Rachel Smith's Blog: Guinea Pigs and Books, page 59

Dr. Sexy, MD

37. The Year of the Intern – Robin Cook

This was published in 1973, and yet, so little has changed when it comes to the exhaustive aspects of medicine. We may have better drugs now, but, if you get the wrong doctor, or, really, the wrong nurse, you have little chance of getting what you need in the United States. If you aren’t rich, you have even less chance of getting what you need. And I blame greed for that, not the actual hospital staff, just the greedy assholes who decided that medical care could be forced to turn a profit. Greed and the concept of turning a profit are the two worst things about living in the United States, hands down. Corporatization ruins everything that would otherwise be for the public good, like how every other very developed nation doesn’t shit on the sick because some of them are poor…

Money isn’t discussed really in The Year of the Intern as I recall, but parts of the healthcare experience that were and still are effected by money are. For instance, staffing and what happens in the ER. Like many public service areas that need to be available 24 hours a day, staffing and the decisions made by staff who either are or aren’t good at their jobs without being able to sleep properly, ever, alter people’s lives and provide a lot of opportunities for people to be loudly frustrated. This intern spent a lot of time being mad at on-call doctors who didn’t want to come in, patients who showed up with fake illnesses just to hang out in the ER (and you have to treat everyone the same way, welcome to working with the public where you can explain theory all you want and they may never listen) creating massive wait times and shenanigans for actually dire patients, and yet, also spent a lot of time talking about how he was banging various nurses- even one who had a boyfriend, which just read to me as, yep, this is still pretty current but with 1970s sexy flair and lots of blood. He’s so altruistic, but also has that Burt Reynolds charm. He will also end up getting paid a lot more than the first on-scene persons. So next year, let’s elect someone who will fight to fix this shit.

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Danger Crumples and Horace, ever vigilant because of their proper nap schedule.

She even managed to address the Breaking Bad connection.

85. Theme Music – T. Marie Vandelly

At first, mostly due to chapter length – which is like 20 pages per, yikes – I did not think I was going to like this book. I thought I was going to have to say, why didn’t anyone mention how chapter length can help with pacing in this author’s first published book? How did it not come up? Thankfully, later on, things started moving. I still am not a fan of chapters over 10 pages in any book that wants to thrill, however, there is more to like in Theme Music than dislike overall.

I think this author made good by creating a modern domestic thriller that’s way more interesting than other modern domestic thrillers I’ve read about people being rich and having affairs and that leading to entitlement murders. So much of domestic abuse and murder between couples/families is really about entitlement, as in feeling entitled to do whatever you want and also control someone else’s ability to do whatever they want, like if they, say, wanted to divorce you or not be strangled or leave their millions to someone else. Theme Music has one hell of a domestic murder and the family involved doesn’t have an estate and yet, still manages to keep a variety of fun secrets- there’s even a secret keeping selfish aunt who manages to seem much more well rounded by the end of the story, so, yay, character development!

I also think that it’s because the domestic elements are so well thought out that the ending bothered me. Not the main twist. And because this book is WAY newer than most of what I review I’ll be a bit kind with spoiling it and just say the kitchen possession twist, which is both specific and vague. It made more sense to me when there was a hallucination element present.

The whole thing is also really gory and I really appreciated that. Things that hurt, hurt. Things that are sticky and terrible were sticky and terrible. Broken glass didn’t magically go away. Also, very horrifying for anyone with allergies and asthma – mildew smells! They haunt the furniture in this book and my nostrils and the part of my brain that knows I’ll encounter them again. It’s a good thing this book was new. I get very disappointed when the 80s and 90s novels I buy turn out to smell and I have to set them aside in my unfortunately nonarchival decontamination system for months before I can read them.

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One father who never murdered anyone, Mortemer, with his biggest baby girl Pickles and Mama Murderface.

