Reading roundup with Lies Sleeping
Ugh, why is cross-posting not working on this...
70. Ellen Klages, White Sands, Red Menace -- the second book in the Gordon Family saga of historical kidlit books, set shortly after The Green Glass Sea. I still enjoyed it, though I missed the historical figures populating the first book as cameo characters; here, Wernher von Braun and Lou Slotin are mentioned, and I guess maybe the Popular Mechanics guy was a real person? -- but I think that's about it. Anyway, I enjoyed learning what happened next with Dewey and Suze (and, like ambyr hypothesized might happen, I liked Suze a lot more in this book than in the first one; she's not a perfect kid, but felt much more sympathetic and interesting now that she's found her place, including the genuinely interesting social commentary art she's graduated to), and spending more time with Terry Gordon (I especially liked her interaction with Suze in this one). SPOILERS from here! I liked the backstory we got about Dewey's mom, and the resolution there -- Rita is not a villain, but she's not the right parent for Dewey either, and yet they do form a kind of relationship, ultimately (I liked the bracelet with the volume of the cone; that was a nice touch for closure). Dewey's relationship with Owen the sci-fi geek was very sweet, but I liked Suze and Ynez's friendship even more (and also... was I supposed to find it as shippy as I did? Like, they have a lot of fun banter, and I liked Ynez in general, but the hair-brushing scenes were pretty goddamn sensual, I'm just sayin'). I'm less happy about Phil Gordon essentially abandoning his wife and child(ren), even if it's for his first love, space. But then, I never got the sense that Ellen Klages was very interested in Phil Gordon.
On a random but related note, I kept twitching whenever "Doctor Gordon" was used to refer to Phil, since Terry also had a PhD, so I cheered when she corrected the principal that it was "Doctor Gordon". I was also briefly pleased to see Rudy Mueller addressing her as "Frau Doktor Gordon", but then the concentration camp factory thing came out, and, yeah, not so fond of him anymore. (I was a bit surprised that the Germans we meet in this book are as unsympathetic as they are. I mean, they're not actively villainous, but all the good that can be said for them is, they're polite, but the only person who approves of them is Phil, who is not a shining beacon of sense or decency in this book. Like, I was impressed that in the first book, with the war still one, Dewey's father had pointed out to her that his German mathematician friend was a decent man who went to work for his government, same as he did. Maybe such a sense of nuance is no longer possible once the story of the concentration camps becomes known; I could see that. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for sympathetic Nazis! I was just surprised, after the first book, that we didn't get something more like what Jimmy Kerrigan had said, vs Phil's "why can't you just move on", which I don't think is meant to be a defensible view.)
Despite not having the famous scientist cameos, and being less interested in the early space program than the Manhattan Project, I did really enjoy the historical setting of this book, the flavor of the times -- television on the horizon as this amazing new thing, filmstrips and mimeographs as newfangled additions to the classroom, the Golden Age of SF starting to bloom with the magazines and Bradbury and Heinlein, the sense of possibility when it comes to scientific discoveries -- atomic ovens in every home! (and microwaves being an actual thing Terry has vaguely heard about), "Either they would all be blown to bits, or it would be a paradise where cars could run for a year on the energy in a cup of water."And stuff like the girls having to learn all 48 states, and period movies, and other marks of the era.
The Not Like Other Girl-ness is increasing, or possibly my tolerance for it is being worn away, though it still feels in character for non-traditionally-feminine girls this age, especially in such a restrictive era. But Suze and Dewey deciding that they wanted to be brothers rather than sisters really made me raise my eyebrows, and all the eyerolling about silly girls with their movie star crushes and caring about hygiene... *sigh*
There was fortunately less playing with radioactive materials, but this time around I kept cringing at the way Terry kept smoking while pregnant -- and thought it was interesting that, at the end, Phil says that maybe it's not good for the baby, and she totally dismisses him. Oh, an speaking of radiation, and pregnancy, I appreciated that the misunderstanding was not too drawn out, but I liked the way that scene was played, with both pregnancy and radiation sickness making a lot of sense with what people were saying and how they were acting. (Note to self: rabbit died reference.)
Quotes:
Dewey, to Suze, while they're briefly fighting: "There's your chalk. You wanna go draw a line down your mom?"
And a little later: "'Yeah. Go on. Talk to my friend Terry.' She buddy-punched Suze on the arm. 'I think she likes you.'"
72. Ellen Klages, Out of Left Field -- the third book in the Gordon family saga, although it's different in a number of ways from the first one. It's set 10+ years later (i.e. in late 1950s), focuses on a character who is only hinted at in book 2, and is told in first person (by her) vs alternating third POVs. Also, Katy's thing is baseball, rather than science or art, which is something I have zero interest in and also know pretty much nothing about the history of, so I was worried I might find the book boring -- but not at all! Instead of getting to see history I already knew about in a lot of real-time detail through a child's eyes, I got to learn a bunch of new-to-me things about female baseball players and the history of baseball in general, which ended up being pretty cool. Spoilers!
I would've liked to have seen more of Dewey and Suze as grown-ups, but enjoyed the little tidbits we got -- Suze and her MFA, Dewey and her patent -- but at least there was plenty of Terry. Although Terry and Phil parted on a definitely uneasy note at the end of book 2, I wasnt expecting him to have just... completely walked away from the family, apparently, although Terry's later explanation, that she had been blacklisted for refusing to sign the loyalty oath and he wanted to keep his clearance, made a bit more sense. Still, him having been so scarce in the first two books and only represented by a frankly pathetic phonecall in this one almost made me wonder what the point of him as a character was. I was also sad to see that Grandpa Weiss had passed and we never got to meet him, though it was good to see the grandmother. The Not Like Other Girls vibes also continued, although I felt like they were toned down a bit here, with Katie actually having a female friend, meeting so many different women who WERE like here, and then inviting the girl to play at the end. Oh, and Terry's sister Babs is the magic character who doesn't do magic, isn't she? Or her partner is?
I got a kick out of the setting finally coming back to the Bay Area, where the Gordons are from, and getting to see a little bit of 1950s San Francisco and the Cal campus (Doe Library! <3). I had no idea
73. Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song -- ikel89 and I continued our Hardinge sync read with Cuckoo Song, which you can find in situ here. Cuckoo Song was actually the Hardinge book I was most intrigued by, because I knew what it was about, but I was worried I'd find it too creepy. I didn't find it TOO creepy, but it definitely WAS creepy -- very, very creepy -- and so I'm glad I didn't actually start my acquaintance with Hardinge with it.
First, the creepiness, because I do feel like thats the thing that stands out the most to me about this book. Some of it is just the mood and foreshadowing -- the way Triss has gaps in her memory where we start and realizes something is wrong with her but not what, the creepy countdown dreams, the shadow of the dead brother over the whole family, the pall of the parents' stifling and conditional love -- before it's even fully clear whats going on with Triss. But the thing that ended up being creepiest to me caught me by surprise and made me realize I had a heretofore undiscovered squick about binge-eating. Spoilers from here! Oddly enough, eating dolls and shoes and things became a lot less squicky to me once I realized, along with Tris(ta) that the reason she was doing this was to, like, keep renewing her connection with Triss. Somehow that falling into, like, mass/energy balance category made it all make sense and not be creepy or gross, IDK. XP But there are other really neat creepy things, like the reverse-of-movie-screen attempted kidnapping of Pen, with her residual muteness (because these are the silent movies still) and black and white color and words writing themselves on nearby objects -- such a neat scene, and not something I think I've seen before. And I think Sebastian's letters from the stopped-tie moment between life and death, the perpetual war, were possibly the objectively creepiest things ever.
On top of the creepiness, I think there's another reason it took me a bit more time to get into this book vs the other Hardinges: the protagonist when we first meet her. Like I said in my first liveblog post, I said: "I liked Makepeace and I liked Faith. Triss... I feel sorry for, but am finding a lot harder to like. The overly sheltered child who is convinced by her parents that she doesn't feel well, and feels both cradled and stifled by this brand of love, who is rewarded with pretty dresses for being ill -- that's a really unusual idea for a protagonist! But while it's clear Triss is a victim in all this, I'm not feeling much of HER yet, the way I did with Faith, who was also constrained by her family." And of course there's a good reason for this: MAJOR SPOILERS! Triss isn't actually Triss, and the reason she doesn't feel particularly compelling at the start is that she's trying to be someone she's not. The book really took off for me once "Triss" realized she wasn't actually Triss and thus felt free to actually be herself. Not-Triss/Trista (I'm just going to call her Trista from here) was someone I sympathized with a lot more, especially once she stood up for Pen to her parents.
Because Pen ended up being my favorite character in the book, with her delinquent shoe-stealing ways, hitchhiking by faking being struck by a car, Clever Disguises, and insistence that since she saves Tristas life, she can call her whatever she wants, whether it's Fake Triss or Trista. She is such a flawed and complicated character -- I totally had not expected her to be the reason behind the original Triss's kidnapping, and I think her fear and guilt about this are dealt with very well and very believably -- but she's so VIVID, she really lit up every scene she was in. And I liked Pen's relationship with Vivian -- in fact, the only time I found Vivian at all interesting was when she was interacting with Pen. Also, I loved Pen's explanation for why their parents couldn't tell not-Triss was scared/really crying: "Because they're stupid. They can't tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can't tell when fake Triss is real-crying."
I also liked most of the other secondary characters. Piers Crescent surprised me by ending up as someone I found sympathetic, considering where I was at the beginning of the book. Knowing exactly how Piers ended up in a bargain with the Architect changed my view of him for the better in a way I really didn't expect. I was really hating him for the "my Triss is a good girl" remark. Weirdly, the way he behaved during the scene where he and Mr Grace try to throw Trista in the fire made me like him more -- like, the way he clearly is fully aware he is doing a terrible, terrible thing, but he is doing it to (as he thinks) save his daughter. And when he and Trista met again and he was willing to bargain anything to save the girls, and actually listened to all the harsh truths gave me a lot of respect for him I wasn't expecting to feel. I'd been expecting, like you're supposed to, I think, that his faerie bargain was for fame and fortune -- that the architectural designs which made him famous in Ellchester were the "get" and not the "give" -- knowing that he had actually been reluctant to pass off the Architect's designs as his own an only did it because he thought it was a way to bring Sebastian home changed a lot for me in how I saw him. I do think it's a bit unfair that Trista is more willing to forgive Piers than Celeste. I mean, I'm not sure it's MEANT to be fair? Like, based on both Skinful and especially The Lie Tree, I think Hardinge is very aware that girls can be so much harder on their mother figures, so it very well could be intentional and the point. But taking Trista's thoughts at face value: Yes, Piers faced up to what he did, and it's not clear that Celeste ever did, but: I feel like Celeste's learned helplessness is actually an extension of the same thing real Triss was being smothered by -- one strong personality, feeling he's failed his family in a way he can't fix, going overboard and "protecting" everyone with a more malleable character into a total abdication of choices. (I suspect this means Pen and Piers are actually the two most similar in character, and kind of want to see fic of that. Especially weird time-travel fic where Pen gets to meet her father when he was a stubborn pre-teen who always had to get his own way. But anyway!)
I also quite liked Joseph Grace, the tailor, who is introduced as a nice and sympathetic figure at first, and honestly, he never stopped being somewhat sympathetic to me, even when he was advocating for throwing our protagonist into the fire. It's very realistic that after his own loss -- for which he blames himself, I'm sure, since he didn't listen to his wife's "superstitions" -- he would see the Besiders and anything that comes fro them as evil and inhuman. I wasn't sure how I wanted the book to end for him, or how I feel about the way it did conclude. It makes absolute sense that he would not be willing to believe in peaceful coexistence with the Besiders, and would be determined to kill them all. His execution of the Besider couple by the fire -- not entirely unprovoked, but definitely disproportionate response -- made that pretty clear. I do like that Trista neither fully condemns him nor ever forgives him -- it's about the right balance. It would've been nice if he'd been able to come around to a more nuanced view, but, yeah, more realistic this way, alas. And I do like the way Trista can almost see things from his point of view sometimes.
