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1250863856
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| 1250863856
| 3.10
| 1,303
| Mar 26, 2024
| Mar 26, 2024
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really liked it
| A woman wearing a CNN shirt tells a man holding a clipboard to find a way to crop the other crews out of the shot. Adjacent to the riser, CNN has s A woman wearing a CNN shirt tells a man holding a clipboard to find a way to crop the other crews out of the shot. Adjacent to the riser, CNN has set up the barstool and the table littered with makeup, brushes, and hair products. Lots of hair products. There’s no riser for Entertainment Tonight’s reporter, but there’s a king-sized mirror secured to a step stool. A thick container rests on the top step. It reminds me of the attache case that travels with the president in doomsday movies. A man clacks open the lock, and pulls out the drawer loaded with shadows, blushes, and lipsticks.-------------------------------------- Attention is the drug of choice in local news.And attention will be paid. Good Evening world. This is Will Byrnes reporting live from my computer. (Well I was live when I wrote that) Our lead (and only) story tonight is breaking news. Phoenix-based TV reporter Christina Estes, has written a whodunit. Set, of course, in The Valley of the Sun. An odious, Rush Limbaugh-radio-talk-show sort has been cancelled with extreme prejudice. Seems he ingested something toxic and went off-the-air for good. Given that he was such a sweet, charming individual, there is no shortage of people who might have wanted to see him gone. [image] Christina Estes - Image from her site Jolene (named for the Dolly Parton song) Garcia is an intrepid TV news reporter looking for the truth and a good story. She is under relentless pressure from her bosses to produce something, anything, that they can put on air. She has an edge, as she had interviewed the happily departed just a few days prior. We follow Jolene as she follows the breadcrumb trail of clues, and comes up against resistance of all sorts, from her competitors, her police contact, and all the suspects. Payload is the real-world information one gleans from fiction. There are two major pieces of that here. In fact, Phoenix counts as a character in the book, as places often do in mysteries. Estes takes us around the place, offering looks at many aspects of Arizona life, and culture, and pointing out many local spots. (Sadly, Chase Field, where the Diamondbacks play, was not among them. But, as Estes is working on sequel, there is still hope. Maybe bring in Arcosanti as well? Or some Cactus League baseball?) Off the Air includes real locations and businesses with special significance. For example, two of my favorite photographers introduced me to Rito's Mexican Food and Harlow's Café. I included Chicago Hamburger Company because the owner allowed me to follow his journey during the first year of the pandemic. He was open and honest during a frightening time, and I appreciated his transparency. Food City chips and salsa are my favorite snack and I made them my main character's favorite. I included the history of the former Phoenix Indian School, which many people may not know about. Three historic buildings remain in what is now Steele Indian School Park. There's a walkway with columns depicting the school's history and a bridge that leads to a garden with Native American poems etched into concrete. It's a jewel in the heart of the city. - from the Los Angeles Public Library interviewThe other non-story major element here is TV reportage. Estes makes excellent use of her two-decade-long career as a TV reporter to inform a depiction of what that life is like. It was one of my favorite elements in the book. One can feel the huge stresses these folks endure with ever-decreasing resources, and ever-increasing demands from management. Film at Eleven. We’ve got film, right? Right? I think some people who have never worked in local news do not understand how much the industry has changed and how challenging it is for journalists who care about their communities to earn a decent living and stay in the business for more than a few years.Jolene is a good egg and easy to relate to, particularly as she faces conflicting demands. She handles all with aplomb. Secondary characters come and go, given enough detail to either laugh at them (this is a satire), be repulsed, or just watch them skip across the stage. Gripes are few. Some attributes noted early on were not utilized later, at least not nearly enough. The secondary characters sometimes felt a bit too secondary. I would have liked a bit more on one or two of them. Jolene follows clue after clue, placing herself into dangerous situations, sometimes very dangerous situations. As with any mystery, there will be red-herrings. Estes’ portrait of the local TV news reporter’s life will give you some reason to sympathize with hard-working TV reporters where you live, and maybe reason to feel scorn for some others. There is a single mystery, and it will be solved. Off the Air is a fun read, perfect for the beach, next to a pool, or maybe lounging in or near a cabin in the woods. Be sure to tune in next week (really two weeks) for the next installment of WB-Reviews. From all of us (that would be me, my wife, the cats, and a dog) here at the news center, goodnight, and stay cool. Review posted - 08/02/24 Publication date – 3/36/24 I received a hardcover of Off the Air from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon will be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Garcia’s personal, FB, Instagram, Goodreads and Twitter pages Profile - from Criminal Element CHRISTINA ESTES is an award-winning reporter who has spent more than 20 years covering crime, public policy, and business in Phoenix, Arizona. Her reporting has been heard on National Public Radio (NPR) and appeared in the Arizona Republic, Arizona Business Gazette, and Phoenix Business Journal. Christina’s career inspired Off the Air, which won the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest. Interviews -----Voyage Phoenix - Daily Inspiration: Meet Christina Estes -----Arizona Horizon - Christina Estes releases first book | Arizona Horizon - by Ted Simmons - video – 8:28 -----KJZZ - Reporter Christina Estes debuts 'Off the Air,' her first mystery novel by Lauren Gilger -----Arizona Family - Beyond the Next Chapter Podcast: Christina Estes on her new book "Off the Air" by Whitney Clark – video – 33:56 -----Criminal Element - Q&A with Christina Estes about her mystery debut, Off the Air -----Los Angeles Public Library - Interview With an Author: Christina Estes by Daryl M. - print Item of Interest from the author -----Criminal Element - Excerpt ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jul 28, 2024
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Jul 31, 2024
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Hardcover
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1250853699
| 9781250853691
| B0C1X7JYZ6
| 4.11
| 31,495
| Oct 24, 2019
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
| While she may be capable of functioning several levels into the future, her mind is no crystal ball. She may have the ability to visualize dozens o While she may be capable of functioning several levels into the future, her mind is no crystal ball. She may have the ability to visualize dozens of disparate pieces of information simultaneously, but her brain doesn’t work like in those movies where you see a whole string of letters superimposed on the face of the protagonist as they’re thinking.-------------------------------------- Antonia is afraid of almost nothing, apart from herself. Afraid of life, maybe. After all, she relaxes by imagining for three minutes every day how she could kill herself.The Black Wolf is the second in Juan Gómez-Jurado’s Antonia Scott series. If you have not read the first, Red Queen, I would take a break, read that one, then come back. Also, if you have not read the first book in the series, there are some items in this review that might be spoilerish for you. Caveat lector. Red Queen is a super-secret international anti-crime organization. They specialize in finding and developing a small number of exceptional human beings to become the mental equivalent of super-soldiers, assigned to look into Europe’s worst crimes. Antonia Scott is the Red Queen in Spain. She has an amazing mind, but also some issues, as you might suspect, given the two quotes at the top of this review. She has a pill she takes when it all becomes too much for her. Sometimes she takes too many. Jon Gutierrez is an erstwhile cop from Bilbao who was recruited to assist Antonia with matters of a police sort, and with more baby-sitting types of responsibilities. He is a large man (but not fat) with red hair, and a very good guy. The pair had a nasty adventure in book #1, with a primary villain who remained beyond their reach. [image] Juan Gómez-Jurado - Image from Expansión – photo credit – Luis Malabran We begin with the extraction of a very water-logged body from a river. Antonia wonders if it might be a major nemesis from the prior book, Sandra Fajardo. She has been on the lookout for this baddie ever since. The story continues with an assassination attempt at a shopping mall in Marbella, a city on Spain’s southern coast. A mafioso has been killed. His beautiful wife, Lola Moreno, who travels with a bodyguard, is set upon by a professional assassin or two, but the lady has skills, and manages to escape. She will provide one of the two major story lines of the novel. Antonia and Jon are sent to have a look by their boss, the mysterious Mentor, which made me think of M in the Bond novels We alternate, more or less, between Lola’s flight from henchmen directed by a Russian mafia don, and Antonia’s and Jon’s tracking of clues. This is Antonia’s domain, seeing, or sensing things that others miss. She is somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Lisbeth Salander of the Millenium series. There will be blood, unpleasantness with cars, an infuriating discovery, close calls, and twists. We get some backstory on both Lola and Antonia, helping explain how they became who they are. And then there is a killer, the famed assassin, the Black Wolf, feared even by other professional killers. [image] Vicky Luengo as Antonia and Hovik Keucherian as Jon - image from Amazon UK Many of the chapters begin with fairy-tale-like recollections. This one is typical. There was once a little girl who grew up in a sad, loveless home where the food tasted of ashes and the future was black, she tells herself as she waits.Jorado offers paralleling of characters. For example, the mob boss Orlov with Mentor, and Antonia with the Black Wolf. It is satisfying to see excellent craft like this on display. He also regularly offers up a collection of interesting foreign words, that describe a particular situation or feeling better than Spanish or English. Here are a couple: Kegemteraan is in Malay. In Malay it would mean "the joy of stumbling". The simultaneous feeling of pleasure and grief when you know that you have done something that you shouldn't.Gomez-Jurado did this in the first book in the series. It is a charming element. [image] Alex Brendemühl as Mentor - image from Amazon UK One thing that irks in tales of this sort is the perpetually stupid local authority. Here the area captain seems to be blaming A&J for the carnage that they are investigating, as if they had somehow caused it. But the author has some fun with this trope, which I will not spoil here. Antonia’s and Jon’s personal relationships come in for examination, enhancing their appeal, but it is kept to a minimum, so adds color without interfering with the story. And the story is great fun. A rock’em sock’em thriller, pitting the best mind against the darkest evil, with plenty of conflict, and lots of clues (and some red herrings) to tease you into guesses and theories. Humanizing of (some of) the baddies combines with offering appealing, quirky, leads and a story that speeds along way over the limit. The Black Wolf is an excellent follow-up to Red Queen, leaving one panting for the third entry in the series. That need will be satisfied on March 12, 2025, with the publication in English of The White King. I can hardly wait. She has a black belt in lying to herself, and only a yellow one in expressing her reality. Review posted - 07/26/24 Publication date – 3/12/24 – in English First published in Spain – 10/24/2019 I received an ARE of The Black Wolf from Minotaur in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon will be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Gomez-Jurado’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Profile – fromWikipedia Born in Madrid, Spain on December 16, 1977, Juan Gómez-Jurado, is a Spanish journalist and author. He is a columnist in "La Voz de Galicia" and "ABC", distributed in Spain, and he participates in multiple radio and TV programs. His books have been translated into 42 languages and he is one of the most successful living Spanish authors, along with Javier Sierra and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. His writing has been described by critics as "energetic and cinematographic". He worked in various Spanish media outlets, including 40 Principales, Cadena Ser, Cadena Cope, Radio España, Canal + and ABC, before publishing his debut novel, God's Spy (Espía de Dios) in 200Interview -----Radio New Zealand - Spanish author Juan Gomez-Jurado on his best-selling - audio – 23:32 – by Kathryn My review of Gomez-Jurado’s prior book -----2023 - Red Queen Music ----- Joaquín Sabina - 19 Days and 500 Nights - Jon listens to this Item of Interest -----Arganzuela Footbridge - appears in Chapter 3 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 18, 2024
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Jul 24, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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9798989689200
| B0CT3WNLGQ
| 4.43
| 7
| unknown
| Jul 02, 2024
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it was amazing
| Harmony thought about cats as she rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. Her favorite cat was the one that used to get stuck on top of a Harmony thought about cats as she rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. Her favorite cat was the one that used to get stuck on top of a telephone pole in front of the house where she grew up. At least once a month in the warm weather, she’d hear the neighbor kids yelling, “Cat’s on a pole!” as they gathered around to taunt the poor thing.