r/suggestmeabook: I want to be stuck on a small and spooky desert island with two rich boys, two girls linked by tragedy, and two girls who are in relationships with the rich boys.
Movie rating: R
Pages: 320
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
ARC provided by NetGalley
Publication date: 1/4/2022
Contemporary psychological thriller
From the publisher: Six stunning twentysomethings are about to embark on a blissful, free-spirited journey—one filled with sun-drenched days and intoxicating nights. But as it becomes clear that the group is even more cut off from civilization than they initially thought, it starts to feel like the island itself is closing in, sending them on a dangerous spiral of discovery.
I happen to be going through a phase of revisiting The Eagles, my favorite band when I was in high school, and as soon as I sat down to write this review, “Hotel California” went through my head. For me, that song encapsulates the mood of Rachel Hawkins’s Reckless Girls (and if it’s ever adapted to film, I want credit for the song being used in the movie).
I was excited to read this new book from Hawkins, having really enjoyed The Woman Upstairs. The writing, again, is clean and clear, and Hawkins definitely knows how to create an atmosphere of increasing dread. In many ways, this is a feminist book, looking at how women find themselves defined by the relationships they’re in and how trapped they can become, economically, by those relationships.
Dreams were for people with money and time, people who didn’t feel hollowed out from watching the only person who loved them die in agony. Dreams for people who had choices, opportunities. I didn’t believe I had any of those things.
Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls
The island of Meroe serves almost as a character in the book, malevolent and always lurking in the background, which is emphasized by the periodic “postings” included in the book; these postings warn of the weirdness of the island. This Meroe Island, however, appears to be completely fictional, as the Google search only turned up an island belonging to India and an archeological site on the Nile. (A search of my public libraries databases didn’t do me any better.) The fictional history is that it was named after the 1822 wreck of the HMS Meroe, a frigate whose survivors met mysterious ends on the island, including possibly being sacrificed to feed others.
It sounds much like some of the facts of the Essex shipwreck, which inspired Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In that case, though, the three crew members who elected to stay on the island did better than those who sailed on (which is where the cannibalism happened) and the vessel in question was a whaler rather than a frigate. At any rate, there were sufficient shipwrecks on atolls with grisly overtones that Meroe Island of the book resonates as a real place.
The protagonist, Lux, is trying to figure out what she wants to do about her life. She left home with Nico, a rich boy with a boat, to travel the world, but they only got as far as Hawaii, and now she’s beginning to worry about the future. Her recent past was full of pain, and that trauma informs the story. Lux’s trauma, as well as that of other characters, is something others fail to recognize, acknowledge, or feel; and yet Lux feels like she should keep it to herself, as if she’s not entitled to support and understanding. This divide between the traumatized and those who appear to live golden lives free of trauma and want is another theme Hawkins explores.
The truth is, when your world is falling apart, you stop having ‘a thing.’ You get so focused on just making through each day that ‘interests’ or ‘ambitions’ kind of go out the window. You definitely don’t have time for passions.
Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls
It’s definitely an unsettling book, and even at the close I still felt unsettled. I’m not sure I like that feeling, but if that was what Hawkins was trying to achieve, she succeeded. The deception of beauty, from the island itself to some of the characters, is a part of what makes it unsettling—what we generally use as a way to keep ourselves safe, judging both places and people by appearances, can have fatal consequences.
And with people like that—people you meet on the road—there’s no real past and no real future. It can all be a glorious present where Eliza can be anyone she wants. She doesn’t have to tell people that her mum is in prison, doesn’t have to confess to the wasted years on wasted men and wasted opportunities.
Rachel Hawkins, Reckless Girls
Reckless Girls is more solid evidence that Rachel Hawkins is an author to watch for deliciously scary thrillers with deep themes; I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.
r/suggestmeabook: I need some comfort about death and dying, but I no longer believe in a God preached by a mainstream religion.
Movie rating: PG
Pages: 390
Publisher: Tor Books
ARC provided by NetGalley
Optimistic fantasy
From the publisher: When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead. And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.
When I was eleven and afraid of death, I read C.S. Lewis’s The Final Battle, and that gave me a positive way to look at death. Now, almost fifty years later, I no longer have the faith of that preteen, but TJ Klune’s Under the Whispering Door has given me a comforting book about death and dying which is just as much about how to live, and it is comforting even though I no longer believe in a hereafter.
There are little deaths, because that’s what grief is.
TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door
Klune’s vast gift for empathy and kindness infuses his books with an optimism that does not overlook the pains and perils of life; rather, Klune celebrates the possibilities of change and growth within clearly flawed people, and he’s fast becoming one of my favorite authors. In Under the Whispering Door, Wallace, the protagonist, starts as one of those people you love to hate: a workaholic unmotivated by even the slightest degree of concern for his fellow man (or woman)—the worst kind of lawyer. While the losses in life were insufficient for him to make any changes, the loss of control in death makes him face what kind of person he was.
All that work, all that he’d done, the life he’d built. Had it mattered? What had been the point of anything?
TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door
Don’t get me wrong; there’s no unrealistic, cloyingly sweet arc here. It’s all very grounded in the real world, and there’s a lot of pain felt by various characters that can be achingly familiar. However, it’s a hopeful world, where change is still possible, a wonderful vision in our increasingly polarized society. Part of what makes it work is Hugo, the ferryman, an empathetic soul, paired with an irascible grandfather, so they complement each other nicely, as well as the spunky Mei, who does not suffer fools.
Every time Wallace opened his mouth to say something, anything, he stopped himself. It all felt…trivial. Unimportant. And so he said nothing at all, wondering why he felt the constant need to fill the quiet.
TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door
Then there’s the view of death and dying itself. While I’m clearly not saying anything Klune propounds in his fantasy is literally true, the ideas behind them often resonate with me, providing a lot of comfort. I particularly like the view of faith, which has nothing to do with the kind of faith preached to me for years, but a more accessible faith that reflects experience.
There’s no one way to go about this, no uniform rules that can be applied to every single person like you who comes through my doors. That wouldn’t make sense because you’re not like everyone else, much like they’re not you.
TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door
And, of course, it’s just a damn good story, with love, loss, and longing (hmm—didn’t plan on alliteration, but I’m going to leave it) all written in lucid prose with a pace that made me want to keep reading even when I had other things to do.
Whoever told you that you were funny obviously lied and you should feel bad about it.
TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door
TJ Klune is a master of the optimistic fantasy, but never in ways I expect it to be, and never in contexts where I expect optimism, and it’s a gift to every reader, and Under the Whispering Door is a book I expect to reread many times.
r/suggestmeabook: I want a contemporary mash-up of Jane Eyre and Rebecca.
Movie rating: R
Pages: 398
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (an Amazon imprint)
ARC provided by NetGalley
Contemporary retelling of classic
From the publisher: Jane has lost everything: job, mother, relationship, even her home. A friend calls to offer an unusual deal―a cottage above the crashing surf of Big Sur on the estate of his employer, Evan Rochester. In return, Jane will tutor his teenage daughter. She accepts.
This is a fun read, and instead of doing the usual analysis as a retelling, I’m going to talk about why I titled it the way I did. The writing is good and fast-paced, the characters work, etc., and the plot is taken from greats. However, in retellings I have certain expectations about how the new version plays with the old one, so my gut take on how to treat this was to look more at that, as expectations play such a big part in whether we like a thing or not.
I pulled out my phone. Just one bar, which quickly spluttered out like an extinguished candle.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
I know, the book blurb says that it’s a retelling of Jane Eyre, but I kept thinking of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: the setting on the coast with an abandoned cabin was probably the part that kept me thinking of the later novel. Okay, I admit, I’ve only seen the movie[s] version of Rebecca; I have read Jane Eyre (and seen some movie versions). (More disclosure—I hesitate to say full—I only got around to reading Jane Eyre because of Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. Love that book.) That’s not a criticism; I like both Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and this modern gothic has taken bits of both and given a spin on them that works. But for fans of the former, this retelling may be a little different than they expected.
A heavy gust of fog obscured my view, and when it passed, the glimmer was gone, and there was nothing down there at all. Nothing except sand laced with gray foam and glistening rocks and the heaving sea beyond it.
Nothing could have disappeared so quickly.
Nothing except a ghost.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
Evan Rochester is hot, not really how I recall feeling after reading the description of Edward Rochester. Another detail that makes me lean toward the Rebecca feel.
I became aware once again of his intense physicality. His height. The breadth of his shoulders. The power of his musculature. The rage had faded from his face, and I no longer felt threatened. Just the opposite, I realized. I felt protected.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
However, it’s not hard to see similarities between Jane Eyre and Rebecca when you start looking, as they’re both Gothic, brooding sorts of novels. Both have the wealthy older man coupled with a naive and poor younger woman, in both the protagonist has no family, and in both, the male hero is stupidly withholding information. Both also have a current potential rival to the protagonist.
I made it back to the cottage feeling shaken and chilled. Like a first rate martini, I thought. Except, no, the best martinis were stirred, and suddenly I began to crave one.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
For me, the strongest reason for thinking of Rebecca rather than Jane Eyre is the cursory treatment of this Jane’s family and upbringing and that she doesn’t lose her mother until adulthood. The original Jane’s childhood in her forbidding orphanage explains many of her adult choices. (Okay, I’ve got to use some kind of shorthand for the original Jane Eyre character—from here on, she’s OJ.) The Jane in LIndsay Marcott’s version has only lost her mother relatively recently, and there’s nothing to indicate the same kind of hardships that OJ underwent. At the opening of the book, Marcott’s Jane has been a successful TV writer, albeit on cable, which doesn’t parallel OJ at all.
An unwelcome surprise in my cottage. My bed that I’d left rumpled was now made up military tight. My breakfast dishes were no longer in the sink. Every surface gleamed. Anunciata had been here with her Swiffer.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
And the other stance that differentiates it from Jane Eyre and makes it more like Rebecca is that Marcott’s Jane knows of the existence of Rochester’s wife from the outset, whereas OJ doesn’t learn of Bertha until Chapter 26. (Hell, OJ didn’t even know Rochester existed until after she arrived at Thornfield.) Instead, like the second Mrs. De Winter, Marcott’s Jane is obsessed with the first wife (Beatrice in this version for reasons that are probably obvious) even though she doesn’t come to Thornfield because of her marriage. Indeed, the Rebecca analogy is strengthened by the stronger presence of the Bertha analog’s brother in this retelling, more like the cousin in Rebecca, whom Jane interacts with on various occasions throughout the book.
And now, with visible calculation, Richard McAdams tried another tack with me: his eyes softened; his mouth assumed a boyish smirk.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
The strongest reason to discard the Rebecca analysis is the absence of Mrs. Danvers’ psychological manipulation. The creepy housekeeper in this one is no Danvers; she barely speaks English (if at all; I don’t now recall if she said anything much), so her ability to bewitch Jane with insinuations is limited. If anyone is being a frenemy, it’s Jane’s friend Otis, an aspiring chef, who is the one who dragged Jane out to Thorn Bluffs (the Thornfield analog) to begin with.