Speaking of the Besiders, I thought they were a really good exaple of what I like in urban(ish) fantasy with faeries. I love that nobody actually ever says the word "faerie", although the whole changeling mythos is rooted in it. "Besiders" is a great term, vague enough to be really creepy while being a very ordingery word -- it just feels right. And I love that none of them ever get actual names that the human(ish) characters can pronounce or remember -- the ones that get names at all, it's titles or descriptions, not their real names. And they are just this really nice mix of threatening, unpredictable ("There was a long, long second during which a hundred winter winds drew in a silent breath and the Architect was not handsome at all"), and just human enough to be interesting and/or sympathetic on occasion (like the pair that got killed by Grace's posse). Also, Besiders as tea room patrons and crime scene witnesses were HI-larious. I also found it interesting, if not intuitively true, why the Besiders need to take refuge in cities now (maps, which create too much certainty) and what it is about scissors that's so antithetical to them (I figured it was just iron, like in faerie stories, but I like the explanation that "scissors are really intended for one job alone -- snipping things in two. Everything on one side or the other, and nothing in between. Certainty. Were in-between folks, so scissors hate us. They want to snip us through and make sense of us, and there's no sense to be made without killing us."), as well as why they weren't able to abide churches before but aren't bothered by church bells now (WWI having killed faith, according to the Shrike). I read two other books with faeries in the last couple of months (The Cruel Prince and Witchmark -- and, hell, maybe even Spinning Silver sort of counts -- but these are my favorite faeries.)
Like in all the other Hardinge books I've read, there's some really nice layered symbolic stuff going on, though I feel like this book brought it to the foreground a bit more? Like, the buried-alive frog -- an accident, becuase Pen was only trying to help -- and Triss who is buried, smothered under the weight of her parents' overprotectiveness (they were also only trying to do what's best for her) -- and of course the literal threat of Triss being buried alive by the Architect (and the plan to have Piers seal her in in the capstone ceremony, brrr!) There's also the really nice connection between Trista, on her last day, when Pen and Violet worry she's too frail to go try to catch the Architect on her own, making the case that it's her life and she should be allowed to make her own choices about it, even if those choices hasten her death, and the real Triss being swaddled in cotton by her parents.
Because I found the ending a weak point of the other two Hardinge books I've read so far, I was braced to be disappointed here, too, but it was actually not bad. I'm not thrilled about Trista and Violet riding into the sunset on V's motorcycle -- I didn't think Violet needed an ersatz daughter, and I didn't think Trista needed any additional parent figures -- but it is probably more practical and more realistic than Trista being able to stay with the Crescents, and it does ean that the real Triss will get the opportunity to be a good sister to Pen without having to do it from under Trista's shadow, and will have to stand up to their parents on her own.
The prose is still gorgeous, and I love Hardinge's unexpected but striking imagery, so have a bunch of quotes:
"The scissors snipped with a slow, throaty crunch, as if relishing every inch."
"If I tell my parents, she thought irrationally, then they'll get worried, and if they're worried, that means it's serious."
"There was something comforting and familiar about her parents being angry on her behalf. It felt like being coddled inside a horse-chestnut shell, protected by its inward downy softness, while all the spikes pointed outward."
"Every time she closed her eyes, she could sense dreams waiting at the mouse hole of her mind's edge, ready to catch her up in their soft cat-mouth."
On Pen covering for her: "Feeling a little as if somebody had poked her in the eye with an olive branch."
"Even when she dipped into sleep, it was puddle-thin and streaked with dreams."
"All her best-loved dresses had been bought there, after fits of illness. Her whooping-cough blue chiffon. Her three-day-fever cotton with the primrose print."
"Out of instinctive loyalty to her father, Triss wrinkled her brow and thought sickly, woebegone thoughts."
"Over the years her parents had herded Triss's woolly memories into the neat pens of their stories, until she no longer knew what she actually remembered."
"'More hullabaloo,' murmured Triss's mother, in a tone that combined martyrdom and pride."
"In it she heard the splintering lament of wind-felled trees, the steel cacophony of gulls, the whining note at the heart of a storm wind. [...] There was a reek in her nose, a slick dark green smell of water that was old enough to be clever and dangerous."
"It was a good lie, with a fair dollop of the truth in it to stop it from curdling."
About an ex-sanatorium resort type place: "the place still bristled with doctors, like a crust of barnacles marking a high-water point after the tide had gone out."
"Not-Triss remembered seeing her father wrap his arms around her mother many times, but usually gently and firmly, as if he was holding together a broken thing long enough for the glue to set."
"pastel-colored parties where languid, fashionable women slunk and posed, slim and elegant as fish. [...] Not-Triss had a strong feeling that this was not the kind of party that welcomed sudden damp children."
"'Someboy get me a drink and a cigarette!' Violet said. It was not a sultry request, more like a mechanic asking to be passed a wrench."
"Perhaps she was weighing up a lie, like a snowball in her hand, seeing if it would hold together."
Underbelly seagulls being fucking creepy: "One child, two child! Pink cheek childs with eyes in their heads! Soft eye childs with hearts like fruit!"
The Shrike, looking at not-Triss, as she understands it: "He had the pride of a chef who revels in seeing his masterpiece but does not care what happens to the remains after the banquet.
"[Mr Grace] kept his hands slightly raised and spread, as if Violet's temper was a gun."
"After a long period of silence, there came a sense that hugging had solved all it could."
"She did not know how these two facts were connected, but she could sense the link between them swaying in the darkness, like a submerged mooring chain."
"'[Sebastian] didn't come home.'
'He's not the only one,' said Jack's mother flatly. Her gaze passed over her son smoothly and coolly, like fingers stroking the marble of a sepulchre."
"His tone was bright, light, and unpredictable, like the leaping of windswept washing on a sunlit line."
Besiders at the tea shop: "Good afternoon. I am not here to devour you. Now bring me sweetmeats so that I may pass as one of your kind." "A glass of your tears, my honey. What? Oh. Tea, then."
74. Tim Federle, The Great American Whatever -- a book I hadn't even (consciously) heard about until ikel89 compared it favorably to Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and I was intrigued enough by that to read it. I'm glad I did! It's a good book, although I wouldn't compare it to WG,WG, which feels solidly YA -- it reminded me more of Catcher in the Rye (apparently Kirkus Review agrees with the comparison) -- so, yes, a book in which the narrator and most characters are teenagers, and teens certainly can read and relate and enjoy, but it feels pitched older than regular YA (not surprising, since the afterword revewals it was originally going to be set 10 years later). The characters are very much teenagers, but the themes and takeaways feel more suited to adult fiction, which I consider to be a good thing.
I can't say that I loved Quinn, the protagonist, but he was sympathetic and an interesting narrator. The script bits, which I was afraid might be hokey, were actually fun in juxtaposition to reality, and also sparingly used. And the narration overall was really great -- both fresh and believable, without being too try-hard; I especially enjoyed the "[statement]. Wait, no, apparently [contradictory statement]" and retroactive spoiler alerts, which made it really feel like you were listening to someone talk as they figured stuff out. Quinn was also believable as someone sharp but also myopic / self-centered to the point of obliviousness -- in general, I mean, not just MAJOR SPOILERS from here! in the wake of his trauma over his sister's death and his guilt over his role in it, which exacerbates everything. The way he doesn't even entertain the possibilitity of some secrets he learns until confronted with them (that Annabeth and Geoff were an item, that Annabeth wasn't actually interested in film-making, that Amir has his own agenda) and the way what he thinks of as his secrets are not (the coming out to his mother, the confession that Annabeth had been texting him when she ran the red light, when it was on the news and everyone already knew) also serve as nice counterpoints. And there's just a lot of nuance I hadn't been expecting from a YA book -- the way grief hits him in a very different way than he expects when he finally drives by the place where his sister died, the way what happened makes him sharply aware of mortality all at once. It's good stuff. And I appreciated that Quinn is relatable but far from perfect.
Speaking of which, the secondary characters were particularly great, for the same reason. I liked Quinn's mom, who is (understandably) not coping very healthily either, and his relationship with her. (This part actually reminded me of The Art of Starving, and there are actually a lot of superficial similarities -- gay boy dealing with a serious psychological issue, coping with the absence of his sister, single mother on hard times, Middle Eastern boyfriend -- although the two books are actually not at all alike.) Geoff and Carly and Quinn's relationship with them also worked for me nicely, especially the moment where Quinn shows up at Geoff's house to beat him up and they end up laughing and crying instead. And I especially liked Amir and the way Quinn's relationship with him was handled. Because Amir is a really neat mix of decency and flaws -- when he inadvertently offends Quinn by going off on an overweight woman -- but has the courage to apologize; that he takes care of drunk Quinn and brings him home and thanks him for the honesty he doesn't remember -- but doesn't actually care about him on any significant emotional level. I would've happily read about an actual heartfelt first romance between the two of them, but the way things played out, with Quinn calling him up for a getting-even-with-Geoff-and-Annabeth de-virgin-izing booty call and they ended up talking instead and then Quinn read his diary and confronted him about Evan, and the sex they ended up having anyway -- sweet but pretty much NSA, which is fine with both of them at that point. It's not what I'd been expecting -- I'd been expecting either an actual love story or something about waiting for the right moment (and I think if this were REALLY a YA book, that's what it would've been), but this is refreshing, and more realistic than Quinn's imaginings of brown babies with Amir's DNA. Also, I was cuted out by the fact that Amir's novel -- some kind of epic philosophical fantasy thing, I guess -- is both really earnest and actually terrible. I had not been expecting that, either. Also, Quinn finding the way Amir drives stickshift hot was pretty adorable, too.
Quotes:
"His outfit today, by the way: Literally who cares. You shuld see his hair."
"I deactivated all my profiles three months ago. I was tired of getting tagged in #tributes. I was tired of the banal poetry and misappropriated quotes that people would add my name to and, worse, Annabeth's. 'This made me miss @annabeth_roberts17,' some second-tier girl from school would say, tagging Annabeth in a ludicrous Eleanor Roosevelt quote written in, like, Comic Sans, and laid over a very fake-looking rainbow, as if @annabeth_roberts17 even liked rainbows. You know what Annabet Roberts, seventeen, liked? Gray skies."
"God knows I've seen enough porn to at least have a basic sense of the etiquette and approach to this stuff, but then again, I've watched a lot of YouTubes of Olympic divers, too -- those bathing suits, those bathing suits -- and I'm no closer to flipping off a forty-foot platform than I am to winning an Oscar."
75. Rainbow Rowell, Attachments -- the last Rowell novel (i.e. not counting comic books) I hadn't read, and also her first book, by a few years. It shows, but I still enjoyed it, and blazed through it in like a day, maybe because it was like the perfect antidote to what I should've been reading, which was the Bear and Nightingale sequel to finish up my not-really-syncread-any-longer with cyanshadow (which, I'm not disliking that book, although I'm less into it than the first one, but apparently I'm just not in the mood for period fantasy at the moment. Anyway!). I'd been vaguely aware of Attachments for quite a while, from ms_geekette, I think, but when venturing beyond her YA books, went with Landline a couple of years ago, and then never tracked down this one, until ikel89 was reading it and complaining about it to Best Chat (the evolved form of Virtual Worldcon).
Attachments is a weird book. It bills itself as a romcom, but actually I semi-seriously wonder if in the first draft the couple did NOT get together, and it was just a book about, in your late 20s, growing up, but romance is easier to sell. Spoilers from here, but if you read it, I encourage going in spoiled -- I think that's part of what helped me injoy the book, knowing the romance endgame was going to be ridiculous. Because I actually enjoyed everything about the book EXCEPT the endgame romance, which makes no sense, is ethically dubious, the couple interact directly for the first time at the 94% mark of the book (this is not an exaggeration!), and then spend the remaining 5% of the book going, "we should care that this situation makes no sense, but somehow we don't, let's not talk about that anymore" (this is also not an exaggeration; that's literally what happens).
