Yes, two days late, but as everything from management to mass media reminds me, the situation these days is fluid.
What I Just Finished Reading
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow – Natasha Pulley
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is a very good book; from a technical perspective, it’s fully on par with The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Unfortunately for me, Pepperharrow’s focus strays from the narrative elements I like best, with the result that I enjoyed it less than Watchmaker.
I love character interaction over the course of a novel. I love slow burns. Watchmaker had both in spades. But Thaniel and Mori spend the vast majority of Pepperharrow physically and emotionally estranged, and while the other narrative elements—setting, secondary and tertiary characters, suspense, humor—are as strong as ever, they’re less personally interesting to me absent that sustained character interaction.
Another thing I love about Watchmaker is its mundanity: subtract the one character inexplicably born with the ability to remember the future, and the novel could absolutely have taken place in the world I inhabit. But Pulley leans heavily on the fantastical in Pepperharrow; Thaniel et al. very much inhabit an alternate universe now, and that makes me a little sad.
She rolls back the mystery I loved so much about Watchmaker elsewhere, too. Mori gets an origin story. Mori gets a hero’s quest with Major Implications For The World. Mori gets a lot of exposition explaining the mechanics of how he remembers the future—which ultimately makes him less intriguing to me. And then there are the Japanese language errors.
Which, again, isn’t to say that The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is not objectively good—it is, and I’m glad I read it. But Watchmaker hit multiple personal narrative kinks that Pepperharrow does not, and so my head canon still ends where Watchmaker does.
House of Many Shadows – Barbara Michaels
Michaels’ The Master of Blacktower is one of my favorite books, so I jumped on the chance to pick up House of Shadows on the cheap from one of the local bookstores. Unfortunately, the elements that work well in Michaels' historical fiction don’t transfer well to a present day setting, and this volume is a bit of a mess.
Our setup: Main Character, suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations after a hit and run accident, takes a charity job cleaning and refurbishing forbiddingly cold, forbiddingly rich second cousin’s extra mansion in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Cue Narrator Voice: But the hallucinations only intensify after she arrives...
I’d be hard pressed to name two protagonists aside from Shadow’s Main Character and Leading Man who spend so much page real estate in each other's company while generating fewer sparks. They have all the romantic chemistry of two bricks, which is a major problem in a Gothic romance. Then there’s Leading Man himself, the sulky former childhood bully of Main Character, whose frequent mood swings left me with concerns about potential physical violence, for all that Main Character routinely “Golly gee, that’s men for you”-s them off.
This stuff flew in 1975 when the book was written, but it’s jarring in 2020 in a way something not set in the modern era wouldn’t be. This extends to the dialogue too: when Leading Man’s car dies at a crucial moment, he “calls the vehicle bad names” which is probably as explicit as publishers would let Michaels get, but seems childish and naive today.
The supernatural elements underpinning the plot—and the social commentary and philosophies underpinning those—are intriguingly fresh, but Michaels doesn’t reveal them until the last 20 pages, to the book’s detriment. And while it is fun to read a mystery whose solutions the main characters don’t miraculously intuit on their first try, Main Character and Leading Man’s utter lack of chemistry makes recognizing each successive red herring alongside them less fun than it should be.
Indeed, I found myself throughout the course of Shadows wishing it had starred the secondary characters. Aunt Sylvia, the forbiddingly rich, forbiddingly cold second cousin with a lonely streak and hidden heart of gold—why can’t we get more of her interior life? Georgia, the unapologetically promiscuous, hard drinking antiques dealer? Oh my god, sign me up! But alas, our journey follows Main Character and Leading Man. Ultimately, I enjoyed the read well enough, despite its disappointments, but this one will soon find a new home in a Little Free Library.
I Am Not Your Slave – Tupa Tjipombo & Chris Lockhart
Per the back cover, I Am Not Your Slave is “the shocking memoir of a young girl abducted from southwestern Africa and forced into sexual slavery.” And the first 106 pages, during which the book fits this description, are heartbreaking and harrowing reading. But then, one starts to encounter passages like this:
Eventually, however, the subject of sex began to dominate the one-sided conversation. He told us all about his sexual preferences, divulging things that, prior to my time with the Jackal, would have shocked me. As he spoke, it became clear that the apartment was a place that he and several other men rented so they could fulfill their sexual fantasies. It seemed like many women had passed through the place prior to us, undergoing all kinds of sexual ordeals, most of which revolved around bondage, dominance, and various acts of sadism.
And this:
As the women dressed, I could see that their costumes were meant to represent different parts of the world. Each costume was so scant, however, that there was hardly anything to work with; some were little more than strategically placed bits of cloth in the national colors of some mysterious foreign country. [My friend’s] costume consisted of an extremely short and very revealing white skirt—if it could be called that—with a matching top that was not much wider than a belt, which she tied somewhat futilely around her ample breasts. I looked own at myself. Like the other costumes, mine was basically nonexistent and intended to be revealing as possible. My breasts were completely exposed.
