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.

Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful

 

Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith 

Goodreads Description: In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

My Review: Maggie Smith is a poet by trade, so it's no surprise that her memoir is part prose and part poetry. The book is very much a conversation between you, the reader, and Smith herself, as she personally invites you into her emotional reality. Smith frequently breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader and even addresses them as such. This kicks up the sense of intimacy, but also seats you inside her story as an active participant. Many books invite you to disappear into the story of another, to become someone else, so I found it particularly striking that in this memoir about self-actualization, Smith never forgets that you, dear reader, have value just as you are. 

There's a fair bit of repetition to the book, from framing devices to certain phrases, but this gives structure to a story that largely has no structure -- healing, after all, does not follow the plot beats of the hero's journey. By re-using certain poetic structures, such as the strawmen conversation or the way her house looks on Google maps, Smith is able to beautifully communicate the imperceptible inner change taking place over the course of the book. While some readers may be put off by this style, there's a cadence to the repetition that gives the narrative a melodic rhythm. 

While I enjoyed the book on the whole, I will admit the story loses steam in the second half as the more dramatic elements of Smith's divorce conclude. However, some of the best moments come from this slower-paced half of the book, including some of the best musings on life and happiness. The book culminates with powerful messages around self-love and learning to be single again after a long relationship, which could be very meaningful for those facing independence after spending their life as half of a whole. How do you build a life about you, for you, and filled with all the love and joy you deserve, when you've only ever built a life around someone else? Smith's book makes an excellent case for how.

TL:DR: 5/5 stars. A deeply emotional reflection on marriage, happiness, and love.  

Book Review: What Moves the Dead

 

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher 

Goodreads Description: When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

My Review: What a creepy, atmospheric read! Kingfisher reimagines Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher with a fantastical twist: the rotting house of Usher, both the building and the family itself, have been infested with a fungus that makes the dead walk. The thematic rotting of the Usher House is made literal through Kingfisher's fungi, which behaves similarly to the real family of cordyceps mushrooms that make zombies out of their living hosts. This omnipresent infestation creates a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere that is so tangible it's almost another character. Even before readers know exactly what it is, there's a sense that the characters are constantly being watched by a predator waiting for its moment to strike. What Moves the Dead follows Poe's original story quite faithfully, with the added elements only serving to flesh out (heh) the original story. 

While Poe's story was not particularly queer, Kingfisher changes that up by playing with gender identity and neo-pronouns in her retelling. The novel features the made-up country of Gallacia, where gender and pronoun use differ from the rest of Europe. They draw from an expanded set of personal pronouns with individual pronouns for God, minors, and soldiers. The main character, Alex Easton, is also a transgender man or trans-masculine nonbinary, which was really cool to see representation-wise. Since Alex is a soldier, the book explores the 'soldier' gender category and how it manifests differently from masculinity. While the 'soldier' gender is presented as masculine, the way it is expressed is tied more closely to the role of a warrior than the typical 'male' role, i.e., more concerned with duty than domination. I really enjoyed how Kingfisher wove these ideas into the overall plot. While gender and pronoun use do have a role to play in the plot, it's not Alex's gender that comes under the microscope. It's refreshing to see gender feature as a main plot point without focusing on bigotry, coming out, or a crisis of identity. 

All in all, this was such a delightful read. The writing was gorgeously haunting. Kingfisher's ability to blend modern slang with the formal language of Poe's era added a musicality to her text that made it a true joy to read. Plus, at less than 200 pages, this novella reads quick but leaves a lasting impression. 

TL;DR: 5/5 stars. Freaky fungi, some queering of gender, and a whole lot of atmosphere. 

Book Review: Pageboy

 

Book Review: Pageboy by Elliot Page 

Goodreads Description: Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

My Review: First off, I've been a fan of Elliot Page since I saw Hard Candy as an edgy teen, and as a trans person myself, I'm in full support of Page's politics -- trans rights are human rights, baby. But this book was terrible. It was worse than terrible, it was barely even a book. It's not often that I give one star reviews, since I can usually find positives in any book I read. However, Pageboy is disorganized, poorly written, and fails to provide nuanced insights into the trans experience. It often reads like a teenager's diary that focuses more on Page's pain than deriving a message from it that would be useful to anyone but him.