I usually don't summarize books, but I do think expectations need to be clear going in, so: sad-sack 28-year-old Lincoln who still lives with his doting/controlling mother, has no idea what he wants to do with his life, besides go to more school for something, and is still emotionally compromised from the breakup with his first and only girlfriend freshman year of college, gets a job as an IT security guy at a newspaper on the eve of Y2K. (I was surprised by the Y2K setting, which ended up completely not mattering, except possibly as some kind of symbolism about transitions and thresholds maybe? I have no idea, honestly.) His job mostly consists of investigating messages flagged by the corporate IT security filters, and through this/instead of this he starts reading the highly personal correspondance between two women his age: Beth, a movie reviewer in a relationship with her emotionally unavailable rocker boyfriend from college, and Jennifer, a copy editor with an adorable-sounding husband who is coming to terms with whether or not she wants to have a baby. Of course Lincoln falls in love with Beth through these emails he is reading, in violation of basic decency and also corporate policy, because he does not DO anything about them, like issue a warning, like he's supposed to. Beth also? somehow? develops a crush on him based on 1) him looking like the guy from the Brawny paper towels, and 2) him being sweet to the older lady who stocks the vending machines. Beth breaks up with the rocker boyfriend when he tells her he will never marry her at her little sister's wedding, and Lincoln has a sudden crisis of conscience and quits his job, writing Beth an anonymous note explaining he'd been reading her email -- at this point, recall, they have not interacted at all EVER -- and then they meet by accident in a dark movie theater and kiss? and get together? for some reason? It is all very rom-com on the surface, and it's basically played as a romcom, but those are not the parts of the book I liked best.
Best was the friendship between Beth and Jennifer, which was clear and funny and heartwarming through their emails, and also did not shy away from the two of them occasionally saying things that hurt the other. Jennifer was my favorite, actually, and I would've preferred to read the book about her and Mitch and her changing feelings on motherhood, from regular pregnancy scares to shopping for clothes at BabyGap before she's even decided to get pregnant, to her ambivalent feelings when she does get pregnant, the grief and guilt over the miscarriage (but Beth telling her that the miscarriage was 93% not her fault? WTF Beth, who says that, and what do you even know about it? O.o) I would've actually really liked to see the other part of this journey, which happened after Lincoln had already quit so there were no emails about it; we hear that Jennifer is expecting again at the end, which I was happy to hear, but I wanted to know how she felt about it this time. I also quite liked what the book did with Chris, Beth's Mr Wrong, the rocker boyfriend. He is not a cheater or a creep -- although he is a jerk (although I didn't quite buy the un-proposal at the sister's wedding; there was no reason at all for him to say ANYTHING, so it just felt totally contrived) -- but he's definitely not the right guy for her. The thing is, I can actually buy that he is someone who genuinely does not WANT a serious romantic/emotional attachment, and never did, and feels trapped just by being in a relationship with Beth even without marriage, by actually having emotions for her, when he'd rather just save intensity for his music and spend the rest of the time isolated from the world via headphones or a paperback in front of his face. Is he using Beth to live rent-free or just coasting because it's easy or both -- both are things that Lincoln does, too, by living with his mother -- well, probably both. But I found Chris largely sympathetic, and actually more sympathetic than Lincoln for most of the book. There's also a cast of variously wacky characters rounding out the book, newspaper staff people, Lincoln's D&D friends, Doris the vending machine lady, Lincoln's mother and sister and nephews. I liked the way a number of these secondary characters also get arcs: Lincoln's bro-y college friend Justin grows up enough to marry the bar hook-up he fell for, Lincoln's mother actually gets some human contact besides her children, in the food-based friendship she seems to strike up with Doris and D&D hostess Christine's admiration of her, etc.
The hilarious-sad thing is that, as a result, there are all these crackships that are way more believable than the actual endgame ship we're asked to accept. Beth basically ships Mitch/herself, in a really adorable way. ikel89 and I got into a mini ship war over whether Lincoln/Chris or Justin/Chris was the true OTP of the book. Lincoln stalks Chris's band's shows and admires his cheekbones, BUT (I pointed out) Justin actually digs his music! (and also theorizes at one point that Chris might have a boyfriend, which I'd forgotten to use to bolster my case). But then Chris literally, on-page, asked Lincoln if he were single, and I had to concede. Doris/Lincoln's Mom makes about 175% more sense than Lincoln/Beth, the way it is played out.
And it's too bad, because I feel like Lincoln/Beth actually undermines any growth the two of them experienced over the course of the book? Beth, who's known for the last couple of years at least the Chris was not going to marry her (which she really wanted at this point) or give her the emotional anchor she needed, breaks up with him -- good for her! -- and then immediately gets together with someone she DOES NOT KNOW AT ALL. This can't possibly be healthy! Lincoln has finally taken some steps to move on with his life, got his own apartment, appeared to get over the high school girlfriend breakup he was still traumatized by 10 years later, acquired something like a life, and a job he didn't have to feel skeevy about -- and the culmination of this is getting together with a girl he cyberstalked (very nicely, but still) while misusing his job role. It makes no sense as a romantic arc, if you think about it for more than 10 seconds, and it makes no sense as a character grown arc, either. Also, they don't even really have anything in common, not really? Except a tendency to stalk their crushes I guess, which... And, OK, Lincoln mostly agrees with her film reviews and finds them funny. This is not much of a foundation for a relationship XP Like, at the 2/3 point of the book, Lincoln thinks, "He couldn't help but think about Beth, but thinking about her was like thinking himself into a corner. Like realizing towards the end of a logic puzzle that you'd made a mistake early on, and that there's no way t reach the solution without starting over." And YES. YES, it is exactly like that, which is why the rest of the book -- which is, like, the equivalent of ignoring the fact that you now have two 7's in one row of your Sudoku puzzle and forging blithely on -- is such a bizarre choice! And the reason on Beth's side that this supposedly works is... love at first sight, revealed at the 98% mark, and, first of all, that's ALWAYS stupid, and second, that's not how books work! XD
Which is why I think the first draft must've ended with Beth making a date with the redheaded pharmacy student she met at that protest against tearing down the old cinema, and Lincoln starting his new job at the School of Medicine and maybe meeting a cute nursing student who plays D&D and whom he has no opportunity to stalk -- or better yet, HAS the opportunity to stalk but chooses not to, because, you know, he's actually learned something from the previous 95% of the book. (And, like. Getting to know someone and falling in love with them before you meet them face-to-face is something that actually works for me really, really well -- see Simon vs, which did this adorably and NON-CREEPILY -- but the key concept here is that you're actually interacting with the person, not peeping through their windows. Someone might even be able to sell me on "I'm a lurker who fell in love with you through your blog" or similarly one-sided information flow -- I doubt it, but maybe? -- but even that would be 1000x better than this because the information would at least be freely put out there and not a horrendous violation of privacy.
But I knew about the terrible romantic resolution going in, so was able to prepare adequately for that, and enjoy the rest of the book. There's something about the way Rowell writes people -- damaged and flawed, but very recognizable -- that really speaks to me. This book's prose was not as polished, but there were still quite a few quotes I liked:
"And with all of the lights and the computer servers, it was like sitting inside a headache."
Abut the newspaper finally getting internet: "it was now impossible to distinguish a roomful of people working diligently from a roomful of people taking the What-Kind-of-Dog-Am-I? online personality quiz."
Beth: "they've already picked their wedding song, and of course, it's 'What a Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong -- I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models."
Lincoln, thinking about his sister's relationship with his mother: He didn't understand the anger between them. He didn't even recognize his mother in the stories Eve told."
Jennifer, about her mother: "'That's how it starts. You better watch yourself.' 'It,' of course, is divorce. Which she's sure I inherited along with her straight teeth and her evil apologies. She's just waiting. She keeps poking my marriage with a toothpick. Almost done!"
Jennifer, on the baby fur coat she bought on sale at the BabyGap: "The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls." (OK, there are probably better years to pick, but it still made me laugh.)
Lincoln, on Chris: "He looked like he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in his back pocket. If you looked like that, a woman would forgive you. She would expect to have to forgive you now and then."
Lincoln, about his mother: "You could never be offended or dismayed with her -- she always beat you to it."
Beth, about Chris being distant: "I think of it like winter. During winter, it isn't that the sun is gone (or heating on you with some other planet). You can still see it in the sky. It's just father away."
Lincoln's flashback about learning that Sam had cheated on him: "He wanted to touch her, jump on her. Cover her like a hand grenade."
And I also like this line Lincoln says to Sam, except it's fairly ridiculous in the actual context: "There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with."
Jennifer on being pregnant: "Really, I feel a little bit like a suicide bomber. Like I'm walking around pretending to be normal, all the while knowing that I'm carrying something that is going to change -- possibly destroy -- the world as I know it."
Lincoln, on being taught the rules of pinochle by Doris: "Could your brain actually reject information? Like a foreign organ?"
Beth: "The kind of dancing that's more like touching to music. That's more like closing your eyes and trying to think how you would tell someone that you loved him if you didn't have words or sex."
Beth: "I think I called him 'a great horrrible bastard.' Like I was swearing in a second language."
Eve, horrified that her son is interested in playing D&D: "You're too young, and too socially adept."
Lincoln, who developed a crush on his medieval lit professor, "a flammably intelligent woman in mid-thirties": "He thought he might ask her out when the term ended. Or he might sign up for her advanced seminar."
71. Cry Fox (Rivers of London comics #5) -- I've been missing this world, as the last comics collection I read was back in the very beginning of the year, and it's been over a year since the Furthest Station novella, and almost two years (holy shit, I didn't realize it's been that long!) since the last full novel. I cannot wait for Lies Sleeping (one month to go!), but the comics make for nice little tidbits to tide me over. This one was fun enough, though I don't think I followed the plot completely. But that doesn't really matter, as I still enjoyed visiting with all the characters I like: (spoilers)
- Varvara! Rocking that silver suit and pumps (which matches the Jag, lol) , and accessorizing with her boys. That panel where she's got an arm looped through the arms of both Peter and Nightingale.
- Nightingale's cavalry charge! Peter fanboying him for all he's worth: "There's a spell called vox imperante. To do it you've got to string together six forma and a dozen inflectores with absolute precision. It's almost impossible to do even under laboratory conditions. To do it in the field you pretty much have to be the best in the world." Thomas giving up hunting after the war because "when you see sufficient blood shed in earnest, spilling it for 'sport' ceases to have any appeal"
- Great to see Abigail in a nice big role, disabling tracker bracelets (Guleed: "Brilliant. Though a bit worrying that you know that." Abigail: "I blame YouTube.") and pocketing sharp implements, labeling the people who kidnapped her ("creepy old bag", "skinny bitch", etc.), and kneeing "chubby wanker" in the balls to Nightingale's censure ("Abigail! That's not how we treat our prisoners.")
- Peter snarking at the lowlifes: "He stole my horse!" "Then it's your lucky day, mate. Because we're taking you to the police station, where you can report such heinous crimes."
- Peter's voiceover about how the "cry wolf" strategy doesn't pay off for the bad guys because when a kid disappears out of the foster system, the police throw everything at it.
- Reynard Fossman has now replaced Remus Lupin as the most obvious name for an animal-connected supernatural being. Well done!
And then I got to read Lies Sleeping a little early thanks to meathiel!
76. Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping -- This was really good. I think it's the book I've been waiting for since Broken Homes (although that one is still my favorite, I think), or at least the first time since then that I closed a RL book without feeling at least a little disappointed. (I loved the story in Night Witch, but was therefore disappointed that it wasn't a full-on novel.)
