April 2022's Burgoine Reviews & Pearl Rule Reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Irish Midlands, 1859. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle - a girl said to have survived without food for months. Tourists have flocked to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, and a journalist has come down to cover the sensation. The Wonder is a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil.

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

My Review: First, read this:

A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.
–and–
How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized—as reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.

I dislike Author Donoghue's prior success, Room, a lot. I found it cynical and manipulative. I got this book thinking I'd give it a good drubbing and forget this author existed afterward.

The more fool I. This is beautifully written...so was Room...but also acutely observed and compassionately told. It was too long, it was very slow for two-thirds of its length, and it had a very strong anti-religion bias (which I share). More than anything else, I read and read and read to get more of this:

An obsession, a mania, Lib supposed it could be called. A sickness of the mind. Hysteria, as that awful doctor had named it? Anna reminded Lib of a princess under a spell in a fairy tale. What could restore the girl to ordinary life? Not a prince. A magical herb from the world's end? Some shock to jolt a poisoned bite of apple out of her throat? No, something simple as a breath of air: reason. What if Lib shook the girl awake this very minute and said, Come to your senses!

But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad. Standish's wards were full of such people.

Besides, could children ever be considered quite of sound mind? Seven was counted the age of reason, but Lib's sense of seven-year-olds was that they still brimmed over with imagination. Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple.

That insight alone was worth five stars! But it came swaddled, hidden, in much too much waffle for me to give even close to all five stars.

A Kindle copy is NOW ONLY $2.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link) and, in my honest estimation, a worthwhile purchase.

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Ride Around Shining by Chris Leslie-Hynan

Rating: 3* of five

Soon to be a Netflix feature film.

The Publisher Says: A provocative debut novel about a young white chauffeur and his wealthy black employer, an NBA player—a twenty-first century inversion of what we’ve come to expect stories of race and class to look like, and a discomfiting portrait of envy and obsession.

Ride Around Shining concerns the idle preoccupations, and later machinations, of a transplanted Portlander named Jess—a nobody from nowhere with a Master’s degree and a gig delivering takeout. He parlays the latter, along with a few lies, into a job as a chauffeur for an up-and-coming Trail Blazer named Calyph West and his young wife, Antonia.

Calyph is black and Antonia is white and Jess becomes fascinated, innocuously at first, by all they are that he is not. In striving to make himself indispensable to them, he causes Calyph to have a season-ending knee injury, then brings about the couple’s estrangement, before positioning himself at last as their perverse savior.

In the tradition of The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Great Gatsby, and Harold Pinter’s The Servant—not to mention a certain Shakespeare play about a creepy white dude obsessed with a black dude—Ride Around Shining tries to say the unsayable about white fixation on black culture, particularly black athletic culture, something so common in everyday life it has gone all but unaddressed.

My Review: The problem with writing a novel from the PoV of a slacker is that it begins to resemble a conversation with a slacker: Not going anywhere fast, and wherever it is you thought you were going, you're going to end up there several times because focus isn't a slacker's strong point. The clearest image I retain of the read is of Portland, Oregon. The author is at his most lyrical, and most evocative, when Portland is the object he's observing.

The publisher's comparisons are vastly overstated as comparables. This isn't in the same league as those titles. There's no subtle (or unsubtle) kink in this story...Jess is tediously heterosexual and ineffectually infatuated with Antonia (the question I had was, "why ever are these men interested in her?!" *yawn*). I've always thought that Iago was into Othello; Tom Ripley's sexuality is "whatever gets me what I want;" and Pinter's adaptation of Robin Maugham's novella is about using sex, not hopelessly bungling around with it. It's not bad, and it's a perfect story to film, but honestly finishing it felt good...because it was over.

Kindle copies are $6.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link).

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The Human Front (PM's Outspoken Authors #10) by Ken MacLeod

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of a Prometheus and Sidewise Award, this science fiction novella is a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and an exploration of technological singularity in a posthuman civilization. As a world war rages on without an emerging victor, the story follows John Matheson, an idealistic teenage Scottish guerilla warrior who must change his tactics and alliances with the arrival of an alien species. This alternate history and poignant political satire flips hero types and expectations, delivering a lively tale of adventure—as dramatic and thought provoking as it is funny. Also included is an interview with the author and two essays that relate his poignant views on social philosophies.

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

My Review: What a hoot...what a ride! I can't imagine how the author works in the past and still makes a future worth dreaming about. He's just better at it than the other guys from the 1970s & 1980s.

This alternate history novella, with a few explanatory notes following, gives the reader a real workout. There are a few points where I was sure I understood what he was doing...and was I ever wrong. When he decided to show me the real deal, I thought I was a bit dim for not getting it. Still love being off the beam, when we get to go this way. If you're in the mood for a read that doesn't mean what you think it means, you could do worse but not a lot better.

