccuracies and exaggerations" but "captures [Holiday's] tart voice and unflinching eye," and that Dufty's "aim was to let Holiday tell her story her way." It sounds like a lot of the events didn't happen as described, but perhaps most of the opinions the narrator expresses are really Holiday's -- even the ones I wish weren't. I'd have to read a thorough biography of her to have a better idea, I suppose.

The main opinion I hope wasn't really Holiday's is the narrator's attitude about lesbians. I suppose on the plus side, nobody reading this book could deny that there were lesbians in the 1920s through 50s, as well as male and female cross-dressers. But the narrator seems very keen to dissociate herself from queerness. Apart from owning up to being friends with a male transvestite, the narrator (I keep saying "narrator" instead of Holiday because I don't really know for sure!) expresses a great deal of contempt, pity, and disgust for the queer people she encounters. It was really unpleasant to read, especially when I thought that "Miss Brown To You" was a sweet song about lesbians! (Lady Sings the Blues does not say anything about those lyrics.)

I really do like what the narrator has to say about trauma and stress. A lot of very bad things definitely happened to Holiday, starting in her early childhood. Without having the psychological language people use today (like PTSD and triggers), the narrator says very simply and convincingly that a person who's had terrible things happen to her doesn't just get over them completely. They stay with her and can overwhelm her again if she's reminded of them. She says they informed her singing, especially particular songs which she has a very strong reaction to.

The narrator describes how she went on tour with a band whose musicians were all white men. All the "cats" (as she calls them) liked her and always wanted to insist on her being treated the same as they, but this meant a constant battle at segregated restaurants, hotels, and concert halls all over the country. She loved them for standing up for her, but she says that sometimes she pleaded with them to just let her go in the back door so that she didn't have to go through the civil rights movement five times a day. This was so stressful for her that she became physically ill.

Another opinion I think is interesting is what she says about drugs, the law, and treatment. Of course it's really hard to tell what her real opinion was about this subject, since Holiday was being monitored by the law and was still struggling with her addiction when this book came out. But one thing she says is that when she was on tour in Europe, she was very impressed by the different legal attitude towards drugs there (particularly in Great Britain). She said that there, unlike in the United States, she could see a doctor openly about her addiction without fearing arrest, and so it would be so much easier to break the addiction without the stress and stigma of criminality.

I'll end with an anecdote that made me laugh. This is the narrator's (I hope verbatim from Billie Holiday) opinion of opinion of the luxury car bought by Artie Shaw, leader of a band she went on tour with:

From then on Artie used to lead the caravan driving this big old Rolls. And he always wanted me to ride up with him and Max and Tony and sometimes Benny, our road manager. I had mixed feelings about this. A Rolls is built for pleasure. It's great to be able to call your chauffeur and say, "James, take me through Central Park and then back home." It's fine to pull up in front of El Morocco or somewhere and have it wait to take your black ass home. But it's nowhere for highballing a hundred and fifty miles to make a gig. You take it up over thirty-five miles an hour and if you're in the back seat it's apt to turn you into a milkshake.

You got to sit up straight in it like a queen cruising past her subjects. It's no damn good for lovers either. You can't bend in it no kind of way. It's only good for one thing -- that's to be dicty.

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The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:49:11 GMT

I finished this book over a week ago, but I had to process it for a while before I knew what to say about it. My review also appears here on Goodreads.

I had trouble deciding what to make of this book. I think that's my fault for reading very few recently published novels that aren't genre fiction!

I had trouble reading it, too. I considered stopping, at first, but I wanted to find out what was going on. I read the last third or so quickly, but before then, as I was getting used to it, I kept pausing -- to thaw, in a way.

This is a book about a woman who has very, very good reasons for being cold. And the way the narrator describes the world she lives in, who would want to think warmly of it? It's a world that magnifies the trivial, that's full of corruption and self-deception; a world in which the secure are sordid and the insecure fight one another. The narrator is not interested in pointing out the goodness or genuineness of humanity.

This is our world -- New York City (never named) when the Civil Rights Movement (referred to most obliquely) has begun to make itself felt (slightly).

