The Stories You Don't Tell

Last week, I wrote about leaving out prose in strategic ways in your story. This week, I wanted to discuss writing stories you don't intend to show to the world.

Picture of underground waterfall in
Ruby Falls Cavern obtained here

One could argue everything I've written falls under this category, though I have gotten braver. I've shared pieces with my writing group, and I'm entertaining the notion of submitting something when things are less chaotic.

There are most certainly things I'll never show anyone, though. That writing I did when I was in middle and high school, typing away at all hours of the night with my parents a room away? I've read it. It's so bad, it's not even worth trying to polish it. There may well be something salvageable in that mess, but it's too painful to read. We're talking about some amateur attempts.

The notion of writing uselessly doesn't frustrate me, though. I wouldn't be the writer I am without that practice. Everyone has to start somewhere. It's because I made mistakes and recognized the imperfections that I was able to change them and do better.

Ask published authors how many books they wrote before they submitted for publication. Ask how many tries they made before getting an offer from a publisher. Ask how long they'd been writing before they were able to finish a book they were proud of.

There's no shame in writing just for yourself. You learn how to write by making mistakes, by trying new techniques, by stumbling into what works for you. Sometimes, that means doing a writing exercise that may turn into a full novel or a short story at some point, but is useless as-is.

It's not a waste, so long as you learned something.

Now, if you've been doing this for years and you feel like nothing you write is worthy of seeing the light of day, you may have a problem. You'll need a reality check. If you're truly awful and not improving, you'll want to take some writing workshops or read some books on writing for new approaches. Or, you may want to show what you've written to someone who can critique you, so you know where you're going wrong.

And, who knows? Maybe your only problem is that you lack confidence.

Review: The Woman Who Died A Lot (Friday Next #7) by Jasper Fforde

The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Near the 2/3rds point in this book, I realized that I was utterly confused about what was going on. Then I reasoned that the confusion was deliberate, that knowing what was going on was just as important as what was going to happen next. The narrative tension lay in seeking answers.

Thursday Next is recovering from an assassination attempt, which keeps her from reading herself into the BookWorld. But her native world has plenty to keep her busy. Between a scheduled smiting, the disbanding of the regulators of the timestream due to the impossibility of time travel ("Oh, NOW you tell us!" I imagine some ChronoGuard director saying), and taking on a head librarian job, Thursday's hands are full. On top of that, she's trying to track down Aornis, helping her daughter, Tuesday, lead a normal teenage life, and helping her son, Friday, deal with his new, mundane future.

The only BookWorld presence in this installment is the presence of a character she bought Landen, her husband, to help him with his book. He's called "the Wingco," and he's researching Dark Reading Matter, which is the BookWorld's version of an afterlife. He can talk to imaginary friends, which are a different kind of fictional person.

When confusing things start cropping up, it's not immediately apparent why that might be. There are synthetic Thursdays walking around, Thursday's painkiller addiction, and the mystery of Aornis Hades that could explain any of the events that don't add up. There are enough clues to figure out at least one of the subplots before Thursday does (and you're apt to, for reasons that will make sense when you read this), but the complexity of the plot keeps the ending up in the air until the last page. There's a lot going on in.

My favorite subplot is that of Thursday and Landen's relationship. They've been married for decades, and they still gross their children out with how lovey dovey they can get. It's easy to see why they're still in love. They get one another's humor, accept one another for who they are, and support one another to the best of their abilities. At one point, Thursday remarks that Landen's career as a writer likely didn't take off because he was supporting her, but she doesn't wallow in guilt over this, nor does Landen try to make her. It's a nice reversal of the woman giving up everything to support her man. And, considering everything she did in earlier books to win him and keep him, it's good to see that he's worth it. To borrow romance novel parlance, Landen is a beta male, and a lovable one, at that.

I didn't know what to expect, going into this book. I thought One of Our Thursdays Is Missing wrapped things up nicely, and I couldn't imagine what could be left. Sure, there was the Goliath corporation, and BookWorld, but I was afraid the story might get stale. This was anything but, and the next book is rather nicely set up by the end of this one, while the main conflict is resolved.

Jasper Fforde is the most creative writer I read. That can be a challenge, for some readers, but I love books that play with tropes and take things in completely unexpected directions. When a blurb says a book will "keep me guessing," this is what I expect, and never get.

