David Yoon
Mallory Viridian is a magnet for murder - humans tend to die around her. So in a post-first-contact world it seems a sentient space station, host to a remarkable array of alien lifeforms that are decidedly not human, might be a great place to hide out. And it is until she gets wind of an Earth shuttle on its way to the station - which arrives with predictably turbulent results.
Military intrigue, pharmaceutical weapons, estranged families, rock aliens, super smart wasp collectives, vigilante brides, ADHD military contractors, and a whole lot more. Like a whole lot - the story goes off in multiple directions, with flashbacks, overlapping plots, and countless side characters. Shooting for madcap sci-fi but ending up unnecessarily chaotic with a story that barely manages to resolve itself. Ability overwhelmed by ambition but enjoyed the attempt.
Marguerite is quite the moneyed 17-year old, traipsing the globe with her mother to secure items from those that understand it best. While the English understand wool — “the French understand wine, cheese, bread”; “the Germans understand precision, machines”; and “the Arabs understand honor.”
This short story beautifully packaged, joins a slate of recently read books that offer up incisive pokes at the publishing industry coming off the heels of Yellowface and Erasure. I'd say more, but it would otherwise be mauvais ton
Castillo is a self-professed “bossy Virgo bitch ...irritatingly sure of myself and my convictions” and it shows.
I had to read this twice because I felt my initial knee-jerk recoiling against the book needed further examination. It's a pop culture smorgasbord as Castillo invokes everything from the X-men, HBO's Watchmen, J.K. Rowling and Jane Austen and should hit me where I live.
I'm here for her assessment that writers of color are often served up as some kind of “ethical protein shake”. That too often they are called upon to provide “the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.” I'm nodding along wholeheartedly, I like what I'm hearing, but it's also a lot. Castillo lives in the strident, purple prose of the confidently righteous. And then I think, is my objection gender biased, have I internalized the dominant white supremacist status quo and resorted to tone policing?
I feel that way throughout the book. I've never read Joan Didion and don't care to defend her either. It feels too much of “not like other readers” but perhaps Castillo could have just as easily come for my fav DFW. I've never watched a Wong Kar-wai movie so don't share that spark of recognition. The second time around I was able to better piece it together and realize I like what she's saying but just didn't connect with the florid seething, unevenly mixed with far too hip asides. It probably just means I'm old, complacent, and doddering towards irrelevance.
It wasn't working for me at first. I found it wide-eyed and simple, not realizing that McCurdy is subtly adjusting her voice to reflect the age she's writing about. It's a small thing, but done well as we see her moving into her petulant teenage years and then into the revelry and rebellion of young adulthood.
While it's specific to Jennette's experience as a Nickelodeon child star, it's also the perfect encapsulation of what we've long been witness to. From the conservatorship of Britney Spears to the entire D'Amelio clan cashing in Charli's initial TikTok fame which has shades of Lindsay Lohan's camera hungry parents. Sadly this isn't an especially new story.
Debra McCurdy is still a one of a kind monster. Hypocritical hyper-religious Mormon when it suited her, to capitalizing on her bout with cancer for points, she exploited, bullied and manipulated her daughter into becoming a child actor so she could live vicariously through her. She encouraged her anorexia so Jennette could land child roles longer, which inevitably led to her bulimia. Weirdly insisted on showering with her daughter until she was 17, and became fiercely co-dependent on Jennette as her star began to rise.
Meanwhile Jennette herself was wrestling with being sexualized onscreen as such a young age, of having to take increasingly irate direction for what was her first ever kiss, to being manipulated, lied to and dismissed. All while she trying to uncover who exactly she was when the cameras weren't rolling with an upbringing that never provided her with the tools to deal with it all.
It's unbelievably frank, even-handed, and even empathetic when Jennette could have justifiably taken a torch to everyone involved in her formative years at Nickelodeon. One hell of a debut.
It's a propulsive, airport-read thriller with an, if not totally unreliable, then blissfully unaware narrator spilling tea on the publishing industry. The satisfaction lies less with the unsympathetic protagonist blinded by capitalist ambition and fuelled by systemic entitlement and more with the deep bookish lore referenced throughout. For that small subset of us readers versed in the online book world, this is a collection of greatest hits and I suspect the conversation around the book itself will get wonderfully meta.
