Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 77

The Solitary, by Lynn Hall

When Jane was five years old, her mother shot her abusive husband, Jane's father, and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. This is backstory. When the book opens, she's seventeen and has left the loveless relatives who raised her, and gone to reclaim her abandoned childhood home and take up her father's business of raising rabbits for meat.

The book is about the process of Jane fixing up the house, putting in a garden, meeting locals, launching her rabbit business, expanding it to raise pet and show rabbits, and coming to grips with her past and family and herself. It's short (120 pages) but feels in-depth. Jane is a likable, interesting character, and her choices and dilemmas and experiences feel very real, from making herself butcher her own rabbits to going on a date and wishing she was home reading.

I love books about solitude. I am a largely solitary person myself. When I'm alone by my own choice and can meet people whenever I want, I am completely content to spend the majority of my time by myself. (Enforced solitude is not something I enjoy. Thanks Covid!)

I was very pleased to discover that The Solitary is in fact a novel about solitude - not only that, but the particular type I like - and makes an explicit case that it's completely fine for a woman to be solitary, and that solitude doesn't have to mean you're alone all the time but can mean that you're alone exactly as much as you prefer. It also explores the difficulties and pleasures of self-reliance and running your own business.

This was so extremely up my alley that it overcame the squick factor of the business being raising rabbits for meat. I liked the book a lot, and recommend it if you're OK with that.

queenbookwench recced this book to me, and it sounded so interesting that I ordered it used. Excellent rec, thank you very much!

The Solitary

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rachelmanija @ 2021-03-11T21:21:00

When Jane was five years old, her mother shot her abusive husband, Jane's father, and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. This is backstory. When the book opens, she's seventeen and has left the loveless relatives who raised her, and gone to reclaim her abandoned childhood home and take up her father's business of raising rabbits for meat.

The book is about the process of Jane fixing up the house, meeting locals, launching her rabbit business, expanding it to raise pet and show rabbits, and coming to grips with her past and family and herself. It's short (120 pages) but feels in-depth. Jane is a likable, interesting character, and her choices and dilemmas and experiences feel very real, from making herself butcher her own rabbits to going on a date and wishing she was home reading.

I love books about solitude. I am a largely solitary person myself. When I'm alone by my own choice and can meet people whenever I want, I am completely content to spend the majority of my time by myself. (Enforced solitude is not something I enjoy. Thanks covid!)

I was very pleased to discover that The Solitary is in fact a novel about solitude - not only that, but the particular type I like - and makes an explicit case that it's completely fine for a woman to be solitary, and that solitude doesn't have to mean you're alone all the time but can mean that you're alone exactly as much as you prefer. It also explores the difficulties and pleasures of self-reliance and running your own business.

This was so extremely up my alley that it overcame the squick factor of the business being raising rabbits for meat. I liked the book a lot, and recommend it if you're OK with that.

queenbookwench recced this book to me, and it sounded so interesting that I ordered it used. Excellent rec, thank you very much!

The Solitary

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The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher

Kara, nicknamed Carrot, loses her house as well as her husband in a divorce. Luckily for her, her sweet eccentric Uncle Earl is delighted to have her move in and help him with his museum of taxidermy and other bizarre stuff. But he has to have surgery, and so leaves her alone in the museum, where she discovers an eerie portal that leads to a corpse and about a million signposts that she should not explore further, or at least not without taking some heavy-duty precautions.

Undaunted, Kara and her gay friend Simon explore further with distinctly lightweight precautions. The portal leads to an utterly horrifying gateway-world, populated with spooky willows, the better-off-dead victims who blundered in from other portals, and Things that eat you if you're lucky and play with you if you're not, and are attracted by you thinking about them. Brrrr!

The part of the book that's set in Willow World overall really worked for me. It's full of vivid imagery, sometimes utterly horrifying, sometimes spooky, sometimes simply mysterious. I could have done without Kara and Simon the gay friend constantly undercutting the scariness with unfunny jokes, but Willow World as a whole is a great invention.

(I call him "Simon the gay friend" because he or Kara remind us that he's gay what seems like every thirty seconds. I mean literally stating that he's gay. There's probably only about four or five times when they joke about how he's not into her because he's gay, but it felt like a hundred.)

They escape Willow World, mostly by pure luck. But it seems like Willow World isn't done with them...

I loved about a third of this book, liked other parts in concept but less in execution (the parts directly involving the museum), and was incredibly annoyed by about half of it. That half is when Kara (and Simon too, but especially Kara) tops her earlier stupid decisions, which can at least sort of be justified by her not knowing she's in a horror novel, with multiple scenes of jaw-dropping stupidity/denial after she knows there's a portal to hell-world in her house.

I had a similar problem with Kingfisher's The Seventh Bride, in which the heroine keeps disbelieving in and denying magic while she's literally being chased by zombies and wizards, but it's even worse in this. I don't think I've ever encountered such a dunderheaded heroine.

Aggravated spoilers below.