If you're a fan, I think this is hit or miss. But it's certainly not the same old story.


View all my reviews

Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Libba Bray mentions in her brief "bio" at the end of the audio book that she should've written what she knows, and I found myself agreeing with her. Maybe this story wouldn't have been as compelling set in modern-day Texas, but it wouldn't have had so many problematic elements.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is about young Gemma Doyle, whose mother dies horribly on Gemma's sixteenth birthday. Gemma blames herself for her mother's death, which is why she's so mopey when she first gets to her new finishing school, Spence Academy. She's mean to the only girl who'll speak to her, then bemoans her lack of friends. She finally gains a friend in the most popular girl in school through implied blackmail, and her new friends help her figure out that she's magic, not crazy. She and her new friends go to a magic realm where her dead mother hangs out and says cryptic things and makes unhelpful proclamations about what Gemma needs to do, and Gemma creates conflict by ignoring every bit of common sense slung her way.

I didn't understand why Gemma's mother couldn't at least drop a hint about who Gemma was supposed to be looking for, or how she was supposed to do that in her current situation. When we get the full story on her mother's background, the cryptic approach makes even less sense. You'd think, in one of the scenes where they lie around looking for shapes in the clouds, she might've mentioned some vague geographic hints. Instead, she gives her dire warnings about the terrible things that might happen if she doesn't. Because if she approached it like a thinking person, there would be no plot.

The novel is set in Victorian England (after starting out in India), but the characters rarely seem to inhabit that time period. For young women growing up in 1895, their notions are awfully modern. They chafe at being owned by their future husbands and are defensive of prostitutes. I can see why Gemma's attitude might be more progressive, but hearing it from her classmates and a teacher was odd. The finishing school, Spence, also feels more like a high school with sleeping quarters than a proper Victorian academy for young ladies. Some of the details are authentic, but the tone felt all wrong.

The worst part of the book, though, is the racism. Gemma interacts with "Gypsies" who threaten to rape her, and holds her head high long enough to speak to their resident fortune teller. My mouth actually fell open at the jumble of racist stereotypes, and again in the author commentary section where the author asserts how proud she is of her research. Clearly, she didn't dig long enough to find out that Romani are real people and that the stereotypes have been used to persecute them for centuries.

There was also some mumbling about her exotically beautiful love interest, who was kind of useless in the narrative, and who apparently joins the Gypsies without question.

The story is told in first-person present tense, though Gemma sometimes reflects on things that she hasn't narrated yet. It detracted severely from the sense of immediacy.

The book isn't uniformly terrible, but the terrible elements certainly detracted from my enjoyment of the better parts of the narrative. I was interested to learn what happened next, even if I did wince every time Gemma started talking about Gypsies.

I listened to this on audio, which did enhance my enjoyment somewhat, though how much lower I might've rated this if I'd had to read it, I don't know. I also don't know if I'm going to seek out the other two books in the trilogy. This is a stand-alone story, and the conflict was wrapped up by the end, though I can see where the later stories might go. There's the possibility we may be spared Gypsy depictions in future books, and that Gemma may have learned from her experiences of the first book and will, therefore, be less of a twit. But, I have a lot of other books I could read, instead.


View all my reviews

What You Don't Say

During my hiatus, I ran across one concept several times. In a discussion on poetry, an author mentioned that a poem is about what isn't written. I ran across it on twitter in a couple of forms, and something I edited informally suffered from a need to have this lesson drilled in.

Optical illusion pic obtained here

When you're writing, what you don't say can be just as important as what you do, if not more. If you want a theme to emerge, constantly using the word or having characters say it may be the worst way to approach it. If, on the other hand, you can present a concept without ever explicitly addressing it, you've shown some level of skill. The narrative shapes itself around what isn't there.

The story I'm working on now is about a haunted house. Not that anyone calls it that. It's creepy, it's scary, locals have stories about daring each other to go near it, but it's never "the haunted house." My main character, who witnesses a number of impossible events, specifically doesn't tell her housemate, out of fear she'll scare her away and then have to be in that house all alone.

