stuff i read 2 Oct 2024

[tabacoychanel]

 

Alexis Hall, A Lady for a Duke (2022) What the heck happened in the second half of this book??? I cried multiple times during the first half, which was about childhood BFFs who were in the war together and one of them faked their own death and the other one has PTSD. Everything I want in a historical romance served up to me on a platter of gothic house in the windswept moors. After The Breakup, the scene shifts to London and that’s when it goes off the rails. The tonal shift from “angst central” to “novel of manners“ caught me off guard; the B-plot was not well integrated. Mind, I’m not expecting Mr. Wickham/Lydia levels of well-integrated but “the rake who endangers the ingenue younger sibling” is a well-worn trope! It’s not hard to pull off competently! When I finished the book I was so agitated I jumped onto one of the 89 bookish Discord servers where I lurk and flung out a screed. Well it turns out I misgendered Hall, who is a man writing under a pseudonym, way to go self lol in my defense my bestie’s name is Alexis so it did not even occur to me to pull up an author bio I mean how many male writers are active in the romance space ANYWAY I’m told that most of Hall’s other work falls on the frothier end of the spectrum. I can tell from his dialogue that’s where he’s more at home. I’m going to check out his amnesia romance next, I think, but before I go I just want to commend Hall for the superb trans rep. Violet’s transness wasn’t the reason for her traumatic separation from Gracewood but it was a key component of her identity she suppressed for a long time, and the way Hall avoided deadnaming her was quite clever.

Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022) “Some friends complete us, while others complicate us.” ”Friendship is about the willingness to know, rather than be known.” At college in 1990’s Berkeley, Hua Hsu loses his dear friend Ken to a senseless act of violence. Ken was a good-hearted but basic frat boy while Hsu wears his cynicism like armor: “I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected.” Sounds like Ken was the first person who made Hsu stop and question who he was constructing this elaborate persona for.

I kept waiting for this memoir to slap me in the face, the way when you are reading fiction there is usually a point where the story hooks you and tows you along and then you’re blinking at the clock and it’s 2:00am. It’s not that kind of story. But when I went to write this review, I had so many passages highlighted I couldn’t possibly transcribe them all. It’s a story about the slow accretion of time, and the reason it works is that forty-year-old Hsu has so much compassion for twenty-year-old Hsu. Losing Ken is the inciting incident that turns Hsu into a writer (“I wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night”) and because in the days following Ken’s loss Hsu is ostentatiously scribbling away in notebooks, he’s asked to give the eulogy at the funeral. I think if twenty-year-old Hsu were writing this it would be framed as “Ken’s story.” Forty-year-old Hsu has the self-awareness to know that Ken is the lens through which he’s refracted his own story. There are facets of Ken that Hsu never knew at all: he only finds out at the funeral that Ken was a regular churchgoing member of the Japanese-American community.

After a short prologue we begin with a long section on Hsu’s Taiwanese American parents. Hsu reproduces a number of faxes from his father, who moved back to Taiwan for work, whose syntax is reminiscent of my own father when he writes in English. I don’t think, actually, that my own father is necessarily more comfortable writing in Chinese than in English; by now he’s lived here most of his life and there are arenas where he is definitely more comfortable in English eg. home improvement. Took me a long time to get that just because he sounds “nonnative” doesn’t mean English isn’t his preferred mode of expression on certain topics. I have this holdover from my adolescence, this proprietary sense of English as my turf, this domain where I hold the upper hand over my parents. Hsu has the same instinct. Hsu’s father’s faxes are stilted not just because he’s writing in his second language but the actual content of them is ultra-anodyne. There is this yawning crevasse that opens up between you and your children the second adolescence hits. Hsu’s dad is like “how ‘bout them Red Sox?” Sorry i forget what all sports teams y’all have on the west coast but you get the gist. Why is it so hard for Hsu’s dad to have a non-stilted conversation with his son? Why is it so hard for Hsu to figure out who he is?

“Theres a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience.”

“I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed …It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract.”

At college, after he meets Ken, Hsu has a political awakening. He asks his parents about Black Panthers and the Yellow Power movement of the 1960s since they were, you know, there. And his parents fob him off with vague non-answers and when he presses them they’re like yeah we were kind of busy. This is so relatable!!! There is nothing more important to 20-year-old Hsu than this historical period, he wants to learn everything about it, and his parents are like “sorry we were working.” Then there is the polisci professor whose office hour Hsu takes to haunting, who eventually encourages him to apply to grad school.....in any subject but political science lmfao.