Thickets of ferns glistened like otherworldly plants between the trunks. Hump-backed shadows flickered in the foliage beyond.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
Regardless of the Rebecca similarities, it’s still got Jane Eyre references. The names, of course, are the most significant, as well as the general plot, although, not surprisingly, there are key differences. The character of the girl Jane comes to Thorn Bluffs to tutor is much more developed in Marcott’s story, which I found to be a plus. The brother of the Bertha character is very well done and adds depth to the story.
With the air of granting a particularly nonsensical favor, Sophia yanked the belt across her chest. Tugged her short-shorts from between the cleft of her buttocks, excavated a pack of Bubble Yum from her back pocket, and ripped it open. Crammed two pink slabs in her mouth.
Lindsay Marcott, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost
So if you’re in the mood for a Gothic romance that is reminiscent of both these classics, check out Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost.
r/suggestmeabook: I want a coming of age story of a young Black woman whose mother had very specific dreams for her.
Movie rating: PG-13
Pages: 336
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ARC provided in exchange for honest review.
Second half of the 18th Century
From the publisher: Coming of age as a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her.
Ah, mothers. Easy to blame, and often justifiably, but it’s always so much more complicated than daughters anticipate. Not always an excuse, but often an explanation. Kaitlyn Greenidge does a great job of explicating the difficulties between a mother who wants her version of “the best” for her daughter when the two have different ideas of what is the best.
There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
This relationship is explored in the context of the years just before, during, and after the American Civil War, beginning with an eleven-year-old Libertie witnessing her mother’s first failure (at least that’s she’s seen) as a respected doctor, simultaneously becoming cognizant of her mother’s role in assisting people escape from slavery. Libertie is ready to be part of the solution, and she resents anyone’s cold shoulder of her mother, even while she feels coldness radiating from her mother.
It was sad and cold to be outside her caring. It had scared me as a smaller child, made me cry.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
The evolution from idolizing daughter to a more complex adult is well conceived and believable. Libertie evaluates her mother first from how she is situated within their New York community, populated with many free Blacks, to how her mother is situated in the broader US where whites are openly contemptuous, and then Haiti, where Libertie wrestles with various ideas about what it is to be free and Black.
A daughter is a poem. A daughter is a kind of psalm. You, in the world, responding to me, is the song I made.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
Among the books I’ve read this year set in this general period with a Black protagonist, this is the first one where the political and racial situation was mostly in the background, although slavery and racism pervade and inform the actions of Libertie as well as others. What would it be like to spend your life free when the color of your skin is the same as that condemning others to slavery? How does it affect your world view when your interactions with whites begin with violence and end in contempt? The different answers to these questions of Libertie and her mother are inseparable from the quality of their relationship.
I had grown up free, only around colored people, and I could not fathom their scrutiny. And Mama chose them over me, every time.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
But instead of directly focusing on slavery and racism as in The Underground Railroad, or even on the social structure of freed blacks, as in The Conductors, Libertie focuses on intimate relationships, first of Libertie and her mother, then of Libertie and her singing friends, then of Libertie and her husband (and his family) in Haiti. Sometimes Libertie and those around her seem to exist in a parallel world where whites are not a factor, but that illusion is sometimes crushed suddenly, and other times the outside world is only visible through the cracks it leaves.
Music at night, music after dark, music finding its way to you across sweetgrass, can feel almost like magic.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
The other theme that’s explored through these relationships is that of colorism. Libertie is darker than her mother, who is light enough to pass, if she should so choose, which she emphatically does not. But Libertie’s life is shaped by that difference in shade, both in how she’s perceived by other members of the Black community as well as by whites. It’s a less heavy-handed approach than The Blacker the Berry, yet still manages to make the same basic point of the insidious effects of colorism.
Mrs. Grady had taken to calling to me, as I left for class, “Go on, Black Gal, make me proud,” and though I smiled at her each time she said it, knew she meant it with love, I could only hear a lie in her voice.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
Kaitlyn Greenidge explores all of these issues and relationships with delicately drawn, thoughtful details, and the resulting book is a pleasure to read.
For more on the significant historical event that I’m not talking about because, well, spoiler, check out this link.
A Big 4+ review of The Spanish Girl by Jules Hayes
Rachel’s Random Resources Book Tours
r/suggestmeabook: I want to follow an orphaned daughter’s search for her mother who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War.
Movie rating: PG-13
Pages: Less than 300 pages (probably)
Publisher: Orion Dash
ARC provided by Rachel’s Random Resources
Spanish Civil War Novel
From the publisher: Feisty journalist Isabella has never known the truth about her family. Escaping from a dangerous assignment in the turbulent Basque country, she finds her world turned upside down, firstly by her irresistible attraction to the mysterious Rafael, and then by a new clue to her own past. As she begins to unravel the tangled story of her identity, Isabella uncovers a story of passion, betrayal and loss that reaches back to the dark days of Spain’s civil war—when a passionate Spanish girl risked everything for her country, and for the young British rebel who captured her heart.
The first thing that comes to mind for me when the Spanish Civil War is mentioned is Pan’s Labyrinth. [1] Yes, it’s a fable, and, yes, it actually takes place after Franco won, but the protagonist’s stepfather so vividly portrayed the brutality under a veneer of sophistication, and the story’s so rife with the undercurrents of the recent conflict, that images from the movie invariably conflate with whatever else I read on the subject. So it’s not surprising that the odious stepfather was cast as the various villains in my mental production of The Spanish Girl by Jules Hayes.
I’m generally a fan of dual or multiple timelines, and this novel has one set in 1976 and one in 1937. I ultimately liked having both periods, but at about a third of the way through, I wasn’t sure why the later one was bothered with. I’m not sure if it would have been aided by cutting between the two sooner or more frequently; I just know that I didn’t particularly care if we got back to the one in 1976 after the 1937 Spanish Civil War scenes started.
