[identity profile] emma-in-oz.livejournal.com
Annwfyn's review of *Girl Missing* made me want to read it: http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/384480.html

And I enjoyed it. It's a a cross between a romance and a forensic crime thriller. Of course, the forensics is very dated - in the mid-1990s things were a lot less forensic-y.

But, still, a good, light read.
[identity profile] veleda-k.livejournal.com
Last year I completed the [livejournal.com profile] 50books_poc challenge, but I reviewed only a fraction of the books I read. So this year I'm going to make an effort to keep up, in order not to become overwhelmed by how far behind I am.

#1: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (translated by Yuji Oniki)

The reason why you're all here today is to kill each other )
[identity profile] wordsofastory.livejournal.com
10. Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

If you ever wanted to know the Mumbai slang terms for 'motherfucker', 'ass-fucker' 'sister-fucker', or just plain old 'fucker', well, this is the book for you!

More seriously, this enormous novel is the story of two men: Sartaj Singh, a world-weary, slightly corrupt, recently divorced, low-level policeman; and Ganesh Gaitonde, the head of an organized crime syndicate, and probably one of the most powerful and wealthy men in India. The novel opens with Singh receiving a phone call from an unknown source, who tells him that Gaitonde is in Mumbai and gives an address. When Singh arrives, he finds a strange building, a sort of concrete bunker; a short conversation between the two men via intercom later, the police break down the door and inside find Gaitonde, dead by his own hand.

The rest of the novel follows two threads. The first is (mostly) Singh's, who is given the assignment to figure out why Gaitonde was in Mumbai and what he was doing in that building. This half of the novel is a crime thriller, particularly as it picks up speed near the end as consequences and meanings start to come clear and events take on an urgency (I admit, I didn't figure out the mystery at all, and once the truth comes out, it's genuinely scary and exciting). Despite that, other characters occasionally speak, ones usually related to the plot, but who fill out the world of the book. I found a chapter from Singh's mother, remembering her childhood during Partition, particularly moving. Partition and the violence then show up repeatedly throughout the novel as a recurring theme. The second half of the story is Gaitonde's; he speaks in first person, directly to Singh, though it's never clear if this is meant to be a ghost, the proverbial "life flashing before your eyes as you die", or what. He retells the story of his life, beginning as a child without a name or past, up through his struggles to get his first few followers, the growth of his mob, gang-wars with rival organizations, several stints in jail, advancing to become an international figure, his dabbles with Bollywood, his struggle with faith, and finally the explanation of how he ended up in a small building in Mumbai and why he killed himself. I liked the Gaitonde sections better than the Singh ones, if just because Gaitonde appealed to me more as a character; he has a incredibly engrossing voice and point of view. And his story is just more exciting, at least until the discoveries Singh makes at the end. The tone of the novel ranges from melodramatic gun shoot-outs or spy adventures to high-minded discussions of religion and the meaning of good and evil. There's lot of sex and violence, but just as many epiphanies and golden moments, and some seriously beautiful turns of phrase.

Highly, highly recommended, though be warned: this is seriously a massive tome of a book (my copy had nearly a thousand pages), so don't start it if you're on a deadline for something.
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[identity profile] coffeeandink.livejournal.com
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide, and Sea of Poppies
It's hard to know how to summarize the work of Amitav Ghosh; he never does the same thing twice. I can't even give you an idea of the scope of his work with the notes below, because it's just the novels I've read so far; I'm missing a novel, a memoir/historical investigation, and a book of essays, and that's just what's been published in the U.S. I could, I guess, say that all of his work that I've read so far deals with one or a dozen of the cultures contributing to modern India, but that's so capacious a subject I might as well just say, "Well, he writes about people," and have done with it. (Except then I'd be leaving out the dolphins, swamps, fruit flies, and sailing ships.) He's remarkable not just in the range of his content but the range of styles: he has written a Modernist literary novel, a science fiction thriller, a magic realist novel without magic, a contemporary literary novel, and an historical adventure.

Full review at my journal.

Karin Lowachee, Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird
Set of loosely connected space operas; each has a different protagonist and the plots occasionally overlap, but what unites them is a common background and similar thematic concerns about the effects of growing up in wartime on adolescents. (All adolescent boys, in this case, but she depicts enough male sexual abuse and prostitution that the only thing that would seem to distinguish male experience from female is the lack of unwanted pregnancy or fears thereof.) It's not necessary to read the books in any particular order or to read one to understand any of the others.