The protagonist Lila Mae Watson has, through gruelling work, self-denial, and singlemindedness, managed to become the first black woman in the Department where she works. (There is also one black man there, whom she despises for his obsequiousness.) Lila Mae, we are told, is not given to self-reflection, and she is surrounded as much by unanswered questions as by chill. Is she cold because institutional and personal racism demanded it of her ambition? Or did her innate coldness simply give her an advantage? Is she a pawn or the center of the conspiracy -- or is she involved completely by accident, then assuming her significance? Is her accuracy rate really 100%, and if not, where do her perceptions intersect with reality?

The adventures of Lila Mae are played out on the stage of an incredible invention -- the elevator industry. In the book's world, which is otherwise exactly like our own at a certain place and time, elevators are important. Lila Mae's Department is the Department of Elevator Inspection, and she is the first black female Elevator Inspector, and was the only black student at the Institute for Vertical Transport. Elevators have a history, two competing schools of thought, their own politics. They provide material for jokes and philosophical metaphor.

This entire schema is ridiculous, of course, but carefully so: it is not so ridiculous, so implausible, that it doesn't invite comparison with other institutions, obsessions, Departments, calling into question their own sincerity and worth. No reader could believe that the Department of Elevator Inspection is worth all of the intrigue that surrounds it, nor that Lila Mae has found a worthy object for her ambition; but Lila Mae makes sense, and all of the other patronizing, power-greedy, cowardly, cliquish, and/or corrupt characters are perfectly recognizable.

The Intuitionist is tightly focused on its elevator story, but its very reticence and remoteness invite thought about more expansive subjects: human contact, cities, and (the one inescapable pun) racial uplift.

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Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee - The Palace of Illusions

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:41:14 GMT

This is a retelling of the Mahabharata from Panchaali's point of view (in this text, she prefers "Panchaali" to "Draupadi"). It starts from her youth in Drupad's palace, where she's largely dissatisfied by the traditional feminine trappings of her upbringing and longs to break out of gender roles to fulfill the prophecy that she will change the course of history. Then it continues through her marriage to the Pandava brothers and, of course, the great battle of Kurukshetra.

Generally, I like to know a reader's context while I'm reading their reactions to a book, and moreso when the book is a retelling of a familiar story. So: I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Sneha Mathan. I've read Ramesh Menon's retelling of the Mahabharata, but I'm not as familiar with it in the way someone who grew up hearing the stories would be, and furthermore, it's not a story from my own religious or cultural backgrounds. It was also interesting "reading" a book for the first time as an audiobook; I tend to like something familiar with audiobooks, so almost everything I've listened to before this has been a reread. Also, I read fan fiction.

I didn't feel very lost in the book, despite not being entirely familiar with the source; I'd forgotten about Drupad and Drona's rivalry, as well as Panchaali's brother Dhrishtadyumna's role in it, but Divakaruni
drops in backstory and things outside of Panchaali's knowledge fairly nicely.

Anyway, back to the book! I liked the early parts about Panchaali's childhood the most; in a way, it feels like the story stops after her swayamvara because Divakaruni stops adding as much to the text. It's almost as though the first part is Divakaruni writing fic of Panchaali's backstory, but once Panchaali meets the Pandavas, Divakaruni's narrative becomes more a straight retelling from Panchaali's point of view.

I wasn't particularly fond of Panchaali's desires for a less traditionally feminine life, largely because the way it was expressed felt very modern and Western and out of place. Also, Divakaruni sometimes follows up on it, but not always, so my impression was more that it was something younger Panchaali felt but older Panchaali did not think as much about, without a narrative of how that change took place. That said, I do like the first part for fleshing out Panchaali and Dhrishtadyumna's sibling relationship.

