Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 64
November 16, 2021
The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood, by Fermin Rocker
From Goodreads:
Fermin Rocker was born in the East End of London in 1907, the son of Rudolf Rocker, the famous anarchist theorist, activist and disciple of Kropotkin. A book illustrator, and painter, in exploring his origins as an artist, Fermin conjures a moving and colorful picture of his remarkable father, of Anarchism and of the Jewish East End. Heavily illustrated by the author.
This slim memoir is about half perceptive and well-written anecdotes illuminating a very particular time and culture, and about half with the same subject but kind of dry. Possibly the parts I found dry would be more interesting if I knew anything about the anarchists he was describing. The illustrations, unsurprisingly, are lovely.
Fermin Rocker (his real name) was very close to his German father, who was interned during WWI along with Rocker's mother. This, like his account of the war and the splitting of anarchists over the Russian Revolution, is a heavy topic that he treats with delicacy without glossing it over. But just as much of the book is about the things he happened to remember from his childhood, from his childhood habit of peeing down on cops from off his balcony to his father's bedtime stories to the anarchist who gets treated to a lavish meal from an anonymous donor who turns out to be a local Mafia leader impressed by anyone who had two detectives tailing him at all times.
Rocker comes across as a good guy, both idealistic and willing to question his assumptions. Also, based on a photo at the back of the book, he was really hot stuff when he was a young man.
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Fermin Rocker was born in the East End of London in 1907, the son of Rudolf Rocker, the famous anarchist theorist, activist and disciple of Kropotkin. A book illustrator, and painter, in exploring his origins as an artist, Fermin conjures a moving and colorful picture of his remarkable father, of Anarchism and of the Jewish East End. Heavily illustrated by the author.
This slim memoir is about half perceptive and well-written anecdotes illuminating a very particular time and culture, and about half with the same subject but kind of dry. Possibly the parts I found dry would be more interesting if I knew anything about the anarchists he was describing. The illustrations, unsurprisingly, are lovely.
Fermin Rocker (his real name) was very close to his German father, who was interned during WWI along with Rocker's mother. This, like his account of the war and the splitting of anarchists over the Russian Revolution, is a heavy topic that he treats with delicacy without glossing it over. But just as much of the book is about the things he happened to remember from his childhood, from his childhood habit of peeing down on cops from off his balcony to his father's bedtime stories to the anarchist who gets treated to a lavish meal from an anonymous donor who turns out to be a local Mafia leader impressed by anyone who had two detectives tailing him at all times.
Rocker comes across as a good guy, both idealistic and willing to question his assumptions. Also, based on a photo at the back of the book, he was really hot stuff when he was a young man.
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November 12, 2021
The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix
In the world of this book, slasher movie franchises are based on actual, real-world incidents. The sole female survivors of bizarre mass murders get movies made about them, and attend a special "final girls" support group. Hendrix uses very thinly veiled versions of our-world slasher franchises, so Texas Chainsaw Massacre becomes Panhandle Meathook (my favorite variant), Scream becomes Stab, Freddy Kreuger becomes the Dream King, and so forth.
The women have been in the support group for fifteen years, but it's beginning to break up when one of them is murdered. The narrator, Lynnette Tarkington (survivor of two Christmas-themed massacres), is convinced that a killer is stalking them all.
I regret to say that despite an excellent action climax, this book was a disappointment and my least-favorite book by Hendrix.
(My ranking of his books, now that I've read them all:
Tied for # 1 - I loved all three but they're so different and have such different goals that I can't rank them against each other: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, Paperbacks from Hell.
4. My Best Friend's Exorcism.
5. Horrorstor.
6. The Final Girl Support Group.)
Lynnette is basically paranoia and hypervigilance made into a character. Her narration is extremely repetitive and one-note. The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development. The support group is disintegrating and the women are all on the outs when the book starts, so we don't really see what their relationships were like when they were better.
To add to the frustration, we don't learn enough about the other survivors and what they survived to be able to see what's the same and what's a departure from the movies in our world. If you're going to be meta, go all-out and let us see whether or not the equivalent of Sydney from Scream is actually anything like Sydney, and if she too ended up stalked on the set of the movie that was made out of her life.
The meta aspect of slasher movies being based on real massacres was intriguing, but makes the point of the book very muddy. In our world slasher fans are not actually relishing the suffering of real people. They're fans of fiction. Norman Bates was loosely based on a real serial killer, but Marion Crane was not a real woman. In the world of Final Girls, she would have been a real woman who had been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead but survived, and Psycho would have come out just a few years after that happened. The tastefulness and social impact of movies like Scream may be debatable, but Sydney is not a real person whose real friends actually died.
The closest equivalent to the Final Girls slasher movies would be true crime, but that functions in a different way because it is in fact real. So the points made about sexism and so forth are in this weird limbo land where they're true in and of themselves, but they're directed at a target that doesn't actually exist in our world, and in our world is either more benign or a different thing entirely. For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.
