FOWL EULOGIES, strange, absurd, and very French

FOWL EULOGIES
LUCIE RICO (tr. Daria Chernysheva)
World Editions
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Fowl Eulogies is an absurd fairy tale for the ethical carnivore, fiction of perfect madness, of brutal and unprecedented humor. From the meadow to the supermarket, this dazzling first novel of mischief and feathers, brings to life the singular poetry of the industrial chicken.

Upon her mother's death, Paule Rojas, a vegetarian city-dweller, returns to the chicken farm where she grew up. Pressured to fulfil her mother's last request, Paule rediscovers pleasure and meaning in running the old family business. Yet, eager to bring something of herself to a family tradition, Paule embarks on increasingly intricate ways of helping the chickens to self-actualize before their deaths. She records the chickens' life stories, adding them to the labels that decorate the vacuum-packed meat sent off to market—an individual biography for every chicken.

But not all runs smooth in her childhood village; Paule finds she has few friends and many enemies. She is forced to spread her wings, relocate her livestock, and oversee the construction of an urban farm of never-before-seen practices and proportions.

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

My Review: A fable of modern factory farming that manages to be cautionary, amusing, and thought-provoking.

A woman whose mode of survival as a being is a rejection of her mother's means of support deals with the grief of losing a mother she...felt conflicted about, let's say...reassesses everything as she goes through the process. What I've always known about les animaux, their individualty and complexity within their scope, is apparently a revelation to Paule. That bumfuzzles me a bit, as it seems someone who has had life-long contact with them ought to have picked up on that before. After all, she did go vegetarian, yet *now* as she's learning to like killing chickens, she discovers their individuality...? Well, just go with it, I advised myself.

The pleasure of the read, to me at least, is in the fantastical element of mass public response to Paule's oddball response to being a chicken-killer for a living: Those obituaries for the bird you're roasting as dinner catching fire (!) with the bird-munching public seems wildly improbable to me. It makes me grin. It gave me a moment of wistful acknowledgment that my existence is predicated on the deaths of innumerable other living things I'll never know a thing about. In this vein of response, the story reminded me of that other very, very French novel of wildly improbable events, A Novel Bookstore.

It seems a truly French thing is to use fantastical and unlikely human responses to things in order to question those underpinnings of our world we don't spend a lot of time considering. It doesn't take Author Rico a huge page-count to get to the meat (!) of her fable. There's a sting in the tail of the tale, I suspect put there to cause discomfort. How many people can, if they really *know*, genuinely get that the food they eat is mass death? This applies equally to vegetarians, of course, but they seem not to worry overmuch about plant sentience. As forms of denial of evidence go, that one's pretty sensible since the world does not support the exitence of billions of Jains.

As a story meant to provoke thought, I'm on a different point on the curve of Author Rico's trajectory. I was far more focused, for my edification and education, on the many iterations of the vile, evil Violet Gamart of The Bookshop that populate the story. The innumerable, deeply solipsistic NIMBYs, the no-change stasis lovers, the PTB threatened in their sacred wallets by new ideas, all abound. I was varyingly infuriated, repulsed, and appalled at Paule's detractors. It was thus saddening to see Paule gradually submerge into The Capitalist System. I expected it. I was still saddened.

I suspect her evoking of my sadness is meant to remind me that collusion can be coerced from any of us; that principles are costly; that human nature is destructive always in all ways. Bleak as it is, this is a truth self-evident to any remotely honest observer of life.

As a way to "eat my spinach," this read is a properly well-made inducement. As a translation, it is smoothly made. As a narrative, your French gear needs to be engaged or its absurdity will clonk you hard. If you can shift that gear, this is a delight of a read.

MY PART OF HER, a parting in no way sweet but replete with sorrow

MY PART OF HER
JAVAD DJAVAHERY (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Restless Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In exiled Iranian author Javad Djavahery’s captivating English debut, a youthful betrayal during a summer on the Caspian sea has far-reaching consequences for a group of friends as their lives are irrevocably altered by the Revolution.

For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the “poor relative from the North,” but a welcome guest at his wealthy cousin Nilou’s home and the gatekeeper of her affections. He revels in the power of orchestrating the attentions of her many admirers, granting and denying access to her would-be lovers. But in a moment of jealousy and youthful bravado, he betrays and humiliates an unlikely suitor, setting into motion a series of events that will have drastic repercussions for all of them as the country is forever transformed by the Iranian Revolution a few short years later.

Over the next twenty years, the lingering effects of that betrayal set the friends on radically different paths in the wake of political, religious, and cultural upheaval. Their surprising final reunion reveals the consequences of revenge and self-preservation as they each must decide whether and how to forget the past. Urgent and gorgeously written, My Part of Her captures the innocence of youth, the folly of love, and the capriciousness of fate as these friends find themselves on opposing sides of the seismic rifts of history.

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

My Review: Layers of response to this book. Most of them uncomfortable with the narrator, his assumption of power over the life of his female cousin, over the lives of the men who pursue her, and the general awfulness of a culture where that's just the way it is.

You'll see. It'll happen to you, if it hasn't already, and you will know as I do that the life you spent wanting to forget was in fact nothing but a life spent remembering.

This storytelling voice is the one used throughout the book. You're told what the story will do next, where it will lead you the reader. That isn't going to be everyone's favorite technique, but it's integral to the book. It is, per Translator Ramadan, a cultural staple and thus a vital part of the story being told. As she's translated other works from French in ways that delighted me, I'm willing to trust her.

How far will a male go to possess a female? How high is up, the answer ends up being; the young woman in this iteration of that seemingly eternally fresh story represents the startlingly awful answer of "into depths of manipulation and depravity that will revolt and surprise you."

The details aren't unique, or even any more distasteful than the fact that he uses his position of trust to rifle his cousin's underwear drawer; to cause a discovery to be made that screws up her chances at escaping an ugly, exploitive sysytem; and to ruin her suitor's life entirely in his home place while simultaneously looking virtuous to a powerful man.

So we're listening to the confession of a truly despicable boy...why?

