tabacoychanel

Sally Rooney, Normal People (2020) I finally read Sally Rooney and she is Really Good!!! Hottest of hot takes lol. I think the reason she is good is every element pulls in tandem towards the same goal. For instance, there’s the main characters’ political views. These are relatively privileged university-aged kids, they’re nominally socialists but not like, in a way that materially affects anybody’s life. What struck me was how holding political views on idk, Palestine or whatever Marianne was on about at that one dinner party could have been a distraction from the novel’s central concern—intimate relationships are messy and hard!—and it wasn’t, because Sally Rooney does not waste a single word. Every element she introduces pays off. Connell and Marianne are broken in complementary ways—he’s broken on the outside and she’s broken on the inside—and they fit together and they hurt each other and they break up and come together over and over. I just told you the plot but I didn’t really tell you anything about it. I am in awe of the way she writes sex scenes that aren’t hot but not the way bad erotica writers are not hot—she’s doing it very deliberately—and the way she uses time-skips back and forth to control the narrative momentum.

Jo Walton, Lent (2019) At the midway point of this historical novel about Girolamo Savonarola, aka the mad monk of Florence—you know the one who burnt all those books in a bonfire—it transpires that this is actually a speculative fiction novel with the most sff of sff conceits buried at the heart of it: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS a fucking time loop! He’s in a time loop! The way she marries a plot revelation to a characterization moment here is +100 chefs kisses. Savonarola is a demon and when he’s not being reincarnated into a new loop he’s roasting in hell, beyond every hope of salvation. Savonarola, who spent his whole life railing against the Church’s corruption. Savonarola, who thought if he was pious enough he could by sheer force of will preach Florence into a purer city. I’ve read 6 or 7 of Walton’s novels but this is the first one where I stopped and thought: Goddamn, I can see why she’s Ada Palmer’s best friend.

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017) (Murderbot #1) It was cute and I liked it, although I’m not sure it hit the spot for me the way it seems to have grabbed a lot of other people.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The Ones Who Don’t Say I Love You (2021) The first story slapped so hard! It was basically a perfect story. The others oscillated between middling and kind of shoddy; they all center on New Orleans and race and class.

Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005) Lamott is really good at what she does! i haven’t read Bird by Bird but now i think i should—personal essay collections are not a genre i generally gravitate toward but i could not but these down.

Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible (2021) (Dreamer Trilogy #2) Did Maggie just write a book with a plot or am I tripping on acid? It provoked in me a lot of thoughts about art and artists. Declan and Jordan take a backseat to Ronan and Hennessy in this one (the way Maggie picked apart Hennessy’s Deep Dark Trauma was more compelling than the way she approached Ronan’s—the climax hinges on both their traumas so it was imperative she get them both right). Matthew my beloved gets his own pov and he is—wow, i had forgotten how hard it is to be a teenager, even when you’re the most easygoing teenager alive. Jordan sort of sets him straight; ofc it sucks that he is literally a supernatural entity dreamed into existence by his brother, but otoh does it suck that much more than the day-to-day trial of existing in the world as a teenager?

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden (2020) My first outing with Tchaikovsky and I like him! I like the scope of his ideas. There’s a tendency in contemporary SFF to elevate the social sciences above the “harder” sciences but Tchaikovsky is cut from a different cloth, right out the gate he’s like bro lemme tell you about the Permian Extinction. I will say that once we had unraveled the mystery of how these parallel universes function there wasn’t much substance, character- or relationship-wise, to hold my interest. There was a trans character but she just wasn’t that interesting; what was interesting was what other characters’ reactions to her told us about them, which imo speaks to something lacking on the writer’s part.

Jessamine Chen, The School for Good Mothers (2021) Harrowing, as entirely expected, and as other reviewers have noted the middle section dragged—this is the “remedial” school where she has to parent a robot to “prove” she’s a fit mother—and the social commentary was anvil-blunt. By contrast when she goes to court for the custody hearing her lawyer’s entire strategy is “let’s hope the judge sees you as white.” Which does not work in Frida’s case but you can see why it is often a winning strategy!! So much model minority toxicity to unpack. The whole time she’s waiting to appear before the judge there’s an ITV home renovation show running in the background on TV—somebody is replacing their jacuzzi—and meanwhile Frida becomes more and more conscious that she is the only person in the room wearing business casual who’s not an attorney. Everyone else is either 1) lower-class 2) nonwhite or 3) both. That was when the novel was sharpest, the implicit contrast there. Also when she would engage in self-destructive behaviors like sleeping with her ex’s best friend just because she needed to know she was still desirable?? Will is a tool—every man in this book is a tool—but I can’t blame her. She didn’t have any good choices, she’s being asked to perform motherhood to an ever-shifting unattainable standard, she’s being set up for failure at every step. I was initially wary because this is the zeitgeistiest of debuts but it was quite good.