-------------------------------------- When he was forty-three, he met Judy. By then, construction work had taken second seat to massage therapy, where he discovered he had a gift.Harmony and Joshua have special abilities. You might even call them superpowers. As with most such talented people, that has not necessarily led to them being happy. Joshua makes a living running healing classes at his own studio. He has always had what seems a pheromonic gift for attracting women. Woof! But commitment has never been a strong suit. Until he married Judy and they had a baby, Emily. Still, it is tough to resist all those longing gaze from his students and assistants. [image] Betsy with pooch - image from her site Harmony is forty-something, works at a gardening magazine, is of uncertain ethnicity, having been adopted and having no real memory of her birth parents, and is different from the rest of us. She sees colors around people, auras, and has a sense of smell that allows her to tell about a person’s health, among other things. It is understandable that being in a relationship can be tough if you can pretty much read the other person’s thoughts and feelings. Insightful? Yes, very literally. She thinks of it as being about energy, hers, others, an experiential milieu no stranger to her than seeing the usual colors or hearing the sounds of the world are for most of us. But can you live through every day seeing, sensing the world like that? Harmony is in mourning for her best friend, her late pooch and beloved companion of 18 years, Delilah. Each believes they are unique, and are destined to remain that way. It is pretty clear that these two crazy kids are destined to get together in one way or another. In this magical rom-com, they meet cute on a Manhattan bus, and we are off to the races. The story centers on their relationship, which, surprisingly, never gets truly physical. Maybe metaphysical? With or without physical touching it is intensely sexual. They are both, because of their abilities, outsiders. Joshua manages by running a school, trying to help people find the abilities they have, but do not recognize. He is able to direct his energy to healing as well. ”We all have this capacity,” says Robinson in her video promo for the book. She has been involved for a long time with spiritual psychology and healing arts, so brings an interesting perspective to Joshua and Harmony’s capacities. [In therapy] I was talking about how I reacted to various people in the office. There was one guy there who wanted an office wifey. I couldn’t stand this guy. Every time he would approach me it was like I was getting slimed with ectoplasm. Etheric gunk would come over me. I wanted to take a shower.Harmony gets more ink of the two, with a large piece of that her interactions with her therapist, Doctor Thompson. These are fabulous. Spectral beings are also a considerable presence. Ghosts? Angels? Something else? Like Julie Jordan in the musical Carousel, Harmony’s favorite musical, both Joshua and Harmony see or sense presences, which sometimes become active to the point of issuing directions. Keep an eye out for mirrors, an image that pops up multiple times. Can you actually see yourself? Or does truly getting to know yourself require another person? There are a few cockroach POV scenes that are hilarious, even to a native of NYC who had to contend with them for a lifetime, sometimes in large numbers. Lord knows, those of us who have spent much of our lives in city apartments can well attest to their persistence, and share Josh’s frustration at their ability to mockingly skitter away from our attempts to extinguish them. Robinson is a funny writer, so there are plenty of LOLs throughout the novel, not all related to bugs. Cats on a Pole is a moving story about people searching for…something, love, companionship, understanding, truth, connection, release. There will be tears as well as laughs. The novel also offers a deeper perspective on spirituality and the meaning of death. It all builds up to a surprising climax, so buckle in. These cats may be stuck atop a pole, (or multiple poles?) getting some temporary safety, but they also gain a broader view of the world, and so will you. What was extraordinary were her colors—raw red and orange energy around her torso, a deep indigo, bluer than the bottom of the ocean with radiant purple wafting through it vibrating so fast above her head it made him feel faint just to watch it. But watch it he did. How could he not? Her desire was direct and raw. Review posted - 07/05/24 Publication date – 07/02/24 I received an eBook version of Cats on a Pole from the author in return for a fair review. Thanks Betsy. [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 Robinson’s personal, Twitter and FB pages (Partial) Profile – from her site Betsy Robinson was raised an atheist and went on to make her living as a writer and editor of spiritual subject matter: as managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine for six and a half years and as an editor of spiritual psychology and books about shamans and traditional healers.She is or has been an actor, a playwright, an essayist, an editor, a freelance writer, messenger, paralegal, legal secretary, chambermaid, IHOP hostess, fortune cookie writer, novelist, and more. Cats on a Pole is her third novel. Plan Z was published in 2001 and The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg came out in 2014. Interviews ----- Ectoplasmic Inspo + Publisher at 73: Betsy Robinson - mostly on becoming a publisher ----- Why Publish "Cats on a Pole" and "The Spectators" Now? self-interview - video – 4:25 My review of an earlier book by the author -----The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg Songs/Music from Carousel – Harmony buys a CD of the 1987 revival It does make one wonder if Harmony’s last name was an homage to the composer. -----What’s the use of Wond’rin -----The Carousel Waltz -----You’ll Never Walk Alone -----If I loved You Items of Interest from the author ----- Her promo video -----Book trailer -----Betsy reads from the book ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 20, 2024
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Jul 2024
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Jul 04, 2024
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Paperback
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059344938X
| 9780593449387
| 059344938X
| 3.66
| 1,961
| Mar 01, 2019
| Feb 27, 2024
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really liked it
| History doesn’t allow itself to be rewritten that easily.-------------------------------------- One single night: A house burned down in Tolarp. History doesn’t allow itself to be rewritten that easily.-------------------------------------- One single night: A house burned down in Tolarp. There was someone inside, on the kitchen floor. One instant, a before and after: the stillness before the spark appeared, and the inferno that followed. One single event: That was all it took to redirect the path of a life. Like the filament of a root moving through time.Or, in this case, two lives. How do you deal when the thing that obsesses you interferes with your life? Isak Nyqvist is seven years old in 1994. Vidar Jörgensson is a young cop, four years in the police. We will follow them through the next twenty-one years. Both their lives are largely defined by the fire that takes place on a cold night in November. A young woman is found dead inside a torched house. It was not the fire that killed her. [image] Christoffer Carlsson - image from Frankurter Rundschau – credit Emelie Asplund Isak loves his uncle Edvard, 25, who has spent a lot of loving time with him, but Edvard has a history of rage, much of it provoked, and a lot of it ascribed to him because his father was a violent person. He had been dating Lovisa Markstrom, was seen leaving the scene of the crime on the night of the fire, and is presumed to have been the one who killed her. There is circumstantial evidence supporting that belief. The town is certain of it, given his family history. The person who had seen him that night was Vidar. But Vidar has his doubts, or will. Vidar has many local connections and uses those to help his investigation. Isak’s family is known by everyone, not in a good way. Gramps was known as a violent person. Isak’s uncle Edvard was also painted with that same brush, so it is easy to believe that he killed his girlfriend. Isak is only 7 when the murder take place but local biases, and bullies pile on Isak, assigning to him the snap-judgments that were affixed to his uncle The story is told in three parts, the first being when the death occurred, 1994, the second in 2003 and the third in 2015. Even though Isak has doubts, he still cannot believe his loving, kind uncle could be responsible for a murder. Vidar becomes aware of some problems with the evidence, sees alternate explanations for the crime and becomes obsessed with it for the rest of his police career and beyond. It even threatens his marriage (Wait, didn’t she know this about him when they got together?) The trope of the investigator’s non-understanding significant other gets on my nerves. Isak is impacted both internally, wondering if Edvard really was a killer, and wondering if genetics are destiny, and externally, as bullies constantly remind him that his uncle is serving time, and provoking him to violence. (Why are provoking bullies never held to account? Is the world really that dumb? Don’t answer that.) The long expanse of the tale gives us insight into the main characters, how they feel and behave in the world, and what has gone into creating those feelings and behaviors. It is both heart-breaking and illuminating. The parallelism of Isak and Vidar works well, showing how history ripples forward into the future for both of them, albeit in very different ways. Carlsson offers many specific ways in which their paths run in the same direction. Both their lives are crap, in a way. Both have boxes of clues to their mysteries. Vidar’s wife’s assumptions and lack of understanding re Vidar mirrors the community’s view of Erik. Vidar imagines himself as a child, akin to a dream of Isak’s In Carlsson’s previous novel (at least as far as USA release dates go) Carlsson had used a similar structure, with Vidar’s father tracking a crime from 1986 to 2019, stopping off at several intermediate years to track the characters and advance our understanding of the very cold case. This original Swedish language book was released in 2019, before Blaze Me a Sun (2021). Vidar Jörgensson features in this one. But in the later book, it is Vidar’s father who stars, with Vidar being introduced later in the tale. I do not know if Under the Storm was intended as a prequel, or maybe was written later but published earlier. I read the pair in the order in which they were published in the USA, #2, then #1. There is a third, which was released in Sweden in 2023, Levande och döda (The Living and the Dead). I do not know when an English translation will be available. Family is a major concern, as it was in Blaze Me a Sun. How does the cop’s obsession (or deep commitment to truth) impact his friendships, his work life, his marriage? (“You seem so far away sometimes,” she said at last.) How does Isak’s affection for and connection with a much-loved uncle affect his ability to have a normal social life, to have a family life? How is the rest of Edvard’s family impacted by his travails? As with Blaze Me a Sun, there is mention of a local superstition. That one had to do with fortune, good or bad, being caused by how one saw a particular bird. Here it is a place where a legendary rich man is buried, a place where ghostly apparitions are said to appear. Under a bridge in Anarp is where The Old Man sleeps, a boogie man who is death to anyone who meets his ghost. Non-superstition-based history is also addressed, as Carlsson tracks town history back to sundry events, like the introduction of manufacturing in the town, its loss and attempt to revive it. A persistent motif throughout is secrecy, as one might expect in a procedural murder tale. Vidar and Isak, while not alone in this, are robust practitioners. Isak keeps two things to himself from the night of and a short time after. It is never particularly clear why he fails to tell what he knows in time to have an impact. Vidar does not tell his boss what he is working on in the latter parts of the novel. Schtupping a local married lady is also kept on the down-low. Talking separately to Edvard and Isak while not informing either of them of his contact is another. Vidar keeping secret a challenging work-based relationship also requires deceit. The noir atmosphere gets jiggy when a major hurricane, Gudrun, blows through. Homes are destroyed, people displaced. This was a real storm that caused major damage in Sweden. Details of the experience of such a beast are chilling. Maybe not the same as the assassination of the Prime Minister in the psyche of the nation, but it had a real impact. A heat wave also adds to the tension. Carlsson succeeds in presenting both detailed character portraits and in giving us a sense of what life was like in this area, a place in which he grew up. He is a PhD criminologist for his day job, publishing papers and teaching. He grew up around things criminal, as mom was a police dispatcher. It is clear that a lot of the conversation on which he eavesdropped at home as a kid made an impact. He knows crime, both real and fictitious, and writes with authority about it. This is a procedural, however lengthy the duration of the investigation. You will enjoy Vidar picking up on clues and following through, as he spends a lifetime attempting to find out the truth about that night. In the beginning it is a hot, fiery case that becomes a cold-case in the following parts of the novel. (In Sweden are all cases cold cases?) But not to Vidar. He is a flawed guy, but is determined to find out what really happened that night. Under the Storm is a triumph of the genre, tickling your brain with the mystery, engaging you emotionally with the characters, and offering up informed looks at a place and time, well, times. As a smart, accomplished example of Swedish noir, Under the Storm is out of this world. The world had shown what it was truly capable of. As if a lifeline was suddenly severed, it could take your loved ones away. The world watched without blinking as you fell.Review posted - 06/28/24 In Sweden - 3/1/2019 English Translation - 2/27/24 I received an ARE of Under the Storm from Hogarth in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [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 Carlsson’s Instagram and Twitter pages Profile - from Penguin Random House Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986 on the west coast of Sweden. He holds a PhD in criminology from the University of Stockholm and is one of Sweden’s leading crime experts. Carlsson is the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, voted by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy, and has been a finalist for the prestigious Glass Key award, given to the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year.Interview -----The Occasional Bookwitch Christoffer Carlsson – neither pink nor fluffy - It’s close to where he grew up, where he and his brother used to play. And then, halfway through writing the book, his parents sold up and moved away from his childhood home, moving into a flat in town, enjoying their new life on the 13th floor with marvelous views. ‘The novel became some sort of farewell. It was pretty hard. It’s as if part of my past has moved out of reach.’My review of another book in this series -----Blaze Me a Sun Item of Interest from the author -----With the Dead - this is a must-read item, as Carlsson details how he became a writer. You will see how his books incorporate elements of his life. Item of Interest -----Cyclone Gudrun ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 20, 2024
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Jun 19, 2024
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Paperback
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0063014734
| 9780063014732
| 0063014734
| 4.03
| 1,915
| Mar 26, 2024
| Mar 26, 2024
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it was amazing
| The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a mon The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a monster a name, you had it in hand. There, that one was anger. Rage. Sexual abuse. Dennis learned the names of all these before he was four, as items the child psychiatrists crossed off on their checklists. They were looking for answers. They were looking for monsters to blame.-------------------------------------- …all the boys here were throwaways. It was like being in a giant wastebasket filled with dirty tissues. You knew you were lost.The road to hell is paved with good intentions. - Aphorism, origin unknown [image] Renee Denfeld - image from her site Rene Denfeld, author of several novels (see links in EXTRA STUFF) dealing with criminal justice, and in particular the abuse of children, has returned to familiar territory, with a story about a boy ill-treated by the child-protection system, the torturous methods used to control him and others, and the impedimenta of foster care secrecy laws, designed to protect, but often used to cover up. The idea for the scene depicted on the cover came during a trip to an Oregon beach for a mental health day when she spotted a little boy charging into the water - from the Spokesman (print) interviewIn Chapter One, we are introduced to nine-year-old Dennis Owen as he races toward the ocean, a frothy, treacherous body of water bordering Oregon, a place not conducive to family outings. [image] Mist struck his face with force, and the wind tore at the institutional shirt he wore…Behind him, signs littered the dunes by the beach road: WARNING: TREACHEROUS CURRENTS. WARNING: HIGH TIDE. WARNING: SHARP DROP-OFFS AND SNEAKER WAVES.Dennis plunges into this perilous Pacific, pursued by a man. The novel looks back at the boy’s meager life and at that of the man who had been chasing him. The backstory will eventually explain all. As part of that, we see Dennis from age four. Already having been bounced from foster home to foster home, he is relegated to Brightwood, a place with a new director, Martha King, fresh off directing another group home in Arizona. Think Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Delores Umbridge from the Harry Potter series. Killing you with kindness. She has ways to be mean where everyone around her stands up and claps. That’s the worst kind of meanness, son. The kind where everyone says it’s for your own good.Martha’s ability to be everywhere and see everything is too extreme to be believed, but suspend that disbelief, as her awfulness provides a strong counter to Dennis’s strength and character and the kindness of others. Renfeld does give Martha a backstory that explains, while not forgiving, her dark behavior. It seems likely that Martha King was named for Martha Welch, author of a book on Holding Time. “Holding time” is a draconian, punitive method of treatment that sounds nicer than it is. It’s basically a physical and psychological torture that’s designed to break children down to the point of psychological collapse by physically restraining them. Some children have actually suffocated to death by this treatment. The idea is that children will somehow “start fresh” afterward, like rebooting a computer, which of course is not how humans work. If you destroy someone psychologically, they’re not reborn. They’re destroyed. Holding time