David Yoon
Dhananjaya Rajarathnam was born in Batticaloa Sri Lanka. It's the jewel of the East known for its fire walkers, tongue-piercers and silver beaches where you can put a reed to your ear, lean down from your paddle boat, and hear the music of the fish.
But now Dhananjaya is just Danny, sitting on a Sydney train, a Turbo Model E Super Suction power vacuum strapped to his back on his way to his next cleaning gig.
For the last 4 years he's worked at becoming invisible. As an illegal in Australia he minds his posture, never spits in public and works to eliminate the tics of his mother tongue. But now, privy to key information that might solve a recent murder, Danny must wrestle between staying quiet and staying in Australia or going to the police with what he knows and face the threat of deportation.
Danny has spent his time in Australia paying keen attention and now, in the single day recounted here, the city is sending him signals. Street signs, store windows, radio snippets and even his own phone send cryptic messages, singing an urban key.
Meanwhile he has to contend with the killer himself, verbally sparring back and forth over the phone. He offers up an easy out, speaking up has never led to anything good for Danny, a cigarette burn on his forearm a testament to his past inability to pay attention to the rules around him. Danny is, and has always been, a faker - a fake citizen in Australia even a fake vegan to his girlfriend. Staying quiet means staying safe.
An examination of illegals making their way in the world, hidden in plain sight - wrapped up in a tight little crime thriller.
Laos had over 2 million tons of ordinance dropped on it over a 9 year bombing campaign starting in 1964. That's the equivalent of a bomb every 8 minutes for those 9 years the US dropped in an area roughly the size of Utah. More bombs than it dropped during the entirety of WWII, and 30% of these cluster bombs have yet to explode.
It is against that backdrop that we are introduced to 3 orphans, Alisak, Prany and Noi living in an abandoned farmhouse turned makeshift hospital in the Plain of Jars. The children on motorbikes wend their way through unexploded ordinance to retrieve supplies and deliver patients. And it sounds unremittingly grim but proves a dreamlike read with the occasional bursts of searing violence.
The chapters swing across the years and traverse the globe taking us out of Laos and into France, New York and Spain. How these teenager can and cannot escape their past. Beautifully melancholic with perfectly realized grace notes throughout. Of things hid in a piano, the brush of a father's fingers against a child's heel as he drives beneath him in a tree, a bike shop and the smell of the ocean. Memories burnished to a shine and held close in contrast to those burning moments of horror. Just an incredibly written, finely wrought, hypnotizing piece of work.
At 15 EJ suddenly finds herself moving in with her older 19 year old brother in California. Her father has accepted a lucrative position back in South Korea and EJ's mother and father have planned a return without them. This return means they will be “well paid, confident with tall backs from splendored living.” Meanwhile what was to be a brief contract and separation goes from 2 years to 9 years away. In that time, abandoned by her parents, EJ skips school, develops an eating disorder and considers suicide while her mother sends self-absorbed and oblivious missives from Korea talking about shopping with aunts and convincing EJ that she is doing well, being strong. The letters are captured and translated here between chapters, a weird tonal counterpoint to the hardships EJ is enduring and the history she is excavating.
This is the third Korean book I've read this month where the dead can infect the dreams of the living. Here, as in The Kinship of Secrets, they are nightmares that can be translated as water seeping into the graves of grandparents. And such Korean han. Intergenerational trauma and stories of her ethnically Korean grandmother Kumiko born in Tokyo. She would escape to Korea to flee the country's suspicions and prejudice only to find herself in the midst of the Jeju Island massacre.
And then EJ finds poetry. Maybe I'm just trained to read and revere this love for words. It's thrilling to see how poetry gives EJ a place to find forgiveness. I'm a sucker for reading about an all consuming passion and the artist's discovery. All of this together creates such a strange literary collage that manages to cohere into something that speaks to a fragmented life, a notion of a hyphenated person, a second-generation, Asian-American.
