Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 12

A Scent of New-Mown Hay, by John Blackburn

I obtained this book at a library book sale with the cover above, after getting a deliberately vague rec from sovay . It is currently in print, in both paper and ebook form, but very frustratingly, both the cover and blurb of the new edition give away the premise, which in the book you don't learn until about a quarter of the way - and it's much more fun to find out for yourself.

Written in 1958, the novel at first appears to be a post-war spy thriller with a noir tone. Something mysterious but probably bad is going down in Russia; British spies are looking into it; a man is called away from his wife and peaceful life due to his expertise in chemical warfare. But when a British boat is wrecked by a Russian naval vessel and its crew are washed ashore, the book takes a sudden, chilling turn into horror. What sort of horror? We don't know. It has a Charles Fort feel, with inexplicable terrors and mysteries hovering just out of sight.

I can't say more without spoilers, and I am deeply annoyed at how difficult it is to read the book unspoiled as it's very pleasingly cross-genre and odd. The horror elements do come into clear focus, but never quite clear enough to lose their essential fear of the unknown and the unknowable.

I quite enjoyed this weird little book, with its dour and cynical tone, atmosphere of existential dread, and unexpected amount of agency on the part of its female characters, and was pleased to see that Blackburn has written many other books. I'm going to attempt to dive into them knowing nothing.

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Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

You’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”

Zauner's mother, Chongmi, died of cancer, sending Zauner in a spiral of grief. The memoir reconstructs their relationship, often in terms of Korean food.

The depictions of cancer in this book are rough, even for a book about someone who died of cancer. Her mother did not have a good death - again, even in the context of death generally not being great - and the horrible way she died is a big part of Zauner's grief. As her father is white and some of her Korean family had already died of cancer, when her mother is dead Zauner struggles with the loss of heritage and culture, as well as the loss of her mother.

Their relationship is intense. Some of the things her mother does to her, especially in childhood, are abusive in my opinion, like kicking her when she hurts herself falling out of a tree. At other times, her mother is extremely loving and considerate, like wearing a pair of gift boots around the house for a week to break them in for her. Her mother keeps saying Zauner was a difficult child, but... she was a child! It sounded like Zauner, an only child in an isolated setting, was incredibly driven to please her mother, who was not easy to please. She rebels when she's a teenager and they have a big break for a while. Zauner creates a band, Japanese Breakfast, and gets a boyfriend... and then she gets the cancer call.

A memoir of grief, family, and food by a Korean-American musician sounded so exactly up my alley, and I loved the first chapter (originally a New Yorker essay) so much, that I was surprised to not love the rest of the book anywhere near as much. There were individual parts that were great, but as a whole, it never quite cohered for me.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly why. There were times when I wished she'd dig deeper into what was going on rather than simply reporting it (but there's plenty of books I love that report rather than dig deep), and the structure felt a bit scattered (but there's other books I love that also skip around in time). I kept thinking, "Wait, what about such-and-such? Is that seemingly really important thing ever going to get explored?" She marries her boyfriend because her mother wanted to see them married before she died; a family friend makes her dying mother convert to Christianity; her music career happens kind of around the edges. I finished the book thinking that she'd undoubtedly gotten divorced and her band was extremely obscure, only to look them up and discover that she's still married and the band is HUGE.

Crying in H Mart got overwhelming critical and popular acclaim, and really resonated for a whole lot of people. Maybe because I'm not a biracial Asian-American, I didn't relate to the specific intergenerational and cultural issues, but on the other hand I loved the first chapter which also was about those issues. For whatever reason, it wasn't a book for me, but that's not a critique of the book. It's obviously a book that resonated a lot with many. You will probably like it more than I did.

Where it really succeeded for me was in making me crave Korean food. I've had it twice since reading the book, and am planning a visit to the nearest H Mart.

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Moon of the Turning Leaves, by Waubgeshig Rice

Sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, in which a remote Anishinaabe community survives an apocalypse.

Twelve years after the first book, the community realizes that the place they've settled in is too small to sustain them. The lake is getting overfished, and the game is getting wary. They decide to send an expedition to look into whether they can resettle in their original home, in the Great Lakes area. The last expedition they sent never came back, but Evan Whitesky, his now teenage daughter Nangohns, and several others decide to take the chance...

