Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 7

Rest Stop, by Nat Cassidy

A musician driving to visit his dying grandmother stops at a gas station in the middle of the night, and makes the unwise decision to use its restroom. Next thing he knows, he's trapped inside it by someone who's come up with a lot of inventive ways to fuck with someone inside a locked room, from the outside of the room.

This was a very mixed bag.

A+ for the parts that are "I'm trapped in a gas station bathroom by a psycho:" it feels just like a nightmare, and is riveting.

B+ for Abe being Jewish, and how his bad relationship with his awful grandmother, a genocide survivor, comes into play in the story. I like that it's there but it could have gone deeper.

D for the irrelevant, annoying flashback storyline about Abe crushing on a woman who ends up dating another guy in the band.

D for story logic. Major elements of the story are just nonsensical.

(  Read more...  )

C- for the ending. (  Read more...  )

I very rarely say this, but this was a novella that should have been a novelette. The last chapter and the entire annoying subplot with the woman he failed to ask out should have been cut.

Also, I cannot believe I'm suggesting adding anti-Semitism, but an anti-Semitic psycho would have been really thematically on-point.

This was a lot of fun to read in paperback because of excellent graphic design elements.

Content warnings: Extreme gore, insects/spiders/snakes, insect/spider/snake harm, generational trauma.

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The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

This is actually a sequel to both the book and the TV show The Handmaid's Tale, rather like the movie Doctor Sleep is a sequel to both Stephen King's book and Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining.

The Testaments takes place about fifteen years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale (the book), and is narrated by three characters with three intersecting plotlines. One is Aunt Lydia, in Gilead. One is a young woman in Gilead, Agnes. One is a teenage girl in Canada, Daisy.

Aunt Lydia recounts how she ended up in Gilead - she was a judge who was tortured and broken along with a lot of other professional women. This is the part that feels the most like a genuine sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - it's horrifying and visceral and insightful.

However, a big part of what was so good about the book The Handmaid's Tale was how small-scale it was: rebellion was inner thoughts and scratchings on a closet wall. In The Testaments, rebellion is YA dystopia-style secret missions.

Cut for spoilers that are revealed very early on. (  Read more...  )

Agnes is the daughter of a Handmaid adopted by a Commander and his wife. The most interesting part of her life is that there is genuine love between her and her adoptive/kidnapper mother. But Agnes herself is kind of a blank slate. She's writing from the perspective of having turned against Gilead but still defending it a little bit, which sounds more interesting than I actually found it. She ends up becoming a trainee Aunt under Aunt Lydia.

Daisy is a shallow, annoying teenager whose parents are murdered, whereupon she discovers that she is more important than she ever knew. If you've seen the TV series you know who she is. I did not like her, and I REALLY did not like her storyline, which read very much like a YA dystopia circa Divergent and all the others where some teenage girl discovers that she's super important to the rebellion despite having no actual qualifications. She is sent to Gilead on an incredibly important mission despite being literally the worst possible person to do it, and also despite it being the sort of thing that any random rebel could have done. She proceeds to be the worst secret agent ever, but (  Read more...  )

The whole book is beautifully written on a prose level, unsurprisingly. But only Aunt Lydia's narrative is compelling. Agnes doesn't have a whole lot of personality other than being brainwashed and then de-brainwashed, and Daisy is the kind of YA heroine that makes people stereotype YA books as being shallow and bad. And I just didn't like (  Read more...  )

I felt like The Testaments was unsatisfying both as a sequel to the book (nowhere near as good) and the TV series (depressing when you consider (  Read more...  ) That being said, Ann Dowd is going to absolutely kill it in the TV version.

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Book Review Poll

View Poll: #32766

Have you read any of these? What did you think?

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Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata

A famously strange Japanese novel about a woman obsessed with convenience stores. I read this largely because I love Japanese convenience stores, forgetting that it's famous for being strange, not famous for being an ode to convenience stores. It is, indeed, quite strange.

Keiko Furukura was always odd. She doesn't see the world the way other people do, and this was extremely noticeable from when she was a child. Adrift in a world she didn't understand and which didn't understand her, she found her niche when she started working at a convenience store. There she found that she could fit in by imitating other employees in a way carefully calculated to make her seem normal and likable, and has a rather regimented but happy life. She eats all her meals from the shop, and ponders how her entire body now consists of the shop.

Despite disapproval and side-eyeing from her family and childhood friends, who think she should get married and be normal, she's basically content with her life until a horrible incel starts working at the store at the same time that social pressures on her reach a peak.

Keiko seems very obviously autistic, but also, well, odd. Or possibly it's just the author writing an odd book. Keiko has a unique way of describing ordinary things in a defamiliarizing manner, so they seem creepy or gross; I was uncertain whether I was supposed to think that was just Keiko being Keiko, or if I was supposed to think that actually, modern life is bleak and horrifying. I liked Keiko and rooted for her to get rid of the incel and spend the rest of her life unmarried and working at the convenience store, but I'm not sure if her staying at the convenience store was supposed to be good (she defies social pressure to conform and instead lives in a way that suits her) or bad (she's still masking and possibly the convenience store is a symbol of modern consumerist emptiness and her wanting to merge with it shows how inhuman society is?)