Kindle edition $9.99 at this non-affiliate Amazon link.

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Wingwalkers: A Novel by Taylor Brown

Read the author's article about the role of "aeroplanes" in William Faulkner's life!

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A former WWI ace pilot and his wingwalker wife barnstorm across Depression-era America, performing acts of aerial daring.

“They were over Georgia somewhere, another nameless hamlet whose dusty streets lay flocked and trembling with the pink handbills they’d rained from the sky that morning, the ones that announced the coming of DELLA THE DARING DEVILETTE, who would DEFY THE HEAVENS, shining like a DAYTIME STAR, a WING-WALKING WONDER borne upon the wings of CAPTAIN ZENO MARIGOLD, a DOUBLE ACE of the GREAT WAR, who had ELEVEN AERIAL VICTORIES over the TRENCHES OF FRANCE.”

Wingwalkers is one-part epic adventure, one-part love story, and, as is the signature for critically-acclaimed author Taylor Brown, one large part American history. The novel braids the adventures of Della and Zeno Marigold, a vagabond couple that funds their journey to the west coast in the middle of the Great Depression by performing death-defying aerial stunts from town to town, together with the life of the author (and thwarted fighter pilot) William Faulkner, whom the couple ultimately inspires during a dramatic air show—with unexpected consequences for all.

Brown has taken a tantalizing tidbit from Faulkner’s real life—an evening's chance encounter with two daredevils in New Orleans—and set it aloft in this fabulous novel. With scintillating prose and an action-packed plot, he has captured the true essence of a bygone era and shed a new light on the heart and motivations of one of America's greatest authors.

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

My Review: As fictional Della and Zeno Marigold make their way through this story, on the way to meeting up with Billy Falkner, I came to appreciate the readerly stance one of my sisters expressed to me: "Leave famous people out of it. Just makes things harder to buy into."

The story Author Brown (In the Season of Blood and Gold, Gods of Howl Mountain) tells here uses the Marigolds and their barnstorming to illuminate a facet of William Faulkner (fancied-up Billy) that isn't much discussed: His fascination with aviation. It's beautifully written, glacially slow of pace, and not quite up to the task of convincing me that these two stories belonged together. If your reading led you to love Last Dance on the Starlight Pier for Depression stories, or Cloud Cuckoo Land's multi-stranded take on intertwined fates told over time, then this book will get more stars from you than me. If you've grooved to Sea of Tranquility or Unlikely Animals for their gorgeously wrought images and smoothly set sentences, this book will give you happy hours.

Follow this non-affiliate Amazon link to get your own copy.

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Picabia by Alain Jouffroy

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An iconoclastic poet and painter, open to everything that was "other" and different, responsive to any form of newness—not only in art but to such external realities as machines—Francis Picabia never needed to define himself as a "modern."

"Sur-modern" rather than modern, he, like his early comrade Marcel Duchamp, was several years in advance of Dada and Surrealism, abd other avant-garde movements. A follower of nothing and no one, he, with Duchamp, was the true pioneer of modern art.

A born innovator, he paid only a passing visit—and no artistic dues—to the avant-gardes of the day and anticipated all future forms of visual expression.

GIFT CARD PURCHASE...AWAITED FOR SIX YEARS!

My Review: Reading the copy above, it sounds...hyperbolic. And if one's never heard of him, looking at the artwork in the modestly sized and carefully scope-limited visually enhanced biographical sketch will feel familiar. "That's a lot like Matisse!" or "Huh...Abstract Expressionism through a French lens!" or "My god, that's a Man Ray image!"

They're all Picabia. And he made them first. The claim that he's a pioneer is valid.

It's also clear that Picabia was completely at home in his own skin. He never shrank back from experience, he allowed no consideration for convention (or, sometimes, even the bonds of friendship) to stand in the way of his lusty, loud progress through life. Women he wanted, he had; friends he grew away from, he abandoned; art, that is to say ART, was the product of his unceasing forward-aimed projection of himself through the world he wished to inhabit.

I first heard of this book in 2015. The friend who mentioned it to me was mildly disparaging about it, and about Picabia; she was not very well-informed about art and artists. I was intrigued immediately but, as happens so often, Life did things and I reacted. The book didn't end up on my shelves until Yule 2021.

Now that it's here it's staying. The printing is very high-quality; the design is sleek and simple, if uninspired. Or, to be less judgmental about it, I could remind myself that the design of a work about an artist is usually best if it's unobtrusive. The point isn't the design but the subject, after all. Picabia is well-served by this accessible, elegant introduction to his fascinating life and extraordinary breadth of creative output.

Hardcover copies available at this non-affiliate Amazon link.

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Moderan by David R. Bunch

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine.

Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with “arsenals of fear” and everyone is enamored with hate. The devastated earth is coated by vast sheets of gray plastic, while humans vie to replace more and more of their own “soft parts” with steel. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses are waiting? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible.

“As if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated,” wrote Brian Aldiss of David R. Bunch’s work. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, these mordant stories, though passionately sought by collectors, have been unavailable in a single volume for close to half a century. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. He sought not to divert readers from the horror of modernity but to make us face it squarely.

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

My Review: First, read this:

“WE’LL FIGHT! We’ll fight each other. We’ll make harsh monsters, set them loose and fight such monsters across all our space. We’ll move with engines and hard, programmed thoughts. We’ll make all manner of dragons for our involvement, and we’ll overcome them. For we’ll program the conquests a little more carefully than we’ll feed in the threats. But mostly we’ll just fight each other—each other and ourselves, the truly tireless enemies.”

Fifty years ago, these stories...I really bridle at calling them stories, it feels to me more like loosely interconnected chapters of a single, too-big-to-fail novel...appeared. I wasn't aware of them. I was too young to "get" them. I am still too young to get them...they are brilliant tours-de-force of a man's vision of a future no one could possibly want, but they're likely to get anyway.

In a lot of ways, Author Bunch's world reminds me of the world that Sandy Hook took place in, and no one stopped it from happening again.

And then the flesh-man - oh, consider. CONSIDER him - the sick few that are left. Please do. Then perhaps you will see why we in our new-shining glory, flesh-strips few and played-down, pay homage to a massive stick of new-metal placed as our guide star when New Processes Land, our great Moderan, was new!

J.G. Ballard at his bleakest, John Brunner at his most sarcastic, Joanna Russ at her most misandric. SF futures don't usually age well...this one, more's the pity, has.

The cheapest $18.95 paperback you will ever buy. There's $500,000-worth of ideas and entertainment in here.

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Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Run a Google search for "black girls" - what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance - operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond - understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

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

My Review: The world, as the Internet has shaped it, took a promise of information access and educational opportunity unparalleled in human history and screwed it up to the point it reinforces the evils and stupidities it could so easily have alleviated.

The problem, it transpires, is both blindness..."*I* am no racist, or a sexist! Why, some of my best friends..." is not new, nor is it uncommon in any society...and neither is hubristic malevolence (Cambridge Analytica, for example). We're two decades in to a giant, uncontrolled social experiment. Voices like Author Noble's are still notable for their infrequence of prominence in the rarefied world of Congressional hearings and the European Union's creation of the GDPR.

The issues that Author Noble raises in this book need your attention. You, the searcher, are the product that Google and the other search engines are selling to earn their absurd, unconscionable, inadequately taxed profits. Every time you log on to the internet, Google knows...use other search engines, never click on any links, and Google still knows you're there. That's the Orwellian nightmare of it...like East Germany's Stasi, they're everywhere, in every website you visit. Unlike the Stasi, they are possessed of the capacity to quantify and analyze all the information you generate, and sell it to anyone who can use it. For you or against you, as long as the check clears, Google and its brethren couldn't care less.

Learn more. Get angry. Do something! Start by getting this book. (non-affiliate Amazon link)

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The Commandant's Daughter (Hanni Winter #1) by Catherine Hokin

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: 1933, Berlin. Ten-year-old Hanni Foss stands by her father’s side watching the torchlit procession to celebrate Adolf Hitler as Germany’s new leader. As the lights fade, she knows her safe and happy childhood is about to change forever. Practically overnight, the father she adores becomes unrecognisable, lost to his ruthless ambition to oversee an infamous concentration camp...

Twelve years later. As the Nazi regime crumbles, Hanni hides on the fringes of Berlin society in the small lodging house she’s been living in since running away from her father’s home. In stolen moments, she develops the photographs she took to record the atrocities in the camp – the empty food bowls and hungry eyes – and vows to get some measure of justice for the innocent people she couldn’t help as a child.

But on the day she plans to deliver these damning photographs to the Allies, Hanni comes face to face with her father again. Reiner Foss is now working with the British forces, his past safely hidden behind a new identity, and he makes it clear that he will go to deadly lengths to protect his secret. In that moment Hanni hatches a dangerous plan to bring her father down, but how far she is willing to go for revenge? And at what cost?

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

My Review: First in a series, flawed, and still...something in here honestly made me think twice about the eternal eyeroll I've developed specifically for use on plucky spying heroines. I concur with the sales bunf, if you liked The Alice Network you'll do well to give this one a shot.

Not that it's quite up to the same literary standard...the plot wanders a bit midway through...but it has that compelling quality that is so frequently missing in other WWII fiction I've read.

Follow this non-affiliate Amazon link to get yours for 99¢...cheap at twice the price!