This series does something I respect even though it doesn't cater to my specific desires (for this series) or general preferences. Several things, actually. For one, it's not static. Like, the premise of books 1-4, with Peter the rookie cop who gets into trouble, and Nightingale a man out of time, decades behind the modern world? I LOVED that setup, and figured it would just keep going, because these books are police procedurals, and it's very easy to just keep those case/monster-of-the-week and keep the team dynamics the same. But it's actually impressive to see just how far Peter has come, professionally and personally, even though I miss the apprentice/mentor dynamic of the earlier books. Peter, a detective in his own right now, writing policy and liaising with other agencies, and mostly not needing to be rescued by Nightingale, and holding his own with senior officers like Seawoll; and Nightingale, moving on with the times and Skyping Peter for lessons, and interacting with an ever-widening circle of modern policemen -- it's good to see, and it's a lot more believable than if the dynamic I fell in love with had just stayed fixed. Peter and Nightingale really felt like peers in this book, in a way they didn't yet even in The Hanging Tree, and that was bittersweet, but like I said, I respect it. And the other thing is, I was really after Peter finding a second family in the Folly, and in Nightingale in particular, but that's not what the series is about either. It's not finding a family, it's building a community, which is much rarer to see. Spoilers from here! Peter's network of agencies and colleagues, his growing demi-monde connections, the civilian analysts being fed up by Molly, the cousin he's got working security at the posh legal firm to keep an eye on them -- hell, now even the Bacchanalia lawyers Nightingale is taking in hand, however little Peter likes them -- it's looser but bigger than family, and more relevant to the story the series is trying to tell, even if not to me personally. Hell, from the conversation with Dr Vaughan, it looks like Peter is already thinking ahead to the possibility of sharing magical classification data with the High Fae themselves, instead of just studying them as the Other -- and that's so wonderfully Peter.
I found Peter's voice a little jarring at first, but I'm not sure if it's just because it's been so long since the last novel that I'm misremembering that it's supposed to sound like, or if there's some change happening. Some of it was just stylistic -- more sentence fragments than I remember there being. But I also feel like he might be opening up about his parents more than before? Still not much, and maybe I'm just paying more attention now that I know what to look for, but I feel like he's actually letting himself feel some resentment instead of sublimating it (e.g. "I was beginning to worry about what the nanny's idea of discipline might have been. And I'm saying that as the son of an African mother." and "My dad said that this [looking after Abigail] would be a good preview of life with my own children, but what he thought he might know about it I don't know."). Which is good, if he's going to be a father himself. I... don't really know how I feel about that. I still don't find Beverley actually interesting, but she and Peter seem to have a good time, and I want him to be happy, so I'm fine with it? I am really curious to see him as a parent, Abigail babysitting (can you imagine?), and people like Nightingale, Molly, and Peter's mum getting to interact with a much-too-curious toddler down the line. Speaking of Peter and Bev, after that bit in memories/spirit world/whatever where Bev was the historical -- and male -- version of the genius loci, and Peter did not seem the least bit scandalized by getting snogged by him? I'm counting that as proof of bi Peter -- or, at least, not-fussed-by-the-gender-of-the-person-he-likes Peter. Randomly, I think this book is the first explicit confirmation we've gotten that Peter doesn't believe in God. Not a surprise, since he's never mentioned anything that suggested otherwise, but still interesting.
I also feel like I got to see more Nightingale in this book than in the other recent ones, or at last got to see him in a more satisfying way. My favorite scene was probably the one where Nightingale, at his poshest, goes to play bad cop with Patrick Gale. But he also gets some great action scenes, both onscreen (seeing him in battle mode, barking "On your feet, Grant!" was pretty neat, or Peter holding on for dear life while he's flooring the Jag, and then listening to Guleed do the same over the Airway later) and off (accidentally tossing murderous nannies through the roof and then feeling sheepish about it. A little concerned to hear Nightingale talking about retirement plans, but presumably not any time soon yet.
I like the way Abigail is coming along, in her studies and in growing up, and I love the newly revealed knowledge that it's not just Nightingale teaching her, but Varvara is too! Including some Russian/Greek notation and shorthand that she wasn't supposed to be. And that Peter and even Nightingale have been picking up icy pointers from Varvara! (I mean, it would've been lovely to actually see Varvara onscreen, but this was the next best thing. I really felt like she was present a lot in this book despite not participating in any of the action.) Am I supposed to know/remember why Abigail's brother is in the hospital or has to go there? I don't recall that coming up before... It was also nice to see Stephanopoulos, even if she did get injured in the line of duty in the course of it, and to see that Peter has advanced to the point of being invited over to her house and has now met Miriam's wife. It's also neat to see Peter's increasingly nuanced understanding of Seawoll, but I still really wonder what Seawoll and Nightingale's deal is (and whether it has anything to do with the cursed safe Seawoll mentioned in his litany of weird bollocks that peter did not know anything about.) I spent Hanging Tree kind of resenting Guleed for being partnered with Peter for so much of the action, but either I'm getting used to her or she was more diluted here, by David Carey (which, it was sad, but believable to see someone who CAN'T just adjust to the weird bollocks like Lesley and then Guleed had done) and having her own assignment (probably both), which was a relief. I didn't mind Kim's reappearance via phone, or the pagetime spent with the Rivers (and am kind of cuted out that Maxim has become "Uncle Max" to Nicky), or Zach, and appreciated the cameo, however brief and remote, from Kumar. Really, the only person I was really missing (though there was no reason for her to make an appearance) was Caroline Linden-Limmer, because she'd been probably my favorite thing about The Hanging Tree.
I've gotten this far without talking about Lesley, because I'm still trying to figure out how I feel. I've been waiting for a proper reunion -- not just texts and abortive rendezvous and confrontations in Martin's hearing -- since Broken Homes, and wondering what she was really doing. The revelation we get makes a fair amount of sense. I never believed Lesley turned just to regain her face (though, like Peter, I wouldn't blame her if she had -- she just didn't seem like the type). The double agent theory was looking increasingly unlikely, and I didn't really believe working class Lesley would buy into Chorley's "glory of the Dark Ages" crap, so it was reassuring to see just how much not-on-his-side she was. Believing the world would be better off without Punch (and not worrying about the ecological niche he might be filling in the "eidolosphere") makes a ton of sense for her, and I could see taking a chance on a new/better world order, too, though this seems secondary for her. Her cold-bloodedly shooting Martin in the head because she doesn't trust the Folly or prison to hold him also made a ton of sense for her character, however much I'd been hoping that she would cross back over to the side of the Met once she and Peter teamed up to take Chorley down, like in the good old days. (That scene was so great! And I was hoping, like Peter, that she could be talked into a Heel Face Turn, but this makes more sense, alas....) I hope Lesley won't be the new arc Big Bad, now that Chorley has been taken care of, and I hope she won't disappear entirely either; the kind of shadowy, ambushy assistance she's been providing is something I can live with, so hoping for more of that. On a different Lesley note, I remember readers picking up on a kind of condescension from her to Peter, and apparently that was right, when they were first starting out, but, well, Peter, for all his talents, wasn't a stellar cop back then, one has to admit. She does respect him now, it seems, though she still disagrees with him on so many things.
(Which is something that I do love about Peter while being very distant from it myself -- just how much of a Hufflepuff he is when it comes to policing (still Ravenclaw first, but after that, definitely 'Puff) -- that going in with the law is his first and on impulse, when it comes to Chorley, when it comes to goat-sacrificing lawyers, even when it comes to the people who abandoned Foxglove and her sisters in a hole for fifteen years to starve: "One day, I thought, I will find whoever it was put you in that pit. And then what will I do? Prosecute them for false imprisonment and/or attempted murder? Make sure they were branded as sex offenders, that was for certain." The scene where Peter is considering whether to manipulate Foxglove into releasing him from captivity, with his "what would Lesley do?" and then actively rejects that route and tells her the truth, difficult as that is, was another scene that stood out to me. One thing that I really like about Peter is that he is committed to ethics and justice without being naive about it. Like, there are several times during this book when he thinks about terrible things people have done with magic -- demon traps, weaponized vampires -- and is very aware of the likelihood that his own side might've used or experimented with them as well: "Nightingale swears blind that no British wizard ever stooped to such practice and I admit I've never found any record to show they did. But still -- you have to wonder." (about demon traps), and later, about weaponized vampires: "Maybe [the Germans in WWII had] got the idea from the Americans. Or maybe everyone had tried it -- although Nightingale denied that the British had." And it was good to see that Peter and Nightingale are still discussing the various ethical implications of their position and the actions they take: like Nightingale telling Peter "Follow my lead in this [...] And do try to trust my judgement on the ethical issues this time" as they're prepping for the Patrick Gale interview, and, after:
Peter: [And] the fact that the public have no say whatsoever in our conduct of operations.
Nightingale: "They do in a general sense, through the office of the Commissioner and, beyond him, the Home Office."
Peter: "That is not accountability."
Nightingale: Do you think the general public would make good decisions?"
Peter: "That's not the point."
And, in the memories, the little symbolic exchange with Fleet where Peter refuses to use a spear in a battle fight, and opts instead for a round shield. Which, as I'm typing it right now, is taking me back to him imagining himself as Captaion America('s younger brother). Huh!)
One of the joys of this book for me are the geeky references, and this installment didn't disappoint. My favorite were the Tolkien bits, kidnapped Peter reading young Chorley's dog-eared copy of The Sil (and actually getting through the early chapters because there's nothing else to do), going all policeman on the subject of the theft of the silmarils -- and then downloading the book on his phone so he can finish reading it even when he's free. And Peter recognizing Gandalf's G rune in the larger canvas of Richard Williams' tattoo. Oh, and Peter pretending he's Captain America when pummeling the old-style punching bag at the Folly is very cute. And of course there's the "Fuck me, I'm in an episode of Game of Thrones" tagline, which was also very amusing. Oh, and this bit when Peter was making a toast at the Summer Court: "When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list." And apparently he can recite most of The Emperor's New Groove from memory, too XP Also, not quite the same thing, but I continue to love the mix of old lore and modern technology that Peter brings to his role, like translating the Greek he needs "with the aid of a dictionary, a 1922 edition of Smyth and Messing's Greek Grammar, and Google."
I was surprised and sad to see Peter finish up the book on suspension from the force, although I definitely hope it's a short-lived one. (I assume this is the "exile" Father Thames prophesied for him in Latin.)
Another difference I noticed about this volume's narration, which I don't think was present before, is Peter addressing the public directly. Like, obviously, he's always been a first person narrator, speaking to someone. And people noticed earlier that he seemed to be writing from some point in the future, although it was never clear how far. But I think this might be the first book where Peter directly addressed a reader who could've interacted with him, rather than some generic reader, removed from him in time and/or space, like when he says "And if you're the woman who, driving along the A4155 that afternoon, found herself inexplicably picking up a pair of hitchhikers", etc. He's also starting to talk to Nightingale about ending the Maskerade and revealing to the general public that magic exists, which is making me think that, in-universe, these books may be Peter's way of coming out to the public about the Folly, or at least helping to provide context, however the reveal actually happened. (Oh, and note, this book takes place while Obama is still POTUS, since Guleed gets that selfie with Michelle Obama, so some time before the end of 2016.)
Open questions:
- So if Chorley was telling the truth, who killed John Chapman and Gabriel Tate, and why? And who's been emailing Camilla Turner pretending to be John Champman since, since presumably that was also not Chorley.
- Who is the mole at the Met, and will they continue feeding info to someone (Lesley?) now that Chorley is dead?
- Where is the fifth High Fae woman who'd been sold along with Molly, Foxglove, "Alice", and the Pale Lady? And how did Molly come to the Folly from wherever she had fetched up?
- What sort of demi-monde person is Abigail's friend Simon?
Quotes:
"Homes are like witnesses. They pretty much lie all the time. [...] When you're the police, an interesting lie can be as useful as the truth. Sometimes more so."
"The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner."
"The good gentlemen of the Society of the Wise had plenty of theories and systems of classification for the people of the demi-monde, most of them involving a mixture of Latin, Greek and misinterpreted Darwinism."
"Archeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickablness."
"My mum maintains a couple of rotating feuds with the vast cloud of family and semi-family that now stretches across four generations and eleven time zones."
"My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn't exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms.I'm particularly proud of 'initial incident' although 'subjective perception threshold' runs a close second."
"It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: 'Fuck truth and beauty. We've got money and loads of it.'"
"'We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster,' [Seawoll] said, which went into the official log as - DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive."
Beverley: "I was thinking of going into flood management."
Isis: "Isn't that cheating?"
Beverley: "I like to think of it more as offering a unique insight."
Isis: "The insight being that they pay you money and you don't flood their back gardens?"
"Beverley denied the extortion aspect."