Come for the pearl clutching act of June Haywood passing off her successful and recently deceased friend's novel as her own. Stay for the sharp digs at the publishing machine playing coy with ethnic ambiguity, authors on the offensive over poor Goodreads reviews, inevitable misogyny and racial epithets, being cancelled, being embraced by the right after being cancelled, #ownvoices, yellowface and more. All from an author who hasn't reached 30, yet has a decade of hits under her belt and the receipts to show for it. The call is coming from inside the house and Kuang is no doubt writing from a wealth of personal experience.
So even if you've never shaken your fist at the Goodreads Choice Awards, taken a cringey group photo at BookCon, or gotten attacked by an author over your 4 star review, there's still lots to love — but your mileage may vary.
Thanks to the Mayor of Flavortown, Cho's Delicatessens are thriving in Honolulu. Or at least they were. When the Cho's eldest Jacob heads to South Korea to teach English he manages to get himself possessed by the ghost of his dead grandfather who uses his body to faceplant himself trying to run across the DMZ into North Korea. Viewed worldwide, people stop coming to the deli, the Chos tainted by the mere whiff of a connection to Kim Jong-un and North Korea. Grace meanwhile is barely dealing beneath a persistent cloud of weed. All this before the 2018 false missile alert that sent the island into panic.
Amidst all that, this is an exploration into second generation immigrant isolation, questioning one's own sexuality, notions of community, reunification, nations subjugated by outsiders, separation and reconciliation. At least I think so - I felt unbalanced throughout as if I couldn't quite get a solid footing - as discombobulated as Jacob reeling under the thrall of Baik Tae-woo, the King Fool.
Marra is just a beautiful storyteller from the sentence level right up to the macro plotting effort involved in satisfyingly closing out nearly a dozen different character arcs, often with beautiful, melancholic effect. There's the toupee'd b-movie mogul Artie Feldman and his girl Friday Maria Lagana. Maria has left her father Giuseppe behind in exile in San Lorenzo Italy, now recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. There's a German miniaturist Anna Weber who finds herself in Utah recreating German tenements. Shakespearean actor Eddie Lu who dreams of something more than simply playing Asian caricatures. Passport photographers, widowed great-aunts awaiting death, and a mother with a suitcase filled with the dirt of her homeland. Woven throughout so many of these stories is the constant tension between reality and artifice during the lead up to the Second World War. Even more compelling and bizarre is that much of the book is drawn from actual events. German Village existed just an hour outside of Salt Lake City and the roofs of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica were covered to look like a sleepy suburban enclave complete with actors high above pretending to mow their lawns and hang laundry to fool potential bombers.
And can Marra turn a phrase, here the prose is often inflected with the sharp pulpy dialogue of Philip Kerr's WWII Bernie Gunther thrillers and the pop of early Hollywood hustle. But threading throughout is the shimmering lyricism I've come to expect from Marra. Fascism, racism, paranoia and propaganda are all explored and it's less a mirror of our own time and more a reinforcement that sadly this is as it's always been.
Abigail is a feminist economist lying awake in a hotel bed wedged between her husband and daughter, rehearsing her presentation on John Maynard Keynes she's set to give tomorrow. She's using the loci method, placing aspects of her speech in different rooms of her house that's she's moving through in her head, along with Keynes himself who offers up wry commentary throughout.
Which is kinda yawn TBH
Where the book really cooks is in the spot-on late night doom spiral, the dawning realization that past decisions have invariably led to this dark cul-de-sac. In this case Abby has lost tenure and, as the primary breadwinner in the family, the loss of income means having to move to a different town, a smaller house. And while she mentally lashes out at the sexist dinosaurs who denied her tenure despite her consistent publishing schedule and willingness to take on all the extra work thrown her way, she soon turns the blame on herself for pursuing an unsanctioned book project after a personal essay of hers went viral online.
It was a risk and it didn't pan out as she'd hoped.
She quickly goes from beating herself up over her critical misstep to dwelling on a collection of minor coincidences have brought her to this point, this career, this job - one that's she's not going to have for much longer. It feels like she never been completely in control. And then to all the relationships she's ruined on the way here, having lost touch, been called out, spurned, and ignored. And as she struggles to slow down the frantic gallop of her anxious mind, to redirect her energy back to the speech at hand, she can't help but heap on the self recrimination.