The disorganization and lack of clear narrative was especially aggravating, because it felt like Page was prioritizing the "artistry" of his book over coherence, i.e., he makes no attempt to ground you in a timeline, or even the scene itself. The book routinely meanders from subject to subject in naval-gazing monologues; Page will start a paragraph discussing one event, but quickly name at least five other incidents based on a similar theme. While he's trying to link these incidents together, he focuses more on artfully describing details rather than connecting them in a meaningful way. It often felt like Page was trying to be James Joyce without understanding how Joyce's writing style worked. It's easy to compare this to Jeanette McCurdy's memoir, because even though she jumps around in the timeline, she grounds readers in a tangible scene and leaves enough clues so we know where we are in her life. Pageboy makes no such attempts. 

Not only is the book confusing as hell, but it fails to articulate anything meaningful about transgender people. The book tries to be both political and personal by using Page's experiences to justify the necessity of transgender rights, yet there's a disconnect between the stories he's telling and the messages he's trying to impart. It all feels inauthentic and contrived. It seems like Page chose messages he wanted to impart and then found a moment from his past that kind of fits that message, rather than showing how his life experiences caused him to learn those lessons. Because of that, we get a story from Page's past with a ham-fisted moral at the end that doesn't fully fit. Page has moments where he authentically shows how being trans has shaped his life, but these moments are fleeting and don't connect to form a bigger picture. Because of this, the messaging is as disorganized as the narrative. As a trans person, I know my way around the queer watercooler, yet I still found it difficult to understand what exactly Page was trying to say. If someone who is well-versed in trans politics has a hard time understanding the message, then it's unlikely that people with little to no experience with the trans community will be able to take anything meaningful away from this book. 

All in all, not worth it. This was such a terrible reading experience that I can't recommend this to anyone, unfortunately. 

TL;DR: 1/5 stars. A disorganized recollection that lacks substance and coherency. 

Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 

Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid 

Goodreads Description: I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.

Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.

My Review: After watching the movie adaptation, I scooped this book up immediately to see if there was more to the story. I was in a slump after watching too many boring, uninspired movies, so when I stumbled across this story, I was immediately drawn into its mysterious and introspective nature. While the book has a slightly different ending, for the most part, if you've seen the movie, there's not much more you're going to get out of the book. The book is quite clear about aspects that the movie keeps vague or layered in metaphor, but I personally preferred the movie's ambiguity over Reid's more direct approach. 

There's a lot of things to like about this book. It's a fascinating character study on the 'incels' of our society -- isolated men struggling with their mental health who direct the frustration for their situation onto women. These are the people who become mass shooters, who fall down radicalization rabbit holes, who kill themselves. Though we are introduced to and carried through the story by Jake's girlfriend, the entire book is eventually revealed to be a study on Jake. Even the parts that don't appear to be about him end up being about him. The book spends a lot of time philosophically musing on relationships and solitude-- both in dialogue and narration-- which is reflected in Jake's life-- a tangible example to contrast the theories proposed. 

Reid is excellent at building tension and suspense. The book sinks its hooks in you from the first page and never lets up. The slow build of mystery and threat made it hard to put the book down, but this tension felt too drawn out over the climax, as if Reid didn't know how to escalate it into a full conflict when the time came. At times, Reid strays into cheesy territory by using phrases that feel both clumsy and condescending. Lines like, "I'm so attracted to him," lacked any subtly, while the epilogue's meta direction that "You should read it. But maybe start at the end. Then circle back," felt like Reid was talking down to his readers, as if he didn't trust them to understand what he'd done without directing the audience to re-read the book with its twist ending in mind. It is good to keep in mind that this is Reid's debut into fiction (with an established non-fiction career preceding it), so it may be that Reid doesn't yet trust that his readers will pick up what he's laying down. Hopefully this is resolved in his later books. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. An interesting philosophical dissection of relationships and solitude with mediocre prose. 

Book Review: Brave New World

 

Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

Goodreads Description: Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F.—"After Ford"—in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that combine profoundly to change society.

My Review: Brave New World is a difficult classic to get invested in. Huxley had a point to make with this book, but he largely expresses that through worldbuilding rather than narrative. The dystopia he presents is indeed fascinating -- governments controlling people through pleasurable distractions rather than pain -- but it's coupled with next to no plot, unlikable characters, dry, colourless writing, and awkward pacing, which makes it a difficult swallow for modern readers. Brave New World is a quintessential dystopia through its soul crushing ending, but its lack of plot and character depth also robs that ending of some of its power. Instead of seeing how these characters struggled against the system and lost, we see them tour their world before ultimately submitting to it. I'm sure others feel differently, but I felt that many other classic dystopias do a better job at emotionally engaging the reader with the characters' struggle.