Was I like the majority of Spain, insofar as I’d been remiss in not investigating what had really happened, even regarding my own parentage, about my own mother and father?
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
Part of that was because I had a hard time buying the instalove Isabella has for Rafael, perhaps because most of his alleged attractiveness is mediated by Isabella telling us about the attraction rather than making him charming and seductive through his actions. For example, he persists in calling her “querida,” a term of endearment, having only met her a scant time before and despite her request that he stop it, making me find him less than attractive. And in the beginning, that romance and a lot of re-iteration of how much Isabella wanted to know about her mom seemed to be the only justification for the framing of it. And, I suppose, the ability to weigh in on the consequences of the Franco regime, particularly during, but also after the war.
As rapidly as the suspicion had descended, it dissolved, and something shifted within me as this man I did not know spoke of a woman he did not know with such empathy.
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
So if you start the book and have that feeling, don’t give up on it after you find out the story about the Spanish Civil War; there is, eventually, some payoff for the inclusion of Isabella in the story. I still find the first timeline more compelling, but it didn’t bother me when I found out where it was going. I think, though, I would have preferred to read a more developed version of Sofia’s story than both of them.
Despite the heavy cloud cover the morning light was growing brighter but the quietness, which hung like a physical entity around Miguel’s abode, hit me as hard as the rumble of noise when I opened the balcony doors of my Barcelona flat.
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
Alternatively, I would have liked more info about the “other victims” that are vaguely referenced in the story. The White Terror killed somewhere between 160,000-200,000 and no one knows how many victims of rape, torture, and oppression. Like most countries recovering from fascist regimes, the new government is ready to move on rather than deal with the legacy of those insidious political ideologies, and Hayes does a good job of bringing that reluctance (at best) and whitewashing (more frequently) into the limelight. But the magnitude of the tragedy is harder to discern, although it’s clear that Hayes has done the research and is aware of it.
With Franco dead, the new Spanish government does not want Spain’s civil war in the global eye. They want trade, they want tourists. The don’t want the remains fo a murdered woman and her unborn child in the world media.
The plot, however, is quite good, and although I suspected most of the eventual outcome of events, I was not ever completely sure I was correct until the author revealed those plot points. One of the distractions (I’m not sure that it was meant to be a red herring) was that the “young British rebel” referred to in the publisher’s synopsis is named Jack Hayes, which you probably already realize shares a last name with the author (although I now believe it’s a pseudonym). So I kept wondering if this was a family history that Hayes the author was fictionalizing, and wondering when that was going to become obvious. It seems a petty complaint, but it took me out of the flow of the story, and I wish that the author had chosen a different name for the character.
As well as being patient, George was also kind and generous to his men. Something else a family’d knock out of him.
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
As long as I’m bringing up petty complaints, I really dislike the way the book is captioned on Amazon (US, UK, Canada, and Australia): “The Spanish Girl: A completely gripping and heartbreaking historical novel.” It’s like someone getting ready to tell you a story at work and starting it with “This is soooo funny.” It almost never is. Let me decide if it’s completely gripping and heartbreaking, and don’t tell me that in the title. If I’d come across the book that way, I’d have done a hard pass.
Barcelona caught Jack’s imagination and captured his heart—because the city itself had a heart. Beating and pulsing. It was a feeling he wanted to scoop up and put in a box.
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
This book does deal with some serious trauma, and there are moments that are sad, although I didn’t find them as heartbreaking as whoever wrote the header. I never got completely vested in the characters, and I’m not completely sure why. However, my favorite character was Jack Hayes, and it’s because my view of him was based on his actions and attitudes, not because a narrator told me how great he was, that I rather suspect my lack of connectedness with most of the characters was for the same reason I wasn’t enamored with Rafael.
I objected a little to the characterization of the villainous Severino Herrera; the word “instability”is most frequently used, and sometimes “madness.” These descriptions come up regularly before Herrera actually appeared, and I expected someone with wild mood swings or a tenuous grip on reality. Instead, we have a remorseless sadist who hungered for power. Although this can be a pathological psychiatric state, it’s not really unstable—he seems to be consistently nasty, and the frequent references to Isabella’s godfather as an effective protector would seem to indicate that Herrera is quite capable of reining in his instincts in a rational manner. If I were to characterize anyone as unstable, it would be Joe Hayes, Jack’s duplicitous brother.
He thought he could cry forever. But of course we don’t cry forever, only inside.
Jules Hayes, The Spanish Girl
Despite those criticisms, I did find it a…well, “pleasant” isn’t really the word for a book about a traumatic civil war, although I suppose it could be applied to the love story…well told mystery of a woman’s disappearance in a period that deserves far more attention than it gets.
[1] Never Hemingway. Not a fan, to say the least, but this isn’t a review of any of Papa’s works.
The Extraordinaries by T.J. Klune, narrated by Michael Lesley
r/suggestmeabook: I want a funny YA book with an uncritical depiction of police from the point of view of a very ADHD gay teen who really wants to be a superhero.
Movie rating: PG-13
Pages: 397
Listening time: 13 hours, 3 minutes
Publisher: Tor Teen
Series: The Extraordinaries
From the publisher: Nick Bell? Not extraordinary. But being the most popular fanfiction writer in the Extraordinaries fandom is a superpower, right?After a chance encounter with Shadow Star, Nova City’s mightiest hero (and Nick’s biggest crush), Nick sets out to make himself extraordinary. And he’ll do it with or without the reluctant help of Seth Gray, Nick’s best friend (and maybe the love of his life).