has been thoroughly rebuked by scientists, and yet somehow it’s still used. - from the ZED interviewThe methodology of the novel is a contemporary investigation twenty years after Dennis disappeared, by his sister. Amanda Dufresne, adopted as a child, now twenty-six, had survived the foster care system much better than had her brother, whose existence she only recently discovered. She works as a keeper to an orphaned polar bear (Molly) at the Oregon Zoo. She is smart and dogged in trying to find out what had happened to her brother. Denfeld brings her real-world skills as an investigator to this tale, yet again, giving Amanda’s quest plausibility. She gets a boost from a retired detective, Larry Palmer, who is still living in Eagle Cove, even though his wife, who had been the one to move them here, had passed. Helping Amanda gives him a sense of restored usefulness, and a daughter figure to nurture and protect. It was important to Denfeld that her prime investigating character not be a detective, but an everyday person in search of the truth. Amanda does take the lead, but Larry helps considerably more than the prototypical police expert who helps the leads in cozy mysteries. This is a world Denfeld knows all too well, both as an abused kid, homeless at fifteen, and as a loving foster and adoptive mom. The novel features a strong cast of supporting characters, among them employees and other children at Brightwood, residents of Eagle Cove, and the local constable. She also offers a side-mystery. There is something hinky with the story of how Molly found her way to the zoo. Amanda conducts her solo investigation of that, because of her love for the bear. No Larry involved in that. It is a heart-warming tale, paralleling the human investigation, and will leave you in need of tissues. [image] The Blythe intaglios were created on the desert floor hundreds if not thousands of years ago by Native people for an unknown reason. - Image from AZcentral Denfeld is a master of imagery. The story takes Amanda and Larry to Arizona, where they learn of a remarkable (real) local feature. In the novel, sleeping giants are massive stone age carvings…But the real sleeping giants are the secret, hidden pains, and anger inside us that can come out in misdirected rage. In my experience, when these sleeping giants are awakened with a cause—especially one driven by white supremacy, misogyny, or other biases— a permission slip to commit harm is signed, sealed, and delivered. - from the Crimereads articleThey might also be the fierce waves into which Dennis plunges. Renee Denfeld will break your heart. By page six, I was already feeling a welling up. Thankfully, I am not faced with the sort of sorrow Larry must endure, having retired to a remote, coastal town, and then losing his wife. My spouse is doing quite well, thanks, and is likely to be around long after I am gone, but Denfeld so captures the sadness of loss that it is no trick to summon the feelings, the awful mourning that accompanied the passing of my sisters. It makes me wonder what Larry would do with his pain. She will also bring you to tears of rage at the treatment Dennis experiences at Brightwood, and feel affection for him as human being with no control over his life. She then tugs your heartstrings again as Molly’s story is revealed. There is a core intention in this novel of raising consciousness about the plight of thousands of children in the foster care system, (Renfeld estimates that there are over 20,000 children who have gone missing) and the legal limitations that make it so hard to help, find them, or even know that they are missing Sleeping Giants is a masterwork by one of our finest novelists. It took her several years to write this one, a longer stretch than is usual for her. It has been worth the wait. For a book that comes in under three hundred pages, it is a giant of a read. Most crime fiction focuses on the outliers—the outright, obvious sociopaths, usually unexplainably brilliant—or else criminal underworlds, like gangs or drug cartels. This is all interesting stuff. But I think it has the effect of othering violence. It assumes there is a world full of normal people who are blameless, who couldn’t fathom the idea of committing harm even if you suggested it. This creates a false dichotomy, an us vs them that is troubling and honestly, kind of disingenuous. Review posted - 06/7/24 Publication date – 3/26/24 I received an ARE of Sleeping Giants from Harper 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 The author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages Profile - from her site Rene's novels are influenced by her work as a licensed death row investigator. She is the past Chief Investigator for a public defenders and has worked hundreds of cases, including exonerations and helping rape trafficking victims. The survivor of a difficult background, Rene regularly speaks on social justice issues, as well as writing and overcoming trauma.Previous Denfeld books I have read and reviewed -----2019 - The Butterfly Girl (Naomi Cottle #2) -----2017 - The Child Finder (Naomi Cottle #1) -----2014 - The Enchanted Interviews -----The Spokesman-Review - Rene Denfeld hopes to inspire change, reflection with new book ‘Sleeping Giants’ by Emma Epperly -----The Spokesman-Review - -Northwest Passages Book Club: Author Rene Denfeld, "Sleeping Giants" - by Stephanie Oakes – Video – 47:23 -----ZED – The Zoomer Book Club - Rene Denfeld Reveals the Sad Truth About American Foster Care in ‘Sleeping Giants’ by Rosemary Counter -----Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe - Addressing Harm, Helping Others, and Embracing Hope: A Conversation With Rene Denfeld - there is a pay wall here Items of Interest from the author -----Crimereads - WHEN GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS: EXPLORING EVERYDAY EVIL IN CRIME FICTION - 3/27/2024 -----Ravishly - Born Again: Rene Denfeld on the Birth of Love - 10/25/2019 -----Washington Post - After a childhood of wishing for a new family, I found my dream in adulthood - 8/30/2017 – on her challenging upbringing -----NY Times - Four Castaways Make a Family - 8/11/2017 Items of Interest -----Wiki on Holding Time - Attachment Therapy -----AZCentral - Blythe Intaglios: The 'sleeping giants' of the desert by Michael Chow and Thomas Hawthorne -----Wiki on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -----Harry Potter Wiki on Delores Umbridge ...more |
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| I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.-------------------------------------- …the woods of Gallacia are as I had the unpleasant feeling that I was riding straight down a giant throat.-------------------------------------- …the woods of Gallacia are as deep and dark as God’s sorrow.T. Kingfisher, nom de plume of Ursula Vernon, introduced Alex Easton, the Sworn Soldier of the series title, in her 2022 novella, What Moves the Dead. Easton is a native of the fictional nation of Gallacia, a place with its own language, nasty weather, and plenty of reasons to stay away. Alex travels with Angus, erstwhile batman from military days, and overall assistant these days. It is the late 19th century. The pair managed to survive the creepy challenges offered in the first book in the series, a particularly original and alarming take on Poes’s, The Fall of the House of Usher. They are looking forward to a holiday at Easton’s hunting lodge. But they do have a penchant for finding the unusual and unpleasant. [image] T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon - image from Edubilla.com Easton invited Eugenia Potter to be a guest at the lodge. Potter is Beatrix’s aunt, a personage from the prior book, and a love interest for Angus. Easton is hoping that the lodge has been well maintained, as a local had been hired to see to that, but had proven unreachable. Is the place ready? Is it even standing? Who knows? The focal point on the spectral scale in this volume is an obscure regional spook. According to wiki, a moroi is a phantom of a dead person which leaves the grave to draw energy from the living, so, not a paying guest. Vacation plans are foiled, in fact, replaced with mortal perils The initial volume in the series introduced Alex Easton as a person with female physical attributes who is established in a traditionally male role. The author even takes on pronoun-ing in the created culture that incorporates such a person into the extant culture. It was an interesting element in the first volume, but is only lightly addressed here. Kingfisher has fun setting the creepy stage with grim descriptions of Gallacia, and the particularly dreary part of it in which Alex and company find themselves. For examples, see the two quotes at the top of this review. But she also peppers the tale with humor. …I recognized the smell of livrit, our beloved national paint thinner, made from lichen, cloudberries, and spite. No Gallacian soldier would be without a bottle, in case we ever need to remember what we’re fighting for. (Mostly the opportunity to be somewhere that has better liquor.)-------------------------------------- The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.And Potter butchering the local patois is quite fun. Alex and company try to figure out what is going on, then how to address the problem. The local woman, whom they hire to take care of the household, should come with a surgeon general’s warning. The most interesting element in the story is the fuzzing of the lines between reality and the dreamworld. Are battles fought in an unconscious state still deadly? The struggle for self-control, for self-awareness is as significant as the physical (or is it spectral) harm that is risked, and even suffered. But frankly, this one was a bit of a dud for me. Only occasionally scary at all. I always enjoy a bit of humor and Kingfisher offers up a fair bit here. But there seems far less richness to this book that there was to its predecessor. An enjoyable read but far from a compelling one. It has the benefit of being a short one, a novella, not a full novel, so you can inhale it in a sitting. Kingfisher/Vernon has a third Sworn Soldier volume in the works, set in the USA, and featuring Dr. James Denton from What Moves the Dead. Hopefully the digging she has been doing for that project will yield a motherlode of fun and horror. The silence didn’t feel peaceful. It felt thick. Like a layer of fuzz on your tongue after a hard night of drinking, which you can’t see or touch but you can damn well taste. There weren’t even any birds singing. Review posted - 04/19/23 Publication date – 02/13/23 I received an ARE of What Feasts at Night from Tor/Nightfire in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [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 Kingfisher’s personal, Goodreads, and Twitter pages Profile - from the Fantasy Hive T. Kingfisher is the adult fiction pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, the multi-award-winning author of Digger and Dragonbreath. She is an author and illustrator based in North Carolina who has been nominated for the Ursa Major Award, the Eisner Awards, and has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “Jackalope Wives” in 2015 and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Tomato Thief” in 2017. Her debut adult horror novel, The Twisted Ones, won the 2020 Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, and was followed by the critically acclaimed The Hollow Places. My reviews of earlier books by Kingfisher -----2022 - What Moves the Dead -----2023 - Thornhedge Items of Interest -----Wiki on moroi -----Stone Soup - The Mess That the Editor Fixes: What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher - really only so-so ...more |
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| A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive. A forty-minute drive from the volcanic Mount Etna, Becchina should have been alive.-------------------------------------- A low scritching noise caught his attention, and he swung the flashlight beam down to the right, where the natural tunnel and the man-made wall formed a dark and jagged corner. Tiny, putrid-yellow eyes glittered in the shadows.A deal that is too good to believe. Ownership of an abandoned hilltop house in a Sicilian town (Becchina, a made-up town, - buh-kee-na) for a single euro, as long as you agree to live there for five years and invest 50K euros fixing it up. What could possibly go wrong? Tommy and Kate Puglisi see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A chance for a much better future than they could ever afford in Boston. [image] Christopher Golden - Image from MichelleRLane.com The world seemed to be unraveling every day. American culture seemed to be rotting from the inside out, manipulated by an amoral oligarchy whose worst enemy was young people who didn’t want to play their game, and Kate and Tommy were happy to be counted in that category. The irony had not been lost on them, that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been defined by people leaving the so-called Old World to seek their fortunes in the New World, and now she and Tommy were doing the opposite, seeking new life in the Old World. But they both believed that earlier generations had it right—a slower life, a smaller circle, a focus on home.That Tommy's family had come from Becchina gave it an additional draw, a chance to spend time with his grandparents, whom he loved and very much wanted to see lot of in their final years. The importance of that is magnified by the fact that both of Tommy’s parents are dead. Tommy and Kate are on extended time off from work, so can attend to getting things fixed up before returning to their jobs, remote jobs, which allows them the freedom to live anywhere. And they do not yet have children. Of course the house comes with some unadvertised extras. The book opens with: The rats are like fingers.Uh oh. Squatters. Toss in being within commuting distance of Mount Etna to shake things up. Oh, and that lady down the hill who is always staring daggers at them whenever they pass by. And the family, who is warm and welcoming but not altogether forthright about the history of the town or the house. On the other hand, there is a group of other new arrivals, lured by the same opportunity. They call themselves The Imports. It’s fun seeing Tommy reconnect with famiglia. He and Kate slowly get to know the town and some of its residents, make friends, and come up with a plan to boost the local economy. Can-do Yanks in action. But things keep happening. Kate thinks she sees someone in the house, but did she really? A tremor arrives soon after they do. There is a part of the house that the R/E agent somehow managed to overlook when showing the place. A door that was locked, but then is mysteriously open. Golden makes generous use of Gothic fiction features (see abbreviated list in EXTRA STUFF) to give you chills. Tommy and Kate are actually a happy couple. Many horror books use spectral events as manifestations of underlying relationship problems. Not the case here. This is also not a case in which better-off sorts gentrify an old area, forcing out the locals. Instead, they are trying to save, replenish, and reconstruct, infusing new life into a withered, crumbling, forgotten town. The houses The Imports bought were already abandoned. The newbies are looking to build up not just the houses they occupy but the community as well. So, the dark forces here are not cutouts for obvious social criticism. They are pretty much straight up malignancy coming at you in sundry ways. One way is our visceral reaction to vermin. The rats that feature in the opening lines persist throughout, gaining in their power to induce fear and loathing. It was a specific choice. In the Book Nook interview, Golden talks about how he believes we mortals have a race-memory fear of rats, the result of plagues that wiped large portions of humanity from the planet multiple times, akin to the natural fear most of us have of snakes, from the days when they were in our immediate environment and posed a mortal threat. Rats give us the creeps. What you get in The House of Last Resort is a likable pair in peril, with a plentiful supply of scary, a cauldron of creepy, and a shipload of shivers. If you think your basement is a mess, you have no idea. There are nifty twists, some local color and action aplenty to keep you turning the pages. Depending on your susceptibility to such books, you may get a sleepless night or two out of this one. A fun read, a pure entertainment, uncluttered by larger sociopolitical concerns, a fabulous summer read. But probably a bad idea to take this along if you plan to visit Sicily. A voice crying out. Tommy frowned, wondering if that had been a dream or if it had been what woke him. Review posted - 04/05/24 Publication date – 01/30/24 I received an ARE of The House of Last Resort from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and some DNA samples. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [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 Golden’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile Golden is a monster of an author who got started, and found success, very early. He has a gazillion publications to his credit and an army-size host of teleplay credits from his years writing for Buffy with Joss Whedon, and plenty more. And then there are the comics. You may have heard of Hell Boy, among those. Here is a list of what he has published, from Fiction DB. I personally think he has elves, or more likely, goblins, chained to computers in his basement helping him crank out such volume. My reviews of Golden’s two prior books ----------2022 - Road of Bones ----------2023 - All Hallows Interviews -----Paul Semel - Exclusive Interview: “The House Of Last Resort” Author Christopher Golden ----- WYSO - Book Nook - ’The House of Last Resort,’ by Christopher Golden by Vick Mickunas – audio – 50:04 Checklist – Partial Characteristics of the Gothic Novel See my review of While You Sleep for more of this sort Setting - castle or old mansion - oh, Yeah Secret passages or creaky doors - of course Atmosphere of mystery or suspense - fuh shoo-uh Ancient prophecy or legend - sort of Omens, portents, visions - tremors, hints from neighbors and family Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events - ghost sightings? High, overwrought emotion - you betcha Women in distress - actually not so much. Both Tommy and Kate are beset Women threatened by powerful, tyrannical male - see above ...more |