Now, the worldbuilding in this book is indeed fantastic. Huxley's ideas around governments conditioning behaviour and controlling people through pleasure was truly ahead of his time. It would be another 30 years before theorists like Michel Foucault began echoing these sentiments during their research on governmental and systematic power. Huxley's vision of this control is absolute, beginning with psychological and biological conditioning before birth, and continuing through pleasurable distractions like drugs (Soma) and sex (orgies). Huxley also questions the concept of civilized society, contrasting his "utopian" future against a racist caricature of Indigenous "tribal" life. Huxley posits that for all society's advancements, our moral regression has left us less civilized than the "savage" societies we purport to be superior to. While Huxley makes some interesting points about what is "savage" and "civilized," he singles out polyamorous sexual behaviour as the ultimate moral failing of modern society, which feels pretty dated. 

If you're just getting into classic dystopias, I don't recommend starting with Brave New World. It is worth the read, but more for the concepts it introduces rather than the story it's trying to tell. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A fascinating world with a mediocre narrative. 

Book Review: Tits On The Moon

 

Book Review: Tits on the Moon by Dessa 

Goodreads Description: Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Proudly published by Rain Taxi in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed.

My Review: Dessa's collection of poems begins with a short essay that sets the 'stage' (heh) for the rest of the collection - when technical difficulties delay the show, it's important to have a handful of poems to appease the waiting crowd. As a writer and rapper, Dessa's comfort with the written word shines through her experimentation with different poetic forms. Some poems are free verse, some use a more rigid rhyme scheme and meter, while others play with cliched phrases. There's a nice balance of cynicism and hope, so while Dessa pokes at some darker subjects, they're handled with a nice dose of dry humour to keep things light. The collection also ends with a piece called Stage Dive, which coupled with the opening essay, create perfect thematic bookends for this short and sweet collection. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A rap artist's perspective on poetry. 

Book Review: Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

 

Book Review: Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Goodreads Description: Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg's stories will make readers laugh, weep, and shiver in uncomfortably delicious recognition. In "A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion," a young couple planning a wedding is forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices. "Missed Connection--m4w" is the tragicomic tale of a pair of lonely commuters eternally failing to make that longed-for contact. The members of a rock band in "Up-and-Comers" discover they suddenly have superpowers — but only when they're drunk. And in "The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Important New York City Landmarks," a woman maps her history of romantic failures based on the places she and her significant others visited together.

My Review: As the title implies, this collection takes a look at love -- the good, the bad, and the downright weird. This isn't your happily-ever-after kind of love, these stories dive into its bittersweet transience: how people grow apart, how things don't work out, how hearts get broken, bandaged up, and put out there just to get banged up again. The opening and closing pieces make perfect endcaps to this theming: the book opens with a woman on a first date, wondering if the man she's with is worth trusting or if she's going to get hurt again, while the last piece features a one night stand where a couple comes to know each other completely, only to become strangers again in the morning. Throughout the collection, Raphael Bob-Waksberg plays with the concept of love -- along with the form of his poems and stories -- in order to view the traditional love story through a fresh perspective. We get a love story told through the point of view of the boyfriend's dog. The love poem about writing love poems. The rules list for a game of Taboo that explores the things you can and can't say in relationships. Whether it's playing with form, or inserting superheroes or Satanists into age-old tales of marriage or growing up, each story has something that makes it feel like it's never been done before. 

The writing style isn't overly flowery, but the narrative spends a lot of time contemplating the nature of people, things, love, etc. Any plot or action is used as a framing device for the emotions or atmosphere Bob-Waksberg is trying to communicate. Even pieces that are more plot-driven don't seat us inside the action; the focus is always on the internal and interpersonal drama playing out around it. If you enjoyed Bojack Horseman but found it a little dark, this collection may be just right for you. While many of its stories are bittersweet, it's not nearly as hopeless as Bob-Waksberg's popular Netflix show. It may make you feel lonely and like finding love is utterly hopeless, but it won't make you hate the rest of humanity (hopefully). 

The book has such a powerful emotional impact that it's hard not to dwell on some of these stories, even months later. If, like me, you love that sour punch of bittersweet love and loss, you won't be disappointed with this collection. 

