Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 24

Constant Nobody, by Michelle Butler Hallett

It’s hard to believe I haven’t already posted a review of this wonderful novel, which recently won Atlantic Canada’s most prestigious literary prize: the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. I had already read it, but, as is often the case with those of us who live in a small and close-knit literary community, I read it in manuscript form and offered some critique to the author, who is a friend. However, reading the finished book was such a completely different and much more overwhelming experience.

At its most basic level, Constant Nobody is a literary spy story that begins against the background of the Spanish Civil War, when British spy Temerity West has a chance encounter with Russian spy Kostya Nikto. Months later, when Kostya is back home in Moscow, they meet again. Temerity is now living the exceptionally dangerous life of a British agent undercover in Stalin’s USSR when Kostya finds her and (maybe) saves her life. For long, agonizing weeks, as Temerity hides out in Kostya’s apartment, the two are bound together by secrets, lies, intrigue, attraction, and danger.

It’s a love story, of course, but it’s so much more than that: these two people are drawn together, and owe much to each other, but can never come close to trusting each other. In fact, they can trust nobody: one of the things this novel does most strikingly is recreate the claustrophobic atmosphere of Moscow under Stalin’s purges. Kostya is a respected KGB officer, yet neither he nor any of his fellow officers can feel any sense of security, nor can any of them trust each other. Kostya’s privileged life is almost as precarious as Temerity’s illicit presence in the city; the dreaded knock could come on anyone’s door, at any moment.

This is a beautifully-written and tightly constructed novel of intrigue, suspense, and thoughtful reflection all interwoven into the story of two unforgettable characters.

Unmask Alice, by Rick Emerson

Right after racing through the audiobook of Tim Miller’s Why We Did It, I started listening to the very different, but equally compelling Unmask Alice, which I came to by way of the podcast You’re Wrong About, which did a three-part series on Go Ask Alice, part 3 of which featured Rick Emerson with an interview and a recommendation to read his book for the rest of the story.

I’m not sure why I found this so compelling, apart from the usual reason with great non-fiction: I didn’t know I was interested in the subject until someone wrote about it in such an engaging way that I couldn’t put it down (or turn it off, in the case of an audiobook).

I’ve never actually read Go Ask Alice, though the book has been around almost my entire life (published in 1971). I was always aware of it in a vague way as part of the culture: the anonymous diary of a teenager who died as a result of drug use (mostly LSD). I also had a sense that it might be a fake diary, and learned a bit more about it from episodes of the podcasts Worst Bestsellers and the above-mentioned You’re Wrong About. But with Unmask Alice I took a very, very deep dive into the world of author Beatrice Sparks and her best-known books, Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal (about a teenaged boy who dies by suicide after becoming involved with satanism and the occult).

Long story short: after some incredibly exhaustive and detailed research, Emerson concludes that Beatrice Sparks was pretty much a fraud through and through. She didn’t have the psychology degree (much less the PhD) that she claimed to have; she may have done some volunteer work in hospitals or programs that worked with troubled youth but she certainly was not a therapist or counsellor, which she represented herself as being. What, then, of her claims that Alice’s, Jay’s, and other diaries came her way as part of her work as a youth counsellor, or that other books were based on her case notes? Sketchy at best — especially in the case of Jay’s Journal, which was very loosely based on the real diary of a sixteen-year-old boy who died by suicide and whose mother gave the diary to Sparks, only to feel horribly betrayed by what she made of it. The true story that may have provided the germ of the original Alice book is not explored in nearly as much detail here as the “Jay” story is, because the author had permission to speak to and write about “Jay”‘s family and friends, whereas the people involved in “Alice”‘s story wished to have their privacy protected. But the broad outlines of that story are sketched here too, and it is indeed a very different story than the one that became famous and is still selling millions of copies today.

This is a great, well researched and engagingly written story of an author who pulled off an amazing scam — but what adds a layer of interest is how Sparks’s two most famous books tie into the political and social story of America during the years they were published. The timing of Alice was fortuitous — the book got a big bump in visibility from Art Linkletter, who Sparks already knew from some previous writing gigs, during the time that Linkletter was grieving the death of his daughter from a possibly drug-related suicide. The book became part of the hysteria that led to Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and, well, we all know how well that worked out.

As for Jay’s Journal, the parts that were complete made up and unconnected to the real story of the boy behind the diary – the occult explorations, the bizarre satanic rituals — proved to be the most interesting to readers, and fed into (possibly even helped kick-start) the 1980s “Satanic panic.” So Beatrice Sparks was far more than just an unsuccessful writer who conned her way into becoming a successful one — she was an influencer whose contributions to American society led to untold harm to a lot of innocent people. Which makes Unmask Alice not only an incredibly interesting and engaging book, but maybe an important one too.