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Mar 31, 2024
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164009606X
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| 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 |
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| Nov 07, 2023
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really liked it
| The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.-------------------------------------- Love is the mind killer.So what would you do if your super-secret software gave you the alert? End times are afoot. Time to scoot! If you are like most of us, you might seek our your nearest and dearest to see the world out together. But what if you are one of the richest people on the planet? Well, in that case, you would have prepared a plan, an escape, a plane, supplies, a bunker somewhere safe. Buh-bye, and off they go. The they in this case includes three billionaires, the heads of humongous tech companies, some years in the not-too-distant future, Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater. They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interviewWhat if you were the number one assistant to one of these folks, or the less-than-thrilled wife of another, or the ousted former CEO and founder of a third one, maybe the gifted child of one? You might have been spending your time trying to see what you could do to mitigate the vast harm these mega-corporations have done to the planet. These are Martha Einkorn, Lenk’s #2, Selah Nommik, Zimri’s Black British wife, Alex Dabrowski, founder and former CEO of the company now headed by Ellen, and Badger, Ellen’s son. “Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interviewBTW, Atwood mentored Alderman. What if you were attending a conference in Singapore, having recently met one of group B above for an interview, and gotten entangled in an unexpected way, but now find yourself in the vast mall in which the conference is being held, being chased and shot at by some psycho, probably a religious nut? Lai Zhen is a 33yo refugee from Hong Kong, an archaeologist and well-known survivalist influencer. She had met someone she thinks may be The One, but her immediate survival is taking up all available mental space. Thankfully, she has help, but will it be enough? [image] Naomi Alderman - image from The Guardian The action-adventure-sci-fi shell encasing The Future is a dystopian near-future that takes an if-this-goes-on perspective re the road we are currently traveling toward planetary devastation, global warming, the increasing greedification of the world economy, and concentration of wealth, at the expense of sustainability and human decency. But Alderman has done so much more with it. The Future has a brain and a heart, to go along with the coursing hormones, and some serious mysteries as well. Did I mention there is a romance in here also? Good luck shelving this thing. You probably will not have much luck putting it down once you start reading. Well, take that advisedly. I did find that it took a while to settle in, as there is a fair bit to get through with introducing all the characters, but once you get going, day-um, you will want to keep on. While offering a look at survival post everything, Alderman tosses in some fun high tech and BP-raising sequences. And she gives readers’ brains a workout, providing considerable fodder for book club discussions. To bolster the thematic elements, Aldermen provides plenty of connections to classic tales, biblical and other, that offer excellent starting points for lively discussions. Martha was raised in an apocalypse-concerned cult, led by her father. As an adult she gets involved in on-line exchanges about questions like what might be learned from the experience of a biblical apocalypse survivor, Lot. Alderman was raised as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah in the original, so knows her material well. (God was about to firebomb Sodom when Lot’s kindness to a couple of god’s emissaries earned him and his family a get-out-of-hell-free pass.) In addition, she finds relevance in Ayn Rand, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and more. She brings in a discussion of the enclosure act in the UK, how the stealing of public land by the wealthy has a mirror in the theft of public space of different sorts in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the biggest issue at work here is trust. In fact, Alderman had intended to title the book Trust. But when Herman Diaz’s novel, Trust, won a Pulitzer Prize, she had to find an alternative. Can Zhen trust her new love interest. Can she trust the AI that is supposedly helping her? Can she trust any of the oligarchs? Can she trust people she has known for years on line, but never met in person? This is a core concept, not just on a personal, but on a societal level. Civilizations are built on trust. It is an issue that touches everyone. The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interviewConsider a concern that is immediate in early 2024. Can American allies, whose alliances have kept the world out of World War III since the end of World War II, trust the US intelligence services with their secrets, when our next president might give, trade, or sell it to our enemies? Can you trust that the person you are communicating with on-line is being honest with you. (As someone who has met people through Match.com, I am particularly aware of that one.) If you are stuck on a survival island, can you trust that the other people there will not do you in, in order to improve their chances of gaining power once things begin to return to some semblance of global livability? In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interviewZhen’s is our primary POV through this, although we spend a lot of time with Martha. She is an appealing lead, a person of good intentions, and reasonably pure heart. She is wicked smart, able, and adaptive. It is easy to root for her to make it through. But, noting the second quote at the top of this review, if Love is the mind killer, might it impair her clarity of thought, her maintenance of necessary defenses? Of might it impair that of the person she is love with? The concern with dark forces is a bit boilerplate. Two of the oligarchs are cardboard villains; another has some edges. But it is the conceptual bits that give The Future its heft. Oh, and one more thing. Woven throughout the 432 pages of this book is minor crime, Grand Theft Planet. It should come as no surprise that an author who has had great success with her previous novels, and who has spent some years writing video games, would produce a fast-paced, engaging read, replete with dangers, anxieties, fun toys, and wonderful, substantive philosophical sparks. I cannot predict the future any better than 2016 presidential pollsters, but my personal AI suggests that should The Future will find its way to you, you will be glad it did. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.Review posted - 3/8/24 Publication date – 11/7/23 I received an ARE of The Future from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and the password to my super-secret software. 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 Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, GR, and Twitter pages Profile - from Simon & Schuster Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.Interviews -----Professional Book Nerds - Dystopian Futures with Naomi Alderman - video, well, mostly audio, with no real video – 41:59 -----Toronto Public Library - Naomi Alderman | The Future | Nov 13, 2023 with Vass Bednar - 45:05 - there is a nice bit in here on tech as neither bad nor good, but a tool which can be used for good or evil. -----Literary Hub - Naomi Alderman on Creating a Fictional Tech Dystopia by Jane Ciabattari -----Shondaland - Naomi Alderman Is Still Finding Hope in Humankind by Rachel Simon -----AP- Naomi Alderman novel ‘The Future’ scheduled for next fall by Hillel Italic -----Electric Literature - Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology by Jacqueline Alnes -----Independent - How We Met: Naomi Alderman & Margaret Atwood - by Adam Jacques – Atwood mentored Alderman in 2012 – a fun read Item of Interest from the author -----BBC Sounds - audio excerpt - 1.0 – The End of Days – 15:47 Items of Interest -----Tristia by Ovid – Zhen reads this prior to a trip to Canada -----The Admiralty Islands -----inert submunition dispenser - a kind of cluster bomb -----Wiki on the enclosure act ...more |
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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 |
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| Oct 24, 2023
| Oct 24, 2023
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really liked it
| A scream suddenly pierces the air. Startled glances are exchanged on the porch, a drink is spilled, a baby begins to cry, and your muscles tense; y A scream suddenly pierces the air. Startled glances are exchanged on the porch, a drink is spilled, a baby begins to cry, and your muscles tense; you sense this is one of those plot leaps that writers use to punctuate and propel the narrative, like those bursts of biological creativity that scientists claim shock evolution into action. But you are unsettled; just pages into the book, is it too early? Should a mystery unfold in a more demure fashion? Aren’t the suspense and anticipation the real secret thrill of the book, rather than (let us be honest) the all-too-often disappointing dénouement, the magician turning over his cards for an audience that realizes, bitterly leaving the theater, that they’ve been had?-------------------------------------- Other people’s secrets are easy. It’s our own that are hardI am not particularly a fan of video games, the large immersive, role-playing ones. Nothing against them. They are simply outside my experience for the most part. But I do know that a lot of the experience, the joy of these games, lies in figuring things out. If I do this, what happens? What if I do that? Where might secret intel reside? How can I get to it? It strikes me that for many readers, particularly for readers of detective stories, the experience is comparable, however different the physical approaches might appear. The internal processes are quite similar. Reading West Heart Kill is a bit like having a game designer walking you through the construction of the game as you play it, reminding you of the usual rules, and teasing you a bit about whether you will actually figure things out or not, suggesting tricks and traps that writers (or game designers) employ to keep you off base, while remaining entertained. I am a bit obsessive when I read mysteries, keeping lists of characters with their attributes, keeping track of timelines, locations, motives, et al, so am primed for such things. The game here is an overt one. The author is challenging you to figure out whodunit. If you accept the challenge you need to figure things out before the final reveal, otherwise it is game over for you. It is not that you finish the book with no points. Figuring out the mystery, the how, why, when and where, may be the top prize, but a skillful writer will offer plenty of rewards along the way, whether you succeed or fail. I did not figure out ahead of time the large murder questions, but I did suss out some of the lesser puzzles, and there was at least some whoo-hoo!-figured-it-out satisfaction to be had in that. There are further benefits to be had. [image] Dann McDorman - image from the NY Times – shot by Maansi Srivastava The West Heart of the title is a private club (membership fees are exorbitant), high on wealth (well, presumed wealth, at least), and low on morals. Secrets abound, as one might expect. The residents, many of whom spent their summers there as children, have considerable difficulty with marital vows, in particular, and then, of course, with that whole thou shalt not kill thing. Adam McAnnis is a thirty-something private investigator who has been hired to hang about, keep his eyes open, and see if he spots anything off. His connection is with an erstwhile classmate, from whom he manages to wheedle an invitation. The place is isolated, and will become more so as an expected storm seems likely to close off roads and cut off communications. Sound familiar? Many of the elements that make up this very meta novel will, particularly as McDorman lays them out for us, addressing readers directly. The weary detective is one: How often is he both lonely and alone, suspicious of everyone, accepting betrayal as the rule, not the exception? The deceits that begin to unfold the moment the client walks through his office door. Nights spent in parked cars watching illicit silhouettes behind shaded windows, receipts pulled from dripping trash bags, a five-dollar bill waved between two fingers before a junkie’s fixed gaze . . . the debased work of hundreds of cases, a file cabinet full of tragedies and comedies and tales too ambiguous to categorize.Or one particular character type: As a general rule, in murder mysteries, the least likable character is the most likely to die. But devious writers can anticipate your knowledge of this cliché and thrust a character like Warren Burr into early prominence to surprise you, later, with an entirely different victim. Or, perhaps, more devious still, circle back and kill him off in a double bluff—destined to die all along, exploiting and perverting your expectations from the start. Of course, some writers, among them not the least skilled, use much the same trick to mask and unmask their murderers . . .These permeate the story, as McDorman pokes you to figure things out. He even provides lists of characters and clues to help you along. It does not take too long for first mortality to occur. McAnnis takes on the role of investigator, publicly this time. We tag along as he interviews each of the suspects in turn. McDorman has a bit of fun, even concocting one interview with a dead person. We are treated to small essays on this and that, methods of killing people, for example, or an etymology of the word Murder, or on Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance, or on well-known writers using pseudonyms, or on the rules for mysteries, or on unresolved literary murders, and more. These are small, delightful diversions. Voice is handled differently from the norm here. The novel takes place over a long July 4th holiday weekend —Thursday to Sunday — and so I had the idea of writing each day from an additional different perspective: “he”... “I”... “we”... etc. Thus, each section is stamped with its own particular identity. And of course, the “you” voice explores why the perspective suddenly shifts, and how that plays into the intrigue of the plot… - from the Bloomsbury interviewIn fact, this works to keep one off-balance a bit. But there was some ambiguity even within the voice, at times, that I found off-putting. For example, there are sections in which the resident population is represented by a sort-of “we” voice. Then it mixed with an omniscient narrator. While there was certainly a purpose to it, it came across as jumbled to me. Asked what drew him to the 1970s as a time in which to set his novel, McDormand said, The superficial reason is that it was fun! The hairstyles alone defy belief. Some of the most entertaining hours I spent “working” on the novel involved paging through mid-70s clothing catalogs; that led directly to an entire paragraph early in the book that is just a listing of the trademarked (and fabulously named) artificial fabrics worn by the characters: Acrilan®, Fortrel®, PERMA-PREST®, Sansabelt®, Ban-Lon®… More substantively, the zeitgeist of the 1970s felt intensely familiar to me. We’d lost trust in