Been there. And that's why it just works for me. It's so immediately recognizable in a way that I haven't seen done so well.
...also lots of stuff about Keynes here for any budding economist, if that floats your boat.
Cleo Li wakes up at the side of a mountain highway with no recollection of how she got there, with no idea who she is. As she begins to piece together the life she once had it's clear she isn't exactly the most likeable of people. I love the setup, the unreliable narrator trying to reconcile who she was and what she might have been capable of as it's revealed her parents have recently gone missing after a massive lottery windfall.
Can I just say, someone should give Cleo a jacket. I don't think I've read about a person shivering, running goosebumps, and shuddering uncontrollably more. That girl has some serious temperature regulation issues. All this in an otherwise shaggy story that meandered to completion. There wasn't the deft feints, canny misdirects and shocking revelations I was hoping for from the taut thriller I know this could have been.
Sam Masur and Sadie Green first bond over Super Mario Brothers in the games room of a Los Angeles children's hospital. From this bitter-sweet, meet-cute we flash forward a decade to a chance encounter in a Boston subway station when Sam shouts the classic video game line “Sadie Miranda Green. You have died of dysentery!”
In this cold recounting it can feel manipulative, a bit pandering to the sensibilities of literary gamers. I felt the same way reading Zevin's earlier work, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, so clearly a book for book people. And yet I'm happily able to suspend that bit of cynicism and give myself over to the inevitable ups and downs rendered in the altogether capable hands of the author.
This explores notions of childhood trauma, disability, sexism, loss and violence threaded through a story filled with love, creative energy, fame and forgiveness. Add Sam's roommate Marx Watanabe and you've got a warm story about best friends that never gets bogged down in the minutiae of video game design or corporate growth. Naturally there's always going to be aspects of the “will they or won't they” for the leads but in the end it's all about hope, beautifully teased out throughout the read. Hope that becomes all important when life throws obstacles in our protagonists' way, and here are obstacles aplenty.
Reminded me of another great book called The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker that explored the creative tensions between friends. It's just as Sadie says here: “Lovers are common... True collaborators in this life are rare.”
It opens as a satirical update to Animal Farm at an Independence Day celebration where the animals are decked out in jackets, hats and scarves despite the intense heat. It's Richard Scarry's first political rally in the nation of Jidada (with a -da and another -da) It seems the perfect way into absurd populist leaders and their cabal of influencers and opportunists.
Tholukuthi that while it can be incredibly funny as the American President is referred to as the “Tweeting Baboon of the United States” while the new Jidadan leader is revealed to be attracted to his Siri virtual assistant, the story still opened up a history I was not aware of. Bulawayo is exploring Zimbabwe's 2017 coup d'état that removed then president Robert Mugabe, as former First Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa took the nation's reins. Here the leaders are shown as aging horses surrounding by a blood thirsty canine military, but their story intertwined with the nation responding on social media sounded eerily familiar.
Even with the remove of anthropomorphized animals, the recounting of the Gukurahundi genocide is absolutely chilling. And the story of the goat Destiny returning to her home nation was incredibly powerful. I appreciated this intimate insight into a part of the world I was previously blind to, and the strange political ascendancy of one Tuvius Delight Shasha.
If you, like me, still harbour dreams of waxing eloquently on Wittgenstein, noodling aloud over the nihilism of Nietzsche, or articulating your profound ideas about Aristotle — but the thought of actually reading these philosophers feels just a little too exhausting — this is the book for you. 2,500 years of philosophical thought rendered in short pithy chapters like “Do I Have to Return My Shopping Cart to the Shopping Cart Rack Thingy? I Mean... It's All the Way Over There” and the one I'm currently wrestling with; “This Sandwich Is Morally Problematic. But It's Also Delicious. Can I Still Eat It?”
Turns out being good is hard. Even Schur admits that 80% of the time when faced with a morally problematic issue the decision is never perfect. But 20% of the time, if you're thinking about it with some rigour, there is the realization that “Oh, you know what? This other thing I could do is just slightly better so I'm going to do that instead.” There are no hard and fast rules, but there's value in the thinking.
Also, I did not realize how many permutations of runaway trolleys and unwitting victims there are. Someone should really contact the trolley control board.