( Read more... )

Also, this is very minor and petty, but the way she was fannish frustrated me because it's generic rather than specific. She never names what shows or characters she's into, but just says "This show I'm into" and so forth. I'd have preferred that she named real shows (or made some up); otherwise it just seems pointlessly coy.

There's something about Kingfisher's prose and characters that rubs me the wrong way in both of her books I read. The heroines are so bizarrely set on denying what's literally right in front of them, while wisecracking cutely. Too twee for me.

The Hollow Places: A Novel

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Sun, Snow, Shade

I went to Halle's place for the weekend. It was lovely and sunny.

I returned right before it would have been too late to return!

Book Nook in progress. Click through to see stages. I'm going for a primordial forest look. I'm very pleased with the rock.

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ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH

I just accidentally erased my "book review" tag while attempting to erase the unused tag "book reviews." I must now go back and individually tag thousands of posts, because this seems more pressing than any of my actual jobs, chores, or other productive things I could be doing.

On the positive side, I've been wanting to do more granular tags for romance and some other genres for ages (romance: paranormal, romance: contemporary, etc) so I guess this is my chance.

(You will see a few "book review" tags because I already started.)

ETA: Does anyone but me use my tags at all?

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Dead of Winter (Battle of the Bulls # 2), by T. S. Joyce

Dead, Dead, he's good in bed.

Dead of Winter, the most uncouth of the bucking bull shifters, reveals a sweet and sensitive side that will only be surprising to someone who's never read a T. S. Joyce book. Her heroes talk trash, come on strong, and fight each other a lot, but they are unfailingly kind, gentle, sweet, and supportive with the women they love (and women in general), once you get past their rough defensive shields.

The heroine of this book is Raven, a goth cow shifter raised by humans who does funeral flower arrangements, who was branded at birth and still bears the scars. Dead sweeps her off her feet, gets her to attend an autograph signing with him where she reveals a lot of managerial skill, and takes her to go mudding (driving around spraying your opponent's car with mud) and spend the night with him in his camper while making it absolutely clear in advance that he no matter how dirty he talks, he will 100% respect her right to say no as well as yes.

Dead is a really fun hero, but the star of the book is Raven's inner cow, Hagan's Lace. She is a purebred longhorn who hates everyone and everything, which makes her perfect for the rodeo. (Unlike, say, Zoe Chant's inner animals which are reflections of the characters' truest selves, Joyce's inner animals are "monsters" who are viewed as separate from the people who contain them.) Hagan's Lace only gets a little page time, but it's worth the entire price of the book.

Fuck that man. And fuck that glow stick.

Dead of Winter (Battle of the Bulls Book 2)

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Two Shots Down (Battle of the Bulls # 1), by T. S. Joyce

Bull shifters weren't dainty flower-pickin' wood sprites. They broke, punched, and ruined everything they touched. It was in their nature.

Bull shifters on the pro rodeo circuit!

In a world in which shifters are known to the general public, bull shifter rodeo has become a pro sport in which humans attempt to stay on a bucking bull shifter for eight seconds. The hero is named Two Shots Down and he's the bad guy that the audience loves to hate. Other bucking bulls are named First Time Train Wreck, Dead of Winter (everyone just calls him Dead) and Kiss Your Momma Goodbye.

The heroine’s first husband was a human rodeo rider who was ACCIDENTALLY KILLED BY THE HERO, who returns to rodeo to manage the top three shifter bulls - him included. Two Shots Down was so traumatized by this that he initially refuses to even talk to her. She proceeds to yank out the battery connector to his truck to force him to listen to her pitch over lunch.

He ordered a few chicken sandwiches for himself because he'd always felt a bit squeamish about eating beef. Felt like cannibalism, but some bull shifters were fine with it. That psychopath Dead of Winter ate a medium rare steak dinner every time he placed in the top three and took home money from an event, or so the rumors said.

When they fall for each other, the media pounces and mean headlines proliferate, like

TAKE A LIFE, GET A WIFE

and

DATING YOUR HUSBAND'S MURDERER: WHEN IS TOO SOON?

I've read the first two of Joyce's "Battle of the Bulls" series in two days, and I can confidently say that it's her best since the first two Lumberjack Werebears series. It completely plays to her strengths: a vivid, blue-collar setting that she clearly knows and loves, heroes who are equal parts exaggerated masculinity and hearts of gold, funny gritty heroines, found family camaraderie, and go-for-broke worldbuilding which is bonkers fun within its own self-contained world. If you like your bull shifter rodeo series with lots of details about fans and venues and prize money, this is the series for you.

Two Shots Down (Battle of the Bulls Book 1)

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Tree Castle Island, by Jean Craighead George

I bought this book by the author of My Side of the Mountain because it promised another nature-centric survival adventure, which is something I love, and I finally got around to reading it because it's set in the Okefenokee Swamp, which is a setting I'll be loosely adapting for an upcoming book.

Exactly half of the book is indeed a nature-centric survival adventure set in the Okefenokee Swamp. The other half takes a sudden swerve into a completely batshit other plot, in which multiple batshit plotlines proliferate. This is especially unexpected as the first half of the book had pretty much no plot at all.

