Dark Places

Jun25 by Anna

By Gillian Flynn

Dark Places made me feel terrible, but at the same time I read it straight through in just three days, staying up far too late into the nights.

Kinsey has previously reviewed two of Gillian Flynn’s novels, Gone Girl and Sharp Objects, and had recommended Dark Places to our friend Cara. (Kinsey in fact said that when Cara asked for summer reading recommendations, Kinsey, knowing her tastes, combed through all of her recent favorites for the most grim and depressing.) When I went to visit Cara a couple of weeks ago, I picked up her copy to just check out the first few pages. One of the first things I did when I got home was put a reserve on it at my library and then waited with literary withdrawal symptoms (lack of focus, irritability…) for my request to come in.

The book follows Libby Day, the sole survivor at the age of seven of her family’s massacre, supposedly by her older brother in a Satanist sacrifice. At the beginning of the book, she is a severely emotionally stunted adult who simply lives off of the charity donations that accumulated during the news frenzy of her family tragedy. She is nearing the end of her funds when she is contacted by a club of true crime fans who want to pay her to help them prove her brother’s innocence. She agrees solely out of financial desperation but becomes caught up in the investigation herself.

The book seesaws between Libby’s current search for the truth and first-person perspectives from both her mother and brother on the day before the massacre. I mean this as a total compliment, but as I read through it, the sense of doom and accumulating circumstances felt very real, like gathering storm clouds. (This is not a good book for Rebecca.) Like Kinsey described in Gone Girl, as a reader you have no idea how it is going to pan out, and keep wavering in each chapter: did the brother do it? Surely not, but wait, did he, though?

One night, after finally tearing myself away from the book, I was thinking about how insane all of this Satanist stuff sounds, like just completely bonkers, and all of a sudden I remembered it! For those of you who didn’t live through the 80’s, it sounds completely absurd, and it absolutely is, but it was also truly there: this very real fear that there were Satanist cults lurking in every town, just waiting to grab young children off the street and sacrifice them in a violent ritual. It is so ridiculous (and eventually discovered to be totally unfounded) in retrospect that I had completely forgotten about it until this book, and suddenly I remembered as a child, peering into graffitied tunnels (where I’m sure the local teens just went to smoke) and thinking, “that could be a lair for the Satanists.”

It really kind of boggles the mind when this kind of national hysteria occurs, and one of the most powerful aspects of this book is that it really brings home how unlucky individuals can be destroyed before we all recover our senses.

—Anna

The Outlaws of Sherwood

Jun21 by Anna

By Robin McKinley

I mentioned The Outlaws of Sherwood in my previous review as a possible non-homophobic treatment of a heroine-in-disguise romantic plot. I decided that since it had been years since I’d actually read it, though, I was a bit fuzzy on the actual treatment, so figured I’d better reread it.

Robin McKinley is a favorite author of mine, so even though this isn’t one of my favorite books of hers, it is still better than most books out there. It is also the most realistic and least romanticized version of the Robin Hood story that I’ve ever read/seen/heard. This can make it a bit slow at times—Robin is often unsure of himself and uncomfortable with his increasing renown—but the characters really shine. The outlaws of Sherwood Forest are desperate people who are simply trying to stay alive in a time of political and economic upheaval while keeping as much a moral compass as possible in their circumstances.

Unfortunately, per my previous review, the Little John storyline was not quite as extensive as I’d remembered, with the woman-in-disguise element dealt with summarily enough that it does not really address the issue of potential homophobia. On the flip side, the female characters themselves are, I believe, the most interesting and nuanced characters, so at least there is a strong feminist theme.

—Anna

Life After Life

Jun17 by Kinsey

I feel like I have a habit of recommending the hottest book of the moment, as if people don’t already know that they should go read Gone Girl or Where’d You Go, Bernadette. But sometimes the masses are correct and I am powerless to do anything but join in with the chorus. In this case, that means saying that Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is amazing and everyone should go read it.

In case you haven’t seen the many, many glowing reviews, Life After Life is about Ursula, a British girl born in the early 1900s who dies almost immediately. Except, then the story starts again and this time she lives. Over and over, the book skips ahead and then backs up again, with events playing out in different ways and alternate timelines spinning out into different futures that hinge on the smallest things. Now, this is not a time travel book–the point here is not whatever magic allows Ursula to do this, and she only has the barest sense that anything is going on. Rather, the point was wide range of possibilities that every life contains. Sometimes Ursula is alone and sad, other times she has family and friends around her. By the end of a possible timeline, things feel inevitable, but Atkinson immediately shows you how different Ursula’s life could be. And because of the way the book is structured, I felt a growing sense of hope as I read, like Ursula was slowly figuring things out and fighting an invisible battle for the best life possible for her and the people around her.

