Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 22
October 20, 2023
Last chance to sign up for Yuletide!
Yuletide signups end at on Saturday, 2:00 PM Pacific Time. Here is a countdown. Come on in! It's fun!
You can find a how-to and a link to eligible fandoms in the tagset at![[community profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1497869825i/23063418.png)
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Anyone still trying to make up your mind?
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You can find a how-to and a link to eligible fandoms in the tagset at
yuletide_admin
.Anyone still trying to make up your mind?
comments
October 17, 2023
Holly, by Stephen King
Holly Gibney, a 50-something private eye with anxiety and a passion for movies, takes on a missing person case that's bigger than it initially seems.
Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.
Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...
We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.
In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.
Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.
I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.
The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.
The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.
( Read more... )
This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.
[image error] [image error]
comments
Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.
Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...
We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.
In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.
Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.
I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.
The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.
The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.
( Read more... )
This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.
[image error] [image error]
comments
October 16, 2023
The Watching Eyes AKA The Winds of Time, by Barbara Corcoran
Back jacket: Who is this strange family Gail has stumbled upon in the middle of nowhere? Why have they befriended Gail so easily - no questions asked? They seem to sense that she's in terrible trouble - and desperately needs a place to hide. Do they somehow know more about Gail than they're telling?
Goodreads: In her desperate attempt to escape custody of her cruel uncle, thirteen-year-old Gail finds refuge with the Partridges, a strange family living isolated in a spooky house in the woods. Mrs. Partridge, like the rest of the family, believes in the lore of ancient Egypt, and seems to live in two worlds at once.
Given the title and blurbs, what do you think the book is likely to generally be about? I will add that the Partridges have no electricity, talk like they're from about 100 years ago, and have basenjis named Isis and Osiris. Please comment now with your guess, then comment again (if you like) after you read the rest of the review.
This was an unexpectedly weird book, and weird in an unusual way at that.
I was expecting an enjoyably spooky story, so I was jarred by the 1974-gritty opening in which Gail's mother is put in a mental hospital and an unsympathetic social worker contacts her one reachable relative, her creepy uncle. (Her father bailed when she was eight, was last seen in Hawaii, and doesn't pay alimony.) The one time Gail met Creepy Uncle, the last time her mom was hospitalized, he offered to take Gail home with him and Gail decided, apparently based on vibes, that he was going to use her as a housekeeper/slave. She said so and he hit her, but no one ever believed her about that so she stopped telling people.
When Creepy Uncle arrives, Gail begs to be allowed to take her cat, Sylvester. Creepy Uncle agrees, but Gail thinks he plans to do something bad to Sylvester. At this point I flipped to the last page to see if Sylvester was still alive. He was!
Creepy Uncle drives her into the snowy woods, drinking from an open bottle of whiskey, offering her a drink, and patting her knee. Sylvester claws him and he crashes the car. Gail climbs out, finds Creepy Uncle unconscious, flags down a car, then flees into the woods, chasing Sylvester.
She finds a strange house where she's welcomed by an elderly man, Sonny, his even older mother, Mrs. Partridge, and their basenjis Isis and Osiris. Their house is very big and elaborate, without electricity or hot water but with beautiful old furnishings. They take in Gail and Sylvester, feeding her delicious home-cooked meals and asking no questions. Their conversation is odd - they talk as if they're living in the 1800s and refer mysteriously to members of the family who are "gone" - and they seem to know things about Gail she hasn't told them. The only books in the house are very old...
( Read more... )
The author is a different Barbara Corcoran than the reality TV woman who writes nonfiction. This Barbara Corcoran appears to specialize in tearjerkers and strange plots. According to Goodreads, she wrote two books about kids befriending wolves in which the wolf dies at the end, Wolf at the Door (wolf gets poisoned) and My Wolf My Friend (not sure what happens but the reviews talk a lot about sobbing.) The Clown, bizarrely, is about an American girl in Moscow who helps a Russian clown defect.
She also wrote May I Cross Your Golden River. Please comment to guess what you think that's about before clicking on the cut-tag.
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
Goodreads: In her desperate attempt to escape custody of her cruel uncle, thirteen-year-old Gail finds refuge with the Partridges, a strange family living isolated in a spooky house in the woods. Mrs. Partridge, like the rest of the family, believes in the lore of ancient Egypt, and seems to live in two worlds at once.
