Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows comes recommended by many lists and all of them promise this is both an Important novel and an Enjoyable one, and I’m not convinced its either.
Sure there are some stark descriptions of LA and the madness of the traffic and the absurdity of the people and what they wear/eat/consume/do. Descriptions that are well written and evocative and spectacular in ways that mirror their subject matter AND YET.
Continue readingFiled under American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Mystery
While Long Bright River was uneven, Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods is a consistently good read. I can’t say much about the plot without getting into spoilers, but the general thrust is a young girl goes missing at an overnight camp in the 1970s. What follows is an investigation both into her disappearance and that of her younger brother, Bear, who vanished – presumed dead – 15 odd years earlier.
Weaving togethers themes of domestic and gendered violence, of class privilege, of the gap between what appears and what is, and above all of what it means to be “self-reliant” there are moments where these themes read as overdetermined and overly forceful (like the house of the wealthy family is explicitly named Self-Reliance). Though the heavy-handedness sometimes struck me as… heavy handed, at other moments I didn’t mind foregoing the interpretative work and just letting the book tell me what I needed to know and find important.
This directed-ness lends to an utter absorption in the story. With choppy (not in a bad way) chapters that jump in time and perspective, the plot propels while still giving (some) space for (modest) character development. Having just finished hosting a murder mystery, I also appreciated a way played red herring and the tidiness of the ultimate outcome.
It is the kind of book you would love to have with you on a vacation, or airplane, or other occasion where you want to be absorbed and taken out of your physical place. It is not great literature (the writing is good enough to not be distracting and to be occasionally striking, but is not on the whole beautiful; the characters are good enough to be believable and engrossing, but not on the whole complex) but it is good and extremely enjoyable in the way it reminds you that you, yes you, can read for hours at a time and forget where you are and where you need to be until your body reminds you. So put your cellphone somewhere the notifications can’t reach you and sink in.
Liz Moore’s Long Dark River starts out with such promise. It opens with a captivating premise and mystery. Two sisters (Mickey and Kasey) – one a police officer and one an opioid addict working and living the same streets. Kasey goes missing, there is a serial killer on the loose, and Mickey tries to find Kasey to keep her safe (or at least that’s what we think at the start).
And this plot carries us for the first half of the book and it is wrenching to hold the two parallel lives at once in our minds (what when wrong? how did the sisters end up estranged?). At some points Mickey forces the question of what did Kasey do wrong to end up living the life she is living and not the moral one that Mickey does – and I find this point irritating, for nothing about addiction suggests choice and in the framing of the question there is (at least at first) the idea that there is some kind of moral failing on Kasey’s part. Later in the book this question is – really far too patly and again with some kind of pinning of individual blame – explained in that their mother was in the throws of her own addiction when she was pregnant with Kasey, and so Kasey was born addicted herself. The whole thing makes it as though opioid addiction is an individual failing made by individual choice. And if there’s one thing we took from the utterly brilliant Demon Copperhead it is that this mess is not the fault of the individual user.
I digress. So halfway through when some of the questions about Kasey are resolved, the book turns – instead of to a conclusion that might be complex and nuanced about the sisters and their relationship (which is, I think, what the book is best about) to instead solving the murder mystery element. Like we care who the serial killer is? I guess we’re supposed to care who the serial killer is. And so we have to work our way through the plot structure of a Law and Order episode to chase some red herrings and eventually find the killer. It was all just so bizarrely beside the point to (what this reader saw as) the heart of the story: the relationship between Kasey and Mickey.
So I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I mean I did recommend it to a bunch of people (sorry M.) when I first started reading it because I was so taken with the family dynamic and some of the writing is Not Bad. But by the end I was sort of embarrassed to have suggested it because it becomes some other kind of book. Maybe if you go into it expecting that turn you’ll enjoy it the whole way through. You let me know.
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, Mystery
I took a heap of holiday in August – much of which was taken up with canoeing, camping, splashing, napping and, of course, reading. Dear reader ask me what the book was that I brought on the canoe trip and really loved? I can’t remember! I know I loved it and that my mum recommended it, but it’s been three weeks and I’m back to routines and it’s just vanished. Proof that one should not procrastinate on book reviews.
So onward!