The book is written in the matter of fact tone of a psychiatrist tasked with examining the contours of Kim Jiyoung's life to decipher what might have triggered her recent breakdown. It's a novel conceit that serves to frame the book's true purpose of exploring the misogyny that permeates every aspect of Korean life.
From childhood where her younger brother is pampered and centered, given clear preference over his two sisters - to elementary school where the taunts and bullying of the boys are dismissed with the all too familiar refrain of “boys will be boys!”
Jiyoung endures the leering glances and “playful” pinches of teachers in highschool. She graduates into a culture where only 30% of new employees hired at over 100 top companies are actually women. Those lucky few who do find employment can hope to earn 63 cents to every dollar their male peers make. Korea is recognized as the worst developed nation to be a working woman.
It's hardly a literary story and feels more like a rosetta stone to understand the works coming out of present-day Korea. In fact it should be a required companion piece to Han Kang's much lauded book The Vegetarian, providing context to Yeong-hye's oblique story.
I'm not always this format's biggest fan. Funny online personality turns in a collection of essays for a debut novel, the publisher hoping for some of that online recognition turning into book sales. Exhibit A: a columnist for Elle.com who's day job originated with a presidential thirst tweet citing a photo of Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto as “Tom Ford presents The Avengers.”
Still, Here For It and subscribed to the newsletter. Seriously, R. Eric Thomas has a newsletter I've been getting for months now. That means I can see through his suburban lies and know despite all his neighbourhood foreboding laid out in one of his essays, citing a distrust of living anywhere with a lawn, he and his husband David recently bought their first home.
Fine, showing my hand here and revealing how I'm part of that online fandom and in the pocket of black, gay columnists, but hear me out. Eric brings his A game here. A Moth veteran he knows how to build a story. He's a playwright who understands a good narrative arc. Eric's story on his high school crush Electra is as perfect and touching a story as you could want. And wrestling with his own deep Christian faith as a gay man that would go on to marry a Presbyterian pastor isn't all Whitney Houston in The Preacher's Wife and is fraught and thoughtful. I liked this collection more than I thought I would. Filtered through some queer ebonics sure - qween and gurl are proper pronouns here - still a fun respite. Worth it.
There is a point in your life, perhaps it's when you have your first child, when you can better reflect on how you were raised. How love was shown in your home and what you carry with you as you build your own future.
Here our protagonist Madang has found himself a new home in a quiet rural outpost, but finds himself shuttling back home to Seoul to take care of his ailing mother. Navigating doctors, an alcoholic layabout of a father, and a somewhat resigned mother, Madang finds comfort in his rural garden and food. He reflects warmly about his mother's cooking and carries that love to his own family.
It's a simple story with pared down line art that turns our characters into anthropomorphized cats that nonetheless delivers a familiar gut punch of reconciling your past, actively turning from your parents to carve out your own space in life to the feelings of duty that come as they age. Wrestling with the economies of care, feelings of desperation and trying to find a way forward amidst the mess.
7 year old Nainoa Flores is gently carried back to the boat he has fallen from in the teeth of a shark. The shark holding him as if made from glass, like he was its child, head up out of the water like a dog. Later Noa will heal a boy's hand torn apart from a firework mishap.
There is magic at work here, the old gods of the island working through this golden boy. But Washburn can't let the story tumble along without dropping ominous portents, foreshadowing some grim future. Meanwhile Noa's two siblings, who interchange chapters tell their story. Of being eclipsed by their brother, or worse being plied for information about how he's doing. How it feels like they are being muscled out of the spotlight of their parents affections and how it sits like a heavy weight with them both. It's this dark cloud rumbling ever present in the distance and it hangs heavy over the story. And then it really starts to pour.
I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to realize I was reading an indigenous story, of the generational trauma of the colonized. How it breaks them and calls them home all the same. But man, just out of the teeth of winter and this was such a grey tale that just sat hard and heavy on the heart.
It's another in a growing work of literary nature writing that I find I'm a sucker for. From The Overstory to Greenwood it's the personal entwined with the natural world and Lee, as an environmental historian, is uniquely poised to tackle this growing genre.