It's a unique set up where we find Stephen Smith fresh out of prison and obsessed with uncovering the mystery of something that happened when he was still in high school. He starts recording his exploration and we are presented with a transcript of his thoughts as he starts peeling back the layers.
Is this the ravings of a deluded conspiracy nut seeing unlikely patterns everywhere or is Stephen onto something, uncovering ciphers, cracking codes and connecting the dots? As he reconnects with former classmates it seems like there might be something bigger happening just at the periphery of his understanding.
But it wasn't connecting with me. The further I got into the story the more convoluted the mystery became, it wasn't until the end that I realized I'd been reading it wrong all along but by then all my literary goodwill had been squandered. The problem certainly lies with me, but I was more relieved than satisfied when the book finally came round to its explanatory conclusion.
I loved this collection's ability to evoke a feeling; the sense of lost opportunity, the frisson of sexual danger, the questioning imbalance in the face of gaslighting, murderous ennui, and the impossibility of conjuring a specific flavour without a sense of taste. While many of the stories project into a technological future, several tackled appearance vs reality in our current social media age.
All of it just there, tucked inside a slightly skewed world that never overstays its welcome.
Mandel is here expanding her literary universe, plucking characters from her last book, The Glass Hotel, and mining her own experience on tour promoting her world-ending pandemic book Station Eleven. Here in Sea of Tranquility, Olive Llewellyn is touring her wildly successful post-apocalyptic novel and finding herself thinking about how end-of-the-world literature could be born from our current state of economic inequality. In a world that seems fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over. Or maybe it's based on a longing for heroism. That should the unthinkable happen, we might find ourselves remade into better, more heroic people. Or maybe we just want to imagine a future with less technology in it. Whatever it might be, Mandel muses here that “no star burns forever.”
The book slips from timelines and perspectives over a span of 600 years from a British dandy Edwin St. John St. Andrew arriving in Canada in 1912 to take a run at something, anything really — to a disaffected hotel worker on a moon colony in 2401. Along the way Mandel leaves tiny breadcrumbs across the years and on the page while managing to bring it all together in a melancholic, yet satisfying way.
Mandel I find has a soothing light touch. The writing never really blows my hair back but I enjoy the ride nonetheless. It's literary chill-hop, the perfect bookish vibe.
Finally, I have to mention my favourite anecdote, captured here on the page, based on an experience Mandel had at a literary festival in 2015 with American poet Kay Ryan. Ryan called attention to the phrase “The chickens are coming home to roost...“
“Because it's never good chickens. It's never ‘You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.”
And now I can't stop thinking about those bad chickens.
29 year old PhD candidate Ingrid Yang is in the 8th year of her dissertation on the late Xiao-Wen Chou, colloquially known as the Chinese Robert Frost, with his accessible poetry about rivers and teacups whose quotes adorn the walls of middle-class homes and ornate tea boxes.
Things are not going well for Ingrid. She's facing mounting school debt, a likely ulcer, aggressive eczema, a growing addiction to her allergy medication and the chilling realization that she's just not that into Chou's body of work.
Things take an abrupt turn when she discovers a strange note in the Chou archives. Shenanigans ensue. A lot in fact. And while it's clear it's satire, we've come to a place where truth is stranger than fiction. Most of the wilder plot points are based on actual events and half the fun is uncovering their real world origins. Disorientation does feel like a debut in that it can't help but throw an entire universe of ideas onto the page.
Yellowface, red-pilling for profit, cultural appropriation, MRAzns, weebs, internalized racism, campus politics, performative wokeness and more. Sure there are inevitable hits and misses but I'm here for the often messy, sometimes contradictory, and regularly weird nature of a second generation Asian's racial awakening. Satire is hard, and your results may vary, but I am here for Elaine Hsieh Chou's Ingrid Yang.
Quan Barry made a splash in 2020 with a much talked about novel that focused on a girls field hockey team in the 80's. Naturally you expect her to follow that up with a Mongolian Buddhist quest story helmed by a 23 year old novice that shares a psychic connection with his rebellious twin brother.
Chuluun is in search of the reincarnated Lama and embarks on a reflective travelogue that includes sheep smuggling, personal hunting eagles, American paleontolgists and sky burials. But it's a spiritual journey as well as Chuluun wrestles with his place in the Buddhist order, especially when his pool hustling, cigarette smoking and decidedly “experienced” brother has forsaken much of the order's tenets.