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The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong by John Mitchinson & John Lloyd

Rating 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more,The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.

Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out The Book of General Ignorance for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:

How long can a chicken live without its head?
About two years.

What do chameleons do?
They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.

How many legs does a centipede have?
Not a hundred.

How many toes has a two-toed sloth?
It’s either six or eight.

Who was the first American president?
Peyton Randolph.

What were George Washington’s false teeth made from?
Mostly hippopotamus.

What was James Bond’s favorite drink?
Not the vodka martini.

My Review: Once upon a time, I was smart...then I got this book. Now I am reduced to a mere mouth-breathing lump of proteins and acids and the majority of them aren't even human.

Abandon all sense of smug superiority, foolish mortal, if you succumb to the desire to get your triviality tested against The Elves. Ask not how I know.

You know you want one...follow this non-affiliate link and succumb....

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Conventionally Yours (True Colors, #1) by Annabeth Albert

PEARL RULED @ 19%

The Publisher Says: When two "big name fans" go head-to-head at a convention, love isn't the only thing at stake.

Charming, charismatic, and effortlessly popular, Conrad Stewart seems to have it all…but in reality, he's scrambling to keep his life from tumbling out of control.

Brilliant, guarded, and endlessly driven, Alden Roth may as well be the poster boy for perfection…but even he can't help but feel a little broken inside.

When these mortal enemies are stuck together on a cross-country road trip to the biggest fan convention of their lives, their infamous rivalry takes a backseat as an unexpected connection is forged. Yet each has a reason why they have to win the upcoming Odyssey gaming tournament and neither is willing to let emotion get in the way—even if it means giving up their one chance at something truly magical.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL.

My Review: I'm almost 20% in and I actively dread opening this book. I hate admitting to it but there's just too much of a gap between 22 and 62 for me to care about bridging it.

Your mileage may vary. The angst that is sending convulsive shudders down my abdomen may strike just the right chord for you. If you read a lot of YA, it's that but college boys. Driving their my-age professor's 1999 Town Car. By themselves. From New Jersey to Las Vegas. I will actually die of annoyed boredom before they make it into the sack together.

Stop smirking. I am *not* being an old drama queen.

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Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Pearl Ruled at 7%

The Publisher Says: With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.

In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

Laura Spinney writes that the Spanish flu was as significant—if not more so—as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.

I spent $1.99 on Kindlesale. It makes me mad that I can't get it back.

My Review: I bought into the author's justification for not making the book one linear, beginning-middle-end story. The social parts and the science parts are very different and they interacted but were never remotely in sync, so trying to stay purely chronological sounded like a bad plan.

What I got instead was borderline incoherent, with paragraph-by-paragraph switches among authorial opinions, statements of fact unsupported by citations, and stodgy-wodgy bits of statistical stuff. This tiger of a topic was less ridden by the author than it rode the author. I felt frazzled by the time I realized I was not going to have a better experience later on...I flipped through some random spots and found that I was getting the same structure.

Not what I want, or what I will accept, from narrative non-fiction.

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City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts by Catie Marron

Pearl Ruled at 21%

The Publisher Says: In City Parks, eighteen writers reflect on various parks that hold a special significance for them, sharing personal moments they associate with them. Andrew Sean Greer eloquently paints a portrait of first love in the Presidio; André Aciman muses on the passage of time and the changing face of New York as viewed from the High Line; Nicole Krauss describes the real citizens of Prospect Park-dogs!; Simon Winchester takes readers along on his adventures in the Maidan; and Bill Clinton describes his affection for Dumbarton Oaks.

Intensely personal, yet joined by overlapping themes of memory and the unstoppable passage of time, these essays create a warm portrait of parks around the world-from London to Brooklyn, Calcutta to Chicago, Paris to San Francisco-and offer a unique, thoughtful vision of their significance both to the individual and society itself. Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white images, City Parks is a literary anthology and collector's item that illuminates our personal histories and public experiences.

My Review: Snapshots illustrating different peoples' varyingly pedestrian to humdrum musings on their favorite public parks.

Bill Clinton's vapid maunderings about Dumbarton Oaks illustrated with very ordinary Kodachromes of trees was when I foundered. I slugged my way through to get to the ever-delightful Jan Morris's disappointingly somewhat superficial ruminations on Trieste's Giardino Pubblico, though. I was hoping for a resurrection of fun...and at the end of it, there were five little candid snaps, one of a stroller being shoved by a whey-faced person, and another of two shirtless ping-pong players playing ping-pong with their long, skinny limbs gracelessly stiffened by a poorly framed black-and-white shot...the other three made even less of an impression. Not even Jan Morris's charming, if slight, essay could prevent my final submergence under the Sea of Mediocrity.

I can't imagine why this very, very good idea elicited such a bland, uninteresting execution.

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