Jane Harper, The Lost Man (2018) Grabbed me from the get-go, devoured it in one greedy gulp, instantly vaulted to All-Time Top Tier favorite book. Honestly do not remember how or why this wound up on my tbr but by jove am I glad I went into it blind. A fellow is found dead in mysterious circumstances in the Australian outback (the body is discovered in the three-page prologue). It really brought home to me that worldbuilding is not just for SF/F. Every book is doing worldbuilding, you see it clearly here because there are wildly different norms to living in a place where the nearest ambulance is 3 hours away by helicopter. Our main character Nathan is an outback native but in the opening pages he’s identifying his brother’s body and dealing with a bumbling out-of-town cop and that’s how we get a heaping dose of worldbuilding. Elegant, right? Nathan’s been alone for a long time. Ever since his dog died (was probably poisoned???) he regularly goes months without seeing another soul.

For the first half of this book I thought it was litfic. Yes I know genres aren’t real, but we made them up because humans are enamored of categories (also for marketing purposes). This book felt literary insofar as there was soooooo much character work I didn’t even notice Plot happening. If you look closely at the cover art its style is solidly mystery/thriller, but it doesn’t SCREAM “mystery” the way Lee Childs does. When it really shifted gears for me was when Nathan begins to notice some irregularities in the crime scene. I have to wonder, would it be considered mystery/thriller if Cameron was murdered but litfic if Cameron decided he’d Had Enough and had simply walked into the desert of his own accord?

I cannot overstate the extent to which this book left me reeling. I finished it and immediately yeeted the epub into mysticalmuddle’s inbox with strict instructions to go into it blind like I did. I then mused to myself that if all intergenerational family traumas dramas were structured as murder mysteries I would have finishedThe House of Spirits in 3 days instead of 3 months.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It’s very Murder on the Orient Express, not in the sense that “they were all in on it tOgEThEr” but in the sense that the victim was a bad hombre and he had it coming. The order of the reveals is impeccable. As in any good mystery, everyone is a suspect because everyone is at the very least hiding something. “Something,” in each case, turns out to be another unsavory facet of Cam’s personality. We find out about his sexual assault of Katy first, and that casts the Jenna incident from twenty years ago in a rather different light. As we learn what kind of man Cameron was I started to get this crawling sensation on my skin. I mean, did Nathan make a bunch of terrible choices wrt his ex-wife and his father-in-law? One thousand percent. Did Cameron then exacerbate those choices by subtly working against Nathan’s interests while pretending to be on his side? Fuck this duplicitous motherfucker, I wish I’d murdered him myself.

It’s fitting that the useless younger brother, Bub, sees Cameron more clearly than the others do. Stopped clock is right twice a day etc. Even the death of Nathan’s dog is more Cam’s fault than Bub’s; not that the responsibility wasn’t Bub’s, but it was done without malice and Cam otoh does everything intentionally, methodically. If he “forgot” to make things right between his brothers he obviously did it on purpose. And also, he stole Nathan’s girl. That’s just a fact. But the book chooses not to dwell on this, probably the single most hurtful thing Cameron ever did to Nathan in their entire lives. It’s so powerful, this lacuna where Nathan our POV character could be cussing his dead brother out for all the ways he’s screwed Nathan over, and instead what we have is this pillar of raw grief that the book is built around. “Nathan found himself once again wishing that Cameron was here. He would handle this properly.” The person who grieves Cam the hardest, not incidentally, is also the person who murdered him. That’s the final reveal obviously. No I’m not going to give it away, read the damn book.

The climax of this whole drama is of course Cameron’s funeral. Outback funerals are weighty affairs. All the neighbors from hundreds of kilometers around show up in their Sunday best. “Nathan had to wear his dad’s old suit. Liz had dragged it out form somewhere and handed it to him without a word. It was twenty-five years old but had the stiffness of barely-worn fabric.” Nathan is not like his father, he has proved his haters wrong on that point, and the proof is Xander. Xander begs him to move to the city “Because I don’t want you to end up like Uncle Cameron.” What he means is “please don’t commit suicide.” This kid has AN ACTUAL RELATIONSHIP with his dad. Sure he may not see his dad very often but he clearly gives a shit what happens to him. You did good, Nathan.

