Kate
Reading history books, especially ones like this about the everyday lives of a few people, really makes me want a time machine. The only glimpse we get into their lives is through their writings that survived, and Charity asked a lot of her friends and family to destroy her letters, so there's not always a lot to go on. I want to go back in time and observe them from behind a tree or something. Pretend to be a turn-of-the-19th-century lady and become friends with them. But time travel is impossible I guess, so we just have letters and ledgers and wonderful people like Rachel Hope Cleves to read and interpret them.
Charity and Sylvia had such stressful lives that were yet still full of love and family! They were tailors who worked incredibly long hours to weather all of the financial instability of their time, they couldn't find time to sleep much which made them ill all the time and I can't imagine cutting and sewing fabric for sometimes up to 20 hours a day was great for repetitive stress injuries. Plus all the blood loss, which was prescribed by the doctors of the time FOR EVERYTHING. They were into each other in a way that wasn't socially sanctioned at the time, so they worried about how people would talk about them and about their families not accepting their unorthodox living situation. They agonized for their entire lives about how their lifestyle was an affront to God...they were in constant spiritual pain thinking that their attraction to each other was a major sin and that living as they did made them hypocrites. But, their family (mostly) accepted them, the church loved them, their local community regarded them as beloved aunts to look up to as spiritual mentors, and their contributions meant that everyone was also able to accept them as basically a married couple without having to actually talk about it. They appear to have done good, in comparison to other young ladies who were ostracized for never marrying and deciding instead to work for themselves, and to many of their male family and friends who underwent bankruptcy more than once. Despite their social and spiritual worries, they remained together for 44 years, so it must have been worth it.
This book kind of blew me away with its art. The story is really cute too, about an imaginary friend who gets tired waiting for a kid to imagine him so he sails to real world to find them.
The totally amazing endpapers consist of kids standing with their imaginary friends - a giant happy cloud with a kid holding a kite, a cat & yarn ball with a kid knitting, an eyeballed & tentacled drum with a kid holding a guitar...they are the cutest little monsters.
This may be one of those books that I enjoy from an adult's perspective but might not resonate with kids so much. The story is very simple...a lonely kid finds a beached whale and keeps it in his bathtub for company. Don't question how he managed to get a whale into his bathtub! His dad comes home from work and apologizes for not realizing his son was lonely, and then they bring the whale back to the ocean together. It's cute, in a melancholy way. The illustrations really make this one. I love the blobby whale.
I really wanted to like this book, but there are a couple reasons why I cannot.
First, I didn't like the writing style. It reminded me of my own writing, which is bad. Too many describing words, not enough description, if that makes sense...character never just “said” anything, they “teased” or “agreed” or “admonished”. Some of the sentence structure just didn't sound right to me: “Gentle Eagle looked at him oddly, revealing he understood that Joshua likely had stereotypes about Native American food.” “The loons cautiously eyed the two intruders. They finally took off after having had enough of the unwelcome and rambunctious humans.” I know that some other reviewers really like the writing style, it's just not for me.
I'm always happy to see more books about Native kids, but there's so much out there that is stereotypical and disrespectful. As someone who is not Native, I try to do some research to make sure that what I'm reading is respectful and accurate. The first warning sign I found is that the author is not Native. Not that a non-Native person could never write truthfully about Native characters, it's just something I feel is important to look at.
I recommend reading this review, from a website that specifically evaluates Native representations in children's books. She pointed out many things that I wouldn't have known, not being very well-versed in Ojibwe culture. She did point out one thing that bothered me, that one of the characters said he always thought that Pukawiss (a spirit from the Ojibwe culture) was gay, because he ignored pretty ladies and wore bright colours. Is that all it takes?
There's so little young adult/children's literature out there representing minorities, and even less that is intersectional. I so wanted this book about a gay Native boy to be a good representation of both gay and Native people, but it missed the mark.
