Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 96

My New Book: Defender Raptor

I have a new book out! It's the result of all that circus research I was doing, and I had an absolute blast writing it. It has flying kittens, backstage hijinks, hurt-comfort, food porn (several readers have testified that they ran out and bought Girl Scout cookies after reading), and a surprise magical pet (hint: he's blue).

If you don't want to buy from Amazon, you can buy it directly from me by emailing me at Rphoenix2@gmail.com. If you can't afford it, email me and I'll send you a free copy. If you want it in paperback, that will be possible soon.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

The problem is, it is his circus. Literally.

Merlin grew up in a traveling circus where all the performing animals are shifters. Not to mention that it's a front for an international crime ring. (It's a long story.) And that's just the beginning of his secrets... all of which he's determined to keep from his bodyguard team of misfit shifters, and desperate to hide from his mate.

Too bad that his circus stole her priceless family heirloom... and she's hired him to get it back.

Dali just got mugged by a flock of pigeons. And you thought you were having a bad day.

Her Navy career blew up in her face, pigeon shifters stole her grandmother's necklace, and the cops won't even take her police report. On the plus side, an adorable flying kitten just adopted her, and the man she hired to retrieve the necklace is the sexiest guy she's ever laid eyes on. Sure, he turns into a velociraptor, but everyone's got baggage.

But what she doesn't know can hurt her...

Defender Raptor (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 2)[image error]

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Make Her New (Kaid Ranch # 2), by T. S. Joyce

This one was a misfire for me, surprisingly because I really enjoyed the first.

The heroine, Sadey, just found out that her husband Dallas had been married to her schoolfriend Maris the entire time he was dating her. I am very confused by how she could have not figured this out for literally years given that Dallas and Maris lived together and owned a ranch together!

She dumps his sorry ass and apologizes to Maris in a bar. Sadey expects Maris to hate her, but she’s actually very nice. Dallas comes in and is a dick. Maris is there with her mate and the werewolf brothers, Hunter and Wes. Hunter goes absolutely nuts on Dallas and has to be dragged away and shoved into a truck before he turns into a wolf in public!

Wes orders Hunter to stay away from Sadey, since she clearly makes him insane. Hunter does, but writes her a letter by cutting and pasting magazine letters, which she calls a “serial killer letter” but is charmed by, and writes him a letter in return which he has her read aloud because he reads so slowly/poorly. This is actually pretty cute.

In the previous book, Hunter came across as the quiet, good-natured, scholarly one, as opposed to his brother Wes who’s a lady’s man, hot-tempered, and kind of a dick. In this book, he has a total personality change and is portrayed as having a cognitive disability caused by brain damage from birth, which means he talks and acts like a werewolf Forrest Gump. He can barely read or write, only Joyce had previously set up that he was the one who read all the books to help Maris survive so he inexplicably has all these books that he reads and understands, but he can also barely read a letter and has an extremely limited vocabulary.

It turns out that Hunter is dying of a broken heart which has magically turned his blood black and given him wounds that won’t heal, because his brother left him for dead in the previous book. He nevertheless has sex with Sadey. Their whole courtship is weird as it ping-pongs between being so cute it’s twee and the angst of him dying, which makes the whole thing just bizarre. Especially as no one really does anything about him literally dying for ages even though they all know about it for most of the book.

Finally Wes decides to fix him, and Sadey moves across town. The entire emotional crux of the story, in which Hunter is healed, happens off-page and without the heroine’s involvement. Wes and Hunter reconcile, oh yeah and Sadey and Hunter are an item, yay happy ending! And then there’s a hook for the next book, which is more interesting than anything that happens in this book.

The book had a lot of noticeable typos, missing periods, the hero’s name not capitalized, etc. It clearly wasn’t proofread at all.

The hero really did not work for me. He’s very passive and under his brother’s thumb. The cognitive disability was portrayed like older books write “simple” characters. He’s big and strong and nice, but the whole package was really, really not my romantic fantasy. And the heroine comes across as childish and immature.

