Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 21
October 31, 2023
Alex makes his feelings known
I had been idly contemplating keeping the racist afterword to use as kindling for my woodburning stove, but Alex had a better idea.
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October 30, 2023
Stonewords: A Ghost Story, by Pam Conrad
It seems I had always woken up in the morning with leaves and bits of grass in my toes and under my sheets as if I'd been a ghost wandering the countryside at night. But maybe not. Maybe it wasn't until that summer my mother visited us when she was forever weaving honeysuckle wreaths, and I followed her out into the backwoods that night after dinner.
Zoe's mother has the 1980s/1990s YA mother mental illness that makes moms abandon their children, and so she leaves Zoe with her grandparents when Zoe is four. Zoe's grandparents refurbish an old playhouse once used by her mother, and her mother drops in periodically to do things like show her the old gravestone inscribed with "Zoe," which narrator-Zoe was named for.
Our Zoe meets Zoe Louise in the playhouse, when they're both four years old. Zoe is too young to realize that Zoe Louise is a ghost, and Zoe's grandparents assume she's Zoe's imaginary friend. They become close friends, and it's several years before Zoe starts noticing that while she grows older, Zoe Louise doesn't. For Zoe Louise, it's always the same day - her birthday, when her father is going to give her a pony. Zoe realizes that as Zoe Louise is a stuck-in-time ghost in her life, she is a bouncing-around-in-time ghost in Zoe Louise's life.
But while Zoe Louise's time doesn't change, Zoe Louise herself begins to change in terrifying ways...
This is a short book that feels almost epic, despite its tight focus on one house and two girls in two times. The way the timeslip works has its own internal logic that makes it feel real, but is strange enough to also feel eerie and numinous. The scary aspects would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read this as a child, and were still pretty scary now. The relationship between the girls, and between Zoe and her mother, intersect in odd ways that have the strangeness of real relationships and real emotions.
Out of print, but you can get used copies for cheap. I'm surprised this hasn't had an ebook reprint by now - it's really excellent and not particularly dated. Highly recommended.
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Zoe's mother has the 1980s/1990s YA mother mental illness that makes moms abandon their children, and so she leaves Zoe with her grandparents when Zoe is four. Zoe's grandparents refurbish an old playhouse once used by her mother, and her mother drops in periodically to do things like show her the old gravestone inscribed with "Zoe," which narrator-Zoe was named for.
Our Zoe meets Zoe Louise in the playhouse, when they're both four years old. Zoe is too young to realize that Zoe Louise is a ghost, and Zoe's grandparents assume she's Zoe's imaginary friend. They become close friends, and it's several years before Zoe starts noticing that while she grows older, Zoe Louise doesn't. For Zoe Louise, it's always the same day - her birthday, when her father is going to give her a pony. Zoe realizes that as Zoe Louise is a stuck-in-time ghost in her life, she is a bouncing-around-in-time ghost in Zoe Louise's life.
But while Zoe Louise's time doesn't change, Zoe Louise herself begins to change in terrifying ways...
This is a short book that feels almost epic, despite its tight focus on one house and two girls in two times. The way the timeslip works has its own internal logic that makes it feel real, but is strange enough to also feel eerie and numinous. The scary aspects would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read this as a child, and were still pretty scary now. The relationship between the girls, and between Zoe and her mother, intersect in odd ways that have the strangeness of real relationships and real emotions.
Out of print, but you can get used copies for cheap. I'm surprised this hasn't had an ebook reprint by now - it's really excellent and not particularly dated. Highly recommended.
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October 29, 2023
Happy 50 to me!
Today I am 50!
Yesterday I had a private pottery lesson which was GREAT, followed by a lovely sushi dinner and my favorite cake.
Today I am having brunch at Saddle Peak Lodge
If you would like to help make my birthday extra awesome, please comment with something I will enjoy, such as a book/movie/TV rec, a review of a hilariously terrible or hilariously weird book/movie/TV, pictures or videos of cats, naked mole rats, or other adorable animals, cool craft or nature or food things, fic or fanart, something I did that made you happy, or a donation to Tenth Life (kitten rescue) or OutRight Action International (queer rights).