I was planning on reviewing each book separately, but because I read them all back to back on my phone I couldn't remember what happened in each book so I'm just going to review the omnibus edition.
This review might get a bit ranty.
You may remember my review of the 1st book in which I was annoyed that it was so compelling. This feeling continues into the rest of the books. They are messy and confusing and unrealistic (we'll skip the part where someone tries to tell me that stories about alternate universes are all unrealistic and settle on good stories being internally and logically consistent and these not being that) and I wish I wasn't so interested in Audie's life. I wanted to know that she would be okay at the end, and that her and Daniel would stay together, because I liked her!
So in the first book I had assumed for a second that the parallel universes had split off after Audie/Halli were born which would then make sense why they were identical, but then learned that their parents and grandparents were very different so that couldn't be true. In the next books, we learn that the universes actually split just after WWII, where in Halli's universe, a bunch of scientists all around the world signed a “peace pact” saying that they would not pursue research that could lead to the development of weapons. Which seems a little hand-wavey to me because technically anything could be used as a weapon, which they mention in the book but don't follow up on so I have no idea how this pact worked out in that universe...except that they don't have space travel because all of the rocket research could lead to bombs. But they have amazing horticulture because I guess nothing to do with biology could ever lead to a weapon (except for biological weapons but we ignore those I suppose). And that universe obviously decided to err further on the side of safety over personal freedom since everyone has a tracking device implanted in their bodies (which everyone can access before you're an adult, after you turn 18 you can remove people from the list of who can track you but presumably the police/government could access anyone's information whenever). Despite these HUGE CHANGES from Audie's universe, Audi and Halli's grandparents (with wholly different personalities) managed to get together and have genetically identical children born at exactly the same time, who then developed their own wholly different personalities and managed to get together to again have genetically identical children born at the same time. It's IMPLAUSIBLE.
So Audie tried to save Halli from death once, and in doing so she ended up in Halli's body with Halli ending up in Audie's body in their respective universes. This is never explained. It just happened because Audie was distraught at seeing Halli die so she panicked and this ended up happening. So Audie is trying to get back to her old body while also trying not to mess up Halli's life too much, and Halli is terrible at waiting so she just starts making plans to ditch all of Audie's family and friends and live in the wilderness. I hate Halli in these books. She's so self-centered it's painful. Her grandmother taught her to be that way...basically, everyone needs to look out for themselves and if they can't then they deserve whatever comes to them. There are a couple stories that even demonstrate how Halli's empathy was stamped out by her grandmother, for example, there's a guide they know who is a terrible guide and many people have died under his watch. This makes Halli upset, she wonders why her grandma wouldn't warn the people who keep paying him to guide them, and she basically says that people only change when they want to change and the people who signed up to be guided should have done their research. So instead of, say, reporting him to some oversight organization or the police or something (this universe seems like they'd care even more about stuff like that than ours), Ginny is like, whatevs, they're not you or me, so fuck ‘em. And Halli internalizes this attitude and therefore only cares about people she likes. Which means that when she's in Audie's life, she's rude to all her friends and makes plans to leave them all as soon as possible. She hates anyone who tries to impose rules on her, which she did in her own universe too, but doesn't take into account the completely new circumstances which may involve a little bit of tolerance and thinking about other people for once. It's been ONE WEEK since Halli has been in Audie's body and she's already like, Audie can't do anything for me I must make this life my own. Man, you SWITCHED BODIES AND UNIVERSES. Give it some time, this can't be an easy problem to fix! So I basically don't give a shit about Halli. She's not even dealing with anything important, she just needs to go to school and try her best to act like Audie.