Malleus Peregrino

86. Last Rituals – Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Grad school is harder on some than others. Some study witchcraft, some turn to witchcraft…not all get through. And in this story a rich German student with a bisected tongue carrying on his grandfather’s legacy of studying witch hunts in Europe who can afford just about anything he wants ends up dead in a copy room in Iceland. Murdered, then ritualized. His eyes are missing. It’s up to one Icelandic lawyer and a German security dude to sort it all out for the family. This is the book that taught me about corpse-pants. It’s also the last book that I got to read alongside my longest-lived, most beautifully grumpy guinea, Peregrine. So before she passed, she also learned about corpse-pants.

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Peregrine the Great, successor to Danger Crumples as herd ruler who reigned for the longest time period of any in charge pig, my muse and extremely grumpy little best friend. It’s all for her.

A cursed no.

25. House of Windows – John Langan

To say I did not like this book would be a vast understatement. I thought the premise sounded good – essentially a lit professor being driven to some unknown madnessy sounding fate by a dark unexplainable force, I was an English major after all, I know what pompousness looks like and sometimes I definitely wanted to see it driven to madness. But…not like this. I can honestly say that the sole reason I finished reading this is because I started it while doing hospice care for Finny and he was having a lot of bad days and I knew I wasn’t able to read anything that might actually be fun or engaging. Finny was still very much alive when I finished it and I was very much annoyed.

The framing device for the whole story is that it’s being told to a friend of the “family” – which in this case means friend of the professor who disappeared and his much, much younger wife – by the young wife. Who is not only unlikable, but unbelievable. She consistently insults the wife the professor had when she, as his student, started sleeping with him. Why? The wife never literally does anything in the story, she’s always acting off page, so it’s never proven that she’s actually awful and I mean, no one is sweet and charming during a divorce caused by your husband’s inability to not sleep with his student. The insults that the narrator gives the wife are all rude and mostly looks-based. It’s like the dream of a guy that wants to justify his terrible behavior. If she really legitimately wanted that relationship and didn’t solely want to break up a marriage so she could insult the ex-wife, why does she care about what his ex-wife looks like? He’s your douchebag now. And it’s very different when the child in a marriage is an adult and not someone younger who could be used as a pawn in a custody battle, so I really didn’t find the insults believable.

Also, said adult child is then cursed by his father, who then spends a lot of time in their weird-possibly madness inducing house trying to reconnect with the ghost of his adult son after he dies in Afghanistan. This curse thing is important and also really boring. I mean, there are a lot of different ways to disown a child that happen every damn day. It’s only because of the professor dude’s massive concept of self-importance that he and his much younger wife make it a thing and a deal with an entity and yell about it a lot in their weird house.

The house being fake-alive with the son’s ghost is…also really boring. Nothing about this haunting is innovative or made me want anything other than for the story to be over forever, never to be seen again. The haunting also reminded me of terrible music videos. Beavis and Butthead would have many insights about the visuals, I am sure of it. They might also have had some insights about the dipshit version of a research scene, where the younger wife explains how web pages open and various design choices that were made, I think the crazy artist’s site used Geocities.

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Finny was still alive when I finished reading this and the eighteen books I’ve read since that at the time of this writing. If he made a deal with an entity, it was obviously a cool one because he’s had many spritely days.

 

There’s a lullaby for suffering.

57. The Forgotten Girls – Sara Blaedel

I was browsing in a book store’s mystery section after being disappointed I couldn’t find the rest of a YA series I was trying to read when I noticed the font on the side of several Blaedel books and pulled one out. So, I know I talk a lot about book covers and fonts and frankly, there’s a lot to be desired. Much sameyness. And I was not a fan of that cheap trend of putting some random staring girl’s face on the cover of YA books. Why did they stick so many placid, vacantly staring teen girls into the void? WHY? However, I have found the cover trope that attracts me and forced me to slightly swallow my pride. The covers of all of the Blaedel books I’ve found that I actually like feature really tall trees (Yay Scandanavian and Nordic forests! Some of the few places I might actually be able to go outside on purpose for a while and not die of allergies due to their climate…although that’s changing…) and some random woman in a rain coat with her back to the viewer. Lookin’ lost in tall trees, that’s the ticket. I do like all of the mysteries and thrillers I’ve read from authors from Iceland and Denmark now, they’re so bleak it’s amazing.