This book made me laugh out loud more than any I’ve read in a while, so I started recommending it left and right when I was only a quarter of the way in. The story opens with Nick’s fanfic about the IRL superhero Shadow Star in a reality that shares our fictional superheroes, and includes in-jokes comic aficionados will get (I had to ask the resident expert about those), which got me going at the outset.
What if he’d met some Luxor Avenue debutante or a burly mechanic with oil stains on his fingers? Nick read alternate universe fanfiction. Stuff like that happened all the time.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Usually characters who are oblivious to things that the text makes obvious frustrate me, but T.J. Klune manages to make Nick so endearing, it doesn’t bother me. Part of it is that I relate to his ADHD to the extent that I was (and still am) often oblivious to what’s going on around me because I hyperfocus on something to the exclusion of everything else. Nick is far more ADHD than I, and might strike some as stereotypical, but he feels very much like kids I’ve known. On the other hand, there are some of his symptoms that don’t sound much like ADHD, but I’m not going to speculate on those.
Some people were born to be an Extraordinary. Nick was born to have a million thoughts in the space of a minute that often led to splitting headaches. It wasn’t fair.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Nick’s friends are also very likable. In addition to sweet best friend Seth, Nick hangs out with Gibby, a badass I wish I could be more like, and Jazz, the constantly underestimated rich cheerleader who is more supportive than you’d think a character with that shorthand description would be. The adults are very much portrayed from a teen POV, but they are, for the most part, positive folks, with a couple of glaring exceptions.
That’s the one thing you don’t expect. How lonely it is. Because you can’t tell anyone about it. You can’t tell your family because they wouldn’t understand. You can’t tell your friends because they could become targets, and you don’t want them to get hurt.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
The pace is brisk and the tone teenage snark. The narrator is a bit over the top, but it worked for me. I could have done without the Jack Nicholson impression for ex-boyfriend Owen and his father, and two accents of BIPOC that are problematic. Granted, if you’ve got one narrator for a book and a diverse cast, there’s a potential for problematic voices no matter how well-intentioned you are; it’s a question of impact that I defer to people of that community to resolve.
Just because you did something wrong doesn’t mean that’s who you are. And even if you keep doing the wrong thing, you can still be saved. Maybe they just need someone to listen to them, to hear the storm in their heads.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Not all is fun and games. Nick’s mom is dead, and that fact hovers over his life profoundly and pervasively. Klune handles the multifaceted nature of grief deftly and that grief informs one of the intriguing themes of the book: “What are you willing to do to keep your loved ones safe?” I’m not sure how I feel about the way that question is resolved in this book, and am interested to see if Klune picks it up in the next volume, because it’s a good question to ask. The knee-jerk answer is “Anything,” but even that virtue can become a vice under the right circumstances, something that Klune alludes to, but doesn’t address as deeply as I thought he was going to with the various references to that question.
Life isn’t a comic book. Extraordinaries aren’t everything. So what if they can do things others can’t? That doesn’t make them more special than the rest of us. It doesn’t work like that.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
The more complicated question is that of the depiction of police. Nick’s dad is a cop. As I’ve mentioned before, my husband is a retired police officer. I haven’t gotten my kids to read this yet, but from my POV, the portrayal of the police dad and his relationship with his kids is spot-on. In fact, there were a couple of incidents that were very close to some we went through during my kids’ teen years.
It’s well known that regardless of what else they are, teenage boys are inherently stupid.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
There were only two quibbles I had when I finished the book as it pertained to the accuracy of depiction: first, that the police utility belt wasn’t called by its name, a Sam Browne. However, neither of my kids remembered that term, so I discarded that quibble. The second I’m going to add below the “check the price” button, as it could be a spoiler.
In the mystical time known as Before, Dad would regale him with stories of grotesque injuries he’d seen on the job, much to Mom’s dismay.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Nick’s dad, Aaron, is a gruff but good guy. The story is told from Nick’s POV, so it makes sense that as a junior in high school, he hadn’t yet developed a critical eye when looking at cops. But the events of the book portray police in an uncritical way, showing almost exclusively the admirable aspects to police work: the times that an officer will put his own life in danger to save a stranger, the dedication to the law over vigilantism, and the sense of service to the community and each other. All of these things happen, but it’s clearly not the complete picture.
‘Police officers are woefully underpaid,’ Nick agreed. ‘Especially for the line of work they’re in. It’s dangerous on a daily basis, and they should be compensated.’
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Given that Klune introduces the idea that superheroes would be more complicated than good vs. evil, it’s hard to argue he couldn’t have artfully placed the argument that the police and policing are also flawed. The book was written before George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers and published a few months after. Although Black Lives Matter predates the Floyd tragedy, the video of that event has signaled a seismic shift where uncritical portrayals of police feel a bit tone deaf.
You’ll be an officer of the law, they said. You’ll help people, they said. You’l get a Taser, they said, even if they also said you couldn’t use it whenever you wanted.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
This complicated my relationship with the book, as it brought back many familiar and rather cozy memories of a time when I felt like police were generally good, and the problems were that of a few bad apples—we always knew guys “like that.” However, there was no way to watch the protests last summer, with all the videos of attacks against protestors and journalists, and keep that point of view.
Dear ol’ Dad straps a gun to his waist and a badge to his chest and goes to work every day knowing there’s a chance he might not come home. And that’s scary.
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Perhaps the use of a Black police chief was meant to signal that this particular department in this alternate reality doesn’t have those issues; we see that in other fantasy fiction, where some social issues of our current day are not a problem so that others may be addressed. Indeed, none of the officers in the book have any issues with the fact Nick is gay, which also strikes me as improbable, so this may be a conscious decision on Klune’s part. I can also see how using a “good” police department or an unambiguously evil antagonist are useful in conducting the kinds of extended thought experiments that are part of what I find so appealing about SFF. But I’m having a hard time arguing to myself that it’s sufficient reasoning not to address the police depiction here.