Given the title and blurbs, what do you think the book is likely to generally be about? I will add that the Partridges have no electricity, talk like they're from about 100 years ago, and have basenjis named Isis and Osiris. Please comment now with your guess, then comment again (if you like) after you read the rest of the review.
This was an unexpectedly weird book, and weird in an unusual way at that.
I was expecting an enjoyably spooky story, so I was jarred by the 1974-gritty opening in which Gail's mother is put in a mental hospital and an unsympathetic social worker contacts her one reachable relative, her creepy uncle. (Her father bailed when she was eight, was last seen in Hawaii, and doesn't pay alimony.) The one time Gail met Creepy Uncle, the last time her mom was hospitalized, he offered to take Gail home with him and Gail decided, apparently based on vibes, that he was going to use her as a housekeeper/slave. She said so and he hit her, but no one ever believed her about that so she stopped telling people.
When Creepy Uncle arrives, Gail begs to be allowed to take her cat, Sylvester. Creepy Uncle agrees, but Gail thinks he plans to do something bad to Sylvester. At this point I flipped to the last page to see if Sylvester was still alive. He was!
Creepy Uncle drives her into the snowy woods, drinking from an open bottle of whiskey, offering her a drink, and patting her knee. Sylvester claws him and he crashes the car. Gail climbs out, finds Creepy Uncle unconscious, flags down a car, then flees into the woods, chasing Sylvester.
She finds a strange house where she's welcomed by an elderly man, Sonny, his even older mother, Mrs. Partridge, and their basenjis Isis and Osiris. Their house is very big and elaborate, without electricity or hot water but with beautiful old furnishings. They take in Gail and Sylvester, feeding her delicious home-cooked meals and asking no questions. Their conversation is odd - they talk as if they're living in the 1800s and refer mysteriously to members of the family who are "gone" - and they seem to know things about Gail she hasn't told them. The only books in the house are very old...
( Read more... )
The author is a different Barbara Corcoran than the reality TV woman who writes nonfiction. This Barbara Corcoran appears to specialize in tearjerkers and strange plots. According to Goodreads, she wrote two books about kids befriending wolves in which the wolf dies at the end, Wolf at the Door (wolf gets poisoned) and My Wolf My Friend (not sure what happens but the reviews talk a lot about sobbing.) The Clown, bizarrely, is about an American girl in Moscow who helps a Russian clown defect.
She also wrote May I Cross Your Golden River. Please comment to guess what you think that's about before clicking on the cut-tag.
( Read more... )
[image error] [image error]
comments
October 15, 2023
Dear Yuletide Writer
My AO3 name is Edonohana. Thank you for writing for me!
I am very open to treats. If you have any questions, please ask the mods to check with me.
I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you make for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, lengths, etc. I enjoy both shipfic and gen. I am fine with sex if it suits the story, or no sex if that suits the story.
General Likes: Hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, canon-divergence AUs, domestic life, survival situations, mysterious alien technology, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, difficult choices, Groundhog Days and Peggy Sues, miniature things, food, and animals.
( General DNWs )
( Cat in the Mirror - Mary Stolz )
( Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander )
( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )
( The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick )
( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )
( Tillerman Chronicles - Cynthia Voigt )
comments
I am very open to treats. If you have any questions, please ask the mods to check with me.
I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you make for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, lengths, etc. I enjoy both shipfic and gen. I am fine with sex if it suits the story, or no sex if that suits the story.
General Likes: Hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, canon-divergence AUs, domestic life, survival situations, mysterious alien technology, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, difficult choices, Groundhog Days and Peggy Sues, miniature things, food, and animals.
( General DNWs )
( Cat in the Mirror - Mary Stolz )
( Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander )
( Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin )
( The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick )
( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )
( Tillerman Chronicles - Cynthia Voigt )
comments
October 13, 2023
Goddess of Yesterday, by Caroline Cooney
In a jewelry booth, I found something I could not identify. It was a tiny jar, the length of my finger, and hardly twice as wide.
I forgot everything as I held this amazing jar. I could see through it. The merchant dropped a shiny red bead into the jar and I could still see the bead. It broke all the rules of a container. It contained, but did not hide.