institutions and in each other; the old solutions didn’t work; the new ones seemed inadequate; a creeping disillusionment had overtaken the best of us, while the worst seemed full of passionate intensity. As an era, the 1970s seems extraordinarily relevant to writers and readers today. - from the Bloomsbury interviewThere are plenty of suggestive atmospherics, like a part of the considerable property that is used for hunting (hunting what, exactly?), or a traditional bonfire that might be used for the destruction of evidence, (or maybe eliminating a pesky witness?) primitive maps, hidden paths, mysterious people seen at a distance on ill-lit trails, a dark and stormy night. All great fun. Of course, there is another traditional element in the mystery novel. Be sure to bring along your fishing pole. There are red herrings aplenty to land. I found this to be an entertaining read, but there were bits that did not sit well. There is an event that happens near the end, which I will not spoil, that created a bit of a vacuum, that space being filled in a way that, while very creative, still felt forced and unnatural. Certain scenes are written as plays, which seemed cutesy. Not saying these were not entertaining, but why? Many of us who read Stephen King continue to do so because there is pleasure to be had in the reading, the engagement, the flow, the scares, even though many readers often find his final reveals to be unsatisfying. In a similar vein here. There is much in West Heart Kill that is great fun, that engages us and prods our brains to kick into gear when a less meta approach might just leave us to cruise through the read in a straight line. It encourages us to play, rather than just watch. That is worth a lot. The elements that bugged me made it less than a five-star read, but it will certainly stand out from the pack for seasoned readers of crime novels for its interactive approach. Game on. Review posted - 01/26/24 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 10/24/23 ----------Trade paperback - 9/3/24 I received an ARE of West Heart Kill from Knopf 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 Author links – well, McDorman’s social media links definitely remind one of the time in which he located his novel. He did have a Twitter account at some point, but has not posted anything for years. Nada on FB. Here is his GR profile page. Interviews -----NY Times - When a Book Deal Feels Like ‘Winning the Middle-Age Lottery’ by Elizabeth A. Harris – nothing on the book itself, solely on his unlikely situation of getting a first novel published. -----Bloomsbury - “In the end, both the detective and the killer must make a choice, whether to act from hate, or from love” -----Crimereads - DANN MCDORMAN ON EXPLORING LITERARY HIJINKS AND META MYSTERY by Jenny Bartoy -----BookBrunch - Q&A: debut novelist Dann McDorman by Lucy Nathan Items of Interest -----Publishers Weekly - Knopf Bets on 'West Heart Kill' -----Wiki on Angela Atwood - referenced in Chapter 1 ...more |
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| Jun 08, 2023
| Aug 15, 2023
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it was amazing
| In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.-------------------------------------- For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the waterThe Barnes family is having their problems. It is 2014 in small-town Ireland. We follow Dickie, Imelda, his wife, PJ, their son, and Cass, a high school senior, through a range of travails. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens with, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Guess which category the Barnes family fits into. PJ is almost a teen, so will have a lot of growing-up to do, but he is faced already with challenges that are plenty daunting. Coping with bullies at school is no fun, if a particularly usual checklist item in coming-of-age stories. But he is also beset by the thug teen child of one of his father’s customers, who feels his family has been cheated by Dickie. Beatings happen, and more are promised if he does not pay up. And these are the lesser of the challenges he faces. On the upside, he likes spending time hanging out with his father, working on a project in the woods behind their house. [image] Paul Murray - image from the Hindustan Times - shot by Lee Pelligrini Cass has teen-angst aplenty, coping with her social status, her newly-ripening sexuality and her attraction to a promiscuous friend. She is trying to define who she is. (which is not exactly a wonderful person when we meet her.) A part of that is seeing herself as separate from her family. She would definitely not want to be associated with those people. She is particularly hostile to her father, blaming him for the demise of the family business, and the collateral social impact that is having on her. She is not a stunner like her mother, which does not help. The prospect of heading off to college in Dublin offers a concrete escape route, the sooner the better. She is besties, I guess, with Elaine, who is as amoral and unfeeling as she is beautiful. Imelda came from a working-class family. Rough around the edges would be a kind description. But she was born a knockout. It was always going to be her ticket out. She falls in love with the town’s football superstar, Frank. They are to be wed. Frank stands to inherit a successful family business, and should be able to provide nicely for her. Problem is a literal crash and burn, and buh-bye Frank. She winds up marrying Frank’s older, smarter, but not-golden-boyish brother, Dickie. Dickie had the brains for college, and attended, for a few years, until an unfortunate event derailed his collegiate career and he headed home. He may have been the smarter of the brothers, but Frank had the gift of salesmanship, and was a better fit to take over the car dealership. But when Frank dies, it falls to Dickie to step in. He manages, but it is not work he exactly loves. These days, he is spending time in the woods behind their home, building a defense against Armageddon, spurred on by a troll-like employee who exhales conspiracy theories and seems to be looking forward to the coming end-times. He has a lot of time on his hands. The car-dealership is in the crapper. Along with plenty of other businesses, suffering not only from a global economic downturn, but massive flooding in the town. Dickie’s father, Maurice, retired, but still the owner, swoops in to try to fix things, blaming Dickie for the difficulties. Dickie is not entirely faultless here. But there are serious complications with him. We follow these four for over six hundred pages, getting to know them intimately. We learn their secrets, see them change, see them cope with relentless stressors, see them grow, or not. This is the greatest power of the novel. Each is faced with decisions, moral choices, that define their character, that define their changes, maybe their failures. If that were all, it would be an outstanding piece of work, but Murray offers a very rich palette of content as well, raising it to another level. There are many notions that run throughout The Bee Sting’s considerable girth. Space has been reserved to handle them all. The core, of course, is family. Not exactly the most functional, the Barnses. Parents who have been raised to hide their emotions have no natural ability to make a happy home. You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…On top of which, secrets abound. They are all trying to find a way out, except for PJ, who is mostly interested in seeing things returned to the way they were before the dealership miseries began, and radiated outward. Murray shows how dysfunction and damage can carry forward from one generation to the next, the brutality of Imelda’s family, the emotional absence of Dickie’s. But all has not been destroyed. When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…Family connection is important, mostly in the desire of most to sever it. Dickie was desperate as a young man to get away, get an education, do something other than sell cars for the rest of his life. Imelda came from a toxic family (not all of them) and also struggles with her connection to the family she is in, for current-day part of the story. Cass wants out, ASAP. Tethers are cut, but some are also sewn. The tension between these struggles is fuel for the story. Murray looks at the impact of the environment on peoples’ lives. The story is set at the tail end of the recession from the Celtic Tiger boom that had preceded. The economic environment was still pretty tough and we see how this impacts the family. It will come as no shock that a major, unusual, flood impacts Dickie’s already sinking business, with talk of liquidation, that a water leak in the Barnes house carries omens, and that Imelda dreams of being washed away, as she is forced to cope with losing the luxury level lifestyle to which she thinks her incredible beauty entitles her. Cass’s collegiate prospects and social standing are endangered. Other players in the story are challenged as well. PJ is fast out-growing all his clothing, but does not want to be a burden on the now-struggling family, so keeps quiet and castigates his feet for growing too much. There is a stream involving the presence of gray squirrels in Ireland. They are an invasive species, as of a century back, and carry a disease that is fatal to the native red squirrels. Are they the only locals in danger of being wiped out? Another stream is the notion of returning, coming back from the dead, in particular. Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.Imelda keeps looking for the ghost of Frank to show up at her wedding to Dickie. Dickie is definitely not the same after returning from Dublin. Same for Cass and PJ. Other characters, a maid, a mechanic, a patriarch, return as well, with mixed results. …is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?Bees get a bit of attention, if a bit less than expected. The bee sting of the title is inflicted on Imelda, on her way to her wedding to Dickie. Her face was in no condition to be seen, so every wedding picture of her is through her veil. There is another passage about the mating habits of bees. It does not end well for the males. …the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.The impact of stinging on the stinger is also considered. There is even a bit of magic as Imelda’s Aunt Rose has a particular gift, sees things that others cannot, says sooths, a family thing, but not one that Imelda has ever manifested. Murray writes in differing styles. Most of the book is presented as third-person omniscient, describing the actions and peering inside to reveal the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Standard stuff. The final section, The Age of Loneliness, is written in the second person. We alternately assume the POV of the main characters, as each races toward the stunning climax. Imelda gets a breathless, minimally formatted structure. There is a sample in the second quote at the top of this review. I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interviewIt would not be a Paul Murray novel if you did not come away from the reading without a few more laugh lines in your face. He takes the most liberty with this in the teens’ sections, the most reminiscent of the grand, rude humor of Skippy Dies to be found here. For example Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?You get the idea. Love this stuff. So what’s not to like? Nothing, nothing at all. This is a wonderful, engaging, risk-taking, funny, moving, horrifying, engaging, biting, human triumph of a novel. You may feel stung by elements in this great tale, but you will come away with a literary trove of honey. Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview Review posted - 12/8/23 Publication dates ----------Hardover – 8/15/23 ----------Trade paperback - 5/2/24 The Bee Sting was short-listed for the Booker Prize I received an ARE of The Bee Sting from FSG 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 Links to Paul Murray pages on Wikipedia and Goodreads Interviews -----Hindustani Times - Paul Murray – “Climate change is something I worry about all the time” by Saudamini Jain – READ THIS ONE ----- The Guardian - Paul Murray: ‘I just dumped all my sadness into the book’ by Killian Fox -----The Booker Prizes - A Q&A with Booker Prize 2023 shortlisted author Paul Murray - video – 4:08 My review of an earlier book by Murray -----Skippy Dies – one of the best books EVER! Items of Interest from the author -----New York Magazine – 3/15/23 - Who is Still Inside the Metaverse? -----The Guardian - Paul Murray: ‘How the banks got rich off poor people would be a painful read without comedy’ on The Mark and the Void -----Boston College Libraries – Fall 2022 - How to Write a Novel - video – 1:20:05 - Paul from 7:45 - On the book from 18:25 – well, sort of - Largely about why it took so long between novels – and his experience with screenwriting - Wicked funny, too. -----Outlook India - Excerpt ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 27, 2023
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Dec 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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1250843332
| 9781250843333
| 1250843332
| 3.72
| 3,800
| Jul 25, 2023
| Jul 25, 2023
|
liked it
| Maybe sex made more sense than marriage—or even dating—in old age. Wasn’t courtship for the young?-------------------------------------- Meet me Maybe sex made more sense than marriage—or even dating—in old age. Wasn’t courtship for the young?-------------------------------------- Meet me at Café des Artistes, eighteen hundred.”Loretta Plansky, widowed, retired, pretty fair tennis player, (particularly considering her new hip, only nine-months in) 71, Florida resident, financially comfortable, wakes one morning to discover that she has been pretty much cleaned out. Bank account, retirement fund, investments, the whole kit and caboodle, well, mostly. It seems that the ten grand she had given to her grandson, Will, overnight went instead to cybercriminals. The real Will had not asked her for anything. (Of course, I am totally in favor of folks sending cash to people named Will, but that’s just me. Any amount gratefully accepted.). The FBI special agent in charge holds out virtually no hope of her ever seeing her lost funds restored, but her number two, about to leave the bureau for a private gig, gives Mrs P one intriguing bit of intel. Unwilling to let this crime stand, she heads out to darkest Romania hoping to do…what? who knows? something. [image] Spencer Quinn (pen name for Peter Abrahams) - image from Macmillan – photo by Diana Gray Mrs P is an intrepid investigator, with an unusual skill set. She manages to talk to a relevant person at the US embassy in Bucharest, and persists in following up the few clues that float down her way. The story is told in parallel lanes. Mrs P is the primary of course, but we are also let in on the doings on the other side. Dinu is a teenager with a gift for and enthusiastic interest in American English. He collects colloquialisms and contemporary American slang the way a video-game player collects tokens to gain power. Of course, the power Dinu is amassing causes real harm. His scary uncle has paid to train him, and is now employing Dinu in making calls to American grandparents, pretending to be their stressed-out grandson, in need of emergency cash in order to get out of jail, or whatever. He has a computer whiz bff, Romeo, another teen, who is also employed by the scary uncle. Generally, they do not seem all that morally concerned about what they are doing, and the pay is good. So, Mrs P makes her way to the relevant town, and stumbles her way through to the sort of cozy resolution one might expect. Along the way there are mysterious passageways, dark deeds, life-threatening adventures, a car chase, a valuable jewel, and some very unpleasant characters. So, I guess this is less of a cozy mystery and more of a cozy adventure tale. It is a very good-natured story, and Mrs P is a fun lead, a very engaging sort, a good egg, who has been done dirt, but who would prefer to take matters into her own hands rather than leave her fate to the dubious efforts of others. She displays considerable courage, the creativity of an experienced field agent, and a wily serenity in stressful circumstances. One lovely element was her continued connection to her late husband, Norm. No magical realism here, just a pining for the person to whom she had been the closest for most of her life, as she shares thoughts and concerns with his memory, wondering at his theoretical advice. She is also a very kind person, amenable to applying the resources she has…well, had…to helping out her kids, despite that not necessarily being the wisest choice. You will get a taste of Romania, a very small taste. Most entertaining among these is a hotel festooned with portraits of Bela Lugosi. There is enough humor in here to generate several actual LOLs, which is always welcome BUT, as things were winding up to the big finish, there were multiple eye-roller events that took me out of the book. Like running a marathon then tripping over a stick in the road, then another, then another. I did finish the book, and it was a fun read, for the most part. But I found myself saying “Really?” more than once or twice. And that damaged my overall feeling. Bottom line is that you have to be willing to overlook some egregious reliance on coincidence and deus-ex-machina trickery to make the story work out. I expect I am a bit towards the higher end in my sensitivity to such things. But if you are more forgiving, better at leaping past roadway impediments, then do it, jump in. You will be rewarded with a fun, light read, featuring a very engaging lead. Mrs P will be glad of the company, and so will you. Review posted - 09/29/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover– 7/25/23 ----------Trade paperback - 7/9/24 I received an ARE of Mrs. Plansky's Revenge from Tor Publishing in return for a fair review and the password to my bank account. Hey, now wait a goldarned minute! Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This is 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 Spencer Quinn is the pen name for Peter Abrahams, the Edgar-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Chet and Bernie mystery series, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling Bowser and Birdie series for middle-grade readers. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife Diana and dog Pearl.Interviews -----The Big Thrill - Up Close: Spencer Quinn by Karen Hugg – all on dog books -----Famous Writing Routines - Interview with Peter Abrahams: “I love what I do. Love seems to clear a lot of paths.” - nothing particular to this book. More on his methodology. Songs/Music -----The Byrds - Eight Miles High - appears in Chapter 13 -----The Chimes - I’m in the Mood for Love - Chapter 20 Items of Interest -----Excerpt - Chapter One -----Federal Trade Commission – Consumer Advice - Phone Scams -----Tor/Forge Blog - Inspiration and Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge by Spencer Quinn! by Ariana Carpenter Five or six years ago, my dad got a phone call. At the time he was in his early nineties. He died two weeks short of his 97th birthday and was in excellent mental shape and very good physical shape until the end. I want to emphasize that mental part. He was a very smart guy: quick, sharp, clear-headed. Back to the call....more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Sep 24, 2023