Even more egregiously, we barely see the Final Girl support group! It's only in a few scenes, and there isn't a single scene with all six of the final girls together. Most of the book is Lynnette rushing about madly, alone or with other people or occasionally with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions. Every single one of Hendrix's other books gets an A for leaning into the premise, but this one is more like a C.
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The women have been in the support group for fifteen years, but it's beginning to break up when one of them is murdered. The narrator, Lynnette Tarkington (survivor of two Christmas-themed massacres), is convinced that a killer is stalking them all.
I regret to say that despite an excellent action climax, this book was a disappointment and my least-favorite book by Hendrix.
(My ranking of his books, now that I've read them all:
Tied for # 1 - I loved all three but they're so different and have such different goals that I can't rank them against each other: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, Paperbacks from Hell.
4. My Best Friend's Exorcism.
5. Horrorstor.
6. The Final Girl Support Group.)
Lynnette is basically paranoia and hypervigilance made into a character. Her narration is extremely repetitive and one-note. The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development. The support group is disintegrating and the women are all on the outs when the book starts, so we don't really see what their relationships were like when they were better.
To add to the frustration, we don't learn enough about the other survivors and what they survived to be able to see what's the same and what's a departure from the movies in our world. If you're going to be meta, go all-out and let us see whether or not the equivalent of Sydney from Scream is actually anything like Sydney, and if she too ended up stalked on the set of the movie that was made out of her life.
The meta aspect of slasher movies being based on real massacres was intriguing, but makes the point of the book very muddy. In our world slasher fans are not actually relishing the suffering of real people. They're fans of fiction. Norman Bates was loosely based on a real serial killer, but Marion Crane was not a real woman. In the world of Final Girls, she would have been a real woman who had been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead but survived, and Psycho would have come out just a few years after that happened. The tastefulness and social impact of movies like Scream may be debatable, but Sydney is not a real person whose real friends actually died.
The closest equivalent to the Final Girls slasher movies would be true crime, but that functions in a different way because it is in fact real. So the points made about sexism and so forth are in this weird limbo land where they're true in and of themselves, but they're directed at a target that doesn't actually exist in our world, and in our world is either more benign or a different thing entirely. For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.
Even more egregiously, we barely see the Final Girl support group! It's only in a few scenes, and there isn't a single scene with all six of the final girls together. Most of the book is Lynnette rushing about madly, alone or with other people or occasionally with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions. Every single one of Hendrix's other books gets an A for leaning into the premise, but this one is more like a C.
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November 2, 2021
It's a beautiful day
Think I'll do some gardening in my yard.
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November 1, 2021
I saw something nasty in the woodshed
1. Can someone please iconify Darrell's horrified chicken face?
2. What do you think she's just seen, heard, or learned?
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2. What do you think she's just seen, heard, or learned?
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October 29, 2021
It's my birthday!
Today I'm going to drive to Alhambra to get Chinese pastries at Simply Splendid, which does outstanding dan tat, and other goodies in the restaurants and grocery nearby. Then I will return home, pack a picnic basket, and go on a hike.
On Saturday I'm hanging out with Halle. On Sunday I'm either getting my hair done (if Tea Cup has an opening - I'm thinking blue and silver for winter) or prowling around LA.
On Monday my trees get planted!
If you'd like to make my birthday week even happier, here are a few options.
1. Have I ever made a difference in your life, whether large or small, that was significant to you? Let me know what it was!
2. I am always up for fic or art. Here's some fandoms I'm currently into. (It's a Yuletide mini-challenge where you can request Yuletide-eligible treats not in your actual request.) Any request I've ever made in a fic exchange (easily accessible by clicking on my "fic exchange letter" tag) is still valid.
3. I have figured out the post office issue (mostly) so if you have anything physical you'd like to send, please message or email me and I'll explain the address situation.
4. Review something great, terrible, bizarre, or just of interest to me, and link me to it!
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On Saturday I'm hanging out with Halle. On Sunday I'm either getting my hair done (if Tea Cup has an opening - I'm thinking blue and silver for winter) or prowling around LA.
On Monday my trees get planted!
If you'd like to make my birthday week even happier, here are a few options.
1. Have I ever made a difference in your life, whether large or small, that was significant to you? Let me know what it was!
2. I am always up for fic or art. Here's some fandoms I'm currently into. (It's a Yuletide mini-challenge where you can request Yuletide-eligible treats not in your actual request.) Any request I've ever made in a fic exchange (easily accessible by clicking on my "fic exchange letter" tag) is still valid.
3. I have figured out the post office issue (mostly) so if you have anything physical you'd like to send, please message or email me and I'll explain the address situation.