It is the history of Taiwan, a relatively young island at a spry 6-9 million years and barely 90 miles wide, variously occupied by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. It is the home to thousands of endemic species specific to the island, plants that have yet to be found anywhere else. And here in this lush, damp greenery Lee explores her past after the death of her grandfather. He a pilot with the Flying Tigers during WWII who came to Canada and worked as a janitor at the Chef Boyardee factory in Niagara. Her grandmother from Nanjing who lived through the horrors inflicted there by the Japanese.
The stories never fully cohered for me. While it's a mere sliver of an island and she was never more than an hour or two away from where her grandparents lived, it felt as if she was climbing the Rockies while limply gesturing to her family's past in rural Saskatchewan. I enjoyed the nature writing but I shouldn't want less of her grandparent's history when their lives seem so ripe for storytelling.
Let's get this off my chest right away - I thought this book was all over the place. It picks up threads only to discard them completely in the next chapter, lays out mysteries it will later explain away with a shrug, veers wildly through a growing cast of characters laying down narrative beats I must not be bright enough to fit into a cohesive whole and then, when you think you've got a handle on things, it goes supernatural?
And yet Mandel is still such a disarmingly great writer. She got a light touch that can draw on extensive research into international shipping and Ponzi schemes without completely derailing the story. And the beats she hits just sing. There's the notion of being pulled along in the wake of larger forces and the slow inevitable erosion of personal agency until it's all too late. How a single concession can assume mass over time is beautifully explored. And there is a character's slow descent into madness that is convincingly told both in its psychological causes and its clear manifestations.
Loved it a lot, longed for it be less lumpy.
I do enjoy a slim novella, so it feels unfair to criticize the slight world building of a post-something, southwest hellscape where information is tightly controlled by the government, energy is scarce and life is precarious. I just could have used a bit more to chew on. Instead what I get is just cowboy set dressing and the knowledge that queer love in this world is dangerous. Well not so dangerous for our protagonist it seems who, days after her lover Beatriz is publicly hung, falls in queer love-at-first-sight. It's a novella, things move fast I suppose.
Subversive gun-toting lesbian librarians in an apocalyptic Wild West is as good a tag as any to hang your hat on, but this story needed more meat on its bones.
A collection of short stories with characters that reappear in subsequent sections and protagonists that tend to sound remarkably similar - which might explain why a writer named Kaie Kellough occasionally pops up as if to remind the reader that it is in fact someone else telling the story.
It is the Caribbean diaspora and how it has long insinuated itself as part of the larger narrative that is Canada.
Casey Peabody is a writer labouring over her novel for the past six years — long after her peers in writing class have moved on, married up, gotten their real estate license and put their novels away. In that time she's endured listening to male writers who feel they should already be famous, men dismissively wondering what she could possibly have to say while living in a potting shed that smells of loam and rotting leaves. She's barely covering her student debt working as a waitress serving grabby patrons at an upscale Harvard Square eatery and occasionally walking her landlord's dog. Getting health insurance only seems to reveal a litany of potentially life changing ailments at the hands of indifferent doctors. And still she writes.
Amidst all this Casey finds herself caught between two men. Oscar is an older widower with two precocious but adorable kids. He's an established and successful writer who has invited her into his little life. Meanwhile there's Silas, a high school teacher and struggling writer with a chipped front tooth and a rusted out car. Silas is a bit flaky and bails almost immediately after a first date.
All of this paints a bleak picture of the struggling creative class in America. So much so that I distrusted how it all ends. I felt manipulated even as I cheered Casey's every decision and win. It felt like a bit of fantasy in an otherwise grim accounting, and if King's writing didn't completely beguile me I'd otherwise begrudge her upbeat ending.
In the meantime the book has been optioned by Toni Collette for her directorial debut and I can't wait.
Ada and Evered lose their infant sister before the first snowfall. The ground is frozen solid when they lose their mother, their father tipping her out into the black winter ocean. He joins her shortly, passing before the new year. Ada and Evered are 11 and 9 and in the four opening pages find themselves completely alone on a desolate crag off the coast of Newfoundland that would come to be known as Orphan's Bay.