This isn’t how women describe their experiences of sexual exploitation, it’s how straight men describe their pulp fiction fantasies of women's sexual exploitation, and it makes one wonder how much of the narrative was dictated by Lockhart’s imagination. Descriptive language isn't the book's only questionable element: Tjipombo, for instance, goes from never having seen a touchscreen phone in her life to knowing how to defeat its passcode, to stealing the phone from an unnamed high ranking World Food Programme official at an oasis sex party in Dubai and using it to blackmail him—for some reason he is incapable of using either the phone’s GPS function to locate it or contacting the provider to cut service, even after it's been stolen for weeks—all of which further stretches the book’s credibility. By the time Tjipombo meets the Madame With a Heart of Gold(TM), who, unlike every other pimp whose path she’s crossed, frees her despite her popularity with johns because “You do not belong here my dear. I have known this from the beginning. Africa is your full-time home” few readers will be able to suspend any disbelief.
Human trafficking is real, but this sort of over the top fictionalizing does a disservice to the victims whose cause it’s ostensibly trying to support.
What I Am Currently Reading
Mermaid Moon – Susann Cokal
First off: this is one of the most physically beautiful books I’ve encountered in quite some time. The dust jacket is gorgeous. The hard cover is gorgeous. The flyleafs, binding, typesetting, and dye job on the pages are gorgeous. The paper is glossier than Rhodia's.
And then there’s the story itself: lesbian mermaid matriarchies and ostensibly Christian Scandinavian microkingdoms ruled by necromancers, all of it described with Cokal’s signature bittersweet realism. Cokal looks set to outdo both Mirabilis and The Kingdom of Little Wounds with this one. Everything about it is Relevant To My Interests and I've already inhaled half of it.
What I'm Reading Next
Menna van Praag's The Sisters Grim, which, oh my, that cover. And then on to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija and Sherwood Smith's Stranger.
Gratis Review
I finished Melissa Albert’s The Night Country several weeks ago, but holy shit, what a powerhouse of a book. Albert did indeed roll back a couple of my favorite things about its prequel, The Hazel Wood, but even still, this book was good. And I mean, left-me-in-an-elated-daze-when-I-finished good. It deftly blends a wonderfully menacing atmosphere with moments of bright humor, and Albert has worked out the pacing issues that kept is predecessor from shining as much as it could have. It all owes a pretty big narrative debt to Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, but is so absorbing and well written that it feels entirely new. If you haven’t already, read The Hazel Wood and then read this.
これで以上です。
What I Just Finished Reading
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow – Natasha Pulley
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is a very good book; from a technical perspective, it’s fully on par with The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Unfortunately for me, Pepperharrow’s focus strays from the narrative elements I like best, with the result that I enjoyed it less than Watchmaker.
I love character interaction over the course of a novel. I love slow burns. Watchmaker had both in spades. But Thaniel and Mori spend the vast majority of Pepperharrow physically and emotionally estranged, and while the other narrative elements—setting, secondary and tertiary characters, suspense, humor—are as strong as ever, they’re less personally interesting to me absent that sustained character interaction.
Another thing I love about Watchmaker is its mundanity: subtract the one character inexplicably born with the ability to remember the future, and the novel could absolutely have taken place in the world I inhabit. But Pulley leans heavily on the fantastical in Pepperharrow; Thaniel et al. very much inhabit an alternate universe now, and that makes me a little sad.
She rolls back the mystery I loved so much about Watchmaker elsewhere, too. Mori gets an origin story. Mori gets a hero’s quest with Major Implications For The World. Mori gets a lot of exposition explaining the mechanics of how he remembers the future—which ultimately makes him less intriguing to me. And then there are the Japanese language errors.
Which, again, isn’t to say that The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is not objectively good—it is, and I’m glad I read it. But Watchmaker hit multiple personal narrative kinks that Pepperharrow does not, and so my head canon still ends where Watchmaker does.
House of Many Shadows – Barbara Michaels
Michaels’ The Master of Blacktower is one of my favorite books, so I jumped on the chance to pick up House of Shadows on the cheap from one of the local bookstores. Unfortunately, the elements that work well in Michaels' historical fiction don’t transfer well to a present day setting, and this volume is a bit of a mess.
Our setup: Main Character, suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations after a hit and run accident, takes a charity job cleaning and refurbishing forbiddingly cold, forbiddingly rich second cousin’s extra mansion in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Cue Narrator Voice: But the hallucinations only intensify after she arrives...
I’d be hard pressed to name two protagonists aside from Shadow’s Main Character and Leading Man who spend so much page real estate in each other's company while generating fewer sparks. They have all the romantic chemistry of two bricks, which is a major problem in a Gothic romance. Then there’s Leading Man himself, the sulky former childhood bully of Main Character, whose frequent mood swings left me with concerns about potential physical violence, for all that Main Character routinely “Golly gee, that’s men for you”-s them off.
