Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 4

The Husband, by Dean Koontz

Mitch, a 30-something gardener, gets a call from a stranger who claims to have kidnapped his wife - a claim the man quickly proves. But Mitch can get his wife back unharmed, the man says, so long as he does two things: say nothing to the cops about the call or the kidnapping, and pay a ransom of two million dollars. Mitch protests that he doesn't even have a fraction of that money. The kidnapper tells him to wait for further instructions...

This is a great premise, and the plot goes in some interestingly unexpected directions. (The kidnappers do not intend for Mitch to rob a bank or some such to get the money; the wife is a lot less of a helpless victim than it seems at first.) ) There's a plot turn that a lot of writers would have used as their shocking conclusion, but it happens about halfway in here, then the repercussions play out.

The book feels exactly like watching a satisfying action-thriller with a high concept, so much so that I'm surprised it's never been made into a movie. It would be a fun one.

I glanced at this on my way to putting it in the used book sale box, then read a chapter, then read a little more, then ended up reading the entire book in one sitting. It would be a good book to read on a plane.

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A Sundae with Judy, by Frieda Friedman

This children's book was first published in 1949. I picked up a reprint from 1969 at a library book sale because it said Judy worked in her father's ice cream shop, and I wanted descriptions of a 1940s ice cream shop. And I got them. The ice cream and homemade sodas, with syrups full of bits of real fruit, sounded delicious.

A Chinese-American girl, Mayling, moves in next door to Judy, and Judy is eager to introduce her to her "Saturday Club" of girlfriends. Mayling is wary, but Judy assures her the other girls will love her. But one of them very much does not, and says the Chinese girl goes or she does! The entire club breaks up over this, then reforms in a new configuration plus Mayling and minus the racist girl.

I was expecting the racist girl to repent, but we literally never hear from her again and the plot then goes in a new direction. A poor family in the neighborhood needs some help, and Judy decides to raise money for them by putting on a show. She not only gets a very diverse group of kids to participate, but when her piano playing flops during rehearsals, she swallows her pride and MCs instead - and learns that she's a much better MC than a musician.

This book is a fun read but most interesting as a period piece. (There's also a great bit where Judy visits the Automat.) The theme is anti-bigotry and pro-diversity, and while some of the language surrounding that is dated and it's a bit rah-rah America, it's refreshing to read in a book from 1949. (Or now, unfortunately.) Nobody talks in dialect. Judy, who's Christian, has a crush on a Jewish boy who plays the harmonica. The happy ending is a multiracial and multi-religious group of kids, who all met because Judy wanted to help out her neighbors, gathered to celebrate their success and eat delicious-sounding ice cream sundaes.

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Face the Dragon, by Joyce Sweeney

In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.

I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.

My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.

What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.

Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.

While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.

I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.

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Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun, by Kaz Rowe

That amazing cover is an extremely accurate drawing of an actual photograph which is reproduced in the book, of a performance piece by Claude Cahun.

Liberated is a graphic novel telling the true story of Claude Cahun, a French Jewish writer and artist born in 1894. Cahun, along with their lover, the photographer and artist Marcel Moore, was active in the Parisian surrealist movement. Later, they resisted the Nazis via a stealth propaganda campaign aimed at occupying Nazi soldiers. They created pamphlets and fliers, and smuggled them into the soldiers' cigarette packs and even pockets! And they did all this while Cahun was chronically ill. Eventually, they were ratted out, arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but the war ended before the sentence was carried out.

Assigned female at birth, Cahun's life and art interrogated gender, persona, and identity, writing, Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. Marcel Moore was also assigned female at birth, but I'm not sure how Moore identified in terms of gender, or whether the name Marcel Moore was a preferred name or a pseudonym/artist's persona. I think the graphic novel probably doesn't pin this down on purpose, and my guess is that either it wasn't clear at this remove, or it seemed more true to Moore to leave it ambiguous/fluid.

The two of them met at school, fell in love, and traveled Europe together. And just when it started getting socially dicey for them to stay together, social cover fell into their lap when - I am not making this up - Moore's mother married Cahun's father! When they moved to the island of Jersey to escape the Nazis (this only worked for so long) they represented themselves as sisters living together.

The graphic novel is largely told in Cahun's words, with lovely graphic art plus a few of Cahun and Moore's own photographs. It's a quick, moving, inspiring, thought-provoking read, more relevant now than ever.

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The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

Finally, a book that lives up to its premise!

The Tainted Cup's plot is a murder mystery, complex but playing fair, in the tradition of Agatha Christie. Its main characters are Ana, a spectacularly eccentric reclusive genius, and Din, her young assistant who does the legwork, in the tradition of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin or Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

...and the setting is a world that has been regularly ravaged by leviathans the size of mountains that emerge from the sea every "wet season" and rampage around, not only stomping everything in sight but also creating zones like Annihilation's Area X due to their magical, mutagenic bodies!

This has led to the Roman Empire continuing as it's the only force that can (barely) keep them in check, and also to it evolving a sophisticated scientific/magical biological technology which can perform many forensic, military, and technical functions including augmenting people and animals. So you have legionnaires augmented to be short-lived but massively strong and with extra bones that crunch when they move, called cracklers, using giant sloths called "slothics" to haul around artillery to shoot at kaiju!!!

I fucking love this sort of setting. All I want is to roll around in its weird biological decadence, ideally with guides in the form of interesting and/or likable characters. A good plot is just gravy. But! I love the characters AND the plot is excellent!