It's a hell of a start. The brother and sister barely eke out the winter months, awaiting salvation with the biannual visit of a supply ship called The Hope. They are replenished but refuse to leave their tiny cove and begin to set into the summer's chores.
“Their severe round with little variation but the wheel of the seasons and nothing but the slow pendulum of The Hope's appearance to mark time on a human scale.”
Against that gruelling backdrop the siblings come across a ship frozen in the ice and the horrors within, meet Captain Solomon Truss from Oxfordshire who saves their lives, John Warren and his crew from the HMS Medusa come limping into the cove after their mainmast is split in an Atlantic storm.
The kids are in good hands with Micheal Crummey, who has a poet's eye for language sprinkled with the regionalisms of his home province. It's a wondrous story inspired by a paragraph Crummey came across from an 18th century clergyman who discovered a brother and sister living in an isolated cove, the sister clearly pregnant. When he asked about their situation he was promptly shooed off the island at gunpoint. So yeah - I have to admit a bit of ick here, despite being handled well and in a way that made sense. Crummey still pulls it off.
Video review here: https://youtu.be/8Q2vg9HsLWY
The upcoming movie finally pushed this to the top of the TBR pile. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's 2017 New York Times article helped ignite the #MeToo movement and this is the tense account of the months leading up to the Weinstein expose. And while it's a damning portrayal of a sexual predator with decades of abuses to his name, it is as much the story of the apparatus surrounding him that facilitated his actions, looked the other way, and even sought to capitalize on the situation for their own benefit.
Gloria Allred and her daughter Lisa Bloom, known for taking on high-profile sexual harassment cases, are shown as mercenary opportunists seeking to obtain fat settlements accompanied by NDAs, muzzled victims, 40% cuts and lucrative book deals. David Boies, also known for representing Elizabeth Holmes (as revealed in the equally riveting book Bad Blood) is shown as a dogged defendant of Weinstein, utilizing the private Israeli agency Black Cube to surveil Twohey and Kantor and employ agents in the field to pose as feminist advocates and conference organizers to lull the journalists into false confidences. Not to mention the entourage of Miramax executive and board members that looked the other way, convincing themselves that this was just some marital infidelity.
Nearly five years later it can be a dispiriting read at times. The final chapters recounting how Christine Blasey Ford spoke out against Brett Kavanaugh before he was to be appointed for life to the Supreme Court we see him claiming his staunch support of women, down to the hours he spent coaching his daughters in basketball - only to overturn Roe v Wade. But more than that this is a testament to dogged journalism. We see how hard the work is to carefully construct, diligently verify and work against deep pocketed interests highly motivated to dissuade anyone from learning the truth. How this relies on the support of institutions and it's just as much a testament to the power of reporting in an environment when it's increasingly being doubted, touted as fake, and completely sidelined.
What can I to say about this one? This was some formative sci-fi in my youth and while the details are murky the sentiment was clear - I loved this as a kid. It's been on the want to re-read shelf forever but you know how it is with things you loved as a child. I mean have you tried to watch Dukes of Hazzard as an adult? You wonder what kind of a moron you were in grade school.
The Atreides aren't just some good ole boys, never meaning no harm (my God, what sort of a hole have I dug myself here) and Dune did not disappoint. The first half had me hooked and I would have happily plodded along as House Atreides settled on Arrakis. I loved the political intrigues, the backroom dealings, and the strategies inside strategies. I gobbled up the pseudo-religious talk and the historical notes and read it again as an ecological warning.
I generally don't read these sort of sprawling epics and even now I'm hesitant to read any more of the series (though it looks like I'm in relatively good hands with the first trilogy) Even if my time with the Fremen ends here, this was just the sort of indulgent clunker of a classic that I needed right now and can only hope that Denis Villeneuve once again manages to film the unfilmable.
It's a bit of metafiction. Willis Wu dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy, to transcend a life lived on the margins as disgraced son, striving immigrant, delivery guy or generic Asian man. He's living in the world of the cop drama Black and White, more specifically within the walls of the Golden Palace.