It's a slow journey but one that was thoroughly savoured.
Unaware of the Matryoshka doll-like conceit of the novel, I go in blind and find myself shaken by the second chapter with its jarring notes, “Brief paragraph Mildred, domestic delights. Home a solace during these happily frantic times.” The third novel realigns my approach to the preceding two (I especially love the flourish as Bevel recounts a complete fiction to Ida as if it actually happened) and all these are once again re-examined by the time I finish the book.
At least it is a clever take on what seems to be a glut of fiction this year that pokes at extravagantly moneyed douchebags existing within their own reality distortion bubbles, intent on manufacturing their own imagined legacies.
There is a nostalgic comfort in reading Heather Havrilesky. She of the immediately recognizable blogger voice which is both a blessing and a curse. For me she is forever stuck in the 90's — I imagine her big headed comic avatar as rendered by Terry Colon at Suck.com opining on the tragedy of marriage. It is a beautiful disaster, a tornado of emotion, a sinkhole of nagging doubts, a glorious drag. And Havrilesky wastes no time weighing in on her phlegmy, walking heap of laundry that she chose to marry 15 years ago when an emboldened fan, clearly overstepping the parasocial boundaries of online fandom, emailed her a mash note. Suddenly she finds herself in the suburbs with two kids and obsessing over the possibility of a tiny infidelity.
And it's all achingly familiar with the gnashing of teeth, petulant griping, murderous thoughts and another example for good comedic measure. It is the classic sitcom setup where amidst the chaos you imagine the action frozen in place and the author quipping “you're probably wondering how I got here”. Havrilesky eventually comes around to the understanding that she is certainly with her favourite human on the planet before dashing off for another round of hijinks.
A more coherent examination of the notion of Asian-American, coalescing the various thoughts he's poked and prodded at in numerous articles and in his ongoing conversation with his No Time To Say Goodbye podcast co-hosts Tammy Kim and Andy Liu.
King pushes against the notion of Asian-American, a term that perhaps matters only to affluent, educated, second-generation professionals who are becoming as white as whites will allow while still brandishing their POC status. But the term barely manages to contain the multitudes of cultures and countries, and breaks down across class lines, irrelevant to the refugees, the undocumented and the working class.
The chapters are all over the place, more like individual articles than a real cohesive whole. It's an exorcism of sorts for Kang who seems to want to shake off all the nagging thoughts he's had around Asian-American identity. At the same time it can read like a “Not Like Other Asians” justification. Kang is constantly setting himself apart, the author at a cool remove from those he's talking about. He's the lonely American sitting on his own instead of engaging with the other Asians sitting together at the lunch table. Still, his podcast is well worth a listen where you'll find his more misanthropic tendencies are better mitigated by his co-hosts.
I'm all in for a first time novelist making her literary debut at 64 and absolutely killing it. You might dismiss this as a feminist fairytale set in the 1960's if it wasn't for the fact the writing is just so delightfully sharp and fun. Naturally Elizabeth Zott is at once gorgeous, smart and fearless - the love of her life Calvin Evans is a Nobel Prize nominated scientific wunderkind, her kid is clearly a genius in the making, and even their dog Six-Thirty is a thoughtful animal with a growing understanding of English words under his collar. Even when Elizabeth Zott begrudgingly transitions out of the labs of the Hastings Research Institute and into the mid afternoon slot as the host of a TV cooking show, her Supper at Six inevitably becomes a nationwide sensation. This smart but wacky ensemble can't help bring to mind the equally lovely Where'd You Go Bernadette - and like Maria Semple's book, Lessons in Chemistry is also coming out with its own adaptation featuring Brie Larson.
But it's not all sugar and spice here, Elizabeth has to contend with misogyny, petty jealousies, dismissiveness, sexual assault and intense grief to say nothing of the sheer nail biting unknown of being a first time mom. This isn't an overburdened, navel gazing examination of feminist empowerment - I can only imagine how plodding and morose it might have been if this were about a man - rather this is a wry story of one woman's satisfying engagement with adversity, being underestimated and getting it done in spite of it all. Sure it follows a sort of too good to be true bookish logic and conventional story arc that nonetheless should not get in the way of enjoying what is an entirely entertaining, fist pumping read.
