Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 46

Dear Yuletide Writer

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write 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, story lengths, unusual formats, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, landscape in general, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, and animals. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

( General DNWs )

( Cass Neary Series - Elizabeth Hand )

( Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander  )

( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )

( Space Trilogy - C. S. Lewis  )

( Shadows of the Apt - Adrian Tchaikovsky )

( The Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt )

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The Last, by Hanna Jameson

A random group of people are trapped in a Swiss hotel when most of the world is destroyed in a nuclear war. While everyone struggles to survive and stay more-or-less sane, Jon, an American historian who was there with a conference, keeps a journal and investigates the murder of an unknown child.

The child's body is found inside a locked hotel water tank. The one doctor on the premises does an autopsy with the tools she has available, which doesn't reveal much but does show that she was probably killed around the time when the world got nuked. A lot of people left at that point, so her murderer could no longer be present. But Jon starts doggedly investigating, mostly as a distraction from, well, everything but particularly his probably-dead wife and children back in America, and soon starts getting the impression that someone still present in the hotel doesn't want him to learn the truth.

I saw this on a list of modern mysteries riffing off And Then There Were None, and was intrigued by its premise. I like mysteries in which the usual trappings of detection are either unknown or unavailable.

I had WILDLY mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it's extremely page-turning. I read the entire thing before bed, staying up too late to finish it.

It does function as a murder mystery, and a reasonably fair one in that I was able to guess the murderer and several key aspects. (The main thing I missed was the motive.) However, as a murder mystery and particularly as a riff on And Then There Were None, it misses one of the key things that makes the genre enjoyable, and while not technically a cheat is still annoying.

( Extremely spoilery )

The post-apocalyptic aspects are pretty well-done. It does not fall into the typical cannibalism rapefest tropes, but is plausibly about a set of devastated, shocked people struggling to survive under very difficult circumstances. It uses modern technology and social media, and how people use it and miss it, very plausibly and well.

What I did not like, apart from the spoiler above:

The main character. He was literally the least interesting person in the entire book. He's such a stereotype of both the main character of a literary novel about a white guy and an example of "he's the main character because he's a white guy."

He's a historian but his actual field is mentioned literally once. He has an affair with the only other American in the hotel, an annoying woman who's clearly a Trump voter though the name Trump isn't used and is obsessed with guns, and gets unsurprisingly defensive when people point out that Unnamed Trump caused the end of the world.

There's a supposedly shocking revelation late in the book that he had a loveless marriage and he and his wife were both cheating, and I literally hadn't realized this was supposed to be a surprise because I'd assumed that all along.

The hotel inhabitants isolate themselves a lot, and Jon isn't friends with the ones who are more social. They never really feel like a society, which is really missing one of the most interesting aspects of the premise. If you read literally any Agatha Christie book with a bunch of strangers stuck in a house, you'll know what everyone thinks of everyone and how they function as a group. This book is missing that.

There's a bunch of eerie/spooky elements that are set up but then nothing comes of them, including...

The hotel is huge and it's repeatedly mentioned that people could be living in it without any of the other residents knowing! Nothing ever comes of this.

One of the characters might be haunted by a creepy little boy! Nothing ever comes of this.

The hotel has been the site of multiple bizarre deaths and a serial killer! Nothing ever comes of this.

And then there's the climax. I actually really liked the climax... right up until the aggravating final page.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Things you'd expect given the premise that aren't actually in the book: No nuclear-specific horrors like radiation sickness, as everyone's too far away for that. It does centrally involve child death, but there's no on-page child harm. There's an attempted rape, but it's off-page. Cannibalism is discussed as something that's probably happening elsewhere, but does not appear on-page.

Things that do appear on-page: violence, drugs, and suicide.

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My New Zoe: Winged Wolf Vet

Guest-starring my chickens Darrell, Sally, Bill, Clarissa, Mary-Lou, and Gwendoline Mary Lacey. It's a romcom with magical animals and a whole lot of elements you will probably recognize if you are reading this.

And it's a bestseller!

