Book Review: I Crawl Through It

Book Review: I Crawl Through It by AS King 

Goodreads Description: Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.

So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away…but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.

The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience—and find the way out.

My Review: This book is certainly a product of its time. It was published in 2015, when internet meme culture began to shift away from XD rawr randomness, mustaches, and hipster irony. The book uses this "randomness" meme culture as a metaphor to explore domestic trauma, mental health, and the struggles of growing up, but it feels like a "fellow kids" moment, as King doesn't seem to have a clear grasp of the culture she's emulating. 

This book's approach to trauma is... interesting, to say the least. It features a cast of protagonists that are all coping with their personal traumas, though even after finishing the book, it's hard to tell what each character is actually dealing with. The book cloaks the reality of what happens in surrealism, and then relies on that surrealism to convey the emotional fallout and coping methods of each character; how they "crawl through it," if you will. But either King is scared of naming the traumas outright -- perhaps that would shatter the denial-like illusion -- or she has little understanding of how to express traumatic experiences through surrealism due to a lack of personal experience -- or both. Because of that, the surreal elements lack metaphorical significance to the events at play. Everything feels disjointed and purposeless -- random without any understanding of what made "randomness" meme culture work. Some of the metaphors used did connect back to the subject in a powerful way, such as China turning herself inside out as a response to anxiety, but so many elements feel completely disconnected. Several characters escape to a "genius-land" on an invisible helicopter, and while I could see the intention behind this subplot (escaping the stressors of reality through an imaginary paradise), the metaphor completely falls apart once they arrive and it fails to communicate anything meaningful about escapism, the myth of genius, academic/career pressures placed on youth, etc. 

It's a shame, because surrealist fiction can effectively express the confusion and intensity of traumatic emotions, but King doesn't dive deep enough into the emotions to achieve that. It's just randomness for randomness' sake, with no thought behind the arrangement of surrealist elements. There's no emotional gut punch here, no interesting metaphorical take on life, or even cool magical realism vibes. The book pretends to be deep, but it's shallower than the kiddy pool. 

TL;DR: All in all, 1/5 stars. Painfully underwhelming. 

Book Review: Code Name Verity

Book Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein 

Goodreads Description: Two young women from totally different backgrounds are thrown together during World War II: one a working-class girl from Manchester, the other a Scottish aristocrat, one a pilot, the other a wireless operator. Yet whenever their paths cross, they complement each other perfectly and before long become devoted friends.

But then a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over France. She is captured by the Gestapo and becomes a prisoner of war. The story begins in “Verity’s” own words, as she writes her account for her captors.

My Review: Classifying this book as YA was a bit of a strange choice. While the coming of age and friendship aspects are very YA, the voice feels off. The book spends a lot of time on female war pilots -- how they lived, worked, and were promoted -- to the point where it slows down the narrative. It adds to the historical accuracy at the cost of pacing, and makes me think this book would fit better in the adult market. It often reads like a report more than a novel, and while that works with the WW2 setting, it doesn't really jive with a teenage voice. Wein does insert some obvious teenage moments to make the characters feel younger, but these moments stick out, and read like they were added later in order to age the manuscript down. 

Other than that, the book is fairly solid. The framing of "Let me tell you how I ended up in this situation" is a little cliche, but Wein shakes it up by focusing the story on Maddie, the pilot back home, rather than Verity, the spy captured by the Nazis. This creates an air of mystery around Verity and her circumstances, as we only learn about her through the way she tells the story of her friend. Honestly, my biggest gripe with this book is that it's not sapphic. There's a weird romantic tension between the two main girls that I wish would have been expanded on. It would have deepened the stakes and tension while also exploring queerness during the time period. I have no problem with friendship stories -- in fact I love them, and wish there were more -- but these girls did not read like friends. Friendships feel more genuine to me when there's a sense of unconditionality - when people know that they can fully be themselves, because the other person loves them for who they are. Yet with romantic interest, there's always a bit of tension and the players are more cautious, because they can sense something powerful building, and they have no idea what's going to happen to their relationship when that "something" comes to light. In every scene with Maddie and Verity, I could feel the weight of that romantic tension, but it never boils over into anything real, leaving me rather unsatisfied by the end. It felt like eating a dish that was missing a key ingredient.