I liked this even more than the first book, and I liked the first book a lot. It's one of my absolute favorite genres, "cozy apocalypse but with stakes." A lot of the book is about life and how it's lived now, with tons of details about how to preserve a plastic fishing net and how to dress a deer, how to name a baby and how to create a consensus, how to fight and how to live. The various communities feel very real, and the relationship of Evan and Nangohns is lovely.

It has a very satisfying ending but I really hope Rice writes more books in this setting and creates a whole saga.

Content notes: violence, one instance of rape threats, racist slurs, all in the context of the group encountering some white supremacists.

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Email Kamala Harris to ask her not to pick Sexual Harassment Cover-up Guy, Josh Shapiro

It's not too late to email Kamala Harris and ask her not to choose two-time sexual harassment cover-up guy Josh Shapiro as her VP. Sexual harassment scandal number one. Sexual harassment scandal number two. We're on a roll and we're calling out the other side for being horrible to women; let's not make our number two person someone who's also horrible to women!

If you're not following closely, Josh Shapiro seems to be the most likely pick as he's popular in Pennsylvania. But I think the last thing we want to do is to spend the next 97 days defending our own pick against his own gross scandal. ANYONE would be better.

Please comment once you've emailed. If you like, I will reply with a cat pic or a garden anecdote or one-line book review or something similar of your choice. ;)

I tag all political posts so you can block them if you like.

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A Quiet Place: Day One

If you haven't seen or heard of the Quiet Place movies, they're about an invasion by aliens who are super-sensitive to sound, so you have to be very very quiet or they will eat you. This is basically a cool gimmick to build suspense; don't think about it too hard.

A Quiet Place: Day One is, obviously, a prequel about the day the aliens invade. (The previous movies occur years later). Much less obviously, it's about what's precious and worth saving when everything that we normally value is already lost: an unexpected melding of an Aliens-style action thriller with a bittersweet and heartwarming story of a dying woman, a terrified man, and the world's chillest cat.

Lupita Nyong'o is a poet dying of cancer in a hospice. She's understandably bitter and angry, only reluctantly attending an outing into New York City with other patients and a nurse when she's bribed with the promise of actually good pizza. She takes her beloved cat, Frodo. Needless to say, the trip is interrupted by an alien invasion. This part alone makes the movie worth seeing on the big screen - it's incredibly immersive and believable. After various events, she ends up with a very scared survivor who clings to her like she's a life raft, to her annoyance.

This movie is the epitome of "better than it had to be." All it really needed to be enjoyable was Lupita Nyong'o vs. sound-sensitive aliens. It gives us that, and it also gives us the best cat performance since the cat in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and it gives us a genuinely beautiful story about life, loss, and how we use the time left to us.

If you're worried about Frodo, (  Read more...  )

Lupita Nyong'o had a fear of cats when she started filming. She had to do cat therapy to shoot the movie. After it ended, she adopted a rescue cat.

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Beta reader for the final book of the Change?

Would anyone here like to do a final beta read on Traitor, the last book of the Change series? We're looking for someone who can do a quick read (2-3 weeks turnaround), primarily for pacing. (Do any parts drag, do any parts feel repetitive, do any parts feel glossed over, is anything confusing, etc.)

We're looking for someone who has already read the first three books. You don't have to have read them recently or have them fresh in your mind, but we do need someone with a general sense of who the characters are and what's happened previously.

Please email me if you're interested at Rphoenix2@gmail.com.

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Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett

Finally, a cozy fantasy with actual stakes!

Emily Wilde is a Cambridge professor of dryadology (the study of faeries) who travels to the remote village of Hrafansvik to finish her great work, an encyclopedia of faeries, with a study of a type of Scandinavian faeries. There are just a few problems: the locals are deeply suspicious of her, and she has absolutely terrible social skills; the local faeries are in the habit of kidnapping and mindwiping people; and another Cambridge professor, the charming/annoying Wendell Bambleby, descends upon her welcome solitude with a pair of grad students in tow.

The novel is in the form of Emily's journal, with plenty of footnotes and scholarly details on faeries. It is, very delightfully, exactly what one might hope for from the premise: an account of an academic's fieldwork on faeries, and a fantasy centrally dealing with human-faerie interactions. As a bonus, it also contains a very enjoyable romance between a pair of giant weirdos. Emily is extremely not good with people, and Bambleby, who initially appears to be the normal one, is also extremely, extremely not normal.