Meanwhile, Audie in Halli's body is trying to fix the universe mix-up while dealing with the fact that her parents want to buy back the 49% of their company's shares that Audie has before she turns 18 and can make that decision herself, so Audie is trying to prevent Halli from losing her fortune at the same time trying to avoid her overbearing parents at the same time trying to figure out how to get back to their own universes...AT THE SAME TIME dealing with some relationship bullshit that I was 100% not into. Will is the dude she's been in love her for blah blah blah I don't give a shit, and his counterpart in Halli's universe is super into Halli and Audie is pretending to be Halli but she's into Daniel, but alterna-Will is just soooo good-looking or whatever and Audie keeps being like, I tried to not make out with alterna-Will because I'm into Daniel but then he looked at me and I just had to make out with him! No, girl. Have some self-restraint.
Anyway Audie ends up dying because she tried to stuff her consciousness into her old body with Halli already in there and that makes you die. Because. So she dies and as she's dying I guess she reaches out her mind into blah blah and wakes up again as Halli back in time so she can do it all over again. And THIS time she doesn't make out with alterna-Will, and she realizes that this universe is slightly different from the last one because she stayed with someone different and her dog doesn't like alterna-Will and as it turns out all of these things are true because Audie somehow changed the past from the future without knowing it. And they go through all this ridiculousness to try and get everything back to normal, and in the end, she just had to think about switching her mind with Halli's and then IT WORKED. I mean, they needed to have access to a universe-bending machine (or whatever) that a professor built and used to switch universes back in the 40's but really it seemed so obvious that Audie should have tried it before. So anywhere they're like, oh yeah, everything is fine now. Except no one is thinking about the other universes that they created...like the universe where Audie died in Halli's body?!? THAT HAPPENED. That didn't just disappear, that is a universe in which Daniel (and the entire world) is in mourning, and then another universe in which Halli is trapped in Audie's body forever and has betrayed all her family and friends and I guess is living happily by herself as an adventure guide or whatever. Which, I mean, Audie's current consciousness isn't living that universe, but she also visited a universe in which Halli's grandmother didn't die but Halli did, so Ginny is living sadly without her granddaughter. So I'm just saying, Audie could totally visit the universe in which she died in Halli's body and see how sad everyone was. Not that she should have done that in the book, but it seems weird that she didn't even acknowledge it. Really, she has a get-out-of-jail-free card now because if anything goes wrong she can just slip into a different universe where it didn't go wrong anymore. It's just strange that the fact that she actually did die isn't mentioned again. Audie seems like the kind of person who would think about that and be a bit sad for the fact that she caused that to happen, basically. And it seems like an obvious consequence of there being multiple universes.
So I found all of the alternate universe and travel between universes stuff to be really sloppy. This is supposed to be a science fiction series, and the first book at least tried to explain things using science, but it sort of just broke into a series of increasingly ridiculous reasons that seemed invented either to increase the tension in the book or to explain away a plot hole. It was overly complicated and didn't seem very consistent. I started reading it because that seemed cool but it turned me so completely off that I started skimming through a lot of the explanations of alternate universe travel. I just wanted to know that Audie would be happy. It was an easy series to read, and written well, I just don't like hand-wavey “science” explanations for things. Either make things actually scientifically plausible (alternate universes are fine, just make things internally consistent!) or don't try to explain things using science.
Adorable! Not my favourite art style, but the pictures are brightly coloured and likely appealing to kids. It's a little heavy-handed (there's a picture of a crying heart behind bars), but what LGBTQ book for kids isn't? It's nice to see queer-positive messages for kids from different cultures. I especially liked all the happy objects in space at the end.
I would have given this 2 stars only I can't stop reading this series so I guess it warrants another star for being compelling.
Otherwise, it's the kind of book that makes me crazy with not being able to suspend my disbelief. You'll notice I tagged it fantasy even though it definitely wants to be sci-fi. Also it's a young adult novel, which isn't its fault, I just tend to be irritated by young adult protagonists.
So first, the main character is a girl (Audie) who is terrible at math but great at physics. So already, I don't believe her. I'm sure you can understand physics to a point without math, learn the theories and whatnot in plain language (that's what I do), but I seriously can't imagine being able to actually BE GOOD at physics, especially in a university setting (which is where Audie wants to go), without understanding the math behind it. Someone, please, prove me wrong, it just doesn't seem possible to me given that physics IS MATH.