Because all this takes place on the cusp of Iran's 1979 Islamist rebellion against the Shah and his paymasters. Everything changes...for the worse...very soon after the events of the story. Even here, my goodness if he doesn't try to finagle a way to weasel in with the new, hardline regime. The risks of playing a double game with True Believers come home to him. His much-desired cousin is suddenly more vulnerable than he is. She's a woman with an education and counterrevolutionary ideas.

She disappears.

An exiled Iranian author makes his Anglophone debut in this disturbing tale of moral turpitude and the cost of power to those who only want its benefits. The story the narrator tells us, finally revealing his ugly, wizened by lust soul to the gaze of others, doesn't so much edify its readers as provide a horrible example of the wages of the truest, most unforgivable sin:

Greed.

I read it with a strong desire to douse my brain in bleach to get the pervy little bastard's cringing Uriah Heeply gloating over his power cleaned off its surfaces. To no avail, obvs. I'm decidedly not edified at the end of the read. I'm damned glad I've never met this little lickspittle. I'm even more glad I can judge him from the untested heights of US cultural privilege. I've confronted that gift again and remain knee-shakingly grateful I was never tested in this way. Would I have done better?

EVE OUT OF HER RUINS, Paradise for whom?

EVE OUT OF HER RUINS
ANANDA DEVI (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.96 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: "Devi writes about terrible and bitter events with a soft, delicate voice."—Le Figaro

With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence: Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power; Savita, Eve's best friend, the only one who loves Eve without self-interest, who has plans to leave but will not go alone; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, in love with Eve; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France.

Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the dark corners of the island nation of Mauritius that tourists never see, and a poignant exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society. Awarded the prestigious Prix des cinq continents upon publication as the best book written in French outside of France, Eve Out of her Ruins is a harrowing account of the violent reality of life in her native country by the figurehead of Mauritian literature.

The book featurues an original introduction by Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio, who declares Devi "a truly great writer."

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

My Review: Paradise is always a fantasy, a construct imposed on a much more complicated reality. It is also used, with distressing regularity and near-universal success, as a trap for the seekers and for the sacrificial victims the entrappers designate.

The sea by the luxury hotel gleams with hazy fire. Where we live, it looks like oil and smells like an armpit. People walk past, sit at a café, take in the air, drink beers, enjoy the weather, and think about nothing. Eve once told me that we were on another planet. I think she’s right. Our sun and theirs aren’t the same.

No tourist could fail to wince at the reality of Paradise; so they're carefully steered away from contact with it.

Sometimes, when the neighbourhood is quiet, the island’s sounds seem different. Other kinds of music, less funereal tones, the clang of cash registers, the dazzle of development. The tourists scorn us without realizing it. Money has made them naïve. We cheat them out of a few rupees until they begin to mistrust our pleasant, false faces.

The country puts on its sky-blue dress, the better to seduce them. A marine perfume wafts from its crotch. From here we can’t see the island all dolled up, and their eyes, dazzled by the sun, can’t see us. As things should be.

Fantasy is good business, and good for business. Look at Disney's "entertainment" empire, its parks, hotels, cruise ships, retirement homes for fucksake. What it costs, what it does to the homes of real people, isn't priced into the fantasist's experience. It's an economic externality. Tourists, often with the very best of intentions, go to places to have experiences, learn things, be broadened and hopefully improved. Travel does alter people who can afford to do it.

The capitalist system demands that, wherever there is money to be made, as much as possible of it should be funnelled into the pockets of the very richest. So that broadening travel? It benefits you, the comparatively rich tourist and it enriches the service providers; leaving the people whose home you're staying in, whose lives you're altering, with less than a fair share. Most destructively, people like Eve are encouraged to commodify their being on this Earth:

The school principal told me: Vous vous devez de réussir. Then she said it again in English: You owe it to yourself to succeed. And finally in Mauritian Creole: Pa gaspiy u lavi.

Careful now...read that again. This is the colonizer's hand showing through the glove. Like that deeply and disturbingly unchristian "prosperity doctrine," it exchanges the idea of development, improvement, education for "success" that ever-elusive endlessly mutable chimera of the economic system. And look how beautifully succinct that message is, delivered in the colonizers' tongue, the dominant language of capitalism, then the hearer's local language. The hierarchy is laid bare. Fewer than thirty words to create the spine of a story.

Eve is, in the eyes of those around her who purport to love her, a wild creature of iron whims and large passions. She is a small woman. That means her intensity is almost fetishized in acknowledging it; it also has the side effect of making her sexually desirable. As she's a person very capable of dissociation, like many intelligent women, she uses sex to acquire things she needs and things she wants.

This willingness to divorce herself from the use of her body is, ironically, the greatest guide to the woman she loves and who returns that love, Savita.

Eve's silence is the rumble deep within the volcano. It hurts me to see her so fragile when she thinks she's so strong.

Savita sees Eve's magma, her soul heating the rock of her life to boiling point. She longs for the abillity to soothe her, to release the pressure that pushes Eve away from everyone else. In a grim, horrible way, she does that.

The shortness of this read shouldn't be mistaken for truncation or cursoriness. Savita's arc, not long, so hugely, consequentially alters Eve's and Troumaron's as an entire "native" (that ugly colonizers' term for the owners of the land) community, that an entire fifty thousand more words could be spent on it without adding a scintilla of intensity, meaning, or passion. Eve is transformed, attains an apotheosis, that alters her male admirer Saadiq (a poetry-obsessed yobbo whose yearning for her organizes his life and leaves hers untouched) perhaps most. The end of the story isn't a cheery, uplifting one. The end of the story is, instead, the realization of the inevitability of sacrifices in pursuit of the idea of Paradise.

I'll comment that the narrative voice here is not, nor was it meant to be, an accurate presentation of young people's actual spoken language. When you're telling a story this consequential, using more poetic, lyrical cadences is a useful way of communicating to the reader they're to look for more than the surface of the tale. I also note that Nobel-winner J.M.G. Le Clézio wrote an introduction that is one long spoiler for the story. I advise you to read it last.

