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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IRONHEAD, or Once A Young Lady by JEAN-CLAUDE van RIJCKEGHEM (tr. Kristen Gehrman)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Eighteen-year-old Constance is not interested in marriage or in being a "young lady." But for a young woman coming of age in the early 1800s, that's just about all that's available to her. When her parents arrange her a marriage with a man more than twice her age, she's powerless to resist. Stance couldn't possibly find her newfound husband less appealing, but what can she do?
Here's what:
Four months into the marriage, she can slip out of their bed in the middle of the night, and she can put on his clothes. She can look in the mirror and like what she sees. She can sneak out of the house before dawn and visit the baker's scrawny son, who has just been drafted into the army, and offer to take his place. Vive l'Empereur!
Hot on Stance's tail all the while is her younger brother Pieter, determined to bring Stance back home to Ghent where she belongs. (The battlefield is no place for a young lady, after all.)
Ironhead, or, Once A Young Lady is the riotous and powerful story of a fierce renegade, and the silly men who try to bring her down.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I can only say that Stance makes a perfectly good male character...selfish, unthinking, insensitive to the feelings of others...and a generally unpleasant person to read about for those reasons.
I suspect this is not the author's intent. I can't prove that. I was reading along and suddenly had the thought that I wasn't clear why Stance was female to begin with. Does this selfish, thoughtless teenager who's only focused on how to get what she wants actually need to be female? The message that sounds like it sends to me is "only boys get to do, say, think, and act exactly as they please." I don't like that message.
The translation read very well, in that I was never bored...just squicked out...and I particularly enjoyed the oddly specific details of how that era's firearms worked. Not a book I'd give to my granddaugher but fine for adults.
Levine Querido publishes it in the US for $8.99 Kindle edition, available now. (non-affiliate Amazon link as the publisher's webwite has no search function)
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The Easy Life in Kamusari (Forest, #1) by Shion Miura (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From Shion Miura, the award-winning author of The Great Passage, comes a rapturous novel where the contemporary and the traditional meet amid the splendor of Japan’s mountain way of life.
Yuki Hirano is just out of high school when his parents enroll him, against his will, in a forestry training program in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. No phone, no internet, no shopping. Just a small, inviting community where the most common expression is “take it easy.”
At first, Yuki is exhausted, fumbles with the tools, asks silly questions, and feels like an outcast. Kamusari is the last place a city boy from Yokohama wants to spend a year of his life. But as resistant as he might be, the scent of the cedars and the staggering beauty of the region have a pull.
Yuki learns to fell trees and plant saplings. He begins to embrace local festivals, he’s mesmerized by legends of the mountain, and he might be falling in love. In learning to respect the forest on Mt. Kamusari for its majestic qualities and its inexplicable secrets, Yuki starts to appreciate Kamusari’s harmony with nature and its ancient traditions.
In this warm and lively coming-of-age story, Miura transports us from the trappings of city life to the trials, mysteries, and delights of a mythical mountain forest.
I GOT THIS BOOK FROM THE PRIME WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH GIVEAWAY IN 2022.
My Review: Perfectly adequate.
Teen boy is more-or-less shoved out the door of his house as he reaches productive working age. Choosing, in its loosest possible sense, a life as a forester, he learns the utterly weird and slightly icky traditions of the forest culture. This makes him the perfect PoV character for me because I was curious about that part of the story.
The problem for me is in the original, not the translation. Yuki's a generic kid, one asked quite roughly to make his own way in the world. He's not developed that much, nor do I get the feeling this was unintentional. This is a story about 1) making your way and finding your place, b) a fascinating corner of Japanese reality I doubt many Japanese people know about let alone us in the US, iii) what the harsh, unforgiving reality of life can do FOR you as well as TO you.
All of these are worthy aims. They aren't especially interesting to me personally. They most likely would find their most receptive audience among my grandchildren.