Anaxandra is a six-year-old girl on a tiny, nameless island in the Aegean Sea when she's kidnapped for the first but not the last time, taking nothing with her but a little stone statue of Medusa carved with octopus tentacles instead of snakes. She ends up on a bigger island as the companion to a princess, and discovers amazing new things like glass, horses, and stairs.
I won't give away much more of the plot, other than that she does eventually get entangled in the Trojan War, because it has a whole lot of twists and turns. It's fantastically readable and does a great job of defamiliarizing all sorts of familiar things, from a glass bottle to the story of Troy to the name "Helen of Troy," making them seem fresh and startling and immediate.
Anaxandra is a great character, wily out of necessity but afraid of offending the gods, prone to talking when she'd be better off keeping her mouth shut but also often able to maneuver into a better spot by fast talking. All the many characters are well-drawn and memorable, particularly the female ones. Andromache and Cassandra are heartbreaking and lovable, and Helen of Troy is terrifying-- part self-satisfied beauty queen, part half-divine eldritch horror in human form.
The atmosphere and historic details are excellent and vivid. Cooney includes an afterword which discusses her sources and the places where she departed from the historic/mythic record and why, and provides a concise update on what became of the characters she didn't invent.
Absolutely fantastic. I can't recommend this too highly.
If you've already read the book, look closely at the cover. It's clever as well as striking.
[image error] [image error]
comments
I forgot everything as I held this amazing jar. I could see through it. The merchant dropped a shiny red bead into the jar and I could still see the bead. It broke all the rules of a container. It contained, but did not hide.
Anaxandra is a six-year-old girl on a tiny, nameless island in the Aegean Sea when she's kidnapped for the first but not the last time, taking nothing with her but a little stone statue of Medusa carved with octopus tentacles instead of snakes. She ends up on a bigger island as the companion to a princess, and discovers amazing new things like glass, horses, and stairs.
I won't give away much more of the plot, other than that she does eventually get entangled in the Trojan War, because it has a whole lot of twists and turns. It's fantastically readable and does a great job of defamiliarizing all sorts of familiar things, from a glass bottle to the story of Troy to the name "Helen of Troy," making them seem fresh and startling and immediate.
Anaxandra is a great character, wily out of necessity but afraid of offending the gods, prone to talking when she'd be better off keeping her mouth shut but also often able to maneuver into a better spot by fast talking. All the many characters are well-drawn and memorable, particularly the female ones. Andromache and Cassandra are heartbreaking and lovable, and Helen of Troy is terrifying-- part self-satisfied beauty queen, part half-divine eldritch horror in human form.
The atmosphere and historic details are excellent and vivid. Cooney includes an afterword which discusses her sources and the places where she departed from the historic/mythic record and why, and provides a concise update on what became of the characters she didn't invent.
Absolutely fantastic. I can't recommend this too highly.
If you've already read the book, look closely at the cover. It's clever as well as striking.
[image error] [image error]
comments
October 11, 2023
Yuletide Tag Set is live!
Behold the glory of the Yuletide tag set!
Diana Wynne Jones has swept the author category, with ten separate nominations for her works: Archer's Goon, Eight Days of Luke, Fire and Hemlock, Hexwood,, and the Chrestomanci, Dalemark, Derkholm, Howl, and Magids series, plus the short story "Nad and Dan and Quaffy."
Agatha Christie also makes a good showing with nominations for Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and And Then There Were None.
At least two non-speaking, non-superintelligent, non-magical dog characters have been nominated, Towser from Biggles and Popchyk from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. I really hope we get at least one story each starring them. Or possibly a crossover in which they team up.
In the blast from the past book nominations, I see Cat in the Mirror by Mary Stolz (okay, that was me), Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman Chronicles and The Callender Papers, The Chalet School, Macdonald Hall by Gordon Korman, the Baby-Sitters Club, and Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, which I have not read but I gather is about girls stranded on a desert island with lots of well-behaved babies.
In the movies category, I was particularly pleased to see nominations for RRR, Red Eye, and Repo Man.
The reliably fun Other Media section includes a nomination for Caitlin Dougherty in her Ask a Mortician YouTube - really curious about that one - the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and various stitches in Bookbinding Techniques.
What looks tempting or intriguing in the tag set? What do you hope gets written? What works had you never heard of before they appeared in the tag set but you now plan to check out?
comments
Diana Wynne Jones has swept the author category, with ten separate nominations for her works: Archer's Goon, Eight Days of Luke, Fire and Hemlock, Hexwood,, and the Chrestomanci, Dalemark, Derkholm, Howl, and Magids series, plus the short story "Nad and Dan and Quaffy."