I enjoyed this read very much. I hope you'll take heed of the content warning for sexual abuse...it's not graphically shown but it is absolutely pervasive of every aspect of the story told here.

THE BOOK OF EVE, woman-centered retelling of the Biblical Font of Misogyny

THE BOOK OF EVE
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: What if everything they’ve told us about the Garden was the other way around? Faced with what appears to be an apocryphal manuscript containing ten books and 91 passages, Eve decides to tell her version: she was neither created from Adam's rib, nor is it exact that she was expelled by the apple and the serpent, nor is story they tell of Abel and Cain true, neither that of the Flood, nor that of the Tower of Babel...

With brilliant prose, Carmen Boullosa gives a twist to the book of Genesis to dismantle the male figure and rebuild the world, the origin of gastronomy, the domestication of animals, the cultivation of land and pleasure, through the feminine gaze. Based on this exploration, sometimes fun and other times painful, The Book of Eve takes a tour through the stories they’ve told us and which have helped to foster (and cement) the absurd idea that woman is the companion, complement, and even accessory to man, which opens the door to criminal violence against women. Boullosa refutes and breaks them in this feminist novel, foundational and brazen.

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

My Review: Feminist retelling of Adam and Eve from Genesis.

As one might expect I was no fan of the patriarchal version, it being part of a religious tradition that I detest. I can't say that flipping the script to make it clear that Eve was hard done by in the Abrahamic original, and offering an Eve-centered corrective, was particularly agreeable, either; the entire religious framework is just so utterly nonsensical that making a shift in viewpoint doesn't make it less ridiculous.

I've seen significant consumer-review criticism of Author Boullosa (of Heavens on Earth fame) for sounding angry and anti-man in this retelling of the ur-text of misogyny. Well, honestly! How silly of the woman to feel some kinda way about a story that's been used for literal millennia to bludgeon women into submission to men in god's name? Outrageous!

The storytelling volume is indeed turned to eleven of ten, and the weird stop on the organ is out all the way. Eve reclaims the Ark myth as her own (which makes a lot of sense TBH) and has a really, um, off-center story of how we all came to have those indispensible things, the anus. Have to read it to find out. But the fact is, neither Adam nor Eve as created being would have one...or a navel...as they never gestated so never grew 'em. What the hell did I just read was my most frequent thought as I kept reading this uncorked, vociferous Eve's take on the stories I value so little.

So, on the one hand, yes indeed this woman's take on a man's story of why women should submit to him is plenty angry, on the other hand it always makes a story more interesting and more relevant to look at it upside down. Author Boullosa is a dab hand at making her characters sound like they are in the room with you. I found this storytelling voice compelling, angry, and Eve herself resolutely unwilling to be a good girl and quiet down. Thank goodness, though in spite of her absence of sham modesty Eve never addressed my most burning Biblical question:

Can anyone explain to me why the myth got started the Eve was created from Adam's rib, when we've all got the same number of these bones? Clearly it makes more sense...insofar as any of this guff does...to have her created from his baculum, since humans ain't got those no more.

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR, #WITMonth Japanese YA fantasy page-turner

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR
MIZUKI TSUJIMURA (tr. Philip Gabriel)
Erewhon Books
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a tranquil neighborhood of Tokyo seven students are avoiding going to school—hiding in their darkened bedrooms, unable to face their family and friends—until the moment they find the mirrors in their bedrooms are shining.

At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives into to a wondrous castle straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. This whimsical place, oddly lacking in food and running water but full of electrical sockets, is home to a petulant girl in a mask, named Wolf Queen and becomes their playground and refuge during school hours. Hidden within the walls they’re told is a key that will grant one wish, and a set of clues with which to find it. But there's a catch: the key must be found by the end of the school year and they must leave the premises by five o'clock each day or else suffer a fatal end.

As time passes, a devastating truth emerges: only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved. And so they begin to unlock each other's stories: how a boy is showered with more gadgets than love; how another suffers a painful and unexplained rejection and how a girl lives in fear of her predatory stepfather. As they struggle to abide by the rules of the game, a moving story unfolds, of seven characters trapped in a cycle of misunderstanding and loneliness, who are ultimately set free by the power of friendship, empathy, and sacrifice.

Exploring vivid human stories with a twisty and puzzle-like plot, this heart-warming novel is full of joy and hope for anyone touched by sadness and vulnerability. At the heart of this tender, playful tale is a powerful message about the importance of reaching out which shows how with one kind act you can change your life for the better, and more importantly, you can change the lives of others.

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

My Review: A story about coming out, though not the kind that phrase currently evokes. These socially maladroit and thus ostracized middle-schoolers are magically transported away from the bullying horrors of that age...the characterization of reincarnation as an endless round of middle-school lifetimes makes me so very glad I'm not A Believer...but, of course, there's a price to pay for this act of rescue. The seven of them must open up, honestly share their experiences, and only then will they be truly safe.

Well. That sounds like something I'd be sharpening my flensing knife with a ghoulish grin on my face, doesn't it? More adolescent exceptionalism! And with an added splodge of fantasy goo! "Oh he's gonna go to town on this one!"

Not this time.

Any story in which adolescent readers are encouraged, without bludgeoning, to share, and to respect the gift of sharing from another, gets my vote. Then to put it in a fantasy world that protects the wounded ones? Bonus points! To go on with the worldbuilding in a way that connects their safe escape spot back to the world they're rescued from, yet without the toxicity they need rescuing from flooding in after them? Rare and delicate flower, let me inhale you! The most usual problems are here, the bullying and the losses of safety and love. Each person's also shown to be made aware from the response to the issue that led the sufferer to this magical safe space of how much different the same stimulus can feel to different people.

Literally the point of this entire book is to learn the art of perspective in dealings with others.

I would like to experience no surprise, no extra frisson of happiness at this. The world would be a better place if I didn't. But I did, and I encourage all y'all with grands, niblings, kids of twelve or more, to grab this story up thence to present it ever-so-casually to them. It's a message, one of kindness and the presumption of goodwill on the part of all who are not genuinely rotten-souled, that I'd strongly urge getting into their heads.