In dialogue, a character's refusal to address something, or a refusal to say something aloud, can create tension. People rarely spout their life stories and all their secrets at first meeting. There are things all of us avoid talking about, sometimes because it's too personal, sometimes because we don't know enough about it, and sometimes because it involves a secret. Get two characters talking, one of whom is keeping something from the other, and the conversation becomes a dance, as one pushes conversational boundaries and either confronts the one avoiding the subject, or accepts that the other person doesn't want to talk about it.

In my own dialogue, nothing makes me prouder than to have a character give an answer that's factually correct, but that doesn't answer the intent of the question. My dishonest characters are masters of lies by omission, rather than outright and blatant untruths. It amuses me to have my protagonists teased with something so near the truth, yet so widely misleading.

Bear in mind, this is a tricky skill to develop. You can't assume that your readers all have the same cultural context as you, and therefore that they'll fill in your gaps with the same things. Nor can you assume they'll have the reading comprehension to understand you've deliberately left something out. You'll want to call attention to it, either through repetition, by subtle cues that something's missing, or by having a character make note of the omission.

Remember, you're writing in your own world, with its own rules. If you leave something out, a reader doesn't know if you've left it out because it doesn't exist, or if it's on purpose to highlight a theme.

But, if you know how to use this skill, it's an excellent way to avoid bashing your reader over the head with telling. It's going to take some practice, but it makes for much more elegant writing, in the long run.

Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the only one of David Sedaris's books not included in the
  Ultimate David Sedaris Audio Collection, not counting Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which is newer and therefore I didn't expect it to be included. It took me a while to warm up to Sedaris's dry, dark humor, but now, I find myself a fan.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames takes the same scattershot approach as his other books. There are stories about his childhood, about his struggle with drugs, about his longtime partner, Hugh, about living in France. The last quarter of the book is about how he quit smoking by going to Japan for a couple of months, where he revisits his hopelessness to learn new languages, as seen in Me Talk Pretty One Day.

In many ways, I felt like this was the most personal of Sedaris's books. He still talks about other people, but he also discusses a lot more of what things mean to him, why he makes the observations he does, and how he collects so many tidbits about the world around him. He still strikes me as a magnet for weirdness, but it becomes clear that anyone could witness all the strange things he does, if they had his luck and his little notebook.

There is one fiction story slipped in, a satire on Princeton and Ivy League education in general. He speaks as if he went to Princeton, but frames the story as if it were during Roman rule.

The funniest story, to me, was "Town and Country," about a NY taxi driver who gives him advice he inadvertently takes. "Crybaby" was the most touching of the stories, and, while it has its funny parts, it reminded me that Sedaris writes about humanity, not just its laughable moments.


I read this on audio, which means I'm quite familiar with the author's voice, by now. If you're unfamiliar with his softer, slightly nasally voice, you may have an adjustment period. I recommend listening to some of his live tracks, where the audience will help you realize it's okay to laugh at some of his darker observations.


Overall, I liked this book. It gave me a greater appreciation for David Sedaris. I'd like to see him live when he comes to Albany.

View all my reviews

Review: Bossypants by Tina Fey

Bossypants by Tina Fey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of the novelty of a feminist comic, and because I remember Tina Fey from SNL Weekend Update. I don't know a lot about her beyond that, though, so reading this sometimes felt like going to a birthday party for someone I didn't know. Overall, it was entertaining, but a lot of the in-jokes sailed over my head.

Tina Fey starts with her upbringing, and brings us through her improv comedy at The Second City, being hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live, getting married and going on a horrific cruise, having a daughter, and making her own show, 30 Rock, based loosely around her experiences working for SNL. The narrative seemed disjointed, and it's told out of order, with very little to tie it together. I suspect if I watched 30 Rock, this book would have a lot more context, but I don't. (According to the book, that puts me in the majority, which failed to talk me into watching the show. Mentioning it contains racism and blackface also didn't persuade me I was missing anything.)

Fey goes well out of her way to explain that she's not attractive, which I suppose is true if she were comparing herself to actresses and models. She also doesn't include pictures of the awkward phases she discusses, for which I can't say I blame her, but it makes it difficult to tell if her sense of self-worth is just that distorted, or if there was something wrong with all the mirrors she owned. Maybe that's the point, that even a woman who looks like her sees only flaws in herself, but she seemed to take it as a given that the reader would agree she wasn't conventionally attractive.

