Sunyi Dean's Blog, page 3
August 15, 2020
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Cautious 4 stars
Well written and engaging. I found myself turning pages earnestly, and I loved the ecological beauty present in the story. I loved the themes of loneliness and isolation and the quiet exploration of trauma, the damage it does to us through generations.
Structurally, though, I wish the story had been better staggered against the murder mystery, and as a wholly subjective preference I found the ending very predictable. I say subjective because it was emotionally satisfying and that will be plenty for many folks, but it wasn’t much of a reveal.
Side note, the POV did funny things (a strange kind of not-quite-omni) and that was a little jarring for me at first.
View all my reviews
July 17, 2020
THE CHIMERA CODE by Wayne Santos
The Chimera Code by Wayne Santos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this novel (received a free copy from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review).
Santos sometimes bills himself as a straight-up action guy whose books are full of explosions, but that’s doing himself a disservice. Although Chimera Code is certainly an action-oriented novel with plenty of explosions, there really is quite a lot of depth to some the issues being presented and tackled throughout the storyline.
Everything about how a futuristic or fantasy world (depending on your genre) is constructed says a lot about the ideologies an author carries with them, and taps into their own sense of ethics. When authors say they “don’t put politics in their books” that is, in my experience, code for “I want the current status quo but with flashy trappings.”
Chimera Code is progressive and subversive in lots of subtle ways, from how thoughtfully the nonbinary character is handled, to how the world economy has shifted away from being North American centric (culturally and otherwise).
So if you want your gripping cross-genre action thriller with a healthy, well-made dose of not-perfect-but-genuinely-progressive-society, and you really like cyberpunk settings, this book will be great for you 
June 26, 2020
DEAD ASTRONAUTS by Jeff Vandermeer
Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The cover of this book (I won’t call it a novel) must have a mention. It’s gorgeous to see in person, it’s gorgeous to see in pictures, it’s gorgeous to touch.
Note above that I feel I can’t call it a novel. The book reads like poetry, like a novel length work of prose verse. Rhythm, imagery, repetition, and thematic overtures take precedence over the story. There is a narrative, but it is spun fine and cast wide like a net.
Borne (the previous book set in the same multiverse post apocalypse) followed a tight character arc. Yes there was crazy biotech mutant apocalypse stuff, yes a floating golden bear the size of a building, and enormous monster warfare, but at its heart Borne was a story of found family: a young couple struggling to navigate the changes in their relationship caused by the addition of a “child” (in this case, a blob monster child that grows to the size of cities) while dealing with their own baggage (enormous vast trauma). It is a personal story with wild, multi hued surrealist trappings.
DEAD ASTRONAUTS is very far from Borne. There is no close character arc, no diving into a layered emotional journey. If anything, it is almost an esoteric tribute to angry cosmic magical foxes who want to eliminate humanity for fairly good reasons, the landscape populated by dead astronauts and lost women who drift disconsaltely in and out of the narrative.
Is it good? Sure.
Is it a novel? Not… Really.
Is it a sequel? Sort of?
Would I recommend it? Yes, but not as an entry point to Vandermeer. Best to read Borne first, or better yet, Annihilation and THEN Borne. It may also help if you enjoy poetry / free verse / novels in verse.
June 13, 2020
New Publication: This Song Is Dedicated To the End of the World
This story took almost 6 months of picking on to finish writing, and another entire year to finally sell. At nearly 7k words, it was too long for most genre fiction zines, and its saleability was probably not helped by my choice to use Second Person perspective. Also, it’s more of a character study than anything else; minimal plot. I’m really selling it here, no doubt!
Still, it’s only one of two stories (of any kind) that I completed last year, and my first sale of 2020, coming on the heels of finally finishing PAPERFLESH. Maybe it’ll bring good luck.
I’m sorry to say that it’s not free to read as Prole is a subscription-only print magazine, but if you check back in a year’s time I’m sure it’ll be up on this site eventually.
April 13, 2020
April 8, 2020
Love Curse 2.0
The following short story was read out on BBC Radio Leeds on April 7th, 2020. You can find a clip of that audio recording here:
https://blindnycteris.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/love-curse.mp3
Otherwise, the full text of the story is available below.
This is a story I wrote sometime in 2019 when I was struggling to finish anything at all, even flash pieces. I had been lucky with shorts–the scant handful I’d written had all sold–and I’d started to feel the pressure of maintaining that streak. Which in turn created a kind of perfectionist-driven writer’s block.