Their dads and uncles, older brothers, and so on, as well.

SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS, the kind of uneasy horror-inflected thriller I enjoy reading the most

SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS
KAILEE PEDERSEN
St. Martin' s Press
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.

But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

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

My Review: The pleasure I felt reading this book about a bisexual man embroiled in a failing family that's falling to pieces under a culturally unexpected malevolence...! If your mood says, "make it fast," move on to the next cookie-cutter thriller. If your mood says, "give me the literary equivalent of edging," you opened the right book.

The pacing of the read itself is fast. The way the short chapters propel your reading is not, however, equaled by the pace of the story unfolding. The relocation into different periods of time that unfold the wide fan of motives and motivations is much more deliberate. I was surprised by this at first, but in time found my footing in this technique of moving the pages at a different rate from the story itself. In the end, the mechanism I used for dealing with this mismatch was the same one I'd used eons ago when I watched All My Children...the stories moved slower than the episodes.

That said...the story is very familiar. Using this technique helped a Gothic romance-cum-horror tale feel more exciting than that description does. Emilia, the exoticized Other, gets the modern reader's sympathy at first. She's rejected and devalues based on her Otherness. We respond to this behavior nowadays with complete sympathy for the Othered, as goodness only knows it was long past time for us to do as a default.

...but what if that could be used to wreak havoc...?

The author, an ethnic Chinese adoptee into Midwestern culture, decided she would use this very, very clever repurposing of the wide paranoid streak in US culture to create a Gothic story of supernatural entities causing havoc for, apparently, the hell of it. The nine-tailed fox of East Asian folklore seems, more often than not, to just do stuff to see what'll happen next. That seems to me, when attributed to conscious entities, like a wicked, immoral, rotten-souled thing to do, as it is guaranteed to hurt someone who does not know what they're getting into when they fall for the fox-spirit's lures. One can argue that, really basically, Nick fucking his brother's wife for any reason at all is just cause for everything that follows.

I agree.

But everyone else? They didn't ask for this.

So runs my usual horror-themed read response. Like Walschots's Hench, I've always seen super"heroes" as agents of chaos and misery; I watched Poltergeist and asked my then-date, "what the hell are these people gonna do when their insurance won't replace the house?" (He broke up with me a few weeks later.) It doesn't help that I do not believe in The Supernatural, or spirits, or gods. (The vastness of just measurable spacetime isn't awe-inspiring enough for you?) That's one steep hill of disbelief to climb for one little story.

Where I got invested in Author Pedersen's iteration of it was back to that soap-opera technique of unfolding the fan behind the shadowplay of the story. I was constantly thinking "what's that going to mean?" and "what's his zipper doing down?" not focusing on the action in the moment.

For some of y'all, that's the nail in the coffin right there. Good. This will not be a good read for someone whose story in-the-moment expectations are to move from cause to effect and ever onwards, kicked in the hindquarters by heavy boots of Action. A more satisfied reader will come from the ranks of the curious ones who climb hills to look around from the top, then walk down to look at the top.

Satisfying reading, though not in the easy, ordinary way.

August 2024's Burgoine and 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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A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil (tr. Nermin Menemencioğlu & Amy Marie Spangler)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In English at last: the first novel by the first Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel. A Strange Woman is the story of Nermin, a young woman and aspiring poet growing up in Istanbul. Nermin frequents coffeehouses and underground readings, determined to immerse herself in the creative, anarchist youth culture of Turkey’s capital; however, she is regularly thwarted by her complicated relationship to her parents, members of the old guard who are wary of Nermin’s turn toward secularism.

In four parts, A Strange Woman narrates the past and present of a Turkish family through the viewpoints of the main characters involved. This rebellious, avant-garde novel tackles sexuality, the unconscious, and psychoanalysis, all through the lens of modernizing 20th-century Turkey. Deep Vellum brings this long-awaited translation of the debut novel by a trailblazing feminist voice to US readers.

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

My Review: "At last" indeed! This fifty-three-year-old tale is, I suppose, a feminist classic in Turkey...if it's still available there, considering how horrifically the current fascist government has wrenched Turkey to the political wrong that we call "the right" in English. Imagine! The horror of a young woman seeking new ideas, and even *gasp* s-e-x!!

The problem is its an oft-told tale of a woman declaring independence from a rigid, repressive, patriarchal culture. Not fresh,or new, or even very interesting. It's a damned good idea to get it into the hands of 2024's young US women to motivate them to vote against this country's version of the Turkish regime. This view into the struggles of the past could blast 'em awake. I'm already there, been there a while, so found this not very exciting.

Deep Vellum wants $16.95, but Amazon only wants $10.79 for the trade paper edition at the non-affiliate link.

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The Performance by Claudia Petrucci (tr. Anne Milano Appel)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of a love triangle played out through mutual manipulation

Giorgia was a talented actress before she abandoned her stage career and fell in love with Filippo. She settles into a life of quiet compromise—until one day she bumps into her old theater director, Mauro, who fans the acting flame back to life. But setting a restless soul on fire can be dangerous if she loses sight of the boundary between reality and fiction—and Giorgia collapses, ending up in a clinic. Filippo and Mauro find themselves both accomplices and adversaries, seduced by a dangerous game to heal and win back Giorgia: by writing the script for her perfect life. In this dazzling debut, Petrucci explores the ambiguous borders between love, possession, and control in clear, magnetic prose.

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

My Review: The prose is great! I felt unable to tear myself away. I badly wanted to, because this is a super-squick story of two men conspiring to gaslight a woman who fell apart because she put men and their demands on her before her duty of self-care. This story always bewilders me...why would you do that?

Still more confusingly, the gaslighting is positive, intended to give her back a constructive, capable sense of herself. But it's coming from the men. They're *saving* her.

Not a story I want to amplify.

World Editions wants $18.99 for any edition, Amazon wants $14.99 at the non-affiliate link. A bargain for the prose; the story...you decide.

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It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Told with gripping intensity, It Would be Night in Caracas chronicles one woman’s desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future.