Steven Brust, Issola (2001) (Vlad Taltos #9) “It’s useful, for example, to categorize your target as a sorcerer, if he is one; but if you get too attached to your category it’ll leave you embarrassed when he suddenly pulls a knife on you.” Well Anna this has got to be one of your faves right? Vlad, Morrolan and Aliera negotiate —as far as i can tell—against THEMSELVES in this most fraught of hostage situations. The situation is: they are the hostages. It sounds asinine when I put it like that but Brust has the knack of painting Vlad into the absurdest of corners and then springing a solution that is surprisingly inevitable. The real meat of the story lies not in confronting the baddies but in Vlad’s conversations with Lady Teldra, Morrolan’s Executive Assistant. Teldra is an Issola and they have a reputation for being governed quite rigidly by protocol. In the course of being held hostage with her, Vlad learns that the Issola are not as alien as he supposes them to be; that he in fact has internalized a number of Issola instincts. “It is really all a question of taking appropriate action for the circumstances,” explains Teldra. Teldra goes on to drop the paradigm-shifting revelation that Morrolan was raised as an Easterner, which….makes you reframe everything you think you know about Morrolan doesn’t it? Holy guacamole. “Well, I’ll be—he thought he was human? I mean, Easterner?” says Vlad, and that sentence just about says it all. I’m glad we got those scenes of Vlad rescuing Morrolan and Aliera—comedy gold—and them coming back to rescue him, and I’m glad Vlad finally, before it was too late, learned to recognize Lady Teldra’s value. “There is a subtle but important difference, Vlad, between thinking only of yourself and seeing the world as it affects you” is a damn astute observation. This book isn’t one of my favorites but it definitely does that thing you were talking about, Anna, where you’re climbing a hill and you’re climbing and climbing and all of a sudden you reach a certain spot where you look back at the way you came and the light hits different and you’re like oh because you’ve seen this scene before but now you see it from an entirely new angle.

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) Wow I cried. At first I found the omniscient narrator insufferably patronizing—upper-middle-class people have zero self-awareness, all right, we get it!!! Lay off the moral superiority already. It took me 1/3 of the book before I saw a glimmer of Ng’s compassion. I saw that bourgeois individualism makes people mean and small: It broke my heart that Linda McCullough never told Elena Richardson—her supposed bff!—about her serial miscarriages. Mrs McCullough and Mrs Richardson are the villains of the piece! Insofar as a story like this has villains; you’re definitely rooting against them, anyway. But what I mean is, if Mrs McCullough had been able to share her pain with someone, had been able to lean on her friend instead of zipping everything up inside and pretending to be self-sufficient, would she have been less desperate to go to court for custody of somebody else’s baby? If Mrs Richardson had been less invested in “nothing must disturb the status quo,” would Lexie have felt safe enough to go to her own mother when she needed an abortion, instead of Mia? The asymmetry of what Mia did when Mrs Richardson’s daughter came to her needing an abortion (gave her tea and a place to crash), and what Mrs Richardson did when Mia’s daughter did the same (threw Pearl and Mia out on the street), is making me absolutely feral. Anyway this book made me think a great deal about art as labor, and how artists must labor to procure the time and space to create art. Mia literally became a surrogate because she didn’t have the money to attend art school. But then she kept the baby, and that decision, instead of derailing her photography career, wound up jumpstarting it because Pauline took those “Virgin and Baby” photos of Mia and Pearl, and gifted them to Mia, and Mia was able to sell the photos to buy herself time to make art. The Rabbit was Mia’s brother’s car, but before he bought the car he had offered Mia the money to send her to art school. She refused to take it, but after he died she took the car. One way or another it’s an exchange, you see? Money for time or blood for time. Blood for art. The area I felt the book was weakest was the race stuff: Everything about baby Mirabelle, the McCulloughs being white and the baby’s biological mom being Asian all seemed kind of hamfisted. The thing that hurt me most: Moody’s betrayal. “‘I cannot believe you,’ Izzy had never seen her brother act this way. Moody, who had always been the most thoughtful person in her family; Moody, who had always taken her side even if she chose not to take his advice. Moody, the person in her family she’d always trusted to see things more clearly than she could. ‘You realize,’ she said, ‘that Mom is probably going to blame Mia for all this.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe she should have kept a closer eye on her daughter. Maybe she should have raised her to be more responsible.’” To be clear: Moody is so cut up about being friendzoned by Pearl that he gladly throws his BEST FRIEND to the wolves. Fuck this whole society, I’m glad Izzy burned the house down.

Tana French, The Trespasser (2017) (Dublin Murder Squad #6) “Me and Steve, scrabbling so hard to pull the true story out of the tangle, we forgot the false ones come with their own ferocious, double-edged power.” I’m about to go out and read every word Tana French has ever published, she is that good. It’s a page-turner but not the sort that leaves you feeling you ate an entire bag of chips on autopilot because you weren’t paying attention and now you have a tummyache. Antoinette Conway and Steve Moran are the outcast and the rookie, respectively, of the Dublin Murder Squad: they’re assigned a run-of-the-mill domestic assault case that turns out to be more than it seems. Something pings their cop-spidey-sense and it’s not the case itself; it’s how various people—witnesses, suspects, other cops—react to the case. The sense of offness that suffuses the narrative is immediate and frighteningly effective. The way French resolves all the loose threads; even the prat of a journalist who is stalking Conway has his hour in the sun. The open wound of Conway’s dad, whom she never knew, who left her and her ma before she was born—her dad does not overnight become part of her life but his reappearance is key to a breakthrough in the case. It’s so elegant I could cry. That’s her at her lowest ebb, when she confronts her dad. And she swallows her pride and picks up the phone and calls Steve. I was so proud of her when she did that. Her and Steve just had a blowup. Her paranoia and her persecution complex have made her distrust everyone; she’s spun a story in her head where even Steve, her partner, is out to get her; she is allergic to being “rescued” because it means she’s not in control of her own narrative anymore. She calls Steve and he comes, no questions asked. The way that trusting your partner beyond all logic and sense is at the heart of solving this case—at the heart of why this murder was committed. The way that the stories that buttress our identity are more powerful than the most advanced policework or interrogation technique.