R95. The Butcher's Hook by Janet Ellis

Year Published: 2016

Pages: 349

First Sentence: When my mother lay down to birth that last baby, she was so tired of everything that I thought I could have sold her shoes; surely she'd not get up and need them anymore.

Review:

The Butcher's Hook is a book that wouldn't've ended up on my radar if not for "Booktube," which I feel like I've never written about here but has been a big source of book recommendations for me over the past few years. Normally a semi-literary debut novel by an author from the UK (Janet Ellis) wouldn't have made it onto my library hold list the way this one did.

Anne Jaccob is 19 years old in London in the summer of 1763, when she meets Fub, the butcher's boy. Her mother has been plagued by miscarriage after stillbirth after miscarriage, and has just given birth to a healthy baby girl. Anne resents the baby as an interloper, especially after having lost her adored toddler brother to a fever three years before. The Jaccobs are relatively well to do but Anne's world is small. She interacts with her parents and the servants and rarely a friend of her father's. So when she lays eyes on Fub for the first time, it's love at first sight. The feeling is mutual, and Anne is soon pursuing Fub single-mindedly—finding pretexts to go to the butcher shop, arranging clandestine meetings, and so on. Then, her father introduces her to the man named Onions who he intends her to marry. Anne refuses to accept this, and takes matters into her own hands.

I'd hoped that I would be able to write about this book as a romnov but as with Sweet Days of Discipline, I just can't make that fit.

The Butcher's Hook is a fun read, but I'm not sure I'd go much further than that with my praise. I don't know much about the Georgian period of English history, and I didn't get any sense of the era from the book. That's obviously because Anne is so sheltered—she has no sense of local events, even socially. She's just stuck in her family home with no stimulation other than the occasional book. I should also say that I liked the book's dark sense of humour. The best joke is the name Onions... but it's a really good joke. 

Anne is a fun protagonist, too. She's part Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle and part the narrator from "The Yellow Wallpaper," and if you've read either of those you'll know whether you'll like her or not. Fub is amusing in his own way. The two of them barely know each other and Anne is a first person narrator so we have to read between the lines. He's clearly a bit of a dick but doesn't deserve the mayhem that is visited upon him in the book.

The Butcher's Hook almost—almost—makes me wish I'd read Pamela, mainly because I think Ellis is channeling Samuel Richardson here (based on the very little that I know about that book, published in 1740, concerning a servant girl who resists her employer's advances but then gets to marry him). But I've heard Pamela is terrible, so read this role reversal of it instead.

R94. Wild Rose by Sharon Butala

Year Published: 2015

Pages: 401

First Sentence: The first night she hardly noticed he was gone, and even though she had expected him back before the moon rose, she slept soundly.

Review:

I'm ashamed to say that I don't follow Saskatchewan publishing news very closely, and I also haven't read very many Saskatchewan authors. This is something that I'm planning to work on more once I'm finished reading The List, and here's as good a place to start as any.

Sharon Butala is a Saskatchewan author and Wild Rose is a Saskatchewan story, about a young woman, Sophie Carron Hippolyte, whose husband Pierre leaves her. The two of them have been farming a claim in the south eastern Saskatchewan prairies for three or four years, and have a young son, Charles. One day Pierre takes a trip to town to get a broken part fixed, and he doesn't come back. After a few days, when Sophie realizes that she and her son have in fact been abandoned, a man named Walter Campion shows up. Pierre has sold him the farm and the contents of their house, leaving Sophie destitute. Unwilling to contact her family back in Quebec for help, because they didn't approve of her marriage or her voyage west, Sophie ends up working for room and board at the local boarding house in the nearest town. She discovers that Pierre ran off with the teenage daughter of the new French-speaking family in town. Soon enough, Sophie begins making eyes at the sexy bachelor next door.

Interspersed with the "present" narrative of Sophie's struggles as a single mother in the very early days of European settlement of the prairies, we get glimpses of her childhood in Quebec. Having lost her parents at a very young age, she was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather was the owner of a successful general store, while her grandmother had a background in the seigneurie. This timeline mainly shows how Sophie grew up unwanted and oppressed by the Catholic Church and then fell in love/lust with the first boy who paid attention to her.

The book isn't bad, but it suffers from being unfocused. I couldn't tell if Butala was more interested in the Quebec narrative, the settler lifestyle of endless work and hardscrabble survival, or Sophie's adventures among the town gossips. I'm not sure if Butala knew what she was most interested in, either. There's one really gratuitous aside in the book (I don't think it's substantial enough to merit being called a subplot) where Sophie is abused by a family member. This seems to have no bearing on anything else in the book, from the way Sophie relates to the other members of her family to her own sexuality, and I seriously wondered why Butala chose to include it. Besides that, I generally think the book puts an interesting spin on the frontier narrative, which typically features men or families, choosing instead to focus on what a woman alone might do.

And Sophie is an interesting character. It's easy to forget just how young she is—about 24 years old. Her rash actions in the Quebec timeline are carried over into the novel's present, when she continues to act in ways that could lead to a lot of trouble. She's someone who spent all of her time since leaving her childhood home working from dawn to dusk, and so it's only when she finds herself alone that she's able to spend any time thinking about what she wants. Unsurprisingly, by the end of the novel, she's still figuring that out.

As much as I like to ridicule the bleakness of CanLit, I missed it in Wild Rose. Butala focuses on the landscape and the natural world like any good prairie writer would, but I needed more of a sense of despair. On a word by word level, I also felt like there were some strange things going on with the prose in this novel. I specifically didn't care for how inconsistently the French words Sophie uses are peppered into the narrative.

The aim of reading more Saskatchewan novels is to really explore the psyche of the place, and this book sort of accomplishes that. Settler culture in Saskatchewan is built on these narratives of hardships suffered by people who were known by others who are still alive today (I'm thinking of my grandmothers' grandmothers here). As the 21st century moves on and Canada attempts the project of reconciliation with the First Nations people, these narratives will need to evolve and acknowledge some additional complexity. Wild Rose pays lip service to this idea, but doesn't want to confront it.

R93. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

Year Published: 2013

Pages: 231

First Sentence: Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.

Review:

I've been very loosely attempting to return to my roots as I get to the end of this project, and to add in some more romnovs for my last few reviews. For some reason I was under the mistaken impression that All the Birds, Singing was a romance novel. It most definitely is not, but it is a really good book.

We're introduced to Jake Whyte when she finds one of her small flock of sheep dead, having clearly been attacked and killed by something—or someone. I say small flock because I know absolutely nothing about sheep but fifty of them doesn't seem like many compared with what was going on in The Thorn Birds (which coincidentally is one of the few other books I've read by an Australian author). Anyway, Jake is living alone with her sheep on an island somewhere in the UK. This is one of the two interwoven timelines in the novel. The second is Jake's not-so-distant past in her home country of Australia, and reveals, ever so slowly, what she's running from that has brought her to the other side of the world.

This past timeline runs in reverse, an extremely neat trick. Jake has to ditch the new friends she's made while shearing sheep, because one of them finds out she's being sought by a man who she doesn't want to find her. How'd she get started shearing sheep, a job that's clearly dominated by rough older men? Why is she on the run? Who is the man coming after her? The author of this book is Evie Wyld, and I really admire what she's done here—doling out answers step by step, and inviting new questions it hadn't seemed necessary to ask.