 

All in all, if you're a history buff, then absolutely snatch this up. If you're not interested in WW2 history, you're not missing much by passing on this one. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A deep dive into WW2 pilots in novel form. 

Book Review: The Memory of Animals

 

Book Review: The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller

Goodreads Description: In the face of a pandemic, an unprepared world scrambles to escape the mysterious disease’s devastating symptoms: sensory damage, memory loss, death. Neffy, a disgraced and desperately indebted twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, registers for an experimental vaccine trial in London―perhaps humanity’s last hope for a cure. Though isolated from the chaos outside, she and the other volunteers―Rachel, Leon, Yahiko, and Piper―cannot hide from the mistakes that led them there.

As London descends into chaos outside the hospital windows, Neffy befriends Leon, who before the pandemic had been working on a controversial technology that allows users to revisit their memories. She withdraws into projections of her past―a childhood bisected by divorce; a recent love affair; her obsessive research with octopuses and the one mistake that ended her career. The lines between past, present, and future begin to blur, and Neffy is left with defining questions: Who can she trust? Why can’t she forgive herself? How should she live, if she survives?

My Review: Written in the wake of Covid, this novel captures the emotional uncertainty of quarantine and ramps it up to a nightmarish, apocalyptic extreme. It strikes an interesting balance between the external and internal - between the mystery of Neffy's past and the mounting apocalypse outside her window. While this book has speculative elements, it's a literary novel first and foremost, with most of the narrative focused on reflection and introspection. The characters do eventually contend with the chaos outside, but the climax primarily revolves around the emotional and internal conflicts, rather than large scale action. 

This book has excellent tension and pacing. The narrative flip-flops between the past and the present at just the right moments, creating a series of mini-cliffhangers that kept me devouring pages. At the beginning of the book, I found the flashbacks to be the most engaging part of the story, but near the end, it was the present timeline that I was eager to return to, which mirrors their roles in the story. Neffy retreats into her memories at the beginning of the novel as a form of escapism, but eventually it becomes a maladaptive coping strategy which ends up taking her away from what she needs to focus on. I'm curious if other readers felt the same way towards the flashbacks, because the effect certainly seems purposeful, but maybe that was just my experience while reading. 

I would recommend this book on vibes alone, because the writing is GORGEOUS! The atmosphere, the prose, the very likeable and very flawed people trapped together. The climax doubles as a reveal, where the people we thought we knew turn out to have committed heinous acts out of fear, yet in order to survive the very real apocalypse outside, Neffy still has to find a way to work with these people. The end comes with this loss of innocence, yet despite everything, Neffy is able to pull her crew together and forge ahead. Even in the face of tremendous uncertainty, loss, and betrayal, the book seems to say: we will persevere and life will go on. I found that really beautiful. 

TL;DR: 5/5 stars. An introspective sci-fi that explores the psychological and interpersonal effects of quarantine.

Book Review: Self-Portrait With Nothing

 

Self-Portrait With Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka 

Goodreads Description: Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian’s front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She’s never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity of her biological mother.

That’s because her birth mother is Ula Frost, a reclusive painter famous for the outrageous claims that her portraits summon their subjects’ doppelgangers from parallel universes.

Researching the rumors, Pepper couldn’t help but wonder: Was there a parallel universe in which she was more confident, more accomplished, better able to accept love? A universe in which Ula decided she was worth keeping? A universe in which Ula’s rejection didn’t still hurt too much to share?

My Review: What a weird little book. 

If I had to sum up this book in a single word, it would be: contrived. Everything in this book is so forced that it was difficult to read at times. Characters often acted against their own established motivation in order to advance the plot. Pepper, the main character, acts on flimsy assumptions that turn out to be correct, making it feel like she's pulling answers out of thin air. She also comes across as a Mary-Sue in the sense that nearly every character falls over themselves to help her. Characters she's never met approach her with critical plot information because she "seems nice." Some even wait on her hand and foot, literally, like in the scene where a supporting character rubs Pepper's feet. Her boyfriend has no life outside her, people fall over themselves to help her for no reason-- after a certain point, it all started to feel a little narcissistic. Perhaps this story works as wish-fulfillment for people who dream of being the center of the universe, but it just reminded me that this was some writer's fantasy, which kept pulling me out of the story. 