My main issue, though, is how Divakaruni portrays Panchaali's relationship with the Pandavas. Here, she is bound to them by duty, not love, and though Panchaali is fond enough of the brothers, her passion is reserved for Karna. Except... she only talks to Karna maybe twice in the book, whereas the entire second half is spent with the Pandavas. So there's a lot of longing in her thoughts about Karna, but no actual action, and when she's with the Pandavas, the narration largely consists of how she feels obligated to them but no real emotional attachment. This did not make for the most scintillating reading. She does rage at the Pandavas at times, particularly Yudhisthir post-dice-game, but the narration always feels a bit removed emotionally. Panchaali will think about how angry she is, or how betrayed she feels, but then she will immediately counter herself by saying that the Pandavas are not bad husbands, that Yudhisthir has his good points, etc., so that there's not much emotional progression. She begins marriage to the Pandavas with very similar feelings that she ends the book with, and while there are a few highs and lows, the Panchaali-Pandava relationship largely remains the same.

That said, my favorite bits are probably the ones that flesh out Bheem and Panchaali's relationship a bit, since I'm fond of them.

I was also a bit irritated to read Divakaruni's piece linked below, in which she talks about how none of the women in the epics she grew up on get to interact with each other that much. Panchaali does interact with a few women in the book, particularly with her mother-in-law Kunti, but there's very little about her and the other Pandava wives. I was somewhat disappointed to find that her relationship with Kunti was very antagonistic, the both of them fighting over the Pandava brothers' affections. I think if Divakaruni had wanted to portray the relationship differently, she could have, and interpreting it as the antagonistic mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law wasn't particularly interesting to me. The other main female relationship Panchaali has is with Dhai Ma, her childhood nurse, but here too, Divakaruni doesn't really step out of the stereotype. Dhai Ma is lower class, earthy, more blunt, and somewhat gender policing, and though Divakaruni keeps telling us that Panchaali is very fond of Dhai Ma, we don't see that much of it in her actions.

Much as I understand Panchaali's attraction to Karna's story, I'm not sure how well it worked for the novel. There's too much of Panchaali thinking about Karna without interaction between the two, and the little interaction there is wasn't fleshed out enough for me. I felt the same way about Panchaali's love for her palace in Indraprastha; Divakaruni writes a lot on how much Panchaali loves it and feels at home there, but the ten years spent there are glossed over in a few pages, so there's never that much depth to it.

The book reads as though Divakaruni was caught between wanting to do a reimagining of the Mahabharata and a straight retelling, and I'm not sure it quite succeeds at either. I think my reaction is very colored by what I expect from fanfic, though, and I'm not sure how fair that is. I especially wish she had spent more time on Panchaali's relationships with the five Pandavas, since that takes up so much of the book and because so much of the book rests on the Karna vs. Pandavas comparisons that Panchaali keeps making. And, strangely enough for a book that ends with Kurukshetra, the book read as too introspective to me, without enough of Panchaali interacting with other people in dialogue vs. thinking about them.

Audiobook-wise, I liked the reader and especially being able to hear the pronunciations of names more accurately than the pronunciation in my head. Mathan has somewhat of a British or more Western-sounding accent in her narration (I think... not great at identifying accents), but the lower-class characters, especially Dhai Ma, are voiced with a much stronger Indian accent. The nobler characters, like Krishna, Arjun, Kunti, and etc., have less of the Indian accent, and I think Panchaali's spoken accent is the same as Mathan's accent in narration; i.e. it reads more as "invisible." I particularly didn't like how this marks Dhai Ma even more, though the novel itself definitely supports the somewhat stereotyped lower-class nurse take. Also, in audio, Divakaruni's textual quirk of having Panchaali ask several rhetorical questions in a row gets very, very old, very, very quickly.

Links:
- "What Women Share," by Divakaruni (published before she wrote Palace of Illusions)
- rachelmanija's review
- oncejadedtwicesnarked's critique

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28-32: various authors

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:25:05 GMT

28. Hong Kong Encounter (3rd edition) by Piera Chen (Lonely Planet Publications)
29. More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson
30. Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
31. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
32. War Dances by Sherman Alexie

28. Hong Kong Encounter (3rd edition) by Piera Chen (Lonely Planet Publications)
( Read more )

29. More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City by William Julius Wilson
( Read more )

30. Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Content notes are at the end of the review inside the cut.