There's something about the way the book is written that makes a reader feel on uncertain ground, and wonder if they're either missing something or interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. I went on Goodreads to see how other people interpreted it, and found an interesting split between people who enjoyed the dark comedy aspects and people who thought it was bleak and depressing and that anyone who found it funny was mocking autistic people. I did often find it funny. Keiko dissing the mango-chocolate buns and making the incel sleep in the shower with his feet sticking out was hilarious.

I gather that Murata's other books are exponentially weirder.

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Something in the Walls, by Daisy Pearce

GREAT cover. (Look closely.) I'm having a run of "the cover is better than the book lately."


Mina, a just-qualified child psychologist, gets an unusual first patient: a teenage girl who might be a witch.

Mina was in a grief group to cope with the loss of her teenage brother, who had an immune deficiency that doomed him to die young, and died when he was fourteen. In the group, she met Sam, a journalist whose young daughter had died. Both of them hoped there was life after death, and Mina even thought she had a photo of her brother's ghost. So when Sam got assigned to cover a possible haunting-by-witch in the tiny village of Banathel, he gets Mina to come with him to rule out psychological causes.

In what will not be the last of her questionable professional moves, Mina and Sam move in with the family of Alice, the girl who might be a witch or be possessed by the ghost of a witch. Alice is sure that a witch is haunting her via the walls and the creepy fireplace in her bedroom, and that the witch allows her to see ghosts. Alice really does know a whole lot, including about dead people, that she has no way of finding out, and this has attracted a bunch of groupies who lurk outside, trying to get Alice to contact their dead loved ones. This is all complicated by the fact that her financially strained family would definitely benefit from publicity that might bring money, so they have a motive to fake the haunting.

The rest of the Banafel locals, who keep hag-stones to ward off evil, also believe in the haunting but are a lot less happy about it. "Burn the Witch" graffiti appears. In an intensely spooky scene, Sam finds his dead daughter's shoe in a fireplace. And then people who bully Alice start dropping dead...

Up to about the 75% mark, this book was very enjoyable, spooky folk horror. It had some issues but they weren't enough to spoil my enjoyment.

Issues: Mina's poor professional ethics and methods. Mina's irritating refusal to entertain the idea that anything supernatural could be happening even when there's really no other possible explanation, which doesn't match with the entire reason she came which was that she supposedly wanted to believe. Why it never occurs to anyone to move Alice out of the haunted bedroom to see if she improved. Why it never occurs to anyone to check the chimney to see if there's 1) a natural cause for the weird noises emanating from it, 2) a witch.

That sounds like a lot but the actual haunting and creepy superstitious village bits were so good. Halfway through, I ordered it off Ingram for my bookshop, planning to rec it to my folk horror customers.

Immediately upon finishing it, I rushed to Ingram to delete it from my cart.

This was a very frustrating book. Up until the last ten pages or so, it was engrossing, atmospheric folk horror - a subgenre I quite like. Then I got to the ending, which was so bad that it retroactively ruined the entire book for me. It was an absolutely unnecessary "clever" twist that made the whole book make no sense in retrospect. It also completely failed to explain or resolve what was going on with Alice and the witch, which was the main plot of the entire book!

Angry spoilers! (  Read more...  )

WHAT ABOUT ALICE AND THE FIREPLACE WITCH???

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All That's Left in the World, by Erik J. Brown

After a covid-informed pandemic, two teenage boys - one gay, one who hasn't yet figured out that he's bisexual - meet, slowly get to know each other, and go on a post-apocalyptic road trip.

I LOVED this book. There's so much about this story that I've seen done badly so many times, and it not only did all those things well, it did all sorts of other things well that I wasn't even looking for.

The romance is the slowest of slow burns, full of pining but very understandably so - they both have extremely good reasons for not talking about their feelings. Andrew thinks Jamie is straight because Jamie thinks he's straight, so he doesn't want to make Jamie uncomfortable or mess up their friendship by confessing a crush, especially given that they desperately need to stick together for their own safety. Jamie's feelings develop slowly, and he's uncertain what they mean and if Andrew feels the same way. I ended up incredibly invested in their relationship. So, no stupid misunderstandings or inexplicable refusals to just fucking talk to each other.

They both have dark secrets that are actually dark, and so it makes sense that they worry that the other might dump them or feel differently about them if they confess them. (I'm often annoyed by supposedly dark secrets that turn out to be something like "I like light bondage" or "I got in argument with my mom and then she got hit by a cement truck.")