The book's available from Amazon (who published it via their AmazonCrossing imprint) for $4.99 on Kindle, free via Kindle Unlimited if you pay for that service, or $8.95 in trade paper. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Man had always sought a meaning beyond Earth. Lonely, even with the company of his fellow Man, he had sought another spark of life, somewhere out there. But by the end of the century, the gates of exploration had shut. The Earth was constricted by a radioactive belt of Man's own making.
Yet scientists still searched the skies through radio probes for a signal, a hope that intelligent life beyond our galaxy might exist. But the Universe yielded no emissions.
And unless a strange young boy was allowed to develop and understand his baffling "wild talent," a talent frightening but with no apparent purpose, they might never find an answer.
I RECEIVED A COPY FROM A SCI-FI FIEND FRIEND. THANK YOU, STEVE.
My Review: Set in the unimaginably different, advanced, supercool world of 2002, this YA novel pretty much did nothing for me. Awkward and stilted, bizarrely pessimistic yet so deeply sure of Humanity's ability to do better and better, the tone was problem one. Problem two was the exceptionalism...one person saves us from ourselves!...that I find so deeply troubling and destructive in superhero stuff. Religion and its "saviors" ring the same alarm bells in my head.
I gave it an extra half-star because the thing trapping us on the planet was of our own making, and while it's not radiation, we are in fact about to suffer that fate.
It's out of print, and largely forgotten, but used copies can be had for ten bucks or so (like these listed on Amazon). (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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Moonshine: A Cultural History of America's Infamous Liquor by Jaime Joyce
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Nothing but clear, 100-proof American history.
Hooch. White lightning. White whiskey. Mountain dew. Moonshine goes by many names. So what is it, really?
Technically speaking, "moonshine" refers to untaxed liquor made in an unlicensed still. In the United States, it’s typically corn that’s used to make the clear, unaged beverage, and it’s the mountain people of the American South who are most closely associated with the image of making and selling backwoods booze at night—by the light of the moon—to avoid detection by law enforcement.
In this book, writer Jaime Joyce explores America’s centuries-old relationship with moonshine. From the country’s early adoption of Scottish and Irish home-distilling techniques and traditions to the Whiskey Rebellion of the late 1700s to a comparison of the moonshine industry pre- and post-Prohibition and a look at modern-day craft distilling, Joyce examines the historical context that gave rise to moonshining in America and explores its continued appeal.
Even more fascinating than the popularity of the liquor itself is moonshine’s widespread effect on U.S. pop moonshine runners were NASCAR’s first marquee drivers; white whiskey was the unspoken star of countless Hollywood film and television productions; and numerous songs inspired by making shine have come from such musicians as Dolly Parton, Steve Earle, Metallica, Ween, and others. While we can’t condone making your own illegal liquor, reading Moonshine will give you a new perspective on the profound implications that underground moonshine making has had on life in America.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Two hundred-ish pages of text is barely an overview of a subject this vast...how and why the US has always loved them some illegal highs...so I went in to the read knowing I wasn't going to get everything there is to know, and was fine with that. In point of fact, I gave the book a lower rating than I might otherwise have done for the tediously drawn-out NASCAR stuff.
Briefly and concisely, Author Joyce wends ahead of us through a thicket of propaganda, misinformation, snobbishly dismissive social condemnation of the use of intoxicants, and clueless judgments to show the true impact of moonshine on the US cultural landscape. “Heritage is what moonshine is all about. Moonshine is tradition. It’s family. It’s folk art, and people are invested in keeping the art alive.” The damn-near innumerable craft breweries and microdistilleries littering the US are the tax-payin' health-and-safety obeyin' great-grandchildren of the moonshiners.
For her clarity and absence of condescension I think she deserves awards. A bookish landscape littered by J.D. Vances (Hillbilly Elegy) and Nancy Isenbergs (White Trash) that broadcast judgments from title to content, this is very refreshing. I will say, though, that my interest in NASCAR...the truest, most direct descendant of the moonshiners' need for speed...gave out long before the chapter was over. The Whiskey Rebellion, OTOH, has been the subject of book after book, including a novel by the fine writer David Liss, so its chapter being short failed to rouse my ire despite the fascinating subject.
