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164009606X
| 9781640096066
| 164009606X
| 3.35
| 553
| Jan 09, 2024
| Jan 09, 2024
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liked it
| Falling into friendship, with Edith was also, for Lacey, inextricable, with falling in love with the northern summer. Never had she woken to birds Falling into friendship, with Edith was also, for Lacey, inextricable, with falling in love with the northern summer. Never had she woken to birdsong, or plunged headfirst into cool water on a blazing day, or listened to the whispers of the oaks as a thunderstorm, swept in. Never had the sun felt so warm and golden, or rain soaked her so completely. The shrill of crickets, alarming at first, began to soothe her to sleep at night. A toad hunched by a log was so intensely ugly she cried out in shock, while a fox, slipping through the pines, looked like the tip of a paintbrush dipped in orange. Her hands and legs became tan and useful. She could tie three kinds of sailor knots, and she could kick her way up a river current. Her face in the spotty cabin mirror was freckled, it also looked rounder and full. She was gaining weight back, and when one night Edith observed, “You’re not coughing anymore,” Lacey realized it was true."When the stranger returned to the city..." are the opening words of Goldenseal, or could be of a fun Western. The description that follows is pure delight, set in 1990 Los Angeles, as Maria Hummel shows off her poet's gift for description. In The Rumpus interview she talks about having to tone that element down to spend more focus on moving the story forward. A loss for the likes of me. Edith Holle left Lacey, and Los Angeles forty-four years ago. She is back now on a mission known only to herself. I was interested in creating a novel that had an allegorical Western feel. The stranger comes back to this city for the first time in forty-four years; “the stranger comes to town.” That’s the beginning of the classic Western, and Westerns play an important role throughout the story, as both subject and backdrop, especially in regard to gender. Because in the classic Western, the “stranger” is male, right? But here, it’s Edith, an old woman in a wrinkled skirt and sneaker boots. - from The Rumpus interviewIn addition to the western genre references, there is a mystery afoot here, well, a few. What was the nature of Edith's connection to Lacey? Why did she leave? Why is she back? [image] Maria Hummel - Image from her site We get an up close look at Lacey’s discomfort, wondering what Edith is up to, stressing over what to wear, as if her sartorial selections might provide a layer of armor, but Lacey is also clearly dying to see her. Once the waiting is done, we get on with the bulk of the story. It is told in two time lines. First is an ongoing conversation between the two women, the frame. Second is the history they recount within it. Lacey Crane was born in Prague, her parents fleeing before, but not because of, the future Nazi invasion. Middle class, they were able to experience success in the hotel business. We get a look at the impact of the Holocaust on her parents, particularly her Jewish mother. As girls, Lacey and Edith meet at a California camp, where Edith is a bit of a loner, the daughter of the camp caretaker, special for her talent at stage performance, among other things, but seen as too lower class for most of the privileged girls. Not for Lacey. They become instant besties. (see quote at top) Edith's home life is challenging, and Lacey wants to take her away from all that. We follow the development of their friendship, and of their lives, together and apart. It is events in adulthood that split them, a final, dramatic schism. Dirty laundry is pulled from their memory bags, and held up for close inspection. Some garments are left unaired. The contemporary conversation functions as a way for them to both examine the lives they have led. It also illuminates some of the changes women experienced in the 20th century. The novel germinated over a protracted period, until all the elements finally came together. First was the Biltmore. When she and her husband moved there in the early aughts, Hummel was smitten with the LA hotel culture, particularly that hotel. [This] combined with a book that I read that came out in American translation in 2001 called Embers …originally published in 1942, is a story about two old friends, males, an old general and a soldier, meeting in a castle in the Carpathians for the first time in forty years. They're also weighing out friendship. When I read that book, I thought, this is such a great treatise on friendship, but it's about male friendship. Female friendship is different. Wouldn't it be great to use this structure but set it in an American castle? There it is. Then the third piece was, as we all experienced, we lived like recluses, particularly for me, the academic year that was 2020/'21. I thought, I know how to write this character now, this person who's basically a hermit who lives in the hotel and never goes out and is locked in her tower. - from the Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books interviewUnderneath it all is that primal bond, forged in childhood, hardened in adulthood but seriously damaged. We are waiting for the high noon moment when the women unholster their revelations and take aim. The Lacey-Edith intersection is, in a way, where Old World meets New. Lacey having been born middle class in Europe. Edith living a much more frontier-type of existence in the American far west. Lacey is relatively well-to-do, while Edith is a bit of a Cinderella character, responsible beyond her years, kept as something of a household slave by an unfeeling parent. Maybe Lacey can fit her up with a glass slipper, get her a carriage ride to something better? There are medical remedies from both the Old World and the New that present the strengths of both cultures. Familial tragedies echo across the divide. Do we care? Each girl faces challenges at home. And both are portrayed as decent kids, so it is not hard to feel for them. The tale of their early friendship is incredibly charming and engaging, a major strength of the novel. The bond between these two is palpable and we want it to be eternal. Each girl finds relief from her personal stresses in having someone with whom to share. We get glimpses of their time together later, as teens, but these are fleeting, and lack the immediacy and impact of their camp days. Their time as adults is also presented in brief glimpses, stroboscopic flashes of events. Sure, there is angst, pain, heartbreak, betrayal, and disappointment, but having stepped back from Lacey and Edith, the impact is dulled. It is not a bad thing to leave readers wanting more of a character but it seemed to me that we got a bit short-changed and should not have needed that much more. The narrative flow works quite well, switching back and forth between the contemporary and historical. But in a latter section of the novel, the conversation became much less...conversational, transforming into almost straight up exposition. I found this distancing, and thus off-putting. There is a lot going on in Goldenseal. Thematically, it offers a trove of genre touches, coming of age, mystery, western, domestic drama and probably others. Hummel writes beautiful descriptions. I wish there had been even more of that. She gets us to care about her leads. And offers a persuasive explanation at the end, for most questions. It is a good read for sure, but maybe a Silver Seal instead of a Golden One. Review posted - 03/29/24 Publication date – 01/09/24 I received a hardcover copy of Goldenseal from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Hummel’s personal and Twitter pages Profile – from her website Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Goldenseal, Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize… Hummel worked for many years as an arts editor and journalist, and as a writer/editor for The Museum of Contemporary Art, experience that informed Still Lives and Lesson in Red. She also taught creative writing at Stanford University and Colorado College, and is now a full professor at the University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons....more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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1957224231
| 9781957224237
| 1957224231
| 4.13
| 1,600,906
| Jun 1890
| Nov 06, 2023
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it was amazing
| There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.------------------------ There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.-------------------------------------- “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”Be careful what you wish for. [image] Oscar Wilde - image from Wikipedia Man sells soul to the devil in return for…something, in this case a body encased in eternal youth, while a portrait takes on the outward manifestation of his aging and his sins. It ends badly, as deals with the devil usually do. This is hardly a unique tale. In fact, it is a bit of a trope, a Faustian bargain. There is a lovely listing here of examples new and old. Absent, of course, is the most famous, and least successful example of a soul-selling, really more of a soul-buying, from Matthew 4:1-11, when the devil made Jesus an offer he actually could refuse. Don Corleone would have been very disappointed. But it is a bit more complicated than that, as these things often are. It is always a challenge and an adventure to read a classic. Books become regarded as a base part of our culture for reasons. They can establish motifs, or ways of seeing the world that resonate with their contemporary audiences (well, not always) and future generations. They can offer us a portrait of a time and place, a culture, a class, a social or political issue. They can illuminate moral questions, deal in universal themes, offer insight into human motivation, whether individually or en masse. And we come to see them in particular ways. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the prior re-pub in this Gravelight series, what one finds in the original is not quite what one might expect, given how popular culture has transformed the story by bleaching out important nuance. That is less the case with Dorian Gray, at least in part because there appears to have been fewer iterations of the tale in popular entertainments. But, nonetheless, our understanding of the story is generally of the bare bones sort. There is plenty of flesh to give those bones some added heft. [image] Jeffrey Keeten - they came to take his furniture, but the only way they will take his books is from his cold dead hands - image from his site The history of a book matters. Keeten’s introduction offers an excellent take on how Dorian was received at publication. It generated quite a bit of attention on its release. There were many who were not amused. That may have contributed to the fact that The Picture of Dorian Gray is singular in being the sole novel published by Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. The subject matter was considered a big no-no in 1890. The Dorian of the title is a man of many tastes, and apparently insatiable appetites. He manages to bring ruin to both men and women. It was not, in particular, the ruination of women that caused a storm. The periodical in which it was first published was withdrawn from bookshops due to the outrage. Wilde was a very popular writer of the time, wearing his sexuality like a badge. A tough stance to assume in a culture that preferred to sate it appetites and interests discretely. His novel was a shocker for the time in portraying homosexuality in interest, if hardly in action. The painter of Dorian’s portrait is clearly smitten with him, dazzled by his physical beauty, which he sees also as representative of an underlying perfection. For all the shock of its homosexual content, there is no physical contact of that sort in the pages. (an earlier version may have been more direct) All is insinuation, suggestion, hinting. It is the same technique that has worked quite well for ages in the horror genre. Shadows, rattling chains, creaky doors, unsourced moans. Sometimes we are offered the shocker scene in which the monster is revealed. The Opera Phantom’s mask is pulled off to reveal the horror of his face. Hyde’s deformity is revealed as the window into Jekyll’s soul. And so it is here. Dorian’s true nature is revealed. The “I’m shocked, shocked” reaction of contemporary critics suggests more about what they were projecting onto the novel than what was actually there. [image] The portrait, used in the 1945 film by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright - image from Wikipedia So, what is the horror that is on display? It is the hedonism of the late 19th century English upper class, sashaying about in the interesting, entertaining, appealing drag of philosophy. Henry argues for the unashamedly sybaritic life. Art need have no meaning, no being other than itself. Apply to humans. Is art, is beauty the highest value? When beauty is left to dangle free, disconnected from any higher value, what is its impact on the world? Actions have no moral content. It is in fact a positive good to live a life dedicated to the primitive accumulation of sensation, through the arts, through physical pleasures, not just of sex, but of sight, smell, sound and touch, to experience beauty in all its forms. Try everything. Art for art’s sake in the guise of human experience. Some people have an amazing ability to come up with excuses for their excesses, explanations, some reason for why they shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. Like the poor and taxes, we will always have the morally challenged, the malignant narcissists, the sociopaths with us. beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile.... People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....But if this was on the up and up, there would have been no need to keep one’s behavior secret. It is clearly a place where freedom crosses the line into license. The practitioners of such a “philosophy” knew they were up to no good. They merely wanted to hide from the responsibility. Dr Jekyll was quite happy to have an alter-ego he could let loose on the world, to have the sorts of fun he could not have as himself in public view. They knew, not just that their behavior was wrong, not just that it ran afoul of extant mores, but that their reasoned explanation was taffeta thick. [image] Hurd Hatfield as Dorian in the 1945 film - image from Wikipedia It is not the barely latent bisexuality of the novel that marks Dorian as fallen, it is that he had ruined peoples’ lives, men and women, not by having sex with them, (which is suggested, but never acted out on the pages) but by corrupting them in various ways, by causing them to become as self-centered, as pleasure-seeking as he was. A person can get away with this if he or she is wealthy enough. Paying off porn stars to keep quiet about an extramarital fling certainly fits into such a scenario. Dorian manages to keep his scandals at bay with the use of his wealth. It is as true today as it was when Wilde was writing this book, the selfishness, the hedonism, the amorality of the wealthy feeds on the blood and life forces of those they exploit, few of whom can afford to fight back directly. (You go, E. Jean!) I imagine this is a core of what Wilde was getting at, and the real reason his critics were so angry at him. Dorian does not come to his corruption unaided. He arrives as a beautiful young man, who is seen as being as pristine inside as he is on the surface. The Victorians were very concerned with exteriors, believing that they served as personal screens displaying to the world a person’s character. But then he is introduced to Lord Henry Wotton. Henry proceeds to emit a torrent of nonsense, albeit amusing nonsense, mocking the morals of the time. Wilde, speaking through Henry, is cattier than my living room when I shake a container of treats. Henry offers a torrent of false, cynical aphorisms, suitable material to be printed on small pieces of paper and tucked inside poisoned fortune cookies. Were he opining today, Henry would be posting outrageous clickbait opinions on Twitter. Here are a few examples. They are legion, and will sound familiar in tone to characters from Wilde’s 1895 theatrical triumph, The Importance of Being Earnest …beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.It is the cynical Henry who finds in the gullible Dorian the raw material with which to cast the young man into a representative of his very hedonistic view of life. Dorian offers the plasticity of the young to the dubious molding of the amoral. The young man is all ears. He even takes time away from the painter, Basil Hallward, to learn at Wotton’s feet. . To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.We are offered a bit of background on Dorian, to help explain his vulnerability to Lord Henry’s dark influence. And are even given a bit of theatrical brimstone to explain how the deal with the devil is achieved. Neither really matters much. [image] Angela Lansbury as Sibyl Vane in the 1945 film - image from Wikipedia Early on, Dorian is smitten with a beautiful young actress, Sibyl Vane, who considers him her Prince Charming. It is Sibyl’s appearance, her elevated acting performances, in addition to her beauty, that attracts Dorian. But when her dazzling talent on stage suddenly vanishes, she can no longer offer Dorian the thing he most admired, and he dumps her, cruelly. It is the first crime to which we are witness, the first time his painting changes. The pursuit of beauty and sensation above all else has claimed its first victim. There will be many more, but most of those bad behaviors take place off screen. Wilde put all of himself into this novel “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be.”Unlike Lord Henry, and Basil Hallward, though, Wilde acted on his urges. Unlike Dorian, Wilde was imprisoned for his actions. Unlike Henry’s and Dorian’s depraved indifference to the harm they caused others, it is not clear that Wilde was a cruel person. Dorian is clearly a corrupt individual. Whether he arrived there unaided or had a push is of secondary importance. Lord Henry is clearly corrupt as well, even though we do not see him engage in any physical acts of treachery. Perhaps the corruption of youth, pulling Keeten goes into some detail on the derivation of the name Dorian Gray. Why not Loki? There are reasons. In fact, there is a lot you will enjoy learning when you check out his introduction. It is rich with detail about the author, the book, and the controversy that surrounded its publication. It also looks at the lasting impact Wilde has had on modern culture. It will definitely increase your appreciation of this wonderful novel. I suppose there might be a modern version in which Gray and his portrait are linked by quantum entanglement, or one should be made if it does not already exist. The battle between inner self and outer manifestation is certainly an eternal literary theme. For the second time, a sojourn down the Gravelight illuminated alley of classic horror has proved stimulating and enlightening. From Keeten’s smart, incisive intro to the chance to see what the original of a household-name classic was really on about, The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a richly rewarding reading experience, clever, funny, dark, shocking, intelligent, satirical, and satisfying. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. Review posted - 02/23/24 Publication date – 11/6/23 I received copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray from Gravelight Press in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on Coot’s Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Keeten’s personal, FB, and Instagram pages Prior reviews for books intro’d by J. Keeten ----- Exhumed: 13 Tales Too Terrifying to Stay Dead – edited by David Yurkovich ----- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – edited by David Yurkovich Items of Interest -----Les Cent Nouvelles - a book of coarse French stories referenced in Chapter 4 -----Margaret of Valois -----Manon Lescaut - an 18th C. novel in which young lovers live a life of sexual and social freedom, while giving morality little thought – referenced in chapter 4 -----The St. James’s Gazette - referenced in chapter 10 -----Elephantis - author of a sex manual in Classical Greece – noted in Chapter 11 -----Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans – cited in the introduction – Dorian’s reading of this 1884 celebration of sensory gluttony contributes to his corruption -----Wiki Deals with the devil in popular culture ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 17, 2024
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Feb 21, 2024
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Paperback
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1640095837
| 9781640095830
| 1640095837
| 3.27
| 788
| Jun 27, 2023
| Jun 27, 2023
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really liked it
| The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. T The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them. – Anne Carson - from the epigraph-------------------------------------- We are our own ghosts, dragging our mournful pasts behind us forever.An apartment in Miami Beach, from 1942 to 2012, seventy years of tenants, eleven of them, each with a story to be told. The conceit of the novel is that the apartment retains some form of consciousness. Nothing particularly overt, mind you. It is handled more like a repository for emotional flotsam, psychic impressions that accumulate and rattle around with the tide of each new resident, to no obvious major purpose, until the final third of the book, when the apartment acquires a spokesperson, a late resident, who is on a mission to save the current one, Lana. [image] Ana Menendez - Image from her site So, was all the depositing of emotional residue by the prior nine tenants merely substructure on which this final pair could rest? I found that a jarring shift, a sort of unwelcome unreliable narrator, as we are no longer hearing apt 2B, but as if this person proclaimed, “Shove over, flat. I’ll take it from here.” Menendez’s work is mostly in short form, so it makes sense that her novel is of the linked-story form, as each resident in turn gets anywhere from six to twenty-two pages for their tale. Even though there is a through-arc, it still feels like a short-story collection, which is fine with me. But this form does limit how much one can get invested in any one character. The final chapter, at a novella-length eighty-four pages, changes this dynamic and gives us a bit more to hold on to with its two primaries. After a prologue, in which an indigenous woman sees the first European invaders on what is now Miami Beach, establishes the roots of the storytelling arc, we jump to the beginnings of World War II. An apartment building called The Helena is still moist with drying paint when it is requisitioned by the military. Major Jack Appleton has been moved from Texas to lead an officers’ school. His wife, Sophie, is not what you might call thrilled. Appleton is controlling and abusive. They are not long for this place. During their stay a ship is set ablaze and sunk off the coast by a German U-boat, bringing the war home. In fact, while the violence may be almost entirely off-screen, there is plenty of it. It is a pervasive thread in The Apartment, from the genocidal infections brought by the first Europeans, to carnage wrought by German forces. A veteran suffers from PTSD after serving in Viet Nam. A Marielita flees her abusive father, but is being kept by an abusive lover. A woman dreams that her husband is coming to kill her. A couple fear for their lives, concerned that they are being pursued by agents from their home country. A soldier is killed in action. There is a suicide and another tenant who might follow suit. A man is set upon by thugs in the street and is beaten bloody. Each chapter ends with an interstitial piece, as the apartment is vacant for a time. Cleaners come in to prepare for the next renter. Some offer some wonderful short character pieces. The apartment sees and feels. The front door closes, and absence returns to apartment 2B. but there is still someone here to record the fact, this unseen eye that moves across the floor as it if were a page, sweeps the bedroom, the naked walls, lingers at the single living room window with its blinds at half-mast.We get a Cook’s Tour of many significant moments in American history, including foreign events that impact here through the residents of 2B, WWII, tensions between the USA and Cuba, Viet Nam, the Mariel boatlift, the demise of the junta in Argentina, USA involvement in Central American conflicts, 9/11, the demise of printed newspapers, Lebanon, Afghanistan. A lot. I’ve been interested for a long time in how the trauma of war and displacement plays out across generations. So this was one of the main ideas I wanted to explore in the novel. Many of the conflicts in this novel have ties to the United States, which of course can sadly be said of many conflicts in the world today. We are all implicated. But simply on a craft level, as a writer, there were some conflicts that I wanted to include for personal reasons.Everyone at the Helena is a transplant from someplace else. Many of the characters are foreign-born, carrying with them a sense of mourning for their lost birthplaces. Some have to jump down to the bottom of the work ladder they had ascended back home and begin the climb again, or take on completely alternate work just to get by. Even those who have made successful new lives pine for what was lost. SHAPIRO: You introduce us very early on in the text to a Spanish word, morrina. What does the word mean? And how did you think about the concept in relation to the narrative you were writing?The vast majority of the stories, eight of eleven, center on women. Conflict abroad manifests as abuse or misery at home. Few move on from 2B to a better life. There are exceptions. Relationships are pretty universally strained. Abuse recurs. A marriage of convenience challenges a relationship of love. There are betrayals, problems with gambling, alcoholism, depression, desperation, racism, bigotry of various sorts, and shame. Some are tormented by decisions they have made in the past. Some seem more like lost wanderers, thrown up on shore after being tossed roughly about by an angry sea. The residents vary in their work lives, with creative arts well represented. There are multiple painters, their models, a journalist and a concert pianist. The most piercing spectral presence of all is a painting one of the residents is working on, as it manifests a particular bit of darkness. Snakes pop up throughout. The book opens with A serpent coils through the underbrush of palmetto and coco plum…Harmless, this one, this time.. Later “Time, spooky and fickle. Not arrow, but snake.” There are more. And now back to the apartment designation. Wait, 2B? Or not? Certainly calls up a soliloquy from Hamlet. And informs a fair piece of the book. The Danish Prince wonders if he should keep on keeping on after, learning that dear uncle murdered his father. Certainly many of the characters here have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Some put up a good fight, taking up arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing [attempting to] end them. Well, some efforts are made. The alternative, the not 2B part, is to end the Heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that the flesh is heir to. One last “check, please.” And one of ours does indeed choose to find out what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Is it the fear of the undiscovered country, of unknowable death, that keeps most grinding through the day-after-day? Or some loftier feeling, hope, or value? Maybe it is simply momentum. While The Apartment is not a traditionally formatted novel, it is nonetheless a beautiful work of writing. While we may not have much time with many of the characters, Menendez does a lot in a short space, a talent no doubt honed by her history of short story writing. The stories are moving, at times to the point of tears. Will Sophie get away from her abusive spouse? Will Eugenio find his way to California? Will Sandman find a way to survive his PTSD? Will Isabel make her own life and not remain a kept toy of an older man? Will Margot and her husband evade those who might be after them? How will Susan handle her loss? Will Marilyn stay with her damaged bf? How will Beatrice cope with the change in her circumstances? Will Pilar be able to find journalism work again? Will Lenin succeed in his mission? Will Lana let the many friendly neighbors help her out, or is her secret too much to reveal? There is poetic beauty in here that deserves to be read, to be appreciated. You may or may not feel impelled to look for deteriorating flats in a soon-to-be submerged part of Florida, but it would be worth your while to check in with your real estate agent and arrange to give 2B a look. It might turn out to be just the right place for you. In the English novels she studied in school, the characters all seemed masters of their own fates. When they stumbled, it was because of a flaw. The direction their lives took was the direction they determined through their choices. But this was not Margot’s experience of the world. The world so far acted on her without consultation or sympathy. Her life, dictated first by her family’s wealth and now by her husband’s work, lacked the agency she was taught to recognize in great works. Even this latest leaving had been out of her hands. Maybe the only true literature was the old ghost stories her grandmother used to whisper to her on those windy cold nights on the Pampas. Spirit and mortals alike, all subject to unseen forces that swelled beneath them, hidden and untamable. Review posted - 9/8/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 6/27/23 ----------Trade paperback - 8/13/24 I received hardcover of The Apartment from Counterpoint in return for a fair review and a one-year lease. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Menendez’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter, sorry, X pages Profile – from her site Ana Menéndez has published five books of fiction: The Apartment (2023), Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011), The Last War (2009), Loving Che (2004) and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. Interviews -----NPR - Author Ana Menendez explores stories a single location could tell in 'The Apartment' by Linah Mohammad, Ashley Brown, Ari Shapiro -----Lithub - Ana Menéndez on Crafting a Connected Cast of Characters by Jane Ciabattari Items of Interest from the author -----Links to other things she has written Items of Interest -----The Poetry Foundation - To Be or Not To Be - from Shakespeare’s Hamlet -----Wiki - The Mariel Boatlift -----Museum of Florida History - Florida on the Home Front: The German Submarine Threat off Florida's Coast - “The most dramatic sinking in Florida waters took place the night of April 10, 1942, when U-123 torpedoed the tanker Gulfamerica off Jacksonville Beach. The resulting fiery explosion was clearly seen onshore and curious crowds gathered to view the ship's destruction and looked on in shock as the German submarine surfaced and fired its deck gun at the tanker.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 28, 2023
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Aug 30, 2023
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Hardcover
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1668020793
| 9781668020791
| 1668020793
| 3.75
| 876
| Oct 10, 2023
| Oct 10, 2023
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it was amazing
| Come. I want to show you something. I learned it from the missionary. We haven’t seen him in a while, yes?…I retrieve my teacup where there is a li Come. I want to show you something. I learned it from the missionary. We haven’t seen him in a while, yes?…I retrieve my teacup where there is a little honey left, and I walk toward the perimeter of the woods and hold it up. I hear her coming up behind me, the slow rustle of her skirt in the grass, but I don’t turn.In The Hive and the Honey Paul Yoon returns to areas that readers of his earlier work will recognize. This is his third story collection, following Once the Shore (2009) and The Mountain (2017). He has published two novels as well, Snow Hunters (2013) and Run Me To Earth (2020). He treats often in themes of Korean diaspora, losing a sense of home, trying to build new families and communities, feeling alone, often being alone, the impact of history on one’s lived experience, and the impacts of war. That holds here. I can’t speak to a unifying Korean identity, but I think, growing up, because I had very little access to an extended family, I was often searching for my own version of that. And I think all my characters are searching for their own version of family. They’re quite literally and figuratively orphans. And they want to rebuild. They want to find a home in all sense of that word. - from the Pen-Ten InterviewThere are seven stories in the collection, ranging from 17th century Japan to 20th century New York. The age of the primary characters covers a wide range. One lead is 16, others are in their 20s, returning from war or prison, or still in uniform. There is a couple in their forties and we see one life across decades. [image] Paul Yoon - image from Interlocutor – shot by Paul Yoon A persistent challenge is to make a home. In Bosun, Bo tries to find a home and family in a small upstate NY town. In At The Post Station, Two samurai must repatriate a 12yo Korean boy to officials from his country. Toshio, the samurai who has been raising his young charge for many years, must face this direct loss of family. The boy must face introduction to an entirely alien culture. Cromer offers a middle-aged London shop-keeper couple, both children of North Korean refugees, who had opted to never have children of their own. But when a 12 yo apparently- battered runaway boy turns up in their shop, many miles from home, it makes them face the insular, child-free lives they had chosen, the community they had not built, the family they had not made. In The Valley of the Moon a man returns from a settlement to his isolated family farm after The Korean War. It is a moonscape, littered with bones and craters. He slowly but steadily brings the farm back. He even takes in two orphans to make a proto-family, but the damage from the war, and from an act he commits before the kids arrived, haunts him for the rest of his life. Biological families here are all dispersed, or worse. Characters are often stuck on their own. Relations in other places are unreachable, unresponsive, or dead. Some of the impetus for the collection was Yoon’s own familial diaspora. My grandfather was a Korean War refugee who eventually, after the war, settled in a house in the mountains in South Korea. Where he lived wasn’t nearly as isolated as the setting of “Valley of the Moon,” but my memory of him was that he was—or had become after the war—a bit of a loner, someone who kept to himself, and so I think (a) the character of Tongsu and where he returns to was always linked from the start, and (b) that initial push forward into this story stemmed from wanting to create and capture, perhaps, some corner of family history that felt, and still feels, really distant to me—to engage with that distance, creatively, and to engage with him and with so many others of that generation who had to flee their homes and do anything they could to survive during those horrific years. - from the New Yorker interviewYoon’s characters also travel far afield. Bosun came to the USA at 18. In Komarov, a Korean cleaning woman is living in Spain. At the Post Station features a boy who was held prisoner by Japan for his entire life and will now be faced with living in an alien culture in Korea. In Cromer, the parents of the couple living in London all escaped from North Korea, and a young Korean boy flees apparent physical abuse. In The Hive and the Honey, the community over which the young soldier watches is comprised of Koreans who had left Korea and were establishing a small community in eastern Russia. In Person of Korea, the lead’s father had taken work far from home and had become unreachable. Families that remain (the survivors) are severely depleted, family trees having been pruned to stumps or worse by war and dispersion. Holding on even to images of one’s past can become a challenge. Bo thought he would eventually miss Queens or perhaps even South Korea, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life, but as the months went on, they were like the faces he tried to recall: far away, as though the places he’d once lived had been homes to someone else.But for all the travails, the challenges, there is an intrepid spirit at work that pushes them onward. How easy would it have been for the farmer to simply walk away from his devastated fields? For the convict to have given up hope? The use of imagery is exquisite, illuminating themes, showing how the past impacts, intercedes in, and informs the present. Every night, the moon rose from here, and fell, and shattered. And then built itself back up again.This certainly stands in well for the challenge of all these characters, forced as they are to reconstruct lives after the world has caused them so much disruption. The quote at the top of this review offers another wonderful image. Luring bees with honey then following them back to their nest, taking the steps one can take, however many may be needed, to reach your goal, whether the location of a hive, a home, or something else. A tree grows through the skull of a corpse, offering a (perhaps grim) reminder that life continues, creating a future by feeding on the past. These are very moving tales, as rich with hope, tenacity, and sweetness as they are with loss, disappointment, and sadness, personal tales told against a backdrop of a nation’s history. The Hive and the Honey is an outstanding literary short-story collection, well deserving of all the award buzz it has been receiving. What could be sweeter? economic reasons.”During the pandemic, Yoon says, “we were all scattered. I was separated from friends and to cope I imagined a kind of map. We were all in different places, but we were all part of one world. That got me thinking about the family tree, thinking of that as a map as well. This was the seed of the collection: the movement of a country and its people.” - from the Louisa Ermelino PW interview THE STORIES Bosun - a Korean man, just released from an upstate New York prison, tris to make a life for himself in a small community nearby. Komarov - A refugee from North Korea is working as a cleaner in Spain when she is approached by Korean agents to spy on a Russian boxer they believe to be her son. At the Post Station - Two 17th C. samurai accompany a Korean boy, who had been held hostage all his life, to Korean officials who will take him home. Cromer - The children of escaped North Koreans, a middle-aged couple in London consider their life choices when a 12yo runaway boy happens into their convenience store. The Hive and the Honey - A young Russian soldier is charged with overseeing a Korean settlement in remote eastern Russia. Things get out of hand when there is a killing, then another. Person of Korea - When the uncle with whom he had been living dies, a 16yo boy travels to find his father, a security guard on an island off the east coast of Russia. Valley of the Moon – two years after the Korean War a man returns home to a devastated, vacated farm, and tries to bring it back to life. He takes in two orphans and has a difficult, life-changing encounter with someone looking to cross the border. Review posted - 02/09/24 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 10/10/23 ----------Trade paperback - 3/14/24 I received an ARE of The Hive and the Honey from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Paul Yoon’s personal site Profile – from Wiki Paul Yoon (born 1980) is an American fiction writer. In 2010 The National Book Foundation named him a 5 Under 35 honoree.Interviews -----Publishers Weekly - In Seven Stories, Paul Yoon's New Book Spans 500 Years of Korean Diaspora By Louisa Ermelino | Jul 07, 2023 -----The Pen-Ten Interview - Paul Yoon | The PEN Ten Interview by Sabir Sultan - October 12, 2023 -----The New Yorker - Paul Yoon on the Korean War’s Aftershocks by Cressida Leyshon – about Valley of the Moon -----Publisher’s Weekly - Paul Yoon’s Haunted Geographies by Conner Reed -----LitHub - Writing as Transformation: Who Paul Yoon Needed to Become to Finish His Book by Laura van den Berg (Yoon’s wife) ...more |
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not set
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Feb 04, 2024
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Jul 12, 2023
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1982175370
| 9781982175375
| 1982175370
| 3.61
| 34,719
| Aug 15, 2023
| Aug 15, 2023
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it was amazing
| in every fairy tale girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.-------------------------------------- people in love were such fools, the in every fairy tale girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.-------------------------------------- people in love were such fools, they made up excuses, they wound up doing as they pleased no matter how much good advice they been given.The Invisible Hour is a twice-told tale of a mother and a daughter. Ivy Jacobs’ Beacon Hill family did not exactly treat it as a crimson-letter day when the sixteen-year-old informed her parents that she was pregnant by a feckless Harvard sophomore. Despite her tender years, Ivy wanted to see the pregnancy through and keep the baby. Decisions and plans were made, none of them involving input from Ivy. The newborn would be put up for adoption. Ivy bails, getting as far away as she can, which turns out to be a sort-of commune in western Massachusetts. [image] Alice Hoffman - image from Penguin Random House - shot by Alyssa Peek Mia Jacob is the daughter Ivy bore. We meet her at 15. Living in the place to which her mother had fled, The Community. More of a cult really, an authoritarian farm where the leader’s will is law. Joel Davis took Ivy in, married her soon after she’d arrived, so is Mia’s step-father. But child-rearing is communal here, so parenting is not what you or I would recognize. You will recognize the cult-leader, control-freak personality Joel wears like the headgear sported by the QAnon Shaman. Vanity is supposedly being punished, but it is accomplishment, growth, intelligence and independence that are the targets. He likes his followers unquestioning and compliant. Ivy has stolen parenting moments over the years, so has had a hand in helping Mia find her true self, a young woman who is curious about the world, eager to learn, to investigate, to explore, to read. Discovery of her criminal reading marks her for punishment. When we meet Mia she is, as her mother was, a teen about to flee her oppressive environment. Although we learn about and spend time with both women, it is Mia who is our primary focus. In a dark time, she considers suicide, but, fortuitously, reads a book that saves her, changing her life, giving her hope, The Scarlet Letter. We follow her coming of age, assisted by her mother and an understanding librarian in the town where The Community sells their produce. Her passion for Hawthorne is such that she finds in it a magical power. Alice Hoffman loves her some fairy tales, so it will come as no great shock that one fine day Mia finds herself transported back to the 19th century, and into the presence of her literary love object. Complications ensue. In those, however, we get a sense of Hawthorne, his personality, his material conditions, his family and friends, and his writing challenges. Nice looking fellah, too, to go with that oversized talent. There is some wonderful imagery woven into the novel. The notion of invisibility is large among these. There are times in which it might be useful to go unseen, as in when one is doing something for which one might be punished, or which are simply secret. On the other hand, it is not so wonderful to be unseen in normal human interactions. Like “Yo, dude, human here. Whaddaya? Blind?” There is some literal invisibility as well. Apples are a core element as well. There is a particular breed of apple grown in the area, which is no Eden. They seem less associated with The Fall than with a push. Joel uses leaves of that apple tree as a threat. One could certainly see his actions as serpentine. Mia even decides never to eat apples, given the associations she has for them with The Community. Howdaya like dem apples? Johnny Appleseed comes in for some attention, with plantings of his effort bearing local fruit. The woods as a magical place gets a visit or two. Indeed, magical things go on there. Strange people and buildings appear. There is even one “Once upon a time” in the book. The Woods is where Mia goes to escape. Much of the tension in the book centers around women taking control of their own lives. This happens in various ways. There is the usual disobedience one would expect, with the most daring taking the greatest risks. Reading figures large in this, as subservience is sustained under the lash of forced-ignorance. Reading is the gateway drug to independent thinking, and dreaming of better. Some women even learn herbal medicine, to see to their needs. The comparisons of the modern day with the repressive Puritan world depicted in The Scarlet Letter are clearly drawn. Plus ça change… I think it's a bad idea to write for the moment because the moment passes so quickly. The other thing about time is that what's right and what's good and what's accepted suddenly becomes not. I thought about that with the way women were treated in "The Scarlet Letter," the way that the Puritans blamed women, and they believed in original sin and that women were responsible for that because of Eve. It all changed, but then it changes back. And then it changes again. A lot of the things that women are coping with right now are not that different, really. The judgment against women. - from the Salon interviewThere is a garden in town where all the plants are red. It may feel familiar to frequent readers of Hoffman. This new book [The Invisible Hour] actually takes place in a town where I wrote a book of connecting stories about called The Red Garden, so it's the same place. It's just a novel that takes place in that town. - from the Salon interviewI consider myself an Alice Hoffman fan. While I have not read all her books, I have certainly read more than a couple. Any reader of her books knows that there are certain things one can expect. Among other things, there will be an engaging lead, facing difficult choices, and there will usually be bits, at least, of magic, often of a fairy tale sort. So, one cannot really gripe about a time-travel element pushing things too far, particularly when done in the service of giving us a closer look at a literary icon. My sole gripe is that I felt that the baddie was given too much magical license to pursue his dark ends. Otherwise, despite it’s title, The Invisible Hours very much deserves to be seen. It offers not only an uplifting, engaging tale of empowerment, but an homage to one of the greats of American literature, and long-form praise of the power, the importance, the necessity of reading. I am sure we can all see the value in that. “Q: Did you set out to write a novel so deeply rooted in women’s empowerment? How did it evolve to include time travel?” Review posted - 12/22/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 8/15/23 ----------Trade paperback - 5/21/24 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram and FB pages Profile Other Hoffman books I have reviewed: -----1999 - Local Girls -----2003 - Green Angel -----2004 - Blackbird House -----2005 - The Ice Queen -----2011 - The Red Garden -----2011 - The Dovekeepers -----2017 - Faithful -----2017 - The Rules of Magic -----2019 - The World That We Knew Interviews -----Salon - "I want to believe": Alice Hoffman is always seeking magic, practical and otherwise by Alison Stine -----Shondaland - Alice Hoffman Talks Her Latest Novel, ‘The Invisible Hour’ by Sandra Ebejer -----Harvard Review - An Interview with Alice Hoffman by Christina Thompson Song -----Agnes Obel - Brother Sparrow - relevance to the chapter title Item of Interest from the author -----Salon - Alice Hoffman: Five amazing tips to help you write your novel Items of Interest -----Wiki on Nathaniel Hawthorne -----Wiki on Johnny Appleseed, mentioned multiple times -----Gutenberg – full text of The Scarlet Letter -----Good Will Hunting - Howdaya like dem apples? -----Wiki on the QAnon Shaman ...more |
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Dec 09, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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1250903602
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| 1250903602
| 3.89
| 3,430
| Sep 19, 2023
| Sep 19, 2023
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it was amazing
| “Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.” “Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”-------------------------------------- Part of me wanted to shut her up—if there’s one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a rich girl who felt unlucky in life. But another part knew that what she was saying was factually true. Her family was a train wreck, almost as bad as my mine except rich. Meanwhile, a third part of me couldn’t help noticing her long lashes and her lips—she had what they call a rosebud mouth, a perfect version of it. “I may have misjudged you, miss. If I did, I’m sorry.”There are six primary (fictional) females driving the story in The Golden Gate, with Detective Al Sullivan functioning as the hub to which they all connect and around whom they all spin. There might have been a seventh, but Iris Stafford plunged down a laundry chute in 1930 at age seven, under mysterious circumstances, and appears now mostly in memories, dark visions, and dreams. Her sister, Isabella, all grown up in 1944, is a knockout, as was their mother, Sadie. The Stafford girls have two first cousins. Cassie Bainbridge is an expert hunter, (think Artemis) and a frightening wonder to behold when butchering large game. Nicole is fascinated by the far left, maybe dangerously so. Then there is Genevieve Bainbridge, grandmother to Iris and Isabella, Cassie and Nicole, mother to Sadie and John (who does not much figure in any of this.) [image] Professor Amy Chua - image from AboveTheLaw.com Genevieve is 62 when we meet her, through a deposition she is writing for the DA. There are eleven parts to this document, sub-chapters, spread throughout the book. It is through these that we learn of the events circa and before 1930. But take her words with a shaker of salt. This Bainbridge is an unreliable narrator. She is faced with a very tough situation. The DA has made clear his belief that one of her three granddaughters is guilty of murder, and he is squeezing her to finger the guilty party, lest all three suffer consequences. The events of the novel take place primarily in two times, 1930, when Iris dies, and 1944, the today of the tale. Detective Sullivan is having drinks with a young woman in the hotel bar, when he is summoned by hotel management, about a report of gunshots in one of the rooms. Walter Wilkinson, an industrialist running for president, has acquired a new bit of decoration in his room, a bullet hole above his bed. He offers a tale about a Russian Communist assassin, is relocated to another room, and goes about his night, as does Sullivan. Until a call comes in several hours later. The renowned Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, CA, need some assistance dealing with a newly deceased guest. Mr. Wilkinson had clearly had a pretty tough night. A crew of detectives is called in. Guests, employees and everyone in the vicinity are identified and interviewed, and clues begin to emerge. Timelines and whereabouts are established. Who saw whom emerge from what room, or walk down which hall, at what time, dressed how, gender, ethnicity, age, and so on. The usual procedural digging offers up a list of folks who may have had it in for WW, for a wide range of issues, some personal, some professional. Complications appear like shadows at dusk. Was it the same shooter both times? And what about the unusual way in which his body was left? Witnesses can be unreliable. You cannot believe everything people tell you. Can you believe anything? In fact, there is a sufficient number of the questionably balanced in this novel that the place could be known as much for its head cases as for its headlands. The constant lying and misdirection offer up enough twists to make this read feel like a very tasty bowl of rotini. And it is indeed very tasty. There are two levels at play, the payload, a take on the time and place, and the mystery…well, mysteries. We are eager to learn not only what happened to candidate Wilkinson including wondering if he had it coming) but to Iris Stafford. Did she really fall down a laundry chute to her death? Or was there some dark force at play responsible for killing a seven-year-old child? Chua does a great job of keeping us guessing, and there is plenty to guess about. I figured out one element about halfway through, but there were many others I did not see coming at all. There are surprises aplenty. So, who killed WW (who is loosely based on Wendell Wilkie)? Who was that cowled person seen leaving the scene of the crime? Some people were seen entering and leaving the victim’s room, including an Asian woman and someone answering to the description of the three cousins. Interestingly, Wilkinson had a connection with Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Speaking of which, Chua peppers her novel with actual historical figures. The First Lady of China did, in fact, live in Berkeley during the period of the novel. Her reason for being there is not known. Chua offers one possible explanation. August Vollmer is a name you are unlikely to know, but he was a seminal figure in the evolution of policing. He served as police chief in Berkeley for a time, and is lightly incorporated into the tale, as Al’s mentor, among other things. Place is of paramount importance in good detective tales, and Chua further satisfies the historical need by telling us about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, offering some of her characters a role in its opening. She also writes about the boom-town growth of the area during World War II, when it replaced Pearl Harbor as the premier shipbuilding location in the states, producing an astounding number of vessels for the war, and in so doing, attracting workers from around the country. Some were more welcome than others, as one might expect. There are union issues, housing shortages, poverty, racism, political intrigue, sexual shenanigans, tong gangs, and appearances by two noteworthy ahead-of-their-time accomplished female professionals. Bigotry was shameless and rampant, with Mexicans forcibly “repatriated” by the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese Exclusion Act still in place, and hostile derision openly directed at “Okies,” a term then referring to poor white migrants from the Dust Bowl. In the 1940s came the Japanese internment, when full-fledged American citizens were literally caged off. For the first time, Blacks came to the Bay Area in significant numbers, pouring in from the American South in search of jobs, only to find themselves subjected to vicious prejudice, excluded by labor unions, denied entry into restaurants, theaters and hotels, and barred from living in white neighborhoods. Throughout this period, numerous other ethnic groups—such as Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and Jews—occupied a subordinate position too, not yet considered fully white. - from the Author’s NoteChua builds this into her characters. I chose to make Detective Sullivan a light-skinned mixed-race man in part because Berkeley’s police force in the 1940s included almost no women or minorities, but also because I wanted to explore the phenomenon of racial “passing.” Sullivan is part Mexican, part Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side…But Sullivan can pass as white and chooses to go by Al Sullivan rather than Alejo Gutiérrez for reasons he has not fully admitted to himself. - from the Author’s NoteIn fact, there is enough passing here to make one wonder if Berkeley streets are constructed of all left lanes. In addition to Al, noted above, Japanese characters pass for Chinese. Gay characters pass for straight. One does what one must to survive in a hostile environment. Pathological liars pass for honest citizens. Crazy people pass for sane, and rich kids pass for revolutionaries. But another way to look at some of this is as reinvention. Sometimes you need to change how you present yourself to the world, change how the world sees you, in order to become your truest self. Al is a good guy, conflicted about his decision to conceal his heritage. In addition to his detective work, Al must handle a family problem. His half-sister does not function well in the world, has issues with substances and decision-making. Somehow, she produced an amazing kid. Miriam is eleven going on thirty, from having to cope with so much. She could use some more schooling, but is uber bright, and she loves her uncle Al, who is put into the position of having to take care of her during of her mom’s absences. The love between these two glows like a lighthouse beacon glaring through thick bay fog. Some of the most wonderful scenes in the book are those between Al and Miriam. While it is not a large element, there is also occasional humor. I hate to say it of a fellow Berkeley officer, but Dicky O’Gar was so thick he couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if you gave him two guesses.The events take place in the Berkeley Hills, for the most part. So, near to, while not exactly one of, the ground-zeros for hard-boiled detective yarns. There is some nifty noir-ish patois, (the second quote at the top of this review offers an excellent example) but I would not call this a noir novel, per se. While there is plenty of darkness and grim reality, there is enough optimism to float it out of that sub-genre. Gripes are few. I found the explanation of one of the deaths that occurs less than satisfying. There is a taste of a fantasy element, revolving around the continued presence in the Claremont of the late Iris Stafford. While it adds atmosphere, it suggests more than it actually delivers. Bottom line is that The Golden Gate is a first-rate entertainment, with fun, quirky, interesting fictional supporting characters, an introduction to some actual historical people of note, an insightful look at a vibrant place in an exciting time, a primary character to care about, and mysteries to keep your gray cells sparking. What’s not to like? I put my collar up, pulled my hat brim down, and set off through the drizzle, wondering how much I’d been played in the last seventy-two hours and by how many different women. Review posted - 12/29/23 Publication date – 9/19/23 I received an ARE of The Golden Gate from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating an ePub as well. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Chua’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Wikipedia Amy Lynn Chua (born October 26, 1962), also known as "the Tiger Mom", is an American corporate lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School with an expertise in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization.[5] She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to teaching, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Chua is also known for her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In 2011, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, one of The Atlantic's Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers.The Golden Gate is her first novel. Interviews -----Washington Post - Amy Chua says her hard-boiled detective also is a bit of a ‘tiger mom’ By Sophia Nguyen -----USNews - 'Tiger Mom' Amy Chua Writes First Novel, 'The Golden Gate' Item of Interest from the author -----Macmillan - Discussion Questions Items of Interest -----Wiki on August Vollmer, mentioned in Chapter 3, and throughout -----Wiki on The Mann Act - mentioned in Chapter 14.4 -----Wiki on The Golden Gate Bridge ...more |
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Dec 25, 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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0063258390
| 9780063258396
| 0063258390
| 3.82
| 53,489
| Sep 15, 2022
| Feb 07, 2023
|
it was amazing
| Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the soo Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.-------------------------------------- Who decides what is a monster?When Natalie Haynes wrote Pandora’s Jar, a collection of ten essays on the women in Greek myths, she included a chapter on Medusa. In nine-thousand words she offered a non-standard view of the story of heroic Perseus slaying the gorgon. But the story stayed with her, well, the rage about the story of how ill-treated this supposed monster had been, anyway. If the feeling remained that powerful for so long, it was a message. She needed to devote a full book to this outrage in order to get any peace. Thus Stone Blind. [image] Natalie Haynes - image from Hay Festival We learn how Medusa came by her notable do. After being sexually assaulted by Poseidon in one of Athena’s temples, the goddess was appalled. No, not by the rape. I mean a god’s gotta do what a god’s gotta do. But that he raped Medusa in Athena’s temple! Desecration! Well, that cannot go unpunished. So, Athena seeks revenge on Poseidon by assaulting Medusa, figuring, we guess, that this might make Poseidon sad, or something. Uses her goddess powers to turn Medusa’s hair to snakes and her eyes to weapons of mass destruction. Any living creature she looks at will be lithified. [image] Image from Mythopedia - Head of Medusa by Peter Paul Rubens – 1618 Then there is the other half of this tale, Perseus. We are treated to his dodgy beginnings, another godly sexual assault. He is not portrayed here as the hero so many ancient writings proclaim. Decent enough kid, living with his mom, Danae, and a stepfather sort, until mom is threatened with being forcibly married to the local king, a total douche. Junior tries to make a deal to get her out of it, said douche sending him on a seemingly impossible quest. Good luck, kid. I mean, seriously, how in hell can he hope to bring back a gorgon’s head? [image] Image from Ancient Origins Zeus feels a need to help the kid out. I mean, Perseus may be a bastard, but hey, in Greek mythology, that would put him in the majority. Am I right? Still, he is Zeus’s bastard, so Pop does what he can to help him out, sending along two gods to coach and aid the lad as needed. Hermes and Athena snark all over Perseus, pointing out his many weaknesses and flaws, while providing some very real assistance. They may not hold the kid in high regard, but neither can they piss off the boss. Very high school gym, and totally hilarious. [image] Image from Wiki - Perseus Turning Phineus and his followers to stone by Luca Giordano – 1680s Which should not be terribly surprising. Haynes is not just an author and classicist, but a stand-up comedian. You can glean what you need to know about her comedic career from the Historical Archivist interview linked in EXTRA STUFF. There is plenty of humor beside godly dissing of Perseus. Athena (referred to as Athene in the book) tries to talk an unnamed mortal into signing on to a huge battle between the Olympian gods and the Giants, new powerhouse versus the current champs. It is clearly a tough sell. ‘If you get trodden on by a giant or a god – which wouldn’t be intentional on our part, incidentally – but in the heat of battle one of us might step in the wrong place and there you’d be. . . . Well, would have been. Anyway, it would be painless. Probably very painful just before it was painless, but not for long.’… ‘Come on. If you do die, I’ll put in a word for you to get a constellation. Promise.’There are plenty more like these, including a particularly shocking approach to relieving a really bad headache. [image] Image from Scary For Kids (reminds me of the nun I had for eighth grade) But the whole quest experience uncovers Perseus’s inner god-like inclinations. He becomes an entitled rich kid with far too many high-powered connections helping him out. And develops a taste for slaughter. When Andromeda sees a knight in shining armor, come to save her from certain death by sea monster, her parents suggest that “Maybe, Sweetie, you might consider how gleeful he was when he was murdering defenseless people?” Or noting that if he had really been solid on keeping promises he might have headed straight home to save his mom with that snaky head instead of stopping off to frolic in blood for a few days. “This boy’s gonna be trouble, Andy.” [image] Image from Classical Literature The gods have issues. The Housewives of Olympus could well include some unspeakable husbands, who seem to have a thing for forcing themselves on whomever (or whatever) catches their eye. As a group they are always on the lookout for slights, insults, or minor border transgressions. What a bunch of whiny bitches! But with power, unfortunately, to make life unspeakable for us mere mortals, whose life expectancy is not even a rounding error to their eternal foolishness. Medusa, in that way, was one of us. There is uncertainty about Perseus. [image] Image from Talking Humanities Sisters abound. Apparently, triple-sister deities was a thing for the ancient Greeks. We are treated to POVs from Medusa’s two gorgon sibs, and look on as Perseus hoodwinks the three hapless Graiai sisters, who are doomed to having to share a single eye and a single tooth among them. (Could you please wipe that thing off before you pass it along?) The Nereids are more numerous (50) and a bit of a dark force here. [image] From Greek Legends and Myths – by Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) Never one to stick to a single POV, Haynes offers us many discrete perspectives over seventy-five chapters. Fifteen are one-offs. The Gorgoneion leads the pack with thirteen chapters, followed by Athene with eleven, Andromeda with eight and Medusa with seven. There are some unusual POVs in the mix, a talking head (no, not David Byrne), a crow, and an olive tree among them. Haynes dips into omniscient narrator mode for a handful of chapters as well. [image] Image From Empire As noted in EXTRA STUFF, there is a particularly offensive sculpture of Perseus holding Medusa’s severed head. Not only has he murdered her, he is standing on her corpse. You can see how this would piss off a classicist who knows that Medusa never hurt anyone. Damage done by her death-gaze was inadvertent or done by others using her head as a weapon. And this supposedly brave warrior killed this woman in her sleep. Studly, no? And with all sorts of magical help from his father’s peeps. What a guy! [image] Image from Smithsonian American art Museum – by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer – 1915 Natalie Haynes set out to tell Medusa’s story, and it is completely clear by the end that the monstrosity here is the treatment this innocent female mortal received, at the hands of abusers both male and female. Haynes keeps the story rolling with the diverse perspectives and short chapters, so that even if you remember most of the classic myth there will be plenty of mythological history you never knew. You will also laugh out loud, which is a pretty good trick for what is really a #METOO novel. The abuse of the powerless, of women in particular, by the powerful has been going on only forever. Haynes has made clear just how the stories we have told for thousands of years reinforce, and even celebrate, that abuse. Next up for her, fiction-wise, is Medea. I can’t wait. [image] Image from Smithsonian American Art Museum – by Alice Pike Barney - 1892 Medusa may not have been a goddess, but it seems quite clear that Natalie Haynes is. This is a wonderful read, not to be missed. He’s just a bag of meat wandering round, irritating people.’ Review first posted - 02/24/23 Publication dates ----------UK - September 15, 2022 - Mantle - Hardcover ----------USA – February 7, 2021 – Harper - Hardcover ----------USA - February 27, 2023 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] Image from Wiki by Caravaggio – 1597 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and Instagram pages Interviews -----The Bookseller - Natalie Haynes on challenging patriarchal historical narratives and championing female voices by Alice O’Keeffe -----CBC - Natalie Haynes on the fantastic and fearsome women of Greek myth -----LDJ Historical Archivist - Brick Classicist of the Year 2023 Natalie Haynes - video – 16:46 - this is delicious -----Harvard Bookstore - Natalie Haynes discusses “Stone Blind” - video 1:03:55 - - This is amazing! So much info. You will learn a lot here. My review of other work by the author -----2021 (USA) - A Thousand Ships - Helen of Troy and the women of the Homeric epics Items of Interest -----Wiki on Gorgoneion -----The Page 69 Test - Stone Blind - a bit of fluff -----Widewalls - An Icon of Justice - Or Something Else? A New Medusa in a NYC Park - interesting contemporary sculptural response to a classical outrage. [image] Left: Benvenuto Cellini - Perseus holding the head of Medusa, 1545–1554. Image creative commons / Right: Luciano Garbati - Medusa With The Head of Perseus, 2008-2020. Installed at Collect Pond Park. Courtesy of MWTH Project - images and text from Widewalls article The MWTH (Medusa with the head) image is sometimes accompanied by the ff: “Be thankful we only want equality and not payback.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 06, 2023
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Feb 21, 2023
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Hardcover
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1982180811
| 9781982180812
| 1982180811
| 3.66
| 11,304
| Jul 12, 2022
| Oct 04, 2022
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it was amazing
| “Come.” John Pinten turns and puts his palm against the hull. “Do as I do.” “Come.” John Pinten turns and puts his palm against the hull. “Do as I do.”-------------------------------------- Old superstitions are rife now. The sailors lead the way. Words must be chanted over knots. Messmates must be served in a particular order. A change of wind direction must be greeted. Portents are looked for and translated. The cut of the wake noted. The shape of clouds debated...A lamp taken down into the hold will now burn green. Monstrous births plague the onboard animals. Their issue is hastily thrown overboard to prevent alarm. Eyeless lambs. Mouthless piglets. A litter of rabbits joined together, a mass of heads and limbs. The gardener harvests fork-tailed carrots from his boxed plot outside the hen coop.1628 - Mayken van der Heuvel heads out on a long, exciting, but very dangerous adventure. She is setting sail on the grandest ship of the era, the Batavia, to a place with the same name, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Well, in 1628, anyway. Today, we know it as Jakarta, Indonesia. Her journey is not being undertaken by choice, though. Mayken’s mother died giving birth to a child not her husband’s. The girl is being sent to her father, accompanied by a nursemaid, the kindly, but very superstitious, Imke. Mayken is nine years old. There are many layers to this child: undergarments, middle garments, and top garments. Mayken is made of pale skin and small white teeth and fine fair hair and linen and lace and wool and leather. There are treasures sewn into the seams of her clothing, small and valuable, like her.We follow Mayken’s adventures on this months-long journey across the world. But we know from the beginning that the ship will not complete its trip. 1989 - A nine-year-old boy has just endured a journey of his own. Gil is made of pale skin and red hair and thrifted clothes. His shoes, worn down on the outsides, lend an awkward camber to his walk. Old ladies like him, they think he’s old-fashioned. Truck drivers like him because he takes an interest in their rigs. Everyone else finds him weird.He never knew his father, and Mom kept them on the move all of his brief life, until her death. Gil has been sent to live with his crusty fisherman grandfather, Joss. To the place off the west coast of Australia where the off-course Batavia met its inglorious end. Researchers have been retrieving bits of the ship and its contents. The island is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young girl, Little May. [image] Jess Kidd - image from The Bookseller - by Cordula Tremi Kidd learned about the Batavia while casting about for a subject for her next novel. I will leave you to explore the real-life story here in Wikipedia and in the Sea Museum site. Mayken and Gil’s stories are told in alternating chapters. The duration of their experiences, however, is not the same. Mayken’s time on the Batavia is considerably longer than Gil’s, on what is now Beacon Island. Kidd handles this disparity well, so that difference is not obvious. Mayken is a particularly curious and adventurous little girl, exploring and experiencing the ship with a range of partners, despite her caretakers preferring for her to be a demure, proper young lady. She has a talent for gaining trust and affection from those around her, both children and adults. It comes in handy. Being a child, she carries some odd notions with her, and is susceptible to things that challenge credulity. She is convinced that there is a mythical beast in the deep hold of the ship. (The eel creature was an ancient monster and foe of all humankind. Its name was Bullebak.) Is the evidence she spies of its existence sharp perception or childish imagination? Being the child of a wealthy household, she gains a lot more latitude from those in charge than a street urchin might, which allows her to get away with slipping away from the “Above World” of the deck and passengers to the “Below World” where the crew lives and works. [image] The Batavia replica was constructed between 1985 and 1995 at the Bataviawerf (Batavia shipyard) in Lelystad, The Netherlands. Image: Malis via Wiki Commons - image and text from Sea Museum Gil is a lonely boy, who has seen little stability in his life, and more than his share of horror. Grandpa Joss is less than welcoming, (Gil’s mother had not exactly been a model daughter.) wants him to become a fisherman like him, an occupation to which Gil is ill-suited and strongly opposed. He finds a friend or two. Silvia, the young wife of an older fisherman (and hated rival to his grandfather) takes him under her wing. Dutch, an older deckhand, takes an interest in him as well. In addition, Gil acquires a companion of a different sort, Enkidu, a tortoise named for a bff from ancient literature. There are challenges to survival for both Mayken and Gil, not just their initial de-parenting trauma and grief. In fact there is enough mirroring of their experiences for a carnival fun house. Both are, effectively, orphaned only children, with dead mothers and absent fathers, sent to live with relations after the death of their mothers. Both explore strange new places, with the assistance of those more familiar. Both have a belief in the reality of supposedly mythical beings, finding it easier to seek explanations for the world in cultural fantasies than in the awfulness of the humans around them. (The shadow-monster darkens and becomes solid. It is terrible. Slime slicks and drips over ancient barnacled scales. Eyes, luminous and bulging. Gills rattling venomously. A great, festering eel-king.) It is called a Bunyip. Both are outsiders, in peril from people in their community. There is plenty more. But both come into possession of a stone with a hole in it, that is supposed to have special properties, a witch-stone, or hag-stone. The very same one. It is a link across three hundred sixty years, connecting their parallel experiences. As children, neither has control over much of anything, so they are both at the mercy of the adults around them, not all of whom are benign. With limited immediate familial resources, they are trying to create a kind of family for themselves. [image] This engraving depicts three scenes associated with the loss of the Dutch ship Batavia in 1629. Top: Batavia approaches the Houtman Abrolhos Islands off Western Australia at night. Lower right: the vessel aground on a reef with the crew in boats attempting to refloat it. Lower left: the state of the Batavia the next day, and the passengers and crew abandoning the ship. ANMM Collection 00004993 One of the wonderful things about this novel is the view we get of a lengthy ocean voyage in the 17th century. The physical research helped. “Bumping my head about 400 times as I walked around the ‘Batavia’ replica, it really helped to get a physical sense of the life. The same with the island, walking around and seeing the barrenness and feeling the elements.” - from The Bookseller interviewThe demise of the ship is terrifying, but not so much as the demise of civilization that follows for the survivors. Existential threats abound in 1989 as well, for Gil and others. There are many compelling secondary characters. Several on the ship stand out, a soldier, John Pinten, the ship’s doctor, Aris Jansz, Holdfast, a denizen of the rigging, who snatches Mayken up. Imke the nursemaid is a fun addition, and Creesje, who looks to help Mayken going forward, is a warm, nurturing presence. Those surrounding Gil are likewise interesting. Gil’s colorful grandfather, Joss, goes through some changes. Dutch is a warm force, as is a researcher, on the island looking into the wreck. While Mayken and Gil are entirely fictional, Kidd has populated her story with many of the actual people who were on the Batavia. The presence of those historical personages gives the events that take place in the novel even greater heft. The kids are very nicely drawn, and will engage your interest and sympathy. [image] Wallabi Island (left), Beacon Island (centre) and Morning Reef (right). Image: Hesperian with NASA satellite photos via Wiki Commons. - image and text from Sea Museum Tension ratchets up for both Mayken and Gil. While we know the fate of the Batavia, we do not know the fate of all those she carried. Unlike in her previous book, Things in Jars, which dealt very considerably with things fantastical, the unreality of the creatures May and Gil perceive is much more subtle. The creatures both claim to be real may or may not be. But both creatures serve admirably as metaphors for the awfulness of humanity. While this may not be the best possible choice for reading on a ship-based vacation, it is a moving and fascinating read for landlubbers. Kidd writes with the touch of the poet, adorning her compelling, moving story with sparkling descriptive finery, while offering us a child’s-eye view of the most remarkable ship of its time, and telling a tale of doom. Both Gil’s and Mayken’s stories are strong enough masts to have sailed alone, but together they make a weatherly craft and catch a strong wind, easily speeding past potential story-telling shoals. “How do you describe dread, Gil? That’s what the bunyip is: an attempt to give fear a shape.” Review first posted – December 16, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - October 18, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - August 8, 2023 I received an ARE of The Night Ship from Atria in return for a fair review, and a small, ancient piece of (maybe) bone, recently dug up in our back yard. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Kidd’s personal, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram and FB pages Interviews -----The Bookseller - Jess Kidd discusses her latest novel, new perspectives and maritime disasters by Alice O’Keefe -----BNBook Club Jess Kidd discusses SCATTERED SHOWERS with Miwa Messer and Shannon DeVito - video – 41:28 – forget the title – they talk about The Night Ship My review of an earlier book by Kidd -----Things in Jars Items of Interest -----Wiki on The Batavia -----Sea Museum - The Batavia -----Wiki on Beacon Island -----The Wayback Machine - Batavia’s Graveyard -----Western Australian Museum - Batavia's History -----Dutch Folklore Wikia - Bullebak -----American Museum of Natural History - The Bunyip -----Wiki on Bunyip -----Atria Books - This page includes an excerpt, a reader’s club guide, and an interview with Kidd. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 08, 2022
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Dec 09, 2022