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcon stands over an open grave. Alone, except for harried undertakers, she buries her mother–the only family Adelaida has ever known.

Numb with grief, Adelaida returns to the apartment they shared. Outside the window that she tapes shut every night—to prevent the tear gas raining down on protesters in the streets from seeping in. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida resists and is beaten up. It is the beginning of a fight for survival in a country that has disintegrated into violence and anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But as fate would have it, Adelaida is given a gruesome choice that could secure her escape.

Filled with riveting twists and turns, and told in a powerful, urgent voice, It Would Be Night in Caracas is a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA AMAZON FIRST READS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Too much going on, ends up dissipating all my genuine and interested involvement in this story of a woman living an ordinary life in extraordinary times in a collapsing democracy. No sooner does the mother get buried than five other things happen in ten minutes. Exaggerating for effect, of course.

It's not that I DISliked the read. It's that I couldn't keep up with it.

HarperVia asks you for $2.99 to read a Kindle edition at the non-affiliate link. I would not feel irked had I spent that on this read.

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A Winter's Promise: The Mirror Visitor Book 1 by Christelle Dabos (tr. Hildegarde Serle)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Long ago, following a cataclysm called “The Rupture,” the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands. Known now as Arks, each has developed in distinct ways; each seems to possess its own unique relationship to time, such that nowadays vastly different worlds exist, together but apart. And over all of the Arks the spirit of an omnipotent ancestor abides.

Ophelia lives on Anima, an ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, the young girl hides the ability to read and communicate with the souls of objects, and the power to travel through mirrors. Her peaceful existence on the Ark of Anima is disrupted when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, from the powerful Dragon clan. Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancée to the floating capital on the distant Ark of the Pole. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity? Though she doesn’t know it yet, she has become a pawn in a deadly plot.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA AMAZON FIRST READS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Adolescent exceptionalism gets validated hard in this fun first-in-series fantasy. There are four in total, or so far at least.

I am deeply uninterested in how Unique and Special and Girl this character is. I enjoyed the animate-world parts, and found the worldbuilding deft. It was allowed to be part of the story not presented as A Revelation. As she moves through the steps of discovering *what* is happening, she also learns the whys of it.

Not at all a bad read...especially for someone who doesn't have decades and decades of possessing a "Y" chromosome. In fact, best for people who would say men are possessed by their "Y" chromosome.

Europa Editions offers a Kindlebook for $7.59 at the non-affiliate link. Ouch.

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The Last Twist of the Knife (Brazilian Literature) by João Almino (tr. Elizabeth Lowe)

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil’s northeastern plateau, where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild of his rich godfather―the man who ordered the hit―and may therefore be the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual fixation.

In this masterful novel rich in local color, João Almino creates a complex, damaged narrator inexorably dragged down into the vortex of his own treacherous memories.

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

My Review: Bored middle-aged man obsesses over The Girl That Got Away. After divorcing the wife who has the temerity not to save him from himself, he moves home to The Provinces *eyeroll* from the city, can't find the One, discovers he's descended from a long line of serial sexual predators/abusers, and...well, that's it, really.

Even if this was about him pining for a boy from his past, I'd find this a bog-standard iteration of a story I'm not very fond of anyway.

Dalkey Archive asks for $9.95 to jet you read a Kindle edition at the non-affiliate link. It has the virtue of being short.

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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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Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (50%) by Lucy Sante

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.

Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was.

Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

I HAVE OWNED THIS BOOK FOR DECADES.

My Review: Yeah, this is a re-read; this is also a five-star Pearl-Rule read. It's here because Author Sante is now Lucy, not Luc. I wanted to re-read it with Lucy's transition in my mind, as a test of my hypothesis that the transition was not some giant, wrenching shift in the author's identity.

Job done. Halfway through Part Three, the law'n'order bit that I always get boiling mad reading, I figured out that Lucy, as a person new to my conscious awareness, changed nothing in my idea of Author Sante as a prose stylist or a storyteller. I immersed myself into Author Sante's deep dive into my beloved home city without any slightest thought of how the story would be different had it been written by Lucy, not Luc...they're both Author Sante, albeit I'm sure age has wrought its usual changes on the idea factory within. That would be true no matter whose writing one is looking at.

Why transphobes think transitioning ruins anything at all says bad things about them, and only them.

FSG asks $12.99 for a Kindle version. This is a must-read for all Manhattanphiles, anyone interested in the evolution of cities, and any aspiring hipsters.

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The Book of Elsewhere (BRZRKR) by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville (25%)

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: The legendary Keanu Reeves and inimitable writer China Miéville team up on this genre-bending epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die.

A mind-blowing epic from Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books

She said, We needed a tool. So I asked the gods.

There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.”

And he wants to be able to die.

In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.

In a collaboration that combines Miéville’s singular style and creativity with Reeves’s haunting and soul-stirring narrative, these two inimitable artists have created something utterly unique, sure to delight existing fans and to create scores of new ones.

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

My Review: Bitter dregs of disappointment.

I need to stay much more in the head of "no comic books" and I'll be happier, and make better reading choices for myself. This kind of pseudoprofound character, like The Ancient Mariner, or the Highlander, whose wisdom is aperçus strung together on worn-out fibers of fraying plot-ropes unbundled to make them stretch farther, just does not work for me.

Del Rey Books wants $14.99 for an ebook. Not my $15, so spend it how you like.

DEATH OF THE RED RIDER, The Leningrad Confidential series #2

DEATH OF THE RED RIDER
YULIA YAKOVLEVA (The Leningrad Confidential series #2) (tr. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp) Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: As the Red Terror gathers pace, a horseman and horse mysteriously collapse in the middle of a race in Leningrad. Weary Detective Zaitsev, still raw from his last brush with the Party, is dispatched to the Soviet state cavalry school in Novocherkassk, southern Russia, to investigate. As he witnesses the horror of the Holodomor, and the impact of Soviet collectivisation, he struggles to penetrate the murky, secretive world of the cavalry school.

Why has this particular murder attracted so much attention from Soviet officials? Zaitsev needs to answer this question and solve the case before the increasingly paranoid authorities turn their attention towards him...