( Read more (possible spoilers) )

31. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
Content notes are at the end of the review inside the cut.

( Read more (spoilers) )

32. War Dances by Sherman Alexie
Edited to add a section I missed including about the structure of some of the pieces in this collection (Feb 11, 2:30pm EST).

( Read more (possible spoilers) )

Tags
Hong King Encounter
a:chen piera, travel guide book, non-fiction, subject: hong kong, hong kong author
More Than Just Race
african-american, united states, non-fiction, racism, poverty, a:wilson william julius
Anil's Ghost
a:ondaatje michael, medium:novel, genre:literary.fiction, sri lanka, asian-canadian
The Book of Negroes
a:hill lawrence, mixed race author, african-canadian author, black writer, historical fiction, slavery, africa, canadian author, black-canadian
War Dances
a:alexie sherman, native american, short stories, poems, united states, spokane, coeur d'alene

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02: Legend by Marie Lu

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:48:00 GMT

This is a debut young adult novel and is that rare breed of dystopian that's more action-driven in terms of the plot. Think more Hunger Games, less Delirium.

The basic set-up is that some catastrophe happened and in the aftermath, the western coast of the U.S. broke off and formed the Republic. The Republic is under the totalitarian rule of a dictator who's been in power for 44 years. The Republic is at constant war with the Colonies. I never quite figured out who the Colonies were -- I couldn't tell if they meant a different country (like Mexico or Canada) or if they meant the rest of what was once the United States. I'm thinking the latter but it's never explicitly spelled out although I could have missed it. There are also these rebels called Patriots, who believe the United States once existed. (In this reality, everyone thinks the United States is just a legend and never existed.)

The story is about the Republic prodigy, June Iparis. She scored a perfect 1500 on the test that essentially determines the rest of her life and is well on her way to having a distinguished career in the military. But when her brother, a military officer, dies in the line of duty, she graduates early and becomes the youngest detective agent ever. To test her, they send her after Day, the Republic's most infamous criminal, who's in desperate straits because his younger brother has been infected by the plague. (The plague is a highly mutable virus that sweeps through the slums on an annual basis.)

The book is pretty predictable. Though I can see why it'd be considered pretty original if the other books in its category are more introspective and emotionally driven like Delirium, Matched, and Wither. But despite the fact I could pretty much tell where we were going, I did enjoy reading it.

I wish we could see have seen more done with the genetic engineering being conducted by the Republic's regime. The way it's handled here is kind of throwaway but it really shouldn't be since it's the main reason why June and Day are on opposite sides of the law!

My other complaint has to do with the fact that, of course, it's the guy (Day) who's right about things and it's the girl (June) who needs to be enlightened in order to get onto the right path. It'd be nice if we could have that plot point gender-reversed once in a while. I'm failing to think of a YA book where it's the guy who's aligned with the sketchy, evil people and the girl who's just trying to do what's right.

On a side note, Day is biracial (Asian/white) and so is June. (Day thinks June is part Native -- which I assume means Native American and would support how her hair is constantly described in the book.) Their race has no bearing on the story but I thought I'd mention it.

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Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:35:59 GMT

This is a short biography of the classic blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) by the poet Jackie Kay. It includes passages of fiction that speculate how some of the gaps in our knowledge of Bessie Smith's life might be filled.

Most of my Goodreads review:

This is not a straightforward biography of Bessie Smith. Mostly, I like biographies that are scholarly: lots of citations, and analysis with the seams showing so I can see how it's put together. This biography isn't that, but it's just what I wanted, because it taught me about the early blues scene without ever letting me forget that the person telling me about it is another woman who needs those blues.

Jackie Kay says that when she was growing up in Glasgow, a black child with white adoptive parents, it was Bessie Smith who gave her race meaning.

Like any child with a grown-up hero, Jackie imagined Bessie for herself: traveling across the wilds of America (like the set in a Western movie) in her private Pullman car (which she first imagined to be a sort of fancy covered wagon). Before she understood the meanings of the more ribald songs, she made up her own (the bit about Kitchen Man is charming).