There are lots of photos to illustrate key concepts and put faces with names. The Kindle edition displayed them well enough on my tablet, but the hardcover's the same $25.00 that the Kindle file is (non-affiliate Amazon link). Why not treat yourself to the tree-book? Treat yourself, however, you should.
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The Tesla Gate (The Tesla Gate #1) by John D. Mimms
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: A cosmic storm reunites a father with his lost son—but another kind of disturbance awaits them—in this science fiction novel with “a real emotional core” (Publishers Weekly ).
Thomas Pendleton loves his wife, Ann, and six-year-old son, Seth, more than anything, but his job often makes him an absent husband and father. One day, after Thomas leaves on a business trip, his wife and son are killed in a car accident. Thomas shuts himself off from the world and is at home grieving when a cosmic storm enters Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists are baffled by its composition and origins, but not nearly as much as they are by the storm’s side Anyone who has died and chosen not to cross over is suddenly visible and can interact with the living.
Ann does not return, but Seth does, and Thomas sees it as a miraculous second chance to spend time with his son and keep the promises he had previously broken. They set out on a trip to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, but little do they know that they are traveling headlong into a social and political maelstrom that will test Thomas in ways he could never imagine. Along the way, they come face to face with armed kidnappers who want Seth for his supernatural abilities, meet up with a medium, the ghost of a slave boy, and encounter none other than Abraham Lincoln.
Citing an overpopulation problem caused by the “Impalpables,” the government begins to take drastic measures. Military scientists have a device called the Tesla Gate that is said to return “Impals” to where they were before the storm. Many have nicknamed the controversial machine “the shredder” because no one really knows if it will do what it is reputed to, or if it will instead shred the Impals—effectively destroying the soul. Thomas is determined to do everything possible to save Seth, or at the very least, ensure that Seth doesn’t have to endure his sentence alone...
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A first novel, with all that implies; you're getting the tremolo stop on the organ pulled open throughout, and quite a few plangent violin solos, and a sturdy staff of oboe riffs to give it extra emotional resonance. The author apparently stopped reading SF in the 1950s when psychic phenomena were cool instead of cause for muffled giggles.
The father/son stuff was like listening to Harry Nilsson's famous song just that little bit too often, so it desensitizes the recipient to the message. Author Mimms is a paranormal researcher and thus thinks there's an afterlife into which we merge, or upload, or ascend, or something. As I don't think that's a realistic explanation for ghosts to exist it wasn't like I was all on board for the reveals. When the Impalpables show up I just put the book down and forgot about it for most of a decade. Having now finished it, I think the sentimental story of a dad getting a second chance to love his son out loud appealed to me more than it did then.
It's $7.99 on Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link), but honestly I don't think it's going to light most SF readers up in the 21st century...maybe more for the religious folks? There's no explicit religiosity but it's pretty culturally christian.
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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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PEARL RULED @ 53%
The Ibiza Crone Club by Josephine O'Brien
The Publisher Says: In the wonderful White Isle of Ibiza, magic begins when three women meet in the emergency room of a hospital and realise that more than their medical issues need help.
Tanit, the goddess of women, fertility, and water is on hand to help.
Pot, Prosecco, pals, and the paranormal, what more does a woman need?
Occasionally bawdy, often hilarious but always touching and heartfelt, a truly feel-good read.
"A book with real emotional heart and a fab sense of place."
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I gave up at the end of chapter twenty, when the Scoobygroup of older women toast their decision to become the Crone Goddesses in order to have for themselves exciting and interesting lives by topping up their glasses of wine.
Getting drunk together now that you're free of the Awful Men who've been So Nasty and Ruined Your Lives could, by now, be the subtitle of all the mediocre uninteresting "women's fiction" in the world. I'm not the target audience so the appeal is lost on me, and the writing isn't deft or original enough (really, at all) to draw me along in spite of my utter lack of interest in this kind of story.