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Yesterday I had a private pottery lesson which was GREAT, followed by a lovely sushi dinner and my favorite cake.
Today I am having brunch at Saddle Peak Lodge
If you would like to help make my birthday extra awesome, please comment with something I will enjoy, such as a book/movie/TV rec, a review of a hilariously terrible or hilariously weird book/movie/TV, pictures or videos of cats, naked mole rats, or other adorable animals, cool craft or nature or food things, fic or fanart, something I did that made you happy, or a donation to Tenth Life (kitten rescue) or OutRight Action International (queer rights).
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October 28, 2023
The ripped-out pages are...
...an afterword by the author which is an extended racist joke!
The book is Hideaway, by Dean Koontz. The one where a guy starts having visions after he's clinically dead and then revived, and he and his wife adopt a girl who uses crutches.
I'm not going to defend it as an actually good book, but I'm rather fond of it and my copy, which was used to begin with, had literally fallen apart. So I picked up a newer copy in better shape at a library book sale, and was interested to see that the new edition had an afterword by the author.
The first part is ranting about atheists writing him mean letters. The second part is him trying to get his name removed from the credits of a bad movie based on the book. Supposedly he wrote letters to the Japanese executive of the Tokyo branch of the movie company, whom he nicknames Mr. Teriyaki, ranting about WWII in an apparent effort to offend him enough to make him dump the movie. The whole thing seems intended to be humorous tall tale, but the overall effect is like listening to your racist uncle tell an endless, pointless, wildly offensive, totally unfunny story at Thanksgiving while everyone else vainly attempts to change the subject.
D:
OH LOOK DEAN KOONTZ HAS THE TEXT ON HIS WEBSITE.
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The book is Hideaway, by Dean Koontz. The one where a guy starts having visions after he's clinically dead and then revived, and he and his wife adopt a girl who uses crutches.
I'm not going to defend it as an actually good book, but I'm rather fond of it and my copy, which was used to begin with, had literally fallen apart. So I picked up a newer copy in better shape at a library book sale, and was interested to see that the new edition had an afterword by the author.
The first part is ranting about atheists writing him mean letters. The second part is him trying to get his name removed from the credits of a bad movie based on the book. Supposedly he wrote letters to the Japanese executive of the Tokyo branch of the movie company, whom he nicknames Mr. Teriyaki, ranting about WWII in an apparent effort to offend him enough to make him dump the movie. The whole thing seems intended to be humorous tall tale, but the overall effect is like listening to your racist uncle tell an endless, pointless, wildly offensive, totally unfunny story at Thanksgiving while everyone else vainly attempts to change the subject.
D:
OH LOOK DEAN KOONTZ HAS THE TEXT ON HIS WEBSITE.
comments
October 27, 2023
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October 26, 2023
Just Like Jenny, by Sandy Asher
1980s YA about two young ballet dancers, Stephie and Jenny, who have been best friends since they met at a dance academy at ages six and eight, respectively. The two-year gap and personality factors have led to Stephie looking up to Jenny and seeing her as perfect and herself as inferior and needy. When their dance teacher invites them both to audition for his even-more-hardcore semi-professional dance troupe, it forces Stephie to take a serious look at both her own ambitions and her relationship with Jenny.
This book packs a lot into 148 pages, sketching out a complete life for Stephie beyond the academy, complete with brief but deft characterizations of her family, Jenny's family, teachers at Stephie's school which also has performance classes taught by an aging hippie with regrets, the boy she has a crush on, and actual professional theatres that might be hiring. The ending is a bit pat but overall it's well-done and thoughtful.
( Read more... )
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This book packs a lot into 148 pages, sketching out a complete life for Stephie beyond the academy, complete with brief but deft characterizations of her family, Jenny's family, teachers at Stephie's school which also has performance classes taught by an aging hippie with regrets, the boy she has a crush on, and actual professional theatres that might be hiring. The ending is a bit pat but overall it's well-done and thoughtful.
( Read more... )
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Book Poll: Boo!
I am tackling some to-read stacks. Here is one of them. It is a literal stack of horror and other spooky stories, just right for Halloween. Have you heard of any of them? Which should I select to read and review this week?