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Dec 08, 2022
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Hardcover
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1501189271
| 9781501189272
| 1501189271
| 3.44
| 8,832
| Oct 18, 2022
| Oct 18, 2022
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it was amazing
| Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?-------------------------------------- Autobiography just isn’t good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.The overall format is one of a frame, with Adam Brewster opening by letting us know that this is the story of his life and times, then returning to turn out the lights when the tale has been completed. It is a family saga of Irving’s era, 50’s 60s, (Vietnam) 70s, 80s (Reagan, AIDS) et al, to the mad, reactionary violence of the 21st century. Adam Brewster, a writer and screenwriter, is our narrator for a look at the sexual politics of a lifetime, from his birth in 1941 to his later days some eighty years on. Adam’s mother, Rachel Brewster (Little Ray), was a nearly-pro ski nut, who spent large parts of every year on the slopes, settling for work as an instructor. That left Adam in the hands of his grandmother for much of his upbringing, assisted by a passel of relations. He would hunger for time with his only known parent for much of his life, a core element of the novel. [image] John Irving - image from Outside Magazine Readers of John Irving will recognize much that is familiar, from his prior work and his life. The novel is set in Exeter, New Hampshire, Irving’s home town; includes a benign stepparent teaching at Phillips Exeter (as his actual stepfather did); includes the narrator as a student there. Yep, Irving attended. There is wrestling, of course. Bears are limited to a kind of snowshoe shaped like their paws. A hotel figures large. There is an absent biological father, (Irving’s father was in the US Army Air Force. He never met him.); a mother with too many secrets; there is also reference made to an inappropriate relationship between an adult woman and an underage boy. (something Irving himself experienced); considerable attention is directed to feeling like, to being, an outsider. ”That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”In fact, Irving turns the tables here, as Adam, as the only straight among the main characters, is the outsider in his own family, always the last to get things, he is nonetheless loved and supported by his sexually diverse relations. His mother’s lifelong lover, Molly, effectively his stepmother, tells Adam, “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.” It serves as a core message for the book and for Irving’s oeuvre. One of the main characters is transgender. He first wrote a sympathetic trans character in The World According to Garp, in 1978. So, when his son, born many years after the book was published, came out to his parents as trans, she knew her father would be completely supportive. The politics of divergent sexuality through time manifests in diverse venues. Raucous comedic material performed at a comedy club in one era is considered too much for a later sensibility, a new puritanism of correctness. Safety for being different is a concern. Adam is very worried when his stepfather is out in their town dressed as a woman, even trails him sometimes in case a backup is needed. Reagan’s unwillingness to address AIDS until six years into his presidency is noted. Acceptance increases over time, but increased acceptance sparks increased resistance. A performer of material deemed unacceptable to some becomes a target for violence in a more disturbed climate. In addition to the overarching theme of looking at sexual politics, sexuality is shown as far less important than the connection between people. Things that may seem sexual actually have a lot less to do with sex than connection. For instance, Adam and his mother often sleep together, in the slumbering, not biblical sense, well past the age where that is generally deemed ok. There is another relationship in which a straight man and a gay woman share a bed, sans fooling around. There is hilarity aplenty, not least with Adam’s young sequence of damaged or damaging lovers. Lots of cringy LOL material there. I counted a dozen “LOLs” in my notes, some for entire chapters. And then there are ghosts. Irving calls this a ghost story. I refer you to a piece on his site that addresses this directly. Ghosts don’t just warn us about the future; they remind us of what we’ve forgotten about the past. All this is to say, I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel…the ghosts are more prominent than before; the ghosts, or hints of ghosts, begin and end the novel.We all have ghosts we live with, but the ones here are visible, well, to some, anyway. They hang out in large numbers at a hotel in Aspen, but also turn up at home. The spectres are historical and familial, with some able to interact with the physical world (sometimes with LOL results) sometimes condemned to remain non-impactful. They do indeed, as noted above, remind us of the past, sometimes darkly so, but some offer direction and comfort. And Irving uses his behemoth of a novel to keep generating new ones. They pass over in a wide range of ways; lightning, murder on a stage, sudden avalanche, cancer, suicide, murder in a hotel, falling from a chairlift, leaping from a chairlift, death in war, et al. Falkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” I guess it could be said for many characters in The Last Chairlift that even the dead are never entirely dead. Adam’s profession offers ample opportunity for Irving (winner of a National Book Award AND a screenwriting Oscar) to present a wealth of material about writing, both for the screen and for print. “My life could be a movie,” you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real—too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. “My life could be a movie” means you think your life has been special enough to get made as a movie; it means you think your life has been spectacularly blessed or cursed.-------------------------------------- Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming.-------------------------------------- you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.-------------------------------------- Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—depending on our inclination.There are many more—it is a very long book—but this last one in particular speaks very directly to Irving’s process. As noted up top, he returns to familiar themes and situations. In interviews he says that he begins with the same life experiences, but then changes where they go, how they morph, as if his creative process was to take the stem cells of his experiences and direct them to grow into a wide range of possible pieces. Same source, different outcomes. It is not just the characters and situation that have morphed, it is the form as well. As Adam is a screenwriter as well as a novelist, and as this story is Adam’s, it is fitting that how he perceives the world makes its way into how he presents his story. There are long chapters that are written in screenplay format, complete with fade-ins, fade-outs, off-screen narration, closeups, wide-shots, the whole toolkit. It is an interesting tactic. I found it off-putting, but it does allow for a different approach to the material. He does not just talk about writing per se, but incorporates into the novel considerable attention to his favorite book of all time, Moby Dick. (he has the last line of Moby Dick tattooed on his left forearm) This book opens with My mother named me Adam…, which resonates with Call me Ishmael and no less with …I am born from David Copperfield, Dickens being a particular Irving favorite. He sees himself as more of a 19th century novelist than a 21st century one. …because those novels have always represented the model of the form for me. I loathed Hemingway. I thought Faulkner was excessive. Fitzgerald was ok, but lazy at times. I was enamored of the kind of novel all of my classmates at school despised.References to Melville’s masterpiece (sometimes hilariously), Dickens, Ibsen, and plenty of others abound. It is pretty clear that John Irving has had an interesting life. Eighty years old at the time of publication, he does not see The Last Chairlift as his last hurrah. In fact, he signed a three-book deal with Simon and Schuster, of which this was merely the first. He promises, though, that the next two will be a lot shorter. Until then, this one will certainly suffice. Irving has lost none of his sense of humor. This book was more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. He has lost none of his feel for writing relatable humans. While some of the supporting cast are painted in broad strokes, to illustrate this or that sociopolitical issue of a given time, the main ones, and even hordes of second-tier characters are drawn with fine lines, and deep sensitivity. He has lost none of his vision, seeing clearly the currents of the eras considered, and how those have impacted social and political possibility for rounded humans who do not fit the square holes of a boilerplate majority. For all that Irving writes about people who are different, he makes it eminently clear that in matters that count we all share the same needs, to be loved, seen, and respected for who we are. Here’s hoping it will not be another seven years until we get to enjoy another of John Irving’s marvelous works. …the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart. Review first posted – February 18, 2023 Publication dates ----------October 18, 2022 - Hardcover ----------October 3, 2023- Trade paperback I received an ARE of The Last Chairlift from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Irving's personal and FB pages Interviews -----CBS Sunday Morning - John Irving: A Writer’s Life with Rita Braver – a delight - Sees himself as a 19th century writer -----Late Night with Seth Meyers - John Irving Doesn't Write a Book Until He Knows How It's Going to End -----Freethought Matters - Freethought Matters: John Irving - video – 28:08 – with Ann Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker - Interview begins at 2:57 – focus on chairlift begins at about 18:00 -----NPR Podcasts - Book of the Day - 'The Last Chairlift' is John Irving's latest novel on sexual politics with Scott Simon – Audio – 10:26 -----Hazlift - ‘Hope is an Elusive Quality’: An Interview with John Irving by Haley Cunningham -----Toronto Star - Hugging us back in the dark: John Irving on making us care about his characters, sexual politics, and the ghosts in his new book ‘The Last Chairlift’ by Deborah Dundas Items of Interest from the author -----Here Come the Ghosts Again on ghosts in his novels -----CBS News - excerpt -----Lithub - excerpt My review of another book by the author -----In One Person Items of Interest ----- Moby Dick - Full text – with annotations -----David Copperfield - Full text – with footnote annotations ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 29, 2023
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Jul 01, 2022
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Hardcover
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0525511326
| 9780525511328
| 0525511326
| 3.65
| 12,524
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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it was amazing
| The radio smelled of dust and minerals, and in some ways reminded Luz of reading tea leaves. They were similar, weren’t they? She saw images and fe The radio smelled of dust and minerals, and in some ways reminded Luz of reading tea leaves. They were similar, weren’t they? She saw images and felt feelings delivered to her through dreams and pictures. Maybe those images rode invisible waves, too? Maybe Luz was born with her own receiver. She laughed, considering how valuable such a thing must be, a radio built into the mind.-------------------------------------- Maria Josie insisted Diego and Luz must learn the map, as she called it, and she showed them around first on foot and later by streetcar. She wore good walking shoes, and dressed herself and the children in many layers. It tends to heat up, she had said,There is a lot going on in this novel, so buckle up. Focused on the experiences of 17/18 year-old Luz Lopez--the Woman of Light of the story--in Depression-era Denver, the story alternates between her contemporary travails and the lives of her ancestors. The beginning is very Moses-like, a swaddling Pidre being left by his mother on the banks of an arroyo in The Lost Territory in 1868. We follow Pidre and his children and grandchildren into the 1930s. All have special qualities. Among them, Luz, his granddaughter, reads tea leaves, seeing visions of both past and future. Diego, his grandson, would definitely belong to House Slytherin in a different universe. He tames and performs with rattlesnakes. [image] Kali Fajardo-Anstine in the Western History & Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library - image from 5280 - photo by Caleb Santiago Alvarado This is a story about stories, how telling them carries on identity, while ignoring them can help erase the culture of a people. Pidre is noted as a talented story-teller, urged, as he is given away, to remember your line. KFA remembers hers, giving a voice to Chicano-Indigenous history. My ancestors were incredibly hard working, generous, kind, and brilliant Coloradans. But they were also poor and brown and this meant our stories were only elevated within our communities. When I began writing seriously in my early twenties, I was reading books by James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Edward P. Jones, and Katherine Anne Porter, and many, many others. I saw how these authors shined the spotlight on their people and I also wanted to write work that was incredibly sophisticated that honored my cultural group, making us more visible in the mainstream. - from the Pen America interviewFajardo-Anstine brings a lot of her family’s history into this novel. Her great-aunt’s name is Lucy Lucero. In addition to the name of our protagonist, a second connection can be found in the name of the stream where Pidre is found, Lucero. An uncle was a snake charmer. An aunt worked in a Denver glass factory, as Luz’s aunt works in a mirror factory in the book. Her family had hidden from KKK, as characters do here. Her Belgian coal-miner father abandoned his family, as Luz and Diego’s father does here. There is a feel to the book of family stories being told around a table, or in a living room, by elders, passing on what they know to those most recently arrived. Remember these tales, the speaker might say, and in doing so remember where you came from, so you can better know who your people are and ultimately who you are. As they hopped and skipped in and out of the archway lights, Luz imagined she was jumping between times. She saw herself as a little girl in the Lost Territory with her mother and father walking through snow fields, carrying fresh laundry to the company cabin. Then she saw herself in Hornet Moon with Maria Josie, beside the window to her new city, those few photographs of her parents scattered about the floor, the only remnants of them she had left. She saw herself eating Cream of Wheat for breakfast with Diego in the white-walled kitchen. They were listening to the radio, the summertime heat blowing in from the windows, the mountains far away behind the screen.The racism that Luz and others confront is not subtle. A public park features a sign NOTICELuz is denied an opportunity to apply for a job because she is not white. A KKK march has a very pogrom-like, 1921-Tulsa-like feel. Luz gets a chance to see the range of crimes going on in the city, when she gets a particular job. Sees how the system that is supposed to protect regular folks does anything but. The murder of a Hispanic activist by the police is not just a historical image, but a resonant reminder of police killing of civilians in today’s world, usually with little accountability. The more things change… There is a magical element in this novel, that, when combined with the multi-generational structure, and richness of language, and, of course, her focus on particular groups of people, makes one think of Louise Erdrich. As to the first, among others, Luz receives visions while reading tea leaves, and at other times as well. An ancestor speaks with the dead. A saintly personage associated with mortality appears in the flesh. People appear who may or may not be physically present. The ancestry begins with Pidre in 1868, but in his infancy we meet elders who reach back much further. The generation I knew in real life was born around 1912 and 1918. They would talk about the generation before—their parents, but also their grandparents. That meant I had firsthand knowledge spanning almost two hundred years. When I sat down to think about the novel and the world I was creating, I realized how far back in time I was able to touch just based on the oral tradition. My ancestors went from living a rural lifestyle—moving from town to town in mining camps, and before that living on pueblos and in villages—to being in the city, all within one generation. I found it fascinating that my great-grandma could have grown up with a dirt floor, not going to school, not being literate, and have a son graduate with his master’s degree from Colorado State University. To me, time was like space travel, and so when I decided on the confines of the novel, I knew it had to be the 1860s to 1930s. - from the Catapult interviewLuz is an appealing lead, smart, ambitious, mostly honorable, while beset by the slings and arrows of ethnic discrimination. Like Austen women, she is faced with a world in which, because of her class and ethnicity, making her own way in the world would be very tough without a husband. And, of course, the whole husband thing comes with its own baggage. Of course, the heart wants what it wants and she faces some challenges in how to handle what the world offers her. She does not always make the best choices, a flaw likely to endear her to readers even more than an antiseptic perfection might. The supporting cast is dazzling, particularly for a book of very modest length (336p hardcover). From a kick-ass 19th century woman sharpshooter, to a civil rights lawyer with conflicting ambitions, from a gay mother-figure charged with raising children not her own to a successful Greek businessman, from Luz’s bff cuz to the men the two teens are drawn to, from an ancient seer to a corrupt politician, from…to…from…to… Fajardo-Astine gives us memorable characters, with color, texture, motivations, edges you can grab onto, elements to remember. It is an impressive group. And the writing is beautiful. This is the opening: The night Fertudez Marisol Ortiz rode on horseback to the northern pueblo Pardona, a secluded and modest village, the sky was so filled with stars it seemed they hummed. Thinking this good luck, Fertudez didn’t cry as she left her newborn on the banks of an arroyo, turkey down wrapped around his body, a bear claw fastened to his chest.Really, after reading that, ya just have to keep on. One of the great strengths of this novel is its powerful use of imagery. There are many references to light, as one would expect. Water figures large, from Pidre’s introduction in the prologue, left by a stream, to our introduction to Luz and her aunt Maria Josie sitting together in Denver, near the banks where the creek and the river met, the city’s liquid center…, to a rescue from a flash flood, to an unborn buried near a river, and more. A bear-claw links generations. This makes for a very rich reading experience. I felt that the narrative fizzled toward the end, as if, having accomplished the goal of presenting a family and group history, filling a vacuum, there was less need to tidy everything up, a quibble, given that the novel accomplishes its larger aims. Kaji Fajardo-Astine’s 2019 short-story collection, Sabrina & Corina, made the finals for National Book Award consideration. You do not need to read tea leaves or have visions to see what lies ahead. Woman of Light, a first novel, illuminates that future quite clearly. By focusing a beacon on an under-told tale, Kaji Fajardo-Astine, is certain to have a brilliant career as one of our best novelists. Celia, Estevan’s sister. Luz listened and watched as she read her own words in her own voice. First in Spanish and then in English. The crowd moved with each syllable, cries of anguish. A lamp unto my feet, a woman yelled behind Luz. A light unto my path. Review posted – June 17, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – June 7, 2022 ----------Trade paperback- April 18, 2023 I received a digital ARE of Woman of Light from One World in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Red – June, 2022 - Q&A: Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s “Woman of Light” with Cory Phare -----Pen America – 2019 - THE POWER OF STORYTELLING: A PEN TEN INTERVIEW WITH KALI FAJARDO-ANSTINE with Lily Philpott – not specific to this novel, but interesting -----Catapult – June, 2022 - Kali Fajardo-Anstine Believes Memory Is an Act of Resistance with Jared Jackson Items of Interest -----Following the Manito Trail -----5280 - Inside Denver Author Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Much Anticipated Debut Novel by Shane Monahan ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 12, 2022
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Jun 12, 2022
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Hardcover
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0593546970
| 9780593546970
| 0593546970
| 3.56
| 4,470
| Sep 20, 2022
| Sep 20, 2022
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it was amazing
| Once war is on men’s minds, Selica had said, it festers within, claiming them.-------------------------------------- For a soldier to le Once war is on men’s minds, Selica had said, it festers within, claiming them.-------------------------------------- For a soldier to let his enemy live despite the entrenched inclination to kill touched my heart with a flame. And as he looked out on our land, on the people dying and bleeding on it, no matter if they were Russian or Mongol, I saw pain, deep and endless and raw, open inside him like a ravine about to swallow us. There was light there, light that left me hopeful. Perhaps life, possibly even goodness, did exist, even in a soldier, and it prevailed in the world after all.Baba Yaga, aka Bony Legs, has gotten a bad rap. Ivan the Terrible, however, deserves all the lousy press that can be heaped upon him. Terrible seems far too tame a word, The monstrous, the psycho-killer, the unspeakable, the mindless slayer of mankind, and on, and on, [insert your pejorative here]. (Of course, this is the portrait presented in the book. The real-life Ivan may have had cause for his paranoia, given the considerable opposition of the gentry to many of his policies. Find out more in this small piece in Britannica.) [image] Olesya Salnikova Gilmore - image from her site The most common images of Yaga are of a frightening witch, tooling about in a strange vehicle, trapping and devouring children, and generally doing dirt to people, a personification of evil. But even in traditional lore, she is sometimes shown with a softer side, a healer instead of a tormenter, a consoler, a comforter instead of a horror. She has been seen as a personification of nature, a Slavic version of Persephone. She appears as a change agent in many stories, a trickster, helping the hero or heroine fulfill their quest. [image] Image from The House of Twigs I had written two books that had gone nowhere. Totally uninspired, almost desperate, I turned to the Russian folktales I had grown up with as a child. Baba Yaga loomed large in these stories—her elusive and mercurial character, her enchanting chicken-legged hut, her terrific mortar and pestle mode of transport, her sharp tongue and fearsome appearance, unsurprising for a woman of knowledge living alone in the wood.