Wednesday, November 6, 2024

BEING KIND: How to Add More Meaning to Your Moments, a clarion call to act


BEING KIND: How to Add More Meaning to Your Moments
KOBI YAMADA
(illus. Charles Santoso)
Compendium (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Why does kindness matter? Because there's no such thing as a small act of kindness—each one nourishes and enriches. This heartwarming book is a celebration of the part we each can play in creating a more compassionate world.

Written by New York Times bestselling author Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Charles Santoso, the creators behind the beloved Finding Muchness, this enchanting book illuminates how a simple deed can have extraordinary impact. Captivating artwork of a loveable sloth pairs with bite-sized wisdom to remind readers of the power we each have to uplift one another. It's a heartwarming invitation to be kind to someone—and to remember that you are someone too!

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: I haven't got the words to explain why kindness matters in a horrifying, cruel world that is getting rapidly crueler. Be kind to yourselves, and to each other.

We need to take care of each other. It is, now more than ever, clear we're the only ones who will.

NIGHTMARE.


Resist.

Monday, November 4, 2024

OCTOBER'S OCEAN, charming romantic YA story with a strong young gay lead



OCTOBER'S OCEAN
DELAINE COPPOCK

Tuxtails Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Halloween on Jute Island is like a walking, talking costume parade. That's probably why Seth didn't notice her at first.

The old black dress, wild hair and accent didn't exactly stand out in October. But there is something about Peggy that draws Seth in. He hadn't felt anything but empty since Colin died, but suddenly he feels curious. And who is this new boy in town with ocean eyes that Seth can't look away from?

As the waves of loss threaten to pull Seth under, his love of music and his new friends might just lead him back to shore.

The Summer I Turned Pretty meets Outlander in this beautiful story of teenage love, loss and friendship.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review
: I think older people are either oblivious to, or too uncomfortable to deal with, the gigantic crisis of grief young men are going through. Our in/actions have landed these culturally disadvantaged people in the midst of a life-threatening lacuna in an already thin mental-health safety net for their group. Seth is grieving his lost Colin, and he's male, so doubly not encouraged to discuss this raw, ravaging grief.

I don't think the gay youth suicide epidemic goes unnoticed anymore, but I do think its precursor states like depression and loss go vastly undertreated. If you are, or are aware of, a young person in emotional need, The Trevor Project (link above) is a resource to tap as soon as possible. Doing nothing, not acknowledging the problem or thinking it could just go away, is not a wise choice of coping mechanism. Please reach out, for yourself or to learn more about how you can extend help to your own life's Seth. The rewards are real for those who take action and so are the risks for those who don't.

The story told here is one of gaining perspective and using it to forge a new relationship to life and living with loss. I am a sour old man, well past the perspectiveless, trackless desert that is queer adolescence, so read this story as definite outsider. I was so moved. I was so happy to feel the force of Author Coppock's story. If *I* get it, feel it, am charmed by it, I can see how and understand why a gay young man in a vulnerable state would find it very comforting. We do well to comfort before we make demands of these young men...they get so little of it. The lifelong consequences are more or less invisible, it seems to me at least, and we as adults should make more and better efforts to change this.

Start small. Give this charming story to the queer lad in your orbit.

I learned of this book from its agent/editor, Erik McManus, via his YouTube channel. I'm very glad that I did because I got to enjoy a charming slightly-supernatural romantic story to fill my spooky-season reading card, and found a story that I feel is rooted in an emotional reality underacknowledged in queer culture.

QUEER AS FOLKLORE: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters, straight-peoples' anxieties and hostilities seen from the other side



QUEER AS FOLKLORE: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
SACHA COWARD

Unbound
$25.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents which reveals the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.

Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.

Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.

To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Funny how the stories of queerness, of love between same-sex couples, are so very often found in "monster" tales, isn't it. I mean, the rise of vampire fiction as AIDS bit gay men hard is a tough sell as coincidence. Back a way we have Dr. Fankenstein building his perfect man, who then gets all freaked out because he isn't just like the other boys; we have the enduring folktale of Beauty and the Beast, as queer a metaphor as you can find; we have the Greek gods taking outlandishly unlikely forms to get off with humans.

And that's just the Western world.