Agatha Christie also makes a good showing with nominations for Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, and And Then There Were None.
At least two non-speaking, non-superintelligent, non-magical dog characters have been nominated, Towser from Biggles and Popchyk from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. I really hope we get at least one story each starring them. Or possibly a crossover in which they team up.
In the blast from the past book nominations, I see Cat in the Mirror by Mary Stolz (okay, that was me), Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman Chronicles and The Callender Papers, The Chalet School, Macdonald Hall by Gordon Korman, the Baby-Sitters Club, and Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, which I have not read but I gather is about girls stranded on a desert island with lots of well-behaved babies.
In the movies category, I was particularly pleased to see nominations for RRR, Red Eye, and Repo Man.
The reliably fun Other Media section includes a nomination for Caitlin Dougherty in her Ask a Mortician YouTube - really curious about that one - the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and various stitches in Bookbinding Techniques.
What looks tempting or intriguing in the tag set? What do you hope gets written? What works had you never heard of before they appeared in the tag set but you now plan to check out?
comments
October 10, 2023
Cell, by Stephen King
Cell phones send out a signal that makes everyone who hears it turn into ravening zombies!
Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.
The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.
The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.
The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.
There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.
But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.
( Read more... )
Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?
Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.
[image error] [image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.
The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.
The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.
The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.
There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.
But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.
( Read more... )
Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?
Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.
[image error] [image error]
[image error] [image error]
comments
October 9, 2023
Book Poll: Old Children's Books
I am tackling some to-read stacks. Here is one of them. It is a literal stack of old children's paperbacks, a genre of which I am immensely fond. Have you heard of any of them? Which should I select to read and review this week?
View Poll: Random Children's Paperback Stack
comments
View Poll: Random Children's Paperback Stack
comments
Colorblind, by Siena Maley
17-year-old Harper has a secret. It's not that she's a lesbian, though she's not exactly vocal about that. It's that she can see the age people will be when they die. It appears as a number on their forehead.
This is basically the worst psychic power ever, as she doesn't know how they'll die or a time frame beyond a year. Ever since her mother died four years ago, in a car crash at age 41, Siena has given up on the idea of being able to change the number. She works at a depressing fast food joint with her only friend, Robbie, who can also see the number, and is basically sleepwalking through life in a depressive haze. Until she meets Chloe, a new girl in town, who wears a Pride bracelet, throws herself into life with reckless abandon, and cheerfully hits on Harper. And whose number is 16, and will be 17 at the end of the summer...
This might be the first book I've ever read that I would have liked better if it was straight-up realism instead of fantasy. Harper and Chloe's romance is believable and sweet. Harper's issues feel very real, and would have been perfectly plausible if they were motivated solely by her mother's death and the fear that anyone she loves will die. The supporting cast, including the woman her father starts dating, is well-drawn. The only part of the book that didn't work for me was the numbers and the rushed ending, which felt extra-rushed because of the numbers.
This may be a minor point, but it points to the number issue in general: I can't figure out how Chloe even realized what the numbers meant. She already knew before her mother died, so exactly how many people did she know who died at their number age before her mom? There must have been at least two, so who were they and what was that realization like for her?
( Read more... )
It looks like Maley's other books are contemporary FF romance, and I suspect those work just fine. Everything about this book was sweet and enjoyable except the fantasy element.
I have absolutely no idea why the book is called Colorblind. It's never referenced.
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This is basically the worst psychic power ever, as she doesn't know how they'll die or a time frame beyond a year. Ever since her mother died four years ago, in a car crash at age 41, Siena has given up on the idea of being able to change the number. She works at a depressing fast food joint with her only friend, Robbie, who can also see the number, and is basically sleepwalking through life in a depressive haze. Until she meets Chloe, a new girl in town, who wears a Pride bracelet, throws herself into life with reckless abandon, and cheerfully hits on Harper. And whose number is 16, and will be 17 at the end of the summer...
This might be the first book I've ever read that I would have liked better if it was straight-up realism instead of fantasy. Harper and Chloe's romance is believable and sweet. Harper's issues feel very real, and would have been perfectly plausible if they were motivated solely by her mother's death and the fear that anyone she loves will die. The supporting cast, including the woman her father starts dating, is well-drawn. The only part of the book that didn't work for me was the numbers and the rushed ending, which felt extra-rushed because of the numbers.