It's a shame, too, because there's an interesting idea at the core of this story -- painted portraits as portals to parallel worlds-- but sadly Pokwatka doesn't do anything interesting with this concept. It ends up being a lame excuse to make clones, as Pepper soon finds herself overrun with multiple versions of her mother. This could have been an interesting analysis of motherhood -- how does each version respond to Pepper, and what does that say about her relationship with the mother from her own universe? Instead of exploring the concept with any depth, the book focuses on the 'wacky hijinks' of a bunch of clones who need to do a Serious Job™ yet can't stop fighting like the Three Stooges.

TL;DR: All in all, 2/5 stars. A great concept wasted through a horribly contrived execution.

Book Review: The Buried Giant

 

 

 

Book Review: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro 

 

Goodreads Description: "You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay..."

The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

 

My Review: Ugh. That's all that comes to mind when I think of this book. Just, ugh. I WISH before I'd picked it up that it was mentioned SOMEWHERE that this book is based on Arthurian folklore. I've never been a fan of Arthurian-style stories (the only exception being Monty Python) and would have never picked it up had I known this was the case. However, I did finish it, and while I was very unsatisfied on the whole, Ishiguro's writing style was enigmatic enough to keep my attention. I'd be interested in checking out more of Ishiguro's work just based on his use of language and atmosphere; I just wish this wasn't my first introduction to him.

A lot of the faults in this book could be attributed to its Arthurian style -- but perhaps that's my bias showing. The book is slow, it's boring. It fully embodies the traits of a mythical knight's tale, with plenty of armored men standing around, preaching about honour and chivalry. The characters felt less like people and more like archetypes serving a role, which made the story feel wooden. There are certainly some gems within the text, like the dynamic tension and intimacy between the married couple, but these small sparks are drowned out by the blandness surrounding it. I'd hoped that the ending and the reveal of the mystery -- why the mist made people forget-- would compensate for the boring journey to get there, but that sadly wasn't the case. Unfortunately, the book was utterly flavourless and not worth sinking my teeth into. 

TL;DR: All in all, 2/5 stars. A bland Arthurian journey story with a lackluster ending.

Book Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society

Book Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi 

Goodreads Description: When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls "an animal rights organization." Tom's team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.

What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world. They're the universe's largest and most dangerous panda and they're in trouble.

It's not just the Kaiju Preservation Society that's found its way to the alternate world. Others have, too--and their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.

My Review: Oh man, this book was so much fun. It's a perfect dose of wish-fulfillment to combat how fucking depressing the world is these days. There's another world filled with wonder and majesty and kaijus? Jobs that offer stability, community, a decent salary, BENEFITS?? And to top it off, the corporate cronies destroying our environment and taking advantage of workers finally get what's coming to them? Sign me the fuck up! 

This book calls back to the old days of sci-fi, with a dose of hearty science and expansive world-building. The narrative doesn't linger on the science aspects, but it does offer more technical explanations than many other modern sci-fi novels, which may be a hit for nerdy world-building types. I was particularly fascinated with the science behind the kaijus, as they're often described as living worlds unto themselves. The book also dives into multiple ethical quandaries that are deeply applicable to our own world: should unregulated capitalism be allowed to reek havoc on the natural world? How much does corporatism influence science? How do we balance our needs while being environmentally sustainable? While these questions are explored throughout the text, at its core, this book is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that doesn't dive too deep into introspection. Most of the characters are fairly static, including Jamie himself, who doesn't learn a lesson or grow over the course of the story. Jamie functions as an everyman who has been screwed over by late stage capitalism in a way most of us can relate to, and serves as stand-in that readers can project themselves onto. Because of that, he doesn't come with much personality, or goals, or purpose of his own besides paying his rent. But this lack of dimension doesn't hurt the book at all, as it allows readers to turn their brain off as they wrangle some wily kaiju and take back a sense of control. 

TL;DR: All in all, 4/5 stars. A delightful action-comedy romp with heavy world-building and a heart of gold.