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Blood Brothers by Steven Barnes
Jan. 15th, 2012 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorotheanThanks to torachan for sending me this one!
This time I'll just repost my Goodreads review, which is here. I've tried to avoid spoilers below.
It's hard to decide how to rate this book. For the first 50 pages or so I was constantly about to put it down for good. But I knew I couldn't, because if I did, I'd never find out what happened next! And then I got into it and couldn't put it down.
I kept being jolted out of the story by little details I couldn't believe. Egg cartons don't work like that! Eight-year-olds don't work like that! The moon doesn't work like that! etc. Also by some larger details -- Computer programming never worked like that (right?)! Men and women don't work like that!
Also jolting: there are many offensive things in this book! There are several villains. The major white villain has a name. The major black villain mostly goes by "The African." There is a minor villain thought of by all of the viewpoint characters as "The Indian." The African and the Indian have pretty interesting backstories, but none that really explain why they don't have, you know, names. (I think the African doesn't have a more specific national identity because it would be too slanderous to associate him with an actual group of people.) There are plenty of racial and ethnic slurs.
There's a blurb on the back cover that says the book is "nicely plotted, wonderfully paced, and has characters the reader cares about. What else do you need?" and for the first third of the book I kept thinking that the answer to this question was Respect for Women.
The main female characters later get a lot more personality and/or responsibility for the plot, but it's true that while we meet the two main male characters by finding out what they're good at in addition to what they look like, all the female characters (including the little girls -- urgh) are introduced in terms of how extremely physically attractive they are.
Given all of this, I was astonished by how much I got sucked into the story. I even ended up liking Waites and Tucker, the two main characters, although not as much as I was probably supposed to.
We're introduced, first, to Tucker, a white man with a history of violence and alcohol abuse, who is separated from his wife. He's visiting her and their two children on Thanksgiving, trying to get a second chance at being part of the family. The next thing anyone in the outside world knows, the wife and daughter are brutally murdered, the son is missing and later found dead, and Tucker is blaming the whole thing on some mysterious black men. If I'd been reading about this in the paper, I'd have very little doubt that Tucker was lying and that he committed the murders himself. This is what everyone else thinks too, and Tucker's sent to prison for life.
But this part of the story is told from Tucker's point of view, and it turns out he's right about his innocence -- his family were attacked by members of a conspiracy involving both black and white men.
We then meet Waites, a nerdy (but of course handsome) computer programmer who's also estranged from his wife and two children (the same age as Tucker's were). When inexplicable and terrifying things begin happening to his family, Waites resorts to his shady haxx0r past to figure out what's going on, and his research leads him to Tucker.
I started off at once intrigued by the situation, delighted by the reversal of stereotypes (the white man is the athletic, violent one and the black man is the brains) but kind of put off by one of the apparent themes (Ladies, your man might seem no-good and you might be making a perfectly good life for yourself without him, but really you should give him one more chance!). The intrigue and delight kept getting better (there's a bit where a white supremacist survivalist group suddenly becomes important to the plot and I said right out loud "Did you really do that?" and laughed for ages) and the themes that I didn't agree with at least stayed sort of in the background, and became somewhat interestingly complicated.
I can't really discuss what I loved any more without spoiling the plot, but I will say (1) there is a great deal of potential for Waites/Tucker slash (in fact I am off to check the AO3 archives immediately after posting this), (2) the story is set during and immediately after the riots in Los Angeles triggered by the verdict in the Rodney King trial, and comments on them, (3) the day is saved in part by people doing family history, which I adored, (4) the story is even more awesome than suggested by the back cover description (which contains some inaccuracies).
And some warnings: There are some graphic descriptions of rape, told by the woman who experienced them. Also, a major part of the story depends on abortion being murder, and, relatedly, there's a scene that I can imagine being really horrible to read for a person who has had a miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy. Lastly, there is a lot of extremely gruesome description of non-sexual violence.