70. Ellen Klages, White Sands, Red Menace -- the second book in the Gordon Family saga of historical kidlit books, set shortly after The Green Glass Sea. I still enjoyed it, though I missed the historical figures populating the first book as cameo characters; here, Wernher von Braun and Lou Slotin are mentioned, and I guess maybe the Popular Mechanics guy was a real person? -- but I think that's about it. Anyway, I enjoyed learning what happened next with Dewey and Suze (and, like ambyr hypothesized might happen, I liked Suze a lot more in this book than in the first one; she's not a perfect kid, but felt much more sympathetic and interesting now that she's found her place, including the genuinely interesting social commentary art she's graduated to), and spending more time with Terry Gordon (I especially liked her interaction with Suze in this one). SPOILERS from here! I liked the backstory we got about Dewey's mom, and the resolution there -- Rita is not a villain, but she's not the right parent for Dewey either, and yet they do form a kind of relationship, ultimately (I liked the bracelet with the volume of the cone; that was a nice touch for closure). Dewey's relationship with Owen the sci-fi geek was very sweet, but I liked Suze and Ynez's friendship even more (and also... was I supposed to find it as shippy as I did? Like, they have a lot of fun banter, and I liked Ynez in general, but the hair-brushing scenes were pretty goddamn sensual, I'm just sayin'). I'm less happy about Phil Gordon essentially abandoning his wife and child(ren), even if it's for his first love, space. But then, I never got the sense that Ellen Klages was very interested in Phil Gordon.
On a random but related note, I kept twitching whenever "Doctor Gordon" was used to refer to Phil, since Terry also had a PhD, so I cheered when she corrected the principal that it was "Doctor Gordon". I was also briefly pleased to see Rudy Mueller addressing her as "Frau Doktor Gordon", but then the concentration camp factory thing came out, and, yeah, not so fond of him anymore. (I was a bit surprised that the Germans we meet in this book are as unsympathetic as they are. I mean, they're not actively villainous, but all the good that can be said for them is, they're polite, but the only person who approves of them is Phil, who is not a shining beacon of sense or decency in this book. Like, I was impressed that in the first book, with the war still one, Dewey's father had pointed out to her that his German mathematician friend was a decent man who went to work for his government, same as he did. Maybe such a sense of nuance is no longer possible once the story of the concentration camps becomes known; I could see that. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for sympathetic Nazis! I was just surprised, after the first book, that we didn't get something more like what Jimmy Kerrigan had said, vs Phil's "why can't you just move on", which I don't think is meant to be a defensible view.)
Despite not having the famous scientist cameos, and being less interested in the early space program than the Manhattan Project, I did really enjoy the historical setting of this book, the flavor of the times -- television on the horizon as this amazing new thing, filmstrips and mimeographs as newfangled additions to the classroom, the Golden Age of SF starting to bloom with the magazines and Bradbury and Heinlein, the sense of possibility when it comes to scientific discoveries -- atomic ovens in every home! (and microwaves being an actual thing Terry has vaguely heard about), "Either they would all be blown to bits, or it would be a paradise where cars could run for a year on the energy in a cup of water."And stuff like the girls having to learn all 48 states, and period movies, and other marks of the era.
The Not Like Other Girl-ness is increasing, or possibly my tolerance for it is being worn away, though it still feels in character for non-traditionally-feminine girls this age, especially in such a restrictive era. But Suze and Dewey deciding that they wanted to be brothers rather than sisters really made me raise my eyebrows, and all the eyerolling about silly girls with their movie star crushes and caring about hygiene... *sigh*
There was fortunately less playing with radioactive materials, but this time around I kept cringing at the way Terry kept smoking while pregnant -- and thought it was interesting that, at the end, Phil says that maybe it's not good for the baby, and she totally dismisses him. Oh, an speaking of radiation, and pregnancy, I appreciated that the misunderstanding was not too drawn out, but I liked the way that scene was played, with both pregnancy and radiation sickness making a lot of sense with what people were saying and how they were acting. (Note to self: rabbit died reference.)
Quotes:
Dewey, to Suze, while they're briefly fighting: "There's your chalk. You wanna go draw a line down your mom?"
And a little later: "'Yeah. Go on. Talk to my friend Terry.' She buddy-punched Suze on the arm. 'I think she likes you.'"
72. Ellen Klages, Out of Left Field -- the third book in the Gordon family saga, although it's different in a number of ways from the first one. It's set 10+ years later (i.e. in late 1950s), focuses on a character who is only hinted at in book 2, and is told in first person (by her) vs alternating third POVs. Also, Katy's thing is baseball, rather than science or art, which is something I have zero interest in and also know pretty much nothing about the history of, so I was worried I might find the book boring -- but not at all! Instead of getting to see history I already knew about in a lot of real-time detail through a child's eyes, I got to learn a bunch of new-to-me things about female baseball players and the history of baseball in general, which ended up being pretty cool. Spoilers!
I would've liked to have seen more of Dewey and Suze as grown-ups, but enjoyed the little tidbits we got -- Suze and her MFA, Dewey and her patent -- but at least there was plenty of Terry. Although Terry and Phil parted on a definitely uneasy note at the end of book 2, I wasnt expecting him to have just... completely walked away from the family, apparently, although Terry's later explanation, that she had been blacklisted for refusing to sign the loyalty oath and he wanted to keep his clearance, made a bit more sense. Still, him having been so scarce in the first two books and only represented by a frankly pathetic phonecall in this one almost made me wonder what the point of him as a character was. I was also sad to see that Grandpa Weiss had passed and we never got to meet him, though it was good to see the grandmother. The Not Like Other Girls vibes also continued, although I felt like they were toned down a bit here, with Katie actually having a female friend, meeting so many different women who WERE like here, and then inviting the girl to play at the end. Oh, and Terry's sister Babs is the magic character who doesn't do magic, isn't she? Or her partner is?
I got a kick out of the setting finally coming back to the Bay Area, where the Gordons are from, and getting to see a little bit of 1950s San Francisco and the Cal campus (Doe Library! <3). I had no idea
73. Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song -- ikel89 and I continued our Hardinge sync read with Cuckoo Song, which you can find in situ here. Cuckoo Song was actually the Hardinge book I was most intrigued by, because I knew what it was about, but I was worried I'd find it too creepy. I didn't find it TOO creepy, but it definitely WAS creepy -- very, very creepy -- and so I'm glad I didn't actually start my acquaintance with Hardinge with it.
First, the creepiness, because I do feel like thats the thing that stands out the most to me about this book. Some of it is just the mood and foreshadowing -- the way Triss has gaps in her memory where we start and realizes something is wrong with her but not what, the creepy countdown dreams, the shadow of the dead brother over the whole family, the pall of the parents' stifling and conditional love -- before it's even fully clear whats going on with Triss. But the thing that ended up being creepiest to me caught me by surprise and made me realize I had a heretofore undiscovered squick about binge-eating. Spoilers from here! Oddly enough, eating dolls and shoes and things became a lot less squicky to me once I realized, along with Tris(ta) that the reason she was doing this was to, like, keep renewing her connection with Triss. Somehow that falling into, like, mass/energy balance category made it all make sense and not be creepy or gross, IDK. XP But there are other really neat creepy things, like the reverse-of-movie-screen attempted kidnapping of Pen, with her residual muteness (because these are the silent movies still) and black and white color and words writing themselves on nearby objects -- such a neat scene, and not something I think I've seen before. And I think Sebastian's letters from the stopped-tie moment between life and death, the perpetual war, were possibly the objectively creepiest things ever.
On top of the creepiness, I think there's another reason it took me a bit more time to get into this book vs the other Hardinges: the protagonist when we first meet her. Like I said in my first liveblog post, I said: "I liked Makepeace and I liked Faith. Triss... I feel sorry for, but am finding a lot harder to like. The overly sheltered child who is convinced by her parents that she doesn't feel well, and feels both cradled and stifled by this brand of love, who is rewarded with pretty dresses for being ill -- that's a really unusual idea for a protagonist! But while it's clear Triss is a victim in all this, I'm not feeling much of HER yet, the way I did with Faith, who was also constrained by her family." And of course there's a good reason for this: MAJOR SPOILERS! Triss isn't actually Triss, and the reason she doesn't feel particularly compelling at the start is that she's trying to be someone she's not. The book really took off for me once "Triss" realized she wasn't actually Triss and thus felt free to actually be herself. Not-Triss/Trista (I'm just going to call her Trista from here) was someone I sympathized with a lot more, especially once she stood up for Pen to her parents.
Because Pen ended up being my favorite character in the book, with her delinquent shoe-stealing ways, hitchhiking by faking being struck by a car, Clever Disguises, and insistence that since she saves Tristas life, she can call her whatever she wants, whether it's Fake Triss or Trista. She is such a flawed and complicated character -- I totally had not expected her to be the reason behind the original Triss's kidnapping, and I think her fear and guilt about this are dealt with very well and very believably -- but she's so VIVID, she really lit up every scene she was in. And I liked Pen's relationship with Vivian -- in fact, the only time I found Vivian at all interesting was when she was interacting with Pen. Also, I loved Pen's explanation for why their parents couldn't tell not-Triss was scared/really crying: "Because they're stupid. They can't tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can't tell when fake Triss is real-crying."
I also liked most of the other secondary characters. Piers Crescent surprised me by ending up as someone I found sympathetic, considering where I was at the beginning of the book. Knowing exactly how Piers ended up in a bargain with the Architect changed my view of him for the better in a way I really didn't expect. I was really hating him for the "my Triss is a good girl" remark. Weirdly, the way he behaved during the scene where he and Mr Grace try to throw Trista in the fire made me like him more -- like, the way he clearly is fully aware he is doing a terrible, terrible thing, but he is doing it to (as he thinks) save his daughter. And when he and Trista met again and he was willing to bargain anything to save the girls, and actually listened to all the harsh truths gave me a lot of respect for him I wasn't expecting to feel. I'd been expecting, like you're supposed to, I think, that his faerie bargain was for fame and fortune -- that the architectural designs which made him famous in Ellchester were the "get" and not the "give" -- knowing that he had actually been reluctant to pass off the Architect's designs as his own an only did it because he thought it was a way to bring Sebastian home changed a lot for me in how I saw him. I do think it's a bit unfair that Trista is more willing to forgive Piers than Celeste. I mean, I'm not sure it's MEANT to be fair? Like, based on both Skinful and especially The Lie Tree, I think Hardinge is very aware that girls can be so much harder on their mother figures, so it very well could be intentional and the point. But taking Trista's thoughts at face value: Yes, Piers faced up to what he did, and it's not clear that Celeste ever did, but: I feel like Celeste's learned helplessness is actually an extension of the same thing real Triss was being smothered by -- one strong personality, feeling he's failed his family in a way he can't fix, going overboard and "protecting" everyone with a more malleable character into a total abdication of choices. (I suspect this means Pen and Piers are actually the two most similar in character, and kind of want to see fic of that. Especially weird time-travel fic where Pen gets to meet her father when he was a stubborn pre-teen who always had to get his own way. But anyway!)
I also quite liked Joseph Grace, the tailor, who is introduced as a nice and sympathetic figure at first, and honestly, he never stopped being somewhat sympathetic to me, even when he was advocating for throwing our protagonist into the fire. It's very realistic that after his own loss -- for which he blames himself, I'm sure, since he didn't listen to his wife's "superstitions" -- he would see the Besiders and anything that comes fro them as evil and inhuman. I wasn't sure how I wanted the book to end for him, or how I feel about the way it did conclude. It makes absolute sense that he would not be willing to believe in peaceful coexistence with the Besiders, and would be determined to kill them all. His execution of the Besider couple by the fire -- not entirely unprovoked, but definitely disproportionate response -- made that pretty clear. I do like that Trista neither fully condemns him nor ever forgives him -- it's about the right balance. It would've been nice if he'd been able to come around to a more nuanced view, but, yeah, more realistic this way, alas. And I do like the way Trista can almost see things from his point of view sometimes.