Don’t miss the second installment in the atmospheric and relentlessly dark detective series set in Stalinist Russia, where corruption, informers, and purges take paranoia to the next level.

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

My Review: Less gray-skied than Punishment of a Hunter, just as paranoid, just as nail-bitingly intense. The action moving south of Leningrad to "Cossack country," a nomenclatural sidestep from the modern name of a place Little Vladdy Pu-Pu doesn't much like having mentioned at present, changes the externals and, if anything, ramps up the internal conflicts between self and State present in every single breath taken in Stalinist times.

Zaitsev has a new...comrade? minder? internal spy?...in Zoya, a woman with a chip on her shoulder about being judged unfairly (because woman), a woman with a difficult attitude of disrespect for the people among whom she and Zaitsev must do their investigative job, and a general poor substitute for last book's Nefyodov. When you're among people who are extra-suspicious of you because you're Russian when they were already unhappy to see someone sent by the central authorities to poke around in places they'd just as soon leave unpoked, thanks, to solve a crime that took place a world away, to someone whose life was a-rattle with the skeletons in his closet...this will not end well for plenty of folks.

It's heavenly!

No one can be trusted! About/with/for ANYthing! Every time Zaitsev finds something out he has to unwrap more shades of meanings than Tut had embalmers' bandages! Impressively, Author Yakovleva manages to make the thriller-y bits cohere well. There's a secondary theme in who was murdered, where, and why, though it's not particularly energetically explored. It very much comes with the murdered man's identity, and I found it and its deeper ramifications interesting, but if I don't holler about it the importance won't be obvious to most. And I won't. This series has, as one of its main pleasures, the pressure cooker of Zaitsev sweating out the clues, in the teeth of multiple prongs of opposition, while uncovering realities of his life lived in Soviet Russia that break him on a human level.

So my attention was riveted again...last book I gave an extra quarter-star to, elevating it almost to fivehood. Not this one, despite my praising it; so why?

As pleasure reading, deeply interesting history of the Red Terror is...challenging. The information Zaitsev discovers as his investigation goes on would've gotten him shot in 1937 Russia. He could not have survived learning what he did...too much evidence to the contrary exists in the identities of the many murdered. So my disbelief muscle was sore from overuse. Also, why didn't he just shove Zoya under a tram or into a combine harvester and have done with it? She was more than a poor partner for an investigator, she was a provocatively bad investigator herself.

So there's the missing fractional star. Noe of that made me less eager to get to the next chapter, and I could not wait to pick up the read every day.

So a big #WITMonth win for Pushkin Vertigo, and me; y'all, too, if you go get one now.

NEFANDO, if you have a trigger, do not read this book

NEFANDO
MÓNICA OJEDA
Coffee House Press
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A techno-horror portrait of the fears and desires of six young artists whose lives are upended by a controversial video game, from National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda.

Six young artists share an apartment in Kiki Ortega, a researcher writing a pornographic novel; Iván Herrera, a writer whose prose reveals a deeply conflicted relationship with his body; three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia, who quietly search for ways to transcend their abuse as children; and El Cuco Martínez, a video-game designer whose creations push beneath the substrate of the digital world. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery.

In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo?

Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.

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

My Review: If you have a trigger, do not read this book.

I can't recommend this read to you. I can tell you it challenged my every shibboleth, saying out loud things I'm reluctant to confront, because that means acknowledging them. Unlike Jawbone, this book doesn't burst onto the scene pointing Horror's attention onto girls and women as perpetrators and planners of Evil for the first time...well, not literally THE FIRST time but definitely early on...but treads that path with zeal and a ghoulish delight.

I'm always impressed when a writer can genuinely shock me. I was routinely shocked by the game Nefando, genuinely repulsed and affronted by things within it. As the sales copy above says, this is an unsparing story, deeply deeply perverse, and discomfitingly addictive. I didn't much want to keep reading. I had to. I was not going to be able to keep these images from ruining my sleep until I gave the story closure. The last time I felt this way about a psychological horror story was the Japanese version of Ring, which...well, no, not going into it except to say this story has similarly deeply embedded awful triggers for me.

If I felt any kind of way about the translation, it was deeply impressed. Translator Booker made this nightmarish trip down...all the way down...into the pit an utterly unmissable trip. That takes mad skills. She has those, and clearly also has a deep affinity for psychological horror, the kind that blends pervasive unease with jump scares. If there is ever a horror translators' award, it should be called "The Sarah Booker Slap."

Author Ojeda...I hope this paper exorcism of your personal demons did you all the good in the world. It's set my therapy sessions back at least five years.

*shudder*

COUNSEL CULTURE, quiet story of interiors, edges, and brutal insensititity

COUNSEL CULTURE
KIM HYE-JIN (tr. Jamie Chang)
Restless Books
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

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

My Review: A respectful look at "cancel culture" and its multivarious issues. I was not fond of any of the characters, or rooting for them but also lacked animosity towards them. It was a peculiar reading experience as a result: I wanted to know what happened next but felt no frisson, no personal involvement in the story.

I don't remember a comparable sensation while reading fiction, though given the number of books I've read it statistically must have happened before.

More than anything else, Haesoo evoked from me the nostrum, "Physician, heal thyself." The entire time she is in the frame I expect there to occur another breach of empathy from or towards her. This makes the reading experience almost adversarial, but always compelling. She seems to be presented as a thoroughly ordinary person cast adrift in deeper waters than she can realistically navigate. That she swam out beyond her capability to move safely is, in the end, a completely ordinary, in fact universal, issue for humanity in general. Back in the 1970s we called it "The Peter Principle". It's been a truth of human organizational behavior since forever, no matter what trendy name one gives it: Haesoo has failed upwards to her limit of incompetence. She now reaches that interesting lagoon out of the deeper waters where storms from the outside can still reach her, but she is no longer at risk of being dragged to the bottom from which she cannot rise alive.