The opening scene is a masterclass in how to introduce a very unusual and complex setting by making your viewpoint character someone who 1) must navigate aspects of the setting that are new to them too, 2) has a compelling personal problem that's emotionally engaging, 3) and introduces a mystery to keep us hooked.

Din, the viewpoint character, is the new probationary assistant to the investigator, showing up alone to his very first murder scene. He immediately tangles with the guard on site, who is clearly richer and more experienced and correctly sizes him up as a newbie, and is also suspicious that the investigator herself isn't there. This neatly introduces us to the military and investigatory structure, and makes us wonder about Din's boss. As Din is introduced to a very wealthy household, we get to see the biological magitech of the world while also encountering the bizarre murder he's investigating. And while all this is going on, Din is trying to hide the fact that he's dyslexic, which he thinks could get him fired.

It's an instantly compelling opening.

Ana and Din are great characters, Din immediately likable, Ana immediately intriguing. The supporting cast is neatly sketched in. The plot is a very solid murder mystery, the setting is fantastic, and everything is perfectly integrated. The mystery could only unfold as it does in that setting, and the characters are all shaped by it. As a nice little bonus, there's also good disability rep in the context of a world where many people are augmented to boost them in some ways while also having major side effects. Good queer rep, too. And though a lot of the content was dark/horrifying, the overall reading experience was really fun.

I loved this book and instantly dove into the next one. I hope Bennett writes as many Ana & Din books as Christie wrote Poirots.

Spoilers! (  Read more...  )

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The Last Bookstore on Earth, by Lily Braun-Arnold

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. (  Read more...  )

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100 Books

As is going around, I've made a list of 100 books. It's a list of books which were formative for me in some way and/or particular favorites of mine. Due to the usual ages in which people are formed, the list is skewed toward books I read when I was young.

Here's my list. You can vote on how many you've read.

Any on my list that are also formative for and/or particular favorites of yours?

Feel free to ask me why any of them are on the list.

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The Bookwanderers, by Anna James

This book, the first in a 7-book middle-grade series, was recommended to me by a customer who wanted to buy A Little Princess for her daughters who had gotten interested in it after reading this book.

Tilly Pages lives in her grandparents' home above their bookshop, as her mother vanished without a trace shortly after she was born. She discovers that she and her grandparents (and her mother) are bookwanderers - able to step into the pages of books and interact with the characters. (She only ever explores out-of-copyright books due to real life copyright laws.) Book characters can also sometimes step out of their books and interact with bookwanderers in the real world - Tilly discovered her gift when she met Anne Shirley and Alice from Wonderland.

This is a whole lot of fun, and also has a truly amazing twist. (  Read more...  )

I look forward to reading the next book, which looks like it will center around fairytales.

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Wrong Place, Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister

A time travel story that's also a murder mystery, starting with the murder and working backward.

Jen is shocked to witness her 18-year-old son Todd murder someone who's a total stranger to her, though apparently not to him. Todd is immediately arrested, but won't say anything about it. The next day - well, the next time Jen wakes up - it's the day before the murder. Jen manages to confiscate the murder weapon before it can be used and goes to sleep, thinking she's fixed things. But when she next wakes up, it's two days before the murder...

Jen keeps going backward in time, trying to figure out why Todd committed the murder as everything she does to fix it gets erased every time she falls asleep... or does it? As time unreels itself under her feet, she scrambles to find out what was really going on with her son, and what the purpose of her travel is. Is she supposed to stop the murder? Find out why it happened? Figure out all the things she didn't know about her family? Save her dead-in-the-present father's life? Fix her relationship with Todd? Is the whole thing her fault, for being an insufficiently perfect mother? Is there any purpose at all?

This is a pretty good book that doesn't make it to excellent. It feels too long, not because there's not enough happening but because there's a lot of verbal fluff. It probably could have been cut by 20-30K words without losing any of the plot or characterization. But the conceit really is clever, and I liked her relationships with her son, a friend at work, and a scientist she drops in on periodically to quiz about time travel. There's also some nice plot twists that are unexpected but make sense - no "actually, Jen was secretly a psycho killer all along" nonsense, thank goodness.

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The Housemaid, by Freida McFadden

Millie just got out of jail, which makes her unemployable. She's young, pretty, homeless, and desperate. So she's delighted when she gets hired as a housemaid for a wealthy family. Needless to say, the family turns out to be very weird and possibly very sinister...

Love the cover and blurb, but they're misleading. The story isn't about Millie learning the secrets of a wealthy family by spying on them, whether though a keyhole or because they don't pay attention to her. She does learn their secrets, but she's in the middle of the action and very much noticed at all times.

This book is widely scorned and also accused of plagiarism. I looked up the book it supposedly plagiarized, and while there are some significant similarities, there's other books that also contain similar scenes and plot points. I could be wrong because I didn't read the one it supposedly plagiarized, but it seems at least as likely that books in the same genre may have a lot in common. It's also a bestseller, not just in general but specifically at my bookshop, which is why I read it.

I can see why it's a bestseller. It's extremely entertaining. I could not put it down. Millie deals with a possibly evil child, a hostile lunatic of a wife, a sexy but probably sinister husband, a sexy but suspicious Italian gardener, and a completely batshit plot that combines gothic with domestic thriller. The twists weren't totally shocking but they were fun, and the ending was very satisfying. I get why people like it. I liked it.

Content notes: Domestic abuse, gaslighting, violence.

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