Once I started reading The Forgotten Girls, it became very clear that Blaedel is someone whose books I must read all of – definitely bleak in a variety of ways, the investigating is in-depth and involved records and primary source materials, the crimes are horrible and in this one involved administrative chicanery in an institution for unwanted/potentially “embarrassing” children. So I went back to the book store and got all the ones I could find, then found the other ones with the right kind of covers – What was that chick lit bullshit in a lit up field on “The Daughter,” which is supposed to be called The Undertaker’s Daughter according to the ARC? Excuse me, no. That is not okay. – and ordered the rest on Abe Books. I did this BEFORE finding out that Louise Rick’s partner in the Special Search Agency listens to Nick Cave. BEFORE. These books are precisely my kind of reading.

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I also deeply adored read-watching Jordskott. It was just about perfect for me and Pere and Finny post-Critical Care feeding.

 

“Hey, Garth, let’s do the mega-happy ending.”

30. A Choir of Ill Children – Tom Piccirilli

For me this was a swampy mess. I was very interested because of the setting, a little worried for potential similarities to God in Three Persons, and then I read it and at many points could not tell who was dead and just appearing as a ghost and who wasn’t. Then it ended with a minimally skewed version of a happy ever after. Um, what?

I really should have known what I was in for when I saw the word “lyrical” in a review – that usually means the author is a poet (check) and the book may not make sense as a novel, but the prose will be technically proficient and create interesting imagery (also check). That said, novels need more grounding – mysteries cannot be solved by impressions. And if you forgot what the mysteries the book was supposed to be solving were while reading this, well, that’s not a good impression and according to reviews you’re not alone (I also had this issue – I was supposed to be wondering where your dead mom was, dude? Oops, must’ve forgotten about her in the crush of random characters and sad women trying to ride the main character’s dick.)

To me it seemed like the author thought he resolved the plot or whatever you’d consider the collection of events in these chapters, but there isn’t much resolve in a blurry description. He really only resolved one concrete plot point in the solid form of a crispy one-legged human and I had to re-read the paragraph multiple times because I couldn’t tell if the main character was using something to connect that one-legged dude to an electrical source to electrocute him or if they were being struck by lightning initially. Oh, wait, I forgot, they did resolve that the random kid who showed up was actually a 19 year old mute prostitute from Los Angeles. Oh, and the identity of the dog kicker. Reader, he married her.

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Thorfinnur was a stray (yes, a stray guinea pig is unusual, I assume he was found at the bus station with a little bindle) before he was adopted into my home. I am sure he was not previously a mute prostitute in Los Angeles, for one thing, he is very, very noisy. He got a bit tuckered out enjoying his new home, as demonstrated in this photo from his first day.

I know you’re jealous of my castle.

77. The Fifth House of the Heart – Ben Tripp

Vampires and antiques make soooooooo much more sense as a combination than vampires and teenage girls. So much more sense. Vampires being nostalgic little dragons of treasure hoarding, extremely hard to kill, and easy to have a conversation with in basically one instance if you’re an antiques dealer who gives a shit about the quality craftswork of the past – it’s like someone finally paid attention to what happens when people get old. Most of them aren’t really focused on listening to teens be dramatic.

Granted, in this volume, vampires are what they eat so to speak, so the toad one couldn’t talk about his hoard and sometimes older humans are fond of young humans because they have like promise or whatever; but for the most part, The Fifth House of the Heart just rings much more true than vampire stories typically do. “I’m 5000 years old, please tell me about how hard your math test is and that you were embarrassed through fleeting and ever-changing technologies,” just doesn’t work for me. “Let’s talk about that Caravaggio I have that no one’s seen for hundreds of years so you can be jealous of my immortal collecting powers and how I don’t have to work to acquire such things,” sounds like real evil being talk to me.