Willis is frustrated. He, along with his parents, live a state of perpetually having just arrived, never really arriving. All their striving, all of his hope, and still he can't escape being trapped by his most salient features, to not be seen as anything more than Asian. Guy.
But he's just playing their game by their rules. Is there anything more for him than this trajectory to Kung Fu guy?
Out in the world we're seeing Asian romantic leads, a successful Asian rom-com, Academy award nods, an imminent Asian Marvel hero. It's a far cry from Mickey Rooney in yellow-face and maybe that's progress. But that's just as narrow a world as Interior Chinatown. We're still inhabiting a world that is seeing a sharp uptick in anti-Asian sentiment and sly asides about the Chinese virus and bat-eating Asians. We're still trapped in the world of Black and White.
I get the intent and I think this would make an incredible show or miniseries. It's just the right kind of TV clever - and works within the medium of what has done more to shape American ideas of Asians. There's a lot of visual cues that would be instantly recognizable and would play beautifully onscreen. On the page, I still need some literary fireworks to carry it off.
I was ready to dismiss this out of hand. Iris is encountering a relapse in pain, the result of being seriously injured in a car bomb attack nearly a decade earlier. In seeking treatment she runs into her high school love that cruelly disappeared from her life after the death of his mother. It's an emo midlife crisis with breathless admissions of rekindled love and furtive assignations. Iris' husband is distant, her daughter is away from home and her son is growing up way too quickly, nearly an adult himself. Iris toys with embracing this thwarted love that was cut too abruptly in her youth and justifies the inevitability of this.
But it's all setup for the second half when the focus widens to include quotidian aspects of marriage that extend beyond the personal. How the mundane can hardly compete with the novel and new but how it brings with it a reliability forged over time. All these facets are subtly brought to bear so that you're not reading about whether Iris will or won't blow up her marriage. That's the easy read, Zeruya Shalev is interested in what a marriage becomes over time, for better or worse.
Darryl Cheng is the OG plant parent and green thumbed guru. As far as I'm concerned this is the must have botanical Bible for sprouting enthusiasts. He's also my originating source for so much more insight into the online plant community - which duh, happens to be a wonderfully diverse and all around uplifting safe space. I mean it's not like plant influencers are out here throwing shade (*wink) at each other and Darryl does the work of spotlighting other plant creators and resources.
In his book Darryl covers the basics. Deciphering notions of low light plants (this book might even convince me to buy a light meter!) what watering looks like, and getting your indoor oasis set up. But then he dives deep into plant propagation and the care and maintenance of specific plant types. A beautifully done reference - but do yourself a favour and check him out online as well and discover a massive world of indoor gardening knowledge.
This is so punk rock. While I finish another Asian-American novel wrestling with notions of identity, navigating micro-aggressions and the weighty calculus of being a “model minority” I get to follow it up with this debut from queer Korean-American Jean Kyoung Frazier. Her Korean-American protagonist Pizza Girl is 18 and pregnant. She's not wringing her hands about what it means to be bi-racial and raise a child who will technically be more white than Korean, or worrying about how her dopey white boyfriend and her Korean mother will get along (great actually). Instead she's a bit on the brink and actively trying to blow up her own life. She's sneaking off to her dead father's shed in the middle of the night to drink beers and watch infomercials. She's working pizza delivery and has maybe developed a bit of a crush on a middle-aged suburban mom who requested pickles on her pizza to placate her 7-year old son. It's an L.A. slacker novel that happens to revolve around a queer Korean-American girl I didn't know I wanted. While other writers are thanking George Saunders and Uma Thurman, Frazier is shouting out Tallboy who tackled the California neon cover based on a pizza shirt he designed that she owns. Frazier's just out here living her best life and I'm here for it.
I liked this book. It was warm and entirely Canadian. I know that sounds like faint praise but it fits. I read this in the lead up to the Canadian elections which proved perfect timing as well.