[image] A painting portraying Baba Yaga. According to Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga was a witch who often preys on children to eat them. However, some accounts present her as a wise and helpful creature. The painting was created in 1917 and is now located at the House Museum of Viktor Vasnetsov in Moscow. Gilmore is looking to give Yaga some better press, make her more human in some ways, more of a bad-ass superhero in others. She has a team, of course. (Y-men?) The house on chicken legs that is the very definition of creepy, has been transformed into Little Hen, a supportive, nurturing friendly character who might have been the original mobile home. When Yaga speaks to Little Hen she regards her as somewhere between a beloved pet and a partner. Dyen (meaning day) is a considerable wolf. He (thankfully) is Yaga’s primary means of high speed transportation, while also offering his considerable fierceness. Noch (meaning night) is an owl. Noch specializes in reconnaissance and intel-gathering. They share Yaga’s immortality. [image] Xénia Hoffmeisterová [cs], Ježibaba [cs] (2000) As a provider of potions for this and that, Yaga has a following. Among those is the tsar’s wife, the tsaritsa, whom she has known for a long time. She is suffering from an illness that the court physicians cannot seem to touch. Yaga helps her out, but suspects foul play. Although she would prefer to remain safely in her house in the woods, she must go to Moscow to find out who is doing this to Anastasia Romanovna, a kind, sweet young woman. It would appear that Yaga and crew are not the only immortals wandering about. The tsar has fallen under the influence of a dark-hearted ageless sort, someone Yaga knows. And the game is afoot. [image] Image from King Edward’s Music Tsar Ivan is not exactly the best administrator, and it is not long before he is laying waste to large swaths of the country, under the guidance of a dark force. Whether getting there because of his genetic inheritance, or because his mind had been poisoned by a demonic sort, (The actual Ivan was quite superstitious, taking an interest in witchcraft and the occult.) Ivan, who seems at least somewhat rational when we meet him, is soon barking mad, seeing enemies everywhere, even among friends, and showing no hesitation about slaughtering anyone who displeases him. Yaga loves her Mother Russia and considers it her patriotic duty to defend her against enemies foreign and domestic. Ivan definitely counts among the latter. So, superhero vs supervillain. [image] Ivan Bilibin, Baba Yaga, illustration in 1911 from "The tale of the three tsar's wonders and of Ivashka, the priest's son" (A. S. Roslavlev) There are levels of existence here with diverse characteristics, lands of the dead and living, a glass mountain, with spells aplenty. Yaga’s adventures might remind you of western mythology and Campbellian quest forms having to do with descending to hell in order to emerge better armed to take on whatever. Yaga needs help from other immortal sorts to accomplish her mission, which becomes pointedly clear later in the book. In the shorter term, she is faced with carnage in Russia, and trying to find ways to stop or even just slow it down. [image] Baba Yaga depicted in Tales of the Russian People (published by V. A. Gatsuk in Moscow in 1894) There is even a bit of romance to counterbalance some of the considerable blood-letting. After I had witnessed my first birthing not ten years into my life, Mokosh had explained to me the intricacies of lovemaking and child making. “Though immortals can birth other gods and half gods,” she had said, gently, “it is not simple for us, with mortals above all. Most of the time, it happens not. It is even harder for half gods. If it happens, it does so for a reason. It is willed by the Universe.” I had known many men over the centuries, both mortal and immortal. Not once had my trysts ended in anything other than fleeting pleasure or pointless regret. I knew it would never happen for me.But then she meets Vasily Alekseyevich Adashev, studly warrior, but mortal, which is a problem. It gets complicated. He is probably in his 20s or 30s, she is several hundred. (Baba Cougar?) It is a delightful element. This is a time of transition in Russia, when the old gods were being replaced by the Christian invader. But local loyalties were sometimes with the old and sometimes with the new. Yet, the old gods were still actively interfering in human activities. Getting a look at such a tumultuous period in Russian history is one of the bonuses of this book. [image] Image from Meet the Slavs The view of reality Gilmore presents is informed by her childhood exposure to Russian mythology. She was born in Moscow and spent her early years there. Fairy tales from childhood figure large, particularly stories set in Old Russia. (Gilmore would have included even more, but maybe in some future work.) Setting her tale in medieval times felt right, which led to focusing on Ivan as THE medieval tsar. It helped that he made an ideal villain, given his location in history, his interest in the occult, and his apparently mass murderous sociopathy. What makes a guy go there? This being a book by a Russian-born author, about Russia, you can expect that many characters will be referred to be multiple names. And it can be tricky discerning the good Ivans, Vasilies and Alexes from the bad ones. I read an ARE, so cannot say if the final print (and epub) versions contain character lists. If your copy lacks one, you might want to start your own. My minimal gripes about the book have to do with the attention required to keep everyone straight, and a need for a primer on the structure of everything in Old Russian lore. How many layers of afterlife are there? How does one move from to another? It can be eye-crossing keeping this in order. [image] Image from Amino Apps That said, I found The Witch and the Tsar a delightful, satisfying read. Yaga was a very appealing character. Gilmore has succeeded in making her relatable, and her companions appealing. The devastation wrought by Ivan and those driving him provide all the motive force anyone might require to do everything possible to stop it, which gives us a lot to root for. The romantic element is a nice touch. Added payload on Russian history, folklore, and old religion is most appreciated. I have provided a few links in EXTRA STUFF to more about Yaga in folklore. I urge you to check those out. Baba Yaga may have had plenty of unpleasant things written about her, and many a hideous image created, but in The Witch and the Tsar, Yaga is looking pretty good. Mother had taught me the immortal side of earth magic, of doing without awareness, without feeling. With Dusha, I learned to listen to the natural world around me, not only to the sky, the trees, the waters, the very air, but also to myself. Review posted – 11/25/22 Publication date – 9/20/22 I received an ARE of The Witch and the Tsar from Ace of Berkley of Penguin Random House in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Gilmore’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Gilmore is hard at work on her next novel, with a draft due to her editor in September. This one will be a gothic, set in the 1920s, after the revolution. Two sisters confront their past in their old ancestral house in Moscow. Pub date TBD. Interviews -----Malaprop's Bookstore & Cafe - The Book of Gothel: Mary McMyne in convo with Olesya Salnikova Gilmore - video - Gilmore reads from the beginning of her book - 0:00 to 21:48. Mary McMyne then reads from her book - to 39:43. Then Stephanie Jones-Byrne interviews them from about 40 minutes -----Writer’s Digest - Olesya Salnikova Gilmore: On Introducing Russian History to Fantasy Readers by Robert Lee Brewer -----Paulette Kennedy - DEBUT SPOTLIGHT: Olesya Salnikova Gilmore Items of Interest from the author -----Paste Magazine - excerpt -----discussion guide from her site Items of Interest -----World History Encyclopedia - Baba Yaga -----Literary Hub - Baba Yaga Will Answer Your Questions About Life, Love, and Belonging by Taisia Kitaiskaia -----Britannica on Ivan the Terrible ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Nov 15, 2022
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Jun 03, 2022
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Hardcover
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059343675X
| 9780593436752
| 059343675X
| 3.97
| 2,570
| Apr 26, 2022
| Apr 26, 2022
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really liked it
| God save Nellie from the ladies’ pages. If a woman was lucky enough to get a job working for a paper—which spared her from working in a factory, or God save Nellie from the ladies’ pages. If a woman was lucky enough to get a job working for a paper—which spared her from working in a factory, or as a domestic or a wife (shudder)—she would have to spend her days writing about household hints and recipes, garden shows and charity luncheons. It was mind-numbingly tedious and she wanted to avoid it at all costs. It was one reason why she had left Pittsburgh.-------------------------------------- There is nothing worse than being told that you don’t know your own mind or body. If you aren’t mad when you go in, chances are you will be by the time you come out.When twenty-three-year-old Nellie Bly headed to New York City in 1887, she left a message for her boss at The Pittsburgh Gazette. I’m off for New York. Look out for me.Good advice. It was no easy task for Elizabeth (Elly) Jane Cochrane. Women in journalism were relegated to the “ladies’ page” when they were hired at all. And often had to use pen names to get their work into print. Persistence paid off, though, and Cochrane finally got a gig with The New York World, by promising to go undercover at the New York City Asylum for the Insane on Blackwell’s Island. (called Roosevelt Island today). The notorious institution had already been the subject of multiple journalistic examinations. But it was a tough place to get into, and, as it had changed from a co-ed institution to a women’s asylum in 1872, it would take a female to be able to get inside, one of the downsides to journalism being such a boys’ club. But Nellie’s self-confidence, and courage, knew no bounds, so she dove right in. [image] Maya Rodale - image from Open Shelf – photo by Elsa Ngan The Mad Girls of New York is a novelization of Bly’s actual early adventures in NYC. Some of the characters are taken from Bly’s seminal work, Ten Days in an Asylum, which was comprised of and expanded from the articles she had written for the New York World, a series that made her reputation. She persuaded those who needed persuading that she was mad, in order to be institutionalized as a patient. It was surprisingly easy. Once in, she experienced the horrors inflicted on the patients, although inmates would have been more accurate. The asylum was a physically cold place, and the residents were provided with painfully inadequate clothing and covers. The food was unspeakable, often insect-ridden, the physical accommodations spartan, the doctors dismissive, the nurses abusive, and the cleanliness regimen was cruel. It did not help that some of the help was recruited from the prison that was also on the island. [image] Nellie Bly - image from the Irish Times We meet several groups of characters. The journalism pack leads off. This includes the editors she interviews during a project on why the papers do not hire women. There is a fair bit of LOL to be had in this as she leaves them spinning and sputtering in their own contradictions. There are the other women journalists with whom she engages, a club of sorts, who help each other out, getting together in an establishment, The Ordinary, that serves women only. Such institutions did exist at the time. She has a competition going with a male reporter, Sam Colton, from Chicago. There is also a simmering attraction between the two, but it is not romancy enough to intrude into the story too much, thankfully. There is also a flirtation with the hunky, single mayor. When you learn that there was in fact a hot bachelor mayor of New York City named Hugh Grant, you must include it in your novel. - from Rodale’s Twitter feedRodale has produced numerous romance novels, (22 by my count, plus some novellas, a children‘s book and a couple of non-fics) so it would have been a shock if there were not some sparks flying in this tale. But if you are hoping for ignition into conflagration, you will have to check out her considerable romance work instead. [image] The New York City Asylum for the Insane - image from Wikipedia – cheery-looking, no? Then there are the patients. Anne is in need of care, but cannot afford decent treatment at a private institution. The Princess has a regal bearing but will only say three words, Rose, Daisy, and Violet, over and over. Tillie has a nervous condition, truly needs some rest, some peace and quiet, in a warm place, but her friends dumped her off at Bellevue (with friends like that…). Prayer Girl, who pleads with god to kill her ASAP, somehow never takes the initiative herself. Women are committed to this place for a variety of reasons, few of them good. Many devolve to a broad category of their being inconvenient, something Martha Mitchell might recognize. Then there is Mrs Grady, the Nurse Ratched of this enterprise, a cruel overseer, super control freak, eager to inflict pain and punishment and never willing to hear any of the real concerns of her charges. Toss in a few cruel cops and attendants, a clueless doctor, and another who at least shows some bits of humanity. [image] Newspaper Row in Lower Manhattan. That is City Hall in the foreground on the left. The domed building to the east of City Hall is the New York World Building. The Brooklyn Bridge had not yet been built when this shot was taken, but if it had, it would appear to the north (left) of the World Bldg) – image from Stuff Nobody Cares About Rodale’s focus is on how women were treated, not just in this horrid institution, but in all institutions of the wider world, using her story-telling skills to show us how women were regarded as a lesser life form, in politics, in journalism, in finance, in the overall world of work, well…paid work. Slaving at home for hubby and progeny was still just fine and dandy. She shows the struggles that smart, driven women had to endure in order to access the same level of opportunity and respect as men, just to be able to cover hard news. Bly was one of a group of women called “Girl Stunt Reporters,” daring women journalists who put themselves in peril in order to delve into many of the social wrongs of the late 19th century. [image] Hugh J. Grant two-term NYC Mayor – image from Wikipedia Rodale spices up the story, as if it needed additional condiments, with a mystery about a high-society spouse gone strangely missing, with the widower chomping at the bit to wed a younger, richer, woman. She incorporates actual historical events and people into the tale, sometimes with name changes, sometimes with tweaking of timelines. Some personages retain their names, including the aforementioned mayor, Hugh Grant, (who did not actually become mayor until 1889, two years after the events of this novel) Hetty Green (The Witch of Wall Street), Harriet Hubbard Ayer, a writer of articles about beauty and health for the New York World, and others. Despite the harshness of the conditions Bly, and now Rodale, reveal, there is no graphic violence or sexual behavior in The Mad Girls of New York. This helps make it perfectly suitable for younger readers, particularly girls, who may not know about Nellie, and what a pioneer she was. It is a very fluid, quick read. [image] Hetty Green – The Witch of Wall Street - image from wiki The book is listed as A Nellie Bly Novel #1, so we can presume there are more in the works. I do not have any inside intel on this, but I imagine that Nellie’s around-the-world-in-80-days challenge (she did it in 72) will be among the upcomings. Something to look forward to. Nellie’s story is a remarkable one. Rodale has done a very nice job of letting modern readers in on what Nellie faced as a gutsy, newbie reporter in New York, and what she accomplished, at least in the short term, encouraging us to learn more about this brilliant, dogged, remarkable woman. You’d have to be crazy to pass this one by. The madhouse had been horrible, but this part—writing it all down with the promise of seeing the atrocities in print, made it feel worthwhile. When she thought of the public reading her words and knowing about the suffering that happened at Blackwell’s, Nellie felt shivers. Do stunts, Marian had flippantly suggested. But Nellie had found her life’s work. Review posted – May 6, 2022 Publication date – April 26, 2022 I received an ARE of The Mad Girls of New York from Berkley in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. Can I get a warmer blanket, please? [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interview -----Wine, Women and Words - Nerding out about Nellie with Maya Rodale with Michelle Leivas and Diana Giovinazzo Item of Interest from the author -----Lithub - The Real-Life Heroines of an Outrageous Era: A Gilded Age Reading List My obsession with the Gilded Age began with romance novels—I wanted to set a series in old New York in the world of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom and dollar Princesses, which felt like an updated version of the Regency Era. But in researching the time period I discovered that the best stories weren’t just uptown in Fifth Avenue mansions—they were everywhere. I also discovered that the Gilded Age was a golden age for independent, ambitious, boundary breaking real life heroines.Items of Interest -----Wiki on Nellie Bly -----Wiki on Hugh J. Grant - NYC’s 88th mayor -----Wiki on Hetty Green – “The Witch of Wall Street” - Marian goes to see her to get intel on Jay Wallace in chapter 24 -----Wiki on - Harriet Ayer - Nellie’s mentor in the book -----Library of Congress - Research Guide for Nellie Bly -----Gutenberg - Ten Days in a Madhouse - the full text -----Wiki on The Martha Mitchell effect -----Smithsonian - These Women Reporters Went Undercover to Get the Most Important Scoops of Their Day – an outstanding piece by Kim Todd, author of Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters -----Wiki on The Ladies Ordinary - a women-only establishment where Nellie meets with other reporters -----For a real blow to your consciousness, check out this site, for Octagon NYC. This part of the original asylum has been converted, as all things in NYC are, into luxury housing. The prices are insane. (a 540 sq ft studio is $3,028 a month, a 3 BR, 1,316 sq ft goes for $7500 a month) -----The American Journal of Psychiatry has a brief, but informative, piece - The Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and the New York Press Reminds Me Of -----Leslie Parry’s 2015 novel, Church of Marvels, includes a look at Blackwell’s when one of the characters spends some time inside. -----One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - the film ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 18, 2022
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Apr 28, 2022
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May 04, 2022
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Paperback
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0593337697
| 9780593337691
| 0593337697
| 4.37
| 86,528
| Apr 12, 2022
| Apr 12, 2022
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it was amazing
| I had a hand in breaking all of this. I had to have a hand in fixing it.When does helping become controlling? When does loving become smothering? I had a hand in breaking all of this. I had to have a hand in fixing it.When does helping become controlling? When does loving become smothering? When does zeal become interference? How does one do what one knows is best without crossing the line? Civil Townsend, a 23-year-old nurse in the Montgomery Alabama of 1973 has to figure all that out. Working for a federally funded family planning clinic, Civil is one of several nurses responsible for administering Depo-Provera shots to young women patients. The Williams family is her first case. They live in a cabin that is little more than a shack on a farmer’s property, Mace, the father, Mrs Williams, his mother, and two girls, Erica and India. Civil does her job, but after having administered the shots learns that neither eleven-year-old India nor thirteen-year-old Erika has had her first period. In fact, neither of the girls has even kissed a boy yet. So why are they receiving birth-control shots? She learns as well that there are questions about the safety of the shots, which had been found to cause cancer in test animals. She starts looking into what might be done about this. [image] Dolen Perkins-Valdez - image from American University Civil has the hard-charging enthusiasm of a rookie, eager to do all in her power to help those in need. Her background is nothing like that of her patients. Her father is a doctor, and her mother an artist. They raised her to do good, even named her for their aspirations of achieving civil rights for black people. Civil learns how hard it is to go up against authorityCivil does everything she can to help the family, gets them some public services, a decent place to live, schooling. And she has an impact, but, on a day when Civil is not working, the head nurse at the clinic tricks the family into signing papers agreeing to the girls’ sterilization. Civil’s alarm turns to rage, and then to fighting for change, so this outrage can never happen again to other unsuspecting girls and young women. It is 1973, only a year since the infamous, forty-years-long Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was finally shut down. In that one, hundreds of black men were supposedly being treated for syphilis, but in fact no one was being treated. Of the four hundred who were diagnosed with the disease, one hundred died of syphilis directly or complications from the disease. Dozens of wives were infected, and children were born already afflicted. All this, to see how syphilis ran its course in the untreated. Civil’s activity gets a lawsuit started locally. But soon a young civil rights lawyer, Lou Feldman, is brought in. He transforms it into a national cause célèbre, as the case shifts from looking at the individual harm done to the Williams family to the national disgrace of the forced sterilization of tens thousands. Our research reveals that over the past few years, nearly one hundred fifty thousand low-income women from all over the nation have been sterilized under federally funded programs.He wants the laws changed, to end this practice. It is a huge concern for the Black community, but the novel makes clear that there were other groups who were victimized by this heinous practice. The story take place in two, very unequal timelines. The frame is Civil at sixty-seven, a doctor in 2016, returning to Montgomery after a long absence to see the Williams girls. India is dying. This offers us an ongoing where-are-they-now report. The bulk of the novel takes place in 1973 and immediately after. Civil struggles with her guilt over having played a part in this horror. It is clear that the notions that had supported legislators allowing such things were not entirely unfamiliar. Civil talks with Lou about the history of eugenics. “So the idea was what . . . to stop us from having children because we were inferior?” I whispered.Perkins-Valdez offers a most welcome maturity of perspective. Lou, a young, white lawyer, is viewed with suspicion to begin, but earns the community’s trust with his dedication, brilliance, grueling work habits, and effectiveness. He is lauded as a hero, while Mrs Seager, the head nurse, is shown as a flawed person who, though she was doing something terrible, thought she was doing the right thing. Characters take or avoid difficult decisions for understandable reasons. Even a black Tuskegee librarian whom Civil admires has a hard time understanding how she did not see what was going on right under her nose. There is very little good vs evil going on here in the character portrayals, only in the broader horror of a dark-hearted, racist and classist policy. One of the many joys of the book is the portrayal of a time and place. There are details that add to the touch and feel. The first thing that hit me was the odor. Urine. Body funk. Dog. All mixed with the stench of something salty stewing in a pot. A one-room house encased in rotted boards. A single window with a piece of sheet hanging over it. It was dark except for the sun streaming through the screen door and peeking through the holes in the walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that there were clothes piled on the bed, as if somebody had stopped by and dumped them. Pots, pans, and shoes lay strewn about on the dirt floor. Flies buzzed and circled the air. Four people lived in one room, and there wasn’t enough space. A lot of people in Montgomery didn’t have running water, but this went beyond that. I had to fight back vomit.Some are more cultural, like the perceptions middle class black people in Montgomery had of poor black people, and the less fraught parallel football culture in which Alabama vs Auburn, followed by white people, is replaced for the black population with Alabama A&M vs Alabama State. News to me. We also get a taste of the segregation of the time, how bathroom accessibility while on the road could be problematic for those of the wrong skin color, how a beach that used to be open to all, and featured black-owned businesses, now required one to pay a park ranger and display a piece of paper on your car, the businesses now long gone. The case on which Perkins-Valdez based her novel was a real one, Relf vs Weinberger, filed in July, 1973 in Washington D.C. by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Joseph Levin, one of the Center’s founders, was the young lawyer who prosecuted the case. Mary Alice was 14 and Minnie was 12 when they became victims of the abusive practice of sterilizing poor, black women in the South. Their mother, who had very little education and was illiterate, signed an "X" on a piece of paper, expecting her daughters, who were both mentally disabled, would be given birth control shots. Instead, the young women were surgically sterilized and robbed of their right to ever bear children of their own. - from the SPLCThe story ultimately is about the horror of forced sterilization on poor black people and other classes deemed unfit to breed. You will learn a lot about a crime against humanity that was perpetrated by our own government, and the story of how this injustice was fought. But if the story does not engage, you may not get the benefit of the new knowledge it delivers. Thankfully, there need be no concern on that score. While we may echo the commentary of others to Civil that she did not bear any responsibility for what was done, that her guilt was helping no one, here is a very full-bodied portrait, of a flawed character. One who makes mistakes. A young person who has not yet learned when to push forward, when to take a step back. We see her learning this and can applaud when she takes steps in the proper direction. We also get to see the difficult family dynamic she must negotiate with her own parents, the burden of expectation that has been fitted to her broad shoulders, and the challenge of loving the Williams family, but not too much. And we have a front row seat to her relationships, her struggles, with friends and colleagues. Take My Hand is a wonderful addition to the Perkins-Valdez oeuvre, begun with her outstanding 2009 novel, Wench, and followed by Balm in 2015. She has a fourth in the works, due to her publisher in October 2022, set in early 1900s North Carolina. So maybe a 2023 release? A helping hand is often that, kindly meant, but maybe, sometimes, before you put your hand in another’s, you might want to know where it has been, and where it might be taking you. If the hand is attached to Dolen Perklins-Valdez, grasp it and hold on. It will take you somewhere wonderful. I had never known that good intentions could be just as destructive as bad ones. Review posted – April 22, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – April 12, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - April 4, 2023 I received an ARE of Take my Hand from Berkley in return for a fair review. Thanks to Elisha K., and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Simon & Schuster (mostly) and her site Dolen Perkins-Valdez, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Wench. In 2011, she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was also awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Dr. Perkins-Valdez taught in the Stonecoast (Maine) MFA program and lives in Washington, DC, with her family. She is currently Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University.Interviews -----Publishers Weekly - Dolen Perkins-Valdez's 'Take My Hand' Reaches for Hard Truths by Jen Doll there was something about the Relf sisters she kept coming back to. “The thing that struck me about it was that, even though they’re only really mentioned in passing whenever we talk about this, it was a big deal at the time,” she says. The sisters’ ordeal was heavily covered in the press, and they appeared before a Senate subcommittee led by Sen. Ted Kennedy. “There were so many parts of it, to me, that felt absolutely remarkable. I think some people had heard a little bit about it, but they didn’t know enough. I wanted people to know enough.”-----Politics and Prose bookstore - Dolen Perkins-Valdez — Take My Hand - in conversation with Victoria Christopher Murray The sound level is uneven, which often makes it difficult to hear. But if you have a sound system the Q/A kicks in My review of earlier work by the author -----2010 - Wench Songs/Music ----- Booker T. and the M.G.s - Behave Yourself - chapter 14 -----Mahalia Jackson - Precious Lord Take My Hand - the epigraph notes MLK requesting this be played on his final day -----Stevie Wonder - You Are the Sunshine of My Life - chapter 20 Items of Interest -----Eunice Rivers - re the Tuskegee syphilis experiment -----Mayo Clinic - Depo-Provera Depo-Provera is a well-known brand name for medroxyprogesterone acetate, a contraceptive injection that contains the hormone progestin. Depo-Provera is given as an injection every three months. Depo-Provera typically suppresses ovulation, keeping your ovaries from releasing an egg. It also thickens cervical mucus to keep sperm from reaching the egg.----- Mississippi Appendectomy -----Southern Poverty Law Center - RELF V. WEINBERGER - the real-world case on which the novel is based -----Wiki on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study -----AP - July 12, 2023 - Canada’s Indigenous women forcibly sterilized decades after other rich countries stopped by Maria Cheng ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 17, 2022
