2) The Bridge of Lost Desire

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Samuel Delany's The Bridge of Lost Desire, which I gather has been reprinted as Return to Neveryon lately (maybe with an extra story added?), is the first collection of Neveryon stories I've read. I'm going back for more, as soon as I can.

It provides a parallax view of the career of Gorgik the Liberator, in a land where the mostly black ruling class is fighting an internal moral and political struggle to liberate the mostly white slaves it is growing more and more embarrassed to have. This inversion is key to understanding the story, but it is almost never alluded to. To the storytellers, this is just the way of things.

The three stories in the collection are presented in reverse chronological order and they feature much daring literary technique, kicking off with "The Game of Time and Pain"'s stunning story within a story within a story within a story frame. It's almost dizzying. There is so much care taken to make sure the reader knows not to believe a thing he reads at first, until weighing it against other versions of the same story. Nobody has a reliable point of view.

Delany has always shocked me with his presentations of sexual politics, starting with my first encounter with the androgynous spacemen of "Aye, and Gomorrah." Here, he develops the uncomfortable sexual side of slavery, exploring carefully the lines between consensual BDSM play and the master-slave dynamic of actual slavery. For a nice Jewish boy from Jersey who blushes at Philip Roth, this is a bit out of my comfort zone. But if Delany is a great writer, it might be the mark of his greatness that he challenges me gently, so that it's not until a shocking thing has passed that I realize exactly what he has subjected me to.

Ten Things I Hate About Me and Jupiter Williams

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2. Ten Things I Hate About Me by Randa Abdel-Fattah

Randa Abdel-Fattah also wrote 'Does My Head Look Big In This?', which I know is very popular and has won various awards. So when I saw 10 Things I Hate About Me I had to buy.

Jamilah is a Muslim teen who's proud of her Lebanese heritage and enjoys going to madrasa and playing the darabuka. However, at school she's known as Jamie, and dies her hair blonde and wears blue contact lenses to fit in. She keeps 'Jamilah' secret, afraid of being bullied or not fitting in.

I loved this book. I loved how painfully real I found Jamilah, torn in two between her pride in her identity, and her desperation to fit in and avoid to notice of the popular kids. She's clever and funny, but also insecure and lacking in confidence. This being YA chick lit, it all gets complicated when boys get involved. I saw the twist coming from very early on, but it didn't spoil it much. There's a good cast of well-rounded secondary characters, all with their own issues (and I love Jamilah's sister embroidering 'Save the Forests' onto her hijab). I also loved the ending: it wasn't what I'd expected, but given how Jamilah's character grew over the book, it also made perfect sense, and I think left me happier than if it had ended in a more conventional way.

3. Jupiter Williams by S. I. Martin

This has previously been reviewed by puritybrown here. It's YA historical fiction, set in London 1800, focusing on Jupiter Williams and his brothers. They were born free in Sierra Leone, but sent to the African Academy in London for their education. When Jupiter's brother Robert disappears, Jupiter goes to try and find him.

This is good - I enjoyed reading about the African community in London at a time when most books would have you believe it was all white. It left me wanting to find out more. Jupiter is definitely a strong character, if not a likeable one, and the author doesn't shrink back from describing the nastiness and horror of the time.

But I couldn't help feeling something was missing. At the end I was left thinking, But what happens next? I'm not normally a huge fan of epilogues, but I think that something was needed to make it feel a little more finished. There was no sense of resolution, or at least for me it didn't feel like there was. But I enjoyed it, and it intrigued me enough that I want to find out more about the African community in Britain at that time.

#10: Liu, Shadow Touch; #11: Buckell, Ragamuffin

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#10: Marjorie M. Liu, Shadow Touch

Elena is a healer, able to reach into people's bodies to fix them. Artur is a telepath who can read people's lives and histories from the objects they touch (is there a word for this particular talent that I missed?); he works for detective firm Dirk and Steele, which specializes in psychic crime fighting. When a shadowy organization kidnaps Elena and Artur, they accidentally form a deep psychic bond and must work together to escape and defeat their enemies.

Paranormal romance is a new-to-me genre, and I wasn't sure I'd like it, but you know, I did! The psychic bond thing could have been silly, but the way it was formed was well done, and the consequences of it (like knowing your lover can smell your morning breath). There was a little handwaving around Artur not being able to touch anyone except magically Elena, but I was okay with it. The prose is fine, and the dialogue is quite good and often entertainingly snappy. The hints of an overarching storyline for the series which develop at the end will definitely have me looking for the other books (and going back to read Tiger Eye).


#11: Tobias S. Buckell, Ragamuffin

Nashara is on the run. She wants to get back to New Anegada, if she can, and she needs to escape from the Hongguo who are on her trail. She carries inside her a powerful weapon which could save her, but perhaps at a huge cost, both to her and to the balance of order of the galaxy. Complicating her escape and her decision about the use of her weapon is her discovery that the ruling aliens of the Benevolent Satrapy are planning to wipe out all humans.

Although I really appreciated the kick-ass female protagonist and the other female characters (after noting the relative lack of women in Crystal Rain), I actually liked Ragamuffin a little less. The book just seemed a little incoherent and choppy to me, on a prose level and on an overall narrative level. It jumps back and forth among different characters and even in time a little, and the confusion this created meant I wasn't as pulled along with the story as I was in Crystal Rain. I did like the focus on the larger universe, beyond the New Anegada setting, and getting to learn more about that larger world, but I'd have preferred having that focus through fewer different characters and settings. (And this might well be my issue, not the book's, as I've always preferred less jumping around in POV.)

I do look forward to reading Sly Mongoose, though, and seeing what's coming next for Buckell's fascinating universe; I just wish his prose style worked better for me.

#10: "Gone from Home" by Angela Johnson (2001, Laurel Leaf)

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This is the only Angela Johnson book my library has. The two public libraries don't have any. And Johnson gets recc'd a lot.

It's a collection of twelve short stories. A slim book, and a relatively quick read, even though I read most of the stories twice over to revel in the richness of the language. These are stories about home and homelessness, biological family and non-biological family. And hope.

I love "Sweetness". I love "Starr" and "Barns" and "Home". "By the time you read this" was magnificent (and funny), because it wasn't what I expected. "Sweetness" and "Home" were sad and wonderful, Sweetness and Crystal and Reyetta and Ruby worming their way into my heart.

And the line "Five in the morning looks like the moon, like nowhere I've ever been," from "Barns".

It's brilliant, and I wish I could read more by Johnson, I really do.

Smaller and Smaller Circles by FH Batacan

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Note: I've read this book years ago, so this isn't part of my list of POC-written books for the year. I simply made this review in case people are interested in more Filipino genre books. Unfortunately many of the titles published locally aren't available in Amazon. :( The only vendor I can find is Kabayan Central, though I haven't personally tested their service.

Smaller and Smaller Circles
by F.H. Batacan

Murders in the Philippines are often characterized as crimes of passion, senseless acts without rhyme or reason. Fr. Gus Saenz and Fr. Jerome Lucero, two Jesuit priests from a prestigious university face the impossible task of proving to the skeptical National Bureau of Investigation that there is a serial killer preying on the young boys of the Payatas slums.

Using Forensic Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, the two men of the cloth fight crime.! /facetious

I love Batacan's writing. Spare and journalistic, the brief glimpses into the mind of serial killer remains chilling several reads later. The plot is solid as well. What really impressed me is how fleshed out the victimology of the murderer is, the impetus for the crime revealed so inexorably as the story progresses that the reader cannot help but feel unnerved.

( Read more... )