It's very funny, it has some nice plot twists, and I loved its portrayal of faeries. They're much more like old folklore faeries than like most modern twists on them, obeying their own strange and often incomprehensible logic which, in Emily's theory, is because they are story-based beings and will/must do whatever makes the best story. But also, they're just generally extremely weird and inhuman and hard for humans to understand.

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There are sequels which I haven't read yet, but this stands perfectly well on its own.

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You Like It Darker, by Stephen King

A new collection of shorter works: 7 short stories and 5 novellas. The shorts range from meh to good. All five novellas are terrific; if you like King's work at that length, get this collection. For me, it would have been worth it for "Rattlesnakes" alone.

Like Different Seasons, which contained "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," the genres of the novellas are varied. "Rattlesnakes" and "The Dreamers" are horror, "The Answer Man" is fantasy, and "Two Talented Bastids" and "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" are cross-genre and/or hard to categorize. Despite the title, this anthology isn't actually all that dark as far as King goes, and several stories are outright uplifting.

There's a strong theme of aging and mortality running through the volume as a whole. King is in his seventies and he's clearly thinking about that. One of the novellas, "The Answer Man," has a pretty extraordinary backstory relevant to that, which I'll get into when I discuss it.

I'll take the shorts first as I have less to say about them.

"The Fifth Step" is a horror short about a guy who gets buttonholed by a stranger doing the "Make Amends" AA step. It's fine but predictable.

"Willie the Weirdo" is another horror short, about a creepy kid and his creepy dying grandfather. The story isn't original but it's done well; very atmospheric. I enjoyed it.

"Finn." An Irish kid with bad luck has an unlucky encounter with gangsters. What the hell was this story even. Why Ireland? Why did it have the ending it had? A clunker.

"On Slide Inn Road" is a crime story inspired by Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Good climax, otherwise... fine.

"Red Screen" is a horror short about a cop who arrests a guy who claims he killed his wife because of an invasion of the bodysnatchers situation; the cop starts wondering about his own wife. This story was ruined by its ending, which should have left the situation ambiguous.

"The Turbulence Expert" is Twilight Zone style fantasy about a man with a very unusual job that involves being a passenger on airplanes. It has some dark elements but overall it made me smile.

"Laurie" is a story about a grieving widower who gets a dog. It's really sweet and heartwarming, but because it's Stephen King there's also an alligator attack. (The dog is fine.)

On to the novellas!

"Two Talented Bastids" is a really interesting story in the context of King's career and preoccupations. It's about two friends who were ordinary guys, one (Laird) who wanted to write and one (Butch) who painted a bit, who suddenly achieved meteoric success as a writer and a painter in middle age. The story is told from the point of view of Laird's son Mark, now a middle-aged man, who finally learns how that came about. The story involves some well-worn tropes but with new spins on them, and goes to some pretty dark places with zero violence or even malice.

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"Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" is about a janitor who dreams of a woman's buried body, goes to look and finds it, calls the police, and learns the truth of the saying "No good deed goes unpunished" when an unhinged cop decides Danny killed her and Danny must pay. This is an extremely anxiety-inducing story which starts with a literal nightmare and turns into a living nightmare of persecution and injustice and bad things happening to people who don't deserve it. I could have done with slightly less of Jobert's counting mania, but it's a very effective, tense story.

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"Rattlesnakes" is my favorite story in the book, and it has some strong competition. It's a sequel to Cujo, of all unexpected things. Vic, now an old man, goes to stay in friend's cabin in Florida, and meets an old woman who is also still mourning her twin sons who died many years ago. Creepiness ensues. This story is a banger - genuinely scary, with unexpected twists, solid character work, tons of tension, very moving, and also a really good sequel. Donna does not appear on-page, but we hear a lot about her and we learn what happened to her and Vic in the aftermath of Cujo. It was deeply satisfying for me to find out that, not really unexpectedly, Stephen King loves Donna and thinks she's a hero.

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"The Dreamers" is a terrifying novella about a Vietnam vet who gets a job assisting a mad scientist researching dreams. It reminded me of Revival, with the blend of low-tech weird science and cosmic horror, but they blended better in this. Also I'm much more scared of dreams and the way they're treated here than I am of (Revival spoiler; rot13) tvnag nagf. When I was a child and read Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I initially didn't understand why everyone wasn't immediately terrified of the island where dreams come true: I'd never heard the phrase used to mean "wishes coming true," and my mind instantly went to the worst nightmare I'd ever had. But "The Dreamers" isn't about nightmares, exactly. It's about something worse.