‘Maybe I’ll give it a go,’ Cap said, rubbing his mustache. ‘My secretary says your dad is dreamy, whatever that means. Think I got a shot?’
T.J. Klune, The Extraordinaries
Police are alternately lionized as the keepers of justice and vilified as corrupt in popular media. But the reality is far more complicated and ugly than either extreme, and in this period of debate about what to do to untangle the racism inherent in modern policing, it feels somehow irresponsible to promote a book that does not raise these issues.
So that’s the bottom line, I suppose. I loved this book, but did so with some sense of guilt for loving it, because although the bulk of the story is Nick’s obsession with the Extraordinaries, his love life, and his ways of dealing with fear and loss, the police depiction is a key piece of the story. If you read it with a full awareness that the police depiction is as fictional as flying crimefighters in tights and capes, then you’re good to go.
Postscript: Just to make sure you don’t miss the comment from Dianthaa, I wanted to move the link she shared here: http://www.tjklunebooks.com/new-blog/2020/7/29/a-message-about-the-extraordinaries. In it, Klune talks about the portrayal of police, taking responsibility and planning to address the issue in the next installment in the series. This stance is consistent with the general sensitivity Klune has to social issues, and the timeline of the writing and publication makes sense as well. Thanks, Dianthaa!
The second, spoilery quibble: Although I can see how it makes sense from a story perspective, there would not be a hospital corridor lined with uniformed police officers waiting around when a fellow cop was injured in the line of duty. Cops will come and go all day (and night) to check on the wounded buddy, but you won’t see them filling the hallway and waiting around. Been there; done that.
From the publisher:One evening in 1924, Katharine “Kay” Swift—the restless but loyal society wife of wealthy banker James Warburg and a serious pianist who longs for recognition—attends a concert. The piece: Rhapsody in Blue. The composer: a brilliant, elusive young musical genius named George Gershwin.
Kay is transfixed, helpless to resist the magnetic pull of George’s talent, charm, and swagger. Their ten-year love affair, complicated by her conflicted loyalty to her husband and the twists and turns of her own musical career, ends only with George’s death from a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight.
Set in Jazz Age New York City, this stunning work of fiction, for fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, explores the timeless bond between two brilliant, strong-willed artists. George Gershwin left behind not just a body of work unmatched in popular musical history, but a woman who loved him with all her heart, knowing all the while that he belonged not to her, but to the world.
Mitchell James Kaplan has written a meticulously researched book, and clearly explains in the author’s note where he has deviated from historical fact, something I always appreciate from authors of historical fiction. New York City of the Jazz Age provides a roll call of celebrities, as the protagonist, Kay Swift, was married to a wealthy and prominent financier, and then became involved with George Gershwin, so she did come into contact with people whose names, unlike her own, are well known: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Duke Ellington, Adele and Fred Astaire, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Averell Harriman, Fats Waller, Langston Hughes, George Balanchine, Richard Rogers, Lorenzo Hart, Maurice Ravel, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name quite a few, but not all. However, most of these are mere cameos, and it was a pleasure to learn about Kay herself, the first woman to have composed a produced Broadway score.
Kaplan explores themes that still resonate: the problems of cultural appropriation, the relationship of the immigrant to the US, and the inequal opportunity afforded people based on race and class. Kay’s husband, Jimmy Warburg, immigrated to the US in his youth, with the advantage of money and the disadvantage of being Jewish, albeit only by culture, and he gives insight into how many Jews underestimated Hitler. Jimmy also introduces Kay to the concept of an open marriage, only to find that he likes it more for himself than for his wife.
The book succeeds on an intellectual level, but I never quite connected with the characters. All of them seem to be held at a certain distance, even Kay, from whose point of view the story is told in a close third person. Gershwin remains an enigma. It feels as though we are going through a checklist of events rather than it feeling organic, perhaps in order to make space for all the cameos. Dorothy Parker and Adele Astaire’s cameos have a little more weight, but it feels like breadth was chosen over depth in this telling. But mostly I felt like I was waiting around for George Gershwin to show up and sweep Kay away into the glittering company he surrounded himself with.
If you’d like an overview of the New York cultural milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, Rhapsody is a good introduction, competently written and thought-provoking.
Big 4+ prepublication review: The Unbroken by C.L. Clark
r/suggestmeabook: I want a political novel seared by the trauma of colonialism as experienced by a woman of color acting as an officer for the colonizing power.
Movie rating: R
Pages: 442
Publisher: Orbit
Publication date: 3/23/21
Series: Magic of the Lost
From the publisher: Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet’s edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren’t for sale.
This novel, graphically demonstrating the ills of imperialism, made me dream of the Amritsar Massacre and the Sepoy Rebellion (which was the name given back when I first learned of it) when I was in the midst of it, not sure which way the story was going. However, there are little frills of French, so I probably should have been thinking the Battle of Algiers. C.L. Clark’s book is that vivid, thrusting you into the point of view of what it would be like to feel trapped between a world that had trained you and an unremembered land that gave you birth.
The Balladrians could—would—flay them all alive. Or whip them just as near. It baffled her, how stupid the rebels were about the balance of power: The Qazali had nothing. Balladaire had numbers, equipment, supplies—they were winning, had been winning for decades.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
Touraine has long been caught between her ambition to make something of herself in the Baladaire empire for which she has fought in many wars and her desire to protect her fellow Sands, other conscripts from her homeland. That tension is pulled to its utmost when her unit is deployed to the land of their birth, Qazal. No one wants her—not the country she’s bled for or the country she was pulled from with no say in the matter. Sometimes you just want to shake her to see things as they are (and occasionally yell at her for some ill-considered choices), but you can’t help feeling for her predicament.