I mentioned above that Tina Fey is a feminist, and she is. She even identifies as such. That doesn't mean she's immune to the trap many public feminists fall into, that of apologizing for it, softening it, blaming women for sexism's continued existence. She does present many facets of her life in a feminist light, but she also suggests that women suck it up and deal with sexism in the workplace. It was disappointing, and I hope she's reconsidered.

The book contains a chapter devoted to her Sarah Palin impersonation during the 2008 election. That makes it a bit dated, and I hope, in a few years, people reading that section have to look it up on Wikipedia. She makes some of her best points in that section, though. She points out how it's still sexism if she's a Republican, and that accusations of bullying paint Sarah Palin as far more delicate than she is. She also reproduces the text of the sketch that debuted Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, and gloats about sneaking feminism into mainstream comedy.

This book is funny. I laughed out loud while I was reading at least once a chapter. Unfortunately, it also felt like I was missing something. It wasn't as pronounced as when I read Mindy Kaling's
  Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

But the book also wasn't as funny as Jenny Lawson's   Let's Pretend This Never Happened

. But then, that's a pretty high bar, to me.

View all my reviews

Back from Hiatus

October just isn't a good month for this blog. Last year, I only updated with reviews for the entire month. I had such plans of staying on track this year, and then I found my life thrown into chaos.

Picture of stormy skies obtained here

I'm not going to discuss what happened in this space, because it's all there on my Twitter feed. Suffice it to say that extreme uncertainty about my future, both immediate and long-term, fails to inspire me to write. I had to move to a new apartment, with all the cleaning and packing that entails. Reading nearly fell off entirely, and writing was so low on my priority list that I still have handwritten pages from August I haven't typed up yet.

I do find myself entertaining notions about my stories and characters more and more, which I thought made this a good time to start writing again. Or, at least, holding myself accountable for failing to write. The one short story I wrote that I don't intend on anyone ever seeing doesn't count. It's a laughably thin allegory, and it was pure catharsis.

In the meantime, I have built up some observations, through books and movies and reviews and blog posts and conversations with other writers about the writing process and craft. So I have some fresh material.

I'm still going easy on myself, so I don't anticipate writing more than one post per week, plus reviews as I finish reading books. It's still helping me to analyze what worked and what didn't. If I have an idea I have to share right away, I'll post it, but don't hold your breath. Committing to anything is still difficult for me, and I'm already fretting I'll forget. If there's going to be a blog post on a given week, it'll be up by Monday evening, at the latest.

I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo this month, but I'm here to offer encouragement to anyone who is. If you're struggling with your word count, feel free to drop me a comment, and I'll try to help.

My goal right now is to type up what's been waiting for over two months for me to type up. Maybe I'll do more, but I'm approaching one problem at a time, for now.

Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books where the Goodreads star rating system is inaccurate. I'm rating this a four, which Goodreads tells me means I "really liked it." But honestly, this story left me unsettled and disturbed. It's beautifully written, which is why it has the impact it does, and it would be a disservice to rate it lower. But I'm not rating it where I am because it was a pleasant read.

Never Let Me Go, narrated by a woman named Kathy H., starts out in an English boarding school. All seems normal, at first. Kids are bullied for standing out, the little ones are afraid of the woods bordering the school, and students trade and collect one another's artwork, skills of creating which they're encouraged to foster. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that something is off about the school, that the Guardians running the school aren't just keeping the normal truths of a scary world we know from the children. These students were cloned for the purpose of harvesting their organs.

Even this revelation is softened by the heavy use of euphemism. They're called "donations," as if the students have a choice in the matter, and dying after giving too many organs to survive any longer is "completing." Kathy doesn't explain this in lengthy infodumps; she gives us only peeks of the horror beneath her seeming idyllic life. The entire story is revealed in a way that feels far more real than any flashbacks I've ever read before. Kathy meanders, goes off on tangents, repeats herself, and tells events out of order as they occur to her. It adds to the sense that this is something real, and that Kathy is a real person. I listened to it on audio, which did even more to contribute to the feeling I was listening to someone narrate her life story. The audio edition is good, if you like audio books. It didn't detract from the story at all.