The next thing is that Audie somehow figures out (using her unparalleled physics skills, I assume) that “changing your vibrations” can catapult you into an alternate universe. The way she changes her vibrations is by meditating. And she has to be meditating at the same time as her counterpart in an alternate universe is meditating. Which doesn't seem all that hard, so my question is, how come this hasn't been documented before in all of human history? Audie literally disappears when she goes to the other universe, in a human history full of spirituality, I can't imagine that there weren't a lot of people disappearing and coming back with stories of alternate universes. And you don't even have to be good at meditating, Audie had only been doing it for 6 months before it worked for her!
She finds this professor that all the other physics professors laugh at because he does fringe research on vibrations and shit, and in his lab is a grad student who hooks polygraph machines up to plants to measure their stress levels (as if plants show stress in the same way that people do). So really, I'm thinking, yeah, this guy should probably be laughed out of the physics conferences, except that his research turns out to be right, and they explain the fact that he's not respected by claiming that cognitive dissonance and fear is causing the other physicists to not believe the proof that he's showing to them.
Audie meets her alternate self, Halli, who is exactly like her genetically only she was raised to be an adventurer and is therefore buffer and better at problem-solving. I'm assuming this means that their universes split at least just after they were both born, but that's wrong, because their parents are totally different too. So their parents, despite their crazy-different personalities, still managed to get together and have kids at exactly the same time with the exact same gene configuration. I know, I know, infinite universes contain infinite possibilities, it just seems KIND OF CONVENIENT.
And then Audie is also mooning over this love of her life, her best friend's brother, who is dating a caricature of an annoying person. He's the best most selfless and wonderful guy in the entire world and Audie has never told him that she into him, she just licks spoons that he's used when he's not looking. This is where I start to zone out because I hate reading about mooney love-struck teens.
Audie has adventures with Hallie in the alternate world and then shit goes down, right into a serious cliffhanger. At which point I need to decide: do I walk away from this series, or double-down and read three more books? Despite all of the above, the cliffhanger was really serious and amazon's one-click purchase thing with the kindle app is really dangerous so now I'm reading the omnibus.
It was alright!
Not good enough that I want to immediately read the next one, but I'll likely seek it out sometime in the future when I don't have other stuff to read.
The story was interesting, it's a different take on zombies, even if some bits of it were predictable. All the characters sound the same, and when that happens I imagine that's just what the author sounds like. It was fine, because I like her sense of humour, but I like it when characters can be more individual.
I like reading it, but I wasn't into it. Marche's language is beautiful and reading this book made a couple subway rides fly by, but when the choice was between reading this book and anything other than staring at ads on the subway, I wasn't interested. I don't really care about Raymond or Hannah. I read the last section of the book this morning to see what happens, and then I returned it to the library.
There's something about text translated from Scandinavian languages that is very distinct. It's curt, the dialogue between characters is very pointed and sometimes stilted. I know almost nothing about Scandinavian languages but I imagine it must just be how they are, that anything translated into English would sound curt to native English speakers. I like it though, it's a style I tend to like in certain books and it's interesting to be able to recognize a book as a translation.
So about this book.
I liked it. Near the end I was doing that thing where you read a book as often and fast as possible because you know you're near the end and there's another book waiting for you that you're really excited about, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy the book you're currently trying to finish as fast as you can.
I had a lot of sympathy for the main character. I saw a few reviewers who didn't like her because she seemed selfish or uncaring, but I disagree. She made a lot of decisions that I maybe wouldn't have made, and a few I probably would have made but felt bad about them later...but she's in a uniquely distressing situation. It's hard enough to care for a partner with a debilitating injury, even harder when that injury causes marked personality changes and the inability for the person to feel empathy or be able to thank you for what you're doing - and especially harder when you weren't even sure you wanted to stay with this person before the injury! I can't imagine it. Everything that Mia did, even if selfish, seemed legit to me. Again, not legit in that I could condone her choices, but given her circumstances, it makes sense to be frustrated and lash out and seek comfort wherever you can get it.