Always, always someone weighed her. Always, someone looked for the flaw.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
Luca, princess and arguably rightful ruler of the empire, has been sent to deal with local disturbances. I had less sympathy for her and her inability, at times, to empathize with the colony she’d come to. Having a disabled protagonist who was quite functional despite the condition that made walking or dancing difficult was a plus, but her self-centeredness was a bit off-putting. She can dress it up as beneficial to all her subjects, but those claims felt hollow.
It made Luca wonder what new boundaries people would have to make in the future—how they would call themselves, what they would find to separate themselves from each other.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
It’s an absorbing story, full of devious actors. There’s a lot of emotion packed into this, and the otherness that Touraine always feels is convincing and heart-rending. There’s also a lot of questioning about who is responsible for what and how to handle competing priorities and loyalties. There are some occasional abrupt shifts in pace, and times when the motivations for actions seem less than convincing. The mood is grim most of the time.
People like you and me have to remind people like her the difference between what’s important and what’s possible.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
As well as the unusual storyline, The Unbroken features a cast that’s overwhelmingly female. They all have their own quirks and personalities, and almost all of them are strong (and fragile) in unique ways. Lesbian relationships are taken as a matter of course, a pleasant feature in an alternate reality.
They never chose this. They’re not getting rewarded for valor with ribbons and raises. We just die, and when we die, we’re not even worth the wood to burn us.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
Another interesting feature is that Balladaire has eliminated religion, if not by law, by a pervasive social view that it is “uncivilized.” The imperial view is in opposition to the religious nature of most of the subject countries, although the religions portrayed remind me more of the contractual types of religion (do this for me and I’ll do that for you) rather than any mystical-type connection.
Magic was a tool, perhaps even a weapon. Religion was folly dressed as hope.
C.L. Clark, The Unbroken
It takes a while for any fantasy aspect (other than an imagined reality) to appear, and it may be too limited for some fantasy junkies. But I found it a compelling, if at times disturbing, read.
Big 4+ review: The Women of the Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell
r/suggestmeabook: I want a meticulously told history of the 1913 copper mine strike in Calumet, Michigan, focusing on the woman called the American Joan of Arc.
Movie rating: PG-13
Pages: 339
Publisher: Atria
Progessive era historical fiction
From the publisher: In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements has seen enough of the world to know that it’s unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the mining town of Calumet, Michigan, where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and have barely enough to put food on the table for their families.The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren’t coming home. So, when Annie decides to stand up for the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.
Mary Doria Russell has a wonderful afterward explaining what is and isn’t historically accurate, which I always appreciate, and it reinforced my initial impression that this was a meticulously researched book. On the spectrum from narrative history to costume drama, this would be more weighted toward the historical, but it doesn’t shade into feeling like docudrama as some novels can.
They believed their daddies’ wealth was ordained by God and nature, and the Supreme Court told them they were right. A man who accepted a job was servant to a master, that’s what the court said. If he took a wage, he could be treated any way that master pleased.
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
Perhaps that’s because Russell does a great job of making Anna and her main assistant, Eva, so approachable and sympathetic. Here is a woman who takes on a monumental challenge: organizing the women of a copper mining town, where everything is owned or controlled by the mining company. Yet she’s fully human and flawed—she never comes off as someone who is somehow divinely appointed or a creature unlike us mere mortals.
Women who now refuse to tell another generation of children, This is all you can hope for. This is all your labor is worth. This is all your lives are worth.
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
Given that there’s very little about Annie in her own words, Russell has done a great job of constructing a believable person from the facts known about her: she was approximately six feet tall and reached that height early, her father was also a copper miner who was originally from Slovenia, her parents died when she was young, and she married a 30-year-old man when she was 19. Extrapolating that mix in the context of the period, and she’s come up with a convincing version of this young woman.
With her big plans and her unshakable determination, her beautiful smile and her relentless bustling, young Mrs. Clements is indeed convinced that far-away shareholders can be shamed into acting decently. You have to love that, he thinks. She hasn’t been beaten down yet. She’s not cynical.
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
There are many characters that are only part of the story for short sections, but are memorable, particularly the governor and the judge he sends to try to settle the strike. Their interactions were amusing and showed that not all of the elite was on the side of the corporation. Another is the photographer, Michael Sweeney, who is fictional.
He is deeply suspicious of those who are hostile to compromise of any kind. Given his own conversation with James MacNaughton, he is inclined to be sympathetic toward the frustration such a man’s employees might feel.
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
And because of him and the role of photography in the book, I decided to look through historical photos to put in the banner and kind of lost my mind. Many aren’t dated, but are from the general period. Any photo specifically strike-oriented is from the 1913 strike. The photo with the women in black? The one carrying the big American flag is Annie. The office and portrait? MacNaughton. If you want to see more relevant photos, the best source I found was the Copper Country Historical Images Database from Michigan Tech.
The character that gave me some pause was the CEO of the copper company, James MacNaughton. He’s just completely irredeemable. However, in the author’s note, Russell does a good job of explaining that he really was that guy. His attitudes about his immigrant workers and his complete indignation about their needs, though, I’ve heard echoed by smallish business owners (in the low seven figures) about other racial groups—or millennials, so those guys are still around.
The Finns are the worst. And the Slavs! Croats and Slovenians. Anarchists, half of them. Socialists. Europe is gleefully exporting its wretched refuse to America. How long, he wonders, before the entire American workforce is undermined and replaced by nihilists and hoodlums?