Speaking of the Besiders, I thought they were a really good exaple of what I like in urban(ish) fantasy with faeries. I love that nobody actually ever says the word "faerie", although the whole changeling mythos is rooted in it. "Besiders" is a great term, vague enough to be really creepy while being a very ordingery word -- it just feels right. And I love that none of them ever get actual names that the human(ish) characters can pronounce or remember -- the ones that get names at all, it's titles or descriptions, not their real names. And they are just this really nice mix of threatening, unpredictable ("There was a long, long second during which a hundred winter winds drew in a silent breath and the Architect was not handsome at all"), and just human enough to be interesting and/or sympathetic on occasion (like the pair that got killed by Grace's posse). Also, Besiders as tea room patrons and crime scene witnesses were HI-larious. I also found it interesting, if not intuitively true, why the Besiders need to take refuge in cities now (maps, which create too much certainty) and what it is about scissors that's so antithetical to them (I figured it was just iron, like in faerie stories, but I like the explanation that "scissors are really intended for one job alone -- snipping things in two. Everything on one side or the other, and nothing in between. Certainty. Were in-between folks, so scissors hate us. They want to snip us through and make sense of us, and there's no sense to be made without killing us."), as well as why they weren't able to abide churches before but aren't bothered by church bells now (WWI having killed faith, according to the Shrike). I read two other books with faeries in the last couple of months (The Cruel Prince and Witchmark -- and, hell, maybe even Spinning Silver sort of counts -- but these are my favorite faeries.)
Like in all the other Hardinge books I've read, there's some really nice layered symbolic stuff going on, though I feel like this book brought it to the foreground a bit more? Like, the buried-alive frog -- an accident, becuase Pen was only trying to help -- and Triss who is buried, smothered under the weight of her parents' overprotectiveness (they were also only trying to do what's best for her) -- and of course the literal threat of Triss being buried alive by the Architect (and the plan to have Piers seal her in in the capstone ceremony, brrr!) There's also the really nice connection between Trista, on her last day, when Pen and Violet worry she's too frail to go try to catch the Architect on her own, making the case that it's her life and she should be allowed to make her own choices about it, even if those choices hasten her death, and the real Triss being swaddled in cotton by her parents.
Because I found the ending a weak point of the other two Hardinge books I've read so far, I was braced to be disappointed here, too, but it was actually not bad. I'm not thrilled about Trista and Violet riding into the sunset on V's motorcycle -- I didn't think Violet needed an ersatz daughter, and I didn't think Trista needed any additional parent figures -- but it is probably more practical and more realistic than Trista being able to stay with the Crescents, and it does ean that the real Triss will get the opportunity to be a good sister to Pen without having to do it from under Trista's shadow, and will have to stand up to their parents on her own.
The prose is still gorgeous, and I love Hardinge's unexpected but striking imagery, so have a bunch of quotes:
"The scissors snipped with a slow, throaty crunch, as if relishing every inch."
"If I tell my parents, she thought irrationally, then they'll get worried, and if they're worried, that means it's serious."
"There was something comforting and familiar about her parents being angry on her behalf. It felt like being coddled inside a horse-chestnut shell, protected by its inward downy softness, while all the spikes pointed outward."
"Every time she closed her eyes, she could sense dreams waiting at the mouse hole of her mind's edge, ready to catch her up in their soft cat-mouth."
On Pen covering for her: "Feeling a little as if somebody had poked her in the eye with an olive branch."
"Even when she dipped into sleep, it was puddle-thin and streaked with dreams."
"All her best-loved dresses had been bought there, after fits of illness. Her whooping-cough blue chiffon. Her three-day-fever cotton with the primrose print."
"Out of instinctive loyalty to her father, Triss wrinkled her brow and thought sickly, woebegone thoughts."
"Over the years her parents had herded Triss's woolly memories into the neat pens of their stories, until she no longer knew what she actually remembered."
"'More hullabaloo,' murmured Triss's mother, in a tone that combined martyrdom and pride."
"In it she heard the splintering lament of wind-felled trees, the steel cacophony of gulls, the whining note at the heart of a storm wind. [...] There was a reek in her nose, a slick dark green smell of water that was old enough to be clever and dangerous."
"It was a good lie, with a fair dollop of the truth in it to stop it from curdling."
About an ex-sanatorium resort type place: "the place still bristled with doctors, like a crust of barnacles marking a high-water point after the tide had gone out."
"Not-Triss remembered seeing her father wrap his arms around her mother many times, but usually gently and firmly, as if he was holding together a broken thing long enough for the glue to set."
"pastel-colored parties where languid, fashionable women slunk and posed, slim and elegant as fish. [...] Not-Triss had a strong feeling that this was not the kind of party that welcomed sudden damp children."
"'Someboy get me a drink and a cigarette!' Violet said. It was not a sultry request, more like a mechanic asking to be passed a wrench."
"Perhaps she was weighing up a lie, like a snowball in her hand, seeing if it would hold together."
Underbelly seagulls being fucking creepy: "One child, two child! Pink cheek childs with eyes in their heads! Soft eye childs with hearts like fruit!"
The Shrike, looking at not-Triss, as she understands it: "He had the pride of a chef who revels in seeing his masterpiece but does not care what happens to the remains after the banquet.
"[Mr Grace] kept his hands slightly raised and spread, as if Violet's temper was a gun."
"After a long period of silence, there came a sense that hugging had solved all it could."
"She did not know how these two facts were connected, but she could sense the link between them swaying in the darkness, like a submerged mooring chain."
"'[Sebastian] didn't come home.'
'He's not the only one,' said Jack's mother flatly. Her gaze passed over her son smoothly and coolly, like fingers stroking the marble of a sepulchre."
"His tone was bright, light, and unpredictable, like the leaping of windswept washing on a sunlit line."
Besiders at the tea shop: "Good afternoon. I am not here to devour you. Now bring me sweetmeats so that I may pass as one of your kind." "A glass of your tears, my honey. What? Oh. Tea, then."
74. Tim Federle, The Great American Whatever -- a book I hadn't even (consciously) heard about until ikel89 compared it favorably to Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and I was intrigued enough by that to read it. I'm glad I did! It's a good book, although I wouldn't compare it to WG,WG, which feels solidly YA -- it reminded me more of Catcher in the Rye (apparently Kirkus Review agrees with the comparison) -- so, yes, a book in which the narrator and most characters are teenagers, and teens certainly can read and relate and enjoy, but it feels pitched older than regular YA (not surprising, since the afterword revewals it was originally going to be set 10 years later). The characters are very much teenagers, but the themes and takeaways feel more suited to adult fiction, which I consider to be a good thing.
I can't say that I loved Quinn, the protagonist, but he was sympathetic and an interesting narrator. The script bits, which I was afraid might be hokey, were actually fun in juxtaposition to reality, and also sparingly used. And the narration overall was really great -- both fresh and believable, without being too try-hard; I especially enjoyed the "[statement]. Wait, no, apparently [contradictory statement]" and retroactive spoiler alerts, which made it really feel like you were listening to someone talk as they figured stuff out. Quinn was also believable as someone sharp but also myopic / self-centered to the point of obliviousness -- in general, I mean, not just MAJOR SPOILERS from here! in the wake of his trauma over his sister's death and his guilt over his role in it, which exacerbates everything. The way he doesn't even entertain the possibilitity of some secrets he learns until confronted with them (that Annabeth and Geoff were an item, that Annabeth wasn't actually interested in film-making, that Amir has his own agenda) and the way what he thinks of as his secrets are not (the coming out to his mother, the confession that Annabeth had been texting him when she ran the red light, when it was on the news and everyone already knew) also serve as nice counterpoints. And there's just a lot of nuance I hadn't been expecting from a YA book -- the way grief hits him in a very different way than he expects when he finally drives by the place where his sister died, the way what happened makes him sharply aware of mortality all at once. It's good stuff. And I appreciated that Quinn is relatable but far from perfect.
Speaking of which, the secondary characters were particularly great, for the same reason. I liked Quinn's mom, who is (understandably) not coping very healthily either, and his relationship with her. (This part actually reminded me of The Art of Starving, and there are actually a lot of superficial similarities -- gay boy dealing with a serious psychological issue, coping with the absence of his sister, single mother on hard times, Middle Eastern boyfriend -- although the two books are actually not at all alike.) Geoff and Carly and Quinn's relationship with them also worked for me nicely, especially the moment where Quinn shows up at Geoff's house to beat him up and they end up laughing and crying instead. And I especially liked Amir and the way Quinn's relationship with him was handled. Because Amir is a really neat mix of decency and flaws -- when he inadvertently offends Quinn by going off on an overweight woman -- but has the courage to apologize; that he takes care of drunk Quinn and brings him home and thanks him for the honesty he doesn't remember -- but doesn't actually care about him on any significant emotional level. I would've happily read about an actual heartfelt first romance between the two of them, but the way things played out, with Quinn calling him up for a getting-even-with-Geoff-and-Annabeth de-virgin-izing booty call and they ended up talking instead and then Quinn read his diary and confronted him about Evan, and the sex they ended up having anyway -- sweet but pretty much NSA, which is fine with both of them at that point. It's not what I'd been expecting -- I'd been expecting either an actual love story or something about waiting for the right moment (and I think if this were REALLY a YA book, that's what it would've been), but this is refreshing, and more realistic than Quinn's imaginings of brown babies with Amir's DNA. Also, I was cuted out by the fact that Amir's novel -- some kind of epic philosophical fantasy thing, I guess -- is both really earnest and actually terrible. I had not been expecting that, either. Also, Quinn finding the way Amir drives stickshift hot was pretty adorable, too.
Quotes:
"His outfit today, by the way: Literally who cares. You shuld see his hair."
"I deactivated all my profiles three months ago. I was tired of getting tagged in #tributes. I was tired of the banal poetry and misappropriated quotes that people would add my name to and, worse, Annabeth's. 'This made me miss @annabeth_roberts17,' some second-tier girl from school would say, tagging Annabeth in a ludicrous Eleanor Roosevelt quote written in, like, Comic Sans, and laid over a very fake-looking rainbow, as if @annabeth_roberts17 even liked rainbows. You know what Annabet Roberts, seventeen, liked? Gray skies."
"God knows I've seen enough porn to at least have a basic sense of the etiquette and approach to this stuff, but then again, I've watched a lot of YouTubes of Olympic divers, too -- those bathing suits, those bathing suits -- and I'm no closer to flipping off a forty-foot platform than I am to winning an Oscar."
75. Rainbow Rowell, Attachments -- the last Rowell novel (i.e. not counting comic books) I hadn't read, and also her first book, by a few years. It shows, but I still enjoyed it, and blazed through it in like a day, maybe because it was like the perfect antidote to what I should've been reading, which was the Bear and Nightingale sequel to finish up my not-really-syncread-any-longer with cyanshadow (which, I'm not disliking that book, although I'm less into it than the first one, but apparently I'm just not in the mood for period fantasy at the moment. Anyway!). I'd been vaguely aware of Attachments for quite a while, from ms_geekette, I think, but when venturing beyond her YA books, went with Landline a couple of years ago, and then never tracked down this one, until ikel89 was reading it and complaining about it to Best Chat (the evolved form of Virtual Worldcon).
Attachments is a weird book. It bills itself as a romcom, but actually I semi-seriously wonder if in the first draft the couple did NOT get together, and it was just a book about, in your late 20s, growing up, but romance is easier to sell. Spoilers from here, but if you read it, I encourage going in spoiled -- I think that's part of what helped me injoy the book, knowing the romance endgame was going to be ridiculous. Because I actually enjoyed everything about the book EXCEPT the endgame romance, which makes no sense, is ethically dubious, the couple interact directly for the first time at the 94% mark of the book (this is not an exaggeration!), and then spend the remaining 5% of the book going, "we should care that this situation makes no sense, but somehow we don't, let's not talk about that anymore" (this is also not an exaggeration; that's literally what happens).