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"The Answer Man" is about Phil, an ordinary man who gets three chances to get answers from the Answer Man over the course of his lifetime. The scenes with the Answer Man are really fun and Twilight Zone-esque ("Tempus is fugitting.") The answers aren't exactly helpful, but they're not monkey's paws either. It's not clear whether Phil's life would have been the same if he'd never had those encounters, but they do change his perspective in some ways. Some of his life is tragic, some is wonderful, some is just a life. It's a beautiful, mature, haunting story.

Stephen King wrote the first part of the story, when Phil is a young man, when he was thirty. He then set it aside and forgot about it for FORTY YEARS, until someone else found it and suggested that he finish it. So he wrote the final section, where Phil is old, when he was old himself. It feels very personal.

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Re-release of Stranger (The Change # 1)

Today is the official re-release of Stranger, the first book of the Change quartet by me and Sherwood Smith. We're re-releasing the entire series with new covers and the addition of maps and casts of characters in the lead-up to the release of the final book, Traitor, on October 8. The books have been re-edited to fix some minor continuity glitches.

Stranger on Amazon.

Stranger at Book View Cafe

The entire series (Traitor included, on pre-order) at Amazon

A YALSA Best Book for Young Adults.

“A first-rate page-turner”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In the post-apocalyptic world of the Change, people with mutant talents are powerful and hated, and even the trees can kill you. Teenage loner Ross, wounded and hunted, walks out of the desert and into a town full of secrets. He brings with him a mysterious ancient book, the rage of a vengeful king, and a deadly power he can’t control.

In the walled town of Las Anclas, he confronts prejudice and danger. But he also meets the shy and brilliant teenage mechanic Mia, and the confident and passionate warrior Jennie. The last time Ross got close to anyone, disaster followed. With his enemies closing in on him, he faces a perilous choice…

''A fresh story with well-developed characters, fast-paced action, and a fantastical world''—School Library Journal (starred review)

“Set against a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles that feels like a futuristic Wild West, this novel follows a diverse cast of characters in terms of both race and sexual orientation who must navigate a landscape full of telekinetic squirrels, man-eating trees, and a bounty hunter after an ancient book.”—YALSA (American Library Association) The Hub

''Infused with a generous spirit - call it a utopian dystopia… Characterization is rich and stereotype-free… Equally exceptional is the depiction of conflict… The five dynamic narrators and action-packed plot deliver thrills while slyly undermining genre clichés. A first-rate page-turner that leaves its own compelling afterimage.''—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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Briardark (Book 1 of the Briardark series), by S. A. Harian

Five years after five women hikers go missing in the Deadswitch Wilderness, a geological expedition sets out to visit its glacier. As their trip gets weirder and weirder, an IT guy with vivid memories of something that never happened finds disturbing messages from the expedition.

I love books about expeditions to weird areas, whether they involve cosmic horror, ghosts, creepy cults, urban legends, space-time warps, mutant biology, sinister corporations, spooky magic, aliens, folk horror, living landscapes, unsettling hallucinations OR ARE THEY, apocalypses, humans driven mad by things beyond human comprehension, and/or found narratives. The Deadswitch Wilderness contains all of above except aliens, and maybe those will show up at some point. It also throws in magic Tarot cards and a haunted video game.

This is everything and the time-displaced kitchen sink, and it's a lot of fun. The characters are thin and the prose is clunky, but if you like this kind of thing, it's very enjoyable. I particularly like the spooky, unreleased video game that one of the hikers was playing before she vanished, the book that was written about them, and the online arguments over the book.

It's a series with at least two books and ends on a cliffhanger. (Part 2 comes out in two weeks; I've pre-ordered it, so you'll get a report.) There's a risk that it may not end up making any sense in the end, and it's hard to imagine her being able to come up with a coherent explanation for everything because there's just so much. But it's an awfully fun ride so far. It has a diverse cast with multiple queer characters. And even if it never has any ending at all, it's still WAY better than This Wretched Valley.

Content notes: One bloody body and one brief instance of body horror, but it's generally way heavier on spooky vibes than on violence or gore. One dead mule. There's a dog which has survived so far and has yet to be endangered, and from the tone of the book in general I think the doggie will be just fine.

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