Jake Whyte is a fascinating character. She's someone who is clearly very in tune with the natural world around her, and she has intense empathy for animals. Hence all of the sheep all of the time, both in her past and her present. She has less care for herself and is just generally a really tragic figure. Better yet, she's surrounded by other characters who all feel like genuine, flawed human beings. Like her neighbour Don who keeps trying to convince her to spend some time down at the village pub to meet some other young farmers, but clearly has some unfinished family business of his own that he's avoiding dealing with. Or her beautiful friend Karen back in Australia, who is charming and bold but obviously just as trapped in a bad situation as Jake is.

As anyone who's read any number of my reviews can tell you, I'm pretty particular about what I consider good prose, and Wyld's is excellent. She doesn't overuse self-conscious metaphors and similes, but her writing is extremely descriptive, always latching on to sounds, smells, and temperature in concrete ways to pull you deeper into a scene. It helps, too, to really feel the change between the intense heat and arid climate of Australia in comparison with the gloom of the UK.

I do have to admit that I'm not sure I understood the ending of the novel. I hope it's not a spoiler to say that I think it's symbolic of Jake facing her past and what she's running from. But as for what is supposed to be actually happening? Not so sure. I don't care, though. The secondary ending—actually the beginning just ties things up so well that I'm sure that's all I'll remember.

R91. The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Year Published: 2018

Pages: 93

First Sentence: There is a secret buried beneath the mountain's grey skin.

Review:

I got this book (which I have to admit, is classified as a novella pretty much everywhere i've looked) as a free ebook from Tor.com. I've gotten a few of these now, but The Only Harmless Great Thing is the only one that I've really wanted to make time to read before I get to the end of The List. So here it is on my Random list.

Anyway, this book is hard to explain. It's a fantastical alternate history novel in which we follow a few different threads.

First, there are elephants. This thread concerns a sort of cultural history among elephants that I found really intriguing, and that you might as well, if you're interested in animal culture. Author Brooke Bolander does a great job with this part of the narrative, imagining a culture that is alien to our own, with different values and assumptions.

Next up is Kat, who exists in the "middle" thread of the narrative. She is a scientist, and she wants to make elephants glow as a warning against the presence of nuclear waste. In this thread we learn that elephants in this world are capable of using a trunk-based sign language and have been communicating with humans this way for many years. Kat has an interview with one of the elephant matriarchs to pitch her plan.

And finally, we have Regan and Topsy. Regan is a former Radium Girl who is now riddled with cancer and teaching an elephant to do the job she can no longer perform herself. Topsy is the elephant Regan is training, and we get glimpses of each of their perspectives.

Topsy, by the way, is also a real historical figure. The real Topsy was publicly executed at Coney Island in 1903. The reason for her execution was not, as is popularly believed, a whim of Thomas Edison's, but rather happened after she killed a spectator and earned a reputation as a "bad" elephant. This is a fascinating and bizarre story on its own without any speculative fiction trappings.

Beyond leading to my looking more into Topsy's story, this book unfortunately failed to make much of an impression on me. I do have to say that I think that's more an issue of my own personal preferences though. For the most part, I need more time with a world and its characters to become really invested, and that's why this will be the last of these short novels/novellas that I read for a while.

I will say that even though I failed to really connect with the material, this was a good book. There are good distinctions between all the different characters' narrative voices. And it definitely makes you think about human responsibility for environmental destruction. I just with that I could be more enthusiastic about the whole thing.

R90. The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman

Year Published: 1930

Pages: 125

First Sentence: There were two voices that were louder than the others.

Review:

I discovered the existence of The Shutter of Snow in a list of books at the back of Point Counter Point. I was searching for potential books by women to read for this project. Considering all the talk these days and efforts to draw attention to the issue of postpartum depression, I'm a bit surprised it's not better known.

Emily Holmes Coleman, mainly a poet, wrote her only novel about a woman, Marthe Gail, experiencing postpartum psychosis. Her delusion is that she is God. Unlike the unnamed narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper," Marthe has been committed to a mental hospital rather than isolation. The book chronicles her experience in the different wards of the hospital, interacting with the nurses and other patients. Coleman based the book on her own postpartum stay in a mental hospital. 

Once again, I don't know if I would've enjoyed this book if it were longer, but as it was I thought it was excellent. The author's poetic credentials shine through in powerful, bizarre imagery and evocative passages in which Marthe describes the sensations she's experiencing. The narration is all from her perspective but fluctuates somewhat between the first and third person, with all kinds of liberties taken with the punctuation, giving the prose a dreamlike quality. Every page is covered in beautiful, surprising sentences.

Much of the plot needs to be read between the lines. I don't think it's ever explicitly stated, but it seemed clear to me that Marthe is upper middle class at least, and that this impacts her treatment. The way her husband, who visits her faithfully, feels about all of this is also never explicitly stated but can be discerned through a close reading.  

As I mentioned before, part of Marthe's psychosis is a God delusion, which is more or less prominent as the book goes on. I found it interesting how seldom she thinks of her baby. A lot of her illness "simply" manifests as a loss of inhibition, in which she behaves in ways that are harmless but "inappropriate" for a woman of her class in the 1930s.

I'm having trouble thinking of what else to write about this book. It's good. It's about a woman going through something tough, something she probably had no reason to expect, and doing her best to survive intact. Almost all of the action takes place inside the hospital, leaving the reader mostly ignorant about what Marthe will be going home to and how different it might be from the home she left.

Since I brought it up, I should also add that postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are two different things. Both require compassion and understanding but postpartum psychosis is a serious mental health emergency requiring immediate help.

Honestly although mental health issues interest me, I haven't read many books about the topic, so I can't really situate this one among things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Girl, Interrupted, and the ever-growing list of contemporary memoirs and novels about people dealing with mental illness. However, based on its own merits I do recommend giving this book a read.

- - - - -

Alone in her room at night she stood and pressed her face against the window. It was the end of March and had turned cold again. And all the thumbs of ice began to whirl in shaking circles, keeping with the wind. I shall have snow on my glassy fingers she said, and a shutter of snow on my grave tonight.

- - - - -

R89. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Year Published: 1989 (1991 or 1993 in English, translation by Tim Parks)

Pages: 101

First Sentence: At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.

Review:

I have to admit, I'm doing that thing I said I wouldn't do after my experiment with The Hour of the Star failed so miserably, that is to say I've been reading short books in order to get to the end of The List faster. 

Fleur Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline is certainly short and sweet. When it comes to very short books I've read in translation, but that otherwise have nothing in common, it's not as good as The Hour of the Star.

The story is about an unnamed narrator, who has been at various boarding schools from a very young age. She's currently at a smallish school in the Alps. One day, a new French girl named Frédérique arrives at the school and the narrator begins a sort of romantic friendship with her. In other words, the girls spend a lot of time together and the narrator desires her friend, but their relationship never seems to become physical, and any romance between them remains unspoken.

(Speaking of romance, I was a bit torn on whether to call this a romnov or not, but the romantic element is just too minimal for me to take this review in that direction.)

The story is told with very simple sentences—I have very limited grasp of Italian via French and some lessons on the Duolingo app several years ago, but I could honestly probably take a stab at reading this in original language, based on the style in translation. As you may know, I kinda dig very simple styles, so this prose worked well for me, but I do think that overall the narrative was pretty shallow—there wasn't much to read between those simple lines. Part of the problem is that we don't get to know the main character well enough. We know her mother sends orders about her education all the way from Brazil, we know she goes for walks early every morning, we know that she hates her German roommate. And yet I always felt her as being very distant despite being a first person narrator. The book is also somewhat disjointed by its variable chronology (like any recollections of the past).