The real Bessie Smith was fantastic in different ways. She was an extreme woman: cruel and generous, profligate and jealous, poor and rich. She was fascinating.

I love how Jackie Kay relishes the legends around Bessie Smith. She gives us the tallest stories and then, instead of toppling them, says, "Here's what the people who hear these stories need to get from them."

This book is part of the Outlines series, which is "an unofficial, candid and entertaining short history of lesbian and gay art, life and sex." It seems that the editors of the Outline series really do just mean lesbian and gay. This was the one thing that annoyed me about this book. It quickly becomes clear that Bessie Smith had sexual relationships with both men and women. But Kay constantly refers to her life as a lesbian one. Kay speculates that her marriage to her abusive husband Jack Gee was sexless. Maybe true, but she cheated on him with men as well as women, and at the time of her death she'd been in an apparently happy relationship with another man, Richard Morgan, for years. Kay says very little about him. I think that Bessie Smith might not have identified her sexual orientation the way people do today, but if she had, it seems like she would have chosen bisexual to describe herself, not lesbian.

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'Flygirl' by Sherri L Smith

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:45:38 GMT

I adored this book. It's a young adult historical novel set during WW2 and is the story of the WASP, the female pilots who never were quite accepted by the military, and Ida Mae who is an African American girl who 'passes' as white in order to be able to fly those planes.

I really enjoyed all of it, and found Ida Mae a really easy character to identify with. I really connected with her journey and spent half my time chewing my fingernails for fear she'd be discovered. I wanted her to succeed, I wanted her to fly those planes, I wanted good things to happen to her and was terrified they wouldn't.

I also was incredibly impressed with how well it handled some difficult issues - racism, sexism, the relationship between light skinned and dark skinned - but did so without either giving the reader or the characters easy answers or solutions, or making the book feel like an 'issue' novel. In fact, it felt a lot like a traditional 'boys own adventure' in some ways. There was barely a romance option, and instead it offered cockpit banter, daring heroines risking their lives in the high skies, and some awesome depictions of same-sex friendship. It also passes the Bechdel test with flying colours.

I won't say everyone will like it. There isn't much resolution at the end of the novel, mostly because there wasn't in real life and although I felt it handled the issues it tackles well, other people might not. I would, however, thoroughly recommend it, for the positive depiction of female friendship and the really empowering story of women basically doing male jobs just as well as any man without any kind of apology.

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Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:20:32 GMT

17 Mind Storm by K.M. Ruiz

This is really good cyberpunky post-apocalyptic action-adventure with psionics. It is loaded with gee whiz, basically. I discovered it in the Yuletide suggestions post, but I'm not sure it'd make a good Yuletide fandom. It'd make a great rpg setting, though. Perhaps a Gamma World mod. It's sufficiently gonzo, though it also has some Shadowrunny things going on.

The story begins with a little Mad Max- a team of government agents moves across an irradiated desert wasteland on a secret mission to track down a rogue. After just enough time to introduce us to our heroes, we're given an explosive fight scene in fallen LA that throws open the door to startling revelations. And while the combat slows down from there as we move into the intrigues and preparations of the middle part of the book, the pace never slows down. There is a continuous stream of new faces, new alliances, new pieces of information. And there is a gorgeous plan driving the story, an interlocking plot of great intricacy designed to look to its participants like utter chaos.

I am eagerly looking forward to future books in the series. This one was certainly a lot of fun, and it left plenty of questions open for the sequels.

And note that this book is eligible for Best Novel in the 2012 Hugo Awards.

18 John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

I've been stalled on Whitehead's Zone One for about a month now, but I plowed through this with a vengeance. Actually, that's not quite true. I read it eagerly for a while, got sidetracked into a bit of a Nick Hornby kick, then returned and plowed through it with a vengeance. That's important to note because when I returned to John Henry Days from the airy wit of Hornby the density of Whitehead's writing was a bit of a shock to the system.