I’m afraid this makes the book sound heavier and more complicated than it is–it was really a joy to read. Ursula’s various outcomes don’t play out exactly in order, but it’s so carefully written that it is easy to follow. Major sections of the book take place during World War II, including some especially harrowing sequences during the London Blitz, but there is plenty of family drama and it doesn’t feel like a war story. It’s a long, dense book, but I was sorry when it ended because I wished I could spend more time with the characters. Just so, so good.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Intricate, contemplative, and hopeful.

You might also like: For World War II stories and complex structure, try The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. Kate Atkinson’s other books, especially the Jackson Brodie mysteries, are also great. And I want to recommend Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, although the only thing they really have in common with Life After Life is being amazingly written.

I also want to note that another book with the same title also came out this year. The Life After Life that is not getting all the attention is by Jill McCorkle. I haven’t read it yet, but Jill McCorkle is a North Carolina author who I met years ago when she came to speak at the creative writing summer camp I attended. She was fun and sweet and voluntarily chose to spend time with a bunch of dorky teenagers attending a–let me say it again–creative writing summer camp. I also really enjoyed her earlier books, especially July 7th. So if anyone’s read her Life After Life (it is a really good title), let me know how it was, because I have a soft spot for her and feel a bit bad that her book is getting overshadowed.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons

Jun14 by Anna

By Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy

Rebecca and I were discussing the other day whether it is possible to have a romantic storyline with the old trope wherein the heroine dresses as a boy without including even a hint of homophobia. You know: girl is disguised as boy, girl meets and falls in love with boy, and boy discovers the disguise when he also falls in love with girl since he just knew he could never have those kinds of feelings for another boy. The Fourth Vine writes up an excellent analysis of the inherent homophobic issues in Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders here.

I had suggested Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood as a possibility, in which Little John says that after he began to have feelings for an apparent boy, he studied her more closely to see what was attracting him since he had never before felt that way for a boy, and then saw through the disguise. It is a fine point, but an important one that he didn’t automatically know that she was a woman because of his feelings, so he wasn’t immediately repudiating homosexual attraction. Confusion instead of repulsion.

Rebecca suggested Seven Sons and Seven Daughters, in which the middle daughter in a family of seven daughters dresses as a man in order to go out and make her fortune in trade like her male cousins do. I’d never read it, but was at loose ends, book-wise, so figured I’d give it a shot. It is also quite short, since it is more Young Readers than Young Adult (I would estimate late elementary/early middle school). It does still have some of the inherent anti-gay sentiment, though more by omission in that it never occurs to the love interest that he could be romantically attracted to a boy. Either he has a strong brother-like friendship with a young man or a great romance with a young woman, and the gender of his person of interest will determine that. Considering that this book is the retelling of an eleventh-century Iraqi folktale, that is pretty good.

More interesting than the treatment of the romance-in-disguise, though, was the description of the evolution of Sharia law in the Middle East. The heroine Buran’s family is very poor and pitied by the locals because having seven daughters and no sons at all is clearly a curse from Allah. Sons are how one gains wealth and prestige, and Buran’s wealthy uncle is considered additionally blessed with his seven sons. When coming up with her idea to set out as a man, Buran thinks back over the previous centuries, when women were free to be “musicians, scholars, warriors, poets, and merchants,” and describes how the caliphs had given their power away to the conquering Persians, who brought with them the hajib, and then the Turks, who brought even stricter restrictions for women.

Even though the book itself is very clearly pro-women, the pervading anti-women sentiment in the general society can be a bit shocking to modern ears. One reason Buran is able to stay disguised as male for several years is that no one believes that women have the minds for business strategy, so if someone is successful in business, that person is unquestionably male, all appearances aside.

As evidenced by this quite long review, this 220-page, large print book for young readers gave me quite a bit of food for thought, especially in our current political discourse on the Middle East, Islam, terrorism, gender roles, definitions of traditional families, and sexual equality. Not so bad for a couple day’s reading of a folk tale and love story.

—Anna

A Book About Design by Mark Gonyea

Jun11 by Rebecca

A Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Good
by Mark Gonyea
2005

Another Book About Design: Complicated Doesn’t Make It Bad
by Mark Gonyea
2007

These are awesome! I love them both.

In theory, these are picture books about design, written and illustrated for young children. As such, they are about as long and have about as much text as you might expect from a picture book intended for to be read either by or to very young beginning readers.

In practice, they are design books that show some of the foundational concepts of design, and are a great introduction for adults as well. There is very little text, but it is all exactly on point and the illustrations do an excellent job of actually illustrating the concepts presented.