What this book does best is evoke the atmosphere of an isolated boarding school in an Alpine idyll. I went to an all-girls' school and while it wasn't nearly as homoerotic as this (we were mostly day students, which I think helps a lot with that sort of thing), there was definitely a lot of passionate emotion and unrequited feelings going around, even if they weren't necessarily romantic ones. The girls in this book are also very different from the ones I went to school with. The girls in Sweet Days of Discipline are all neglected rich girls desperate for parental affection and have been squirrelled away in boarding schools from a very young age.

Anyway, I didn't really come away from this book feeling much of anything. It's too short, too disjointed, too distant. There's a good chance another reader would have a very different impression of it though, and for that reason alone I'd suggest giving it a shot.

R88. The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

Year Published: 2014

Pages: 324

First Sentence: In the name of God, most compassionate, most merciful.

Review:

I'm sad to report that The Moor's Account is one of those books that I was sure I'd love based on its premise, but that, when I actually ended up reading it, I just didn't connect with.

Here's that excellent premise: the book is based on a man most commonly known as Estevanico, who was the first known black person to visit the Americas. He was a slave and presumably involuntarily a member of the Narváez expedition to Florida. This expedition ended up failing spectacularly, with only four survivors making it across the North American continent to safety*. These four men, with the hindrance and help of the indigenous people, walked from Florida to Culiacán in Mexico—and eventually to Mexico City—over a period of several years.

So you may, like me, anticipate an exciting and interesting story based on that premise. You would be only half right. The story Laila Lalami invents for her lead character, who narrates the story in the first person and thinks of himself as Mustafa) is pretty interesting. The strongest parts are his recounting of his past as a merchant in Azemmur. Although this is just as invented as the rest of his story, it's obvious that Lalami had many more sources to work with to make her invention more vivid in this section. She clearly took care with how she portrayed her indigenous characters, at least in terms of providing a balanced portrayal, but I think that care led to them all being very flat.

In case it's still not clear, The Moor's Account may be interesting but it certainly isn't exciting. And I don't mean exciting as in action-packed, I mean exciting as in stimulating ideas and feelings. I wanted the characters and themes to grab my attention.

Maybe the book's biggest issue is the amount of plot that takes place over such a small number of pages. The book covers many years and miles in Mustafa's life, so that it rarely has room to breathe in any particular location or develop the characters there. It also doesn't give Mustafa as much space as he needs to grow as a character. Because the book is his memoir, he's already come to the end of his journey by the time he begins telling his story. There was very little sense of how difficult it would actually be for someone to learn and adapt to culture so much different from their own, while also coming from a position of disempowerment.

Ultimately the book doesn't go deep enough into its setting and its characters. There's a lack of description of the environment that was very much to its detriment. Throughout the book I was uncertain what part of the landscape the characters were supposed to be crossing at any given time, whether there were forests or deserts, whether there were mountains or huge rivers. Any of these landscapes would likely have been alien to Mustafa, but he doesn't bother to describe them much. This would have helped to ground the book in a time and place. In fact, the one thing it does really well is to show how vibrant and dense the existing population of North America was prior to European conquest. I've always had a feeling, shared with many other members of settler culture, of this part of the world being vast and empty prior to the arrival of Europeans, but of course it wasn't. Barring the invention of a time machine, we'll never know how many people were here, but I like that Lalami envisions a continent with a flourishing and varied population.

Overall, The Moor's Account is a good book but not a great one. I'd invite you to read it and see for yourself.

* The expedition began with about 600 people. For some reason every narrative I've found is very hazy on what happened to the members of the expedition who Narváez ordered to remain on their ships and sail up the coast, but it does seem that most of these made it along with the four survivors who walked overland. Still, not a successful expedition.

R86. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Year Published: 1992

Pages: 309

First Sentence: I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne.

Review:

Wow wow wow. Bastard Out of Carolina was easily one of the most harrowing reading experiences of my entire life and also proof that The List should've actually included material from the entire 20th century.

This is the story of Bone (actual name: Ruth Anne). She's born a bastard in the days when that label still meant something, to a teen mom in South Carolina. For the first part of her life, she lives with her mother's notoriously white trash, rowdy family, the Boatwrights. Her mother marries a man long enough to end up with another daughter, Reese, before her husband is killed in a car accident. For several years, Bone and her mother and sister live with the Boatwrights again, until the man who will become her "Daddy Glen" arrives on the scene.

It's not long before Daddy Glen begins to abuse Bone, although he doesn't do anything to Reese or the girls' mother, besides being a total loser.

Dorothy Allison writes with a sort of fevered immediacy that made it hard to put this book down. I worried about Bone, and I felt at home with her as my guide to her various Boatwright aunts and uncles. I don't know much about Allison but I do know that this book is semi-autobiographical. I have to say that I really hope it's not as autobiographical as it seems like it might be.

I'm not going to get deep into the further events of the plot, just know that the content of this book includes graphic depictions of multiple kinds of abuse. The book is mostly about poverty and its fallout, but it's also extremely concerned with different kinds of relationships and how abuse and alcoholism and illness can corrupt those relationships. This is a rare book where the supporting cast feels just as vivid as the main character and I loved all of Bone's aunts and uncles through her eyes. This is why I say it's about all kinds of relationships. Because Bone's uncles are violent men, and yet her relationships with them feel safe compared to what she deals with from Daddy Glen. The Boatwright men may be violent, but they're not child abusers.

The book is also about men and women, how they need each other and use each other. What's going on between Bone's mother and Daddy Glen is a perfect example of this. Allison humanizes Daddy Glen even though he's a total snake. Bone's mother puts him through his paces before she begins a relationship with him but then becomes dependent on her daughter's abuser, not just financially but also emotionally. The push and pull comes to a shocking but not altogether unexpected climax.

Not only did I struggle to put this book down while I read it, I'm going to carry it and its ending with me for a long time. It's yet another book that really opened my eyes to the struggles and degradations of poverty and the privilege I have. 

(The way this struck me, in comparison with my ambivalence toward To the Lighthouse last week, has solidified my opinion that I just really didn't like that one very much.)

- - - - -

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

- - - - -

R85. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Year Published: 2016 

Pages: 432

First Sentence: You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.

Review:

I really admire anyone who reviews science fiction and fantasy on a regular basis. If they have to give their readers some idea of what the book is about, they also face the necessity of explaining at least a little bit of how the world works in the book. I'm not very good at this, hence my relatively few attempts to do so thus far.

However, as I've mentioned fairly frequently of late, I do want to finish this project someday, and so from here on out I'm reviewing whatever I can, regardless of how hard it is for me (or when the book was written).

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning is one of those sf novels that defy easy summarization. It's 2454 and Mycroft Canner is a Servicer, someone who has committed a crime and must pay their debt to society through actual labour, in exchange for food and a place to sleep. He/She/They (the pronouns in this book are deliberately all over the place) live in a society which has eschewed nation states, gender, religion, etc. in favour of affiliation with a handful of social structures called Hives, each with unique values and laws. Canner is involved in all of the plt threads of the novel, and there are many. One is the boy, Bridger, who appears to be able to do miracles and create life. ANother is some hard to follow political intrigue involving the various Hives vying for dominance. And so on.