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit: Do Not Go Gentle
Nadine Sander-Green’s Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit is good, but I wonder if it shouldn’t have been a short story. Following Millicent as she begins her first ‘real’ job working as a reporter at a tiny, independent paper in the Yukon, the story is one of a casual slide into domestic violence. I heard a woman describe it to me that way, she was telling me how she found herself in an abusive relationship – “a casual slide,” she said, like the way you might ease from one conversation topic to another. And for Millicent there is some of that – where one behaviour or one situation makes her wonder, another where she is uncomfortable, another where is afraid – but by that point she feels so alone and so isolated as to not know what else to do but to keep going, and when she does know to leave, does want to leave, she instead leaves and comes back leaves and comes back leaves and comes back as so many women do. Not for want of courage or of awareness, but for Millicent for some confusion of love and a certainty that there is no where else. The geography of the Yukon is its own powerful character – the winter cold snaps off the page – holding this isolation like the best of pathetic fallacy. What and how the conclusion comes to Millicent I’ll leave you to read because it’s a well-imagined and written ending. But throughout the book there are these threads – like Millicent’s relationship with her mother, or the idea of newspapers in a digital news era – that get picked up and seem to be Significant (and maybe they are and I just didn’t do the interpretive work to parse it) but don’t realize into anything. All in a way that made me wonder if the whole thing could have been tighter in a different form. Anyway, you read it and let me know.
Fourth Wing and Iron Flame: Don’t Judge Me For How Much I Loved These Books
If you wanted to find the exact opposite of the Literary Effort of Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit you’d find it in Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. Described to me (where?) as a mashup of Harry Potter, Game of Throne and 50 Shades of Grey, the books easily pull you in and suddenly hours later you realize no one has been watching your children and everyone has a sunburn. Truly, there is nothing substantive here. You could probably make an argument that there’s something about who is on the ‘right side’ of history when it comes to war (and whether if you were on the ‘wrong side’ you’d know it or not), something about the authority afforded to those who write that history, something about disability and ability, maybe something about feminist dragons. But what you’re really signing up for is the same promise of anything that just feels good to read/watch: violence, sex, and the little guy triumphing by doing the Right Thing (and the Right Thing is not complicated). They are books you want to read because they take you out of the moment you’re in and remind you of the time decades ago when you read for a few hours at a time without wondering what was happening on your phone. (Not that the only kind of book to do this is… fantasy-romance – just that this one does it particularly well). I will say that having read Iron Flame at a family resort that it’s the kind of book you want to be thoughtful about where you find yourself reading it as you will absolutely blush and wonder just how many synonyms for ‘quivering’ there might be. Turns out: many.
The Peacock and the Sparrow: Stay sharp!
Okay, so we’re on a bit of a trajectory here – from Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit that wanted (and was?) to be Serious and Literary, to the absurd, ridiculous and utterly absorbing Fourth Wing to an extremely complicated and equally delightful mystery in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Author I.S. Berry is a former CIA agent and reviews make much of this because the book certainly feels (to this decidedly Not CIA agent reader) to capture the detail of an overseas CIA agent from the kind of drink, to the way an ‘exotic’ job is to our protagonist Just a Job in the way we are all working Just a Job. Set amid the Arab Spring we follow our washed up agent as he hangs on to his job (and his sense of worth and purpose – not necessarily tied to that job) and then finds himself swept up in making change in ways he never intended or imagined. Sort of inspiring to all who might be wondering just what the point of any of it is (surely we’re all wondering that?) to see in the narrative that impact and change are still possible. If not… quite as anticipated. And a fun mystery in that it’s not about a murder, but instead about a revolution (I didn’t quite get that from the description on the back and so kept waiting for a murder investigation to start, so be warned: not a murder mystery). And fun, too, because the breadcrumbs to sort it out are not impossible to follow and you can with a bit of careful reading keep up with the twisty-turns.
The Darkness
Which takes us to our final (remembered) book of vacation Ragnar Jónasson’s The Darkness (which don’t google because even when you try “The Darkness book” will still just take you to Heart of Darkness because the internet is broken – you have to try The Darkness Iceland book). It’s such a weird little book. Our protagonist, Helen, is strange and sad and this reader wondered if she wasn’t always on the brink of some kind of…. something bad. Her panic about retirement – the loneliness, the purposelessness, the claustrophobia of solitude – helps the reader see how much of her narration is untrustworthy. Her sense of isolation from her colleagues we (eventually) understand as self-narrated and self-fulfilled; so, too, her guardedness from those efforts to connect with her. With the backstory of her childhood interwoven we start to see her caution as explainable (and deeply sympathetic) and to see her as a rich and full character. Making the conclusion of the book – and here we have an actual murder mystery! – all the more powerful. I finished it while out with S. and put it down with a “huh.” Just like… rare to get a book (and a murder mystery for that matter) that offers an actually surprising – and satisfying? – ending.
And that one I can’t remember…
I read another one. I can picture it – green on the cover. I returned it like a snap from the library but because the library (only) remembers the last 300 books I borrowed it’s not in the history anymore (seriously – we have a Picture Book Problem in my house) and so it will be forever in that did I read that? void. If you saw me in early August and I was talking about a book I loved maybe you could remind me…
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, Mystery
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