Harry says, “I’d started to wonder if Cam was more like your dad than he let on. Maybe worse, even, because he was clever. He could hide it better.” This is chilling. It’s implied that Nathan’s uncle aka Liz’s brother was also an abusive dickbag. The world is full of men like Cameron running their own petty fiefdoms. The world is also full of bystanders looking the other way. Up until the events of this book, Nathan was one of them. Not anymore. Change is possible, change is meaningful, and as long as you have a pulse it’s not too late. 100/100 perfect book

Sidenote: I loved Nathan’s connection to the outback. it’s not the geographic isolation that’s the problem it’s being bereft of human connection. Come home, his mother says. Looking back on his exile, Nathan reflects that “the swift cut of rejection had hurt enough at the time when it was sharp and fresh, but it was the way the wound had festered that had been the killer. He had got through it once, barely. He knew with wholehearted certainty that he could not do it again.”

Jenny Mollen, City of Likes (2021) Jenny Mollen is very witty and this book is very readable. She’s not a storyteller, though. Her previous two NYT-bestselling books were both nonfiction and I can see why she’s twitter-famous, she’s funny af, she just doesn’t give the reader time to process anything. I started this while nursing a literary hangover from The Lost Man, and it was just the page-turner I needed. It’s about momfluencing and the world of social media influencers generally, and how as the mother of small children your hunger for identity—independent of the label “mom”—can easily propel you towards poor decisions. I appreciated the breakdown on how paid brand sponsorships work, and Mollen is quite perceptive when writing about marriage. The ending left me deflated because it sets up this very clear binary of “IRL=good, online=bad” and how is that even realistic, you need a smartphone to function lol i really want to ask Jenny Mollen if she’s ever held two contradictory thoughts in her brain at once. Anyway! The scene where Meg takes her four-year-old on a tour of the bougiest kindergarten in the five boroughs had me hiding my face behind my hands. Every single compliment other parents pay to your kids is a comment or anxiety about their own kids, it’s true.

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021) How do you talk about how exhausting it is to be extremely online, without all your references sounding dated in 6 months’ time, and without basking in your superior self-awareness vis-à-vis the screen-addled masses? By doing a heel turn in the second half of the book. No I’m not going to tell you what it is. Patricia Lockwood is a very voicey author, in a way that may irritate you if her voice doesn’t jive with you. She’s also a straight-up freak and a weirdo (read this essay about the time she met the Pope if you want a preview), and this book cannot be said to be at all plot-forward. Oh! And stream-of-consciousness writing is not my cuppa tea but she pulls it off. I was thinking about why this book works where City of Likes doesn’t. They’re both novels about the electrifying, addictive, dopamine-saturating quality of racking up online “engagement.” Like giving testimony in church, Chimamanda Adiche once called it. Do I think this book would resonate with someone who didn’t live through the Trump presidency? No, it’s definitely an artifact of its time, but it’s very very good.

Emily Henry, Funny Story (2024) You know how the Youth like to talk about “autobuy” authors? Yeah Emily Henry has ascended to that status for me. This is only the second romance of hers I’ve read, and I liked it better than Book Lovers but not because it was necessarily a better book: Fake-dating is just more my jam than rivals-to-lovers. I’ve seen enough of Emily Henry to know she won’t let me down. She writes books about basically functional heroines whose most important relationships are with their family members (sister, mother, bff etc). The love Interest being in the picture doesn’t change that bedrock relationship. “Basically functional” meaning they can handle a regular rota of adulting tasks no problem, even if their emotional development has been stunted or blighted in some way. I feel like a lot of romance authors are quite good at the initial setup, or the “dark night of the soul” third act where the protagonists pine away for each other, whereas Emily Henry’s forte is the “repair” phase. And her books are always structurally sound, no detectable unevenness. Damn this woman is SO GOOD at putting her characters in situations that want to make me alternately squeal aloud or claw my own face off. This may be my favorite contemporary romance I’ve ever read.

Emily Henry, Happy Place (2023) The weakest offering from Henry I’ve read so far. Meaning it was still way above average. It’s a second-chance romance but it was unclear to me why they broke up in the first place??? I get the obstacle to them getting back together—once things are said they can’t be unsaid—but the initial breakup, which is revealed bit by bit in flashbacks, lacks coherence? Impact? Something. This book centers also on a tight-knit friendgroup of which I did not warm up to any of the other members. Harriet our mc is a people-pleaser who has spent a lifetime subsuming her needs to other people’s comfort. She’s literally—the only reasons she’s going to be a surgeon is in order to make her parents proud. I do identify with that feeling of contorting oneself into a certain shape in order to be loved. To be lovable. It’s not that I didn’t believe Wyn loved Harriet, but I didn’t believe that there was ever a point in time where his love was not enough for her.

Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation (2021) As I plug away at Henry’s backlist I notice how good she is at incorporating the protagonists’ jobs into the story, in a way that enhances rather than distracts from the central romance? And how every family of origin leaves us with traumas, even if they’re not big obvious ones like zomg Sexual Abuse, and a lot of the work of a romantic relationship is unpacking that trauma. This was Henry’s debut and it’s good, thought not quite great. Cow!sister confides she found the mains unlikeable. I as usual consumed it in 1-2 big gulps. “It’s not your job to make me happy, okay? You can’t make anyone happy. I’m happy just because you exist, and that’s as much of my happiness as you have control over.”

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath (2023) Indigenous girl bonds a baby dragon, goes to Hogwarts For Dragonriders, gets treated like…the first indigenous girl to attend a dragon school. It was great (with caveats, see below). I was especially moved by the estrangement between her brother and her father, who have divergent ideas about what direction to steer their people’s future in a colonizer-dominated world. Anequs, our first-person POV, comes from a society that handles such interpersonal conflicts much more healthily than our own. Anequs herself is entirely secure in her self-worth, which is refreshing. At school she befriends a motley crew of outcasts. One character I felt was underutilized was Frau Kuiper, the founder of the school, a middle-age woman who’s shattered her share of glass ceilings. So, Frau Kuiper commits a microaggression approximately every 3 minutes—on the first occasion we meet her she asks Anequs if she’s familiar with indoor plumbing—but she’s not…it’s not out of malice. She really is on Anequs’s side and she wants Anequs to thrive but Anequs is not willing to thrive on “their” terms. She doesn’t accept the basic premise that she has something to prove just because she’s 1) indigenous and 2) a girl.

There’s just one problem. Anequs experiences zero character growth. She’s not unflappable—she’ll get worked up about stuff—but she’s never in the wrong. “All I’ve ever tried to do is the right thing. If that’s so very different from how things have been done before, then what’s been done before was wrong.” I congratulate Anequs’s parents on raising a well-adjusted child but there is not enough internal conflict here to sustain a novel! To take an obvious counterexample, Naomi Novik managed to write an anti-colonialist story about dragons that did more justice to both the protagonist and the dragon. This book is far too long and there is too much nerding out over chemistry (the periodic table is presented to us in German, to inflict maximum confusion on both the reader and Anequs). I was touched by Theod’s rootless plight, but what even was the point of Liberty and Olga? Argh there were so many subplots that just got dropped.

Oh but you would like it, Anna, the boarding school aspects are solid and the chemistry nerdery is right up your alley.

Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow (2021) I can see through this YA fantasy to the bones of the darker fantasy it was built on, and I kinda want to read that instead. I suspect it was unpublishable and thus the manuscript underwent heavy revision and here we are. It’s Pacific Rim meets Hunger Games! There’s a politically subversive polycule! Wu Zetian as a heroine is bitter, violently vindictive bitch. She’s not just righteously angry at the injustices she’s suffered, she’s been soured by them and she wants to break things. The whole plot is kicked off by her suicidal rampage to avenge her dead sister. Mentally she’s unhinged and this is not a world where people have the luxury of therapy. The miracle is she’s still able to care about other people at all. “People like us?” “People who refuse to break under any number of harsh strikes and any amount of loud words, but crumple as soon as someone touches us gently.” As you an see Zhao’s prose is in a casual, informal register and that’s a choice that works surprisingly well. Xiran where’s the sequel give us a sequel!!!

Additional unorganized thoughts: The big plot twist at the end needed, uh, a lot more runway. “People love to ogle pretty girls, but they love to hate them even more.” Yessss work that reality TV angle! This book made me feel keenly the gaps in my knowledge of Chinese mythology and folklore; first thing I did when I finished it was order a copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, from which Zhao draws her chapter epithets (I got the illustrated version for elementary schoolers).

Nicola Griffith, Spear (2022) Like a long cool drink of water. I don’t usually say this but: blanket rec. Everyone should read this book. Buy a copy for your mom. Jo Walton describes Griffith’s gift for describing the “thingness of things,” the way she makes a cauldron feel like a cauldron. Yes, there is a magic cauldron; there would be, in a book about Percival and and the Grail. It’s been awhile since my own Arthurian era but I’ve read my share of retellings and they were mostly epic and sprawling. Griffith takes the opposite tack. Through the narrow aperture of Peredur’s journey we see how this world treats gender, and rigid feudal class hierarchies, and so much more. I’m going to try and finish Hild now that I know what Griffith is capable of.

Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer (2024) The one where the mains start dating because of a Reddit post. Unrelentingly fun. If the sex was hotter it would have been five stars.

Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance (2024) It opens with the American protagonist sitting in an Italian interrogation cell, coerced into confessing to some dude’s murder. What a clumsy device to hook the reader’s interest, amirite? After this short prologue we jump back in time to see how things came to this pass. And reader, I will begrudgingly admit, it is a good story, even if Piazza’s fiction storytelling chops are underdeveloped. I follow Piazza’s podcast and her newsletter, and all summer she has been a marketing machine for this book, to the point it’s interfered with my ability to enjoy her content. I was like lady, is there anything you won’t do for a NYT bestseller spot. I finally gave in and queued up for a library copy. It’s not my usual fare but I’m glad I read it because I think she actually had something to say. It’s a book that’s obsessed with women’s relationships with other women, and how obsessive they can be, and not even in a sapphic way. The men who appear in its pages are bumbling props who are assigned very little importance. The women are everything to each other: Mentors, confidantes, rivals. It’s about women being made small by the encroaching role of motherhood: “You can’t regret your children. I wouldn’t want to not be their mother. But I do wish I’d been able to do other things instead of mothering them all those years.” In any good mystery you need the antagonist’s motivations to align with the story’s themes, and this one hit the bullseye.

hp | senlinyu, Manacled (Dramione, 370k) I can see why this baby broke fandom containment and went viral on TikTok: It’s super grabby and requires very little HP background. It’s made out of pure “I want to find out what happens next.” It’s a Handmaid’s Tale AU that’s canon-divergent from the beginning of sixth year. It’s actually not as dark as I expected??? When something is “dark” I don’t mean I’m getting out a yardstick to measure the scale of the atrocities the mains are committing. Objectively speaking Draco is a mass murderer. But because it’s Hermione POV and Draco is unfailingly good to her, he’s never framed as a villain. I was thinking about Iron Widow as I read this, actually, and how Li Shimin is also a mass murderer and also the main romantic interest and yet I don’t feel compelled to defend him do I? Not the way I jump to defend this Draco. Hermione is so alone and he is the only one who is not actively cruel to her. Then I hit the flashbacks, and I realized this is actually an amnesia fic!!!! Generally the amnesia trope plays upon the disjuncture between what the amnesiac character knows and what the reader knows. This story is doing something more complicated than that, since initially we are as flummoxed as Hermione by the holes in her memory. It was an incredibly satisfying read and I look forward to a reread. Downloading posthaste since the author has expressed intent to take it down and file off the serial numbers. I hope she lands a publishing deal, it’s superlative work.

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

Oh but you would like it, Anna, the boarding school aspects are solid and the chemistry nerdery is right up your alley.

LOL, it's been on my to-read list basically since I first head about it, because, exactly, boarding school + chemistry dragons. Somehow it hasn't actually happened, not even when I had it physically in my possession for several months (out of the library). Now the library thinks I still have it, though I returned it with all the other books. Possibly this is also a sign from the universe, lol.

There’s just one problem. Anequs experiences zero character growth.

I have heard this listed as a negative for this book before, and maybe that's what's been leading to my hesitation, because i could see that bug me a lot. Do other characters experience meaningful character growth? I think it would be enough for me if SOMEONE did, but the lack of character growth entirely is one of the things I hated about the Becky Chambers debut, and I could not bear to hate a book about chemistry, dragons, and boarding school...

I have also been assuming Alexis Hall was a female author, huh! Mostly I don't make assumptions even about romance writers, but I have only ever encountered Alexis as a female name.

Took me a long time to get that just because he sounds “nonnative” doesn’t mean English isn’t his preferred mode of expression on certain topics. I have this holdover from my adolescence, this proprietary sense of English as my turf, this domain where I hold the upper hand over my parents.

It's really interesting, isn't it, because I can absolutely relate -- both English as my turf and the fact that I know, intellectually, that there are things my parents have dealt with far more in English than in Russian, especially my mother, who changed careers between the two countries, but also anything to do with stuff like real estate and taxes which just weren't a thing in the Old Country.

Sorry i forget what all sports teams y’all have on the west coast but you get the gist.

[SF] Giants and [Oakland] A's (baseball) and 49ers (football) for NorCal :)

Having been in Berkeley in the 90s (looking up Hsu's birth date, he would've been my same year or a year ahead), I'm somewhat curious about this book, but I suspect the author would've been the kind of student I was mainly trying to stay away from, lol.

She writes books about basically functional heroines whose most important relationships are with their family members (sister, mother, bff etc).

Heh, Emily Henry sounds like a romance author I should check out, based on that :)