Palmer is a historian (I only know this because I stumbled on her blog post comparing the two Borgia tv series before discovering that she also wrote this book). Her background shows. While some of her characters' obsession with the 18th century seems pretty arbitrary, I appreciate how well she's captured the alien perspective of people that are several centuries removed from the present time.

Mycroft Canner narrates the majority of the book, and I will say that while I enjoyed this novel immensely, the pace was... bizarre? There isn't a beginning, middle, and end so much as a long drawn out mish mash. There's no resolution to anything at the end of the book (in fact it ends with a revelation that the entire book has been building to without this reader being aware of it), which is somewhat annoying except that I already wanted to read the next book in the series anyway.

There are a lot of interesting themes being toyed with, although I think due to the lack of resolution in the novel, we only see that there's something there rather than figuring out what the novel is saying. I think basically the thesis here is that people find ways to divide and to compete regardless of what those ways are. But there's also stuff to consider about gender and its various definitions in different times and places, about labour, about criminal justice, and about family structures and children and what's natural vs healthy vs not.

I also think the character work is good, with the possible exception of Bridger, the miracle boy, who is 13 years old but written as a much younger child. I suspect that there's a reason for this, but it's not made clear in this book and I have to admit I'm not really on board with that choice. It seems writers often have the opposite problem with writing child characters much too precociously. We'll see how this plays out in the sequel.

Besides that, as I've said previously, I enjoyed this a lot and I plan to read the second book in the series, hopefully sooner rather than later. (At time of posting this review, I actually have read the second book, and have the third sitting on my book shelf ready to pick up soon.)

R84. Hild by Nicola Griffith

Year Published: 2013
Pages: 546

First Sentence: The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn't know it.

Review:
Hild is about a real person, St. Hilda of Whitby, who lived in 7th century Britain. This book is about her child- and young adulthood. I first heard about it when Nicola Griffith was a guest blogger for Charlie Stross way back when this book was first published. I added it to my list of books to read and kind of forgot what it was about, until I picked it up again a few weeks ago. At that point, I realized that the book concerns a character who also appears in Credo, albeit a very different incarnation of that character.

This book is extremely hard to write about. It reads like an exceptionally intense fantasy novel, what with the 7th century British names and the various terms that the author uses. It's also full of 7th century British political details that can be hard to follow and frankly sometimes hard to care about. It begins with Hild's father, a king of some sort, being murdered, and she, her mother, her sister, and her mother's platonic female life partner (?) and that person's son are all forced to leave the place they currently live and go to Edwin, who is King of the Angles. And then Hild, who is a very smart, observant child, becomes Edwin's seer. Eventually the Catholic church is involved, though only on the periphery. Basically throughout the book Hild and her family are struggling to maintain their importance to Edwin, otherwise they will have no means of supporting themselves and they will die.

Before I go any further with this review, be warned that this book has a sequel, which is to say that none of the plot threads you care about will end up being wrapped up.

Despite the hard to follow political machinations, Hild is full of great characters. Hild is great, her mom is great, King Edwin is great. The book is packed full of all kinds of different women, relating to one another in different ways and keenly aware of where their power (or lack thereof) lies. I really enjoyed that aspect of the novel.

I also really enjoyed Hild's strong connection to the natural world. She's the viewpoint character throughout the novel, and she is intensely interested in the flora and fauna of her world. She's especially interested in birds, not just as omens but as important features of the environment. She's out in all weather and competent at many things. Because of her position as seer, she is frequently in situations that are unfamiliar to the other women of her time, and this love of the natural world keeps her grounded and helps her to heal when she's unable to express herself to anyone else.

Overall, though, I still haven't decided how I feel about this book. There is one particular plot thread that I don't want to write about here for spoilery reasons but that I was extremely perplexed by, to the point that it kind of overshadowed everything that had come before. This plot line involves an invented character, so this was an explicit choice on Griffith's part, and I couldn't figure out why she decided to do it. If you're thinking that it's silly that something like this could ruin a novel that is much more complex —yeah, I agree! But I can't help feeling this way.

And yeah, I have to admit that I'm also disappointed that the book is not "complete," i.e. that there will be a sequel. Griffith leaves off her narrative at a point where it is not at all clear how we get from mostly-pagan teen seer Hild to wise abbess of Whitby Hild. Now I need to decide if I'm interested enough to read further, or if I'm ok with just imagining her transformation into Credo's Hilda on my own.

R82. Nexus: Ascension by Robert Boyczuk

Year Published: 2010
Pages: 382

First Sentence: The ship drove toward its hellish perihelion.

Review:
I didn't really want to write a review of this book, but my desire to finish the Two Hectobooks project sometime before I turn 45 overrode that reluctance. This book just feels truly random in a way that a lot of other books I've reviewed lately haven't, plus there's all sorts of techspeak to introduce.

Anyway, Robert Boyczuk's Nexus: Ascension is the story of the long haul crew of the Ea and their passengers who arrive back at their home planet after 30 years to discover that a plague has wiped out the entire population. The crew consists of Sav and Liis, who have both been working on long haul ships (as in multiple decade-long trips) for a long time. They live mostly a couple of weeks here and there and the rest of the time in stasis. Their passengers are Hebuiza, a Facilitator who has had various technological implants, and Josua, whose role I honestly never understood.

The crew of the Ea don't have enough supplies to stay in orbit forever, so they have to risk going down to the planet's surface. They need to find out what happened and figure out what to do next. Liis has fallen in lust with Josua during the short time they've spent together, but he's more interested in finding out what happened to the lover he left behind in stasis. When they go down to the planet, they discover that the stasis facility she'd been in malfunctioned, and she's no longer alive. This becomes the driving motivation for Josua when Hebuiza figures out that the plague was engineered and planet on the planet by Nexus.

Nexus is basically the ruling force in the galaxy in this book, a bureaucracy that controls the distribution of technology through something called the Ascension program. The planet, Bh'Haret, is a rebel planet, and the crew of the Ea believes that it was punished because of this. Nexus maintains control via people called Speakers, who are able to communicate across many light years instantly via mysterious means.

While the crew of the Ea are trying to decide what to do next, another long haul ship called the Viracosa returns to join them in orbit around Bh'Haret. After that nothing that happens is what you'd expect, but I'm leaving off my plot summary there.

This book was pretty decent. It's tightly plotted and you really need to pay attention to the small details to get the full effect. On the other hand, it can tend to drag in places. There are several scenes throughout the novel where the characters just move through spaces for what seems like an eternity with no real reason for spending so much time on those scenes. On the other hand, Boyczuk pulls off something rare, which is that there's a sense of wrongness to the characters and the world they live in which isn't about the quality of the prose or worldbuilding. It's instead about how alien their far-future world, attitudes, and actions feel. The book takes place over the course of well over a thousand years, and the only person whose mind is blown by that is the reader.

The characters are all interesting, though, I repeat, very alien. The crew of the Viracosa ends up getting pretty short shrift in the narrative unfortunately. I wished that Liis hadn't been mostly sidelined by her really intense crush on Josua, being that she's the only female character present from the beginning of the book (others show up later).

There's good stuff here too about standing up to an enemy that seems completely invincible, although there's also stuff about the folly of revenge. If the whole thing had been just a bit more exciting, I'd have no problem recommending it whole-heartedly. As it is: give it a shot if any of the preceding sounds good.

R81. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Year Published: 2009
Pages: 512

First Sentence: I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.