4. Review something great, terrible, bizarre, or just of interest to me, and link me to it!
comments
October 28, 2021
Her Viking Wolf, by Thoedora Taylor
Theodora Taylor is an indie romance writer, a Black woman married to a white man who likes to write interracial romance (most of her books are in the "50 Loving States" series, I assume a play on the landmark interracial marriage case "Loving vs. Virginia"), and wrote a fun book on writing iddy tropes, 7 FIGURE FICTION: How to Use Universal Fantasy to SELL Your Books to ANYONE, in which she memorably referred to the tropes as butter.
I was unexpectedly charmed by Her Viking Wolf, considering that to me, a lot of Taylor's favorite iddy tropes are either anti-iddy (kidnap romance, extreme asshole alphas, A/B/O, knotting) or neutral (white dudes.)
It starts with some unusual worldbuilding. Werewolves can use a few time and space travel portals to be teleported to their true mate, which they often do as much because their own time/place is oppressive as that they want to meet their mate.
The werewolf heroine, Chloe, loves meeting these out-of-time werewolves, which she gets to do because after being abandoned as a child, she was taken in by the pack alpha's family and raised along with the alpha heir, Rafe, to whom she's not engaged. However, she's suspiciously not all that into him (and feels guilty about it). What she really loves is living in her little cottage and running her vlog about being a Black cottagecore homesteader. Rafe does not approve of this.
When a hot Viking werewolf comes through the portal, claims her as his mate, attacks Rafe with a sword, and gets tranquilized, one thing leads to another. By which I mean that for ~reasons~ she is the only person who can give him a sponge bath!
More things lead to each other, and soon Chloe is forcibly married and kidnapped to Viking times. (It's okay, he won't lay a hand on her sexually without permission.) It helps that the reason the hero (unsurprisingly named Fenris) kidnapped her and won't let her return to her own time is that cultural norms are different in his time, rather than him just being an asshole.
Interestingly, Chloe ends up loving Viking times ("an amusement park made up entirely of things she's interested in") and gets along a lot better with Fenris's household than with Fenris himself; both of them need to make some concessions and learn more about each other for the romance to work. It's all surprisingly sweet.
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comments
I was unexpectedly charmed by Her Viking Wolf, considering that to me, a lot of Taylor's favorite iddy tropes are either anti-iddy (kidnap romance, extreme asshole alphas, A/B/O, knotting) or neutral (white dudes.)
It starts with some unusual worldbuilding. Werewolves can use a few time and space travel portals to be teleported to their true mate, which they often do as much because their own time/place is oppressive as that they want to meet their mate.
The werewolf heroine, Chloe, loves meeting these out-of-time werewolves, which she gets to do because after being abandoned as a child, she was taken in by the pack alpha's family and raised along with the alpha heir, Rafe, to whom she's not engaged. However, she's suspiciously not all that into him (and feels guilty about it). What she really loves is living in her little cottage and running her vlog about being a Black cottagecore homesteader. Rafe does not approve of this.
When a hot Viking werewolf comes through the portal, claims her as his mate, attacks Rafe with a sword, and gets tranquilized, one thing leads to another. By which I mean that for ~reasons~ she is the only person who can give him a sponge bath!
More things lead to each other, and soon Chloe is forcibly married and kidnapped to Viking times. (It's okay, he won't lay a hand on her sexually without permission.) It helps that the reason the hero (unsurprisingly named Fenris) kidnapped her and won't let her return to her own time is that cultural norms are different in his time, rather than him just being an asshole.
Interestingly, Chloe ends up loving Viking times ("an amusement park made up entirely of things she's interested in") and gets along a lot better with Fenris's household than with Fenris himself; both of them need to make some concessions and learn more about each other for the romance to work. It's all surprisingly sweet.
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October 26, 2021
The Emancipation of Veronica McAllister (Middle Falls Time Travel), by Shawn Inmon
Veronica McAllister lived a long but largely unfulfilled life. Her marriage was unhappy, and though she loved her two daughters, her awful husband got custody in the divorce and she ended up estranged. She dies at age eighty wondering if that was all there is...
...and wakes up in the 1950s, in her senior year in high school. Veronica has a chance to do everything differently. But if she changes things too much, will her daughters never exist? If she marries a different man, will that make her happy? Would riches? Would a career? Can she fix her relationship with her mother? Will she ever get tired of eating burgers at Artie's diner?
Veronica is a great character to spend time with. She's a very loving person who's conventional in some ways and not in others, not particularly curious about the whys of her time travel but mentally flexible and creative enough to try a number of different ways to get things right, and primarily interested in good relationships and personal fulfillment. She loves the 1950s in a lot of ways (though not the restricted rules for women) and is refreshingly non-neurotic.
Veronica's story actually made me cry at certain points - not because it's sad, because it's very moving. It's all about love and relationships - some romantic, some familial, some friendships.