This may be a minor point, but it points to the number issue in general: I can't figure out how Chloe even realized what the numbers meant. She already knew before her mother died, so exactly how many people did she know who died at their number age before her mom? There must have been at least two, so who were they and what was that realization like for her?
( Read more... )
It looks like Maley's other books are contemporary FF romance, and I suspect those work just fine. Everything about this book was sweet and enjoyable except the fantasy element.
I have absolutely no idea why the book is called Colorblind. It's never referenced.
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October 5, 2023
How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu
A strange, ambitious, somewhat uneven but often excellent novel tracing a pandemic through an immense timeline via a series of linked short stories.
In the opening story, an archaeologist travels to the Arctic research base where his daughter Clara died falling through a sinkhole that revealed a 30,000 year-old-corpse. The ancient body, nicknamed Annie, is of a young girl with a bizarre genome, whose corpse carries a strange virus. As the anthropologist tries to understand Clara and what drove her to leave her own young daughter behind in her quest to save the world from climate change, the virus begins to spread...
Subsequent stories trace the pandemic and its effects on society through the lens of people grieving their own losses, working in new jobs that have arisen because of mass death and grief, trying to find a cure or escape the effects, or all of the above.
Despite the way that sounds, this doesn't feel at all like a typical science fiction pandemic book. It's a distinctly literary mainstream version of science fiction, with major surrealistic elements. You can tell the difference because a genre SF book would follow up on and explore elements like, say, Annie's genome:
Part Neanderthal and part something only superficially human, she possessed genetic traits similar to those of a starfish or an octopus.
I read that and thought, "Wow! Tell me more!" In fact, we get exactly one more sentence about it. This does eventually get followed up on, but not for ages and no one ever says, "WTF STARFISH OR OCTOPUS??!!"
In a later story, a scientist finds that a tiny singularity capable of powering a spaceship has opened up in his brain. This does get more detail as people are understandably concerned about what this might do to him and he wants to extract it from his brain to tap its spaceship-powering potential, but he only glancingly implies that it was the result of a lab "accident" born of depression after his daughter's death, and that's all we ever learn about the cause. We don't get anything more on the "accident," how the black hole was discovered, or anyone saying "WTF TINY BLACK HOLE IN YOUR BRAIN??!!"
In other stories, a man in a coma finds himself in what may or may not be an afterlife, with a strange task that slowly becomes clear; a man works as a costumed mascot at a theme park aimed at giving dying children a wonderful final day before they're euthanized on a roller coaster; a forensic pathologist befriends a dying man who's willed her his body; a man tries to repair robot dogs containing recordings of the voices of their dead owners; two women paint murals on the walls of a generation ship to commemorate the planets they visit and the people they've lost.
The stories are all told in first person, which makes them very immediate and gripping, but also has the unfortunate effect of making it very noticeable that the narrators all sound exactly the same. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them are straight, thirty-something Japanese-American men. (Everyone in the book is straight, not just the narrators, but a few narrators slightly break the mold by being Japanese or women or younger/older than average.)
However, a lot of the stories are very powerful. They're all about grief and many of them are about parent-child relationships. Most of the characters mean well, though some of them are fuckups, and most of the stories are about people searching for and often finding meaning and connection and love in the midst of devastation.
Though the stories are linked by connected characters a la six degrees of separation, and the book as a whole feels unexpectedly unified by the end, the stories vary widely in terms of how much I liked them. The first story is extremely strong and the rest range from excellent to okay. Of the okay ones, there's a set that are fine on their own but collectively feel repetitive. They're about the death and grief industry in a world where capitalism has taken over death and death has taken over capitalism and banks are deathbanks and money is deathcurrency and all the ads are death-related and the sheer muchness of both the death-and-capitalism ouroboros and the several stories focusing on that makes otherwise good stories feel one-note. Death note.
The final story is a banger that recontextualizes the entire book. I could have done without the cameos from real-life famous people but otherwise it's extremely well-done.
How High We Go in the Dark is a flawed and very weird book, and often hard to read due to both the subject matter and sheer intensity with which it's portrayed. But it's also very well-written, well-structured in a way that isn't immediately obvious, often extremely moving, and an unexpectedly quick read. It's an epic in just under 300 pages, which is impressive all by itself.