Andrew is pretty funny and enjoys joking with friends, and he and Jamie initially bond by joking. But they both sound like teenage boys who enjoy joking with each other, and Andrew is funny like a teenage boy can be funny. There's no incessant quipping that sounds like each joke was carefully crafted by a professional writer. In a related matter that is often done badly, they each take turns narrating, and they sound like two different people.

And! The pandemic and the pandemic landscape are unexpectedly interesting. They wander through a series of post-apocalyptic tropes - looters, the nice on the surface but actually terrible community, dark tunnels, lone psychopaths - and every single one is well-done and plausible.

Very interestingly, the pandemic itself is different from any I've ever seen in fiction. It's basically a superflu, but one which spread fairly slowly, so things were slowly falling apart long before the whole landscape got depopulated. Also, the response was distinctly covid-like in terms of government denial and uselessness. As a result, though the world is extremely depopulated, there are very slim pickings at shops because supply lines fell apart quite some time before the plague burned itself out.

Anyway, this was great. It had a perfect balance between a very slow-burn friendship-to-romance, character development, and post-apocalypse action. Very suitable for teenagers, but I adored it as an adult. A sequel came out recently that I haven't read yet.

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The In-Between Bookstore, by Edward Underhill

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

(  Read more...  )

I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.

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Last night I dreamed...

...that a fantasy novel by Jay Williams had just been reprinted and I could carry it in my bookshop. (In reality, Williams wrote the Danny Dunn books and a wonderful, out of print children's novel, The Hero From Otherwhere. The book in my dream does not exist.)

Thrilled, I rushed to order it, as I remembered loving it when I was a kid. It was about a thirteen-year-old girl and a twenty-year-old man who become penpals, then travel to a fantasy world together. As that premise sounds potentially a bit sketchy, I decided to re-read it so I could confidently say, "I know what it sounds like, but it's a beautiful story of friendship and absolutely nothing sexual or romantic happens between them."

I settled in for the re-read. Here's the first sentence of chapter two:

Reading each other's letters, they both had plenty of orgasms.

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What the Woods Took, by Courtney Gould

A dark fantasy about a group of teenagers who are kidnapped from their homes and forced to participate in wilderness therapy, only to encounter actual monsters in the woods. GREAT premise!

Devin is a lesbian teenager who's been processed through a series of often abusive foster families. After she steals some money from her current foster parents, they have her kidnapped by a wilderness program supposed to straighten her out. She's dragged into the middle of the woods with four other teenagers whose parents have enrolled them because they did drugs, stole money, or were generally rebellious or sad. A pair of guidance counselors lead them on a very long hike through the woods, during which Devin gets in an intense love/hate relationship with one of the other girls. Then their counselors disappear...

For-profit wilderness therapy/survival camp for "troubled teenagers" is a real thing in America, and they really do kidnap teenagers with their parents' permission - and payment. It's abusive and unregulated, and a number of kids have been killed at those camps.

The book begins with an author's note similar to my paragraph above. But once the teenagers are violently kidnapped, their forced hike through the woods proceeds with surprisingly little abuse beyond the fact that they're forced to be there. There's genuine wilderness training and self-esteem-building activities. I don't want to sound like "just" being kidnapped and held against your will isn't abusive by itself, but these programs are typically very abusive in other ways too. I felt like the awfulness of these programs was inexplicably downplayed despite the author apparently writing the book specifically to expose them!

The beginning part, before the counselors vanish, is fine but feels a bit slow. The two boys in particular are not very differentiated, and I kept mixing them up. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is the monsters themselves. What they turn out to be is unexpected and SO COOL, and I wish there was more of it. The book overall is about 70% teenagers interacting, 30% monsters/teenagers vs monsters. That would be fine if I was more into the teenagers, and it wasn't like I wasn't into the teenagers. They're fine. But for me, not more than fine.

Overall I would say this was a perfectly fine book that I didn't love. Except for the part that really focused on the monsters. That, I loved. But that's only about 10% of the whole.

So what are the monsters? (  SPOILERS!  )

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A pair of brief nonfiction reviews. Both books could have been a feature article.

Sweet Nothings, by Sarah Perry.

Ostensibly a book about candy, organized by color. Actually, each entry is an anecdote or set of musings about her life, often only very tangentially connected to the candy in question, plus a paragraph or so about the candy IF THAT. Very annoying bait-and-switch if you were hoping for a book that is actually about candy, and the essays aren't interesting enough to make up for it. The prose is accomplished, but the book as a whole feels a bit pretentious and airless. Too much grief and polyamory, not enough candy.



More Than a Doll: How Creating a Sports Doll Turned into a Fight to End Gender Stereotypes,by Jodi Bondi Norgaard.

An account of the author's creation of a sports-based doll and attempt to market it to toy companies; unsurprisingly, she encounters a ton of resistance to the idea of a doll for girls based on sports rather than on sex, mothering, or fashion. Mildly interesting but could have been a feature article.

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