Best Sellers Rank: #128 in Kindle Store. Yes. I have the 128th best-selling book out of ALL the books on Amazon. (Yesterday I had the 102nd best-selling book.)
#1 in Paranormal Werewolves & Shifters Romance
#1 in Psychic Romance

Who do you call when a winged wolf crashes through the roof of your chicken coop? Shifter Vets!

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Leslie’s house was already falling apart before mythical animals started plummeting out of the sky. Now she’s got a hole in her chicken coop, an adorable (and impossible) cub hiding in her kitchen, and her nosy neighbor barging in to search for cryptids.

Not to mention the naked man locked up in her chicken run. Who up until five minutes ago was an enormous, unconscious, injured wolf… with wings.

Shifter vet Bryan is not having a good day. First the magical cub he’s trying to help runs away from him. Then someone put a bullet through his wing. And now he’s woken up in a chicken coop…looking straight into the eyes of his one true mate.

Who just saw the one secret he can never let anyone discover.

Finding love in these circumstances seems impossible. But Vets for All Pets - and the magical creatures its shifter veterinarians care for - has a lot of experience with things that don’t seem possible…



If you would like a copy directly from me, please email me at Rphoenix2 at gmail and I will send you an epub and payment instructions. If you would like a free copy, just let me know and you can have one.

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The Body in the Library, by Agatha Christie

"Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I've never known a case in real life."

The strangled corpse of a young blonde woman is found on the floor of the very respectable Mr. and Mrs. Bantry's library. They've never seen her before in their lives.

Mrs. Bantry promptly asks her friend Mrs. Marple to come over. Mrs. Marple says she's happy to provide what comfort she can. Mrs. Bantry replies, "I don't want comfort. But you're so good at bodies."

This book was enjoyable and a very good fair-play puzzle, but only sometimes hit the delightful fun of Murder at the Vicarage. (My favorite parts were the glee with which Mrs. Bantry approaches the bizarre murder early on, and the truly unexpected secret attached to the young man who recently moved to town and annoyed everyone by partying hard and carousing with blondes.)

( Read more... )

Christie scale: MEDIUM levels of CLASSISM and RACISM.

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The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie

Everyone hates Colonel Protheroe, the magistrate of the sleepy English village of St. Mary's Mead. When he's found shot to death in the vicarage study, everyone without an alibi is a potential suspect. Miss Marple to the rescue!

Christie's first Miss Marple mystery, which I'd never read before. It's told in first person by the Len Clement, the vicar, a sweetly eccentric middle-aged man with a sweetly eccentric much younger wife, Griselda. They are a match made in oddball heaven. Len is the perfect narrator for a book that's as much a comedy about quirky people in a small village as it is a murder mystery.

There's a hilarious running theme in which the cops and other authority figures condescend to Miss Marple because she's a dear old lady who knows nothing of the grimdark realities of real life as seen by men doing manly things, and she condescends to them because they're dear sweet innocents who know nothing of the dark realities of human nature as seen by a lifetime of watching people in a small village.

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This is Miss Marple's first murder, and it was very heartwarming to see her belief confirmed that her longtime observation of human nature could allow her to solve an actual murder.

An extremely charming book. The murder mystery is very solid, with a number of moving parts that all fit together plus one genuinely startling twist.

For -ism levels in Christie books, I will be using a Christie-specific scale, ie, are they low, medium, or high for Agatha Christie. Picture a flip-sign like "Fire danger today is LOW/MODERATE/HIGH/EXTREMELY HIGH/RUN FOR YOUR LIVES."

Christie scale: MEDIUM-LOW levels of CLASSISM.

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RRR (2022 Movie)

When a young girl from a Gond tribe is kidnapped by British assholes to be a slave, the tribe's protector Bheem goes to Delhi in disguise to rescue her. There he befriends Rama Raju, an Indian police officer in the Indian Imperial Police (a tool of the British Raj), who has no idea that the fugitive he's searching for in a Javert-like manner is no other than his new best friend. They proceed to have the most epic bromance to ever bromance, or ever epic for that matter.

Bheem and Rama Raju are based on two actual historical Indian revolutionaries who fought British colonial rule. And when I say "actual historical," I mean that in the same sense that Hamilton and Inglourious Basterds are based on actual historical events. Only more so.