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Apr 19, 2022
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Hardcover
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1250801745
| 9781250801746
| 1250801745
| 3.62
| 2,061
| Mar 15, 2022
| Mar 15, 2022
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it was amazing
| The comics business was messy—a slapdash sprint to meet immovable deadlines, a blur of pages flowing from production to editorial and back before b The comics business was messy—a slapdash sprint to meet immovable deadlines, a blur of pages flowing from production to editorial and back before being jettisoned out the door to the printer. Carmen loved it.-------------------------------------- Miami was a city, too, Carmen knew—but New York was something else. A disease that bubbled and expanded and multiplied and morphed, like some kind of magical, mystical being that seemed from another world.Carmen Valdez, late of Miami, is where she wants to be. She may not be exactly doing what she wants, but she is trying to get there. A New Yorker for the last year, Carmen is 28. She works at Triumph Comics, a third-tier publisher of such things, and is living the dream, if the dream is to be working as a secretary to a boss who cannot see past her gender, cannot even imagine a woman, let alone a Hispanic woman, actually writing stories for his press. But the stories are there, the ideas filling notebooks. She gives him some, but even if he bothers to read them, he dismisses the work out of hand. All she needs is a chance. And then one appears. [image] Alex Segura - image from Comicsbeat Harvey Stern is a junior editor there, young, friendly. They bond over a shared love of the medium (a love she had acquired from her father taking her out for father-daughter bonding that included the buying of comics). They are friendly without being quite friends. The house has a sudden need for a new character; Harvey is given the job of coming up with one, a female hero who will get a rise out of young male Triumph readers. Carmen sees her opportunity and offers to “help.” Their work together goes well. The story is mostly hers, of course, but Harvey has some skills. They produce a pretty good book. It does well. Problem is that no one other than she and Harvey knows the truth about how it came to be. Then Harvey suffers a BLAM! BLAM! leaving him with even less conscious corporeality than an invisible six-foot pooka. Guess who finds the body? And the noir gets dark. I’ve always been fascinated with Megan Abbott’s work and her ability to bring the tenets of noir to areas where you wouldn’t expect noir to exist—gymnastics, cheerleading, science, and so on. She crafts these narratives that are tense, fraught, and loaded with style outside of the typical noir settings. I remember reading Dare Me and just thinking, huh, wouldn’t it be cool to write a comic book noir? - from The Big Thrill interviewSegura had recently finished writing his Pete Fernandez Miami Mysteries, so has the chops to produce a pretty good whodunit. Carmen sees, in short order, that the police are not up to the task. She also knows that unless she can figure out why Harvey was killed, and by whom, she will never be able to get recognition for her work, or maybe sleep at night. Harvey is not the last person attacked by a mysterious villain. [image] The Legendary Lynx - from the book – image from The Firewire Blog Secret identities abound here. Carmen hides her true author self from the boss because of the sexism of the age. Everyone seems to have a secret. Harvey certainly she had to become someone else to surviveSegura has been busy in the comic book industry for many years, working on Archie Comics, while living in Miami, then moving to New York to work for DC. He has written detective novels, and a Star Wars book, stand-alone mysteries, short stories, a crime podcast, and probably an encyclopedia. He is married with kids, and I imagine that he must sleep some…time. Maybe he is one of the characters he writes about and his secret power is eternal wakefulness. Captain Insomnia takes on every request for writerly product, and satisfies them all. He has a particular soft spot for the 1970s in the comics industry, when the industry’s body was laid out on the street, bleeding money and readers. Who would come to its rescue? Well the comic book industry was really struggling at that time after the glory years of the 50s and 60s. Comics were struggling. It wasn’t like today, where we have shows about Peacemaker or obscure characters – it was considered a dying industry. So I wanted to use her passion for the medium and contrast it with comics at its lowest point, and then show her fighting to control this one thing she loves. - from the Three Rooms Press interviewThis was a time when comic books were sold only on newsstands or in small stores, before there were comic book conventions, before the steady drumbeat of blockbuster films based on comic book characters. There was plenty wrong with the industry at the time (there probably still is), with notorious cases of people stealing credit for the work of others. Some of those are noted here. In fact, there are many references made to well-known names in the comic book industry. I am sorry to say that most just slipped past me, as I am not the maven for such things that Segura and no doubt many readers of this book are. I can report, though, that not knowing all the references did not at all detract from my overall enjoyment, and recognizing the ones I did enhanced the fun. He even tosses in a nod to a character of his from another project, as that character’s story was set in the same time period. [image] The Legendary Lynx - from the book – image from The Firewire Blog There was plenty wrong with NYC at the time. I know. I remember. Fun City, originally a tossed-off line by a 1960s mayor facing multiple municipal crises (“It’s still a fun city.”) had not completed the shift to The Big Apple, itself a reconstitution of a city logo from the 1920s. The city, a political creation of the state, was starved by the state for the funds needed to provide the services it was required to offer, then was looked down on for that inability. It was a time when graffiti was ubiquitous, crime was up, and gentrification was beginning, as landlords were torching their properties to drive out residents so they could transform their buildings into co-ops. It was a time of white flight and a time when a local tabloid featured the infamous headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead, after NYC had turned to the federal government for aid. We get a taste with Carmen’s arrival. the drab, claustrophobic walls of the Port Authority giving her the most honest first impression of New York she could expect. As she wandered the cavernous transport hub, a concrete behemoth at the tail end of the Lincoln Tunnel, she got a heavy dose of what she’d only imagined. A city in disrepair, boiled down into this one sprawling bus terminal. Leaky ceilings, shadowy conversations, blaring horns, and unidentifiable smells all coalesced into an unbridled fear that gripped Carmen as she stepped out into the New York sunlight. [image] The Legendary Lynx - from the book – image from The Firewire Blog Carmen’s mission is to solve the crime of course (When a For example, did Carmen really believe that the boss would disbelieve her if she told him the truth about authorship of The Legendary Lynx? There is a scene in which Harvey gets weird and take off after a working-together session. Holy Tunnel Vision, Batman! No freaking out over that? And she lets Harvey take her notebooks, her primary and unbacked up material? Even the Daredevil wasn’t that blind. There was something else, of no real consequence, that really bothered me. There is a scene which entails Carmen walking from the East Side to the West Side of Manhattan without any mention of passing through Central Park, which is directly in the path, or walking around it. That just seemed odd, particularly coming from a guy who lives in New York. (view spoiler)[ Not really a spoiler, just wanted to spare most folks this aside. I used to live on the West side of Manhattan, for most of the 1970s, West 81st Street, then West 76th Street, and walked across the park to my grad school on the East Side. Walked back, too, so, speaking from experience. (hide spoiler)]Like I said, no consequence. One thing you will definitely enjoy is the inclusion in the book of seventeen pages from The Legendary Lynx. They presage events in the chapters that follow. It is a perfect addition to the book. Music permeates, including nods to the venues of the day, The Village Vanguard, CBGBs, The Bottom Line, et al. Her roommate, Molly, is a musician, rubbing shoulders with rising stars, like Springsteen and Patti Smith. Secret identity covers a fair bit of territory, an homage to a beloved industry in a dire time, a noir mystery, a look at the city where he now lives, when it was on its knees, while saluting the music of the time and the creators of the comic book industry, warts and all. And he tosses in a comic book for good measure. This is a fun read of the first order, even for those, like me, who may not be comic nerds. In producing this very entertaining novel, Alex Segura has revealed his true identity, at least for those who did not already know. Clearly, Seguro really arrived on this planet not in a Miami hospital ward, but probably somewhere in the Everglades, his ship originating in a galaxy far, far away. He may or may not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he clearly wields otherworldly power as a writer. POW! If it got published, I’d be ghostwriting it. . . . I mean, I’d get a shot, and if it did well we’d reveal my involvement, but. . . .” Review posted – March 11, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - March 15, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - February 7, 2023 I received an ARE of Secret Identity from, well, I can‘t tell you, in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating an e-galley copy. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Crime Reads - SHOP TALK: ALEX SEGURA IS ALWAYS WRITING, EVEN WHEN HE'S NOT by Eli Cranor Mostly on Segura’s process and insane productivity -----The Big Thrill - Up Close: Alex Segura by April Snellings -----Three Rooms Press - Stand Up Comix:> An Interview with Author Alex Segura Item of Interest from the author -----Segura’s Sub-stack Items of Interest -----When a man’s partner is killed… -----pooka ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 21, 2022
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Mar 03, 2022
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Mar 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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1250774152
| 3.84
| 86,595
| Jan 18, 2022
| Jan 18, 2022
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really liked it
| While Davey tugged the rope, Munro, still in the grave, helped to guide the body out of the small hole in the coffin and back toward the surface wo While Davey tugged the rope, Munro, still in the grave, helped to guide the body out of the small hole in the coffin and back toward the surface world, a strange reverse birth for a body past death. Munro successfully removed the body’s shoes off as it left its coffin, but it was up to Davey to strip off the rest of its clothes and throw them back in the grave. Stealing a body was against the law, but if they actually took any property from the grave, that would make it a felony.-------------------------------------- It’s the lesson young girls everywhere were taught their entire lives—don’t be seduced by the men you meet, protect your virtue—until, of course, their entire lives depended on, seduction by the right man. It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them. Passivity was the ultimate virtue…Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.Ok, so I screwed up. First off, I thought the pub date was 2/22/22 and scheduled my reading and review accordingly. Uh, sorry. Actual pub date was 1/18/22, so I am coming at this one a bit late. Second, I did not do a very thorough job of reading about the book when it was offered. I somehow managed to overlook the fact that it is a YA novel. I have nothing against YA novels. Some of my favorite books are YA novels, but I usually pass on YA books these days unless there is a compelling reason to take them on. Had I seen that it was a YA, I would probably have skipped this one. Finally, yet another failing on my part. I somehow managed to overlook the romance element in the promotional copy. Again, I have nothing against romance elements in books which are mostly of another sort. Quite enjoy them when they are well done. But did not have my expectations primed for the presence of quite as much as there is here, which is not to say that it is huge. It is not. So, multiple failings, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The product of impatience. Won’t happen again. I know the drill, Three Hail Marys and a couple of Our Fathers. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest ands offered fair warning…on to the book itself. [image] Dana Schwartz - image from her site Hazel Sinnett is seventeen. She has always lived in a castle an hour outside Edinburgh. It is 1817. She very much wants to study medicine, has read all the books in the family library on the subject, but lacks actual school-based tuition and hands-on experience. When the grandson of a famous doctor is in town to deliver a lecture, she finds a way to attend. Gender attitudes being what they were at the time, people of her sort were not welcome. Still, she finds a way, with some help, and when the doctor announces he will be offering an anatomy class she is desperate to attend. Medicine is making some advances but the study of the human body requires actual human bodies, preferably lately late. Executions not providing sufficient resources to fill the need, a profession has arisen to satisfy that demand, resurrectionists, who, for a fee, relieve nearby graves of their residents, and deliver same to their clients with the utmost of discretion. Jack Currer, also seventeen, counts that among his several jobs. He happens to be hanging about near the Anatomists’ Society when Hazel is locked out. Meet Cute as Jack shows this clearly well-to-do young lady a secret way in. Think these two might just cross paths again? Of course, there are impediments. Hazel is not in line to inherit anything, regardless of her parents’ wealth, bypassed in favor of the male heir. The female thing again. The usual way for a young lady from a god family to secure a future is to secure a husband of means. As it happens, she has a first cousin living not too far away, Bernard. They have known reach other forever, played together since early childhood, and it has been presumed that it was only a matter of time before Bernard would propose. He is not a bad sort, but rather dull and a bit too concerned with his appearance. Hazel recognizes that there are problems with her being allowed to make her own way in the world, so more or less anesthetizes herself to the likelihood that Bernard is her likeliest way out of a life of penury. God knows that is what her mother keeps telling her, and telling her, and telling her. She manages to attend some of Doctor Beecham’s lectures, and is the star pupil, but the female thing again. Guys, catch up, C’Mon! Beecham at least recognizes her intelligence and they come to an agreement. If she can pass the medical exam at the end of the term, she will be able to get real medical training. Unfortunately, there’s that hands-on thing. Books alone will simply not do. But wait! It just so happens she has made the acquaintance of someone who might be able to help her out, and a beautiful friendship blossoms. I really thought I was going to go be a doctor,” Dana Schwartz says about her time as a pre-med student in college. “Then I had this panicked moment of realizing I was so fundamentally unhappy. My dream was always to be a writer, but I never thought I could make a living that way.” - from the Forbes interviewBut it is not all raw sexism and Hallmark moments. There are dark doings in Edinburgh. A plague has struck, a return of the so-called “Roman fever” which had killed over five thousand the last time it hit, two years before. It had even killed Hazel’s beloved brother, George. She had caught it as well, but managed to survive. Is it really Roman Fever that is boosting the mortality rate? Jack is aware of far too many acquaintances vanishing, and there are strange doings in the local graveyards as a trio of heavies are haunting such areas, terrorizing the poor resurrection men. Then Hazel begins to see some very strange medical problems when she starts getting to study specimens obtained by Jack, and treating some locals. There is also something decidedly off about Doctor Beecham, who never seems to remove his dark gloves, and demonstrates a mind-numbing drug as a road to pain-free surgery. Then there is Doctor Straine, one eye, nasty skin and a worse attitude, a surgeon working with Doctor Beecham. Seems like a nogoodnik from the build-a-creep shop. It was the gothic elements that had drawn me to the story. And they are indeed present. But Schwartz has had some fun with them. (For the following I used some of a list from Elif Notes.) Usually gothic novels feature a Desolate, haunted Setting, typically a very creepy castle or equivalent. Here, Hazel lives in a castle, which is a pretty benign home for her. Other sites must serve this purpose. Graveyards work, and certainly provide some chills, and any place where human bodies are being cut up, for purposes educational or malign, will also serve, so, check. Dark and Mysterious Atmosphere? You betcha, plenty of suspect characters and unexplained deaths and disappearances. Something supernatural? Well, I do not want to give anything away, so will say only that there is an element here that qualifies the story as fantasy. Emotional Extremes? Fuh shoo-uh. Although the emotional extremes are as much about Hazel’s lot in life as they are about the actual life-and-death shenanigans that are going on. Women as Victims - absolutely, but in the wider, sexism-conscious sense as well as in the way of a damsels being put upon by dastardly males. Curses and Portents - not so much, except what we all might wish upon some of the baddies. Visions and Nightmares - Hazel has some of the latter, but nothing mystical about them, just recollections of horrors she had seen in real life. Frightening Tone - most definitely. There is clearly something sinister going on in Edinburgh. Frightening Weather - not really. There is a fun early bit in which we are waiting for an incoming storm to deliver some life-generating lightning, but mostly, weather is not that big a deal here. Religious Concerns - social mores are more the thing in this one. Good versus Evil - there is some serious evil going on here. And Hazel is definitely a force for good. A Touch of Romance - yes. Well, more than a touch. Hey, Laddy, you’d better keep those hands to yersel ef ya wan ter keep ‘em on the ends uh yer arms.” There is Romance and then there is Love. The title even highlights it, Anatomy: A Love Story. There is clearly some romance going on here. Hazel and Jack give off sparks which brings their obvious connection to life. But Hazel’s true love may be more the passion she has for learning, for science, for medicine, for anatomy, for surgery. If she were really faced with a choice between being a doctor or being with Jack, and the two were exclusive, are you confident what choice she would make? Is it possible to have your cake and dissect it too? Not so easy in 1817 Scotland. The real horrors here are the treatment of women as a subordinate level of human and the joys of the class system in early 19th Century Scotland. Even coming from a family of means, Hazel is refused entry into a profession for which she has passion, and a clear capability, simply because of her gender. She must endure belittling by men, in power and not, who are her intellectual and moral inferiors, as she struggles to find a way forward. Contemplating her life options, Hazel sees her future as a life under a bell jar, whatever that may be referring to. The experience of being poor in the Georgian era is shown not only in the life of Jack, but in the ways the poor and working class are held in their place no less than if they were confined to a castle dungeon, and in the depraved indifference the wealthy show to the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. “The main mystery I wanted to pick at and unravel is who gets forgotten in society and for what purpose,” Schwartz says. “Obviously today, there is a huge wealth gap that continues to grow, but in the 1800s, the aristocracy made that wealth gap explicit. There was a social and cultural line, so I wanted to explore in a way that doesn’t necessarily label the characters as heroes or villains.” - from the San Diego Tribune interviewThere are some comedic elements, one of which focuses on a man-eater and is hilarious. There a lovely bit of a secondary romantic sub plot, and some fun references. Hazel is all excited to hear about a lecture/demonstration put on by someone named Galvini. This is a clear reference to the actual Luigi Galvani who was putting on shows in which dead things were animated with electricity from a battery. He provided some of the inspiration for a young writer of that era. The epigraph of the novel is a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose creation has near universal familiarity. A mention of Mary Wollstonecraft, her mom, serves double duty as a reference to a leading light for women’s rights in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and as a reminder that the novel deals with matters of life and death, and maybe life again. Hazel’s younger brother is named Percy, which again reminds one of Mary Shelley. A recollection of Walter Scott reciting his Lady of the Lake epic at her Uncle and Aunt’s house is also reminiscent of the Wollstonecraft/Godwin household, in which Coleridge read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner. So, there are many Frankensteinian parts gathered together to help animate the story. Some parts did not quite fit, however. It was sooo convenient that her father was away on a prolonged naval mission, and that Mum decides to head out of town for an extended period with her other, much more valuable, male child, Hazel’s younger brother. So, Risky Business time for the entire season at Hawthornden Castle. (Although maybe Summer at Bernie’s might be a bit closer, given the issues with dead people.) AND, really? none of the staff rats Hazel out to her mother, the one paying their salary, for running a clinic at the family residence? Maybe we should consider this part of the fantasy element. Re my intro, I was not much excited by the squishy romance bits, but I already told you about that. No biggie, ultimately. It is mostly adorable. Dana Schwartz has written a strong, literary, YA novel that offers some chills, an historical look at a place and time, and a look at the challenges faced by the poor and by those of the female persuasion, when it was still the rule to treat women as servants, eye candy, or brood mares. It shows a powerful approach and makes me eager to see what she comes up with when she writes a full-on adult novel, but that may not be next up on her board. …right now, I have an idea for a sequel that I really want to tell and I think will be really fun. I thought this was going to be a one-off, but when I reached the ending, and I sat with that for a few months, I thought that there’s something else here.” - from the San Diego Tribune interview Review posted – February 11, 2022 Publication date – January 18, 2022 I received an ARE of Anatomy: A Love Story from Wednesday Books in return for a fair review and some help dealing with an uncomfortable neck growth. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my personal site, https://cootsreviews.com/. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter pages Schwartz came to public notice when she was still in the employ of the New York Observer and Tweeted a criticism of Donald Trump for using anti-Semitic imagery in an anti-Hillary ad. She got viciously trolled by his minions, and wanted to write about that experience. Her boss gave her a green light, but did not really proof the piece, an open letter, which called out Jared Kushner, who owned The Observer, for not interceding with his father-in-law to prevent such things. As an undergrad, she established the “GuyInYourMFA” and “Dystopian YA” parody Twitter profiles. She had internships with Conan and Colbert, and was later was a staff writer for Disney’s She-Hulk, then created and hosted the Noble Blood podcast. Anatomy is her fourth book. Interviews -----Time Magazine - Dana Schwartz Wrote the YA Romance She Always Wanted to Read by Simmone Shah -----Bustle - How My Chemical Romance Inspired Dana Schwartz’s Latest Novel - By Samantha Leach -----Forbes - 26-Year-Old Dana Schwartz Doesn’t Need To Stick To A Genre by Rosa Escandon -----San Diego Union Tribune - Dana Schwartz gets skin deep in ‘Anatomy: A Love Story’ by Seth Combs -----Barnes & Noble - Poured Over: Dana Schwartz on Anatomy by BN Editors Items of Interest from the author -----Discussion Questions Items of Interest -----Edith Wharton - Roman fever - a short story -----This very nice bio of Mary Shelley, from The Poetry Foundation, has considerable information about her other works. -----A nifty web-site on Resurrectionists. Can you dig it? -----Frankie for free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg -----NY Times - Reporter Calls Out Publisher (Donald Trump’s Son-in-Law) Over Anti-Semitism By Jonathan Mahler -----My review of The Lady and her Monsters - This is a must-read book for anyone interested in Mary Shelley and the writing of Frankenstein ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 30, 2022
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Feb 06, 2022