And I haven’t even said anything about the main character, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang. Well, let’s just say I named my recently acquired red fox skull after him. He’s fun.

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Danger Crumples was grumpy during his last pumpkin photoshoot, he would’ve rather been photographed surrounded by his massive collection of toys.

“If you go, it’s gonna turn out baaaaaaad!”

12. The Broken Girls – Simone St. James

This book contains many elements that I enjoy – there’s a boarding school for girls that people want to get rid of where four girls find solid support and friendship (I expanded on that sort of “throw away the teens and they will bond” concept in my Squirrelpocalypse Trilogy .), a ghost, murder, and research with primary source material!

It jumps back and forth in time and through a few perspectives, but it was not confusing. There’s contemporary Fiona, a reporter unable to stop herself from staring at the old derelict boarding school grounds – because her sister’s body was found on those same grounds. Fiona’s sister isn’t the only body found on those grounds… and the way that St. James weaves the school’s girls during its time and the school’s registered ghost and the murderage and the complicated but very realistic to me relationships of the character Fiona really worked for me (especially her observations of small town public library staff – she’s right). I was consistently happy to pick this book up again and sad when I was done reading it.

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Having had two pregnant female guinea pigs in a row, including the pictured Miss Pammy, I at one point thought of my home as a boarding house for wayward teenage guinea pigs. It was a great time.

 

Area teenagers repeatedly make bad choices, this time in abandoned subway tunnels.

66. Survive the Night – Danielle Vega

There were a lot of dirty feet in this book. The main character gets paint on her feet after she almost loses a “leather ballet flat” (being that specific happened a few too many times) climbing down; later she loses her shoes entirely in some seriously disgusting water. One of the group takes off her shoes and walks barefoot through the streets of NYC before also occasionally not wearing shoes at the underground rave. If she wasn’t being targeted by a monster she’d have tetanus. A homeless kid with plastic bags on his feet seemed to be the most prepared for the underground rave in disused subway tunnels. Good work, Lawrence.

Casey just got out of rehab for Oxy (familiar) and as soon as she goes to the clean girls’ sleepover and tries to get on with the sober life her past comes rumbling up in an old Buick to whisk her away to the sewers. Her “best friend” Shana takes her to trigger-central- her ex-boyfriend’s band’s show, and when she makes it through that unscathed, they hunt down the underground rave…where she drugs her drink. What a best friend!! What a homecoming!

In the two books of Vega’s I’ve read the narrators could be swapped. They’re good girls for the most part, trying to be- at least, and they get in over their heads with shitty female friends and supernatural elements. They feel hollow and rush into make outs- although, point to Survive the Night, it’s her ex-boyfriend so it’s earned. But – It’s basically a blessing when the tentacle monster shows up.

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Salem is waiting by his personalized plastic pumpkin for the tentacle monster to give it a high-four and return its shoes.

Um, in Poltergeist the house at least had the decency to implode on itself.

76. The Graveyard Apartment – Mariko Koike

Okay, so, I don’t always get the suspensefuls while reading horror novels and just HAVE to finish – but this one I did. The last time I remember staying up later than I should have to finish a book because I got said suspensefuls was when I read My Best Friend’s Exorcism and I finished that well over a year ago. So…yeah, this freaked me right out like the Blair Witch in the 90s. The fact that I’ve experienced one hell of a hateful basement can’t have anything to do with that. Not at all. It wasn’t an apartment basement.

Anyway, one of the things that bothers me and keeps my imagination spinning about Japanese ghost movies I’ve seen- all two, and I’ve also seen their U.S. equivalents- is that the ghosts were the winners. There’s a neverending cycle happening and no character gets out of being freaked out. That does not leave one settled at the end. And the stress that’s depicted here is hellish. So hellish. Also familiar from my basement experience. Also hellish.

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Horace has helped many guinea pigs and me with being frightened of things in basements or otherwise; I really wished he was around while I was reading this.