I don't want to spoil anything because this movie has plenty of good twists and is best enjoyed unspoiled. So I will just say that it involves revolution, dance-offs, secret identities, religious/mythical references, the greatest flogging scene in the history of cinema and possibly everything ever, a leopard getting thrown at a soldier (it's OK, it's CGI), and about ten of the greatest and craziest action sequences I've ever seen. You know the saying "It goes up to 11?" This entire movie goes up to 12. Like every scene goes up to 12. And yet it's enthralling rather than exhausting.

This batshit epic is by S. S. Rajamouli, who created one of my all-time favorite movies, Baahubali. (Two of my all-time favorite movies if you count parts 1 and 2 separately.) I saw each part twice in theatres and multiple times at home, in Telegu, Tamil, and Hindi. I am happy to report that RRR, though a different genre and tone, is also wonderful, epic, over the top but in a way that works, charming, bonkers, and, I am already sure, infinitely rewatchable.

Content notes: Violence, colonialism.

Spoilers are fine in comments. You don't need to rot13. Don't read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled.

RRR is available on Netflix.

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My Yom Kippur

So, that did not go as planned.

My plan: drive down to LA while meditating on appropriate topics, attend virtual services with Halle and her son, and go to the beach to do tashlich, which we'd both missed on Rosh Hashanah.

What actually happened:

I was about one hour into the drive-and-repent when I spotted a crying woman on the phone beside a broken-down car. The car was in a quite dangerous spot, on a sort of dirt median between a very busy freeway entrance and a very busy freeway. Cars and huge trucks were zooming past at high speeds. It was in an area with the general vibe that there was not much there and what there was, was sketchy. It was also about 90F, with very high winds.

I would have pulled over, but by the time I saw her, I was too many lanes away to get over, and there was no place to pull over but behind her and no exit coming up. As I drove on, I thought that probably she'd be fine, she did have a phone and could call roadside assistance, someone else would surely pull over, and it would be a big hassle to get to her.

On the other hand, on this day of all days it seemed like I ought to put in the effort.

So I got off the freeway, got back on the freeway in the other direction, got off the freeway, and got back on so I was now behind her. This took about fifteen minutes and I was expecting to see either someone else or roadside assistance there by then. But no. She was still there.

So I pulled over and asked if I could help. She said she'd been there for two hours and I was the first person to pull over!

She gave me a brief of her situation, which was that her tire had exploded so forcefully that many of the nuts were gone. She had a spare tire, but no way to change it as it needed the nuts. She'd called her insurance, which had promised to send someone. The someone no-showed, so she called back. They promised to send someone else, who also no-showed.

While I was listening, she called her insurance again. They said she had failed to respond to a text they'd sent, so they were starting the entire process all over again. New ETA: 90 minutes.

I suggested that she call a local tow-and-repair place. She did so, and while we were waiting, I took her to a gas station so I could gas up and she could get a cold drink. She returned with two large, water-beaded, iced sodas, one for her and one for me. I have never in my life seen anything so delicious looking. That was the point where I had to explain that it was Yom Kippur and I couldn't eat or drink till sundown. (She'd also bought me a tasty-looking little cake.)

We returned to her car, and soon the supposed tow-and-repair representative showed up. He was not driving a tow truck. He was in a tiny little car, and he took one look at her tire and said he didn't have the right size of nuts so there was nothing he could do.

I said, "Can you go back to the shop and bring them? Or bring a tow truck?"

He said, "Uhhh, there's actually no shop or tow truck, it's just me and what I have in my car."

I said, "Do you know of any ACTUAL mechanics here who have an ACTUAL shop and tow truck?"

He suggested a place. We called them. They assured us they'd dispatch a tow truck with the correct nuts and be there in 45 minutes. We waited. They did not show up.

Throughout this, I was texting Halle dispatches and updates. This was the point where she said "SORRY Rachel, I have to take my son to the beach." I texted back, "I will cast my sins into a mud puddle."

We called the tow place. They didn't answer.

The woman I was with had been on a trip and was returning to her home in the valley, and I was also going to the valley. I'd offered to give her a ride if she was willing to ditch her car, which she understandably hadn't wanted to do. At this point, she said, "FUCK IT DRIVE ME BACK TO SYLMAR PLEASE."