Daniel Addison is trying to escape the cynicism of Ottawa politics, not to mention a betrayal at the hands of his girlfriend. He ends up managing the campaign of an unlikely Liberal candidate with zero chance of being elected - so of course you know how that's going to go.
The issues he has to deal with are way too conveniently solved, answers are altogether too pat, coincidences abound. It's paced like an hour long sitcom instead of a story. It's Corner Gas on Parliament Hill. But it's still eminently likeable. I wouldn't call it a guilty pleasure, more of a cozy read.
Patricia Campbell leads the picture perfect life. A house in the affluent Old Village suburb of Charleston South Carolina, hard working husband and two beautiful kids. She joins a book club with some of the ladies in the community where they escape the humming normalcy of their lives by reading pulpy true crime novels and books featuring serial killers. Things are great.
And then James Harris enters their lives.
Sure this is a blood soaked vampire horror story (though to be honest the most visceral episode in the entire story for me involved a single cockroach) but Grady Hendrix is playing with a lot of themes here.
The housewives may be in mortal danger from a vampiric creature but it turns out the real villain is the patriarchy. As vile as Harris is, it's the husbands that are the monsters here. The women's voices are all invalidated through gaslighting, violence, religion, and careerist concerns. The racial divide is also plumbed as the women can almost excuse their inaction when it's “just” the Black kids disappearing down on Six Mile. The families there are also slowly being displaced by an ambitious new development project called Gracious Cay being led by the charismatic James Harris. A project that makes the book club ladies and their husbands very wealthy to boot. It's easy to just go along with it all - but James harbours a hunger that can't be stopped. Patricia learns that her inaction has led to the horrors seeping into her's and her children's lives. And so she rallies the housewives along with the Black cleaning lady to mount an offence.
God, this whole thing is just a metaphor for white Republican women ignoring all the signs and warnings and willingly inviting a monster into the “House.”
Can I just say this is the book that kicked me out of my pandemic reading slump. It was just the page-turning, thoughtful and funny read I needed, in part because of how warm the relationship between Emira and Briar was. Writing kids is not easy but Kiley Reid is clearly drawing on her six years of taking care of rich Manhattanite children. Briar is a wonky, thoughtful, panicked little 3 year old that loves to smell tea bags, and is Emira's favourite little human. So when she's called in the middle of the night to come and get Briar out of the house for an emergency - Emira is there to take her to an upscale grocery store.
Emira is black and dressed for clubbing. Briar is a white 3 year old. So it's only a matter of time before someone goes full Karen and calls security over. Things escalate until Emira manages to get Briar's dad to come over and be reassuringly white for everyone.
The whole incident is recorded by Kelley Copeland who is completely affronted for Emira's sake. He wants the recording sent to the news station, the security guard to get fired, free groceries for Emira. This is a travesty. You know he's ready to post a hot take on Twitter or upload it to Reddit as soon as possible but Emira insists he delete the file.
So one hand you've got the “woke” white guy that exclusively dates black women and on the other, Briar's mom Alix. She's an upper middle class influencer whose schtick is handwritten notes on fancy paper asking for things, with the perfect little hastag #LetHerSpeak. After the market incident she's intent on connecting with Emira. She LOVES Toni Morrison, she has black best friends!
And it's here that Kiley Reid just has so much fun. It's an examination of fetishization, micro-aggressions, virtue signaling, white-knighting along with the story of how one is supposed to adult in this world. This is meaty fodder for any book group without getting weighted down with it's own self-importance. Just a fun read that you can feel a tiny bit smug about being in on the joke and on the right side of cringe. I mean how do you pronounce SZA?
Abandoned to the foster system, taken in by grandparents then thrown out in highschool, Jesse Thistle ends up homeless and addicted on the streets of Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.
Spoiler - Jesse Thistle is currently an Assistant Professor in Métis Studies at York University in Toronto, a Governor General's Academic Medal winner, as well as a Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Vanier Scholar. Knowing this, knowing that he makes it out alive, adds some much needed air to this memoir because on the page there is no shortage of circumstances that sees this ending in a far more grim, frankly more dead, way.