I liked all the interludes of neuro-philosophy, I thought that stuff was all really interesting. Where does your personality live? What is “you”? If you can claim that brain damage made you do something that you wouldn't normally have done, can we claim that none of us are at fault for anything we do? If you are a jerk, it's because your brain is just wired that way. I don't agree with that necessarily, but it's interesting to think about.
There were a few too many parts in the book where they talked about “men being men”...i.e. men will always cheat, they're “hot-blooded”, they care less about your feelings than women do, etc. Even the idea that Bernard is somehow "less of a man" because his brain damage caused him to give up his cheating ways and become monogamous and care deeply about the people around him. Fuck you, Frederik, if a "real man" is going to cheat on me and disregard my feelings, I would 100% prefer a "fake man". The idea that a man can only be an attentive and loyal partner if he's brain damaged is messed up. Jungersen is a man and this book is written from a woman's point of view, so I'm not sure if that's what Jungersen thinks women think about men, or if that's what he actually thinks about his own gender, but either way, I am unimpressed.
So I actually didn't really like the story in this one...it's a common story in kids books, kid meets annoying friend/animal/monster/whatever, tries for the whole book to get rid of them, they finally do something mean or their annoying adversary finally gets it and leaves, and then kid realizes that they actually DID like having them around and that they're actually great friends. Happy ending!
So I ended up just feeling sorry for the unicorn because he didn't understand that he was intruding on Alice's life (he ruined her books, and used all her stuff, and got glitter all over the place...pretty inconsiderate, if you ask me) so Alice ended up being mean to him...so then the unicorn was sad. And then I was sad because the unicorn is SO CUTE. If he was better at picking up social signals he could have found a new friend because Alice's buddies seemed to want to hang out with him. Or he could have listened to Alice and they could have figured out a way to co-exist without him ruining her stuff. The ending leaves a lot to be desired too because instead of acknowledging the real issues that the unicorn was causing, Alice somehow ends up missing the fact that her books were made into a bed and not having any shampoo and having to clean glitter out of the carpet all the time. This doesn't sound all that realistic. When I have a roommate who doesn't keep the kitchen clean and ruins all my stuff, and we stop living together, I'm never like, man I actually really miss cleaning their crumbs off the counter and locking all my things in the closet, what a mistake I made moving out!
I mean I'm obviously really reading a lot into this story for children so in all reality you can ignore my review because your kids will probably still really love it and I imagine I will still read it to children.
And I also gave it three stars because the illustrations KILLED ME they were so cute.
Also for this line:
“Alice tried to tell him that he was a mythical creature. ‘That means you don't exist,' she explained. But that just made the unicorn feel more special.”
Also for this illustration because of how the dog has horns and wings taped to his back. I love the dog.
I was both impressed and disappointed in this book.
Kate Mulgrew is a better writer than I was expecting - her prose is lyrical and enthralling. I found it difficult to put this book down, which is why I gave it 3 instead of 2 stars.