Lowachee is gifted at creating distinctive narrative voices for and empathetic connections with her different and sometimes unlikable protagonists: Jos Musey of Warchild has been so traumatized he can barely feel his own emotions or recall his own memories, Ryan Azarcon of Burndrive is a spoiled rich boy drug addict, Yuri Kirov of Cagebird is a pirate whose use, abuse, and murder of others isn't glossed over. And all of them are compelling and comprehensible and sometimes surprisingly likable. Jos is probably the most conventionally appealing character, but I have to admit to a weakness for bratty Ryan Azarcon; on her Website Lowachee mentions her admiration for Maureen McHugh, and Burndrive in general reminds me of McHugh's Half the Day Is Night, a book split between the perspectives of a rich and privileged businesswomen and her reserved bodyguard who pays prices for survival that the privileged don't see. No one else seems to like this book -- it gets by far the least notice of McHugh's novels -- but I am extraordinarily fond of it. It's hard to be that clear-sighted about privilege and not have the reader end up hating the privileged. That clear sight -- about prices paid, limited choices, and complicity in abusive regimes -- is also displayed by Lowachee.

Full review at my journal.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the few known autobiography written by a black female slave; most other accounts of black women's lives under slavery were dictated to other people, frequently white or male or both.

Full review at my journal. NB: It's intermixed with comments on Jean Fagan Yellin's biography of Jacobs; Yellin is white.
[identity profile] caile.livejournal.com
I began this challenge in August, but it's taken me a while to get around to posting.

1. Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker - I really love Alice Walker's writing. This book is loosely connected to The Colour Purple and The Temple of My Familiar, but I think it could be read alone or out of sequence as it's not really a sequel to those books. It deals with female genital mutilation and being a black woman from Africa in America and love and life.

2. Tiger Eye, Marjorie Liu - I am a fan of paranormal romance novels. Or maybe I should say I am a sucker for paranormal romance novels and a fan of well-written paranormal romance novels. After reading this book, I am now a fan of Marjorie Liu and am hunting down all her novels.

3. The Bone Garden, Tess Gerritson - An entertaining thriller about a woman who finds an old skeleton buried in her garden and the historical mystery that led to the burial.

4. Gravity, Tess Gerritson - This is a medical thriller set on the international space station! I could completely imagine it as a TV movie, in a good way.

5. Red Heart of Jade, Marjorie Liu - This book is solid weird, far more so than I expected from a romance novel. I found it compelling, though.
[identity profile] whereweather.livejournal.com
 #30. Luba: The Book of Ofelia (Vol. 2 in the Luba trilogy; Vol. 21 in the Complete Love & Rockets)

2005 (material originally published 1998-2005), Fantagraphics Books


Warning: Long and obsessive plot details ahead!  This is a crazy long book -- 240 pages -- and incredibly dense, for a graphic novel.  Also, the storytelling modalities are highly refined and self-referential, full of interweaving, flashback and allusion; and also it's Part 2 of a three-part series-within-a-series.  So I take these reviews as an opportunity to parse the plot, to assure myself that I've actually followed what the hell is going on.
 

So!  This is the second part of Gilbert ("Beto") Hernandez's trilogy about the latest adventures of Luba, his protagonist, in America.  (For basics about Luba, you can see my earlier post about the previous book in this series.)

At this point in time, Luba and her children are in the United States, but her husband Khamo is stuck in immigration limbo.  Luba continues her quest to figure out what she must -- or can -- do in order to untangle his shady past, police record, and hazy criminal associations, so that she can bring him to join them.  (Like most of Luba's accomplishments, this is not really hindered -- and is perhaps made more impressive -- by that fact that, like some of the other main characters living in the United States, she still can't speak a word of English.)

 

Much of this section's narrative mechanics is fueled by the announcement that Ofelia, Luba's long-suffering older cousin, has decided to finally try being the writer she has always wanted to be.  This in-progress "book of Ofelia" gives, perhaps, the collection its title, although the phrasing also seems to imply (in its Biblical cadence) that she is instead the main subject of the book.  (Except that she isn't, really; she's not present throughout.  I keep thinking about the way that, in Spanish -- as I think I understand it, anyway -- this phrase, "el libro de Ofelia," does not make a distinction between the book *by* Ofelia and the book *about* her.  So this book, perhaps, is both.)