Why We Did It, by Tim Miller

Opinions will be divided on this book, but I found it fascinating. Tim Miller is a moderately well-known “Never Trumper” who used to work in communications for several Republican politicians prior to the 2016 election. Miller was working for Jeb Bush when Trump won the primary, and his subsequent disgust with Trump and all that Trump represented, led Miller not only (eventually) away from the party altogether, but to a re-examination of how the party he had once supported and worked for led to the outcomes of 2016 and beyond.

Tim Miller never worked in the Trump administration, but for this book he tells the stories of lots of people who did — some who agreed to talk to him on record and some who did not. But he titles it Why We Did It rather than Why They Did It because Miller fully owns and admits to his own culpability in building the machine that courted the votes and empowered the voices of the same people who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

For some leftie readers, Miller’s self-examination won’t be enough to exonerate him (and I think he’d be OK with that). As a gay man working for an increasingly homophobic political party, the cognitive dissonance was already starting to get to him, but it’s valid to ask whether, if Jeb Bush had won the 2016 Republican primary, Tim Miller would still be a Republican operative. Did his growing questioning and discontent with much of his party’s direction require the catalyst of Trumpism to turn it into open rebellion, or would that have happened eventually anyway?

There’s no way to know for sure, obviously, and while Miller answers a lot of questions in this book, he doesn’t touch on that one directly. For me, as an interested Canadian who swore off my obsession with US politics after 2020 (and has mostly managed to keep distanced from it), Miller’s engaging voice, humour, and honesty were enough to draw me back in for as long as it took me to listen to this audiobook. (Worth noting that I’m using “voice” here in the metaphorical sense as this is one of those audiobooks that is narrated not by the author but by someone else. As Miller is a podcaster, his voice is quite listen-able and I don’t know why he didn’t narrate it himself as I would have enjoyed that even more, but that’s a very minor quibble).

Scratching River, by Michelle Porter

Scratching River is an appropriate follow-up to Porter’s Approaching Fire, though there is more prose than poetry in the current book. As with Approaching Fire, reflections on the natural landscape — in this case, the geography of rivers rather than fire — are interspersed with, and serve as metaphors for, a family memoir. The story centres around the narrator’s brother, who lives with both schizophrenia and autism, and the horrific abuse he suffered in a care facility. This intimate story is set against the broader background of a Metis community dealing with intergenerational trauma and connection to history and land. As always, Porter’s work is beautifully written and thought-provoking.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Like many, many people, I loved Andy Weir’s The Martian (even before the movie). I was more uncertain about his second book, Artemis. While I think there are authors who are brilliantly able to experiment, try new things, dip into different voices, different kinds of stories, and even different genres, there are other writers that (for me as a reader, at least), have a Thing They Do Well and are best when they stick to doing it. I like Project Hail Mary for all the same reasons I liked The Martian: the hard science (and, in this case, a possible end-of-life-on-Earth scenario) is delivered through the smart, slightly snarky voice of a male scientist who is not particular introspective, very practical and innovative, and is dealing with an impossible situation as best he can.

In this case, the narrator is Ryland Grace, and he’s actually a former scientist who has given up academia for teaching junior high science, a job he loves. But as the book opens, Ryland doesn’t remember that — he doesn’t remember anything, even his own name. He awakes from an induced coma to find himself on a spaceship with two dead crewmates and no idea who is he or what his mission is.

As his memories come back, they are horrifying — Ryland is the only survivor of a last-chance mission (hence the title) that was intended to save Earth from a terrible fate. And he has no idea how to do it.

Any normal person would just curl up in a corner and die, but if you’re an Andy Weir protagonist, you buckle down, get to work, make friends with an alien, solve problems, and do your best to salvage what you can on your way to a surprisingly poignant and bittersweet ending. I really loved this book.

The Wolf Den, by Elodie Harper

This is one of the best, if not the best, historical novel I’ve read so far this year. Set in a brothel in Pompeii (a few years before the volcano), the story centres around a small group of enslaved women trying to survive in that brutal and demeaning world. The characters and the world they live in feel at once both impossibly distant from our own, and so vividly real it’s as if the wolf den (the brothel of the title) is just around the corner. Anyone who loves historical fiction that immerses you in another place and time will likely enjoy this book (as long as you are OK with the fact that it’s set in a brothel and the characters are all enslaved sex workers so there are going to be frank descriptions of what goes on there). My only disappointment is that it’s the first of a trilogy and Book 2 is not being released till September … so it’ll be a short wait for that and then a long wait for Book 3!

Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum

This book about the Holodomor, the tragic (and almost completely avoidable, in fact promoted by the Soviet regime) Ukraine famine of 1932-33, took me forever to get through on audiobook — it is long, dense with detail, and on a very difficult and painful subject — but it is very relevant background to have in the light of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. It’s helpful to understand the pre-Communist relationship between the two countries (not that Ukraine was officially a “country” for much of that time, but Applebaum shows how Ukrainian identity and nationalism was always a powerful force and always put down by Russia). As well as learning about the famine itself, I was interested in how controversial even talking about or naming the famine (the Soviets referred to it as “food difficulties” and similar euphemisms) was for a long time, well up through the Cold War era, when sympathy with Ukrainian nationalists was often seen as a right-wing, anti-Communist position in the West (this, as well as WW2 obviously, goes a long way to explaining Putin’s current slander of all Ukrainian nationalists as “Nazis”).