The climax not only happens off-page, but isn’t about their relationship at all, which is weird in a romance. Genre romance is about the romantic relationship; there can be other important relationships as well, but they can't displace the romance. Even if reconciling with your brother is hugely important, normally the heroine would also be present for that scene, or have talked the hero into doing it, etc.

On the plus side, Maris and Sadey's relationship is nice. Joyce usually goes out of her way to portray friendships between women, and manages to do so here even despite using the "most women can't be shifters" trope that normally works to prevent that.

Make Her New (Kaid Ranch Shifters Book 2)[image error]

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Steal Her Heart (Kaid Ranch # 1), by T. S. Joyce

Normally prologues suck, but this book starts with a good one: Maris’s horrible husband dumps her while texting his girlfriend, in between putting her down and informing her that he’s taking all their expensive and necessary ranch equipment to use on his girlfriend’s ranch. Oh yeah, and he was cheating on her all along. Bye!

One year later, Maris is struggling to keep her ranch going. Wolves have been slaughtering her cattle, and she’s forced to give up on her dreams and put her beloved herd up for auction. Enter surly, sexy cowboy Bryson, who buys it and then drives the lot of them right back to her ranch. Maris, unwilling to be pitied or take charity, stuffs a calf into the front of her truck and drives it right back to the ranch where Bryson works as a hired hand!

This has a distinctly realistic/gritty tone (typical for Joyce). The hero has cow shit on his boots, cows go to the slaughterhouse, and werewolves piss all over the heroine's property. (The hero says this is like texting for them!)

The hero is a bit macho/controlling and initially comes across as a dick to the heroine, who slaps him. But his heart is clearly in the right place, and he backs off the assholery very quickly. He's having trouble controlling his grizzly bear, and unlike some of Joyce's books where "oh no, I'm losing control!" is said but not shown, here he actually rampages and slaughters cattle at the ranch he's working at. (This shows how much the werewolf brothers who own the ranch value him, as we've seen how valuable cattle are.) He has a REALLY tragic backstory.

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Maris, the heroine, is a typically likable, realistic, down to earth Joyce heroine with the exception of one truly bizarre bit, which is that she grabs her tits when startled. I... really don't get this.

It's a well-done, satisfying book. I especially liked the interactions with the werewolf brothers, who help Maris take sweet revenge on her evil ex-husband and save her life after she gets bitten. Joyce is great at rough-around-the-edges found family.

However, warning that I read the second book in the series, which I'll review tomorrow, and pretty much hated it. So if you haven't read Joyce before, don't start here. Start with Saw Bears or Grey Back Bears.

Steal Her Heart (Kaid Ranch Shifters Book 1)[image error]

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Tintagel, by Paul Cook

An 80s science fiction novel which is a significant jump in quality from The Alejandra Variations. It has some major flaws but I enjoyed it a lot.

In a near-future world, everything sucks in basically the same ways it currently sucks, but more so. War is rampant, the air is often unbreathable due to pollution, and gangs have taken over large parts of Los Angeles which already extra-sucks due to an attempt at releasing pressure on the San Andreas fault making earthquakes much more frequent.

A new disease, Liu-Shan Syndrome, causes people who get emotionally caught up in music, especially if their mood is melancholy, to vanish and be transported to a dream world of their own creation based on their mental state and the mood evoked by the music. These worlds tend to sad/flawed, but not outright horrible; they’re most typically a fantasy of a better world that has some kind of nasty drawback.

Francis Lanier is a Stalker, one of the rare people who can vanish and return at will, and can also track people into their dream worlds and bring them back.

Can I just say how much I love this premise? I love this premise. I wish we saw even more of the dream worlds, but we see enough to be satisfying on that level. They’re very beautiful and/or eerie, and always vivid.

Cook also reviews classical music, and you can tell that he loves and understands it very well. That adds a lot to the story, in which music is literally transporting, and trying to protect yourself by not listening to it isn’t any kind of solution.