On the surface, there isn't a lot to this story. Going by just what happens, it's about people standing or sitting around, talking. The events aren't exciting. And yet, it's fascinating, because there is a gripping story between the lines. It's about people accepting their fates, even when people hate them for their sacrifices. It's about humanity. It's about love. It's about relationships, and the destruction toxic people can wreak. There's a theme about the need for medical ethics and putting a human face on those we'd dehumanize, but I think there was a deeper message about society's survival being on the backs of those we demonize.

The worst character in the story isn't the invisible forces consigning the characters to die on an operating room table, but Ruth, Kathy's best friend. She's selfish and manipulative and toxic, and all Kathy does is try to see things from her perspective. Even after Ruth admits her role in keeping Kathy and Tommy apart, Kathy has only sympathy for her.

This is an excellent story, beautifully crafted. It's not a joyous experience to read, though.


View all my reviews

Review: An Election, by John Scalzi

An Election by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up either for free or at an extreme discount, and forgot I had, for a while. I'm glad I remembered in time to give it a read. It was a quick, thoroughly enjoyable read.

"An Election" is a short story about a city with alien inhabitants. The science fiction elements are presented as if we, the readers, are already familiar with them, and just as blandly as the fact that the man running for office has a husband. His sexuality is no obstacle at all; what almost proves his downfall is his lack of political connections and the fact that he's human in a sector dominated by aliens. David is hopelessly uninformed about his alien would-be constituents. His most visible election moment is when he literally gets between two squabbling candidates, to embarrassing effect.

The story works because it's short and sweet, and has some biting satire to impart. The relationship between David and James is cute, and follows the trope of the exasperated spouse trailing after the clueless one, rather than stereotyping them as gay men.

I did have an unsettled moment, as I realized I was rooting for the human to oust the one alien-controlled area of local government, thereby taking away their voices. I think I was supposed to feel comfortable with it because David was obviously listening to the alien residents and would give them that voice, as well, but the implications left me feeling colder toward the story than I would've if it had been clear there was another alien voice in power. David deserves the position more than the corrupt politician, the easily-manipulated alien who's running on a platform of eating people's pets, or the squabbling sisters, but does that really make him the best for the job? Maybe that's part of the point of the story, that we're often choosing the least worst option, ourselves.

If you don't have a Kindle, the story is available for free on John Scalzi's blog, Whatever. As there's another election coming up, the timing of my picking it up now seemed appropriate.


View all my reviews

Review: I'm Starved for You by Margaret Atwood

I'm Starved for You by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first of Margaret Atwood's Positron series, a Kindle Singles release available exclusively for Kindle users. I'd gone in with the assumption it was a stand-alone story, but I was happily mistaken. Happily, because I'd love to know what happens next, and I'm not ready to say goodbye to these characters yet.

The story is through the perspectives of Stan and Charmaine, a married couple who's chosen to go to prison for economic viability. A company has set up a program, called Consilience, where one lives and works in the prison for a month, then lives outside it for another month. One may well be working for slave wages and under constant surveillance, but there are three decent meals a day, a roof over one's head, and the trappings of surburbia for six months out of the year.

Despite their strict monitoring (or perhaps because of it), Charmaine begins an affair, conducted in the fuzzy times between her suburban life and her return to prison. Stan finds a note she dropped for her lover, and mistakenly assumes the man's wife left it. He fantasizes about a woman so passionate, while going through the motions with a wife he believes too innocent for such things.

The story is told in present tense, which works so well that I kept forgetting. It's not because of a sense of immediacy, though; the story takes place over the course of several months. Rather, it's the characters' living from one moment to the next, compartmentalizing, so that present tense seems the only way they'd process their lives.

The characters were excellent. Stan and Charmaine appear boring, even to one another, but they have a lot going on. Charmaine seems the least sympathetic, considering she's having an affair, and her job involves a certain kind of moral fiber, but I found her fascinating, instead. Stan is doing his best to appear the upright citizen, even fussing about the terrible care the other guy who shares his house takes of the lawn equipment, but his steps to meet "Jasmine" are sneaky and underhanded. It never crosses his mind, what's really going on under his nose, and I found his innocence almost charming.