TL;DR: 5/5 stars. A bittersweet collection exploring the transient nature of love. 

Book Review: I'm Glad My Mom Died

Book Review: I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy 

Goodreads Description: A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

My Review: I'm usually not interested in celebrity memoirs, since most celebrities aren't writers and many publishers are unwilling to give their manuscripts the editorial feedback they need. Jennette McCurdy's book is a different story. After hearing snippets of the audiobook online, I was quick to snatch it up. Right from the first page, McCurdy demonstrates a knack for storytelling and a keen eye for scene construction that leaves every chapter feeling poignant.

If you pick up this book hoping for a behind the scenes look at Nickelodeon and McCurdy's time with Dan Schneider, you'll end up disappointed. The book spends very little time discussing her work on set, and almost no time on Schneider himself. McCurdy's intention with this book was to tell the story of her abusive and codependent relationship with her mother, so the book doesn't linger on her career as to not detract from the heart of the story. 

Unlike most memoirs, McCurdy does far more Showing over the course of the text than Telling. She doesn't interrupt the flow of the scene with introspection or tell us what to think about her story, she just lets it play out and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. It's through this first-hand, novel-like account that McCurdy is able to demonstrate how love and abuse can become to enmeshed. How a mother who loved her daughter so much could cause so much harm. This is exceptionally important because people who have never experienced this type of abuse often cannot fathom how that relationship functions. However, during the final chapter, McCurdy switches gears and inserts her present day reflections as a sort of "conclusion" to clear up anything that may have been misunderstood. McCurdy spends the entire book showing us how her mother has treated her and in the final chapter, names it: "I was abused." 

McCurdy's strategic use of showing and telling, coupled with her masterful characterization, speaks to her incredible talent for storytelling. At first, her writing may appear bland with no flowery language, but this utilitarian writing style allows us to focus on the action of the scene without distraction. Every bit of the story is intentionally placed to communicate how the helplessness and powerlessness from her childhood manifested as shame and anxiety in her adult life. The real power in McCurdy's storytelling comes as she leads us through her recovery after her mother's death. The book takes us through her healing process and demonstrates not only that healing is possible, but what it actually looks like, with all its highs and lows. This representation is exceedingly powerful for people who see themselves in McCurdy's abuse story, but have yet to figure out what their own path to recovery looks like. 

All in all, marvelous, spectacular. This book left me with that tingly, 'wow' feeling that only comes from a powerful story expertly executed. While its messages on abuse, addiction, and recovery are moving, ultimately what sets this book apart is its focus on relationships and how they ultimately shape our lives - for better or for worse. 

TL;DR: 5/5 stars. One celebrity memoir that you don't want to miss. 

Book Review: Dracula

 

Book Review: Dracula by Bram Stoker 

Goodreads Description: When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

My Review: Every year from May to November, a substack newsletter called Dracula Daily sends out Bram Stoker's novel in bite-sized chunks to readers all over the world. Since Dracula is an epistolary novel with every entry dated, Dracula Daily is able to send each letter to you on the day it happens, making it seem like you've got a gaggle of eccentric, one-sided pen pals. This was how I got around to reading Dracula, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to sink their teeth into the daddy of all vampire stories. It breaks the novel down into digestible chunks, which makes reading a Classic™ far less intimidating, and gives readers a new way to get involved with the story. Plus, the building tension as days pass with no word from the characters does provide an extra little thrill. If you want to catch up on your classics, Book Riot compiled a list of substack newsletters you can subscribe to that were inspired by Dracula Daily. 

And now, for Dracula itself. Published near the end of the Victorian era, this book amalgamates many aspects of Victorian purity ideology in a way that's both fascinating and frustrating. It smacks you hard with female infantilization, back-hands you with virginal purity and promiscuous corruption, drowns you in white knight chivalry, and then spits a little extra xenophobia onto the plate for flavouring. Mina and Lucy are placed on pedestals, one lost to foreign corruption and sexuality while the other must be protected from it. It plays into a Christian heteronormative hierarchy that says while women are pure and good (and sometimes even smart and skilled, like Mina), they are still ultimately weaker than men and must be cared for like children. Despite Mina being a key player in the hunt for the Count, the men often leave her out of conversations or keep her in the dark for "her own protection," which can be irritating for modern readers. While those pieces may be annoying, Dracula also encapsulates this sexist, puritan ideology to such a perfect degree that it becomes fascinating to analyze. Count Dracula's foreign otherness, combined with his thirst for young, innocent girls, makes him an interesting caricature of what Victorians, and even some people today, think of as monstrous. 