Review:
I went into The Little Stranger expecting something along the lines of The Haunting of Hill House. That is to say, great atmosphere, character work, spookiness, and maybe just a touch of ambiguity, but unmistakably horror. I've heard really good things about Sarah Waters for a while now, and because I can't resist a haunted house, I chose this book for my first selection written by her.

The setting is Hundreds Hall, a Georgian mansion in Warwickshire, post Second World War. Our hero is forty-something bachelor Doctor Faraday, a man who comes from a humble background and remembers Hundreds Hall and the Ayres family who live there from the great old days of the Edwardian era. When he's called to examine the Hundreds last live-in maid, a young girl named Betty, it ignites a relationship between him and the last of the Ayres family, Mrs. Ayres and her two children, Caroline and Roderick.

Roderick served in the Royal Air Force during the war before being injured in a crash, part of his face burned and serious damage done to his leg. He also suffered a serious bout of PTSD. Caroline nursed him through all of this. She's a solid young woman, ever practical and wandering around the grounds of the estate with her dog, Gyp. Although the maid doesn't need any significant medical attention, Faraday begins making weekly visits to treat Rod's leg with a sort of experimental electroshock therapy or something. In the process, he gets to know the family better.

This leads to their extending him an invitation to a party they host as a gesture to get to know a new family in the area, the Baker-Hydes, whose wealth is new and business-based, rather than hereditary. The party ends in disaster and this incident seems to be a catalyst for the sudden deterioration of Rod's mental health.

And that's as far as I'm going to go with my plot summary.

So like I said, I was hoping for something along the lines of The Haunting of Hill House with this book, which almost derailed how much I actually ended up enjoying it. Because this is not that. The two books have a lot of things in common:

• They're well written (Sarah Waters seems to inhabit the period she's writing in both in historical accuracy and somehow even her writing style).
• They're atmospheric (the image of Hundreds Hall, a formerly beautiful, imposing house, crumbling down around the ears of its last few inhabitants, is the spookiest thing in the whole book, with more than a little evocation of "The Fall of the House of Usher").
• They've got great characters (from Doctor Faraday in his bitter lonelyhearts club to Mrs Ayres' longing for the past, everyone in this book is multi-faceted and fascinating).
• They're spooky (again, back to that image of the crumbling, nearly empty house).

The Little Stranger differs in a few key ways, however. First of all, Hill House is a brisk 250 pages or so, whereas The Little Stranger clocks in at over 500. Second, much of the spooky stuff in the first part of this book is very temporal, to the point where I found myself wondering if any haunting stuff would come into it at all.

I wouldn't call this more complex than Hill House, but really it's just about different things. The central characters are driving their respective novels in different directions. The Little Stranger is about creepy things happening in an old house, but it's also about class consciousness and social status. The isolation of the characters has shades of Wuthering Heights at times, despite the fact that they all have cars. I have to admit that I don't know much about why or how so many wealthy old families in England lost the ability to afford their estates, though I'm familiar with the phenomenon. It's one you can't ignore as you read this book.

Once I got to the end of The Little Stranger and sat with it for a while and stopped thinking of it as something it's not, I realized how much I liked it for what it is. It does drag a bit in a few parts, but other than that it's an excellent novel. And it is about a haunted house, whether anything supernatural happens or not. You just have to reevaluate what "haunted" means.

R80. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

About a year ago when I actually read and reviewed this book, we were not in the middle of a global public health crisis related to a virus. I've been trying to decide how to handle posting this review given what's currently going on, and have concluded that I'm going to issue it with this warning: Earth Abides deals with an apocalyptic scenario in which the majority of the population dies due to an unknown illness. You may not want to read about it at this time, but I will leave that up to you. Trust me, it felt a bit weird just typing up this post. -M.R.

Year Published: 1949
Pages: 345

First Sentence: ... and the government of the United States of America is herewith suspended, except in the District of Columbia, as of the emergency.

Review:
Earth Abides is an early version of the modern post-apocalypse novel, written and apparently set in 1949, a time around 70 years ago which would likely feel like the post-apocalypse to many young people today accustomed to modern conveniences, social attitudes, and population size. George R. Stewart imagines a world which has been mostly emptied of people, who have all been very orderly about dying in the proper place.

Let's get a bit more detailed, though. Our point of view character is Isherwood "Ish" Williams, lest we forget that people in the past gave their kids dumb names, too. He is a hyper-competent male protagonist in the mode of the late 1940s (see also Walden Two, which the very beginning of this book really reminded me of, in terms of tone if not content). Ish finds an old hammer, gets bitten by a rattlesnake, spends several days tossing in bed with snake venom and some other illness, and emerges to find that while he was away in the mountains, everyone in America besides a small handful of people died of a mysterious illness. Ish calls this the Great Disaster.

Ish is a San Franciscan, and he goes to his parents' home on San Lupo Drive. Of course they are not there, either in corporeal or corpse form. He concludes that he will survive, and here's why he thinks so:

1. Have will to live. Want to see what will happen in world without man, and how. Geographer.
2. Always was solitary. Don't have to talk to other people.
3. Have appendix out.
4. Moderately practical, though not mechanical. Camper.
5. Did not suffer devastating experience of living through it all, seeing family, other people, die. Thus escaped worst of shock.

He decides that, as a student of geography, he will observe and explore the aftermath of the Great Disaster. He gets in a car and drives to and from New York City. When he gets home, he remains lethargic for some time, until by chance he meets Em, the woman who will jolt him into action when there is no longer any notion of civilization left on the planet.

I liked this book even though it's extremely dated in a couple of ways, and also has a few flaws that I had a hard time with. It's almost more interesting to read about an old apocalypse than a new one. These characters have been taken out of a world that is already strange to me, and then dumped into a stranger one. Stewart writes well, although his prose does occasionally take on that Walden Two info dump quality. There are some awkward constructions and descriptive passages but without reading more of his work it's hard to tell whether that's Stewart or just his protagonist, who is such a tool most of the time.

Ish is often insufferable, frankly. He's the smug young white guy who would've become one of today's old white guys if it hadn't been for a plague killing everybody. His age at the beginning of the novel—20—means that he was too young to participate as a soldier in the Second World War, and also makes him about the same age as my grampa (who is no longer with us) would've been in 1949. This personal connection of sorts actually gave me a really good reference point for the book. The other interesting thing is that it allowed me to compare shy, academic Ish with my charismatic, social grandfather, and wonder what he would've been up to in this post-apocalypse. I have no doubt that he would've survived the Great Disaster, anyway.

All that being said, let's go over my three main issues with the book (at least one of which is a bit spoilery).

• Racism! This is one of the really dated aspects of the book. Early on in Ish's cross-country drive, he meets a group of black people. These people are already living self-sufficiently and have adjusted to the new world order pretty well. Does Ish think he should stick around and learn from these people? No. He wonders whether he might set himself up as their king. There's some other gross stuff later, but this is the worst. I've chosen to imagine that these people would become a nucleus for a group that will eventually bring modern technology back to the planet, but whatever.
• Ableism! This comes in later, and involves a character named Evie who is intellectually disabled, although it's unclear whether her disability was caused by the Great Disaster or not. Every time Evie is mentioned, it's in an extremely condescending way that neglects to consider her humanity.