Love Curse was about me giving myself permission to write something that wasn’t deep or pretty or even particularly sellable. Just to finish a damn story, and get back on track with writing more broadly.
Ironically, Love Curse did find a home in the end, albeit a very unusual and unexpected one. But maybe that’s a lesson in itself?
###
LOVE CURSE 2.0
The prince fell asleep on the second day of spring, after returning from his honeymoon. At first, the princess wasn’t concerned. Their trip had been exhausting, and she was tired, too. But after a few days, when the prince still hadn’t woken, she summoned the physicians.
“I think the prince is sick,” she said. “I cannot wake him. Could it be a curse of some kind?”
Both palace physicians bent over the prince to examine him closely with their stethoscopes and thermometers.
“It is certainly a curse,” said the senior physician at length. “A Love Curse, to be precise. Tell me, milady—have you angered any fairies? Specifically, fairy godmothers.”
“Well, I do have a fairy godmother,” said the princess, dubiously. “But we’ve always got along very well. I can’t imagine she would do this.”
“Hrm, rule that out, then.” The junior physician adjusted his glasses. “Regardless, I am afraid there is only one cure: True Love.”
“You mean I just have to kiss him?” the princess said.
The physicians exchanged glances. The senior one said, “Well, these are progressive times. A simple kiss won’t do it anymore. This is a Version 2 Love Curse – you’ll have to demonstrate your love. Not just signal it with a kiss.”
The princess stared at them in bewilderment. “Don’t I do that already?”
“Well. You can always do more, can’t you?” said the junior physician, with a meaningful look.
***
No one knows how to love like a princess.
This one dedicated herself to the prince’s care by changing his bed, singing him songs, holding his hand, showering him in loving kisses. This went on for months, while her belly grew and grew (because it had been a very fruitful honeymoon, as they say.)
As her due date drew near, the princess’s family came by to visit.
“What is the matter with your husband?” said her mother.
“He’s sleeping,” said the princess. “It’s a curse. But if I love him enough, he’ll wake.”
“Ah!” said her mother. “Your cousin Annabelle had a husband like that. Shall I see if she still has that list of hers, for all the things she did to prove her love?”
“Oh, yes,” said the princess. “That would be very helpful, thank you.”
Cousin Annabelle’s list, as it turns out, was not very helpful. The princess had already tried all of that, and more.
But the princess didn’t have time to be despondent. Her due date had arrived, and with it two twin boys. She devoted herself to their care, though never at the expense of her beloved. Anyone could nurse a child, afterall, whereas not everyone could love a prince.
***
Years came and went, while the princess poured all her effort into the prince. If only she could love him enough, he would wake. If only she could do enough, he would be cured.
Eventually, desperate and ashamed, the princess contacted her fairy godmother.
“Asleep, is he?” The fairy godmother curled a lip at the prince as she stepped through the castle doors. “Curse still going strong, then?”
“You… know about it?” the princess said, suspiciously.
The fairy godmother settled herself on a cushion. “Oh yes. I’m the one who cursed him.”
“You what?”
“I cursed your husband,” said the fairy godmother, patiently. “Because he was a vain, lazy, and difficult boy. I should know—I attended his christening, read his fortunes, and babysat him every alternate Saturday until he was sixteen. You deserved so much better than this marriage, dearheart.”
The princess stared at her, speechless.
“My darling girl,” said the fairy godmother, “it was never meant to be spiteful. I was simply trying to help. Think of it this way: if your husband was that much work to love while asleep, how much work would he have been while awake?”
THE END
April 7, 2020
Writing in troubled times
At the time of the Coronavirus lockdown, the biggest success to report is the continuing functioning of the Circle on-line. Ian Harker’s “Places of Poetry” workshop successfully moved to Zoom and proved a great success. The first remote Manuscript Evening was held on Monday, April 6th. Hosted by Graeme and chaired by Lucie, with no less than 18 members appearing on screen at the same time, it worked very well . The other groups are continuing to function too. Writers are irrepressible people.
The adjudication evening for the poetry competition had to be cancelled. The brief from judge Mark Connors was for a Persona Poem and the full results are now on the Competitions Page. Many congratulations to Gail Mosley, Andrew Lambert and Joanna Bucktrout as the main winners, and also to Sue Ryder, Adelle Kirk and Sunyi Dean. Hopefully we can celebrate and hear your poems at an…
View original post 128 more words
April 4, 2020
Review Removed
Lesson learnt, folks! Never write reviews for local poets, especially when you’re in love, or at least infatuated. It will only make you cringe later down the line.