So we moved all her stuff into my car, which happened to be hugely overstuffed so that was a bit complicated. And hot.

Just as we'd finished and I was LITERALLY about to pull out, a roadside assistance guy pulled up behind us. He was technically a cop but one of the ones who just rescues people and tags abandoned cars. He tried and failed to get the spare tire on.

He advised us that he could get the car towed, but it would go to an impound lot and be expensive to get back. If we left it with the intent of coming back and retrieving it, he would note that down and not do anything else to it as long as he was on shift for the rest of the day. After that, it would be up to whoever took over. So if she could get back by 7:00 PM, she could take the car and go.

We thanked him, abandoned the car, and I drove her to Sylmar. I then returned to Halle's place, where I discovered that they had not gone to the beach after all. By then it was about two hours till sundown. We did tashlich in her pool, lit a yahrzeit candle and said the names of the dead, and watched some of the service on live video.

At one point, in the middle of prayers, a woman shrieked, "SOMETHING'S SMOKING!" and rushed off. I assume she put out whatever it was, because service continued and we later saw her passing out snacks afterward.

The horns blew, and we broke our fast with latkes, salad, bagels with lox, and sparkling cider as the kosher wine turned out to be undrinkable. After her son went to bed, we talked into the night.

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Post for Yom Kippur

I am not terribly observant, to be honest. But I do try to observe somewhat.

The fast is the part people tend to think of first. (I only do it sort of (I drink some black coffee in the morning, or else I am sidelined for the whole day with a splitting headache, which is not conducive to doing anything else)). The other part is that it's a day to grieve for people who have died and think of people who are in trouble. And it's the Day of Atonement.

Part of that is asking forgiveness from people you have wronged or hurt. The idea is to admit that you did damage to the person you hurt, take ownership of it, and accept that forgiveness may not be granted.

But ideas have changed about asking for forgiveness. It's very fraught. Unless you're a Jew talking to another Jew on Yom Kippur itself, it's more likely that even asking is going to come across as an unwanted imposition, and create a burdensome sense that you have to accept the apology and forgive. I also have a tendency to be a bull in a china shop and barge in where I'm not wanted, and I'm aware of and working on that. So I'm not going to do individual apologies unless you are literally a Jew I'm going to see on Yom Kippur, which is zero people reading this. (Though if you would like an individual apology, feel free to contact me!)

With that in mind, I apologize to everyone reading this who I have wronged or hurt or wasn't there for in the past year. For most of you reading, "not being there for" is the big one. I've been very bad at being in touch with people, online and off, in this past year. Sometimes that's as small as reading a post (or a fic) that I know someone would really appreciate a reply to and not commenting, or as big as letting a friendship drift away by failing to keep in touch. I'm going to spend tomorrow repenting of that, and I will try my best to do better next year.

If you observe, may your fast be easy.

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I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy

Here is a letter Jennette McCurdy got from her mom.

Dear Net,

I am so disappointed in you. You used to be my perfect little angel, but now you are nothing more than a little SLUT, a FLOOZY, ALL USED UP. And to think—you wasted it on that hideous OGRE of a man. I saw the pictures on a website called TMZ—I saw you in Hawaii with him. I saw you rubbing his disgusting hairy stomach. I KNEW you were lying about Colton. Add that to the list of things you are—LIAR, CONNIVING, EVIL. You look pudgier, too. It’s clear you’re EATING YOUR GUILT.

Thinking of you with his ding dong inside of you makes me sick. SICK. I raised you better than this. What happened to my good little girl? Where did she go? And who is this MONSTER that has replaced her? You’re an UGLY MONSTER now. I told your brothers about you and they all said they disown you just like I do. We want nothing to do with you.

Love, Mom (or should I say DEB since I am no longer your mother)

P.S. Send money for a new fridge. Ours broke.

Relatable.

Jennette McCurdy's mother wanted to be an actress, so she made her daughter into one. It worked out about as well as you'd expect.