In modern times there are the just barely clothed superheroes in comic-book or filmed form, flaunting their junk in our faces at $25 a ticket or graphic novel (aka comic book) with oblivious or deeply in denial boys of all ages perving on their favorite characters' amazing prowess without seeming to have a single introspective neuron firing. These hypermasculine avatars of (mostly) toxic masculinity go around destroying things with their unstoppable powers; what better way for these theater-loads of bottoms to get their desperate need to be dominated, wrecked, brutalized met safely and without admitting to themselves their need is deeply, deeply sexual? Likewise the astonishing-to-me rise of RuPaul and drag as mass entertainment...male parodies of femininity enacted for the audience's titillated amusement. There is no filmed entertainment of any sort that doesn't rely on the universal human lust for voyeurism. If I'm at all honest, that applies to literature and reading as well.

Those sour reflections out of the way, let's talk about the *fun* of it all.

The author's done a creditable job of assembling fun examples of myths and folktales that present queerness in a framework of plausible deniability, as has ever been the case. We've always been here...just have to listen to the quiet parts in between the blaring trumpets of heteronormativity. Only in recent times have we been able to say the quiet parts out loud, and it makes the control freaks and haters absolutely wild with fury that anyone could not want to be exactly like them.

Hm. I seem not to have left the sourness behind after all. Well, take the rough with the smooth, laddies and gentlewomen. I listen to unreflective heteronormativity all day every day. Listen to how it feels to be consciously aware of the receiving end of a microaggression for a change. It's never been what you meant, it's always been what the audience hears.

The audience for this survey course in queer identity is in for a treat in terms of the author's clear desire to bring us history burnished to a mellow, shadow-melting glow of inclusion. The care with which he draws lines between what modern people mean by queerness, and the often very different understandings of gender and sexuality people held in earlier times, is both commendable and clarifying. It enables us to respond honestly from within our framework to stories coming from a different framework. It's often done anecdotally, using reports of experience, so data-driven readers might not like this narrative choice. We're in the unabahedly popular arena in this book. Applying academic rigor to the way the author informs us of the existence and the resonances of queer icons in our (Western) cultural history is unwarranted.

Breadth and anecdotality (I think I just invented that word) are both strengths and weaknesses. As always. No tool cannot also function as a weapon. I did wonder at times where the heck Author Coward found his examples of modern peoples' resonances with the stories we inherited from the foreparents. At times this is my favorite thing about the read; at others, it feels...grafted on, placed too carefully to feel entirely natural.

I am mostly unhappy, to the extent I actually am, with the absence of world cultures' representation. I understand this isn't sold or described as about world cultures, but tell me in the subtitle..."The Hidden Queer History of Western Myths and Monsters, f/ex...that I'm not getting this broader focus. I promise I'd still buy and read it. So now you know where that last half-star went.

Still a good read, still a great gift, still something I want people to know is available for their amusement and edification.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

THE GHOST THEATRE, power to the alt-Elizabethan London lovers!



THE GHOST THEATRE
MAT OSMAN

The Overlook Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wild and hallucinatory reimagining of Elizabethan London, with its bird worshippers, famed child actors, and the Queen herself; a dazzling historical novel about theatre, magic, and the dangers of all-consuming love

London, 1601—a golden city soon to erupt in flames. Shay is a messenger-girl, falconer, and fortune teller who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city’s fabled Blackfriars Theatre, where a cast of press-ganged boys perform for London’s gentry. When the pair meet, Shay falls in love with the performances—and with Nonesuch himself. As their bond deepens, they create the Ghost Theatre, an underground troupe that performs fantastical plays in the city’s hidden corners. As their fame grows the troupe fans the flames of rebellion among the city’s outcasts, and the lovers are drawn into the dark web of the Elizabethan court. Embattled, with the plague on the rise throughout the country, the Queen seeks a reading from Shay, a moment which unleashes chaos not only in Shay’s life, but across the whole of England too.

A fever-dream full of prophecy and anarchy, gutter rats and bird gods, Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is a wild ride from the rooftops of Elizabethan London to its dark underbelly, and a luminous meditation on double lives and fluid identities and the bewitching, transformative nature of art and power, with a bittersweet love affair at its heart. Set amid the vividly rendered England of Osman’s imagination and written in rich, seductive prose, The Ghost Theatre will have readers under its spell from the very first page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Mat Osman, brother of Richard, tries his hand at fantasy noveling...outta the park, buddy, what a genre debut! Co-founder of Suede, a quintessential 90s Brit-emo-boy band, decides to write something not centered in the music culture. Great decision! Tackling the end of Elizabethan London, adding a layer of fantastical performance art to it, made this a book I approached with some trepidation. His earlier novel, The Ruins, was a powerful read set in a modern world heightened but still mudane. It was imperfect in its characters' grapplings with desire, the desire to be one's self, the desire to be valued and still free, but it was a fine read.