Regarding content...as an actress, I can't say it's all that surprising to find that she's very flamboyant and dramatic in the telling of her life as well as the living of it, but even when she was obviously writing from her heart, I found it difficult to find the authentic in it. Her passions run hot and fleeting, at the expense of almost any other thing in her life except her acting. She didn't appear to struggle at all in the acting business. She hadn't even finished acting school when she was cast simultaneously in two major parts on tv and the stage, and from there, her obvious acting chops and professionalism were always recognized. Except for that one time she botched her audition for the captain of a starship, after which she said something to the effect of “that was a terrible audition and I apologize, but as you can see I am a woman in love and very distracted” - and the love she speaks of there, that was the real love, the one that made her realize all the other loves were fake loves, for whom she dumped her two young children with a local teen for the day to go fishing (it was pouring rain) and hang out in the pub until she got back from driving for two hours to meet him at a hotel with a closed bar. When she got back her children were angry with her for leaving them for so long, so she bought them things to make it up to them. Her love for her children is actually pretty obvious, but her passion and spontaneity mean that she neglects them. Not even for work - if it was just that, I would have sympathy because she needs to work and acting requires long hours - but for passionate loves and wild adventures. I think she loves loving and being loved, but the mundane every day of cultivating and maintaining it bores her. She speaks frankly and (as always) passionately about the daughter she gave up for adoption, but less so about the sons she raised. She speaks of meeting her daughter for the first time as being a wonderful and heartwarming experience, and it was beautifully written. She thanks her sons in the book's acknowledgements, and then extra-thanks her daughter. Having never been pregnant let alone either raised a child or given one up for adoption, I can only guess at how it must feel, but how must her sons feel as she continually left them in the hands of the nanny or babysitter or their father to work and play, all the while pining after the daughter she gave up.
In all - I love her work, she's a talented actress, passionate about life, and I would love to drink with her one day, but I don't think we could be friends.
Excellent. Even more tense and affecting than the first volume.
There are a lot of images of men and women staring straight ahead with sweat running down their faces. There's a terrifying scene in which the freedom riders, sleeping in a bus station, look outside and see dozens of ghostly eyes staring at them from underneath white hoods. There is such senseless violence, otherwise normal-looking men and women and children, committing terrible acts seemingly out of nowhere, it's impossible to fathom. Again, until you remember the stories of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Eric Harris, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, and those are only the ones off the top of my head, but I urge you to read more. Just in case you think things are better in Canada, read this too.
There are strands of hope pulled through these books, with John Lewis's civil rights fights set against the inauguration of Barack Obama - but it's hard to put down this book to read the news and still hold on to that hope.
This book is beautiful and horrible. Mostly, I think, due to Dunn's writing style, which is gorgeous and lush and always stays just on the good side of precious.
I'm not really sure what I want to say about this book, because I sort of fell into it like a black hole and couldn't really think about it until I got out of it. I didn't hate all the characters like some other reviewers. I'm pretty fond of almost all of them, actually. Even Al and Lil, who deliberately mutated their children for profit. Their travelling circus was an alternate world where diversity in body layout was celebrated and not shamed, and in that it was surprisingly nice. Of course, there was a lot of other emotional manipulation going on which was dark and terrible but some of the ways that Olympia described having to live in the world after leaving the circus really made it clear that she lived without prejudice because of how she looked. Lil's obvious love for all her children kind of broke my heart. The inside of her head must be so beautiful. She has an idyllic version of her life in which she and her husband didn't create their children in order to sell their bodies for profit, in which her son isn't a megalomaniac, in which the real world is as tolerant as the travelling circus community, in which her family is happy forever. I wish these things were true, for her.
So I obviously loved this book because I'm into grotesque imagery and mad science. Doc P and Miss Lick were some of the more interesting characters to me. Miss Lick has such an interestingly skewed worldview; while I disagree with what she's doing, I'm not sure I necessarily do within the book world. I'd love to read her notes and journals.
As great and terrible as I found this book though, I'm reading it as a person who doesn't have a disability. While I liked how their microcosm of the circus allowed Olympia to be so matter-of-fact about her appearance and the everyday life of living without limbs or joined to your sister or with a hump, there's definitely a sense of “freak show” voyeurism in reading this book.
It took a long time for me to finally review this book, because it made me think a lot about the culture of shaming that the internet has helped to foster. All my previous attempts at reviews ended up too stream-of-consciousness...which is usually how my reviews take shape but the ones for this book ended up much too long and essentially pointless after all the words were smushed together.