I had no trouble believing that these characters would choose the life they did. It actually sounded like a good deal, even compared to today's economic uncertainty. The world I'm Starved for You is set in is even worse than ours, with rampant crime and housing conditions in terrible shape. It seems like it might be the same world as Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, because there's a reference to headless chickens engineered to feel less pain, which could serve as a precursor to Chickie Nobs. The facility also seems like a precursor to the compounds in which Jimmy and Glenn grew up.

What I like best about this story is that, though it's a science fiction dystopia, it's not about the setting. Rather, it's a human story that's highlighted by the setting, and that calls attention to a lot of modern problems.

The story is wrapped up at the end, but it leaves more questions and an upping of the stakes. I already picked up Choke Collar, but there's no release date yet for Moppet Shop, so I may hold off on reading it until I can get through the whole series at once.


View all my reviews

Review: Heart of Iron by Ekaterina Sedia

Heart of Iron by Ekaterina Sedia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the fourth book I've read by Ekaterina Sedia, and it's the most fast-paced. It's steampunk, set in an alternative 1800's Russia, and it borrows from the penny dreadful style one of the characters reads avidly.

The story follows Alexandra (Sasha) Trubetskaya, whose aunt shames the emperor into letting women into the university at St. Petersburg. Sasha meets a great cross-section of Victorian society there, including the English spy Florence Nightingale, Spring-Heeled Jack, and Chiang Tse, a scholar from China. Sasha's friendship with Chiang Tse leads her across Siberia on the newly built Trans-Siberian railroad, chased by British agents and the deathly cold of Russian winter.

The steampunk trappings (airships, submarines, trains before their time, machines that can play music) are mostly background, as well they should be. I'm always annoyed by narratives threads that break just to marvel at how cool the world-building is. Sasha is impressed by the modern age she lives in, but she has greater concerns.

What I really love about the setting is that it changes the focus from where we usually see Victorian or alternate-Victorian literature. This isn't set in Britain, or the western portion of Europe. This book resists British influence, and the characters are struggling against colonialism. If you can't get the notion out of your head that steampunk equals Victorian, this book may give you some cognitive dissonance. As for myself, I loved the alternate take.

I also loved the characters. Sasha has no powers or special strength to protect her, aside from an upbringing that gave her freedom to learn what she wanted. She's treading new ground, literally and figuratively, in a world not built for her. She disguises herself as a young soldier for her journey, but many of the people who help her see through her costume. They help her, anyway, because she shows strength and intelligence that earns their respect.

I liked how the romantic subplot turns out, too. There's some uncertainty, in the end, though it's clear she prefers Chiang Tse. Jack, who's good and deserving of love, doesn't win her just because he's the dashing, brave hero. Sasha wonders what's wrong with her, that she can't love him back, but she never forces it. Though Jack obviously wishes it were otherwise, neither does he. It's a far wiser and more mature outlook on love than I've come to expect in books with a romantic subplot, and I wish more books employed it.

Goodreads tells me I'd have to flip through some short story anthologies to read anything else Sedia has written to date. I may do just that.


View all my reviews

Review: The City and the City by China Miéville

The City & The City by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not the first reviewer to note that this is a police procedural in a science fiction/fantasy setting. For me, though, this was something to be overcome, rather than a feature. I don't generally like procedurals, and this book brought out all the excruciating detail that makes me impatient and want to read something else. Despite that handicap, though, I wound up liking it.

The cities in the title are Beszel (pronounced in the audio "bay-ZHEL") and Ul Qoma (pronounced in the audio as "el-coma). They exist on top of one another, and the residents are taught from an early age to ignore the evidence of the other city's existence. It's generally easy to do, but there are places, which the text calls "cross-hatches," where the borders are thin. Only one such border is a legal checkpoint where people may pass without violating the deepest law of the land, that of Breach.

Our narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a resident of Beszel who gets the puzzling case of a woman who doesn't seem to exist. A random tip from Ul Qoma points him in the right direction, but to acknowledge where the tip came from is to risk Breach. He finds a way around it, and argues her killer had to have breached, but new evidence refuting this surfaces, and he has to cross the border to continue his investigation.

The book consists of three sections, each taking part in a different version of the city. Borlu has a different partner in each section, too, and is increasingly humbled with each reassignment. His goal never shifts, though; he only becomes more and more determined to find the killer with each obstacle plopped in his path.