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Feb 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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125079353X
| 9781250793539
| 125079353X
| 3.67
| 3,797
| Jan 11, 2022
| Jan 11, 2022
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it was amazing
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1968 was certainly an interesting time. Laguna Beach was an interesting place, an artist colony and tourist destination of about 13,000 residents, and
1968 was certainly an interesting time. Laguna Beach was an interesting place, an artist colony and tourist destination of about 13,000 residents, and, these days anyway, about six million visitors a year for a current local population of a bit over 20,000. So, even with a temporal discount it had to have been a lot back then too. T. Jefferson Parker lived there for a stretch. It inspired his first, very successful, novel, Laguna Heat, so he knows the territory into which he places his young hero. Sixteen-year-old Matt Anthony is a hard-working, pretty decent kid. Holds down a paper route for money, building muscle and character on his Schwinn Heavy-Duti bike. Single mom, Julie, holds down a crappy job at a Jolly Roger restaurant. (Might be better named Davey Jones’ Locker?) His older brother, Kyle, is a short-timer in ‘Nam, terrified that something will happen to him in his remaining weeks. Their father, Bruce, a former cop, has been mostly out of the picture for years, but maintains occasional contact. Mom has issues with substances, which are dramatically available in southern Orange County, and her issues are growing more alarming. Matt’s body is going through some changes, which is always a joyous experience. And then his sister, Jasmine, a recent High School graduate, gorgeous, straight-A student, in-crowd, rebellious toward the usual authorities, goes poof! Stayed out overnight (not alarming in itself) but has remained MIA and the local fuzz are uninterested. I was fourteen-years old in 1968 so I experienced the strange, beguiling world of Laguna Beach as a very impressionable, wide-eyed, wonder-struck boy. When it came time to create a hero/protagonist for A Thousand Steps, I just aged myself—that fourteen-year old boy—into a sixteen-year old on the cusp of getting his driver's license, and let him take off in his mother's hippie van! - from the Mark Gottlieb interviewBill Furlong personifies that disinterest, a large officer, with an interest in Julie for things other than possession of illegal substances. Brigit Darnell is the good cop, young, a mom, willing to listen to Matt. It may or may not matter. He knows his sister. Does not accept that she had simply run off. And one more piece. Bonnie Stratmeyer, 18, missing two months, posters proclaiming the fact up all around, has just been found at the bottom of the stairs at the Thousand Steps Beach. (Last time Parker actually went up, or down, or both, he counted 224, but the number changes with each attempt. It’s 219 in the book.) Bonnie had not taken the usual route down. Thus Matt’s panic about Jazz. [image] T. Jefferson Parker - image from Laguna Beach Independent - photo by Rita Parker The thousand steps of the title is a notable waterfront location, but it might also be what Matt sets himself to take on, in the absence of official interest. The plot is Matt continuing to search for his missing sister, continuing to turn up clues, continuing to pester the cops to do their job, while trying to cope with chaos at home, and while coming of age, physically, socially, and emotionally. Although it may be less of a journey for Matt than other teens. He is a pretty grounded kid. And then there is the local color. A holding pen of new agers, con-men, regular crooks, a biker gang, drug dealers, drug abusers, and feckless teens. There are enough shady goings on here to blot out the sun. Mystic Arts World is a bookstore/head-shop/local institution that offers classes on meditation, among other things. Johnny Grail, the owner, is a bit of a local legend, a slippery sort, well able to keep a step or two ahead of the police, (who are desperate to catch him holding or doing anything illegal) to the delight of area residents. The whole New Age thing was not particularly popular with the constabulary. Go figure. But despite their clear prejudice, they actually may have something. Johnny is about as clean as a public crash pad. [image] Mystic Arts World (1967-1970), a head shop in Laguna Beach, was ground zero for psychedelic culture in southern California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was there that a loosely organized group of artists interested in alternative culture, mystical experience and the transformation of society, “The Mystic Artists”, congregated and exhibited their art. Their artistic expression ranged from Beat assemblage to figuration to psychedelic art. – image and text from The Brotherhood of Eternal Love site Local color extends to the presence of Timothy Leary, offering lectures at the MAW, and a Swami who has attracted a bit of a following. He offers increasing levels of instruction to his followers. Some reside at his compound, a former seminary. Matt and his brother used to play there when they were kids and it was unused. The town hosts an annual tableaux vivants, i.e. classic paintings brought to life with people dressed up as characters in the works, and sets made to bring the paintings to life. A few characters in the novel are in it. Matt likes this. He is a budding artist and draws a passel of scenes from his experiences to help police in their frail attempts to look for his sister, and address other crimes. He is particularly fond of the work of Edward Hopper. Working class life contrasts with the lifestyles of the rich, corrupt, and horny. We get a peek at some excusive locations hosting some very dodgy goings on. Matt fishes less for recreation than for a supply of protein, which mom cannot always provide. They live in a clapboard rental, for which Mom struggles to make rent, Matt sleeping in the garage. But we see great wealth on display as well. There is a part of town called Dodge City, for its casual relationship with the law, general run-down-ness and general hostility toward people toting badges. Get out of Dodge? Sure, ASAP. But up-slope and down-slope have plenty of criminal intent in common. So what happened to Jazz? Is she still alive? As the days pass the odds seem worse and worse. Is Matt’s mom serious about stopping her drug use? He gathers help where he can, and pedals on, but we wonder if he might be wasting his time. Why does Mom want to move to Dodge City? Will his father ever show up to help? He keeps promising. And even if he does, would he be more hindrance than help? Is the Swami as nice and wise as he seems? Girls are becoming more a part of his life, and maybe even some activities that often accompany such associations. Will Matt’s permanent crush on Laurel ever go anywhere? I am roughly the same age as Matt, so can relate to being a teen in that era. It never hurts to add that into the reading enjoyment mix. On the other hand, my east coast experience was quite different from his Cali life, including the degree of drug exposure. My older brother was in the army too, but not in Viet Nam. My father was around. My mom’s drugs of choice were Tareytons and tea. But still, we all go through adolescence, so there is the coming-of-age element to relate to. Sounds like Matt skipped the parts where your voice goes to hell, your face resembles a moonscape, and embarrassing body parts pop up for no discernible reason, for all to see. Whatever. It is impossible not to love Matt. There is one gripe I have about him, though. For someone who was so smart and intrepid about tracking down his sister, he is startlingly blind about some items, which I will not spoil here, that were jumping up and down and screaming from the pages. Yeah, he is just an unworldly teen, so could easily miss some things, but he seems pretty sharp about other stuff, so it rankled. [image] Matt’s bike - image from TJP’s Twitter cache Parker has been at this for a while. Steps is his 27th book. His first, Laguna Heat, was an instant success, and was brought to the screen by HBO. His work includes multiple series, and has earned him THREE EDGAR AWARDS! So, no slouch. He started his writing career as a cub reporter. In the Internet Writing Journal interview Parker was asked how his journalism background informed his writing. The best thing about journalism is that it teaches a young person how the world works. It's not the writing itself, because that is fairly straightforward and desirably formulaic. It's the exposure that's valuable. When I was 23 I was covering cultural events, movies, books, city hall, school board, fires, police -- everything but sports and business. It was a crash course on civics, human nature, bureaucracy. It was also a crash course on how the press and the government and business all interact. Those relationships are at the core of what we are as a republic.He knew he was not a journalistic long-timer, but being a reporter did hone his skills, and also allowed him a venues in which he could collect plenty of details to include in his fictional writing. His craft has grown as well. Keep an ear out for the soundscape Parker has incorporated. It enriches the reading experience. I read this one at bedtime, 20-30 pps a night, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending. Every day I was reading this book I was eager, very eager to tuck my lower half under the covers, (also good for hiding the cloven hoofs) crank up the laptop for my notetaking, switch on the lights to make reading my hardcopy ARE possible, and reveled. You all know that feeling when you are truly enjoying a book, and look forward to getting back to it every day. Well, presuming that you do not just scarf down the entire thing in one ginormous gulp. I prefer to spread out that joy. So, a couple weeks, and it delivered every night. Bottom line is that I totally enjoyed this book. Appreciated the portrait of a time and place well known to the author, loved the lead character, and had fun trying to figure out who had committed (was committing?) which crimes, how, and why. A few of those will quickly succumb to your investigative instincts, but the rest will keep you guessing. Mystery, suspense, thriller, coming-of-age? Use whatever adjective suits or mix and match. Doesn’t matter. Whatever you call it, A Thousand Steps will remain a pretty good read. You will not need any LSD or opiated anything to get off on or get into this book. Go ahead. Be a tourist in Laguna Beach for a bit. It’s a trip you won’t want to miss. Review posted – January 7, 2022 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - January 11, 2022 ----------Trade paperback - December 27, 2022 [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! I received an ARE of A Thousand Steps from Macmillan’s Reading Insiders Club program in return for a couple of hits of that sweet product. Righteous, man. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Parker’s personal, FB, GR, and Twitter pages What does the T. stand for?Interviews -----Mark Gottlieb Talks Books - Three-Time Edgar Award-winner and New York Times Bestselling Author T. Jefferson Parker -----2007 – Bookpage - Only in California by Jay MacDonald -----The VJ Books Podcast - T. Jefferson Parker - A Thousand Steps by Roger Nichols -----2018- Bookbrowse - An interview with T Jefferson Parker -----The Internet Writing Journal - A Conversation With T. Jefferson Parker by Claire E. White -----2002 - Orange County Register - THE VIEW FROM ELSEWHERE by Amy Wilson Songs/Music -----The Rollingstones - Satisfaction -----Cream - Tales of Great Ulysses -----Cream - Sunshine of Your Love -----Jimi Hendrix - Foxy Lady - Hendrix performs in front of an audience of the sitting dead in Miami -----The Byrds - Mr. Tambourine Man Items of Interest -----The Brotherhood of Eternal Love - their site -----Brotherhood of Eternal Love - Laguna Beach – Wet Side Story - a bit of Laguna Beach history -----All That’s Interesting (ATI) - An interesting article about the BEL in the 1960s -----Wiki on Timothy Leary -----Wiki on the Pageant of the Masters, an annual event held in Laguna Beach, featuring tableaux vivants, i.e. classic paintings brought to life with people dressed up as characters in the works, and sets made to bring the paintings to life. A few characters in the novel are in it. Here is a nifty video promoting the event today. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 14, 2021
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Dec 28, 2021
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Dec 28, 2021
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Hardcover
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1982168439
| 9781982168438
| 1982168439
| 4.26
| 228,560
| Sep 28, 2021
| Sep 28, 2021
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it was amazing
| Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.Anthony Doerr has written a masterpiece of a tale, connecting f Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.Anthony Doerr has written a masterpiece of a tale, connecting five characters, over hundreds of years through their relationship to a single book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ancient story written by Antonius Diogenes around the first century C.E. (Only in the novel. While the author is real, the book was made up.) It tells of a shepherd, Aethon, seeking a magical, heavenly place in the sky, the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” of the title. Each of the five characters are introduced to this story, and we see how it impacts their lives. Each has characteristics that set them apart. But all have lost, or lose, at least one parent. [image] Anthony Doerr - image from Boise State Public Radio We meet Konstance, 14, on an interstellar, generational ship, maybe the late 21st century, maybe the 22nd. She is laying out on the floor of a large room the scraps of pages that comprise the book. (Sometimes he [Doerr] would lay out all these micro chapters on the floor so he could see them and discover the resonances between characters across space and time. - from the NY Times interview) She was born on The Argos, and the plan is that she will not live long enough to reach the ship’s destination, but will grow to adulthood and raise a family there, passing down humanity’s culture so that someday, homo sapiens can rebuild on a new, unspoiled home world, Beta Oph2. Hopefully that planet will remain better off once people arrive. She is driven by her need to know, a boundless curiosity, and a willingness to think outside the ship. Anna is an orphan. In 15th century Constantinople we follow her from age 7 to early adolescence. She and her older sister, Maria, work as seamstresses in the house of Nicholas Kalaphates. It is a Dickensian world of exploitation of diverse sorts. Anna is far too bright to be denied the world of words, and, once exposed to it, she pursues that world doggedly. On her travels through the city on errands she comes across a class of boys being taught Greek, The Odyssey, and attends, surreptitiously. The master agrees to teach her privately in return for modest items. Her literacy makes her a suspect to the adults around her, a criminal to others, and possibly a witch to the most ignorant, but leads her to a ruined library and eventually, to Aethon. [image] The Imperial Library at Constantinople [in better days] – image from Novo Scriptorium Omeir was born in 1439, like Anna, but with a cleft lip and palate. The superstitious country people in his home town believed him cursed, demonic even, so he is driven out of town, exiled to a remote part of what is now Bulgaria, where he does his best to remain out of sight, to be raised by his grandfather. But Omeir is a survivor. He becomes a marvel at the care of oxen, raising and training two to immense proportions. The team of three are remarkable workers. Downside is that the new sultan demands Omeir, now an adolescent, and his oxen serve in his army. He is planning to lay siege to Constantinople, a city with walls that have withstood such attacks for over eleven hundred years. Omeir will encounter Aethon later. [image] The oldest surviving map of Constantinople, by Cristoforo Buondelmonti, dated to 1422. The fortifications of Constantinople and of Galata, at the northern shore of the Golden Horn, are prominently featured. - image from Wikipedia Seymour does not fit in. He lives with his mother, who struggles to get by on low-wage jobs. Probably on the spectrum, he struggles with more than the usual travails of growing up. He cannot, for example, tolerate loud sound. He cannot or will not remain in his seat at school. The world overwhelms him and when the pressure of it builds too high, he screams, which is not conducive to a successful school life. A class library outing brings him into contact with a whole new world, when the librarian, Marian, (surely a nod to The Music Man) hooks him up with nature books. He finds comfort in the natural world, befriending a large, amenable owl, and reveling in walks in the woods adjacent to his home. We follow him from childhood into adolescence and into his development as an eco-warrior. Seymour is the avatar of Doerr’s concerns about environmental degradation, presenting a generational cri du coeur, however misguided in its application, about the destruction of a following generation’s natural heritage. We see Zeno as a child. He realizes he is gay at an early age. But it is the 1940s in Idaho, and this is simply not allowed. He has to keep that part of himself hidden. We see him again as a POW during the Korean War, when he learns Greek, and as an octogenarian teacher. He lives in a small Idaho community, and is leading five students in a stage performance of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a book he translated from the Greek, well, from what bits remained of it. As with All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, his characters here are young. (Not necessarily for the entire book, but for a good chunk) He says writing from a child’s perspective allows one to “to see more nakedly some of the things that we’ve elided or erased in our minds because of age.” (From the NYTimes interview). Each comes to the world with their own personal content, but also with a sense of wonder. Anna is amazed by the vast universe of story that can be reached through literacy. Seymour is dazzled by nature and nature books. Konstance is amazed by the things she can see, the places she can visit, the knowledge she can gain in the virtual library on the ship. Zeno also finds a refuge and a world of possibility in his local library. For Omeir, it is the tales his grandfather tells him when they’re out trapping grouse that capture his imagination. While all the characters have their individual stories, Zeno and Seymour’s stories converge in today’s Lakeport, Idaho; (Doerr and family spend a lot of time in McCall, Idaho, a likely model for Lakeport) Anna and Omeir’s stories converge in the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, and all their stories converge on the connection to that ancient book up through the somewhat near future of Konstance’s experience. [image] Mural at the Turkish Military Museum of the scene outside the walls of Constantinople in 1453 - image from Europe Between East and West It is these connections, these convergences, that provide the structure and core mystery of the book. How does this first century story find its way to fifteenth century Constantinople, to the world of today, and to the future in which Konstance lives? How is it preserved, by whom, and why? Asked about the spark for his focus on the preservation of literature, of culture, Doer said: I’m getting close to 50. And though I still feel and behave like a kid most of the time, my eyesight is fading, I can apparently injure myself while sleeping and my little baby boys are suddenly big hairy-legged job-working car-driving high school kids. I’m realizing that everything—youth, hairlines, memories, civilizations—fades. And the amazing technology that is a printed book seems to be one of the few human inventions that has outlived whole human generations. What a privilege it is to open a book like The Iliad and summon tales that entertained people almost 3,000 years ago.The folks doing most of the preserving are librarians of one sort or another. Each of the characters has a relationship with a librarian, Zeno and Seymour with the librarians in Lakeport, Idaho, Anna with scribes in Constantinople, Omeir with Anna, and Konstance with the AI controller of her ship. I hope that my readers will be reminded that librarians serve as stewards of human memory—without librarians, we lose perhaps our most important windows into the human journey. - from the QBD interviewPart of his growing-up environment was spending a lot of time in libraries as his teacher mom often made use of them as a form of day care for Doerr and his brothers. It’s not like he minded. In fact, he even dedicated the book to librarians. They were a place where I felt completely safe. And just the miracle of them, there's something that - talk about peeling the scales off your eyes. Like, here's the work of all these masters available to you for free. And you can take them home. - from the NPR interviewAs with All the Light…, Doerr found inspirations for the elements of the book in diverse places. It was while researching the walls at Saint Malo for his prior book that he came across repeated references to the millennium-long impenetrability of the walls of Constantinople, and dug into that a lot deeper. He is also interested in how technology induces change. In All the Light… it was radio. Here it is gunpowder and advanced armaments in the 15th century, allowing a new level of violence in the assault on supposedly impervious walls. In the contemporary world it is the internet allowing in both a world of information and a cannonade of lies and manipulation. He sees the future as being driven by artificial intelligence. One of the things that most stuck with me was the portrayal of reading, particularly the reading of material to others, as not only an act of kindness, of affection, but also be a source of healing, and certainly comfort. There are several times when characters read to other characters who are ill, to positive effect. We are a species that relies on stories to make sense of our world, and to inspire, to spark imagination. The story of Aethon inspires all the main characters to dream of more, to dream of better, to dream beyond realistic possibility. Doerr enjoys tossing in a bit of classical reference spice. The ship Argos, of course, recalls Jason and his crew. Zeno is saved by a dog named Athena as Hercules was rescued by the goddess herself. There are plenty more of these. I would keep an eye out for owl imagery, and roses come in for some repeated attention as well. Walls get special attention. The big one in Constantinople is the most obvious, but Konstance has physical walls of her own she needs to get through. Seymour tries breaching a physical wall, as Zeno tries to defend one. The notion of paradise permeates. The title alone refers to an unrealizable fantasy of heaven. It is the heaven that Aethon pursues. For Zeno it is a place where he can be accepted, loved, while being his true self. Seymour is lured by the promise of a sylvan environmentalist camp where he can embrace nature with others of like mind. A development in his beloved woods is called Eden’s Gate (close enough to make one think of Heaven’s Gate). He and his mother live on Arcady Lane. For Anna it is a dream of a better life outside the city. How Doerr weaves all this together is a dazzling work of genius. He will leave you breathless, even as he shows you the construction of his multiple threads, bit by bit by bit. “That’s the real joy,” Doerr said, “the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.” - from the NY Times interviewMirroring is employed extensively as the experiences of all five characters (and Aethon) repeat in one form or another for them all. The book lists at 640 hardcover pages. Do not take this at face value. In terms of actual words, Cuckoo Land is about the same length as All the Light. There are many pages holding only titles or section headings. There is a lot of white space. That does not make this a fast read. It would still be around 500 pages if one stripped it down to word-count alone. But it is less daunting than the presenting length of 640 pages. Also, Doerr writes in small chunks. You can always use a spare minute or two to drop in on this book and still get through a chapter or five. There is a reason for this. He had hit upon this approach for the most practical of reasons. As a parent, he couldn’t hope to get more than an hour or two of solid work done before having to attend to shuttling the boys to swim practice or some other activity. “I might have stumbled accidentally into that,” he said. - from the NY Times interviewWhile there are dark events that take place in this novel, the overall feel is one of optimism, of possibility, of persistence, and of the availability of beauty and hope to all, if only we can keep alive our connections to each other through time and place, keep alive hopes for a better place, for a better, meaningful life, and continue to dream impossible dreams. If you read nothing else this year, do yourself a favor and read Cloud Cuckoo Land, and be transported (no wings required) to a literary paradise by this book, which I hope will be read as long as there are people able to read. It is a heavenly book, and an immediate classic. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” Review posted – October 22, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 28, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - September 27, 2022 I received an ARE of Cloud Cuckoo Land from Simon & Schuster, but I first learned of it from Cai at GR, who passed on my request to someone at S&S, who sent me an ARE and passed on my request to the person responsible for this e-galley, who ok’d that too. Thanks to all, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating a (DRC) Digital Review Copy. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I usually move it to the comments section directly below. However, in 2021, GR further constrained reviewers by banning external links from comments, so to see the EXTRA STUFF part of this review you will have to continue on to my site, Coots’s Reviews, where the review is posted in its entirety. [image] Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 16, 2021
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Oct 16, 2021
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Oct 06, 2021
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Hardcover
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1627795944
| 9781627795944
| 1627795944
| 3.98
| 32,307
| Feb 11, 2016
| Mar 15, 2016
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None
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Notes are private!