Plus, there’s a certain humor in the presentation of the concepts that I really enjoyed. I thought the books were useful, but I was also grinning the whole time I read them. I highly recommend them.

Code Name Verity

Jun5 by Kinsey

I’ve been home sick from work for a couple of days now, and while I am tired of coughing and sick of my couch, I did get a chance to finish an AMAZING book: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

This WWII story is about a young, female British intelligence agent who is captured in Occupied France while on a mission, and is writing her confession for her Gestapo captors. But telling her story also involves describing her friendship with a female pilot, so while it’s a war novel, there’s also this lovely thread of friendship running through it. I’m a sucker for WWII stories and this one is clearly impeccably researched. It’s also really cleverly put together–things are not the way they may appear on the surface of the story, which is completely appropriate for a tale told by intelligence officers. As I was reading, I had a sense that something else was going on, but was still surprised by how things came together at the end. It was difficult to read, at times, but so well constructed. After Eleanor and Park, this was the best thing I’ve read this year.

One note: my library classified this as YA, but I found it pretty disturbingly violent. Realistically violent, not gratuitously so, but still. I would call this a book for adults or maybe older teens.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Harrowing, heart-breaking, and gripping.

You might also like: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, or How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, or Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy

Stephen Hawking

Jun3 by Rebecca

I was reading a Cracked article the other day: 14 Photographs That Shatter Your Image of Famous People, and #13 was “A Young, Cool Stephen Hawking, Standing With His Bride.”

It actually looks quite a bit like the new Q from the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall.

It made me want to watch a Stephen Hawking biopic starring Ben Whishaw. (There’s already a biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch that is apparently pretty good, but after watching Cumberbatch in both BBC’s Sherlock and Star Trek Into Darkness, I have trouble seeing him as young Stephen Hawking.)

Instead, I checked out a couple of biographies from my library:

Stephen Hawking: Revolutionary Physicist
By Melissa McDaniel
1994

I got this book from the library because it was short and looked like a quick overview. Something like an Encyclopedia article: less detailed, less accurate, but somewhat more reliable than Wikipedia. I wasn’t even entirely sure if this book was supposed to be in the adult section rather than the young reader section. But, no, it was properly catalogued. It’s just that it’s kind of a book for people who don’t like reading. Although it was frequently vague and/or confusing about the order of events, it was a useful overview in preparation for a more detailed biography.

Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind
By Kitty Ferguson
2012

Alas, this book was a severe disappointment. I managed to force my way all the way through it, but I suggest avoiding it. Only in retrospect did I notice that of the five reviews on the back of the book, only one of them was for the book “Stephen Hawking”—the other four for person Stephen Hawking.

Ferguson has a serious case of hero worship for Hawking and it hamstrings this book. I imagine that one doesn’t write a biography of someone without feeling strongly for or against that person, but most biographers attempt to showcase their subjects in all their humanity. Ferguson, on the other hand, does more to obscure Hawking’s existence as a human being than she does to reveal it, presenting Hawking as a godly figure, without failing or flaw.

Ferguson’s own presence is also extremely present, as she highlights her connection to Stephen Hawking, talking about how her children went to the same school as the Hawking children did, how Hawking himself reviewed the manuscript for her first biography of him, and how she met with him at his office! I can see the stars in her eyes and little hearts floating around her head. In keeping with an overblown crush, Ferguson uses the passive voice in a pattern that I believe intentionally denies Hawking culpability in anything that Ferguson didn’t approve of and attributed to him actions and decisions that Ferguson did approve of. Hawking is presented as having perfect intuition for physics such that he requires no proof and his word should be accepted as gospel. Questionable events are either denied, skimmed over, or not mentioned at all. She presents Hawking as a messiah figure—awesome, majestic, unknowable and yet all-knowing—and Ferguson as his faithful disciple—a devoted lesser being who is brought greatness by proximity.

In addition, Ferguson attempts to explain a few actual physics issues that Hawking had worked on over the years, but learning new physics concepts requires a certain amount of trust in the teacher. After, 1, obscuring and contradicting biographical events, 2, describing students as working on incomprehensible and mysterious equations, and, 3, explaining that the Pythagorean Theorem changes when used in space-time*, Ferguson lost her credibility with me for any of her physics explanations.

By the end, this book was a pure slog to get through. I definitely do not recommend it to anyone.

In comparison, I was increasingly impressed by the earlier book which was short, to the point, and presented a factual and nuanced view of the actual person, Stephen Hawking.