  Was it for this, Ish thought with bitterness, that they had cared for Evie? Ezra had found her—dirty, groveling, and unkempt, living in filth with merely enough intelligence to open cans to feed herself on whatever they contained, without cooking or preparation. It would have been better, he had often thought, if they had merely put a can of sweet ant poison within her reach somewhere. As it was, they had cared for her through so many years, and she had certainly been no pleasure to them and probably no pleasure to herself. Their caring for her had been, he thought sometimes, merely a curious lingering of an old standard of humanitarianism.

  There are other aspects to this gripe as well but I'll leave them out for being too spoilery.
• Things are way too easy! Again, this is too spoilery to get into as thoroughly as I'd like, but basically in my opinion the supply of canned food in this world defies belief. I will allow that there would almost certainly have been more canned food around in the 1940s than there is now, but even taking that into account I'm skeptical. This does end up tying in with what feels like a theme of the book, i.e. that people in the absence of civilization have no drive but that this is in tension with the fact that civilization distorts human behaviour and relationships. This is actually one of the most interesting things that the book suggests and I wondered a lot how true it might be.

There are some other things that are dated (e.g. the treatment of women in the book is... interesting) but I try not to get too picky about that sort of thing in old books, drawing the line between "hard to read" like the first two points above and "kinda what I expected."

I liked this book because I'm obviously the kind of person who is interested in where things came from, possibly moreso than where they're going, when it comes to art at least. It's interesting to read Earth Abides and see the things I've mentioned, as well as finding the seeds of everything from The Stand to The Walking Dead. If you're someone who prefers to see what the present has to say about a genre, I think that you can safely skip this.

- - - - -

But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and "sleeping on the job" a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man's dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

- - - - -

R79. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Year Published: 2014
Pages: 404

First Sentence: As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things.

Review:
I probably shouldn't even review The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet because I read the series out of order, meaning I've experienced this book rather differently than the author, Becky Chambers, intended. Therefore, a disclaimer: I have some gripes that maybe I wouldn't've had otherwise.

As for why I read the series out of order: my book club read the second book, and I liked it enough to read the first one. And then the third.

This book is about the crew of a space ship that builds paths in space between locations, so that other ships can take shortcuts. They're hired to take a long trip to the centre of the galaxy to make a path from the centre to the more populated areas. This all takes place in a distant future in which Earth is being rebuilt after an ecological disaster that led to Humans fleeing in generation ships (the Exodan Fleet) and then eventually being welcome into a United Federation of Planets type arrangement called the GC. If this sounds a bit like Star Trek it's because it is a bit like Star Trek.

Anyway, that's the premise. The plot isn't much more complicated, but the book is really more concerned with its characters than its story. This is simultaneously a strength and a weakness. A strength, because it gives the reader a real sense of this universe and the way it is populated by people of many species, with different cultures, political opinions, lifestyles, etc. It feels very grounded, despite being set in space (hur hur).

The problem is that there are a few too many of these characters and furthermore I didn't like all of them. Rosemary, classic fish out of water sf character, is our point of view character and audience surrogate. She's fine, and so are most of the others. Kizzy, one of the two ship techs, majorly got on my nerves (mainly because I think we're supposed to find her charming and I really didn't). Jenks, the comp tech, is not really well-developed other than being a little person who is in love with the ship's AI, and Corbin, algae grower (or whatever his title is) is pretty thinly sketched, too. On the other hand, some of these character issues are obviously more me issues than actual issues with the book as written.

This book is basically Star Trek TNG but more modern, less afraid of LGBTQ content, and even more warm and fuzzy. It's about people caring for each other and coming together despite differences. They are all amazingly reasonable. In fact it's really just a story about a nice ordinary group of people living and loving all over the galaxy, working hard, being good at their jobs, and so on. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It's a nice change for a genre that can be excessively doom-and-gloom lately. But I am glad that not every book is like this.

Definitely pick it up for a different flavour of sf.

R78. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Year Published: 2013
Pages: 323

First Sentence: They said I must die.

Review:
Hannah Kent's Burial Rites is one of those cases where a book and I just don't seem to connect.   I don't think there's anything wrong with this book per se, but it didn't make much of an impression on me.

The book is based on the true story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, who was the last person executed for committing a crime in Iceland in January 1830.   (I looked this up, by the way. It seems that a few other Icelanders were executed after her, but they were sent to Denmark for the actual execution.)   The population of Iceland is about 350,000 at present, and was more like 50,000 at the time when the novel is set. Because of this, the country did not have the kind of infrastructure that one might expect to find a convicted criminal in, i.e. a single jail.

The book begins several months before the execution, after an undisclosed incident at the place where she was previously imprisoned, when Agnes is brought to stay with Jón and his family, wife Margrét and two daughters whose names you don't need to know because they will have almost no bearing on the story.   Agnes has already been convicted and sentenced at the beginning of the story. She and two others (a younger man and woman) have been found guilty of murdering Natan Ketilsson, farm owner, and some other guy whose name you also don't need to know because it's not important. While she stays with the new family, she's visited by Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson, aka Tóti, who is tasked with providing her spiritual advice before her execution.   As the book goes on, we learn Agnes's side of the story of how the murders occurred, and get a glimpse into what her state of mind might have been.

So, I was a bit dismissive of the characters above because the majority of the supporting characters barely matter in this story.   The book is obviously a character study of Agnes, and that's as it should be, except that we spend a lot of time with the other characters and nothing comes of that time.   One of Jón and Margrét's daughters is pretty and distrustful of Agnes and remains so to the end. Jón himself is basically just a ghost in the background of the whole thing, and I can't remember if he has more than one or two spoken lines in the whole book.   Truth be told, I didn't even find Agnes very interesting. She's a woman who's led a difficult life but her story plays out in a way that isn't exceptionally interesting or surprising. I was curious about how she ended up becoming a murderer (or if she was a murderer at all) but it's all a bit rote.

On the other hand, this is a novel that is grounded very firmly in a specific place.   The strength of the whole thing is the details of Icelandic life: whole families and their servants living most of their lives in a single room of their homes, dung used as fuel for fires, sheep butchering, and the chill in the air on the warmest summer days.   Occasionally Kent even throws in some volcano imagery, which was always unexpected and welcome. Iceland is the kind of place, similar to the Canadian prairies, where the landscape and the climate are constant presences that shape everything about the culture and experience of the people who live in them, even more so prior to miracles such as central heat and municipal water systems.

Given that the characters are the novel's weak point, and the setting is its strength, I have to say that the prose was somewhere between the two.   Kent tells her story in a mixture of third person limited (past tense) and first person (present tense), with the latter being narration specifically by Agnes.   In this case the present tense didn't bother me as much as it usually does, because Agnes is a woman who, first of all, will not make it to the end of the story, and secondly, is very much stuck in her present, given that all she can look forward to is her death.   This is true of all of us, of course, but is a matter of much more immediacy to her. The problem is that Agnes's narration is full of the kind of metaphors and similes that always eject me right out of a book. As the book went on these either dropped off or I just got used to them, but in the early going it drove me up the wall.   For example: "I wonder where they will store me, cellar me like butter, like smoked meat. Like a corpse, waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone." This is four consecutive similes, and it's awkward.

Like I said at the beginning, I just didn't ever really connect with this book.   I read it, and there were things that I really liked, and there were things that I was indifferent about, and there were things that annoyed me.   Hopefully if you give it a chance, you'll have better luck than I did.

R77. The Last Hours by Minette Walters

Year Published: 2017
Pages: 549

First Sentence: The summer heat was sucking the life from Develish.