The plot the premise is wrapped around is pretty decent, and it does eventually address the central question the premise brings up, which is “With a world this screwed up, why would you even want to go back?”

It has much better female characters than The Alejandra Variations, which admittedly is a low bar: the first female President of the US (she’s pretty cool), Lanier’s assistant who he loved but married his best friend, and the actress he falls for who he also never actually gets anything going on with. They’re crush objects, but they’re important to the plot in their own right and have their own agendas that don’t involve fucking him, so that’s good.

I was, unfortunately, more bothered by racism than sexism in this one. It’s low-key and of the non-malicious variety but still. The prologue features a “Chinaman” (it’s otherwise unobjectionable), there’s a bit in a dreamworld with flying Shawnee that is embarrassing in multiple ways, etc.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

At the very end, we see that the street sign that used to say Dallas Road now reads Baba Avenue. This is signposted as being an Important Sign, though of what is unclear as Baba has never been mentioned in the book before. DA DA DA DUM!

Or should I say, BA BA BA BUM!

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The Alejandra Variations, by Paul Cook

A fairly typical batshit 80s sf novel by a dude, ie, virtual reality, nuclear war, dream states, drugs, and luscious women throwing themselves at the hero. And then at the end it does something amazingly and hilariously not typical of 80s sf (thank God) though now that I’ve read two of Cook’s books I suspect that it is typical for him.

This book was fairly terrible and incoherent, not to mention incredibly male-gazey, and the plot was dumb. However, it had some very compelling/eerie individual images and scenes, plus some pretty cool conceits, which kept me reading.

Nicholas Tejada is mildly psychic and employed by a government agency as precognitive. They plug him into a massive computer and feed him data, and he enters an incredibly vivid virtual reality hallucination which combines the data and his precognitive talent to construct a scenario foreseeing terrorist attacks.

The scenario also, unavoidably, includes his own personal preoccupations. He typically dreams that the danger is a nuclear bomb because he’s afraid of them, even if the actual incident he’s foreseeing is a sniper attack. This works out because he just needs to be close enough to point other resources in the right direction. For instance, in one vivid, unsettling scenario he dreams of a nuclear bomb walking out of the sea in Bombay; the idea of “attack from the sea” is sufficient for others to find the actual plot, which is a dirty bomb on a boat.

He also constantly dreams of his beloved ex, Rhoanna. She is beautiful and beloved and his ex, and that is literally all we ever learn about her as a person. This is pretty typical of the depiction of women in the book, though to be fair the men aren’t fleshed out much either.

Cut for plot spoilers. ( Read more... )

Commitment to premise: Very solid. It promises a dude tripping through various dystopian futures, and it delivers.

Cook is or was a Baba-lover, but I never met him. He wrote eight novels, one of which was unpublished until the advent of e-publishing, when he put it out himself. It’s called Karma Kommandos, which after reading two of his books somehow did not surprise me.

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Chocolate Box Reveals

I got matched to scioscribe again, who hopefully is not sick of me. 

She had so many wonderful prompts, I initially had ambitions of writing her multiple stories in multiple fandoms, but life intervened and I only managed one, for the inspired prompt of seeing the Dark Tower ka-tet from Oy's point of view. This was a challenge to write, both because I needed to figure out billy-bumbler speech and perceptions, and because I did my usual thing of picking some weird complex structure and then banging my head against it. But I ended up very happy with how it came out, and also got the chance to use the tag "Original Billy-Bumblers."

The Bad Thing by edonohana . Dark Tower - Stephen King.

There was a bad thing in the woods. Oy could smell it.

I got THREE wonderful gifts!

Like Flint and Like Fire by sheliak . The Entropy Effect - Vonda N. McIntyre.

A stranded away mission gives Jenniver a chance to figure some things out.

The Jenniver Aristeides/Snnanagfashtalli story of my dreams, full of tenderness and hope and lovely sfnal details.