Jack, a 14-year-old boy, has been taught an incredible amount of survival and swamp knowledge by Uncle Hamp, who he stays with when his parents are abroad. Hamp leaves him alone for weeks on end and nobody has any problem with this. Like a whole lot of things in this story, this would make at least slightly more sense if the entire story was set about 100 years earlier than it actually is. In fact, the book was published in 2002 and is apparently set around then, or at least in a time when people have cell phones.

Jack paddles off into the swamp to explore. His canoe is attacked by an alligator and he's shipwrecked. He proceeds to deploy a wealth of survival skills that would put Robinson Crusoe to shame. This, which occupies the first half of the book, has plenty of nice nature writing but is just a tad dull as Jack has no notable personality and never seems seriously worried about anything.

AND THEN. I spoil the entire book below the cut but honestly, you probably want to read the spoilers because the best part of the book is the nature descriptions, and the spoiler parts are hilarious.

( Read more... )

What.

Tree Castle Island

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Bats

"Bats, Dr. Casper. Bats."

scioscribe and I decided to watch a pair of B-movies, Bats and The Big Clock. The latter is tonight, the former last night.

"So you're a bat scientist?"

I knew I was in for a treat when before the movie even started, the title card for Bats flipped upside down and roosted. I felt even more certain when attack bats appeared within the first two minutes of the movie. And by the end of the totally incomprehensible yet ineffably delightful opening sequence, in which I think bats attacked a train and then violently ejected a kissing couple from a parked car by hurling them through the windshield which possibly made the car explode, I was in a state of bliss which only increased throughout the rest of the movie.

"Are you saying some kind of bat did this?"

Bats is the movie equivalent of every book in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. It stars Lou Diamond Phillips as a sheriff in a cowboy hat and Dina Meyer as a bat scientist, plus her assistant (wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bat skeleton), a mad bat scientist, and some bat experts from the CDC, all of them turning in reasonably good and 100% committed, straight-faced performances, which makes everything 100% more hilarious. I have no idea how they got through the entire shoot without expiring of laughter, given that approximately 25% of all dialogue consists of the word "bat."

"Bats, sheriff. I work with bats."

Everyone's personality consists of various aspects of their relationship to bats. The good scientist loves bats, wears a bat charm, and has a bat-related backstory. Her assistant is sensibly afraid of bats. Lou Diamond Phillips is stalwart in the face of bats. There is flirting by means of transferring a bat into a cage. Everything is bats, except for the part where Lou Diamond Phillips explains that he's an opera fan so we can have diagetic opera music scoring the sequence where they attempt to bat-proof a high school. It's glorious.

"Bats can be anywhere in a hundred mile radius. That's their range."

Many earnest bat facts are stated, and it is made very clear that these are no ordinary bats. They are omnivorous attack telepathic ultra-intelligent gremlin bats, engineered as weapons because, according to the mad bat scientist, "Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do." No one finds this explanation the slightest bit odd.

"We think this was done by some sort of... bats."

Bats attack cars, plastering themselves all over them like bat mache. They attack Main Street. They stalk people. They hover in mid-air to jeer at people. Sadly, they never actually fly off with anyone, but other than that my desire for bat action was more than satisfied. So was my desire for random explosions. In this movie, things explode at the slightest pretext. In fact, I think the bats might also have Firestarter powers because a lot of things explode and burst into flames that really shouldn't.

"If you blow it up the bats will scatter!"

This movie's entire budget was apparently spent on beautifully designed bat puppets for close-up shots and Lou Diamon Phillips (good choice), so background shots of bats often appear to be a bunch of Halloween-style black paper cut-outs. In fact I am pretty sure that is exactly what they were. We envisioned the crew's kids cutting them out, perhaps with the incentive of getting a bat puppet after the shoot was over.

"We'll freeze their little bat asses."

scioscribe remarked that the film strangely resembled Dante's Peak, but with bats instead of a volcano. We promptly envisioned the blockbuster movie Batcano, about a volcano which ejects bats. But it would not be better than the actual movie, which is a perfect example of what it is.

"Our bats must be infecting other bats with the virus."

You want to talk about leaning into a premise? Bats leans into its premise. Watching it, I can't offhand recall an hour-and-a-half span of time when I was happier.

"You don't want to die choking on no batshit fumes."

Free on Amazon Prime

"Bats."

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Chocky, by John Wyndham

"Why do cows stop?"

Seems like a normal goofy kid question, right? But like many goofy kid questions, it's actually getting at a very complex issue. And the kid who asks it, twelve-year-old Matthew, has a lot more questions along similar lines: "Why does a week have seven days?" "Where is the Earth?" "Why are there men and women?"

But Matthew isn't just a bright, curious kid. He says it's not him that's asking the questions. It's Chocky.

This is the kind of book where even tagging it by genre is a spoiler. But since I always do that, I will say that this is not a horror novel. It's science fiction and it's surprisingly sweet, especially considering how dark most of Wyndham's other books are. Maybe Chocky took him over long enough to write this one.

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