Whitehead writes heavy, overloaded prose that I admire the hell out of. He stays just on the edges of his characters' minds so that all you can see of them is the shadows and echoes cast off. There is always a remoteness to Whitehead's writing: in John Henry Days, the main character is known only by his first initial for the entire novel. His first name is implied once or twice, but never stated, and even when he tells someone what it is on the final page, the reader isn't let in on the 'secret'.

But what impressed me about John Henry Days is that despite sharing this remoteness with The Intuitionist and especially Apex Hides the Hurt, this time around Whitehead's emotional narratives go so much further. I became invested in J. I became invested in Pamela. I became invested in their relationship. I wanted them to get together. I wanted J. to leave the business, delete himself from the List, teach Pamela how to bury her father and I don't know, live happy hipster lives in Brooklyn? Of course this novel was heading for a horrible ending, but I was invested enough in it to be devastated by that ending even though I knew it was inevitable. Which is the core, I think, of the John Henry legend that the novel dances around. Was John Henry's death inevitable and if it was inevitable, why?

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Hugo-Eligible Works for 2011

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:51:12 GMT

The Hugo Awards are a major SFF award, distinctive for being fan-driven: fans nominate works for the award, and fans have the final vote on the award. "Fan" is defined as "anyone who springs $50 for a ChiCon 2012 supporting membership before January 31st". (theferret summarizes why one might want to become a Hugo voter: a chance to boost the career of your favorite creators, and ebooks of the works on the final ballot.) Nominations for the Hugo ballot are currently open; nominations are due March 11.

Some have expressed interest in knowing what poc-created works and which poc SFF professionals and fans are eligible for nomination: this is the post! Rec and discuss your favorite works below (or, alternatively, just name poc-created works that are eligible, whether or not you are actively recommending them); I'll pull the recs up into the main post. And yes, go ahead and rec works or people for the non-book-related categories, if you wish. Just make sure that the people or creators that you are nominating are chromatic/non-white/people of color.

(And please feel free to signal-boost this around! Crowd-sourcing is good!)

( Best Novel )

( Best Novella, Novellette )

( Best Short Story )

( Best Related Work, Graphic Story )

( Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form, Short Form )

( Editors, Artists, Zines, Fan Works )

( John W. Campbell (new writer) )

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Book 1: Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:12:48 GMT

Hiero and me threaded through Montmartre’s grey streets not talking. Once the home of jazz so fresh it wouldn't take no for a answer, the clubs had all gone Boot now. Nearly overnight the cafés filled with well-fed broads in torn stockings crooning awful songs to Gestapo.

The book takes place in Berlin in Paris in the 1930s and '40s then fifty years later in America and Europe, in alternating chapters. It follows the possibly slightly unreliable narration of Sid, an mixed race bass player from Baltimore who's on the European jazz circuit right before World War II. It follows the mystery of what happened to Hieronymus, a brilliant young trumpet player; how and why they were recording in Nazi-occupied Paris, and what Louis Armstrong has to do with any of this. It's very much a love poem to jazz, but also a comment on how love poems to jazz can land you in a lot of trouble.

I think I loved this book mostly for it's language. It's written in close first person, in varying levels of vernacular, and the flow and sway of the prose is beautiful, laden with humour and surprising. Also the difference in tone between the sections set in the '30s and '40s and the stuff in the '90s is subtle and well done. It's clearly the same narrator, but also clearly one who's deeply altered by the intervening time.

The structure of the mystery plays out very elegantly as well. The sooner something is made clear to the reader, the more questions it opens, and one moment will turn everything on its head then around again until the whole book has a completely different perspective. Given that, it doesn't feel artificially constructed or too clever for it's own good. The order the narrator tells the story in makes sense for the story. I should make time to read it again, because I think it would play out rather differently the second time through. My only real complaint was that the ending felt abrupt and a little unresolved, but I suspect that was intentional on Edugyan's part.

I found the characters vividly drawn, and not especially likeable, but not to the point where I hated them. Edugyan managed a balance of sympathetic yet deeply, deeply screwed up people, while exploring how they got that way. There was a love triangle element that irritated me, and felt a little unneeded, but it didn't take up as much of the plot as I thought it was going to.