Here we get the thing I missed in The Ruins. Shay is a cross-dressing woman (it's safer in this world to present as a man) who falls in with young actor Nonesuch (recalling as you do that female roles in Elizabethan theaters were played by crossdressing boys) after her bird-worshipping cult is disrupted by violence. Violence, societal down to interpersonal, is the refrain of this operatic tale of escape, concealment, and ultimately discovery. Violence rules this novel. Shay, rescued from violence, and Nonesuch, accustomed to its sexual expression, decide to become performers of stories that aren't about the great and good. They tell stories like the one they've just shared in which they stave off rage and hate, but pay a price in the process. They know not to try to compete for center stage with those stories of the great and good. They take to the corners, they lurk in the shadows among those like themselves who, stunned, see themselves in the stories the Ghost Theatre duo are telling.

The power of seeing yourself in a story is hard to overstate.

Soon the pair, intimately connecting to the hoi polloi of their class, are attracting crowds. That means they're also attracting notice. The great and good, the primacy, inescapability, of whose stories drove the pair to rebel, are suddenly attentive and making them very much in fashion. They're getting noticed by the elite who never knew they were alive before.

Ask a gay person outed in heteroland, a Black person in whiteworld, a trans person anywhere, how that feels.

Passionately pursuing Truth is, I think, only safe for the young and powerless. They have little to lose. They have no kind of perspective, but this irresistible draw to honesty and truth and self-realization is the road traveled to acquire a lifetime's supply of that missing perspective. This is a subtractive, even divisive process. Shay and Nonesuch ignite passion and create magic with their Ghost Theatre. Fire metaphors for growing up, for attaining wisdom, are apt: annealed in flames of their own ignition, the entire troupe burn in the brightness of fame's flames.

When the bill comes due, the prices (plural) are high; the perspective, one is left to hope in the ending that gives no closure, they've earned will keep them safer than they are during the story.

I can't get to a fifth star because the way we move, bob, and weave in this narrative is sufficiently non-linear as to make the journey circular in affect. Has anything fundamental, or even just more than cosmetic, changed?

I'm not sure; I'm only sure I love the Aviscultans, and the Ghost Theatre, and the honest portrayal of the power of Love among the powerlessness of Others to make a life of struggle feel as though it's a Quest, a magical, important affirmation of Life.

Sadly it never really is, or not for long. That knowlege, though, is mine, not the characters'. Beautiful-sounding, complicated, and still the story's in the end slighter than it feels while you are within it.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

SISTER DEBORAH, latest fiction from literary treasure Scholastique Mukasonga...Rwanda's most treasured export/expat


SISTER DEBORAH
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA
(tr. Mark Polizzotti)
Archipelago Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When time-worn ancestral remedies fail to heal young Ikirezi’s maladies, she is rushed to the Rwandan hillsides. From her termite perch under the coral tree, health blooms under Sister Deborah’s hands. Women bare their breasts to the rising sun as men under thatched roofs stand, “stunned and impotent before this female fury.”

Now grown, Ikirezi unearths the truth of Sister Deborah’s passage from America to 1930s Rwanda, and the mystery surrounding her sudden departure. In colonial records, Sister Deborah is a “pathogen,” an “incident.” Who is the keeper of truth, Ikirezi impels us to ask, Who stands at the threshold of memory? Did we dance? Did she heal? Did we look to the sky with wonder? Ikirezi writes on, pulling Sister Deborah out from the archive, inscribing her with breath.

A beautiful novel that works in the slippages of history, Sister Deborah at its core is a story of what happens when women—black women and girls—seek the truth by any means.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Patriarchy putting words in women's mouths. Colonial masters defining reality for the colonized. Big-god-industry fans denigrating anyone they can't control. Nothing new here.

Until Author Scholastique got hold of the reins. Then this buggy got movin' fast (under 150pp) and furious (women under patriarchal colonialist control got some rage). The action is, unsurprisingly for émigré Mukasonga, split between a Rwandan émigré before and after immigation to the US, and an unusual American woman healer. Ikirezi, whose encounters with African-American missionary and faith healer (of a sort) change her inside and out, leaves the suddenly-too-small world she was born into under the influence of Sister Deborah's...unconventional...take on religion. The meditation practice, the acceptance of the Divine's presence in the beliefs and actions of (especially female) Rwandans, all make Sister Deborah no sister to The Authorities.