This stuff flew in 1975 when the book was written, but it’s jarring in 2020 in a way something not set in the modern era wouldn’t be. This extends to the dialogue too: when Leading Man’s car dies at a crucial moment, he “calls the vehicle bad names” which is probably as explicit as publishers would let Michaels get, but seems childish and naive today.
The supernatural elements underpinning the plot—and the social commentary and philosophies underpinning those—are intriguingly fresh, but Michaels doesn’t reveal them until the last 20 pages, to the book’s detriment. And while it is fun to read a mystery whose solutions the main characters don’t miraculously intuit on their first try, Main Character and Leading Man’s utter lack of chemistry makes recognizing each successive red herring alongside them less fun than it should be.
Indeed, I found myself throughout the course of Shadows wishing it had starred the secondary characters. Aunt Sylvia, the forbiddingly rich, forbiddingly cold second cousin with a lonely streak and hidden heart of gold—why can’t we get more of her interior life? Georgia, the unapologetically promiscuous, hard drinking antiques dealer? Oh my god, sign me up! But alas, our journey follows Main Character and Leading Man. Ultimately, I enjoyed the read well enough, despite its disappointments, but this one will soon find a new home in a Little Free Library.
I Am Not Your Slave – Tupa Tjipombo & Chris Lockhart
Per the back cover, I Am Not Your Slave is “the shocking memoir of a young girl abducted from southwestern Africa and forced into sexual slavery.” And the first 106 pages, during which the book fits this description, are heartbreaking and harrowing reading. But then, one starts to encounter passages like this:
Eventually, however, the subject of sex began to dominate the one-sided conversation. He told us all about his sexual preferences, divulging things that, prior to my time with the Jackal, would have shocked me. As he spoke, it became clear that the apartment was a place that he and several other men rented so they could fulfill their sexual fantasies. It seemed like many women had passed through the place prior to us, undergoing all kinds of sexual ordeals, most of which revolved around bondage, dominance, and various acts of sadism.
And this:
As the women dressed, I could see that their costumes were meant to represent different parts of the world. Each costume was so scant, however, that there was hardly anything to work with; some were little more than strategically placed bits of cloth in the national colors of some mysterious foreign country. [My friend’s] costume consisted of an extremely short and very revealing white skirt—if it could be called that—with a matching top that was not much wider than a belt, which she tied somewhat futilely around her ample breasts. I looked own at myself. Like the other costumes, mine was basically nonexistent and intended to be revealing as possible. My breasts were completely exposed.
This isn’t how women describe their experiences of sexual exploitation, it’s how straight men describe their pulp fiction fantasies of women's sexual exploitation, and it makes one wonder how much of the narrative was dictated by Lockhart’s imagination. Descriptive language isn't the book's only questionable element: Tjipombo, for instance, goes from never having seen a touchscreen phone in her life to knowing how to defeat its passcode, to stealing the phone from an unnamed high ranking World Food Programme official at an oasis sex party in Dubai and using it to blackmail him—for some reason he is incapable of using either the phone’s GPS function to locate it or contacting the provider to cut service, even after it's been stolen for weeks—all of which further stretches the book’s credibility. By the time Tjipombo meets the Madame With a Heart of Gold(TM), who, unlike every other pimp whose path she’s crossed, frees her despite her popularity with johns because “You do not belong here my dear. I have known this from the beginning. Africa is your full-time home” few readers will be able to suspend any disbelief.
Human trafficking is real, but this sort of over the top fictionalizing does a disservice to the victims whose cause it’s ostensibly trying to support.
What I Am Currently Reading
Mermaid Moon – Susann Cokal
First off: this is one of the most physically beautiful books I’ve encountered in quite some time. The dust jacket is gorgeous. The hard cover is gorgeous. The flyleafs, binding, typesetting, and dye job on the pages are gorgeous. The paper is glossier than Rhodia's.
And then there’s the story itself: lesbian mermaid matriarchies and ostensibly Christian Scandinavian microkingdoms ruled by necromancers, all of it described with Cokal’s signature bittersweet realism. Cokal looks set to outdo both Mirabilis and The Kingdom of Little Wounds with this one. Everything about it is Relevant To My Interests and I've already inhaled half of it.
What I'm Reading Next
Menna van Praag's The Sisters Grim, which, oh my, that cover. And then on to
rachelmanija and Sherwood Smith's Stranger.Gratis Review
I finished Melissa Albert’s The Night Country several weeks ago, but holy shit, what a powerhouse of a book. Albert did indeed roll back a couple of my favorite things about its prequel, The Hazel Wood, but even still, this book was good. And I mean, left-me-in-an-elated-daze-when-I-finished good. It deftly blends a wonderfully menacing atmosphere with moments of bright humor, and Albert has worked out the pacing issues that kept is predecessor from shining as much as it could have. It all owes a pretty big narrative debt to Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, but is so absorbing and well written that it feels entirely new. If you haven’t already, read The Hazel Wood and then read this.
これで以上です。
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