So I'm going to try and keep this (relatively) short by jumping off of something I've noticed in a couple of blog posts about this book - that Ronson is somehow trying to let Jonah Lehrer “off the hook”, and by extension, the idea that the punishment of public shaming fits the crime in some cases (the cases that the author deems appropriate - mob judgment, basically). While I did notice that Ronson seemed to downplay some of Lehrer's crimes, I didn't read his analysis as an attempt to get us to forgive Lehrer for what he did. His look was at the phenomenon of public shaming, for whatever reason, and I think we can agree that making a public apology in front of a live feed of negative feedback is probably nightmare fuel for many of us. No, we don't have to forgive him. We don't have to support his publication anymore or read any of his work. We can continue to bring up his plagiarism whenever someone discusses him. What I took away from Ronson's book though, is that we could stand to inject a little compassion into the way we interact online. You don't have to forgive someone to also not want to see them publicly humiliated. Something I found interesting was how many people said things like “don't be so dramatic, it'll blow over, the internet will move on” in response to backlash against racist tweets or unwise photos. It's easy to feel that way when you make one tweet on the issue and move on, but to the person who is under barrage of death threats day after day, it's harder to brush off. The internet doesn't really move on, and some of the people profiled in Ronson's book lived in fear every day that their new employer or partner or whoever would find out about their internet shame. And maybe men are able to forget just how gendered internet backlash can be. Men rarely get rape threats and, at least to me, being called a “stupid idiot” vs. a “dumb bitch” reveals quite a different level of misogyny.
I don't think that people shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. Racist comments warrant calling out, plagiarism needs to be dealt with. But like Ronson pointed out in the beginning of his book, public shaming is cruel and there's a reason we removed it from our law books. Embarrassing or attacking someone for a mistake will not help them learn why it was wrong or help them to move past it. I believe that humans in groups can lack compassion, which makes us cold and torturous. We as individuals believe that one nasty comment can't matter, but that attitude taken as a whole means that we are indifferent to lives we've helped to ruin.
Not as short as I was hoping...
tl;dr it is possible to act compassionately towards people while still holding them accountable for their actions, and we need to remember that internet harassment can ruin people's lives.
When I started reading this book and then looked at the author's other books, I was surprised to learn that I had already read something by this author: [b:Something More Than Night 17332272 Something More Than Night Ian Tregillis https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1380339039s/17332272.jpg 24035910]. I was surprised because the style and vocabulary and atmosphere are really different between these books! And obviously I never remember an author's name unless I really really like a book. But I'll remember Ian Tregillis now.This book was awesome. It's basically an alternate history sci-fi novel - what if alchemical magic existed, and The Netherlands used it to create an army of mechanical golems that they used to become the biggest colonial empire on earth? I really liked that this book started from the perspective of Jax, one of the golems (called Clakkers), because we're immediately put into this underground world of consciousness and rebellion that humans never see. As readers, it is obvious to us that the Clakkers are sentient and intelligent, so we're immediately rooting for them to throw off the shackles of slavery and give the arrogant Dutch what-for. As you read, you learn that the Clockmaker's Guild (who create the Clakkers, imbuing them with the alchemical geasa which bind them into servitude) has an official party line that Clakkers are nothing more than scaled-up wristwatches, and the people buy into because there's not any evidence to the contrary. Only there is, but no one is listening hard enough - the Clakkers speak to each other in their own morse-like language made up of the ticks and rattles of their steampunk bodies, and no one appears to be aware of this, not even The Guild...Though they must be aware of their creations' awareness. There are so many ethical layers to this situation that Tregillis either addresses outright or hints at, but nothing glaring is ignored - and more layers of religious morality and ideas of free will and the immortal soul are added, as the Dutch empire's main enemy, France, is Catholic and believes that Clakkers have souls. While none of the religious arguments ever hit home for me, considering I don't believe that immortal souls exist, the real existential crises that the characters went through were fascinating.I loved all three of the main characters. The book switches between their points of view, and I was always excited to get back to any of them. Berenice was a particularly awesome character - a woman in a position of power, who is smart, capable, and speaks her mind, but is confident to the point of hubris. I imagine her weaknesses are borne out of learning how to defend herself and her position to a royal council full of arrogant men, and I loved her story so much.On another feminist note, while sexism does exist in this world, sometimes as a plot point, Tregillis is really good at using female pronouns as much as male ones in side characters which I find are typically defaulted to male. In a group of soldiers, half are women. In a group of bystanders, half are women. I found myself paying more attention when I read a female pronoun in these cases, because I had already defaulted the nameless crowd members to male - I have been trained by media to view male as default and female as a characteristic added to default, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a female passerby scoffing or a female soldier holding a prisoner's arm or what have you. This is especially interesting to me considering that one of my main complaints about Something More Than Night was the 40's noir detective sexism of the main character.So I'm pretty excited about the next book in this series.