 

(On that note: one other thing I like is how much of the book's dialogue and internal thought-monologues are in Spanish.  The switches back and forth are frequent but consistent: the Latin American-born children tend to speak in fluent English to each other, but use Spanish with their parents, and to think in it when introspection is called for; the American-born children and adults think in English, although they frequently and fluently use Spanish with their relations.  Hernandez indicates the switches with the widely used comics convention of putting the "second-language" dialogue within brackets (and, in this book, some double-bracketing for other languages, like French).  When Hernandez' stories were set entirely in the Central American village from which many of the characters hail, he used to just put a note at the bottom of the first page that everything was in Spanish unless otherwise indicated -- a convention that Jaime has also sometimes used, e.g. in stories set among recent immigrants and jornalero workers -- but now that they've migrated to America, there's a lot more use of both tongues.)

 

So.  What's happening in the Book of Ofelia?

 

 

Obsessive plot details! Avoid if you fear spoilers! )

 


[Tags I'd like to add: a: hernandez gilbert, i: hernandez gilbert, california, children [*not* "children's"], magic realism, disability, meta-literature]


[identity profile] jinian.livejournal.com
Another amazing book in my continuing series (yes! I made it to two!) of posts on books new to the comm.

Origin is a mystery, or several mysteries. The main character, Lena, has an unknown past about which her not-quite-adopted parents have told her little, and in her job as a fingerprint specialist she is also drawn into investigating a series of crib deaths in her city. Lena is logical and detached, overwhelmingly drawn to the details of her work, but also highly intuitive and constantly worrying at her lost memories -- what she does remember seems impossible. Abu-Jaber's writing is evocative and possibly addictive, though in a very different style from her other work. Summer would be a great time to read this book since the miserable freezing cold of a northeastern winter is awfully well described!

Race in this book was largely invisible. There's one moment where Lena's foster parents reveal how important it was to them to get a white baby, but other than that I didn't see it addressed. Abu-Jaber is a fabulous writer, though, so I still recommend Origin on grounds of sheer literary greatness. I also read Crescent, which is set among Arab-American immigrants and their wonderful food; it wasn't as memorable as Origin, but I recommend it as well.

[Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava, a memoir of the author's mixed-race, mixed-location childhood, was previously reviewed by [livejournal.com profile] littlebutfierce.]
[identity profile] rachelmanija.livejournal.com
Cat and Jax are private investigators, bad-ass martial artists, and exes. Though their marriage failed because of their inability to cope with their traumatic pasts, they still work beautifully together and have sizzling sexual chemistry. When they get hired to investigate the leaders of a cult - former conjoined twins Tomo and Joy, who have poorly defined psychic powers that may involve ectoplasmic tentacles - they must go undercover in the cult's sexual healing workshop for distressed couples!

Portions of this novel are just as excellent as it sounds. I am a total sucker for the "undercover at a leather bar/sex club/sexual healing retreat" scenario, and also love stories about bad-ass partners. And hey, not just psychic kids, but psychic conjoined twins! Steven Barnes, you just go on exploring your id - I will always be along for the ride.

Unfortunately, it's also sprawling and messy, often dissolving into overheated and hard-to-follow descriptions of sex and psychic experiences. It reads much like an early attempt at the much more successful Charisma (and has a cool link with the also more successful Blood Brothers.) I wouldn't recommend this to start with, but if you already like Barnes, it's worth a read.

Warning for violence, sexual abuse, racial slurs, and a brief but memorable instance of anal tentacle rape.
[identity profile] kateorman.livejournal.com
In the Miso Soup is a short thriller set in Tokyo's red light district. It's mostly psychological: when the gore does arrive, it's plentiful, but rather than releasing the building tension it actually manages to make it worse. Inevitably, there's sexualised violence, although not nearly as much as I expected; Murakami will set up horrible scenarios, then twist off in another direction. I was compelled by the story, but also fascinated by Murakami's brooding observations of Japanese culture.

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