Jennette's mother was a cancer survivor up until the point that she failed to survive; she made a video of her cancer diagnosis and treatments and made the kids watch it every weekend to remember how amazing she is. She whips out her "stage four cancer survivor" status on every possible occasion, to agents, directors, waiters, and security guards. And that is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

She pushes Jennette into acting, which she hates and is temperamentally unsuited for, to the point where she gets the second lead on a Nickelodeon show, iCarly. (Reading this book, I learned that the show was not about an AI named Carly, but three teenagers who make a sort of early vlog.) Jennette makes friends on set, but the creator is a creepy emotional abuser and fame is both her worst nightmare and feeds her worst tendencies.

Based on the title, I expected this book to be about how much Jennette hated her mother. In fact, the problem--well, one of them--was that she loved her mother. They were extremely enmeshed and living each other's lives, and up until her mother died of cancer, Jennette was desperate to please her. The disillusionment came later, when she finally took a breath and looked out at the wreckage of her life.

There's awful stuff in this book but it's also very funny. Jennette has a distinctive, sharp, very modern narrative voice. The chapters are structured like little short stories or TV episodes, often with punchlines. She sees two therapists, and remarkably manages to capture the actual experience of therapy very well. I laughed a lot, but in solidarity. Though her terrible relationship with her mother is bad for pretty much the exact opposite reasons and in the opposite ways that my relationship with my parents was bad, I found it very relatable.

It also has some excellent surprises I don't want to spoil.

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I listened to this in audio read by the author, which I definitely recommend.

Thanks for the rec, mildred_of_midgard !

Content notes: Child abuse, bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, cancer, mental illness, child labor, gross descriptions of vomit which I fast-forwarded.

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Biggles and the Black Peril, by W. E. Johns

"Great Jumping Jupiter!"

"Black Peril" has nothing to do with race. The main villain has a black beard and in fact is nicknamed Blackbeard. I thought I'd better put that up front.

I started this because I thought it was the one with the secret island hideout, but it turned out to actually be the one that introduces Ginger. Biggles titles are even worse than Dick Francis titles when it comes to remembering which title goes with which book. They should just be called "The One Where Biggles Gets Homemade Dungeon Cake" and "The One Where Biggles Rescues Von Stalhein From A Gulag" and "The One With the Giant Squid."

Algy and Biggles are flying in their amphibious plane, the Vandal, when they are forced down by bad weather and, in a quite beautiful bit of descriptive writing, discover an underwater landing strip. This is part of a smuggling operation, and Biggles accidentally stows away on the smugglers' experimental plane. He makes a good effort to pretend to be some random person who knows nothing about flying, but is betrayed by his own engraved cigarette case which not only says "RAF" but also contains a photo of him in goggles. Things escalate from there.

In one of this book's multiple kidnappings followed by escapes, Biggles run straight into Ginger, a teenage runaway. Hilariously, Ginger turns out to not only be an aspiring pilot who's run away to join the RAF, but is a Biggles fanboy. He's delighted to get a chance to get to know Biggles and Algy and take part in an adventure; for their part, Biggles and Algy are not terribly perturbed by letting a runaway teenager tag along with them on dangerous adventures to other countries. This makes more sense when you remember that Biggles and Algy were both Ginger's age when they joined the RAF and were sent off to a war they were unlikely to survive.

Ginger is a fan of American movies and peppers his dialogue with borrowed slang. For the first part of the story, he's clearly seeing himself as a movie hero. Here he is with a gun, yelling at some bad guys in the distance.

"Stay back there!" yelled Ginger, "or I'll drill you like - like a... now what the dickens do they drill people like?" he growled. "Colander - that's it." Then, raising his voice, "I'll drill you guys into a colander - two colanders," he bellowed. Then, to himself, as he retreated down the drive, "That doesn't sound right to me; I'll have to look it up in a book."

Later in the book Ginger actually does shoot someone, very justifiably but also point-blank and by accident. In an understatedly heartbreaking scene, he tells Biggles how shaken he is and Biggles talks to him in a brisk but sensitive manner that suggests that he's had the "so you killed someone for the first time" conversation a number of times before.

This was a very fun book overall and Ginger was delightful. I didn't even miss the secret island hideout.

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