There's some infodumping in the text, as Borlu narrates as if he's writing a tourism guide, sometimes. The most interesting parts, I thought, were in the small tidbits he drops, rather than the droning paragraphs. He mentions, offhand, that Ul Qoma has the better technology, and that it also has worse poverty and a smaller population. It also has a trade embargo with the US, which adds a layer of politics on top of everything else.

I thought the dual cities could stand for a number of things: the Berlin wall, the ownership of Hong Kong by the British, the selective ignoring citizens of a city do with the less savory elements, or the very different lives people can lead in a city without ever crossing paths with other residents. It could also be said to symbolize the racial divide.

My biggest complaint about the book was that I was never convinced that breach was that great a crime. People are terrified of committing it, and, though Breach is mysterious and frightening, the consequences aren't that great. I couldn't figure out why it was so important that the cities not bleed into one another. That could be a theme of the book, about how we uphold values unquestioningly, and I never heard a strong case that it wasn't, so it's a weak complaint.

I listened to this book on audio. It was nice to know how to pronounce things, but the narrator had some flat inflection. I don't know if the infodumps were as boring as I thought they were, but a lot of the sections sounded like a professor droning on about things I didn't care about. The narrator was capable of inflecting, and had an intriguing English accent, so it was disappointing that I almost didn't listen past the first disc because his delivery was so off-putting. I'm glad I stuck it out, though.


View all my reviews

Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm sure my enjoyment of this book was colored by my agreement with many of its premises. In Beauty Queens, Libba Bray promotes several opinions about corporate entities, pop culture, advertising, and modern feminism that happen to line up pretty closely with my own. Perhaps the book is less enjoyable if you don't agree, but I quite liked it.

Beauty Queens starts by crash-landing the 50 contestants of the Miss Teen Dream pageant on an unknown island. The girls are initially optimistic about rescue, but The Corporation, the faceless entity behind most of American life in this book, has a hidden compound on the island they don't want anyone to know about. That means leaving the girls to die.

But the girls don't die. The ones who survive the plane crash prove remarkably resourceful. Just because they're only valued for their beauty doesn't make them useless, and as they shed their backstabbing rivalry to work toward survival, their true strength shows.

The book is told in third person omniscient, with a little time spent in each beauty queen's thoughts, as well as some of the other characters'. Normally, I dislike omniscient, but it worked for this story. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be in Adina's thoughts all book, and I fear that's who I would've been stuck with, otherwise.

Beauty Queens does suffer from some tokenism, but that's part of the point. The two POC (Indian and black) are there as tokens, and they know it. There's a deaf character, a gay one who also represents the lower class, a Jewish feminist, and a transgendered girl. (The book does an excellent job of always referring to her as a she, and the humor that arises from the situation isn't directed at her, but rather at the closed-mindedness of others.)

The girls all fit stereotypes about their states, but it's mostly by design. They refer constantly to what "the judges" expect of them, and it becomes clear that they've cultivated a safely stereotypical view to fit what the judges will expect of them. As I enjoy watching tropes get bent and broken, I loved it whenever we got a peek beyond the stereotypical exteriors of the girls.

The book contains a lot of biting satire. It covers a lot of topics, most notably: beauty pageants (especially those for young girls), reality TV, commercials, large corporations, the media, action movies (James Bond in particular), chick flicks, and Sarah Palin. It also refrained from condemning the girls for giving in to the culture they were steeped in, and from giving a blanket condemnation of things the girls liked. Mostly, this was accomplished by showing Adina wasn't right about all the things she loathed about the pageant and its trappings, and by showing she had a few things to learn, too. Adina started out thinking she was better than everyone else, but by the end, she learned she was lucky to count these girls as her friends.

Mostly, this is a book about identity, and how difficult it can be for a teenage girl to find it, among all the mixed messages inundating her daily. It's only after their secrets aren't important anymore that the girls let them go, and can finally find out who they are, besides one defining lie. It's a message I could've used as an angsty teenager, though I'm not sure I would've been ready to hear it.

I listened to this book on audio, narrated by the author. I recommend the experience. Libba Bray has a lovely voice, and she's up to the task of acting out several different voices and accents. No two characters sounded alike, though her British characters sounded Australian, to me. Also, I'd imagine the "commercial breaks" are more interesting with sound effects and music. The footnotes may take some getting used to, as they're marked with an alarm ding at the beginning and end. The audio edition also includes an interview with the author, though the questions aren't included.