Review:
I've never actually heard about Minette Walters before, but you don't have to dig very deep into the information for this book to discover that her wheelhouse prior to writing The Last Hours was the psychological thriller genre. While the Black Death setting (i.e. 1348 in England) was all I really needed to know to pique my interest, finding out about the author's previous work made me even more keen to try out this novel.

Unfortunately, Walters dropped the ball on this big time. Beyond just the setting, the book is specifically about Lady Anne of Develish, who is somehow far ahead of her time in her views on medicine, sanitation, class, education, and the Church. When Lady Anne hears about the plague, she immediately quarantines herself, her daughter, and all of her serfs within her husband's demesne. As time wears on with no way of receiving accurate information from the outside world, she, her right hand man Thaddeus (handsome and brilliant bastard), and her other leading serfs need to maintain control and keep everyone safe, busy, and fed.

That's all well and good, except that the characters in this book are underdeveloped in the extreme, especially Lady Anne. It is a huge problem when the character who is driving the entire plot is roughly six centuries ahead of her time and the only reason given seems to be that she was raised in a convent. I really am willing to allow for characters who are anachronistic if those characters are well-developed, but Anne simply isn't. This throws the whole rest of the novel into jeopardy because it made it difficult to suspend my disbelief. Anne's daughter Eleanor is a very distinct character who, dare I say, may turn out to be very memorable. She is extremely hard to pin down: a teenager, extremely petulant, extremely confused, neglected by her mother. This is dealt with sort of late in the novel, but I had a hard time dealing with the worship of Lady Anne in light of the way she treats her own daughter.

The other major issue is that the book is incomplete. Though it exceeds 500 pages (too many of which are about Thaddeus and a handful of serf boys wandering around the post-apocalyptic landscape of the plague-ridden countryside), the end of the book is just where the author chopped it off to lead in to the next book in the series? trilogy? duology? I don't read tons of series these days, mind you, but typically a book should resolve at least a few of its main plot points even if the story is going to continue in future installments. The ending of The Last Hours doesn't answer much of anything other than the question of whether Thaddeus and his band of boys could make it back safely.

I don't even know if I could say there are interesting themes in this book. No one seems to learn much of anything. At the beginning, everyone is already totally convinced about Lady Anne's strange practices. I guess there's a fair amount in it about needing to stick together in the face of adversity (but that's never really at risk either) and the necessity of questioning authority and power.

Listen, this is a very fluffy, quick, easy read. I think to enjoy it you really need to be able to turn your brain off, though, and the less you know about the 14th century, the better.

R76. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Year Published: 2002
Pages: 763

First Sentence: Monkey never dies.

It's been quite a while since I last read a pure alternate history novel—I think the last one was The Difference Engine, back in 2011ish. The Years of Rice and Salt is a very different sort of thing.

This novel got on my radar several years ago, and it must've been purely because of the title, because it wasn't till recently that I discovered the premise and moved it way higher on my list.

Here's said premise: what if the Black Death killed even more of the European population than it actually did? What if Europeans had almost "gone extinct"? How would the world's other cultures have filled that void?

Well, Kim Stanley Robinson develops that idea in this book by dropping us into a selection of different eras of importance: the period immediately after the plague, and various other events hundreds of years apart, from the perspectives of scientists, soldiers, explorers, and the odd ordinary person. He achieves some character continuity by using the concept of reincarnation, giving his characters names that begin with Bs or Ks or Is to alert us to the fact that they're the same people in different incarnations.

Now, I found this book interesting, but I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped I would. The Muslims and the Chinese are the cultures most prominently featured, although we do delve into the Americas and India eventually. Africa is mostly ignored. No European/white/Christian character is ever featured as a point of view character, which I am certain was deliberate but left me curious nevertheless.

The biggest problem with this book is that it breaks the long book rule (i.e. 750 pages is too long). I found that certain sections really dragged, even with the character continuity that was supposed to keep me engaged. I feel like this may have been more effective as a series of short novels or maybe just a trilogy, rather than cramming everything into one very long novel. And before you say anything, yes, I realize that that would make it even longer.

This is my first time reading Robinson, who seems to be kind of a big deal when it comes to sf, and I will give more of his work a try. But as much as I wanted to love this novel, some of the things he did with it really didn't work for me. I found the sections in the bardo (where the characters go before being reincarnated) very tedious most of the time, and the resolution of the novel was too explicit when it came to elucidating its themes (which basically have to do with striving and living as best we can in a hostile world).

Anyway, I've struggled to even write this review to come up with what rubbed me the wrong way in this book. I don't know if I've managed to express it well at all. What it comes down to is that it's an awesome idea with a flawed execution. Alas!

R74. Credo by Melvyn Bragg

Year Published: 1996
Pages: 757

First Sentence: He went up the mountain as God had commanded and it was there that the miracle happened.

Review:
I'm a faithful devotee of the BBC Radio show In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg. My friend Anne introduced me to the show, and she also introduced me to the fact that Bragg writes fiction. We decided to read Credo together.

From just the synopsis, I was ready to categorize this as a romance novel. In 7th century Ireland, Bega (Bee-ga) is the daughter of King Cathal, and Padric is the visiting prince from Rheged, back in Britain. He has been in Cathal's household for several years, spending time with Bega, teaching her how to use a sword, and discussing the gospels. It takes Bega some time to realize it, but she and Padric are in love, which is a problem when Cathal decides to marry her off to Niall O'Neill, who is the literal worst. Many people end up dying, Bega is banished, Padric helps her to escape, and that's only the first part of this seven-part, seven hundred plus page long book.

It's what comes next that places this firmly in the historical fiction genre rather than romance. You see, after Bega and Padric escape, they don't stay together. Padric becomes a rebel leader of the British in opposition to... the Northumbrians? (My knowledge of the British Isles and their various Dark Ages invaders falters here.) Bega becomes a nun, and the book concentrates most on her and the evolution of the Christian Church in this period.

Of course you must know by now if you've read any of my other reviews about books that have religion and faith in them, I love this topic. So, while other readers may find all the God stuff tedious, I was completely on board. Full detail of arguments made at the Synod of Whitby? Yes, please. Bragg does such an excellent job of portraying the centrality of the Church in his characters' lives, their fanaticism, their totally foreign worldview. This past is a foreign country in the way that so many historical fiction novels are not. Take the comforting presence of severed heads displayed in Cathal's great hall as just one example.

That being said, Bragg occasionally gets carried away transmitting the historical research he did onto the pages of the novel. More than that, he occasionally gets carried away putting words into his characters' mouths. This is obviously his prerogative as the author, but for instance, a conversation between Christian zealot Bega and pagan priestess Reggiani feels a bit pat. The prose is workable but there are seams showing. Fortunately for me, I liked all of the other stuff enough that I was able to overlook the novel's real, noticeable problems. I wouldn't fault anyone for disagreeing, however.

Bragg does well with his characters, with the exception of the character named Chad. (I didn't realize that this was a name people had prior to the invention of the popped collar, either.) Bega is a religious fanatic who is easily swayed by authority figures. Padric is brilliant but a hothead who gradually subsumes all of his interests to his obsession with independence for the British people. Various other characters, such as the man who would become Saint Cuthbert, are drawn with a few broad but effective strokes. (Cuthbert specifically, with his unwashed body, emaciated from frequent fasting, and long, uncut fingernails, made my skin crawl whenever he appeared.) But I just couldn't figure out what Chad's deal was. He's introduced as a child basically being adopted by Bega and Padric when they arrive in Britain, and remains with Bega as a servant for many years. On occasion he's portrayed as quite dimwitted, and I wondered if Bragg intended the character to be disabled, but I wasn't able to figure that out at all.