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PEARL RULED @ 32%
Talk to Me by T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Publisher Says: From bestselling and award-winning author T.C. Boyle, a lively, thought-provoking novel that asks us what it would be like if we could really talk to the animals
When animal behaviorist Guy Schermerhorn demonstrates on a TV game show that he has taught Sam, his juvenile chimp, to speak in sign language, Aimee Villard, an undergraduate at Guy's university, is so taken with the performance that she applies to become his assistant. A romantic and intellectual attachment soon morphs into an interspecies love triangle that pushes hard at the boundaries of consciousness and the question of what we know and how we know it.
What if it were possible to speak to the members of another species—to converse with them, not just give commands or coach them but to really have an exchange of ideas and a meeting of minds? Did apes have God? Did they have souls? Did they know about death and redemption? About prayer? The economy, rockets, space? Did they miss the jungle? Did they even know what the jungle was? Did they dream? Make wishes? Hope for the future?
These are some the questions T.C. Boyle asks in his wide-ranging and hilarious new novel Talk to Me, exploring what it means to be human, to communicate with another, and to truly know another person—or animal…
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Gertrude Trevelyan's 1920s novel Appius and Virginia in the late-twentieth century. She was, in her turn, riffing on Frankenstein, and honestly just about everything that riffs on the myth of Frankenstein these days sets off resistance responses in me. We're busily destroying the planet with the hubris Mary Shelley warned us about two hundred years ago, and if you're following in those footsteps, you'd best have something more urgent to say than this oft-told take on miscommunication and the essence of personhood being universal.
I gave up during the trip by car as the academic ponders his male privilege without in any way seeing it, while driving down from renamed Santa Barbara to meet a woman Tonight Show producer who's described as wearing enough mascara to paint a mural, his girl assistant goes off with Sam the chimp and "cleans him up"...sexism AAAND misogyny...and then, for more cluelessly inept egocentrism we go with him into an extended riff on how J. Fred Muggs stole Dave Garroway's fame which sent him spiraling into depression. Afraid, obvs, it's going to happen to him...well, let's just say that I understand this isn't being played as a good person's musings but I just don't find it compelling when I'm aware, from long use, how this is going to play out as a plot. The execution is as always Boyle's selling point, and I wasn't sold.
YMMV, of course, but for me this isn't a hit.
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PEARL RULED @ 52%
Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter by Stefan Weitz
The Publisher Says: Search is as old as language. We’ve always needed to find something in the jumble of human creation. The first web was nothing more than passing verbal histories down the generations so others could find and remember how not to get eaten; the first search used the power of written language to build simple indexes in printed books, leading to the Dewey Decimal system and reverse indices in more modern times.
Then digital happened. Besides having profound societal impacts, it also made the act of searching almost impossibly complex for both engines and searchers. Information isn’t just words; it is pictures, videos, thoughts tagged with geocode data, routes, physical world data, and, increasingly, the machines themselves reporting their condition and listening to others’.
Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter, the first in the Greenhouse Collection, holds up a mirror to our time to see if search can keep up. Author Stefan Weitz explores the idea of access to help readers understand how we are inventing new ways to search and access data through devices in more places and with more capabilities. We are at the cusp of imbuing our generation with superpowers, but only if we fundamentally rethink what search is, how people can use it, and what we should demand of it.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Ten years ago, I'd've lapped this up; now, using Pandora and Watson as examples of cutting-edge machine learning would require a history lesson for most under 40. I sort of get the idea the author would agree with this statement because he predicts glorious glowing things will come from AI as search technology improves and algorithms get sharper and sharper in their focus. Absent a decade's awareness-building curve, there's just no way to put the book on an equal footing with later projects. I came to the conclusion that, honestly, my eyeblinks would be better spent elsewhere. This book was an overview of search engines' capabilities and the possible future use of them.
That future came and went.