Bram Stoker is a master of dread tension - the kind of creeping terror that defines the horror genre. It's the moment before the pounce, before the jump scare, where every hair is raised and something is screaming at you to RUN, even if there's no logical reason for it. The first quarter of the book, when Johnathan Harker travels to Count Dracula's castle, captures this feeling perfectly. Johnathan explores the castle and gets to know the count, all the while seeing strange sights and suffering from stranger afflictions. Despite numerous warnings, including a woman begging Johnathan to flee from the horrors to come, our naïve horror protagonist pushes on until it's far too late to turn back. The tension hovers at a perfect boiling point through much of the novel, though it does suffer later when vampire hunting devolves into paperwork and shipment tracking. To make a convoluted story short, Dracula hides in boxes of grave dirt and then ships himself out of the country, leaving our protagonists in a scramble to track down the box he's hiding in. While some complain that the Victorian bureaucracy grinds the narrative to a halt, Stoker manages to keep the stakes and tension high enough to carry readers through the duller bits. Plus, this aspect of the story places constraints on Dracula's power that makes his ultimate defeat feel reasonable. Dracula may be insanely powerful, but the 'rules' of his vampirism reduce him from a god-like figure into a mortal one. One can get the best of a vampire, so long as they know how. 

TL;DR: 4/5 stars. A dreadfully tense classic wrapped in Victorian puritan values. 

Book Review: Cinder

Book Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer 

Goodreads Description: Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless Lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . . Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg.

She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

My Review: I picked up Cinder about 10 years ago when the book released, so this review has been a long time coming. As the cover and title suggest, Cinder is a steampunk retelling of Cinderella, set in a futuristic New Beijing filled with cyborgs and robots. It expands the original story by introducing a deadly plague that's crippled the globe and tense intergalactic politics centered around a possible royal marriage. In the midst of all this lives Cinder, who works as a mechanic in a Tatooine-like market in order to buy herself a new ankle and car to escape her abusive family.

Let's start with the positives: Meyer's characterization is on point. The chemistry between Cinder and Prince Kai is POPPING. They're both strong, charismatic individuals with their own lives and motivations who end up crossing paths again and again until it leads to something more. It's a satisfying change from YA books where the love interest seems to have no life outside the main character. I was also pleasantly surprised by the political drama between the Lunar kingdom and the people of Earth/New Beijing. Meyer simplified world politics into a handful of state powers to create an us-vs-them structure between Earthlings and Lunars, while still showing how New Beijing is under pressure from other states to make peace with the aliens. This simplified political drama feels perfect for YA readers transitioning from younger fantasy stories towards adult "romantasy," with court drama, politics, and inter-cultural clashes. Despite that, the line between Earthlings and Lunars was depicted as very black and white. Meyer describes how Lunars are savage, totalitarian, and oppressive to their own peoples, committing genocides and using mind control without hesitation. While there is some evidence that "not all Lunars" are evil, the book doesn't do enough to show that good and evil are not tied to one's race. It's trying to play out a more adult political drama, yet falls back on a childish good guys and bad guys dichotomy that feels out of step with what the rest of the book is trying to do. 

While the book does make an effort to avoid the "love at first sight" trope, it steers headlong into "not like other girls." In the years since this book was written, a lot has been said about the "not like other girls" girl who presents herself as "one of the guys" while putting down girls with traditionally feminine interests. This trope ultimately perpetuates misogyny by pitting women against each other while arguing femininity is somehow inferior. Cinder uncritically leans into this trope -- she puts down other girls for wanting to go to the ball, she implies other girls are vapid while she's smart because she cares about mechanics, she resists Prince Kai's flirting and somehow this is supposed to make her cool, etc., etc. This book could have thoughtfully deconstructed and subverted the trope, as Cinder's condescension could have been seen as a defense mechanism for the insecurity she feels about her cyborg parts, but instead the book uncritically embraces the trope without any awareness for the misogyny being perpetuated. In the wake of feminism's sisterhood movement, this book feels both cringey and dated. 