I also got two original stories about children discovering tiny magical creatures in their own backyards. Both are absolutely full of delightful details of tininess and the obsessions of childhood, of magic interacting with the mundane world.

Rory and the Dragon by cirque . An abused child brings a plastic dragon to life, with far-reaching ripple effects.

Small Magic is Everywhere by silex . A boy obsessed with horses discovers unexpected magic.


I will hopefully have more recs later - I have been busy and barely had a chance to dip into the collection beyond my own gifts. 

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The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Now THIS is the book I’ve been waiting for from Tartt after the frustrating disappointment of The Little Friend. This is an old-school sprawling epic about trauma, grief, art, love, denial, and much, much more. After a slow start, I ended up extremely emotionally engaged and look forward to requesting it for Yuletide.

If you liked The Secret History, you will probably like this; if you didn’t, you probably won’t. Though the plots and most of the characters are completely different, the narrative voice is similar and there’s a hard-to-pin-down feel that’s also similar. If Richard Papen drove you up the wall, Theo Decker probably will too.

When the book begins, Theo is a Manhattan teenager living with his beloved mother after his abusive father skipped town, to their relief. His life is shattered when his mother dies under extremely traumatizing circumstances, propelling Theo into a series of different milieus to which he takes his troubles with him.

I read this mostly unspoiled, which was a very rewarding experience, so I’m putting the rest of the plot below a cut. Above the cut, I will just note a few things which readers might want to know about in advance.

Content notes: The dog lives. There is significant gay/bisexual content though a lot of the usual questions that brings up (“Canon or subtext?” “Do they survive?” “Is it a happily ever after?”) are hard to answer due to spoilery/complicated in-book circumstances. There is a lot of addiction, suicidality, and non-sexual child abuse/neglect.

Also, there are Russian characters who I am going to guess are probably not very accurate as I cannot recall a single instance of Russians I know thinking a book by a non-Russian author was accurate.

osprey_archer just reviewed this; if you’ve read it, feel free to jump into the discussion in her comments.

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The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)[image error]

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Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

A thoughtful, well-researched, and compassionate look at care, both medical and otherwise, for living and dying in old age.

Gawande looks at the history and current state of his subject in America, with some forays into India, which is where his family is from. Unlike most people who pontificate about the good old days and how things are done elsewhere, when he writes about that, he's speaking from both actual history and personal/family experience.

The easy answer to "why is old age horrible in America nowadays" is that old people used to be cared for at home by their families, which was the right way to do it, but nowadays the family is broken/young people are selfish/capitalism is bad, so they're pushed into horrible and unaffordable nursing homes. Well... the part about horrible and unaffordable nursing homes is true. But the rest is more complicated.

Historically, not all old people had families, or families who could care for them; the ones who didn't died in the streets, or in horrifying poorhouses or debtors' prisons. So "the family can and should do it" has never been a complete answer.

Gawande presents an example from his own family of what in some regards is the ideal state of at-home elder care. His great-grandfather lived to be 103, was helped with the care he needed but nobody stopped him from doing what he wanted, and died on a business trip! But, since Gawande is looking at real people rather than imaginary ones, he can also see the problems with this: the old man was still bossing his family around way past the point when they wanted to be able to make their own decisions, and there were a bunch of family problems due to that.

When old people are cared for at home by their family, it often means that the younger people don't get to live their own lives. In Gawande's case, this had the biggest effect on sons who wanted independence, but historically it mostly means that women (typically the youngest daughter) spend their entire lives devoted to a parent. The parents don't necessarily want to live with their kids, either.

He's not saying that all generations living in the same home in perpetuity is always bad, just that it's not necessarily the ideal or best option.

Gawande then explores how assisted living and nursing homes are frequently horrible and treat old people like prisoners, then looks at a number of case studies of homes for old people that are not like that, from the original assisted living that was the ideal of what that should mean, to a nursing home that moved in four cats, two dogs, and one hundred parakeets to cheer things up, to an apartment building with a very devoted manager.