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Jul 26, 2021
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Aug 05, 2021
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Aug 05, 2021
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Hardcover
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0063026066
| 9780063026063
| 0063026066
| 4.31
| 33,537
| Sep 08, 2020
| Sep 08, 2020
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it was amazing
| “I am eighty-five years old. I am old and tired and alone. I have nothing I want to do and no one I want to see. I am not depressed, merely done wi “I am eighty-five years old. I am old and tired and alone. I have nothing I want to do and no one I want to see. I am not depressed, merely done with life. I don’t want to end up dribbling in an old-people’s home, wearing adult nappies in front of a shouting television. I want to leave this world with dignity and respect. Now, can you help me out?”-------------------------------------- Life is precious and as long as we have a reason to continue, we should follow that path.Eudora Honeycutt does not seem to have much reason to go on. She is quite the curmudgeon. Maybe not the broomstick-wielding (or shotgun-toting) crank, screaming “get off my lawn, you damn kids!” Eudora is far too proper for such behavior. But the inner resentment is there. She is uninterested in having the sort of death her mother endured when, a husk of her former self, she died, a frequent flyer (often. needlessly) in the ER, she was kept going by a medical system that cared less about the quality of one’s life than extending it at all costs. Sick of the world, fed up with its rampant and growing narcissism, and seeing no meaningful future ahead, she gets in touch with a clinic in Switzerland that might be able to help her end her life with the dignity she wants. [image] Annie Lyons - image from her site – shot by Harriet Buckingham everyone is selfish and caught up with themselves these days. They have no time to notice her or others like her. They consume news or food as if they are trying to eat the whole world; they watch and judge and spit out their opinions as if they’re the only ones worth listening to. Eudora is invisible to these people, but she has stopped noticing them, too. They’re welcome to their “post-Brexit, Donald Trump, condemn everyone, be kind to no one” world. There is no helping them now. Soon enough she won’t be around to witness their continuous decline into moral torpor. Good riddance and good night.But that is not all there is to Eudora. She has seen little kindness in the world, has endured more than her share of its opposite, and yet there is, inexplicably, still a lode of the stuff buried inside her. And she has stumbled across a crew of miners, happy to bring it to the light of day. [image] Dame Maggie Smith - image from Jewish News There are new occupants in the house next door, primarily a ten-year-old girl. Rose is the bubbles in a bottle of champagne, the chirping birds that welcome dawn, sunshine after days of rain, an iced drink on a hot day, a huge jolt of distilled wonderfulness, rain after a drought, and a rainbow after a shower. The rainbow part of that is not much of an exaggeration, as Rose always seems to be dressed in a garish array of colors that may or may not go with any of the other eye-popping hues she is wearing. One typical ensemble is made up of buttercup yellow, ecclesiastical purple, and neon orange. Rose is exuberantly neighborly, and decides that Eudora is going to be her new best friend. Rose may have the wearying positivity of a jack-in-the-box, but she is kindness personified.The next new addition to Eudora’s life is Stanley, a widower, a gentleman of a certain age. It was Stanley who had come to her aid when he’d seen her fall recently. Made sure she was seen to. She remembers him not at all, finds him irritating even. But Stanley persists with Eudora, offering her interest, engagement, and kindness, with a persistence not unlike Rose’s, but without the flamboyance. [image] Haribo Cherries – image from Amazon – Eudora buys some for Rose Like a wrestling tag-team, Rose and Stanley both engage Eudora individually (and sometimes together), seeing something in her that she does not see in herself. Rose’s exuberance is as delightful as it is persistent and overwhelming. It seems that when it comes to Rose, resistance really is futile. As Eudora, bit by bit, is drawn back into the world, she encounters even more people who offer kindness and understanding. She meets Hannah, a death doula, who gives a talk at a local community center, and has made a career of helping people near the end of their lives. But not all the kindness is delivered to Eudora by local folks reaching out to her. In her dealings with the Swiss clinic that provides help for people choosing a decent death, she engages with Petra, her contact there, who is also welcoming and supportive to Eudora. [image] Dame Judy Dench - image from The Hamilton Spectator Throughout the novel we get looks back at Eudora’s life, (18 by my count) beginning in 1940, when she was five years old. Her beloved father took her out for a birthday treat, a memory that has lasted a lifetime. He is heading off to war, and mom is pregnant. What happens with her father impacts the rest of Eudora’s life and the lives of those around her. One inspiration for the character of Eudora was: …my mum, who also lived through the second world war and had that sort of resilience and stoicism, but also that stubbornness and that refusal to ask for help, and I’m just going to get on with it, and I’m ok, and I don’t want to talk about it. My mum was a real sweetie. She was not as difficult as Eudora. But it’s part of that generation I think. To write her story, but then to juxtapose it with Rose was just…I love to read books about inter-generation friendships…It was my way of looking at it in an uplifting way. - from the Better at Home interview [image] Dame Helen Mirren - image from The Mayor's Fund for London One of the inspirations for the book was Lyons reaching middle-age (no numbers have been offered), and realizing that half her life was over. It sparked a concern about (an interest in) death and how people view it. [The book] explores our denial and inability to face death as a reality. However, through Eudora’s honesty and Rose’s curiosity, it also shows different ways to view death – whether it’s through Eudora’s discussions with Petra at the clinic in Switzerland or Hannah, the death doula’s talk on what it is to have a good death or Rose’s enthusiasm for the Mexican Day of the Dead. - from the Book Q&As interviewIn alternating past and present, Lyons does an excellent job of linking todays realities to Eudora’s history. We get to see how life’s many disappointments shaped Eudora into the grouch she has become, with each section about her past explaining one of Eudora’s present-day reactions. We see, also, how Rose, Stanley, and others offer Eudora something far greater than resignation. [image] Michael Gambon - image from The Irish Examiner In the Book Club Girl interview Lyons offered a few dame names for dream actresses to play Eudora. I have peppered the review with images of those. She offered a suggestion or two for Stanley. So, ditto. This is a beautifully written, heart-warming novel, not just about death, our experiences with it, and thoughts on it, but about the value of kindness, of our connection to others, and what is important in life. Lyons has written characters we not only care about, but love. Trust me. Tears will be shed, more than a few. [image] Jim Broadbent - image from The Indian Express By the time my father was my age he’d been dead for over a year. Not that I think about that much, not me, no. So, maybe it is easy to imagine that a book about a woman contemplating her personal end times might be of some interest. But, if I go with my maternal DNA instead of my paternal for projecting my likely mortality, it looks like I may have a few good years left. I hope I can fill them reading books as wonderful, as entertaining, hopeful, and uplifting as The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeycutt. It is a brilliant book and an absolute must-read. For beauty lives with kindness. Review posted – July 16, 2021 Publication dates (USA) ----------September 8, 1920 – (USA) ----------October 19, 2021 – Paperback – Morrow It was published in the UK on September 8, 2020 under the title Eudora Honeysett is Quite Well, Thank You =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Library Love Fest - An Interview with Annie Lyons, author of THE BRILLIANT LIFE OF EUDORA HONEYSETT – with Virginia Stanley - audio 28:24 – begin at about 1:00 -----Blblio Happy Hour - Talking with Annie Lyons + a dive into the week's new releases - by Victoria Wood - audio – 29 minutes - begin at the 6 minute mark -----Better At Home - Annie Lyons -----Book Club Girl - Discussion with Annie Lyons - Includes her US editor Emily Krump – video - 47:11 -----Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb Q&A with Annie Lyons -----Library Love Fest - An Interview with Annie Lyons, author of THE BRILLIANT LIFE OF EUDORA HONEYSETT - audio – 28:24 – by Virginia Stanley Songs/Music -----Oscar Seagle - Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag (And Smile, Smile, Smile) - chapter 1 -----Dame Vera Lynn - We’ll Meet Again - chapter 3 -----This is Me - the greatest song from The Greatest Showman, Rose’s favorite film - It really should have won the Oscar for best song. Items of Interest from the author -----Writing and Wellness - Featured Writer on Wellness: Annie Lyons -----Female First - Seven things I learned in lockdown by Annie Lyons Items of Interest -----Wiki for It’s a Wonderful Life - mentioned in chapter 4 (and my personal all time favorite film) -----Wiki on the British TV Quiz show Pointless - referenced in chapter 7 -----Wiki on the film Coco - mentioned in chapter 7 -----BBC - Babycham - a popular drink of the time – Eudora orders one at a dance with her bff Silvie -----A brochure from lifecircle - a Swiss organization that helps people with end-of-life decision-making. The author references this org as a source for her research on Eudora’s planning. -----PopMaster - referenced in chapter 11 Recipe -----Chapter 2 - Cornish fairings Reminds me of -----Benediction by Kent Haruf - Dad Lewis is nearing the end of his life when he encounters eight-year-old Alice -----Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver – a couple deciding whether to end it all when they hit 80 – review pending -----News of the World by Paulette Giles – a 70-something escorts a difficult 10-year-old back to her family -----Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton – A 78-year-old astrophysicist may be the last man on Earth until he meets a young girl, alone in the Arctic -----Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney – An older woman takes a walk on New Year’s Eve, the stops along her way recalling her life ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 29, 2021
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Jul 11, 2021
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Jul 14, 2021
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Hardcover
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0063076004
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| 4.31
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it was amazing
| All across this vast country they were burning, as they had for a hundred years, all lit by men like Noone. So many dead in the ashes, thousands of All across this vast country they were burning, as they had for a hundred years, all lit by men like Noone. So many dead in the ashes, thousands of them, scattered over the colonies, never to be found, the wind tossing their remains like a plaything, and teasing the dust off their bones.-------------------------------------- “…memories can be slippery as fish, in my experience. Once you have them out of the water, it pays to get them good and clubbed.”In 2018, Paul Howarth’s first published novel, Only Killers and Thieves introduced much of the world to a dark chapter in Australian history. Queensland in the 1880s, Billy and Tommy McBride’s parents are murdered. A former employee, an aboriginal, is blamed. A posse is organized to hunt down the accused and any with him. It is led by Edmund Noone, an officer of the Queensland Native Police, who is in the business of eradicating native people, crime or no crime. Billy and Tommy are dragged along for what turns out to be a massacre, soiling their lives, and polluting their souls. [image] Paul Howarth - image from HarperCollins.com - Photo by Sarah Howarth In Howarth’s compelling sequel, Dust Off The Bones, we follow the McBride boys, adults in 1890, on diverging paths, as they cope with the aftermath of what had happened. Tommy McBride is 19, bigger now, brawny even, working as a stockman, far from his ravaged home. His conscience, PTSD, and fear of Noone bedeviling him, Tommy tries to lay low. Noone had told the McBride brothers that they were never to see each other again, or he would kill them. Tommy is abiding by that order, living his life. But his recurring nightmares, with considerable thrashings-about, freak out the men he works with. The foreman is a bully straight from the build-a-creep store, eager to issue unfulfillable commands, and unnaturally excited to inflict punishments. One thing leads to another, and Tommy and his aboriginal friend, Arthur, are wanted men, on the run. Billy, 21, has married the girl of his dreams and gained considerable property and responsibility in the bargain. But it is not the paradise he expected. When we see him again, some years later, he is still troubled by the men who are working for the farm, for his wife, for him, who show him no respect. He indulges in public displays of prosperity, as the lands that he married into have been productive. But he calms his conscience—or is it his fear of being found out?—with excessive supplies of alcohol. Where Tommy has grown big, and strong, Billy has grown large and soft. Never far from the thoughts of either is Edmund Noone, the terrifying leader of that fateful expedition. He is now established as local police chief in Southport, a coastal suburb of Brisbane. Along with the story of the McBride brothers, Dust Off the Bones focuses on how state-sanctioned authorities provided legal support to a national campaign of genocide. Without accountability, no wrongs will be punished, and without the threat of punishment, those wrongs will persist. It also shines a light on the rights of women in the early 20th century. These elements are highlighted in chapters featuring Henry Wells and Katherine Sullivan (now McBride). The story is told primarily through the alternating POVs of Billy and Tommy, with Wells and Katherine adding several chapters each. I’m British-Australian, but was largely ignorant about Australia’s settlement history and the role Britain played, so was reading about the frontier period for my own interest at first, and became intrigued by this alternative Wild West that played out against the stunning Australian landscape but which remains comparatively unknown, both at home and overseas, and is still relatively under-explored in fiction or film. I was also seeing a lot of relevance in that history to the world today, not just in Australia but in the USA and Europe too. Then as I began to try to write about the period I came across information about the infamous Queensland Native Police—and that was the spark that really set this novel in motion. - from the More2Read interviewWells is an attorney. It is through his eyes that we see the racism inherent in the Aussie legal system of the time. It will feel quite familiar to many who track prosecutions of civilian-killing police here in the states over a century later. Legal atrocities compound the physical atrocities, in which monsters with state authority carry out genocide, and woe to any who oppose them. When a witness to the massacre, to which the McBrides were a party, files a report, Wells sees his chance to bring the big man down. It is this attempt that induces much of the action that follows. Katherine Sullivan, the young widow of an unspeakable husband, remains the owner of a considerable property, and of Billy McBride’s heart. After fending off an attempt by her father to all but sell her to yet another unspeakable man, she marries Billy, instead. But it is not a marriage made in heaven. Her passion for Billy softens with the years, along with Billy’s frame. But she still must contend with a world run by men, a world in which women do not have the full rights to even their own property. We make stops at several points in time. The first, a brief one, is in 1885, when Rev Francis Bean sees something he cannot forget. When he informs the local magistrate, he is threatened with certain death at the hands of Noone, should he file an official report. The main action takes place in 1890 and 1897, showing how the brothers have diverged, and then in 1906 when everything comes to a head. There is a fair amount of blood spilled. A lot of it is done off camera, thankfully. But the tension is palpable as danger approaches and we wonder with every rapidly turned page whether, in this instance, evil will triumph. Gripes – I had hoped that the towering figure of Edmund Noone would be given a bit more depth in this sequel, but he remains a pure black hat (ironically). Added to the black-hat team is his criminally able and amoral assistant, a one-dimensional crooked judge, and the creep Tommy encounters. They function well as manifestations of bigotry, corruption, and cruelty, not so well as rounded characters. There are some good people in the book as well, lest one think it is all darkness. Billy and Tommy are interesting characters, and tracing how they cope with the challenges they face, or fail to, makes for an engaging read. The history depicted here is horrific, albeit not singular in the world. For most of us it is news. There are good guys to cheer for, and baddies to boo. You will learn something, and have your blood pressure raised. It is a sad thing that Howarth’s tales are based on actual Australian history, but a good thing that he has brought that dark time into the light for so many readers. Dust off your favorite reading chair and settle your bones in for spell. Dust Off The Bones is a wonderful book. Henry collected his bags, started for the door, then paused with his back to the two men. He wanted to say something, to have the last word. Ask the magistrate how he lived with himself, how he was able to sleep at night. There was no point. Nothing he could do or say would change anything, not in a town like this. They all lived with themselves quite comfortably here. They all managed to sleep just fine. Review posted – June 5, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - June 8, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - June 7, 2022 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, and GR pages Interview -----More2Read - Interview with Paul Howarth On Writing by Lou Pendergrast – this was done re Only Killers and Thieves, but still applies here. My review of Only Killers and Thieves Items of Interest -----Outback to the future - on how he became a writer -----Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality - it is open on Noone’s desk in chapter 17 -----Wayback Machine – article on Josef Breuer - noted in chapter 17 -----An interesting wiki on the Australian Native Police ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 08, 2021
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May 19, 2021
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May 30, 2021
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my rating |
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3.35
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liked it
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 27, 2024
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4.13
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it was amazing
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Feb 17, 2024
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Feb 21, 2024
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3.27
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really liked it
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Aug 28, 2023
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Aug 30, 2023
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3.75
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it was amazing
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Feb 04, 2024
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Jul 12, 2023
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3.61
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it was amazing
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Dec 09, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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3.89
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it was amazing
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Dec 25, 2023
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Apr 16, 2023
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Feb 19, 2023
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Feb 21, 2023
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3.66
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it was amazing
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Dec 09, 2022
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Dec 08, 2022
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3.44
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it was amazing
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Jan 29, 2023
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Jul 01, 2022
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3.65
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it was amazing
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Jun 12, 2022
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Jun 12, 2022
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3.56
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it was amazing
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Nov 15, 2022
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Jun 03, 2022
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3.97
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really liked it
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Apr 28, 2022
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May 04, 2022
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4.37
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it was amazing
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Apr 17, 2022
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Apr 19, 2022
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3.62
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it was amazing
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Mar 03, 2022
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Mar 09, 2022
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3.84
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really liked it
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Feb 06, 2022
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Feb 09, 2022
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3.67
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2021
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Dec 28, 2021
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4.26
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it was amazing
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Oct 16, 2021
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Oct 06, 2021
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3.98
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Aug 05, 2021
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Aug 05, 2021
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4.31
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it was amazing
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Jul 11, 2021
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Jul 14, 2021
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4.31
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it was amazing
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May 19, 2021
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May 30, 2021
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