Ikirezi maintains a deep connection to Sister Deborah's teachings even as she consumes a Western education and takes on an academic view of this experience in her past. She decides to return to Rwanda to determine the fate of the much-maligned Sister Deborah.

We then hear from that lady directly, learning about her painful, blighted past in the lead-up to an immense awakening experience: The protestant Savior is, indeed, coming back to judge the quick and the dead.

And she's a Black African.

Cat, meet pigeons. Sister Deborah is a profoundly disturbed person, in my view, claiming that a divine avatar is speaking to her; there's meds for schizophrenia now, and she really needs 'em. The one reason I'm not eviscerating this book is that Author Scholastique doesn't take sides, she simply evokes the experience (most powerfully of baptism) that Sister Deborah undergoes as well as provides for the downtrodden women she ministers to. I'm not so constituted as to feel religious awe, nor do I have a clawing need for "community" among believers. In fact, the modern religion-equivalent called "fandom" is too much for me most of the time. The story, then, wastes its lovely magical-realist prose flights on me. They're nice and all, but no gooseflesh over here.

I offer four stars to a story I'm sympathetic to, but not much moved by, because like Kibogo, my guide is a deeply knowledgable person whose experiences allow her to communicate to me both a sense of consensus reality's view of the action, and the lived experience of people deeply Other to me. I'll never not appreciate, value, and celebrate that gift when I'm offered it.

It doesn't hurt that I find all of her writing I've read so far fully worth my eyeblinks.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN, do not read if you're hungry and have no food available...that way madness lies


THE HUNGER OF WOMEN
MAROSIA CASTALDI
(tr. Jamie Richards)
And Other Stories
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Winner of the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose!

The Publisher Says: Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself—by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa’s observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother’s age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter’s inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: A chest-pokey second-person punctuationless stream-of-consciousness narrative of a woman's awakening to the body's hungers? Where she addresses me directly as "Reader" throughout?! Four stars?!

I have not been kidnapped, am not being threatened with grievous bodily harm, and have not lost (more of) my mind. This is a work that, like Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman, uses what could feel like a gimmick in less talented hands to drag you willy-nilly into the head of a woman who, in middle life, determines she is not living, but existing, so sets out to use her woman-ness to its fullest capacity. She's Neapolitan, living in Milan, the mother of an adult daughter whose life has (as they must) diverged from her mother's despite their living together. Her marriage ended when her husband was killed in a car accident...very believable for anyone who's driven in Italy...so there's a huge space in her life as yet unfilled.

So you know, US readers: Neapolitans are the Southern Black folk of Italy, and Milan is the mothership of Italian racism and fascism. AND Rosa's a woman in a misogynist society. These are facts that color the way one sees the narrator that might not be obvious.

Rosa addressing us as "Reader" is my least-favorite thing in this largely plotless inner journey of an adult into the selfhood denied for so long simply by doing the rote, expected things. Rosa decides to open a restaurant...she knows about food, so it makes sense...and thus opens the floodgates of her body's hunger for womanly touch. This is pretty much it as to plot.

A lot of the prose, then, is dedicated to telling us the story of a woman's world as circumscribed by her agreement to be repressed. As that agreement wanes, and as she regales us with...recipes is not the word, with ingredients and techniques for making them sing together, much as one does when talking to a friend who shares one's experience level and cultural referents. These are poetic prose evocations of the cuisine of Naples in all its seafoody glory.

I wanted it all. All the time I read the book I was FAMISHED for the flavors she so intensely evokes in her passages of passata and disfruitings of frutti di mare (seaborne creatures). Then to trudge upstairs to gob a blob of kosher "food"...well, it was its own special torture.

I think I might've withheld a fifth star simply out of enraged anguish....

Is this a read for everyone...well, honestly not. The narrative has no drive for the plot-driven reader. The story is richer with some background that many simply won't care to acquire. The narrator's food-driven hunger is not going to do good things to dieters' willpower. People experiencing sexual deprivation or skin-hunger are not going to feel soothed. I don't imagine the eww-ick homophobes will have too much to shudder over unless they're insanely sensitive to sensuality shared by others. Those sorts aren't likely to be reading my stuff, fortunately.

So I'll clutch my fifth star to my deprived-of-cuisine chest but urge most of y'all to get the beautiful, poetic, seamless translation of a vibrant, intense woman's coming alive for your pre-Thanksgiving (US) or pre-Yule pleasure.

The feast before the feast, let's call it.