I usually don't summarize books, but I do think expectations need to be clear going in, so: sad-sack 28-year-old Lincoln who still lives with his doting/controlling mother, has no idea what he wants to do with his life, besides go to more school for something, and is still emotionally compromised from the breakup with his first and only girlfriend freshman year of college, gets a job as an IT security guy at a newspaper on the eve of Y2K. (I was surprised by the Y2K setting, which ended up completely not mattering, except possibly as some kind of symbolism about transitions and thresholds maybe? I have no idea, honestly.) His job mostly consists of investigating messages flagged by the corporate IT security filters, and through this/instead of this he starts reading the highly personal correspondance between two women his age: Beth, a movie reviewer in a relationship with her emotionally unavailable rocker boyfriend from college, and Jennifer, a copy editor with an adorable-sounding husband who is coming to terms with whether or not she wants to have a baby. Of course Lincoln falls in love with Beth through these emails he is reading, in violation of basic decency and also corporate policy, because he does not DO anything about them, like issue a warning, like he's supposed to. Beth also? somehow? develops a crush on him based on 1) him looking like the guy from the Brawny paper towels, and 2) him being sweet to the older lady who stocks the vending machines. Beth breaks up with the rocker boyfriend when he tells her he will never marry her at her little sister's wedding, and Lincoln has a sudden crisis of conscience and quits his job, writing Beth an anonymous note explaining he'd been reading her email -- at this point, recall, they have not interacted at all EVER -- and then they meet by accident in a dark movie theater and kiss? and get together? for some reason? It is all very rom-com on the surface, and it's basically played as a romcom, but those are not the parts of the book I liked best.
Best was the friendship between Beth and Jennifer, which was clear and funny and heartwarming through their emails, and also did not shy away from the two of them occasionally saying things that hurt the other. Jennifer was my favorite, actually, and I would've preferred to read the book about her and Mitch and her changing feelings on motherhood, from regular pregnancy scares to shopping for clothes at BabyGap before she's even decided to get pregnant, to her ambivalent feelings when she does get pregnant, the grief and guilt over the miscarriage (but Beth telling her that the miscarriage was 93% not her fault? WTF Beth, who says that, and what do you even know about it? O.o) I would've actually really liked to see the other part of this journey, which happened after Lincoln had already quit so there were no emails about it; we hear that Jennifer is expecting again at the end, which I was happy to hear, but I wanted to know how she felt about it this time. I also quite liked what the book did with Chris, Beth's Mr Wrong, the rocker boyfriend. He is not a cheater or a creep -- although he is a jerk (although I didn't quite buy the un-proposal at the sister's wedding; there was no reason at all for him to say ANYTHING, so it just felt totally contrived) -- but he's definitely not the right guy for her. The thing is, I can actually buy that he is someone who genuinely does not WANT a serious romantic/emotional attachment, and never did, and feels trapped just by being in a relationship with Beth even without marriage, by actually having emotions for her, when he'd rather just save intensity for his music and spend the rest of the time isolated from the world via headphones or a paperback in front of his face. Is he using Beth to live rent-free or just coasting because it's easy or both -- both are things that Lincoln does, too, by living with his mother -- well, probably both. But I found Chris largely sympathetic, and actually more sympathetic than Lincoln for most of the book. There's also a cast of variously wacky characters rounding out the book, newspaper staff people, Lincoln's D&D friends, Doris the vending machine lady, Lincoln's mother and sister and nephews. I liked the way a number of these secondary characters also get arcs: Lincoln's bro-y college friend Justin grows up enough to marry the bar hook-up he fell for, Lincoln's mother actually gets some human contact besides her children, in the food-based friendship she seems to strike up with Doris and D&D hostess Christine's admiration of her, etc.
The hilarious-sad thing is that, as a result, there are all these crackships that are way more believable than the actual endgame ship we're asked to accept. Beth basically ships Mitch/herself, in a really adorable way. ikel89 and I got into a mini ship war over whether Lincoln/Chris or Justin/Chris was the true OTP of the book. Lincoln stalks Chris's band's shows and admires his cheekbones, BUT (I pointed out) Justin actually digs his music! (and also theorizes at one point that Chris might have a boyfriend, which I'd forgotten to use to bolster my case). But then Chris literally, on-page, asked Lincoln if he were single, and I had to concede. Doris/Lincoln's Mom makes about 175% more sense than Lincoln/Beth, the way it is played out.
And it's too bad, because I feel like Lincoln/Beth actually undermines any growth the two of them experienced over the course of the book? Beth, who's known for the last couple of years at least the Chris was not going to marry her (which she really wanted at this point) or give her the emotional anchor she needed, breaks up with him -- good for her! -- and then immediately gets together with someone she DOES NOT KNOW AT ALL. This can't possibly be healthy! Lincoln has finally taken some steps to move on with his life, got his own apartment, appeared to get over the high school girlfriend breakup he was still traumatized by 10 years later, acquired something like a life, and a job he didn't have to feel skeevy about -- and the culmination of this is getting together with a girl he cyberstalked (very nicely, but still) while misusing his job role. It makes no sense as a romantic arc, if you think about it for more than 10 seconds, and it makes no sense as a character grown arc, either. Also, they don't even really have anything in common, not really? Except a tendency to stalk their crushes I guess, which... And, OK, Lincoln mostly agrees with her film reviews and finds them funny. This is not much of a foundation for a relationship XP Like, at the 2/3 point of the book, Lincoln thinks, "He couldn't help but think about Beth, but thinking about her was like thinking himself into a corner. Like realizing towards the end of a logic puzzle that you'd made a mistake early on, and that there's no way t reach the solution without starting over." And YES. YES, it is exactly like that, which is why the rest of the book -- which is, like, the equivalent of ignoring the fact that you now have two 7's in one row of your Sudoku puzzle and forging blithely on -- is such a bizarre choice! And the reason on Beth's side that this supposedly works is... love at first sight, revealed at the 98% mark, and, first of all, that's ALWAYS stupid, and second, that's not how books work! XD
Which is why I think the first draft must've ended with Beth making a date with the redheaded pharmacy student she met at that protest against tearing down the old cinema, and Lincoln starting his new job at the School of Medicine and maybe meeting a cute nursing student who plays D&D and whom he has no opportunity to stalk -- or better yet, HAS the opportunity to stalk but chooses not to, because, you know, he's actually learned something from the previous 95% of the book. (And, like. Getting to know someone and falling in love with them before you meet them face-to-face is something that actually works for me really, really well -- see Simon vs, which did this adorably and NON-CREEPILY -- but the key concept here is that you're actually interacting with the person, not peeping through their windows. Someone might even be able to sell me on "I'm a lurker who fell in love with you through your blog" or similarly one-sided information flow -- I doubt it, but maybe? -- but even that would be 1000x better than this because the information would at least be freely put out there and not a horrendous violation of privacy.
But I knew about the terrible romantic resolution going in, so was able to prepare adequately for that, and enjoy the rest of the book. There's something about the way Rowell writes people -- damaged and flawed, but very recognizable -- that really speaks to me. This book's prose was not as polished, but there were still quite a few quotes I liked:
"And with all of the lights and the computer servers, it was like sitting inside a headache."
Abut the newspaper finally getting internet: "it was now impossible to distinguish a roomful of people working diligently from a roomful of people taking the What-Kind-of-Dog-Am-I? online personality quiz."
Beth: "they've already picked their wedding song, and of course, it's 'What a Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong -- I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models."
Lincoln, thinking about his sister's relationship with his mother: He didn't understand the anger between them. He didn't even recognize his mother in the stories Eve told."
Jennifer, about her mother: "'That's how it starts. You better watch yourself.' 'It,' of course, is divorce. Which she's sure I inherited along with her straight teeth and her evil apologies. She's just waiting. She keeps poking my marriage with a toothpick. Almost done!"
Jennifer, on the baby fur coat she bought on sale at the BabyGap: "The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls." (OK, there are probably better years to pick, but it still made me laugh.)
Lincoln, on Chris: "He looked like he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in his back pocket. If you looked like that, a woman would forgive you. She would expect to have to forgive you now and then."
Lincoln, about his mother: "You could never be offended or dismayed with her -- she always beat you to it."
Beth, about Chris being distant: "I think of it like winter. During winter, it isn't that the sun is gone (or heating on you with some other planet). You can still see it in the sky. It's just father away."
Lincoln's flashback about learning that Sam had cheated on him: "He wanted to touch her, jump on her. Cover her like a hand grenade."
And I also like this line Lincoln says to Sam, except it's fairly ridiculous in the actual context: "There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with."
Jennifer on being pregnant: "Really, I feel a little bit like a suicide bomber. Like I'm walking around pretending to be normal, all the while knowing that I'm carrying something that is going to change -- possibly destroy -- the world as I know it."
Lincoln, on being taught the rules of pinochle by Doris: "Could your brain actually reject information? Like a foreign organ?"
Beth: "The kind of dancing that's more like touching to music. That's more like closing your eyes and trying to think how you would tell someone that you loved him if you didn't have words or sex."
Beth: "I think I called him 'a great horrrible bastard.' Like I was swearing in a second language."
Eve, horrified that her son is interested in playing D&D: "You're too young, and too socially adept."
Lincoln, who developed a crush on his medieval lit professor, "a flammably intelligent woman in mid-thirties": "He thought he might ask her out when the term ended. Or he might sign up for her advanced seminar."
71. Cry Fox (Rivers of London comics #5) -- I've been missing this world, as the last comics collection I read was back in the very beginning of the year, and it's been over a year since the Furthest Station novella, and almost two years (holy shit, I didn't realize it's been that long!) since the last full novel. I cannot wait for Lies Sleeping (one month to go!), but the comics make for nice little tidbits to tide me over. This one was fun enough, though I don't think I followed the plot completely. But that doesn't really matter, as I still enjoyed visiting with all the characters I like: (spoilers)
- Varvara! Rocking that silver suit and pumps (which matches the Jag, lol) , and accessorizing with her boys. That panel where she's got an arm looped through the arms of both Peter and Nightingale.
- Nightingale's cavalry charge! Peter fanboying him for all he's worth: "There's a spell called vox imperante. To do it you've got to string together six forma and a dozen inflectores with absolute precision. It's almost impossible to do even under laboratory conditions. To do it in the field you pretty much have to be the best in the world." Thomas giving up hunting after the war because "when you see sufficient blood shed in earnest, spilling it for 'sport' ceases to have any appeal"
- Great to see Abigail in a nice big role, disabling tracker bracelets (Guleed: "Brilliant. Though a bit worrying that you know that." Abigail: "I blame YouTube.") and pocketing sharp implements, labeling the people who kidnapped her ("creepy old bag", "skinny bitch", etc.), and kneeing "chubby wanker" in the balls to Nightingale's censure ("Abigail! That's not how we treat our prisoners.")
- Peter snarking at the lowlifes: "He stole my horse!" "Then it's your lucky day, mate. Because we're taking you to the police station, where you can report such heinous crimes."
- Peter's voiceover about how the "cry wolf" strategy doesn't pay off for the bad guys because when a kid disappears out of the foster system, the police throw everything at it.
- Reynard Fossman has now replaced Remus Lupin as the most obvious name for an animal-connected supernatural being. Well done!
And then I got to read Lies Sleeping a little early thanks to meathiel!
76. Ben Aaronovitch, Lies Sleeping -- This was really good. I think it's the book I've been waiting for since Broken Homes (although that one is still my favorite, I think), or at least the first time since then that I closed a RL book without feeling at least a little disappointed. (I loved the story in Night Witch, but was therefore disappointed that it wasn't a full-on novel.)