View Poll: Spooky Book Poll
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View Poll: Spooky Book Poll
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October 25, 2023
Chlorine, by Jade Song (DNF)
Ren Yu is a 17-year-old Chinese-American competitive swimmer who believes she is a mermaid. Here's an excerpt from the first page of the book:
Mermaids wear one-piece swimsuits sculpting severe camel toe. Mermaids have neither hair nor scalp, but latex swim caps, squeezing forehead fat out like dollops of leftover toothpaste from near-empty tubes. Mermaids swim in chlorine, thrive in locker rooms, and dive under and over lane ropes. Mermaids sprout thick and luscious body hair, until shaved off for aerodynamics. Mermaids would rather eat four bowls of pasta than a man – though a man does taste good, mermaids prefer not to waste precious stomach volume on such non-nutritious fare, for a man is not sustenance but an occasional dessert.
Mermaids are not born. We are made.
Isn't that a banger of an opening? I bought the book based on the premise and the first couple pages, which were both very much up my alley. And then I only ended up reading up to the point of the depressing incident at the party and Cathy's subsequent letter, then skipped to the last couple chapters to see what happened.
The reason I ended up not finishing it was oddly similar to why I liked the opening so much. The rest of the book that I read is written in the same style, same tone, and same level of intensity, whether it's describing mermaids, racism, rape, or breakfast.
We mutilated our guts with bowls of raw oats mixed with applesauce, stacks of banana walnut pancakes, pots of pasta mingled with marinara and basil, shakes of protein powder blended with egg whites, casseroles of coalesced buffalo chicken dip.
Even the interspersed letters from Cathy, Ren Yu's friend and crush, are written in a very similar style and with very similar opinions – so much so that I think they're Ren Yu imagining the letters she'd like to get from Cathy. The book ended up feeling one note and suffocating.
There's a very fine line in this type of unreliable narrative - dark comedy, raw fury, obsession, and social commentary - between awesome and unbearable. For me, Chlorine was just to the wrong side of that mark. I read the gut mutilation sentence and instead of thinking "Brilliant commentary on orthorexia," I thought "Dude. It's pancakes."
This is very much a minority opinion - most reviewers loved this book - and obviously I did not read the entire thing. But in case you're really taken with the idea of a competitive swimmer mermaid, here be spoilers.
( Read more... )
Currently $1.99 on Amazon.
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Mermaids wear one-piece swimsuits sculpting severe camel toe. Mermaids have neither hair nor scalp, but latex swim caps, squeezing forehead fat out like dollops of leftover toothpaste from near-empty tubes. Mermaids swim in chlorine, thrive in locker rooms, and dive under and over lane ropes. Mermaids sprout thick and luscious body hair, until shaved off for aerodynamics. Mermaids would rather eat four bowls of pasta than a man – though a man does taste good, mermaids prefer not to waste precious stomach volume on such non-nutritious fare, for a man is not sustenance but an occasional dessert.
Mermaids are not born. We are made.
Isn't that a banger of an opening? I bought the book based on the premise and the first couple pages, which were both very much up my alley. And then I only ended up reading up to the point of the depressing incident at the party and Cathy's subsequent letter, then skipped to the last couple chapters to see what happened.
The reason I ended up not finishing it was oddly similar to why I liked the opening so much. The rest of the book that I read is written in the same style, same tone, and same level of intensity, whether it's describing mermaids, racism, rape, or breakfast.
We mutilated our guts with bowls of raw oats mixed with applesauce, stacks of banana walnut pancakes, pots of pasta mingled with marinara and basil, shakes of protein powder blended with egg whites, casseroles of coalesced buffalo chicken dip.
Even the interspersed letters from Cathy, Ren Yu's friend and crush, are written in a very similar style and with very similar opinions – so much so that I think they're Ren Yu imagining the letters she'd like to get from Cathy. The book ended up feeling one note and suffocating.
There's a very fine line in this type of unreliable narrative - dark comedy, raw fury, obsession, and social commentary - between awesome and unbearable. For me, Chlorine was just to the wrong side of that mark. I read the gut mutilation sentence and instead of thinking "Brilliant commentary on orthorexia," I thought "Dude. It's pancakes."