View all my reviews

Review: Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Catherynne Valente book I've read, though I met her at a convention a couple of years ago. I'm gratified to learn that I enjoy her prose, because I would've been sad to only like her as a person. Deathless is everything I'd hoped
  Winter Garden

would be.

Deathless is both a fairy tale retelling of classic Russian folk tales, and a story of survival in St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad from post-WWI to the start of WWII. It follows Marya Merevna, who stumbles across the presence of magic in her ever-changing world. She's claimed as a wife by Koschei the Deathless and her worthiness is tested by Baba Yaga, another Russian mythical character. She fights his war against the czar of death, V, meanwhile changing to become a harder, colder person. When the fated Ivan shows up to save her from Koschei, she finds herself torn between them, but ultimately chooses to return home, just in time for WWII to starve her nearly to death.

I thought, at first, that this was about being changed for the worse by loving the wrong person, but the story is more subtle than that. Yes, Marya becomes a demon for love of Koschei, but she embraces her transformation, in the end. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what the message is, except perhaps that magic is dead in the world, and there is no winner in war. There's also some smaller messages about the immortality of stories, the danger of power dynamics in relationships, the roles of men and women, why communism was so dangerous, and changing fate.

The book integrates many aspects of Russian fairy tales into the story, though I'm not familiar enough with Russian mythical tradition to comment on how well it was used. Still, I always like to see so many aspects of folklore tapped.

Many other reviewers have comments on the lyricism of Valente's prose, and I have no quibble with them. This book reads like poetry. Even the dialogue is in harmony, while at the same time sounding like something each character would say. There's a lot of repetition, which further reinforces both the lyrical quality and the fairy tale nature of the book.

I do have a quibble, though, and that's the book's plot-driven nature. For most of the book, Marya is bobbing along, pulled by the plot. I didn't feel that she was invested in any of her choices, until the end. I suppose that fits with another theme, but it's unpalatable to me. I prefer to read stories where people make choices for a reason that makes sense to me.

I listened to Deathless on audio, which I can't recommend. The narrator has a thick Midwestern accent that threw me out of the narrative more than once, and her pronunciation and emphasis gave me a strong sense of dissonance. These words are better appreciated spoken aloud, but not by this narrator.

View all my reviews

Review: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of fairy tale retellings, which is one of my favorite things to read. I like modernizations and twists on well-known stories. This was not my favorite, though.

The title story is a retelling of "Bluebeard," from the young wife's perspective. It gives her a happy ending. "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" is a Beauty and the Beast story, as is the third story in the collection, "The Tiger's Bride." "Puss-in-Boots" is a naughtier take on that legend, where the title character has a female ally, and his master's great ambition is to seduce a married woman. "The Erl-King" is a legend I'm unfamiliar with, but the theme seemed rather similar to "The Bloody Chamber." "The Snow Child" is a Snow White tale involving jealousy and necrophilia. It's short, but disturbing. "The Lady of the House of Love" is mostly a Sleeping Beauty story with vampires. "The Werewolf," "The Company of Wolves," and "Wolf-Alice" are all based around the Little Red Riding Hood story.

For a lot of the stories I read, I couldn't help but wonder why Carter had bothered to rewrite them. I suppose my perception is colored by those following in her footsteps to retell the stories in a more engaging way, but a lot of the retellings seemed pointless to me. I almost didn't pick the book up again after I read "The Snow Child."

It's also fairly repetitive. Of the many, many fairy tales known by modern readers, Carter picks seven for a ten-story collection. I might have enjoyed them more if I'd read them more spread apart. All together like this, and it only increased my puzzlement about why she'd bothered.

I suppose the collection does an excellent job of showing how fairy tales can be turned and twisted to become something new. After all, one fairy tale is turned into three different stories.

On its own merits, I couldn't figure out why people so highly recommended this book to me. The style didn't engage me, and reading it felt like there was a punchline I'd missed. Someone has to break ground, I suppose, and for that, Angela Carter gets some credit. As an enjoyable read, though, I don't see myself picking up anything else she's written.


View all my reviews