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Sep 26, 2023
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Hardcover
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1640095837
| 9781640095830
| 1640095837
| 3.27
| 789
| 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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not set
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Aug 28, 2023
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Aug 30, 2023
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Hardcover
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1640095438
| 9781640095434
| 1640095438
| 3.76
| 3,478
| May 02, 2023
| May 02, 2023
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it was amazing
| …it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life …it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life, all the different versions of a person, throughout the years, all the ways in which people are capable of changing.-------------------------------------- …sometimes he is utterly exhausted by being an adult, by being someone, expected to explain the world to younger people, as if he’s in possession of the right answers.Jackson Huang is nine years old. He dreams of being a professional magician. His mom, Tina, does hair at the mall salon in suburban Albany. She is amazing at it. Jackson spends a lot of his afterschool time there. Kevin manages the mall bookstore. He enjoys dressing up in many story-appropriate costumes to read to children at the store. His wife does not understand why he does not complete his ABD (All but Dissertation) doctorate. They live in a tiny house on her mother’s property. Maria is a beautiful seventeen-year-old high school senior. She works at Chickadee Chicks in the food court. Maria wants to become an actress, so is applying to schools with theater programs. Ro is a ninety-year-old widow who still gets around pretty well. Her rep is that of the neighborhood bigot, and there is some truth to that. Ro comes in to see Tina once a week for a bit of work. I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. - from the Electric Lit interviewWith the impending closing of the mall as the unifying thread, we get to know each of these five as they work their way through individual conflicts, over ten months, from September to June. Jackson gets hassled at school. Tina, her skills being what they are, can probably get another salon gig when the mall closes, but she has always wanted to be an artist. Maria has a boy who is quite odd interested in her maybe a bit too much. Kevin really needs to decide what he wants to do with his life, whether or not to complete his degree work or something else. He has a scheme for a border collie business that sounds impractical. Ro, after a lifetime of pushing people away, has come to her senses, and is eager to reconnect, to make some amends, regretting her long misanthropy. [image] Karin Lin-Greenberg - Image from her Goodreads profile With alternating chapters, we get to know each of these five, and a bit of the supporting cast as well. Some interact solely at the mall. With others, there is connection beyond. Kevin and his family, for example, live very close to Ro. Maria helps Jackson with a school performance. A friend of Maria’s helps Tina with her artistic hopes. The promotional material for the book compares You Are Here to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. That seems a fair comparison. I wanted there to be ten chapters in the span of ten months, leading up to the mall’s closing. While writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout, and how those circled around a particular place, which was a small town in Maine.As with Strout, Lin-Greenberg offers us a cast of regular people, but finds what is interesting in each of them. I would add Kent Haruf to the comparables list. As in the work of Strout and Haruf, KLG, using the mall, gives us a look at a place, a time, a community, by looking closely at some of the lives it contains. It is a novel of personal, very human hopes, of dreams. No one here is looking to save or conquer the planet, or even the nearest mall. But some of those hopes and dreams are secret. Tina is a very practical single-mother focused on taking care of her son, drawing on odd scraps of paper when opportunity presents. Some encourage her to take art classes, but she resists, fearing that dreaming too big might endanger her main role as provider. Jackson tries to keep his magical interest on the down-low with Tina, fearing her disapproval. Kevin has feelings about academia that he does not feel free to share with his wife. Ro has been secretive for almost a century. Old habits die hard. The book has a very quiet timbre to it, one of the things about it that reminded me of Haruf. “People who often get the most attention are the loudest, but people who are the quietest often have a lot going on inside. I wanted to explore that in this book. Many of the characters I write about are isolated and lonely. Many are not living the lives they had once wished for. As a writer I can explore the interiors of these people. I can go into their minds and show what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.” - from the Times-Union interviewMy first impression was that this was not so much a novel but a book of linked stories. KLG is an award-winning writer of short stories, so this seemed a natural progression. I had my first sabbatical during the 2018-19 school year, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of my novel. I tricked myself by saying, ‘It’s not a novel. It’s a series of linked stories.’ - from the Times Union interviewIt may at first have the feel of a linked short story collection, but the five-strand plaiting of the main characters, the consistent concern with a singular place and its impending demise, and consistent thematic concerns ensure that it is indeed a novel, and a bloody good one. There is a tragic event that occurs toward the back end of the tale. Some repercussions of that are shown. Over the lead-up to the closing of the mall, we switch among the five main characters as they approach having to decide what they will do with themselves when it does. With their interactions, they form a small community of their own. You Are Here was not KLG’s first title for the book. I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. -from the Electric Lit interviewThis is a novel that is both incredibly sad and softly uplifting. KLG offers us a look at five ethnically and chronologically diverse ordinary people, ranging in age from nine to ninety, and delivers insightful, empathic looks at them all. (Well, some more than others, of course) We can appreciate both their challenges and their dreams. Even when their obstacles are self-driven, we can see how they came about, and maybe catch a glimpse of what might be possible ahead. You will feel for them, even if some might make you wince a bit at their decision-making. You will want Jackson to have a magical debut on stage. You will want Tina to find a way to respond to her muse. You will want Kevin to figure out what he wants to do with his life. You will want for Maria to get into the theater program of her dreams. You will want Ro to sail past her long-stout boundaries and realize her dream of human connection in the time left in her life. KLG made her mark, and won awards as a writer of short stories, but when you read You Are Here, you will be exactly there, at the very beginning of what promises to be a long and wonderful novel-writing career. She stares at her son, willing him to look at her and tell her about the magic tricks he’s been practicing. She wants him to invite her to his school talent show. She wants him to tell her about the videos he’s been watching. But he just keeps reading. Tina looks down at the desk, sees her sketch of the goose, peeking out from under some menus. Jackson shuffled around, and she grabs the sketch, balls it up, and drops it into the garbage can finish the desk. As the crumpled paper falls from her hand, she thinks it’s not just that Jackson is hiding something from her; it’s that he is imitating her. He’s keeping secret something that’s important to him, maybe because he’s afraid he’s no good or it’s silly or she’d be disappointed to know he cares about such a thing. She feels certain he has learned to be quiet and secretive, and to not allow himself to talk about impractical dreams from her. Review posted - 8/25/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 5/2/23 ----------Trade paperback - 5/7/24 I received a copy of You Are Here from Counterpoint in return for a fair review, and promising not to shut my doors for good. 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 Karin Lin-Greenberg’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Wikipedia Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press, 2014), won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction[1] and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Gold Winner for Short Stories).[2] Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburghin 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.Interviews -----Times Union - Siena's Karin Lin-Greenberg breaks into new novel, 'You Are Here' by Jack Rightmyer - May 10, 2023 -----The Southern Review - A Writer’s Insight: Karin Lin-Greenberg - primarily about her short-story writing -----Zyzzyva - Q&A WITH KARIN LIN- GREENBERG, AUTHORCOF ‘YOU ARE HERE’ by VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY -----Electric Lit - The Last Days of a Dying Mall in Upstate New York by JAEYEON YOO Items of Interest from the author -----LitHub - excerpt -----Lin-Greenburg’s site - Links to other on-line work she has published -----Read Her Like An Open Book - Karin Lin-Greenberg, author of YOU ARE HERE, on patience and publishing Kent Haruf books we have enjoyed -----2015 - Our Souls At Night -----2013 - Benediction -----2004 - Eventide -----1999 - Plainsong My reviews of books by Elizabeth Strout -----2021 - Oh William! -----2019 - Olive, Again -----2008 - Olive Kitteridge ...more |
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not set
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Aug 11, 2023
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Aug 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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1250860024
| 9781250860026
| 1250860024
| 3.49
| 12,576
| Aug 08, 2023
| Aug 08, 2023
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it was amazing
| The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment late The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment later it comes, mournful and high. The stones are singing and I feel it, at last, that I’m home. I listen for a time, despite my tiredness. I think, if heartbreak had a sound, it would be just like this.-------------------------------------- She can smell him the way wild animals smell prey.-------------------------------------- The visions don’t frighten me anymore. I can usually tell what’s real and what isn’t.Don’t get comfortable. Wilder Harlow has returned to the cottage where he stayed as a teen, to write the book he had started over three decades before. He is not entirely well. We meet him in 1989, via his unpublished memoir, which tells of the momentous events of that Summer. He was sixteen. His parents had just inherited a cottage from the late Uncle Vernon, and opt to spend a summer there before deciding whether to sell. It is on the Looking Glass Sound of the title, near a town, Castine, in Maine. Beset in prep school, for his unusual features, particularly pale skin and bug eyes, Wilder is ready for a novel experience. (“I’m looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and thinking about love, because I plan on falling in love this Summer. I don’t know how or with whom.”) [image] Catriona Ward - image from Love Reading The sound has an unusual…um…sound. The leaves of the sugar maple whisper—under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing…it sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in—mermaids, selkies, sirens…’What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside of me, somehow. Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes—kind of like finger stops on a flute—and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through.’Sure, dad, but the wind-driven whistling is not the only sound that haunts in these parts. It does not take long for Wilder to make two friends. Nathaniel is the son of a local fisherman, his mother long gone. Harper is English, her well-to-do parents summer there. Wilder’s relationships with these two will define not only this Summer and the one after, but the rest of his life. Harper is a flaming redhead, with issues. She has been kicked out of many schools, for diverse crimes. So, of course, Wilder is madly in love with her at first sight. Nat, a golden boy in Wilder’s eyes, has a way of describing fishing with a harshness that is unsettling. The three form their own tribe for a time. Pearl is named for her mother’s favorite jewel. She was only five when mom disappeared. They had been staying at a B&B in Castine. But Pearl’s mother is far from forgotten. Sometimes her mother talks to Pearl in the night. She learns to keep herself awake, so she can hear her. It always happens the same way. Rebecca’s coming. It starts with the sound of the wind roaring in Pearl’s head, just like that day on the mountain. And then Rebecca’s warm hands close over her cold ears.The area has a local creep. Dagger Man is the name assigned to whoever is responsible for a series of break-ins of homes occupied by Summer people. He takes photos of kids sleeping. Then sends the polaroids to the parents. The images include a dagger to the throat. Adding to the creepiness, there is a history of women going missing here. And a legend of a sea goddess luring people to a dark end. The second summer in Castine, there is an accident in a secret cave, involving Wilder, Nat, and Harper. It leads to a very dark, traumatic discovery, upending their worlds. When Wilder heads off to college, soon after, he is intent on becoming a writer, but, while there, his closest friend, Sky, steals his story, going on to publish a wildly successful novel using Wilder's work. He is never able to get past this, thus his final return to the source a lifetime later, to have one last go at writing his true version. Ward employs some of the usual tricks of creating a discomfiting atmosphere. The sounds emanating from the bay are strong among these. Even underwater I can still hear the wind singing in the rocks. And I hear a voice, too, calling. In describing Harper, Wilder notes Her hair is deep, almost unnatural red, like blood. And The wet sand of the bay is slick and grey. It’s obscene like viscera, a surface that shouldn’t be uncovered. (Well, ok then. Which way to the pool?) Nat describing how his father kills seals is pretty chilling. Ward has had some eerie experiences, I suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations. They started when I was about 13, taking the form of a hand in the small of my back as I was falling asleep, shoving me out of bed really hard. I knew there was someone in the room and I knew they didn’t mean me well. With the information I had at the time – pre-Google as well – there was no other explanation for it, was there? I think it’s probably the deepest chasm I have ever looked into. There’s nothing comparable to it in the daylight world. - from the 9/26/22 Guardian interviewwhich find their way into the story. So, there are two presenting mysteries, Dagger Man and the missing women. And a bit of magic in the air, whether it is a dark siren luring some to a watery grave, mysterious noises and notes, or teens fooling around with witchy spells. Are the kids just being imaginative, or is there something truly spectral going on? A feeling of powerlessness is core to the horror genre. The main characters here share a deep sense of vulnerability. This is very much a coming-of-age novel. Adolescence is a prime vulnerable state, a transition between childhood and the mystery of adulthood. Not knowing who you are. Trying on different roles, names, behaviors, hoping for love, of whatever sort, always susceptible to rejection and/or betrayal, and/or disappointment. There is added vulnerability with their families. Any teen going through changes would benefit from a solid base of parental constancy. Wilder’s parents are going through more than just a rough patch. Nat does not seem particularly close to his only parent. Harper refers to a pet dog that protects her from her father. There are enough secrets in the world. Bad families, bad fathers. Pearl’s mother, like Nat’s, is long gone. In addition to whatever else assails them, there is self-harm. The Dagger Man is wandering about. People disappear. The bay has disturbing aspects to engage all the senses. There are a few more stressors, as well. That certainly sets the stage for an unsettling horror tale. That would all be plenty. But wait, there’s more. Some books have unreliable narrators This one has an unreliable ensemble, existing in unreliable worlds. Looking Glass Sound is not your usual scare-fest. The terrors here lie deeper than a slasher villain or a vengeful ghost. In addition to the external frights, these have to do with existential concerns, about identity, who, what, where, and when you are. Offering the sorts of thoughts that can interfere with a restful night, with the legs to disturb your sleep for a long time. This would be more than enough, but wait. This is also a book about writing. A pretty common element in many novels, it’s on steroids in this one, cruising along in the meta lane. Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see. The book is a mirror and I am stepping through the looking glass. ‘Writing is power,’ she says. ‘Big magic. It’s a way of keeping someone alive forever.’ I think about our three names, us kids, as we were. ‘Wilder,’ I whisper to myself sometimes. ‘Nathaniel, Harper.’ We’re all named after writers. It’s too much of a coincidence. Harper. Wilder. Harlow. The names chime together. The kind of thing that would never happen in real life but it might happen in a book. ‘You wanted to live forever,’ Harper says gently. ‘You both did, you and Wilder. That’s all writers really want, whatever they say.She also gets into the morality of story ownership. When does your personal tale become a commodity? Who has the right to tell your story? I cannot say I have ever read a book quite like this one. It is not an easy read. Despite some surface technique that places it in the gothic/horror realm, there is a lot more going on here. You will have to be on top of your reading game to keep track, but it will be worth your time and studied attention. There should be surgeon general’s warning on this book. Stick with it and you will get a very satisfying read, and endure many nights of unwelcome wondering. I wake to the sound of breath. No hand caressing me, this time. Instead I have the sense that I am being pummeled and stretched, pulled by firm hands into agonizing, geometrical shapes. I scream but no voice comes from my throat. Instead, an infernal scratching—horrible, like rats’ claws on stone, like bone grinding, like the creak of a bough before it breaks. Or like a pen scratching on paper. Review posted - 7/21/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 08/08/23 ----------Trade paperback - 07/3-/24 I received an ARE of Looking Glass Sound from Tor/Nightfire in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. Can you please turn down the volume on that thing? [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Profile – from Wikipedia Catriona Ward was born in Washington, D.C. Her family moved a lot and she grew up all over the world, including in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. Dartmoor was the one place the family returned to on a regular basis. Ward read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Ward initially worked as an actor based in New York. When she returned to London she worked on her first novel while writing for a human rights foundation until she left to take an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. That novel, Rawblood (distributed in the United States as The Girl from Rawblood), was published in 2015. Now she writes novels and short stories, and reviews for various publications.[1] Ward won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel in 2016 …and again in 2018 for Little Eve, making her the first woman to win the prize twice. Her most successful novel has been The Last House on Needless Street. Links to Ward’s FB and Instagram pages Interviews -----The Guardian – 9/26/22 - Catriona Ward: ‘When done right, horror is a transformative experience.’ by Hephzibah Anderson -----The Guardian - 3/13/21'Every monster has a story': Catriona Ward on her chilling gothic novel by Justine Jordan -----Lit Reactor - Catriona Ward: Learning to Fail by Jena Brown -----The Big Thrill – 8/31/2021 - Up Close: Catriona Ward by April Snellings -----Tor/Forge - Catriona Ward – What Was Your Inspiration for Looking Glass Sound? -----Books Around the Corner - Catriona Ward by Stephanie Ross -----Quick Book Reviews – Episode 206 – April 24, 2023 - Books! Boks! Books! from 26:06 to 42:30 Items of Interest -----The Novelry – 10/2/2022 - Catriona Ward and the Power of Writing Horror -----NHS - Charles Bonnet syndrome ...more |
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Jul 07, 2023
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Jul 19, 2023
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1668020793
| 9781668020791
| 1668020793
| 3.75
| 879
| 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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Feb 04, 2024
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Jul 12, 2023
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1982191333
| 9781982191337
| 1982191333
| 3.87
| 7,382
| May 02, 2023
| May 02, 2023
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it was amazing
| Pinky arrived punctually and silently in a highly modified Tesla equipped with bulletproof glass, a sound system that could liquefy granite and a f Pinky arrived punctually and silently in a highly modified Tesla equipped with bulletproof glass, a sound system that could liquefy granite and a front seat customized to accommodate Pinky’s body, which weighed a tad over 430 pounds and measured nearly the same horizontally as vertically. Pinky, whose real name was Bob Kearful, had once been a standout nose tackle at the University of Florida and probably would have gone to the NFL had it not been for a crucial play in the Florida-Georgia game during which he bit off the little finger of a Georgia offensive guard and refused to spit it out. This conduct was deemed so unsportsmanlike that Pinky was permanently banned from the game, though it also earned him his nickname and the undying affection of Gator fans.Florida Man re-appears after years away as a novelist, having written an incredibly funny book! Police bring him in for questioning. Ok, let’s play Sunshine State Bingo Rednecks with weapons, minimal brain cells, and dreams of gold – of course Foreign-born gangsters with access to tech, and no access to decency – I am shocked, shocked A crooked lawyer with expensive tastes and a serious gambling habit – no, never A sleazy politician with White House ambitions and zero scruples – In Florida? Surely you jest. An uber-vain stud-muffin with an uncontrtollable desire to doff his shirt for the camera, and zero desire to care for or protect his wife and child – a vanishing breed, I expect. Probably the last of his kind. A group of internet-star wannabees who, while in various states of intoxication from alcohol and diverse other substances, concoct a plot to fake a monster sighting to boost business – oh, that never happens A former news anchor reduced to covering things like the annual Florida Python challenge – not a happy camper. There were fewer opportunities in the time before blogs became de rigeur for the unwillingly unemployed media crowd A nice guy who wants to be with the girl – Stop right there. Who let the normie in? Well, the male normie. Snakes – Yep, and snakes were intended to have been even more of a presence Originally this book was going to be much snakier. Then I had breakfast with Carl [Hiaasen], and he had just finished writing “Squeeze Me.”Gators – wouldn’t be a Florida novel without ‘em A wild boar comfort pet – Wait, what? Fictitious swamp monsters - you betcha Buried Treasure – as noted above. Bet you didn’t have that one. [image] Dave Barry - image from Literary Hub We meet Slater as he is struggling to videotape the mother of his child, and the child, as they are attacked by a giant python. But hold on, will ya, while we replace the camera batteries. It’ll only be a sec. The man lives for footage, preferably footage that includes his impressive torso but footage of his gf and baby being devoured by a giant reptile would also be pretty cool, don’t ya think? He wore a filthy pair of cut-off University of Florida sweatpants, nothing else. Yet he still looked better than 99.999 percent of all human males who had ever walked the Earth. He was strikingly handsome in a classic Tom Cruise—in–his–prime way—thick, jet-black hair; brilliant green eyes; high cheekbones; square jaw. He was tall, a foot taller than Cruise, and his body, despite the fact that he never seemed to do anything for it, was spectacular—lean, muscular and sculpted, the body of an elite athlete in peak condition.Jesse knows she is in a dead-end relationship, but had not thought that would mean literally dead. As fortune would have it, though, during one of her walks with Willa, her nursing baby girl, fathered unfortunately by a narcissist who wants to be known as Glades Man, she stumbles across a buried treasure. Thank you, Jesus, a ticket out of the swamp version of bum-fu#$-nowhere. But how to go about getting the bars somewhere safe, and figuring out how to cash them in? Who inspired Slater?The Bortle brothers, owners of Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer, make their primary living selling weed, beer being in short supply, somehow, and the bait being maybe 50% dead. The loo could use a cleaning this millennium, too. They decide to make a video of a fake monster to draw the curious and idiotic, both groups known to spend money on things like Monster Man T-shirts. These guys sure know how to dream big. If you film it, they will come. And, of course, it happens. Their video goes viral, and the earth tilts on its axis, dumping the most loosely connected to the planet to the Everglades. Most of your books have been nonfiction, and your most recent novel for adults, “Insane City,” was published 10 years ago. What moved you to write another novel?Now, about that gold. Everyone who is aware of it wants it, and that consists of mostly terrible people. Dave Barry weaves all these upstanding individuals together, or maybe just tosses them into a blender. You know they will all come together for a rousing climax. Barry does not disappoint. Will the Interior Secretary manage a successful launch of the Florida Python Challenge? Hmmm, I wonder. Where will the gold end up? Will Jesse escape with Willa to some sort of sane life? Will Slater become famous for his bod? Will the Bait & Beer make a killing selling tourist crap? Will sundry extreme criminals come to bad ends? If you are looking for anything serious here, you are in the wrong swamp. If, however, you enjoy laughing until it hurts, this might just be the place for you. I lost count of the “LOL” notes in my Word file. Slip on your bathing suit, slather on bug repellant, a LOT of bug repellant, take a few steps forward. The swamp water is cool and inviting. But if you see eyes looking back at you from the surface, you might want to step back up onto the the land, waaaay back, and make sure to look up, in case something large and hungry might be about to drop down on you from a Cypress tree. Whether you take the opportunity to read Swamp Story near a beach, a pool, a comfy chair at home or in your favorite swamp, Dave Barry is one Florida Man you will want to spend some time with this summer. Ken Bortle was standing in the parking lot behind the Gallo Grande, waiting next to an overflowing dumpster baking in the late-afternoon Miami sun, emitting near-visible stench rays.Review posted - 7/14/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 05/02/23 ----------Trade paperback - 05/07/24 I received an ARE of Swamp Story from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and a lead on some prime Florida real estate. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews, once I make bail. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF I have been to the Everglades, but not quite the neck of those woods Barry describes. The wild creatures I spotted included gators, but along with that, many less alarming critters. These include a totally adorable Big Cypress Fox Squirrel, anhingas, blue, green, and tricolored herons, (somehow missed the polka-dot variation) pelicans, et al. Did not see any snakes. Of course, this was in 2012, so there may have been a much lesser presence then, Trump was still living on 5th Avenue and DeSantis had yet to be elected. I posted some shots from that trip on Flickr, if anyone is interested. Profile - from Simon & Shchuster Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, [unless you have very unusual hands] including Lessons from Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns Forty, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami. Links to Barry’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages, and his blog His FB page is clearly only lightly maintained Interviews -----The Poisoned Pen- An Interview with Dave Barry by Michael Barson - thin -----Tampa Bay Times - Dave Barry talks about his new novel, ‘Swamp Story’ by Colette Bancroft -----Saturday Evening Post - 3 Questions for Dave Barry by Jeanne Wolf Items of Interest from the author -----ScubaBoard.com - Dave Barry on Diving -----Wanderings - Dave Barry Learned All This in 50 Years Items of Interest -----The Florida Python Challenge -----University of South Florida - A python invasion has exploded out of the Everglades -----Bored Panda - 60 Times Florida Man Did Something So Crazy We Had To Read The Headings Twice - Better strap yourself in if you do not want to be rolling on the floor Songs ----- The Beachboys - Be True to your School - Chapter 20 -----The Beachboys - Don’t Worry Baby - great song, but a bit painful to watch – Chapter 20 -----Grease - Summer Nights - Chapter 46 -----Grease Live - Look at Me I’m Sandra Dee - Chapter 46 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 27, 2023
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Jul 09, 2023
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Jul 10, 2023
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Hardcover
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1250853672
| 9781250853677
| 1250853672
| 4.09
| 58,323
| Nov 08, 2018
| Mar 14, 2023
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really liked it