This is very much a minority opinion - most reviewers loved this book - and obviously I did not read the entire thing. But in case you're really taken with the idea of a competitive swimmer mermaid, here be spoilers.
( Read more... )
Currently $1.99 on Amazon.
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October 23, 2023
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
This is one of several classic novels about Jesuits in space.
The book takes place in two timelines. In the present, Father Emilio Sandoz has returned to Earth as the sole survivor of a trip to a newly discovered planet which went disastrously wrong. He is near death from malnutrition and general bad treatment, and has been tortured, gang raped, and horrifically mutilated by kangaroo-like aliens. He was discovered in this condition in an alien brothel, and literally everyone on Earth seems to believe that he just randomly decided that he'd like to be a whore for aliens.
People often do refuse to believe that any given survivor was actually raped and instead claim that the sex was consensual. But if there's ONE situation in which people are likely to believe that a rape happened, it's when the victim is the sole survivor of a massacre and is discovered starving, tortured, mutilated, injured by violent sex, and locked in a brothel.
So that entire storyline, which is an enormous part of the book, was one that I found impossible to believe. Especially since until near the end of the book, literally nobody even considers the possibility that Emilio – who, don't forget, was mutilated so he is literally unable to use his hands – had been raped rather than having consensually had incredibly brutal and violent sex with a bunch of aliens.
The other thing everyone blames him for is that he killed a child. We get no details on that until the end of the book, so I'll just say that once we learn the details, I had a big problem believing that blame too.
This book got an incredible amount of mainstream acclaim. Unsurprisingly, it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it, and largely read by people who don't normally read it. It has genre tropes but not the underpinnings that make them make sense.
What it also has a lot of is whump. If it was written for Whumpfest for the prompt "Everybody blames character for being gang raped, mutilated, and nearly killed," I would say, "Excellent job!"
At least 50% of the entire book consists of Emilio being accused of terrible things, being so traumatized that he's unable to defend himself, having nightmares, having migraines, throwing up, not eating, doing agonizing physical therapy with painful prosthetics, etc. I felt like I was reading a Bucky Barnes fic circa 2018.
The second timeline is the story of the expedition to the alien planet Rakhat. It's discovered when a low-level tech working on SETI, Jimmy Quinn, hears aliens singing on radio waves. Jimmy, who is friends with Emilio and his group of friends, gets together with them one night. They decide it would be cool to visit the planet, and come up with the idea of making an asteroid into a spaceship. They present this to the Vatican, which is the only entity who cares enough to send a spaceship. It hires the entire friend group who came up with the idea to be the crew, plus a couple redshirts.
I cannot think of a less-qualified crew for a first contact mission. It consists of Emilio (linguist and priest), Sofia (another linguist), an elderly doctor, her husband the elderly engineer (all sorts of engineer, he does everything from mechanical engineering to nanoparticles), another priest, and Jimmy, the low ranking dude at SETI. None of them are qualified to go on an expedition to another planet! None of them are capable of designing a spaceship on the back of an envelope!
( Spoilers! )
Religion is a huge part of the book but it's weirdly unmoored from the science fiction part. There's tons of discussion of Emilio's celibacy (the most boring aspect of being a priest IMO) but despite the Catholic Church funding the expedition and putting multiple priests on it, there's no discussion about the theological implications of aliens. Nobody even asks the aliens whether they have a religion!
Back on Earth, Emilio agonizes over how a benevolent God allowed the terrible events he experienced. This is a very understandable reaction, but there is an entire field of study devoted to that exact question. It's called theodicy and it ought to be something a priest would be aware of. Even if Emilio is too traumatized to think of it, the other priests ought to be bringing in actual theology when they talk to him about it, because THEY'RE ALL PRIESTS.
Also, nothing about Emilio's crisis of faith had to be science fictional. He'd be having the exact same crisis if he got caught up in a war on Earth where his friends were killed and he experienced the exact same trauma only done by humans.
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The book takes place in two timelines. In the present, Father Emilio Sandoz has returned to Earth as the sole survivor of a trip to a newly discovered planet which went disastrously wrong. He is near death from malnutrition and general bad treatment, and has been tortured, gang raped, and horrifically mutilated by kangaroo-like aliens. He was discovered in this condition in an alien brothel, and literally everyone on Earth seems to believe that he just randomly decided that he'd like to be a whore for aliens.