Sequoia Nagamatsu (what a great name) wrote the book before Covid, and had the distinctly surreal experience of trying to sell it in 2020.
Content Notes: Even apart from the entire book being death and grief central, the plague initially kills mostly children. So there's that. Also, one story is about animal experimentation and features an adorable and doomed intelligent pig.
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In the opening story, an archaeologist travels to the Arctic research base where his daughter Clara died falling through a sinkhole that revealed a 30,000 year-old-corpse. The ancient body, nicknamed Annie, is of a young girl with a bizarre genome, whose corpse carries a strange virus. As the anthropologist tries to understand Clara and what drove her to leave her own young daughter behind in her quest to save the world from climate change, the virus begins to spread...
Subsequent stories trace the pandemic and its effects on society through the lens of people grieving their own losses, working in new jobs that have arisen because of mass death and grief, trying to find a cure or escape the effects, or all of the above.
Despite the way that sounds, this doesn't feel at all like a typical science fiction pandemic book. It's a distinctly literary mainstream version of science fiction, with major surrealistic elements. You can tell the difference because a genre SF book would follow up on and explore elements like, say, Annie's genome:
Part Neanderthal and part something only superficially human, she possessed genetic traits similar to those of a starfish or an octopus.
I read that and thought, "Wow! Tell me more!" In fact, we get exactly one more sentence about it. This does eventually get followed up on, but not for ages and no one ever says, "WTF STARFISH OR OCTOPUS??!!"
In a later story, a scientist finds that a tiny singularity capable of powering a spaceship has opened up in his brain. This does get more detail as people are understandably concerned about what this might do to him and he wants to extract it from his brain to tap its spaceship-powering potential, but he only glancingly implies that it was the result of a lab "accident" born of depression after his daughter's death, and that's all we ever learn about the cause. We don't get anything more on the "accident," how the black hole was discovered, or anyone saying "WTF TINY BLACK HOLE IN YOUR BRAIN??!!"
In other stories, a man in a coma finds himself in what may or may not be an afterlife, with a strange task that slowly becomes clear; a man works as a costumed mascot at a theme park aimed at giving dying children a wonderful final day before they're euthanized on a roller coaster; a forensic pathologist befriends a dying man who's willed her his body; a man tries to repair robot dogs containing recordings of the voices of their dead owners; two women paint murals on the walls of a generation ship to commemorate the planets they visit and the people they've lost.
The stories are all told in first person, which makes them very immediate and gripping, but also has the unfortunate effect of making it very noticeable that the narrators all sound exactly the same. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them are straight, thirty-something Japanese-American men. (Everyone in the book is straight, not just the narrators, but a few narrators slightly break the mold by being Japanese or women or younger/older than average.)
However, a lot of the stories are very powerful. They're all about grief and many of them are about parent-child relationships. Most of the characters mean well, though some of them are fuckups, and most of the stories are about people searching for and often finding meaning and connection and love in the midst of devastation.
Though the stories are linked by connected characters a la six degrees of separation, and the book as a whole feels unexpectedly unified by the end, the stories vary widely in terms of how much I liked them. The first story is extremely strong and the rest range from excellent to okay. Of the okay ones, there's a set that are fine on their own but collectively feel repetitive. They're about the death and grief industry in a world where capitalism has taken over death and death has taken over capitalism and banks are deathbanks and money is deathcurrency and all the ads are death-related and the sheer muchness of both the death-and-capitalism ouroboros and the several stories focusing on that makes otherwise good stories feel one-note. Death note.
The final story is a banger that recontextualizes the entire book. I could have done without the cameos from real-life famous people but otherwise it's extremely well-done.
How High We Go in the Dark is a flawed and very weird book, and often hard to read due to both the subject matter and sheer intensity with which it's portrayed. But it's also very well-written, well-structured in a way that isn't immediately obvious, often extremely moving, and an unexpectedly quick read. It's an epic in just under 300 pages, which is impressive all by itself.
Sequoia Nagamatsu (what a great name) wrote the book before Covid, and had the distinctly surreal experience of trying to sell it in 2020.
Content Notes: Even apart from the entire book being death and grief central, the plague initially kills mostly children. So there's that. Also, one story is about animal experimentation and features an adorable and doomed intelligent pig.
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