As far as plot goes, I was disappointed by how predictable it was. The book is a retelling, so I expected a certain degree of predictability, but the new parts of the story that Meyer added-- the plague, the politics with a different state, the Lunar people's magic (or lack thereof) -- were so predictable that it was a struggle to stay focused. There was no attempt to subvert expectations - it was almost cliched in the way it did exactly what you thought it would, yet the narration ups the drama by trying to make these incredibly mundane plot twists seem shocking. Perhaps it's my years of reading that make this book so predictable, because Cinder isn't bad at what it does. If you want something that plays into your exact expectations for a teen princess story, then Cinder is it, but unfortunately, that's all it is. 

The final letdown for this book was its lackluster sense of setting. Despite being a steampunk world set in a futuristic Beijing, little effort was put into worldbuilding. We get some description of cramped alleyways, concrete, or tall skyscrapers, but other than that, the world is largely blank. Meyer relies on the droid characters and Cinder's cyborg parts to expand the steampunk elements, yet only utilizes them aesthetically and makes no effort to show how their addition influences the world. Steampunk cities are often infused with so much personality that they become characters themselves, yet New Beijing is almost entirely flavourless. Sadly, this is probably Cinder's biggest missed opportunity.

Despite my complaints, Cinder is an incredibly solid story with some decent writing, great characterization, and decent political drama. While I found the book a little boring and Cinder's Alt Girl routine tiresome, the book never became a drag to read. It would likely be a hit for teen girls who are graduating from books like Anna and the French Kiss and moving towards Strange the Dreamer or A Court of Thorns and Roses. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A solid steampunk Cinderella retelling that errs on the side of predictable and anti-feminist. 

Book Review: Every Heart a Doorway

Book Review: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire 

Goodreads Description: Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else.

But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.

Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced... they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.

But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of the matter.

No matter the cost.

My Review: Portal fantasies have a long history in children's fiction, but what happens when the portals close and we have to head on home? How do you go back to ordinary after experiencing the extraordinary? Seanan McGuire explores these questions by looking at the psychological effects of losing the one place we really belong. 

When teenagers return from their portal worlds, they’re often confused, lost, and desperate to return to their fantasy worlds, leading parents and friends to think they’ve gone mad. That’s where Eleanor West comes in. A left behind herself, Eleanor has opened a home for children who have walked between worlds to save them from mental institutions or abuse at the hands of their families. Funnily enough, the school Eleanor constructs functions much like a residential treatment facility. The kids live there, they go to school, but they also attend therapy-like sessions where they discuss the worlds they came from, process their experiences, and attempt to move on. While the story doesn't focus on this therapy aspect (as there's a murder mystery afoot), it was refreshing to see therapy represented in a positive light, especially with the fantasy elements layered in. Many writers vilify the therapy process for cheap drama (the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest effect), but Eleanor's home is represented as a safe space, possibly the only one available to them in our world. The teachers/counsellors are gentle and supportive, the environment facilitates healing, and characters are able to self-actualize by being true to themselves, rather than forcing themselves to fit a world that doesn't accept them. It would’ve been cool to see more of this, but there is a murder to solve, so I can’t fault the book from moving on. 

The book also focuses a lot on family – both the found families characters discover within the school, and the original families that may love but never truly understand or accept them. The way the story represents letting go of original and abusive families in order to find love and acceptance in a found family is quite queer. Of course, the book is very queer just based on representation – it has trans, asexual, and gender non-conforming characters – it pretty much covers the whole rainbow, but the approach to otherness and belonging takes on a very queer perspective that many will find comforting. The promise of a world that unconditionally accepts and loves you for who you are is a very tempting premise to queer kids growing up in a world that tells them they're inherently wrong, weird, and disgusting. 

The main character, Nancy, has some of the typical traits of plain or invisible YA protagonists. Some YA protags are Bella Swan clones, with little to no personality (aside from being 'nice') so they can be used as blank slates for readers to project themselves onto. While Nancy does fall into this category of boring, blank main characters, McGuire changes things up by creating relevant plot and character reasons for why Nancy is such a wall flower. Nancy's perfect portal world was the land of the dead, where she spent a lot of time impersonating a statue and aspiring to be unmoving and unfeeling. When she arrives back in the real world, she finds it difficult to reconnect to her body and emotions, triggering catatonic-like behaviours. McGuire's interpretation of the "bland wall flower" is a fascinating deconstruction of a writing trend, but ultimately I still found myself bored and annoyed with Nancy's lack of motivation or personality. I wish she had been a secondary character and allowed someone with more agency to take on the main role. 