People often do refuse to believe that any given survivor was actually raped and instead claim that the sex was consensual. But if there's ONE situation in which people are likely to believe that a rape happened, it's when the victim is the sole survivor of a massacre and is discovered starving, tortured, mutilated, injured by violent sex, and locked in a brothel.
So that entire storyline, which is an enormous part of the book, was one that I found impossible to believe. Especially since until near the end of the book, literally nobody even considers the possibility that Emilio – who, don't forget, was mutilated so he is literally unable to use his hands – had been raped rather than having consensually had incredibly brutal and violent sex with a bunch of aliens.
The other thing everyone blames him for is that he killed a child. We get no details on that until the end of the book, so I'll just say that once we learn the details, I had a big problem believing that blame too.
This book got an incredible amount of mainstream acclaim. Unsurprisingly, it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it, and largely read by people who don't normally read it. It has genre tropes but not the underpinnings that make them make sense.
What it also has a lot of is whump. If it was written for Whumpfest for the prompt "Everybody blames character for being gang raped, mutilated, and nearly killed," I would say, "Excellent job!"
At least 50% of the entire book consists of Emilio being accused of terrible things, being so traumatized that he's unable to defend himself, having nightmares, having migraines, throwing up, not eating, doing agonizing physical therapy with painful prosthetics, etc. I felt like I was reading a Bucky Barnes fic circa 2018.
The second timeline is the story of the expedition to the alien planet Rakhat. It's discovered when a low-level tech working on SETI, Jimmy Quinn, hears aliens singing on radio waves. Jimmy, who is friends with Emilio and his group of friends, gets together with them one night. They decide it would be cool to visit the planet, and come up with the idea of making an asteroid into a spaceship. They present this to the Vatican, which is the only entity who cares enough to send a spaceship. It hires the entire friend group who came up with the idea to be the crew, plus a couple redshirts.
I cannot think of a less-qualified crew for a first contact mission. It consists of Emilio (linguist and priest), Sofia (another linguist), an elderly doctor, her husband the elderly engineer (all sorts of engineer, he does everything from mechanical engineering to nanoparticles), another priest, and Jimmy, the low ranking dude at SETI. None of them are qualified to go on an expedition to another planet! None of them are capable of designing a spaceship on the back of an envelope!
( Spoilers! )
Religion is a huge part of the book but it's weirdly unmoored from the science fiction part. There's tons of discussion of Emilio's celibacy (the most boring aspect of being a priest IMO) but despite the Catholic Church funding the expedition and putting multiple priests on it, there's no discussion about the theological implications of aliens. Nobody even asks the aliens whether they have a religion!
Back on Earth, Emilio agonizes over how a benevolent God allowed the terrible events he experienced. This is a very understandable reaction, but there is an entire field of study devoted to that exact question. It's called theodicy and it ought to be something a priest would be aware of. Even if Emilio is too traumatized to think of it, the other priests ought to be bringing in actual theology when they talk to him about it, because THEY'RE ALL PRIESTS.
Also, nothing about Emilio's crisis of faith had to be science fictional. He'd be having the exact same crisis if he got caught up in a war on Earth where his friends were killed and he experienced the exact same trauma only done by humans.
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comments
October 21, 2023
A Sleight of Shadows, by Kat Howard
This is the unplanned and unexpected sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians, an urban fantasy which I quite enjoyed despite its flaws. I enjoyed this while I read it, but not as much; it felt like a slighter retread of the first book, with less emotion, less spectacular set-pieces, and a climax that only works because of a magical and legal loophole that was never mentioned before in either book until it suddenly appeared to solve the problem.
On the plus side, the story moves along briskly, there's a subplot I really liked featuring one of my favorite characters from the first book, Verenice Tenebrae (the other person who escaped the House of Shadows), and it's nice to spend more time with the world and the characters.
( Read more... )
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On the plus side, the story moves along briskly, there's a subplot I really liked featuring one of my favorite characters from the first book, Verenice Tenebrae (the other person who escaped the House of Shadows), and it's nice to spend more time with the world and the characters.
( Read more... )
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