This book came to me at the right time. I've been in one of those ruts where I have a couple piles of books at home, holds checked out from the library, and while they're all books I want to have read none are books I really want to start reading. For some reason they're all too long or too heavy (figuratively) or too heavy (literally) or too dense or too flip. Then I picked up Mãn, and it was light and short, with tiny, vignette-like chapters and airy, poetic prose.
I liked the focus of this book, the main character Mãn, leaving Vietnam to settle in Montreal with her new husband, staying quiet and dutiful while slowly learning about boisterous and joyful affection from her new neighbors and family. Mãn fuses the quiet, subtle ways of loving she was used to, like her adoptive mother stroking her braid three times the same way Mãn does with her own children when they leave for school, with the everyday proclamations of love her neighbor and friend Julie gives to her husband and children. She celebrates fusion in her quiet way in her husband's restaurant, where she uses food to remember and help others remember their homes in Vietnam, the people and rituals and experiences they left behind, adding Vietnamese flavours to Quebecois dishes; she also hires a French pastry chef to add depth and difference to Vietnamese baking. Kim Thúy's writing is spare and beautiful; some other reviews have mentioned that they wish Mãn's relationship with her children had been fleshed out a bit more, and while I sort of agree, by the end of the book I left with the impression that Mãn loves her children very much. Part of her struggle is with methods of expressing love that differ between the culture she grew up in and the culture her children are growing up in.
Regardless of the story, and whether or not you like the choices that Mãn makes or that the author makes about what to focus on, this book is beautiful to read. Crisp and flowing, each short chapter is like a love poem.
While this sounds like a book I would be into, it just didn't grab me. All the bits in between deaths just started to bore me. I'd rather read this book like a list of deaths: in childbirth - drowning - falling off the roof - etc. I only got about a quarter of the way through before the excitement of finding out how she's going to die next was eclipsed by my lack of interest in Ursula's life, so if something really cool or interesting happens sometime in the last 75%, if someone could just tl;dr it for me that would be great!
OK so first thing, LOOOOLL at that cover! It is not the version I read but I'm keeping it because it's definitely the best cover for this book.
So before I read this book I kind of expected to dislike Werther like I dislike Holden Caulfield...self-centered and annoying. And, yeah, he was pretty self-centered and annoying, but for some reason I kind of sympathized with Werther. He suffered so! I had to feel bad for him!
But really...I didn't. I don't want to diminish the pain of heartbreak, but Werther's really got his head up his ass. He talked about the pain of losing people but never really thought about the pain that his friends and family would feel at losing him. My feeeelings are so stroooong I can't even hold down a job because my feelings are always in the way, oh well, I guess I'll just continue being rich or whatever, but it's STILL SO PAINFUL BECAUSE LOTTE. Plus there was the guy who killed a dude because the woman he loved picked the dude instead of him, and Werther was trying to defend him because he totally understood the guy. And poor Lotte, now she has to live with the fact that her friend killed himself because he thought it would make her life better. That sucks.
I enjoyed reading this book, but I thought Werther could have toned it down a little.