| The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about certainties, even fleeting ones. They offer us respite.Police Inspector Jon Guttierez of the Bilbao PD, 43, is a large person, a weightlifter who lives with his mother. He ran into a spot of trouble recently when he attempted to plant evidence on a well-known drug dealer, only to be filmed in the act, said film going viral. Oopsy. He stands to lose a lot more than just his badge. When what to his wondering eyes should appear but a get-out-of-jail-free card, in the form of a mysterious personage known as Mentor. But Mentor has a tough, if unusual ask. He wants Jon to persuade someone to return to work. Someone who really, really does not want back in. [image] Juan Gómez-Jurado - image from Zenda Antonia Scott (her father the British ambassador, her mother a Spaniard) spends three minutes of every day contemplating suicide. (Whatever works for ya, dear.) Her comatose beloved husband has been in a hospital bed for three years. She has been by his side throughout, clearly feeling some responsibility for his condition. (Antonia’s struggle is reminiscent of how JGJ felt when his father was dying during the writing of the book.) Antonia has regular chats with her English grandmother, who encourages her to put her particular set of skills to good use, instead of letting them go to waste. She has some superpowers, but also some limitations, one being a need for a certain medication when she is overwhelmed. The inspiration for Antonia and Jon inevitably stems from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Antonia is that idealistic being, she does not hesitate to face the windmills, because she believes in a better world. Jon, on the other hand, is that pragmatist who has a dreamer hidden inside of him. - from the Hindustani interview [image] Vicky Luengo plays Antonia Scott in the Prime series – image from InStyle Jon clearly succeeds in drawing Antonia out, or we wouldn’t have a book. And he becomes her partner. Not spoilers. It appears that Antonia is quite special indeed, with a mental capacity well beyond the norm. She had been a member of an elite international police organization, Red Queen, a network across Europe, one unit per country, each led by a Mentor. They exist outside the usual police structures, relying on the local constabulary for on-scene access and intel. Each unit uses a person with special gifts to help solve major crimes. Red Queens are selected for having a set of particular characteristics, which Antonia has. Uber-smart, amazing memory, analytical capacity just this side of a super-computer. (very Lisbeth Salander) But will she be smart enough to foil a criminal mastermind who has already murdered one child of the uber-rich, and has kidnapped another? [image] Hovik Keuchkerian plays Jon Guttierez in the Prime series – image from his Twitter profile Alvaro Trueba, a teenager, has been dead several days, drained of blood, and laid out with bizarre religious iconography that is clear to the particularly perceptive. The kidnapper calls himself Ezekiel. The house in which his body was found, in a gated community, was one of several owned by his one-percenter parents. Antonia and Jon must contend with the Abduction and Extortion Unit. (AEU), led by Captain Jose Luis Parra. Far too often, police stories have a dickish supervisor, tacking to political winds at every breeze, and getting in the way of actual investigators. Parra serves that role here, although as someone in a parallel, instead of superior role. He is not a totally incompetent team leader. Still, very dickish. Just because we’re a unit created to avoid competition and secrets being kept between different police forces doesn’t mean we don’t repeat the same old mistakes.Carlos Ortiz is the wealthiest man in the world. When his daughter, Carla, is kidnapped, he receives a call. His next call is to Red Queen, and Jon and Antonia are brought in, seeing the obvious connections between the cases. The story is told in the 3rd person, primarily following Antonia and Jon as they track down leads in pursuit of the baddie. Once Carla is taken hostage, we flip back and forth between the investigation and her experience. There are occasional sidebar chapters in which we get a closer look at some of the supporting characters. Red Queen is a particularly fun thriller to read. JGJ has a wonderfully droll (snotty?) sense of humor which permeates. Do not expect rolling on the floor hysterics, but you will smile and titter a lot. Jon gets all he knows about children from Modern Family reruns or When his sandwich arrives, Jon confirms that the hospital follows tradition: the grill they use must never be cleaned. Because she is fluent in many languages, Antonia often brings in obscure words or expressions from diverse cultures (aboriginal, South Ghanaian, and others) when that word is particularly descriptive of a situation. This is a wonderful bit, speaking to the limits of communication in a single language. There is also some intel on the ancient, unseen, infrastructure of Madrid, a nifty Dan-Brownish touch. The supporting cast is also a plus. Corrupt security guards, a feisty nonagenarian granny, a tattoo artist who delights in disrespecting tourist customers, the testosterone-poisoned Captain Parra, an oily reporter, a mad scientist (I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.), and an evil baddie. The portrayal of criminal motivation and history was thin, but hopefully later volumes will flesh those out a bit more. I was hesitant at first to read this one, as it is the opener of a trilogy. Would there be resolution at the end or a cliffhanger? The answer is yes. There are some things that remain to be resolved, but there is enough of an ending here to make it a viable stand-alone read. Every adventure requires a first step. There are twists and turns aplenty, which always helps. And questions to be answered. Will Carla escape? Will Antonia and Jon uncover who is behind these crimes? Will the usual competitive misery from other forces interfere with the investigation? What is it the kidnappers want and why are those demands not being met? Will Antonia completely fall apart before they can complete their mission? (We’re all mad here) You will want to know as you flip-flip-flip-flip through these pages. Red Queen is a good beginning at which to begin. I would urge you to go on till you come to the end, then stop. But of course, that will not be possible for most of us. We only received an English-language translation of Reisa Rosa in 2023. It was originally released in Spain in 2018. There are three books in the series. For those fluent in Spanish there will be no waiting, but for those of us who do not speak Spanish, let the panting begin for volumes two (Loba Negra or Black Wolf, due 3/12/24 from Minotaur) and three (Rey Blanco or White King, presumably a year later) in English translation. The trilogy has been a huge international hit. Prime has optioned the series for a Spanish-language production. In the video interview linked below, we learn that primary shooting has completed for at least five episodes. I would guess a probable release in late 2023 or in 2024. I wouldn’t wait, though. Red Queen is a perfect summer read, whatever color roses you might prefer. A spasm of pure fear convulses Antonia’s body. Fear and loathing. Because she finally understands—with piercing, icy clarity—what has been going on from the very start. Review posted – June 30, 2023 Publication ----------Hardcover - March 14, 2023 – (English translation) ----------Trade paperback - March 12, 2024 It was first published in Spanish on November 8, 2018 I received an ARE of Red Queen from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review, and releasing my hostage. Thanks, folks. [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 Gomez-Jurado’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Profile- from EAE Business School Juan Gómez-Jurado was born in Madrid in 1977. His interest in literature led him to pursue a career in Information Science. No one at TVE, Canal Plus, La Voz de Galicia or COPE Radio Station —where he has worked— could have imagined what he would become in time. It wasn’t until 2006, when he published his novel, God’s Spy, that his talent became known, not only in Spain, but all across the globe.Interviews -----Murder by the Book - Live from Madrid: Juan Gomez-Jurado Presents, "The Red Queen" Hosted by Sara DiVello - video – 35:08 – almost all of this is about his writing process, with bits about this book here and there -----Hindustan Times - Interview: Juan Gomez-Jurado, author, Red Queen by Arunima Mazumdar Item of Interest from the author -----Crime Reads - Excerpt - Jon trying to persuade Antonia to return to work Items of Interest -----Gutenberg - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll -----Gutenberg - Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll -----Gutenberg - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -----Bookroo – quotes from Alice in Wonderland The epigraph of the novel is a quote from Through the Looking Glass, the book title having been taken from that. So, it seemed fitting to sprinkle throughout the review quotes from that and from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I used the Bookroo site above for that. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2023
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Jun 23, 2023
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Jun 27, 2023
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Hardcover
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0593546857
| 9780593546857
| 0593546857
| 3.88
| 7,235
| Apr 18, 2023
| Apr 18, 2023
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really liked it
| The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.” The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”-------------------------------------- Black bark to her sides and ash beneath her feet, she smelled the earthy odors of dirt, mud, burnt wood, and something so vile her stomach turned. It was the same smell the wind had wafted her way on the nights she’d been chased. Only the odor was stronger now. Inescapable.Seventeen-year-old Anna Horn is terrified of two things. The first a magical, carnivorous head that gets around by rolling, and is possessed of a set of very nasty teeth. She believes it is determined to eat her. This is the result of a tale her Uncle Ray had told her ten years ago. Her terror about the rolling head permeates, as she fears its arrival every time there is a rustle in the bushes, the main difference in her experience of it being that she can flee faster at seventeen than she could at seven. The second is that she will never see her sister again. Fifteen-year-old Grace has joined the growing list of Native women gone missing. [image] Nick Medina - image from Transatlantic Agency Anna is in the throes of that perennial challenge of the teen-years, (for some of us, this challenge can go on for decades) figuring out who she is. She is way more mature than most of us were at that age, for sure. She does not exactly dress to impress, favoring her father’s old clothes, and sporting a very unfashionable short haircut. She loves the stories of her tribe, the fictional Takodas, to the point of wanting to start a historical preservation society, to save Takoda history, myths, and traditions for future generations. The considerate and kind classmates at her mostly white school completely understand and support her efforts at self-discovery. As if. They make her school experience a living hell, taking it further than unkind words. Grace is a very different sort, desperate to fit in, wanting attention, focusing on her looks and pleasing others in order to grease the way to hanging with the cool kids. Acquiring a cell phone is the key to her potential rise, and she will do whatever she can to get the money for one. The story flips back and forth in time, moving forward from Anna’s Day 1 in showing how events came to be, and from the day of Grace’s disappearance, showing the investigation and results. Chapters are labeled in reference to days since Anna’s story begins. Grace does not go missing until well along in those days. Chapters looking at the search for Grace are also labeled with the number of hours since her disappearance. Medina wanted to highlight the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) that has been devastating Native communities for a long time. He shows the all-too-familiar problems residents of tribal lands face when someone goes missing, a viper’s nest of overlapping legal jurisdictions, inadequate police funding, and official indifference among them, not to mention racism. Speaking of which Medina portrays people of all shades as less then admirable. Even the Native manager of the casino assigns Native workers based on their skin color. Fox Ballard, nephew of the tribal leader, is young, handsome, flashy, sculpted, and not at all to be trusted. Medina pays attention, as well to the impact of modernization on traditional values. The Takoda nation has been significantly changed by the opening of a casino on the reservation. The most obvious contrast is that of Anna (traditional) vs Grace (modern). The new road offers up a steady supply of splatted frogs, a pretty clear image of the cost of replacing treasured values with treasure. Income from the casino is making its way to all the people on the rez, although it is also clear that some Takoda are more equal than others. As explained in the Author’s note that follows the book, the inspiration for the carnivorous rolling head came from actual Wintu and Cheyenne legends. It reminded me of the relentless ungulate in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, except that the elk in Jones’s tale is seeking revenge, while the head, though our only real look at it is through Anna’s terrified eyes, seems a more open opportunity attacker. Frankly, scary as it seems to her, it cannot hold a candle to Graham’s hoofed-slasher. It may have been scary to Anna as a character, but did not cause me any lost sleep as a reader. I did feel at times that this book read more like a YA story than a fully adult one, an observation, not a black mark. The greatest strength of the novel is Medina’s portrayal of his lead, Anna. It is in seeing her social challenges, following her passions, tracking her investigative efforts, admiring her bravery, and rooting for her to mature to a point where she is comfortable in her own skin, that we come to care about her. That alone makes this a good read. The added payload, about the core issue of the book, Missing and Murdred Indigenous Women, about the impact of modernization on traditional values, about gender identity, and about the impact of story on our lives, gives it a far greater heft. This is Medina’s first novel. He refers to it as a “thriller with mythological horror.” It is an impressive beginning to what we hope is a long and productive career. She said Frog exemplified transformation. He entered life in one form and left it in another. From egg to tadpole, to tadpole with legs, to amphibian with tail, to tailless frog, he was never the same. He began life in water, only emerging once he was his true self. He symbolized change, rebirth, and renewal, and his spirit could bring rain.Review posted - 6/23/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 4/18/23 ----------Trade paperback - 3/19/24 I received an ARE of Sisters of the Lost Nation from Berkley Books in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. Can you get that thing to stop chasing me? And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [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 author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages PROFILE - from The Transatlantic Agency A Chicago native, Nick Medina is an author and college professor of public speaking and multicultural communication…Nick’s first short story was published in 2009 and he has since had dozens more published by West Pigeon Press, Dark Highlands, and UnEarthed Press, in addition to outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., such as Midwest Literary Magazine, The Washington Pastime, The Absent Willow Review and Underground Voices.Interviews -----Paulsemel.com - Exclusive Interview: “Sisters Of The Lost Nation” Author Nick Medina - e-mail interview -----#Poured Over – The B&N Podcast - Nick Medina on Sisters of the Lost Nation - by Marie Cummings - video - 48:04 -----Murder by the Book - Special Prelaunch Q&A: Nick Medina Presents "Sister of the Lost Nation" by Sara DiVello – video – 33:31 -----FanFiAddict - Author Interview: Nick Medina (Sisters of the Lost Nation) by Cassidee Lanstra Items of Interest from the author -----Tor.Com - Excerpt -----CrimeReads.com - EXPLORING SOCIAL ISSUES THROUGH HORROR Items of Interest -----Medina said that his initial inspiration for the novel was from an AP article published in the Chicago Tribune. Here is the article as published by AP - #NotInvisible: Why are Native American women vanishing? by Sharon Cohen -----CBC - MMIWG cases continued at same rate even after national inquiry began, data shows ----- First People: American Indian Legends - The Rolling Head – A Cheyenne Legend For horror grounded in the Native experience, I can recommend -----Stephen Graham Jones - Mongrels -----Stephen Graham Jones - The Only good Indians -----Stephen Graham Jones - My Heart is a Chainsaw -----Stephen Graham Jones - Don’t Fear the Reaper -----Cherie Dimaline - Empire of Wild ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jun 12, 2023
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Jun 21, 2023
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Hardcover
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