Removing reviews is unusual and unprofessional for me, but sometimes one’s mental health matters more.
And now back to your regularly scheduled blog
March 31, 2020
THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The last time I read a Camus book was 17 years ago, and it was a life-changing experience. Ever since then, I have studiously avoided Camus’ writing in case his other novels were similarly affecting.
But with the onset of Covid-19 and so many people in my literary circles reading or re-reading the Plague, plus with it being Camus’ best known and most commercially successful work, I thought this would be a good time to give it a go.
Fortunately, The Plague wasn’t life-changing for me. Merely very good!
The Plague is straightforward but philosophical; stark yet nuanced; distant, but still emotive. And it is utterly prescient for our times, despite being published in 1947. His explanations of human behaviour can absolutely be applies to how people have behaved regarding Covid-19; I wonder if he would be amused or saddened to know that.
Camus writes always with such stark simplicity. I don’t mean simplicity to say that his concepts are low-brow, but more that his statements are concise and accessible, and with hindsight amazingly obvious; you wonder why you never noticed before the things that he is pointing out.
But the secret to that, of course, is that Camus’ understanding of life and other people was extraordinarily good. He had a depth of insight that cut straight to the heart of things, and enabled him to hone in on the “heart” of the matter.
Towards the end, Camus linked the concept of the bubonic plague with a wider human issue, a metaphorical and intellectual plague that society suffers from (which he describes as a kind of lack of empathy, cruelty in-built into the system.)
Note: I’d like to give special mention to Grand, the aspiring author who the doctor befriends. Grand is obsessed with getting his first line perfectly right, so utterly perfect that a publisher will read it and buy the book on the spot. Consequently, he never progresses past the first sentence. I think we have all been there, Grand!
I do not want to write spoilers for this review but I would like to leave some slightly spoilerific quotes at the end, in case you don’t feel like sifting through all of my Goodreads highlights. Some of them are simply magnificent.
SELECTED QUOTES (minor spoilers)
###
“Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.”
###
“When war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves.”
###
“[T]hey did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end”
###
“The people of our town were no more guilty than anyone else, they merely forgot to be modest and thought that everything was still possible for them, which implied that pestilence was impossible. They continued with business, with making arrangements for travel and holding opinions. Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debate? They considered themselves free.”
###
“Figures drifted through his head and he thought that the thirty or so great plagues recorded in history had caused nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has fought a war, one hardly knows any more what a dead person is. And if a dead man has no significance unless one has seen him dead, a hundred million bodies spread through history are just a mist drifting through the imagination.”
###
“‘Have pity, doctor!’ said Mme Loret, mother of the chambermaid who worked at Tarrou’s hotel. What did that mean? Of course he had pity. But where did that get anyone?”
###
“Every evening mothers would shout like that, in a distraught manner, at the sight of bellies displaying all their signs of death; every evening hands would grasp Rieux’s arms, while useless words, promises and tears poured forth; and every evening the ambulance siren would set off scenes of distress as pointless as any kind of pain. At the end of a long succession of such evenings, each like the next, Rieux could no longer hope for anything except a continuing series of similar scenes, forever repeated. Yes, the plague, like abstraction, was monotonous. Only one thing may have changed, and that was Rieux himself. He felt it that evening, beneath the monument to the Republic, aware only of the hard indifference that was starting to fill him, still looking at the hotel door where Rambert had vanished.
At the end of these harrowing weeks, after all these evenings when the town poured into the streets to wander round them, Rieux realized that he no longer needed to protect himself against pity. When pity is useless one grows tired of it. And the doctor found his only consolation for these exhausting days in this feeling of a heart slowly closing around itself. He knew that it would make his task easier.”
###
“For them the plague was only an unpleasant visitor which would leave one day as it had entered. They were scared but not desperate and the time had yet to come when the plague would seem to them like the very shape of their lives and when they would forget the existence that they had led in the days before.”
###
“‘And this is something that a man like yourself might understand; since the order of the world is governed by death, perhaps it is better for God that we should not believe in Him and struggle with all our strength against death, without raising our eyes to heaven and to His silence.’”
###
I can imagine what this plague must mean to you.’
‘Yes,’ said Rieux. ‘An endless defeat.’
###
“Without memory and without hope, they settled into the present. In truth, everything became present for them. The truth must be told: the plague had taken away from all of them the power of love or even of friendship, for love demands some future, and for us there was only the here and now.”