I didn't get to this book for a while because we meet her briefly in Joe Hart, and she's completely uninterested in helping him out and is about to commit suicide! This turns out to be caused by extremely specific circumstances and isn't what she's like normally. And for anyone who's read others of these books, this one contains zero Universal Life Center.
I've hit a good streak with these books - this one promptly rocketed to one of my top favorites in the series. Shawn Inmon should write more from female POVs. He's very good at it.
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...and wakes up in the 1950s, in her senior year in high school. Veronica has a chance to do everything differently. But if she changes things too much, will her daughters never exist? If she marries a different man, will that make her happy? Would riches? Would a career? Can she fix her relationship with her mother? Will she ever get tired of eating burgers at Artie's diner?
Veronica is a great character to spend time with. She's a very loving person who's conventional in some ways and not in others, not particularly curious about the whys of her time travel but mentally flexible and creative enough to try a number of different ways to get things right, and primarily interested in good relationships and personal fulfillment. She loves the 1950s in a lot of ways (though not the restricted rules for women) and is refreshingly non-neurotic.
Veronica's story actually made me cry at certain points - not because it's sad, because it's very moving. It's all about love and relationships - some romantic, some familial, some friendships.
I didn't get to this book for a while because we meet her briefly in Joe Hart, and she's completely uninterested in helping him out and is about to commit suicide! This turns out to be caused by extremely specific circumstances and isn't what she's like normally. And for anyone who's read others of these books, this one contains zero Universal Life Center.
I've hit a good streak with these books - this one promptly rocketed to one of my top favorites in the series. Shawn Inmon should write more from female POVs. He's very good at it.
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October 25, 2021
Bridge Over the Chicken Kwai
First off, the chooks are OK.
It's pouring rain today. How nice, I thought. I shall bake bread and make Mayak eggs, I thought. I fed the chooks and they seemed fine, so I went back in and started everything.
The rain was really coming down so I went back out to make sure it hadn't blown over their food or anything. And that is when I discovered that the run had flooded and they were strutting around in four inches of water!
I madly rushed about laying down scrap lumber so they had something to stand on, and then tried to lure them into the coop, which is dry as it's well above the ground. Nothing doing. Not even mealworms could lure them in. It wasn't bedtime and they knew it.
I was soaked to the skin, so I went back in, took my second shower of the day, and sent an emergency text to the guys who built the run to see about installing a drain. And soon I will have to go out again to make sure those little feathered nitwits had the sense to get in out of the rain and aren't hypothermic.
Generally I love keeping chickens but NOT TODAY.
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It's pouring rain today. How nice, I thought. I shall bake bread and make Mayak eggs, I thought. I fed the chooks and they seemed fine, so I went back in and started everything.
The rain was really coming down so I went back out to make sure it hadn't blown over their food or anything. And that is when I discovered that the run had flooded and they were strutting around in four inches of water!
I madly rushed about laying down scrap lumber so they had something to stand on, and then tried to lure them into the coop, which is dry as it's well above the ground. Nothing doing. Not even mealworms could lure them in. It wasn't bedtime and they knew it.
I was soaked to the skin, so I went back in, took my second shower of the day, and sent an emergency text to the guys who built the run to see about installing a drain. And soon I will have to go out again to make sure those little feathered nitwits had the sense to get in out of the rain and aren't hypothermic.
Generally I love keeping chickens but NOT TODAY.
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The Witch's Garden, by Ruth Chew
A brother and sister notice strange goings-on in the previously unoccupied garden next door, and decide to investigate. What follows is an utterly delightful cavalcade of wish-fulfillment, humor, small-scale adventure, and charm, as they fly on magical sunflower petals, shrink to the size of ants, and confront a dragon.
If you, like me, read this book about thirty years ago and have been trying to remember it ever since, it's the one with the magical mint leaves and the shrunken kids stuffing themselves on chocolate cake crumbs.
An absolute delight, one of Chew's best. The illustrations are completely magical. I especially like Susan dangling from a weed to get the attention of the cat menacing her brother, the cat's eyes crossing as she tried to focus on the girl jumping on her nose, and the salamander-like dragon.
The Witch's Garden is included in a collection with two other Chew books. I haven't read The Witch's Cat but The Witch's Buttons is great.
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If you, like me, read this book about thirty years ago and have been trying to remember it ever since, it's the one with the magical mint leaves and the shrunken kids stuffing themselves on chocolate cake crumbs.
An absolute delight, one of Chew's best. The illustrations are completely magical. I especially like Susan dangling from a weed to get the attention of the cat menacing her brother, the cat's eyes crossing as she tried to focus on the girl jumping on her nose, and the salamander-like dragon.
The Witch's Garden is included in a collection with two other Chew books. I haven't read The Witch's Cat but The Witch's Buttons is great.
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