* The Pythagorean Theorem is a relationship between the sides of a right triangle and the hypotenuse. It is most often summarized as A² + B² = C². It would take a thorough explanation from someone I trusted to know what they were talking about before I was willing to believe that when time is a dimension, the equation suddenly becomes A² = B² + C².

The Tightrope Walker

May29 by Anna

By Dorothy Gilman

Dorothy Gilman is most well known for her Mrs. Pollifax mystery series, but I like her stand-alone books better, and I like The Tightrope Walker best of all. Actually, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore reminded me a bit of it, and I meant to mention that in the comments of Kinsey’s review, but I forgot, so I figured I might as well reread The Tightrope Walker and review it on its own. Both books feature a central character who is sort of lost and floating through life without a purpose until they get work in an eccentric shop, and both are drawn into a mystery through an artifact within the shop. How’s that for a very specific genre of books?

Both also have a sort of sincerity in the characters and the message that is not that common in modern books. I am very definitely a Gen-Xer and sincerity mostly makes me super uncomfortable (I am way more at ease with satire and irony), but in both of these books, I find it fresh, original, and charming. The Tightrope Walker is especially impressive, I think, with how it positively addresses the newish movements in feminism, psychotherapy, and new age philosophy in the 1970s. The heroine has childhood trauma that she works through with a variety of processes, but she is so optimistic about every movement and philosophy that as a reader you see the attractions of them all, even the ones that are more scorned today (the love interest is introduced early in the book doing meditation in a portable pyramid). It still reads so modern that every time I read it, I am a bit surprised when the heroine buys some bellbottom slacks.

—Anna

Hedy’s Folly by Richard Rhodes

May26 by Rebecca

Hedy’s Folly: The life and breakthrough inventions of Hedy Lamarr the most beautiful woman in the world
by Richard Rhodes
2011

Hedy Lamarr is best known for being “the most beautiful woman in the world.” She was a film actress from 1930 through 1958, and once said, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Hedy was anything but stupid, although it’s amazing (and depressing) how many people discounted her intelligence. She broke into the film industry in Austria when she was 16, married at 19, escaped her controlling husband at 22, moved to Hollywood ahead of WWII, broke into the film industry in Hollywood to become a movie star, married (and divorced) five more times, raised three children, and died in January 2000. She also maintained a significant hobby of invention.

However, while I learned a great deal about Hedy Lamarr from reading this book, the title is somewhat misleading. It’s not so much the story of Hedy Lamarr as it is the story of one of her inventions: the frequency-hopping secret communication system.

Frequency-hopping is now known as spread-spectrum and is the technology that allows wireless communications to happen without interference or jamming. It’s one of the foundational technologies for cell phones, Bluetooth, military drones. And it was developed by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil, the composer of Ballet Mecanique, in Hollywood during WWII as a bit of civilian support of the war effort.

This book tells the story of how this technology came about, starting with background on these two famous artists. While it is an interesting perspective on the two characters, it is not a comprehensive biography of either, and it was a bit disingenuous of the author to title and illustrate the book as if it were a biography of Hedy Lamarr alone.

For what it is, though, the book is well written (with the only a few wrong notes, where the author inserts a few generic homilies), quite interesting, and not that long. I recommend it.

New Development in Publishing

May22 by Anna

I just finished Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, which Kinsey has already reviewed, so I’m just adding on that I LOVED it, and everyone should go read that, too (right after Good Omens). It was seriously one of those books where I was disappointed that it actually ended because I would have been happy to keep reading it for months.

Anyway, this is not a post about Attachments, much as I loved it. In order to get some more Rainbow Rowell after finishing the book, I immediately went on twitter and followed her, and she is currently talking about a very interesting new event in the literary world: Amazon is buying the rights to tv shows in order to try to monetize the corresponding fanfic.

It is all very new and embryonic, so no one is quite sure how it is going to work, but just that it is certainly going to change things up and it will be quite interesting to see how. Rowell and her followers bring up some very interesting points about what it means to monetize a previously free art form and to normalize a fringe culture (particularly a female-dominated creative outlet into a male-dominated media field).

Rebecca has previously given a basic overview into the world of fanfic here, and wants to think over this new development before commenting (she concurs with Rowell’s tweet, that she has many thoughts but few opinions yet on this news).

Discussing it with Rebecca, though, it occurred to me that this isn’t quite as much a sudden new development as it is being reported. Rowell brings up that every author after Stan Lee that used the character Spiderman was in essence writing fan fiction. Sherlock Holmes works continue to be published long after Conan Doyle’s death. Publishing houses have already started searching out popular fanfic authors for original works, and have even published fanfic pieces, just with changed names. So we keep moving forward at a fairly steady pace, I guess?

—Anna