Dark academia with a smart magic system built for logophiles and translators. It's a multi-racial, emo Harry Potter that strikes against empire and colonialism. An alternative steam punk Victorian England fuelled by enchanted silver bars that still adheres to known English history. The golden shackles of privilege and wealth blinding you to the world outside whether it is beyond the walls of academia or the wider world past your shores. This is a campus novel set in a fantasy world with incredibly realized stakes and the tumultuous nature of university friends. Potter was never this scathing or nail biting.
Hornclaw is a 65-year old “disease control specialist” who's been killing people for nearly 50 years. Lately she's been missing a step, and in her line of work that can get you killed. She's still working while deflecting well-meaning suggestions of retirement, to outright hostility for the presumption she can continue on at her age. But a few near botched jobs has her wondering if sabotage is afoot, or may she's just getting sloppy, sentimental even.
It's a fun romp through the corporate world of assassination that is reminiscent of Un-su Kim's The Plotters. Hornclaw is part of a functioning underground with its attendant fixers, doctors and disposal experts, and The Old Woman With the Knife feels like a small story within that universe. I've already fan cast this translated work, perfectly suited as a streaming actioner, with Helen Mirren in the titular role.
It's a Gen Z Mad Max Fury Road meets The Stand set exactly one second in the future. This is what you get when you ask ChatGPT to fictionalize the news as it's understood by Reddit. It's the mutant offspring of Don't Look Up savagely violated by Fight Club. I mean it could be scathing satirical fun if it wasn't hewn so close to how the world works now.
It does kick off with a promising start. A massive teenage suicide epidemic seems to have gone viral. Massive numbers of kids impassively off themselves leaving the enigmatic symbol A11 behind. One of the victims is 17 year old Claire Oliver, daughter of the CEO of Rise Pharmaceuticals that has made millions on the sale of oxycodone. Her brother is shuttled off to be heavily medicated and therapeutically placated at the ritzy Float Anxiety Abatement Center where he meets a monk-like 14 year old who has the temerity to be referred to as the Prophet.
He's roped Simon into his mission that will involve thinly veiled counterparts to Jeffrey Epstein, Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump, the Sacklers, QAnon, Proud Boys and Juggalos alongside characters that refer to themselves as Tyler Durdens, War Boys, Katniss, Cyclops, Legolas and Randall Flagg. And maybe therein lies the problem. The line between Hollywood dystopia and our real world farce is hopelessly porous. The book is unwilling to commit to being a cynically fun satire or novelistic thrill ride and in trying to do both instead ends up feeling ponderously nihilistic and a bit of a buzzkill. So it goes.
An ancient plague released from the Arctic permafrost through global warming begins to decimate the world. Victim's cells begin to work erratically, kidneys hard at work trying to become lungs, brain cells convinced they need to be building a heart. The body shuts down, skin becomes translucent and those infected slip into a coma and die. Death becomes so prevalent that the funerary industry has completely taken over the banking system giving rise to Mortuary cryptocurrencies and the ubiquitous presence of funerary skyscrapers and malls across the nation's cities.
How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories where each chapter is a meditation on grief and loss in the face of this global pandemic. But it's lovely, hopeful and wild. When the stakes are this high it's all that much more important that there is love and community and the persistent impulse to keep moving forward. When the end of the world comes it's not the doomsday preppers hoarding canned goods that survive. Those who make meaningful connections, retain hope and create neighbourhoods where everyone works together to build abundance - that's where the magic lies.
Nagamatsu connects these disparate stories and callbacks abound with little details travelling across chapters until they resolve into a larger whole. I fell in love with a talking pig and a widowed introvert tentatively inviting his neighbours for a BBQ. I thrilled at the euthanasia theme park and the forensic body farm. I saw the inevitability of death being commercialized with shared urns where neighbours could intermix their ashes to save on money and space, contrasted with elegy hotels where the plasticized dead are preserved as crematories struggle to keep up with demand, and inventive disposal techniques abound like liquifying remains to be turned into ice sculptures to melt into the sea.
But these are just wonderful bits of colour and detail among the more restrained explorations of grief and loss and love that just hit me where I live.