This series does something I respect even though it doesn't cater to my specific desires (for this series) or general preferences. Several things, actually. For one, it's not static. Like, the premise of books 1-4, with Peter the rookie cop who gets into trouble, and Nightingale a man out of time, decades behind the modern world? I LOVED that setup, and figured it would just keep going, because these books are police procedurals, and it's very easy to just keep those case/monster-of-the-week and keep the team dynamics the same. But it's actually impressive to see just how far Peter has come, professionally and personally, even though I miss the apprentice/mentor dynamic of the earlier books. Peter, a detective in his own right now, writing policy and liaising with other agencies, and mostly not needing to be rescued by Nightingale, and holding his own with senior officers like Seawoll; and Nightingale, moving on with the times and Skyping Peter for lessons, and interacting with an ever-widening circle of modern policemen -- it's good to see, and it's a lot more believable than if the dynamic I fell in love with had just stayed fixed. Peter and Nightingale really felt like peers in this book, in a way they didn't yet even in The Hanging Tree, and that was bittersweet, but like I said, I respect it. And the other thing is, I was really after Peter finding a second family in the Folly, and in Nightingale in particular, but that's not what the series is about either. It's not finding a family, it's building a community, which is much rarer to see. Spoilers from here! Peter's network of agencies and colleagues, his growing demi-monde connections, the civilian analysts being fed up by Molly, the cousin he's got working security at the posh legal firm to keep an eye on them -- hell, now even the Bacchanalia lawyers Nightingale is taking in hand, however little Peter likes them -- it's looser but bigger than family, and more relevant to the story the series is trying to tell, even if not to me personally. Hell, from the conversation with Dr Vaughan, it looks like Peter is already thinking ahead to the possibility of sharing magical classification data with the High Fae themselves, instead of just studying them as the Other -- and that's so wonderfully Peter.
I found Peter's voice a little jarring at first, but I'm not sure if it's just because it's been so long since the last novel that I'm misremembering that it's supposed to sound like, or if there's some change happening. Some of it was just stylistic -- more sentence fragments than I remember there being. But I also feel like he might be opening up about his parents more than before? Still not much, and maybe I'm just paying more attention now that I know what to look for, but I feel like he's actually letting himself feel some resentment instead of sublimating it (e.g. "I was beginning to worry about what the nanny's idea of discipline might have been. And I'm saying that as the son of an African mother." and "My dad said that this [looking after Abigail] would be a good preview of life with my own children, but what he thought he might know about it I don't know."). Which is good, if he's going to be a father himself. I... don't really know how I feel about that. I still don't find Beverley actually interesting, but she and Peter seem to have a good time, and I want him to be happy, so I'm fine with it? I am really curious to see him as a parent, Abigail babysitting (can you imagine?), and people like Nightingale, Molly, and Peter's mum getting to interact with a much-too-curious toddler down the line. Speaking of Peter and Bev, after that bit in memories/spirit world/whatever where Bev was the historical -- and male -- version of the genius loci, and Peter did not seem the least bit scandalized by getting snogged by him? I'm counting that as proof of bi Peter -- or, at least, not-fussed-by-the-gender-of-the-person-he-likes Peter. Randomly, I think this book is the first explicit confirmation we've gotten that Peter doesn't believe in God. Not a surprise, since he's never mentioned anything that suggested otherwise, but still interesting.
I also feel like I got to see more Nightingale in this book than in the other recent ones, or at last got to see him in a more satisfying way. My favorite scene was probably the one where Nightingale, at his poshest, goes to play bad cop with Patrick Gale. But he also gets some great action scenes, both onscreen (seeing him in battle mode, barking "On your feet, Grant!" was pretty neat, or Peter holding on for dear life while he's flooring the Jag, and then listening to Guleed do the same over the Airway later) and off (accidentally tossing murderous nannies through the roof and then feeling sheepish about it. A little concerned to hear Nightingale talking about retirement plans, but presumably not any time soon yet.
I like the way Abigail is coming along, in her studies and in growing up, and I love the newly revealed knowledge that it's not just Nightingale teaching her, but Varvara is too! Including some Russian/Greek notation and shorthand that she wasn't supposed to be. And that Peter and even Nightingale have been picking up icy pointers from Varvara! (I mean, it would've been lovely to actually see Varvara onscreen, but this was the next best thing. I really felt like she was present a lot in this book despite not participating in any of the action.) Am I supposed to know/remember why Abigail's brother is in the hospital or has to go there? I don't recall that coming up before... It was also nice to see Stephanopoulos, even if she did get injured in the line of duty in the course of it, and to see that Peter has advanced to the point of being invited over to her house and has now met Miriam's wife. It's also neat to see Peter's increasingly nuanced understanding of Seawoll, but I still really wonder what Seawoll and Nightingale's deal is (and whether it has anything to do with the cursed safe Seawoll mentioned in his litany of weird bollocks that peter did not know anything about.) I spent Hanging Tree kind of resenting Guleed for being partnered with Peter for so much of the action, but either I'm getting used to her or she was more diluted here, by David Carey (which, it was sad, but believable to see someone who CAN'T just adjust to the weird bollocks like Lesley and then Guleed had done) and having her own assignment (probably both), which was a relief. I didn't mind Kim's reappearance via phone, or the pagetime spent with the Rivers (and am kind of cuted out that Maxim has become "Uncle Max" to Nicky), or Zach, and appreciated the cameo, however brief and remote, from Kumar. Really, the only person I was really missing (though there was no reason for her to make an appearance) was Caroline Linden-Limmer, because she'd been probably my favorite thing about The Hanging Tree.
I've gotten this far without talking about Lesley, because I'm still trying to figure out how I feel. I've been waiting for a proper reunion -- not just texts and abortive rendezvous and confrontations in Martin's hearing -- since Broken Homes, and wondering what she was really doing. The revelation we get makes a fair amount of sense. I never believed Lesley turned just to regain her face (though, like Peter, I wouldn't blame her if she had -- she just didn't seem like the type). The double agent theory was looking increasingly unlikely, and I didn't really believe working class Lesley would buy into Chorley's "glory of the Dark Ages" crap, so it was reassuring to see just how much not-on-his-side she was. Believing the world would be better off without Punch (and not worrying about the ecological niche he might be filling in the "eidolosphere") makes a ton of sense for her, and I could see taking a chance on a new/better world order, too, though this seems secondary for her. Her cold-bloodedly shooting Martin in the head because she doesn't trust the Folly or prison to hold him also made a ton of sense for her character, however much I'd been hoping that she would cross back over to the side of the Met once she and Peter teamed up to take Chorley down, like in the good old days. (That scene was so great! And I was hoping, like Peter, that she could be talked into a Heel Face Turn, but this makes more sense, alas....) I hope Lesley won't be the new arc Big Bad, now that Chorley has been taken care of, and I hope she won't disappear entirely either; the kind of shadowy, ambushy assistance she's been providing is something I can live with, so hoping for more of that. On a different Lesley note, I remember readers picking up on a kind of condescension from her to Peter, and apparently that was right, when they were first starting out, but, well, Peter, for all his talents, wasn't a stellar cop back then, one has to admit. She does respect him now, it seems, though she still disagrees with him on so many things.
(Which is something that I do love about Peter while being very distant from it myself -- just how much of a Hufflepuff he is when it comes to policing (still Ravenclaw first, but after that, definitely 'Puff) -- that going in with the law is his first and on impulse, when it comes to Chorley, when it comes to goat-sacrificing lawyers, even when it comes to the people who abandoned Foxglove and her sisters in a hole for fifteen years to starve: "One day, I thought, I will find whoever it was put you in that pit. And then what will I do? Prosecute them for false imprisonment and/or attempted murder? Make sure they were branded as sex offenders, that was for certain." The scene where Peter is considering whether to manipulate Foxglove into releasing him from captivity, with his "what would Lesley do?" and then actively rejects that route and tells her the truth, difficult as that is, was another scene that stood out to me. One thing that I really like about Peter is that he is committed to ethics and justice without being naive about it. Like, there are several times during this book when he thinks about terrible things people have done with magic -- demon traps, weaponized vampires -- and is very aware of the likelihood that his own side might've used or experimented with them as well: "Nightingale swears blind that no British wizard ever stooped to such practice and I admit I've never found any record to show they did. But still -- you have to wonder." (about demon traps), and later, about weaponized vampires: "Maybe [the Germans in WWII had] got the idea from the Americans. Or maybe everyone had tried it -- although Nightingale denied that the British had." And it was good to see that Peter and Nightingale are still discussing the various ethical implications of their position and the actions they take: like Nightingale telling Peter "Follow my lead in this [...] And do try to trust my judgement on the ethical issues this time" as they're prepping for the Patrick Gale interview, and, after:
Peter: [And] the fact that the public have no say whatsoever in our conduct of operations.
Nightingale: "They do in a general sense, through the office of the Commissioner and, beyond him, the Home Office."
Peter: "That is not accountability."
Nightingale: Do you think the general public would make good decisions?"
Peter: "That's not the point."
And, in the memories, the little symbolic exchange with Fleet where Peter refuses to use a spear in a battle fight, and opts instead for a round shield. Which, as I'm typing it right now, is taking me back to him imagining himself as Captaion America('s younger brother). Huh!)
One of the joys of this book for me are the geeky references, and this installment didn't disappoint. My favorite were the Tolkien bits, kidnapped Peter reading young Chorley's dog-eared copy of The Sil (and actually getting through the early chapters because there's nothing else to do), going all policeman on the subject of the theft of the silmarils -- and then downloading the book on his phone so he can finish reading it even when he's free. And Peter recognizing Gandalf's G rune in the larger canvas of Richard Williams' tattoo. Oh, and Peter pretending he's Captain America when pummeling the old-style punching bag at the Folly is very cute. And of course there's the "Fuck me, I'm in an episode of Game of Thrones" tagline, which was also very amusing. Oh, and this bit when Peter was making a toast at the Summer Court: "When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list." And apparently he can recite most of The Emperor's New Groove from memory, too XP Also, not quite the same thing, but I continue to love the mix of old lore and modern technology that Peter brings to his role, like translating the Greek he needs "with the aid of a dictionary, a 1922 edition of Smyth and Messing's Greek Grammar, and Google."
I was surprised and sad to see Peter finish up the book on suspension from the force, although I definitely hope it's a short-lived one. (I assume this is the "exile" Father Thames prophesied for him in Latin.)
Another difference I noticed about this volume's narration, which I don't think was present before, is Peter addressing the public directly. Like, obviously, he's always been a first person narrator, speaking to someone. And people noticed earlier that he seemed to be writing from some point in the future, although it was never clear how far. But I think this might be the first book where Peter directly addressed a reader who could've interacted with him, rather than some generic reader, removed from him in time and/or space, like when he says "And if you're the woman who, driving along the A4155 that afternoon, found herself inexplicably picking up a pair of hitchhikers", etc. He's also starting to talk to Nightingale about ending the Maskerade and revealing to the general public that magic exists, which is making me think that, in-universe, these books may be Peter's way of coming out to the public about the Folly, or at least helping to provide context, however the reveal actually happened. (Oh, and note, this book takes place while Obama is still POTUS, since Guleed gets that selfie with Michelle Obama, so some time before the end of 2016.)
Open questions:
- So if Chorley was telling the truth, who killed John Chapman and Gabriel Tate, and why? And who's been emailing Camilla Turner pretending to be John Champman since, since presumably that was also not Chorley.
- Who is the mole at the Met, and will they continue feeding info to someone (Lesley?) now that Chorley is dead?
- Where is the fifth High Fae woman who'd been sold along with Molly, Foxglove, "Alice", and the Pale Lady? And how did Molly come to the Folly from wherever she had fetched up?
- What sort of demi-monde person is Abigail's friend Simon?
Quotes:
"Homes are like witnesses. They pretty much lie all the time. [...] When you're the police, an interesting lie can be as useful as the truth. Sometimes more so."
"The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner."
"The good gentlemen of the Society of the Wise had plenty of theories and systems of classification for the people of the demi-monde, most of them involving a mixture of Latin, Greek and misinterpreted Darwinism."
"Archeology came in all shapes, sizes, and apparent degrees of nickablness."
"My mum maintains a couple of rotating feuds with the vast cloud of family and semi-family that now stretches across four generations and eleven time zones."
"My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn't exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms.I'm particularly proud of 'initial incident' although 'subjective perception threshold' runs a close second."
"It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: 'Fuck truth and beauty. We've got money and loads of it.'"
"'We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster,' [Seawoll] said, which went into the official log as - DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive."
Beverley: "I was thinking of going into flood management."
Isis: "Isn't that cheating?"
Beverley: "I like to think of it more as offering a unique insight."
Isis: "The insight being that they pay you money and you don't flood their back gardens?"
"Beverley denied the extortion aspect."