He makes a strong and moving case for the needs of the elderly for both care and independence/choice, including choices that are risky. People shouldn't lose their rights just because they're old.

He also uncovered some fascinating research on how people prioritize their lives. Young people tend to invest in the future, doing things that will produce rewards later, like going to college, working at jobs they don't like to save money, etc. They also tend to look outward: traveling, making new friends, etc. Old people tend to focus on the present: spending time with family and existing friends rather than making new ones, enjoying daily activities rather than special occasion ones.

This is true across cultures, and is also pretty obvious. But Gawande looks at research that digs into why. Conventional wisdom is that old people act that way because their accumulated life experience teaches them what's really important. But it turns out that in fact, it has to do with the perception of how much time you have. When young people get life-threatening illnesses, they start behaving and prioritizing like old people. When you ask old people to imagine what they'd do if their life was extended by twenty years past what they really have, they start prioritizing like young people.

When you think your time is limited, you focus on the present, current loved ones, and daily pleasures. When you think you've got plenty of time left, you focus on the present, meeting new people, and doing new things. Old people aren't wiser in that regard, they're just making choices that make sense under their circumstances - the same as young people are doing.

Note that this isn't all people all the time, obviously. It's just about overall social trends: young people as a group are more likely to behave in X ways, not "all young people are future-focused."

The book also explores end of life care, but I knew more about that going in, and so was more struck by the parts about living in old age rather than dying in it.

Absolutely perfect cover. If you can't see it well, it's a blade of grass (embossed, on the physical book) casting a shadow.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End[image error]

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Driver’s Ed, by Caroline B. Cooney

Driver’s Ed: The only life and death course in school.

With that tagline, I was expecting the kids to crash and accidentally kill someone. Had I looked at the cover, I would have realized how they actually actually kill someone, which is by stealing street signs as a lark… including a stop sign on a dark road. Oops.

Like Flight 116 is Down! this book leans into its premise and is better than it needed to be. Much of it reads like a high school-set noir, in which a careless action causes horrifically spiraling consequences, while the guilty party writhes and sweats inwardly as the investigation heats up around them.

It’s also more emotionally affecting than I expected, with vivid supporting characters who all have their own motivations and agendas--the bored driver's ed teacher who doesn't bother to learn his students' names, the politician father, the anguished husband of the woman who was killed, the student who is terrified of driving and so misses out on the whole thing. In particular, the heroine’s relationship with her younger brother is unusual and rewarding.

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Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household

An odd, gripping thriller from 1939 which begins with the unnamed hero getting hurled off a cliff after being tortured, and raises the stakes from there.

He is the most British hero ever, even by the standards of books written around that period; he muses on class, he endures with a stiff upper lip, he doesn't want to bother other members of his club by appearing in a disheveled state (due to having fled for his life after nearly getting killed!) but he takes the qualities of that hero type to a bizarre extreme. So much so that I began to suspect him of being an unreliable narrator, even though I’ve read so many books in which he wouldn’t be; this turns out to be partly but not entirely correct.

The reason for the cliff was that he was hunting in an unnamed European country when he got the idea that it would be an awesome challenge to see if he could stalk its unnamed dictator with his rifle, just for the fun of it; he understands, but is annoyed, that the dictator's bodyguards think that was not his actual motive.

Given the publication date, I assume the dictator is Hitler, though I could be wrong. If so, I can see why he and even his country went unnamed, but the protagonist is too, which makes that seem more of literary significance. If so, I’m not sure what it means; maybe an effort to make the themes feel more universal?

Note: Contains cat death.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Leaning into premise: Yes, definitely, regardless of what you consider the premise to actually be. It works on the level of straightforward thriller, and it also works as a weird psychodrama with mythic overtones.

I hope some of you have read this because I’m really curious what you made of it.

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Rogue Male (New York Review Books Classics)[image error]

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