All in all, this was a beautiful story with many fascinating aspects that I could probably blather on about for another few paragraphs. I'm not usually a fan of school stories anymore, since they often feel formulaic to me, but the heart at the center of this story -- that queer nonsense about belonging and otherness-- hits the nail so hard on the head that it's an instant win. This book has a way of seeing the unseen, acknowledging that deep desire for love and acceptance, and promising that it's out there, just waiting for you, if you're brave enough to go out and look for it.  

TL;DR: All in all, 4/5 stars. A beautifully queer story that centers around a tense murder mystery.  

Book Review: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

Book Review: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 

Goodreads Description: Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural urban-settler world, a world of SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, Fjällräven Kånken backpacks, and coffee mugs emblazoned with institutional logos. And each searches out the natural world, only to discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted, and consumed. Cut off from nature, the characters are cut off from their natural selves.

My Review: If you're searching for something out of the box, then Simpson's novel may be just what you're looking for. Noopiming mashes together prose, poetry, and traditional Indigenous storytelling to create a text that defies colonial genre boundaries and narrative conventions. 

Noopiming doesn't follow a traditional plot structure, so giving a description of events is challenging. The text follows seven characters as they navigate their lives in a hyperconsumerist society cut off from nature. Each character is an aspect of Mashkawaji, a being frozen in ice and isolated from the rest of the world, though the text is vague about who or what Mashkawji actually is. The seven eventually unite to resurrect Mashkawaji from their place under the ice, a moment of metaphorical connection that bonds each character into something bigger than themselves. This is largely what the book is about -- isolation and relationships, alienation and connection -- and we see this through the way the characters struggle on their own before ultimately coming together into a community. The book relies heavily on symbolism and metaphor, using a poetic abstractionism to communicate the story through feeling rather than action. Poetry readers will almost certainly have an easier time connecting to the text because of its willingness to eschew narrative for expressionism. 

There’s a beautiful equality all across the text. Human, animal, and spirit characters are on a level playing field – there’s no hierarchy of gods and monsters here. Every character resists the effects of colonialism, from animals dealing with loss of land, to nature reeling from climate change, to Indigenous people themselves displaced and disconnected from nature. This equalization crosses into gender as well – while there is the old man, the old woman, and gendered figures, almost all characters use ‘they/them’ pronouns. Simpson downplays pronouns and gendered indicators for most characters to allow the space to focus on other aspects of their personhood. The text is by no means genderless - it simply places their gender secondary to who they are as people. 

Noopiming is a bit of a strange beast and it's certainly not for everyone. It's not really a novel, or a prose poem, not fantasy or contemporary. It asks some hard questions about capitalism, consumerism, commodification and climate change, but wraps it in poetic symbolism that asks you to feel more than analyze. Lovers of poetry, nature, and spirituality may really resonate with this text, but if you're a fan of traditional western storytelling, this one might be worth skipping. 

TL;DR: 4/5 stars. An intense intermeshing of prose, poetry, and Indigenous storytelling that takes a hard look at colonialism and consumerism. 

Book Review: The Narrows

Book Review: The Narrows by Ann Petry 

Goodreads Description: Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar for a lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. When they enter a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he that she is a wealthy, married, white woman who’s crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve her life’s tedium. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters against the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their town and times.

My Review: I really wanted to like this book. Over her life, Ann Petry worked as a social worker and a journalist, taught courses and wrote for the NAACP, and conducted sociological studies on the influence of segregation on children. This work gave her a very sociological perspective on the world and ultimately influenced the creation of The Narrows, which breaks down systematic racism to illustrate how many moving pieces intersect to justify the vilification and murder of black people. In Petry’s own words: “My aim is to show how simply and easily the environment can change the course of a person’s life.” When I step back and consider the book in whole, it’s so beautiful I could cry, because Petry demonstrates a nuanced understanding of how sociology and psychology shape oppression. However, the experience of reading this book is painful. Beyond that, when taking any of the book’s parts on their own, there’s almost nothing to like about them. It’s like throwing a bunch of garbage at a canvas, yet it somehow makes the Mona Lisa. 