You should know that the author headed Bing, Microsoft's response to Google. He is, based on internal evidence and a quick peek at his biography, a True Believer in Markets and Tech being forces for good. Since I believe neither of those things, take stock of my PoV on the book with that information in mind. Also I myownself found his narrative voice wee bit on the bro-dawg side. Bibliomotion wants $19.99 for a Kindle edition. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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PEARL RULED @ 25%
The Undying (The Undying: #1) by Ethan Reid
The Publisher Says: THEY HAVE COME FROM THE STARS…
In this riveting apocalyptic thriller for fans of The Passage and The Walking Dead, a mysterious event plunges Paris into darkness and a young American must lead her friends to safety—and escape the ravenous “undying” who now roam the crumbling city.
Jeanie and Ben arrive in Paris just in time for a festive New Year’s Eve celebration with local friends. They eat and drink and carry on until suddenly, at midnight, all the lights go out. Everywhere they look, buildings and streets are dark, as though the legendary Parisian revelry has somehow short circuited the entire city.
By the next morning, all hell has broken loose. Fireballs rain down from the sky, the temperatures are rising, and people run screaming through the streets. Whatever has happened in Paris—rumors are of a comet striking the earth—Jeanie and Ben have no way of knowing how far it has spread, or how much worse it will get. As they attempt to flee the burning Latin Quarter—a harrowing journey that takes them across the city, descending deep into the catacombs, and eventually to a makeshift barracks at the Louvre Museum—Jeanie knows the worst is yet to come. So far, only she has witnessed pale, vampiric survivors who seem to exert a powerful hold on her whenever she catches them in her sights.
These cunning, ravenous beings will come to be known as les moribund—the undying—and their numbers increase by the hour. When fate places a newborn boy in her care, Jeanie will stop at nothing to keep the infant safe and get out of Paris—even if it means facing off against the moribund and leaving Ben—and any hope of rescue—behind.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Jeanie and Ben are TSTL. Zou Zou and Günter are ciphers. Paris itself is more a real character than the people are. This is bog-standard vampire-plague stuff and that isn't my jam. I have other uses for my eyeblinks than another iteration of this story...it's a lot like The Passage, only better written, and that isn't for me.
YMMV, as always. For $4.99 on Kindle, vampire-plague fans will have a treat. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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PEARL RULED @ 72%
Between Two Thorns (The Split Worlds #1) by Emma Newman
The Publisher Says: Beautiful and nuanced as it is dangerous, the manners of Regency and Victorian England blend into a scintillating fusion of urban fantasy and court intrigue.
Between Mundanus, the world of humans, and Exilium, the world of the Fae, lies the Nether, a mirror-world where the social structure of 19th-century England is preserved by Fae-touched families who remain loyal to their ageless masters. Born into this world is Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver, who escapes it all to live a normal life in Mundanus, free from her parents and the strictures of Fae-touched society. But now she’s being dragged back to face an arranged marriage, along with all the high society trappings it entails.
Crossing paths with Cathy is Max, an Arbiter of the Split Worlds treaty with a dislocated soul who polices the boundaries between the worlds, keeping innocents safe from the Fae. After a spree of kidnappings and the murder of his fellow Arbiters, Max is forced to enlist Cathy’s help in unravelling a high-profile disappearance within the Nether. Getting involved in the machinations of the Fae, however, may prove fatal to all involved.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Mundanus? Exilium? Really. That's some on-the-nose stuff. Still, not for nothing did I get to 72%. The writing clearly didn't offend me...the plot was a little eye-rolly, with Cathy being very much a modern, sweary woman in pseudo-eighteenth-century times...snappish, ready to lash out at everyone including her future husband whom she very much does not want to marry despite falling in love with him...who just for added eye-rollyness makes an effort to understand her which she repays with unkindness and every attempt to drive him away.
The last straw for me was a major infodump about how the world we're in works to a mundane. Honestly, I shit you not. At SEVENTY-TWO PERCENT into the book. Had it happened at twenty-two or even forty-two percent I'd be a lot less annoyed.
Still and all, this sort of urban fantasy has squads and fleets of admirers. At $7.99 on Kindle you fans will really jam on this tale.
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