Anne Applebaum clearly has little sympathy for even the most lofty ideals of the Russian Communist movement, in the light of the suffering Stalin’s regime caused in Ukraine, and viewed through the lens of these events, that perspective is entirely understandable. Even when I had finished, I felt like there was a lot of nuance I still didn’t fully grasp in this book, but I certainly learned a lot more than I knew before, all of it helpful in understanding the context of the current Russia/Ukraine situation.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler, by Casey McQuiston

Having read and greatly enjoyed Casey McQuiston’s previous books, Red White & Royal Blue and One Last Stop, I naturally was drawn to her newest, I Kissed Shara Wheeler. This one is geared at a somewhat younger audience — the characters are in high school rather than in their early 20s — and does not contain the explicit sex scenes of the other two. There is a same sex romance (more than one, actually) which is definitely in McQuiston’s wheelhouse, and a character who mysteriously disappears just before high school graduation, leaving her friends and enemies to puzzle out what happens to her.

I’ve seen Shara Wheeler’s disappearance compared to the novel Gone Girl, but I’d suggest the much closer parallel is John Green’s Paper Towns, in which a mysterious and beautiful girl leaves town right before high school graduation, after an unexpectedly intimate evening with the boy who’s had a crush on her for years, and the boy and his friends follow a trail of cryptic clues to find her. In this novel, Shara Wheeler is the beautiful and perfect golden girl in a small-town Christian school, and outsider Chloe Green, the novel’s main character who’s competing with Shara for class valedictorian, has wavered between hating Shara and being obsessed with her for all of high school. McQuiston’s not unaware of the Paper Towns parallels; Chloe specifically references the whole set-up being “like a John Green novel” at one point.

The message of Paper Towns is: Boys, don’t turn a beautiful young woman into your Manic Pixie Dream Girl: she is a real person with her own thoughts, feelings, and problems, and doesn’t exist to serve your story. The message of I Kissed Shara Wheeler is, perhaps, also that the beautiful girl is more complex than you think she is — but so is everyone else. In a world that rigidly enforces being straight, cisgender, Christian, and compliant, Chloe finds both within her safe circle of queer friends and in unexpected places outside of that circle, that almost everyone is more than she thinks they are. I found this a fun romp with some thoughtful insights underlying it.

When We Lost Our Heads, by Heather O’Neill

It’s hard to know quite how to categorize this book. At first glance into its pages, it’s a story of two exceptional young girls group up in late 19th-century Montreal, whose intense friendship is blown apart by a horrible act of (semi) accidental violence. Marie and Sadie both go on to live larger-than-life lives, and when those lives intersect, there is passion, decadence, and more violence. The writing is crisp, direct, and sparse, and the story explores, on many different levels, the idea of women’s power and what a revolution of women might look like.

I say it can be categorized as historical fiction — a specific historical place and time is indicated in the earliest chapters — and yet the book feels unmoored from history. Indeed, it might almost be described as an alternative history, for as the story unrolls we realize that while it might nominally be set in 1880s Montreal, it’s not really tied to the events or people of that place and time; huge events happen in the story that never happened in the real Montreal, and many of the characters’ names, personalities, and fates, are deliberate echoes of the French revolution a century earlier — as, of course, is the title of the novel. The novel’s momentum builds towards a second French (Canadian) revolution: one concerned as much with sex as with social class, yet one that ultimately feels smaller and more personal, less earth-shattering, than the real Revolution that inspires it.

At times this novel feels like a dark comedy; at other times like an alternative history; at other times like an allegory. It’s always compelling and thought-provoking, even if it can be hard to pin down.

The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge

This novel about a family and a village during the English Civil War was written several decades ago, by an author who is apparently very well known to my English online book-club friends who suggested the novel, but who I’d never heard of before. It has a slow-paced, old-fashioned feel to it, with a large cast of characters, tons of description, and an omniscient point of view. The “white witch” of the title is a woman named Froniga, somewhat of an outsider in the community not only because of her healing skills and magic spells, but because she is half-Roma — a community of Romany people (frequently referred to as “gypsies” throughout, which was common usage both at the time the story is set and in the much more recent era when it was written) live on the outskirts of the English village at the centre of the story, and the Roma characters are as key to the novel as the squire and his family (the local squire is Froniga’s cousin, and she once turned down his proposal of marriage).

There’s a lot going on in this novel — many viewpoint characters, different perspectives on both sides of the Civil War, a slightly creepy romance that starts when a grown man meets an eight-year-old girl, and some spiritual reflections that are probably going to feel either deeply insightful or unbearably pious, depending on your own perspective (I found them insightful). I haven’t read many books set against the backdrop of this war, and I enjoyed this one a lot.