All of this is, however, much like real life, to be found in pauses, spaces, unfinished sentences. You aren't with Haesoo in the storm. We join her in the lagoon, a place she realizes keeps her safe but feels like a disappointment in its comparative shallowness. The waters are fresh-ish now, much having been dragged out of the space to be redeposited elsewhere. The nature of smaller spaces is, however, that they get full of junk far faster than bigger ones.

Haesoo's letters form a large part of the story. They're the way the author shows us her isolation, her growing sense of the limitations her post-cancellation will be lived within. Letters...things we create in deep isolation that are meant to be sent out to others...are both medium and message in a story like this one that focuses on the quiet parts of Trouble. Haesoo never sends her letters. Her outreach doesn't ever get completed. She focuses on a street cat and an abandoned child, determined to rescue someone as she can not rescue herself, her career, her marriage...some positive thing must come from this diminishment of her self!

It's a self very much built on her identity as a therapist. That's a job of nuances, edge cases, silences unfilled. It did not seem to me to be a job Haesoo should've done. There's a ghostly past event that explains it, I won't offer details because that calls too much attention to what's better experienced as a slow burn. The fact is that Haesoo won't be rehabilitated before your eyes, so if you're after a triumphal overcoming of obstacles story this isn't your best choice.

Read this story if your appetite is for tapas, not smorgasbord. Don't think sushi, those rarefied tastes that come directly from the sea. You're at the end of the food chain not the center. There's a little sip of sherry every so often, dry and cleansing then sweet and masking by turns. It's a case of satisfaction with the presentation, not satiation from the quantity either way.

You'll end up replete not stuffed. I found it very enjoyable. I expect y'all will too.

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES, we have a literary heir to Jean Genet at last

MEDUSA OF THE ROSES
NAVID SINAKI
Grove Press
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sex, vengeance, and betrayal in modern day Tehran—Navid Sinaki’s bold and cinematic debut is a queer literary noir following Anjir, a morbid romantic and petty thief whose boyfriend disappears just as they’re planning to leave their hometown for good

Anjir and Zal are childhood best friends turned adults in love. The only problem is they live in Iran, where being openly gay is criminalized, and the government’s apparent acceptance of trans people requires them to surgically transition and pass as cis straight people. When Zal is brutally attacked after being seen with another man in public, despite the betrayal, Anjir becomes even more determined to carry out their longstanding plan for the future: Anjir, who’s always identified with the mythical gender-changing Tiresias, will become a woman, and they’ll move to a new town for a fresh start as husband and wife.

Then Zal vanishes, leaving a cryptic note behind that sets Anjir on a quest to find the other man, hoping he will lead to Zal. Stalking and stealing his way through the streets, clubs, library stacks, hotel rooms, and museum halls of Tehran—where he encounters his troubled mother, addict brother, and the dynamic Leyli, a new friend who is undergoing a transition of her own—Anjir soon realizes that someone is tailing him too. It quickly becomes clear that more violence may be the fastest route to freedom, as Anjir’s morals and gender identity are pushed to new places in the pursuit of love, peace, and self-determination.

Steeped in ancient Persian and Greek myths, and brimming with poetic vulnerability, subversive bite, and noirish grit, Medusa of the Roses is a page-turning wallop of a story from a bright new literary talent.

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

My Review: I think most of us love the honorable thief in fiction. Stories abound over the generations that feature a good person forced to steal by an unjust system, by a pressing external need, or just to redress the wild imbalance of power over one's person. Robin Hood, Locke Lamora, Aladdin, and their literary kin are enshrined in the cultural conversation. Mythology's trickster gods, those agents of chaos, are...witness Loki as embodied by Tom Hiddleston here and now...endlessly popular because no one doesn't love a funny, witty piss-take.

Then there's Jean Genet. DEFINITELY not a comfortably admirable character to most people, a petty thief and prostitute whose actions as a very incompetent thief (he kept getting caught!) earned him the 1940s French version of a three-strikes law conviction. No one ever tried to pretend he was in the Resistance. Who cared what language the jailers spoke? He stole and sold his body because he didn't like the other options...wholly self-motivated, probably a narcissist, but magnetically interesting and embodying anti-establishment Cool.

Now, after years of disuse, we have Anjir from that mold. He and his love Zal must be together. Funds for transitioning to female aren't coming from the government that demands he take this step...which, to be fair, isn't one he resists...so he steals.

Living in theocratic Iran is awful enough for AFAB women.Think how much more horrifying it would be to be an AMAB man-loving man who, deliberately and consistently, acts "like a woman"...has sex with and enters into romanitic partnerships with men. A complete affront to Male Privilege! An assault on God's Will! God put men on top! DON'T BOTTOM!! Or, if you really must, then transition to female.

I totally support trans rights. I am not in any way trans, have no desire to be female, dislike pretty intensely my culture's hideous fun-house mirror idea of "femininity" and would strongly prefer to be dead rather than forced to conform to what I see as a ghastly disfiguring joke of an identity. Yet, if gay men want to live and love their partnered lives, that is what their theocratic government tells them to do.

I live in fear of the US right-wingnuts figuring out their transphobia can be redeployed.

What I enjoyed about my ride through modern Iran was the sense I got of a society on the boil. Stuff is happening in this book, stuff that's out of most people's sight, but is building up pressure and will blow a hole in the status quo. The author has crafted an avatar of selfish anti-social action who represents, just by his existence, Resistance!

Told in beautiful sentences, this story of Love, Passion, and Honesty draws on millennia of models for its men's identities. It is a read I won't soon forget or easily allow to slip under the newer reads to come.

MOTHERS DON'T, Basque-language translation of very difficult subject

MOTHERS DON'T
KATIXA AGIRRE (tr. Katie Whittemore)
Open Letter Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realizes that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime.

Mothers don't write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children? How could she kill them? Is motherhood a prison? Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don't plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.

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

My Review: Seeing Motherhood, that uncriticizable cult, as a prison exclusively populated by and designed for women, is very culturally risky. Think I'm exaggerating? Call Motherhood a "sacred cow" in public.