I was also worried that the book was going to focus on Nazis Are Bad to the point of fetishisation, but it really doesn't. The Nazis certainly do horrible things, and that drives the plot. It's not a story that could take place anywhere or when else, but the Evils of World War II don't overwhelm the story. That said, I'd certainly warn for dehumanisation, racism, anti-Semitism and sexism, and not entirely just on the part of the Nazis. If that's not the kind of thing you're comfortable reading about, perhaps best avoid this book.

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Ash & Huntress by Malinda Lo

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:47:46 GMT

I read Ash when it came out, but was trying to prevent myself from buying books when Huntress came out, so it passed me by. Then I realized my library had it! So I re-read Ash (actually enjoyed it better the second time around) and then read Huntress. And halfway through, I ordered a copy of Huntress for myself, because I'll definitely want to read that again, too.

No-spoiler reviews on Goodreads: Ash and Huntress.

I really loved both of these, but at the same time noticed a lot of flaws. In Ash, it's mostly that the character Ash is rather stiff and remote, and her feelings about the King's Huntress are not as vivid as they might be. I think the technical problems of Huntress (which I described in the Goodreads review) come from the same source -- Lo is trying to evoke the feel of a fairy tale while writing a novel. She succeeds pretty well overall, but it's tricky because in novels, so much depends on learning deeply about the characters and their relationships, whereas those don't matter in fairy tales. Part of what makes a fairy tale what it is is that things happen just because that's how they happen. Filling in human motivations can make the story less of a fairy tale.

Mostly, though: I love how in Ash, Cinderella's fairy godmother becomes a dangerous temptation. And how in Huntress, dreaming you love someone can change your life.

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Book 7: 最終流放|Zhei Jung Liu Fang!Utmost Exile by 河漢He Hang

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:10:26 GMT

Title: 最終流放|Zhei Jung Liu Fang!Utmost Exile
Author: 河漢He Hang
Author Nationality and race: Chinese
Language: Chinese
Genre: Fiction
Length: novel
Subject: Military fiction
Summary: Who's Liang Shang Juen? The pride of Norhwest Army, the lieutenant of the new Jia Nan new force. Who is Ji Che? The spine of Jia Nan, the ultimate military instructor. When these two men meets, what'll happen?
Review: The characterization is superb, the insight of the war good, and the pace is fast. Contains M/M romance. Warning: Contains brainwashing at the end

Link: Original site

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Assorted Books in Japanese

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:27:43 GMT

Book 7
Title: 蟲と眼球とテディベア| Bug, Eyeball, Teddybear
Author: 日日日
Author Nationality and race: Japanese
Language: Japanese
Genre: Fiction
Length: novel
Subject: Fantasy
Summary: The ordinary life of a teacher and his student lover is abruptly interrupted by a girl who uses a spoon as a weapon. Then three of them are involved in an incident surrounding "The apple of God"
Review: As the beginning of a fantasy series, this novel captures my attention with its fast rhythm and intriguing mystery. I'll follow the series.
Link to Amazon.co.jp

Book 8
Title: ジョニー・ザ・ラビット|Johnny Love Rabbit
Author: 東山彰良
Author Nationality and race: Japanese
Language: Japanese
Genre: Fiction
Length: novel
Subject: Fantasy Noir
Summary: "You should aim to be sahara if you are a flower; you should aim to be Johnny if you are a man."

　　“Love is playing Italian folk song while holding a gun."
　　"Love，the petrol to let me to be Johnny Rabbit，LOVE，my middle name that I 'll never regret.”

　　Go! Johnny! Go! Go!
　　What's love? What's pride? What's life?

Review:
Rabbit and hardboiled fiction seem to be two path that should never meet, but the author successfully creates Johnny Rabbit, who's a totally a hardboiled PI, a knight who walks on a mean street and a complete rabbit. It makes the story insightful. It has a bitter sense of humour, and a story that's among the good of noir.
Link to Amazon.co.jp

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