I ended up enjoying this book very, very much, and I'll be reading more of Steven Barnes' novels, but Blood Brothers is hard to recommend without the above caveats!
torachan for sending me this one!This time I'll just repost my Goodreads review, which is here. I've tried to avoid spoilers below.
It's hard to decide how to rate this book. For the first 50 pages or so I was constantly about to put it down for good. But I knew I couldn't, because if I did, I'd never find out what happened next! And then I got into it and couldn't put it down.
I kept being jolted out of the story by little details I couldn't believe. Egg cartons don't work like that! Eight-year-olds don't work like that! The moon doesn't work like that! etc. Also by some larger details -- Computer programming never worked like that (right?)! Men and women don't work like that!
Also jolting: there are many offensive things in this book! There are several villains. The major white villain has a name. The major black villain mostly goes by "The African." There is a minor villain thought of by all of the viewpoint characters as "The Indian." The African and the Indian have pretty interesting backstories, but none that really explain why they don't have, you know, names. (I think the African doesn't have a more specific national identity because it would be too slanderous to associate him with an actual group of people.) There are plenty of racial and ethnic slurs.
There's a blurb on the back cover that says the book is "nicely plotted, wonderfully paced, and has characters the reader cares about. What else do you need?" and for the first third of the book I kept thinking that the answer to this question was Respect for Women.
The main female characters later get a lot more personality and/or responsibility for the plot, but it's true that while we meet the two main male characters by finding out what they're good at in addition to what they look like, all the female characters (including the little girls -- urgh) are introduced in terms of how extremely physically attractive they are.
Given all of this, I was astonished by how much I got sucked into the story. I even ended up liking Waites and Tucker, the two main characters, although not as much as I was probably supposed to.
We're introduced, first, to Tucker, a white man with a history of violence and alcohol abuse, who is separated from his wife. He's visiting her and their two children on Thanksgiving, trying to get a second chance at being part of the family. The next thing anyone in the outside world knows, the wife and daughter are brutally murdered, the son is missing and later found dead, and Tucker is blaming the whole thing on some mysterious black men. If I'd been reading about this in the paper, I'd have very little doubt that Tucker was lying and that he committed the murders himself. This is what everyone else thinks too, and Tucker's sent to prison for life.
But this part of the story is told from Tucker's point of view, and it turns out he's right about his innocence -- his family were attacked by members of a conspiracy involving both black and white men.
We then meet Waites, a nerdy (but of course handsome) computer programmer who's also estranged from his wife and two children (the same age as Tucker's were). When inexplicable and terrifying things begin happening to his family, Waites resorts to his shady haxx0r past to figure out what's going on, and his research leads him to Tucker.
I started off at once intrigued by the situation, delighted by the reversal of stereotypes (the white man is the athletic, violent one and the black man is the brains) but kind of put off by one of the apparent themes (Ladies, your man might seem no-good and you might be making a perfectly good life for yourself without him, but really you should give him one more chance!). The intrigue and delight kept getting better (there's a bit where a white supremacist survivalist group suddenly becomes important to the plot and I said right out loud "Did you really do that?" and laughed for ages) and the themes that I didn't agree with at least stayed sort of in the background, and became somewhat interestingly complicated.
I can't really discuss what I loved any more without spoiling the plot, but I will say (1) there is a great deal of potential for Waites/Tucker slash (in fact I am off to check the AO3 archives immediately after posting this), (2) the story is set during and immediately after the riots in Los Angeles triggered by the verdict in the Rodney King trial, and comments on them, (3) the day is saved in part by people doing family history, which I adored, (4) the story is even more awesome than suggested by the back cover description (which contains some inaccuracies).
And some warnings: There are some graphic descriptions of rape, told by the woman who experienced them. Also, a major part of the story depends on abortion being murder, and, relatedly, there's a scene that I can imagine being really horrible to read for a person who has had a miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy. Lastly, there is a lot of extremely gruesome description of non-sexual violence.
I ended up enjoying this book very, very much, and I'll be reading more of Steven Barnes' novels, but Blood Brothers is hard to recommend without the above caveats!
