#23: The Au Pairs by Melissa de la Cruz

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Eliza Thompson used to be one of High Society’s It girls until her parents lost everything. When Ryan, one of her few old friends who knows of her circumstances, tells her that his parents are looking for au pairs to watch his younger siblings in the Hamptons over the summer, she assumes (wrongly) that the job offer is a token to soothe her pride, and that she won’t be expected to work. Mara Waters, the quintessential Good Girl who is saving up for college and a car is also hired, and is Jacarei “Jacqui” Velasco, a South American beauty who is looking for a boy she fell in love with who told her he vacationed in the Hamptons.

There’s so much name and label dropping in the first fifty or so pages that a person could go blind in self-defense, but that thankfully lessens as the book continues. The book has some irritating typecasting, particularly when it comes to Jacqui (though she does thankfully eventually say “Screw you!” to the typecasting) and I grit my teeth at some choices the characters make (such as Mara sticking with her loser boyfriend and Eliza trying to cling to her old friends, and most of Jacqui’s choices in general) but the characters are enjoyable, if not original. Each girl has a romance of her own (though not, despite cover implications, with each other) and like the characters themselves, they’re enjoyable if not original, though only Mara’s really seems to have enough development, and one seems to come a bit out of nowhere at the end. But then, I’m pretty sure it was supposed to.

Nothing unique or groundbreaking on any level, but largely enjoyable fluff.

#3 - Biohazard by Ken Alibek

[technocracygirl.livejournal.com]

This one was a bit of a surprise. I've been interested in epidemics and epidemic agents, and so when I checked this one out of the library, I wasn't expecting to write this up here. I knew Alibek was a defector from the Soviet Union, and that he had been very high up in the bioweapon hierarchy, so I assumed he was a white Russian guy.

Assumptions are dangerous. Ken Alibek is an Americanization of Kanatjan Alibekov, and he is a native of Khazakastan. He doesn't talk much about being different from the rest of his colleagues, but it's still really easy to pick him out in his platoon graduation photo. It may be that he was just that good, so he didn't picked on, or he was studious enough not to notice too much, or he just didn't care to talk about institutionalized racism in a book about his work. He does mention that his daughter got teased in school. Not much, because it was a company town, and her father was known to be the head of the lab complex, but enough to read between the lines and see some not-good times for Mira.

Alibekov himself did his level best to be a New Soviet Man, and succeeded at that beyond what he expected. He was on the top levels of the Soviet hierarchy for biological and genetics work, well-respected by his peers and subordinates, and the second-highest ranked Khazak in the Soviet military. Of course, he and his brains earned all of this by engaging in illegal weaponization of biological agents.

If you like this sort of thing, it's absolutely fascinating. However, I know that it's nightmare fuel for others, so I won't go into details about it. I just love the fact that I stumbled upon a PoC book by accident. (There's also a PoC main author on my current ebook, Smallpox and its Eradication, but since it's one out of five main authors, I won't review it here.)

Nami Mun and Walter Mosley

[sophinisba]

These are reviews of two novels I listened to as audiobooks last month.

16. Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun, 2009

This is a first novel by Korean-American author Nami Mun about a young girl named Joon who's run away from home and is on her own in New York City. It's told as a series of episodes, starting when she's thirteen and going through her teenage years, and it's not always clear how much time has passed in between or how she got from one situation to another. (I think listening to it as an audiobook also made that harder to deal with and I'd recommend reading it as a book.) There's a lot of painful stuff in this – violence, racism, prostitution, drug addiction, an unwanted pregnancy – but there's something really compelling about the narrative voice that makes it hard to put down (or in my case, stop listening). I would recommend this book mainly for the poetic language and the fascinating characterization of Joon. Just don't go into it thinking it'll be a fun or easy read.

17. The Wave by Walter Mosley, 2006

This is a short sci-fi novel by an author whose best known for his crime fiction (Devil in a Blue Dress and other Easy Rawlins mysteries have been reviewed a lot here at the comm.) It starts out with the narrator, a recently divorced and recently laid off black man living in California in the present day, receiving a series of phone calls from a man who claims to be his father, even though his father died nine years ago. He goes to investigate and weird stuff happens.

In general I liked this book okay, especially the first half or so when it's more about characters and relationships. The prose is enjoyable and in the middle it had one of my narrative kinks in the main character getting captured and experimented on by a shadowy government conspiracy. (*cough*) On the other hand I was a bit frustrated by the narrator refusing so long to believe that there was something paranormal going on, and then once he really got into it I found the (highlight for vague spoilers) stuff about a strange prehistoric life form taking over the DNA and reconstituting the bodies of dead people, and the narrator's psychic connection to that collective life form was not really interesting to me. If you like your paranormal thrillers though you might want to check it out.

All About H. Hatterr

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

12) All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani

I cannot rave about this book enough. It's absolutely wonderful. It's in the Everyman novel tradition, but there is something unique about Hatterr even within this tradition.

H. Hatterr is half-European, half-Malay and 100% patsy. He grows up in India amidst a mishmash of conflicting ideologies- British colonial influences, Indian traditional influences, garbled influxes of modern philosophies- owning none of them but attempting to grab onto all of them. He always fails miserably and hilariously and pathetically... and gloriously.

Hatterr does not deserve better than he gets. Hatterr is every bit as crass and commercial as those who screw him out of money. Hatterr is every bit as undisciplined as those who best him in the sexual arena. Hatterr is every bit as hypocritical as those who keep him out of the spiritual world. He is one of those fools who need to be protected from themselves. That is the part of ourselves that we see in him, for he is in fact an Everyman.

Modernity is not a comfortable place. All he truly wants is comfort, and that is the one thing he cannot buy no matter how much Tradition he grabs. Hatterr occupies an inherently uncomfortable role, outsider on the edges of European civilization, inheritor of a different cultural strain, trying to figure out how to be true to his heritage without giving up the benefits of Western life.

Hatterr's appeals to the great Occidental wise men Marx and Freud and Locke are hysterical and at the same time tragic. The India we see in Desani's story is an India that will destroy itself and emerge no different from the West it fears and worships.

And Desani's prose!!!!!!! Crazy isn't enough of a word for it. Malapropisms refashioned into something more than malapropisms, the entire English language taken on a tour of the darker corners of its own history. Desani's Hatterr chews up Shakespeare and regurgitates his language into new patterns that retain the Bard's grace and add new levels of meaning and depth.

You ever read a book with language so energetic, so creative, so wildly and powerfully different from anything you've seen before that you just about dance in your seat from excitement as you read? This is that kind of book.

It is filled with powerful formal structures that explode in your hands as you try to read, sabotaging themselves, parodying themselves, refusing to be pinned down or understood in a consistent way. It's a book that is itself alive, and perhaps even human.

4-8: Alexie, Giovanni, Bulter, Delany, Rowland

[papertigers.livejournal.com]

( I really should write my reviews more often )