The memoir benefits from his clear prose and sharp editing as we jump from scene to scene. The matter of fact tone avoids easy sentiment - it never feels like misery porn or the nostalgic showing of scars. Thistle is nonetheless ruthless in his recounting; from a night consumed by the rhythm of the ragga jungle high on E and dancing for days until his nipples were open wounds, rubbed raw against his muscle shirt as if on a belt sander - to detoxing in solitary, bones vibrating in agonizing pain, shattering his frame until he felt like a pile of bloody talcum powder.
I don't know why I'm a sucker for these breathless memoirs of youthful indiscretion and tragedy, it feels almost like a genre unto itself from Nico Walker's Cherry, to the troubled Million Little Pieces (both being made into movies) and I feel a bit like a salacious voyeur into another's troubled past. But I also appreciated Thistle's slight nods to his indigenous background that coloured the edges of this work and brings a tiny bit of magic into this redemptive arc.
I'm more than a little gobsmacked by this one.
When did Malcolm Gladwell get red-pilled into a right wing apologist? Or is it just after countless bestselling books and a lucrative podcast empire he thought he'd just go for it with this Fox News ready hot-take?
I mean it starts with Sandra Bland, pulled over in Texas, arrested, jailed and found dead by suicide in her cell three days later. In a book called Talking to Strangers about our inability to properly communicate with people we don't know, this seems a narrow view of the whole interaction. It's like the conversational equivalent of “you shouldn't have worn that dress.”
Let's ignore the fact Bland was jailed 3 days for a failed lane signal. That Starbucks baristas have better de-escalation skills than the arresting officer who was, let's not forget, indicted for perjury. This reads like yet another story of “driving while Black” not one of crossed wires and an incomplete transfer of information.
But then Gladwell decides to weigh in on the case of campus rapist Brock Turner.
Brock Turner of course is the former Stanford University swim star, son of a civilian contractor for the United States Air Force who was charged for “20 minutes of action” and served 3 months of a six month sentence after Judge Aaaron Perskey (a Stanford Alumnus himself) felt that prison would have a severe impact on him.
And here comes Gladwell using this, of all incidents, to put forward the notion that sexual assault is a failure to agree on the rules of consent because alcohol causes mental myopia. That Brock Turner simply was ill-equipped to know what he was doing when we was raping an unconscious woman, neglecting the fact he still somehow had enough of a self-preservation instinct to try and run away when he was discovered.
That we're to minimize this is a crime of violence where individuals exert their power and control over another individual sexually and instead speak of it as miscommunication - to shifting the blame to the victim for their failure to communicate clearly is a hard fucking no. And it's not just reprehensible on the page, it has real world ramifications. In fact, just this year the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that it isn't rape to have sex with an unconscious woman if she's gotten drunk voluntarily. What.The.Fuck.
And there the book goes from being willfully dumb, narrowly focused, and cherry picking whatever helps the preexisting argument to downright dangerous. I've just read a 300 page opinion piece from a Conservative rag with all the hard-hitting, well-researched rigour of an online anti-vaxxer. Hard pass.
To be fair, when your exemplar of the form is All the Light we Cannot See, everything else suffers by comparison. It's clear this book is well loved and honestly, the hand-sell is pretty solid. WWII drama focused on three young girls struggling to survive and finding hope with the help of a bit of magical realism.
And yet.
Death and danger abound but it felt perfunctory. I felt no stakes even as the roster of characters is slowly whittled down.
These kids are just so remarkable. Julien is a math prodigy and an adept teacher. Victor a natural explosives expert with the French Resistance. Etti of course is nothing short of a full blown wizard able to conjure life itself. And Lea is in possession of a monstrously strong golem who spends most of the time making bread and dancing with a heron. Why are these two on the run again?
These trappings are more suited to a YA fantasy set in a some dire, post-apocalyptic world instead of trying to balance these fantastical elements against the real-world backdrop of Nazism. A bit of a swing and a miss for me.