On final thing I'll say is that the religion in this book, in particular the religious experiences and "miracles" of the characters are not at all contextualized. That's left up to the reader, which again, I didn't mind, but I can see how a different reader might. Even without context, this book makes abundantly clear what many would like to forget, which is that the early Christian Church (and uh, the modern Church too) was an apocalyptic death cult that pathologized natural human behaviour and glorified suffering and asceticism.

Again, I love this sort of thing. If you're not, you might want to give the Venerable Bede a try instead before picking up this book.

R73. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Year Published: 1968
Pages: 296

First Sentence: The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.

The Last Unicorn was published in 1968, and fourteen years later, in 1982, an animated version of the story was released. This is, in my opinion, one of the most faithful adaptations ever made. Until my book club read this book, I thought literally every woman on the planet aged 35 and under had seen and been influenced by this adaptation as much as I have, but I was mistaken! So, I won't take it as a given that everyone knows what this book is about.

Aside from the title, that is. This is indeed the story of the last unicorn, who discovers that she's the last one day when two hunters enter her forest. She quickly decides that she's going to look for the others and embarks on a search. Out in the world, people do not recognize her as a unicorn, thinking instead that she's a white mare.

The only person who recognizes the unicorn for what she is is Mommy Fortuna, an evil carnival grifter of sorts who tours the countryside with a menagerie of pathetic animals who are dressed up to look mythical by magic. Except one: Mommy Fortuna has managed to capture a real harpy. Soon enough, that one exception becomes two, as Mommy Fortuna captures the unicorn as well.

There is a magician, Schmendrick, who works for Mommy Fortuna but not with her, and he also recognizes the unicorn. Soon after her capture, as the harpy tries to escape, Schmendrick helps the unicorn to get away and the two of them return to her search.

The search is a very long process, and they encounter a few different people along the way, none of whom recognize the unicorn, until Schmendrick is, shall we say, apprehended by Captain Cully, a highwayman type who fancies himself to be more of a Robin Hood type. It's in Cully's presence that Schmendrick actually manages to work some magic for once, and when the unicorn rejoins him, they're spotted by Molly Grue, who does the cooking but doesn't have much affection left for Cully. She recognizes the unicorn for what she is as well, and the duo becomes a trio.

This all takes up the first third of the book, and I generally don't write my summaries for anything beyond that except for romnovs, but in this case, I'll mention that there are hints that the three adventurers are following to a King named Haggard and a creature called the Red Bull, who have something to do with the disappearance of the unicorns.

So, Peter S. Beagle has produced such an amazing book that I can get my lone issue with it out of the way right off the bat: the style, which is I think deliberately a bit dreamy and distant, could occasionally be a bit alienating as a result. Usually I was fully engaged in this book, but then every now and then, it would just sort of kick me out.

That's so minor though. Let's get back to that adaptation I mentioned for a moment. I watched it probably a hundred times as a little girl. It's one of those things that I'm sure has contributed to my current taste and sense of aesthetics and God knows what else. It's beautiful and dark and a bit scary, and so is this book. I think many people don't realize that the movie is based on a book. I certainly didn't, until I or my sister stumbled upon it at the library fifteen or more years ago. This was the second time I've read the book.

The movie is a more straightforward fairy tale. Like I said, it's very faithfully adapted, however, the book has much more complex themes and ideas that are close to the surface. It's extremely concerned with identity and perception, and of course with the interactions between those two things. The unicorn is portrayed very much as something other, whose concern for the other unicorns is almost completely incidental, and whose connection with Molly and Schmendrick is likewise. Which is more real, the immortal, mythical unicorn who will witness the passage of time but won't give it any notice, or the human characters who will experience sorrow, joy, and death? Or, as the setting reminds us, with its deliberate anachronisms and poorly defined borders, are they all unreal? Are you a unicorn if nobody can see that you're a unicorn? Should you call yourself a magician if you can't do magic? Will the beautiful girl love you if you write poetry for her, or would it work better to be the best hero you can be, and slay the most dragons?

The book poses so many questions and doesn't offer answers, leaving that up to the reader. So you should obviously read it as soon as you can.

- - - - -

"I'd quit show business first," she snarled. "Trudging through eternity, hauling my homemade horrors—do you think that was my dream when I was young and evil?"

- - - - -

"The eyes are perjurers, right enough," grunted the second man, who seemed to be wearing a swamp. "But do you truly trust the testimony of your ears, of your nose, of the root of your tongue? Not I, my friend. The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me."

- - - - -

"Of course I know," answered the cat, with a glinting, curling yawn. "Of course it would be simpler for me to show you. Save a lot of time and trouble."

- - - - -

R69. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Year Published: 2013
Pages: 375

First Sentence: He clenches the orange plastic pony in the pocket of his sports coat.

Review:
The Shining Girls is a novel about a time travelling serial killer. If you're anything like me, I suspect that that's all you need to know in order to decide whether you're interested in this book or not. The killer's name is Harper Curtis. He is a man who, in Chicago of the early 1930s, finds a house that is more of a House, which has the ability to transport him through time, between 1929 and 1993. In an upstairs room, he finds a collection of objects that speak very loudly to him, and a collection of names that belong to his "shining girls." These are the women he will murder over the course of the novel. One of them is Kirby Mazrachi, and she is Harper's mistake: he leaves her dying, but not dead. Kirby is a young woman whose mother is a bit unhinged, and is victimized while out for a walk with her dog.

So this is a cat and mouse game across time, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Although the premise hooked me immediately, I knew early on that the overall effect of the book would hinge very heavily on how it ended. Unfortunately, the ending comes rather abruptly and Lauren Beukes doesn't quite stick it. Her writing style is more about feeling and atmosphere than detailed description, which I'm sort of neutral on. I would've loved more flavour of each different time period, although I see why details are sparse: Harper visits only for the purpose of killing, and his victims don't get much time devoted to them.

Beukes doesn't shy away from the brutality of the attacks, and it can be very upsetting as well as effective. It's clear immediately that Harper Curtis is disgusting and brutal, and that these murders are not romantic except that he perceives them this way. I don't read a lot of crime fiction (although I watch quite a few murder shows) and the murder scenes in this novel are shocking without being gratuitous. It's especially chilling to read about how quickly a murder can happen, when I feel like so much of being a woman (and maybe just being a person in the 21st century media landscape) is about planning how you would evade a hypothetical attacker.

On the subject of the victims in this book, a bit of an aside. The women whose lives are taken are diverse in terms of their race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. What links them is that they "shine," which can be broadly interpreted to mean that they are brave and special in the way they've chosen to live their lives. Even though she doesn't spend a ton of time with the victims other than Kirby, Beukes does a really good job of sketching out who these women are, what they're offering to their communities, and I felt a genuine sense of loss at their deaths.

Anyway, this is a rare book that I think could have put an extra 100 pages to good use. The ending then might not have been so abrupt and we could have had more time spent with the victims. The other thing is that I think that this book is touching on ideas about mortality and death as the great leveller except that it doesn't go as far down that path as it might. Still worth a read.