Petry wrote the book with a reflective perspective, using repetition and flashbacks to show how the past continuously interjects into the present and influences our behaviour. It doesn’t matter that Othello was written over 500 years ago, the story of a successful black man marrying a white woman to the displeasure of white men still influences the world around us, shaping perspectives and stereotypes. Petry also uses this reflective structure to demonstrate how childhood trauma shapes us long into adulthood. This reflective style is the crux of my problem with this book, because on the one hand, it is utterly brilliant. It artfully (and accurately) represents how the brain processes memory, how our social environment builds our identity from the ground up, and how we fall back onto sociological programming in times of stress. Yet on the other hand, this writing style is frustrating and boring to read. At times, the repetition becomes so overwhelming that it borders on obnoxious, which robs it of its power. Some scenes took forever to get through simply because the story had to continuously stop to repeat mantras or plot points that we've already seen a dozen times already. If not for this reflective perspective, the book could have easily been half or a third its size. While I think there's something meaningful to be found in this style, it certainly could have been cut down. 

On top of the irritating writing style, every character is terrible. Not even in a “they have flaws” kind of way, but in a "they're a freaking monster" way that left little for me to relate to, attach to, or root for. Link, the main character, beats his love interest (though this is played off as romantic "lovers' quarrels," which... certainly says something about the author and the time period). Bill Hod, a quasi-father figure, beats Link as a child, Camilla betrays her love interest in a sickeningly anti-feminist way, and Abbie cares more about being an upstanding citizen of “the Race” than being a good mother. Even characters who don’t do anything overtly wrong are presented with a kind of sleaziness – from Mamie Powther who is presented as sexually devious, to Jubine the photographer who exposes injustices perpetuated by the rich, but is described as little more than a "greedy voyeur." While this is largely influenced by the POV character and often reveals more about the speaker than the subject (Abbie perceives Mamie as disgustingly sexual, for example), every character's perspective is coloured by this pessimism towards other people, and by the end of the book, all that negativity begins to weigh on the narrative. While the book attempts to present every character with duality, it leans too far into their flaws, leaving little good behind to appreciate. There’s lots of fascinating psychological angles to this story, but likeability is hard to come by. 

As you can see, this book is a frustrating one for me. On the whole, I think it brilliantly explores how historical sociological scripts intersect with an individual's trauma and environment to shape oppression, but I can’t point to a single character or scene that I actually like. The reading experience is so dreadful that I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone, unless you're a literary scholar that's more interested in meaning than your own enjoyment. It's a real shame, too, because I do believe this book is something special, if only reading it wasn't such a drag. 

TL;DR: 2/5 stars. A painfully dreadful read that culminates in an insightful deconstruction of systematic racism. 

Book Review: Romance in Marseille

 

Book Review: Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay 

Goodreads Description: Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the "stowaway era" of black cultural politics and McKay's challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

My Review: If I had to sum up Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille in three words, it’d be: queer, punny, and unsatisfying. There’s a lot of elements to like: disability rep, a black man’s success against white society, gender play and fluid openness to sexuality, but the ending undermined a lot of the positives and left a bad taste in my mouth. 

Lafala is a young sailor who travels the world guided by his wit and whimsy, but while stowed away on an American ship, he ends up with frostbite that requires him to amputate both feet. In a twist of fate, Lafala meets a white lawyer while lying in recovery who helps him sue the shipping company for damages. After winning his case, Lafala skips town before the lawyer is able to scam him out of his share and returns to the port town Marseille to reconnect with old friends. Now a rich man, the people of Marseille clamor for Lafala's attention-- and his money-- but Lafala manages to stay one step ahead of his potential scammers at every turn. In this way, the novel is great. It's the story of a black man who, despite his hardships, outsmarts scammers and white oppressors to escape to paradise. Unfortunately, this feels muddied at the end, as his found family are also the people attempting to scam him, confusing their motivations and allegiances. This is what makes the book interesting to some, as they can analyze the characters from multiple perspectives, but to me it reads like a tragedy wherein greed wins over love, loyalty or friendship. The found family that’s established is sacrificed so Lafala remains the smartest man in the room, and the payoff doesn’t feel worth the sacrifice. 

The representation in this book is wonderful. While there’s not a lot of outwardly queer characters, there is heavy implication that certain characters are gay. Characters also question and play with gender, whether through clothing, joking around, or debating the nature of gender roles. As well, Lafala spends the entire book without legs and is never defined by his disability. There’s a nice balance between how it affects his life/mental health and how it doesn't make him less of a person. McKay’s writing is also delightfully punny. He plays with metaphor and symbols, twists language to suit his needs, and utilizes sharp-witted wordplay that is both funny and thought provoking. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A sharp-witted queer tale with excellent disability rep and an unsatisfying finish.