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
From time to time, it does start sounding like an apologetic for the strikers, which was fine with me because I found all of it stirring and inspirational. However, my personal belief is that more people should realize just how much exploitation of workers there was (and still is) without government or union intervention, so it might be good for those who tend to discount the value of either to offset unbridled capitalism. There’s probably more danger of people thinking that’s all in the past. The efforts to discredit strikers and other people protesting oppression are still in use today.
Capital starts things, but labor brings them into the world. Our men wouldn’t have jobs without the capitalists but without labor, capital is stillborn, dead in the womb. Without labor, there is no return on investments.
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
It’s only a small note in the book, but I was really taken with the reference to Bread and Roses. I’d seen it before in some reference to a worker’s movement in England, but it hit me harder the way that Russell described Annie’s interpretation of the demand. It’s easy to gloss over the phrase, but it’s pretty profound in terms of how those in power view what labor is entitled to versus what labor believes it has earned. The contrast between the lives of those who profit by underpaid labor, with their frivolities, and the bare existence of those workers makes it clear that the powerful somehow feel their lives are worth more and that it is good and just that the cards are stacked in their favor.
You aren’t on strike so your children can have a better life, you’re fighting so that they can have a good life! You aren’t on strike for a better wage, you’re fighting for a good wage—a living wage! You aren’t on strike for less danger in the pits, you’re fighting for safe working conditions!
Mary Doria Russell, The Women of Copper Country
All in all, I quite enjoyed the thoughtful reconstruction of historical figures, some with only scant evidence of their personalities, particularly Annie Clements/Anna Clemenc, whom history should not have forgotten.
r/suggestmeabook: I’d like a steamy Gilded Age romance between an unwilling, independent American heiress and a reluctant, flat broke English Duke.
Movie rating: R
Pages: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Series: Gilded Age Heiresses
ARC provided by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours
Gilded Age/Victorian romance
Giveaway
Enter to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card! The giveaway is open to the US only and ends on February 19th. You must be 18 or older to enter: The Heiress Gets a Duke.
From the publisher: American heiress August Crenshaw has aspirations. But unlike her peers, it isn’t some stuffy British Lord she wants wrapped around her finger–it’s Crenshaw Iron Works, the family business. When it’s clear that August’s outrageously progressive ways render her unsuitable for a respectable match, her parents offer up her younger sister to the highest entitled bidder instead.
If you love the chase in a romance with a good dose of sexual tension, this is your book. Harper St. George creates two strong-minded characters with different goals and does a pretty good job of not moving the constant mistaken interpretation of each other’s actions over the line into the ridiculous or annoying.
New York Society thrived on financial and social matches made in marriage, and one unwilling bride wasn’t going to change anything. A hundred unwilling brides wouldn’t change anything.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
There are some really nice touches to this overall predictable story (given the title, the outcome isn’t going to be much of a surprise). There are the chapter epigraphs with quotes from writers of the era (and before), such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Benjamin Disraeli.
The sharp scent of gin, sweat, and cheap cigarette smoke tinged the air. People yelled to be heard over the cacophony of a hundred different conversation.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
Her detailed descriptions evoke everything from crowded and malodorous Whitechapel to the decaying grandeur of an English country house to the perfumed press of a London Season event. I’m generally not that attuned to descriptions of fashion, but St. George did a great job of describing a dress that would shock her milieu in a way that I could both envision the dress and understand the reaction.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on her mood, which changed from one minute to the next, the gown that had been delivered to their townhome last week had been far more scandalously cut than she had realized.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
The two protagonists, August (I so wanted to make it Augusta) Crenshaw and Evan Sterling, the Duke of Rothschild (I also tended to giggle at this title choice) are generally likable. Their interactions are enjoyable—the fighting couple that falls in love that can be traced back at least to The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing. August is modern enough for us to root for but still has the disadvantages of being a woman in the latter half of the 19th century; Evan is self-aware enough that his privileged position doesn’t alienate us.
August was the bluestocking. The one who, while pretty enough, would only marry when she could find a man who could overlook her many shortcomings. She was too opinionated. Too intelligent. Too mannish.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
What was more interesting to me was the other relationships these two had: August’s protective relationship with her little sister, who’s more astute than she gives her credit for; everyone’s relationship with August’s mother, an American Mrs. Bennet; Evan’s feelings about his brother and father; and the sweet relationship of Evan with his mother and sisters.
Bloody hell, this was to be his mother-in-law. Visions of endless holidays filled with her constant boasting stretched out before him. Perhaps bankruptcy would be worth it to avoid that fate.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
Of all of them, the most intriguing is that of August and her father. He has allowed her to be a part of his business, keeping books and evaluating financial opportunities. She feels valued to him as a result, and this burgeoning relationship with Evan complicates August’s relationship with her father in unexpected ways. This was, to me, the emotional core of the book, and it lifts this romance out of the humdrum.
My lord, although Miss Crenshaw is my daughter, she is also a trusted employee of Crenshaw Iron Works. I trust her discretion and her advice implicitly. you did say that this was a business issue?
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
If you’re not a fan of explicit sex scenes, there will be quite a few bits you’ll have to flip past, but the rest of the book makes it worthwhile. if you do like them, you should find plenty here to like.
As he held it tight, something had become clear to him. He wanted to win her on his own merit. He wanted her to choose him. And, more importantly, he did not want to hurt her.
Harper St. George, The Heiress Gets a Duke
All in all, The Heiress Gets a Duke is an exemplary version of the love/hate romance with the commoner and a Duke, so if that’s a read you enjoy, put this one on your to-be-read list.
books + ecstatic = BIBLIOSTATIC 