###
“Thank goodness, at least, that he was tired. If Rieux had been more alert, this smell of death everywhere might have made him sentimental. But there is no room for sentimentality when you have only slept for four hours. You see things as they are, that is to say in the light of justice – ghastly and ridiculous justice.”
###
“‘Nothing in the world should turn you away from what you love. And yet I, too, am turning away, without understanding why.’”
###
“Already at that time he had been thinking about the silence that rose from the beds where he had left men to die. It was always the same pause, the same solemn interval, the same lull that followed a battle, it was the silence of defeat. ”
March 26, 2020
NOPHEK GLOSS by Essa Hansen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Caveat: This is not your usual book review; I’ve included some “behind the scenes” musings for once. If you prefer my usual reviews, this may not be your cup of tea. Okay, caveats out of the way–let’s go!
There’s a lot of mutual back-scratching (praise my book, and I’ll praise your book!) which goes on in publishing, both self and trade. I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense, because it comes from a good place: earnest writers genuinely trying to help out other writer buddies.
But I mention it here because I think, if I don’t, my review will look suspect. By way of explanation, I’m one of Essa’s critique partners, and under normal circumstances I would fully expect anyone reading this review to roll their eyes and say, “Of COURSE you think it’s good!”
The thing is, it’s actually the other way around.
NOPHEK GLOSS won me over on its own merits, all while being massively at a disadvantage.
Let me explain further–let’s rewind three years. I was still 29, and muddling painfully through my first (truly terrible) novel. It was finished, but not very good, and I was struggling to find beta reader swaps for it. Beta reader swaps are where you contact another writer, usually someone you don’t know, and agree to critique each other’s books. The critique process is important for everyone, because humans learn best through teaching; when you critique others’ work, you’re teaching yourself to get better, too, as well as benefiting from fresh eyes on your MS.
But the problem with beta swap partners is they’re often not very good experiences. Either you’re a novice, or the other person is, or you both are, or your critique styles just don’t match–hundreds of things that can go wrong, meaning one or both writers abandons the swap. Think about dating online: it’s probably a bit like that, but far more annoying and far less rewarding.
My early beta swap experiences were pretty terrible. The books I was swapping for appalled me. I’m sure my book appalled other people, too. It wasn’t great. 14 readers in a row bailed on me. I mean, yikes. In fairness, my manuscript was terrible.
Anyways. Somehow, I blundered into Essa. We were in lot of the same FB groups: trawling for betas, asking questions, sometimes giving advice; we both wrote “speculative fiction” and aspired to have a literary edge. (Whether we achieve that or not, I leave to readers to decide.) Eventually–to cut a lot of pointless detail short–we ended up swapping books.
The book I swapped for was, of course, Nophek Gloss.
I started reading. This was pretty good! I kept reading, page after page, making my way through the chapters, leaving notes or nitpicks as they struck me, musing on sections, asking questions.
Even after a couple chapters in, I’d already had the realisation that this was the first manuscript I’d ever beta-read which felt like a real book. Like it could actually get picked up and produced by a publisher. The quality of the writing, the micro tension, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters and characterisations; you could just FEEL it.
This book was going to make it.
That very early version of NOPHEK was only 22 chapters long, and much less polished than the novel you are about to embark on (assuming you are reading this review first, that is.) Through the following three years, as we queried agents, swapped more critiques, wrote different books, rewrote old books, and found rep, Essa continued working on NOPHEK to make the novel more refined and eloquent. All the same qualities that early draft had were still present, just expanded and magnified.
In short, I don’t rate the book highly because I know its author; I know its author, because I rated the book highly.
And therefore, when I say that my review is unbiased, I am genuinely being truthful.
For the novel itself, I will simply say that NOPHEK GLOSS is–to me–a coming of age (bildungsroman) story which is pitched at adults, rather than teens. It explores the effects of growing up too fast–literally, thanks to technology–in response to trauma, and the psychological cost of suppressing pain or loss in pursuit of our goals.
And yes, there are lots of other cool things too: the bubble universe stuff, the sheer variety of alien culture and life, the creative and playful interaction with biotech, the ship that creates universes, etc etc. But I will leave most of that for readers to discover, if they wish. There are many surprises and I’d feel bad spoiling them in-depth.
I hope that you will find Nophek Gloss as surprising and delightful as I first did, all those years ago.
PS – this is not available for sale yet. I read an ARC of the recent version, in addition to earlier versions.
PPS – For those interested in rep, the MC is written as ace-spec, and one of the supporting characters is neurodivergent (#ownvoices ND.) Some very good trans and nb rep throughout, too.