Crowds will gather. Trouble will brew. The speaker will be set upon from every point of the cultural compass. Like saying "religion is evil, a force for the worst people to do the most intentional damage to the greatest number of others" it results in much, much shouting about it from those alleging they most value the freedom to express ideas freely. Feminists will decry the insult perceived in comparing a woman to an animal, a Hindu will shout about colonialist appropriation of a cultural symbol, a mother will complain she is misunderstood....

I know this from experience.

That reality told me Author Agirre was on to a winner in this journalistic investigative thriller of a wealthy woman's "inexplicable" infanticide. I'm going to have to contextualize all of that: by definition, all things pertaining to mothers and motherhood are domestic; a story that centers a journalist investigating a crime in front of us is journalistic; a story involving the uncovering of the "why" of a violent crime no one wants investigated is a thriller. That exactly none of these things are present in their essential forms makes this literary fiction; that the center of the story is absolutely, essentially, irreducibly about femaleness's exclusive biological function, unshared and unshareable with men makes it feminist.

The entanglements do not stop there. This is a web, and it is meant to be. Meanings are massively interwoven: Do these women have a relationship, or is it a case of scraping a connection? Does our journo using an extended leave, not to care for her own child but to write about the infanticide as it travels through the legal system, suggest her fascination might be rooted in some envy? Her old connection is an artist, married to a wealthy man, possessed of an au pair...her own Swedish man isn't wealthy but she has resources many would envy just by giving birth there. Her story is of a difficult birth, a lot of time away from her child, permaybehaps escaping the overwhelming, extinguishing identity Mother, instead of drowning her child in a bathtub.

The story, in pop culture and true crime, is as old as the state of Motherhood. Sometimes it's just too much. Some people aren't interested in doing this lifelong job. Some aren't suited to it. And the less we talk about it, the more women fall into a life they do not want to lead because they had no external guidance to consequences, alternatives, solutions. Tragedies come when people, all of us, refuse to talk through the realities of life. That leaves us all at the mercy of myths. Myths arise to address needs; myths also get crafted, honed to serve as weapons. One thing is certain: The Cult of Mother is incredibly old and powerfully supported, and only a brave soul says, "No."

These kinds of stories tell us about a tragedy arising from the myth remaining unchallenged. That ought to be enough to send all y'all scurrying out to get a copy. I hope it will. For me, this was an above-average reading experience that didn't quite reach the pinnacles I always hope for a read to reach. As a translation of a translation, I wonder if that might be it. Translator Whittemore does a creditable job but I'm...unthrilled. Pleased. Contented. Unthrilled, though, and I am absolutely the audience for this tale. My own mother should never have had me, or any other child, because I can tell you her laziness was the only reason she never killed me. It was easier not to vaccinate me and to ignore my physical problems.

Not kidding. Being female does not mean a person is automatically suited to motherhood.

So, well, do I recommend the read? Yes. It is stylistically interesting, it tells a story I think many will find very involving and will invest their energy into while receiving ample rewards.

It will entertain, it will inform, it will offer rewards. The sale price, had I paid it, would feel very well worth the investment.

THEY DREAM IN GOLD, debut novel from tyro publisher SJP Lit...both worth watching

THEY DREAM IN GOLD
MAI SENNAAR
Zando/SJP Lit
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A “luminous” (Tara Conklin) literary debut following two dreamers, one intercultural family, and the diasporic pursuit of home.

When Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York in 1968―his piercing gaze in a downtown jazz club threatening to carry her away―their connection is undeniable. Both from fractured homes, with childhoods spent crossing the Atlantic, they quickly find peace with each other. And as Mansour’s soaring Senegalese melodies continue to break new ground, keeping time with the sound of revolution and taking him and Bonnie from Paris to Rio and Switzerland, it seems as though happiness might finally be around the corner for them both.

Then Mansour goes missing. His Spanish tour was only meant to last three weeks, but three months later, he and his band have not returned. In his absence, Bonnie reckons with her memories of him, and comes to understand that the hopes of so many women―her mother and grandmother; his mother, aunt, childhood friend―rest on her perseverance. Stirred by the life growing inside her, Bonnie puts a plan in action to find him.

Spanning two decades and moving through the hotbeds of the African diaspora, They Dream in Gold is an epic yet intimate exploration of the migrant hunger for belonging and a powerful, intergenerational testament to our shared humanity, for lovers of Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis and Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice.

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

My Review: Buckle up...this is a complicated read. Long at over four hundred pages, complex in its interrelated cast of characters, difficult to summarize as a result. Senegal, Paris, New York...the Twenties, the Sixties...familys seen in passing, a family being formed...this novel's a web.

It's a debut novel for the storyteller and close to a debut for the publisher. Sarah Jessica Parker's SJP Lit is part of a company called Zando Projects (Zando's website). SJP Lit's mission statement is:

Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit publishes sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking, and discussion-driven stories that are inclusive of international and underrepresented voices. SJP Lit books capture the contemporary imagination and reflect a wide range of ideas and experiences.

So someone famous decided not to start a book club, or an imprint in the Corporate World, but a company publishing books she curates and pays for and edits for us to see what she wants to read and offers us as worth it to read, too. As I would expect from Parker's résumé, the story told here is very much focused on character development. Bonnie and Mansour are not, despite what you could reasonably expect from the synopsis, the only or even the best developed characters. Because the story does not conform to linear time's slightly tedious constraints, we get the family polyphonics as well as the dynamics. This is a fancy way for me to say, if you're expecting a straightforward family saga, you're going to be left wanting. If you really want a book you can inhabit, one that feels more like a series (I mean this in the good way!) than a standalone, here's a great summertime immersion.

The way we move from time to time, from place to place, demands of the reader a level of participation, of code-switching, that might be off-putting for some. I think you'll twig quite quickly to the cues that indicate we're going to shift, though they are not the same from one instance to the next. What I like about that is the mood of the read never stagnates, a danger that family sagas can fall into readily. After a time many of them feel like trauma porn, or a weird triumphalism celebrating a character's Strength, Nobility, and Fortitude. Yeeeccchhh

Author Mai Sennaar doesn't succumb to that too-easy, too-incredible stuff. Her women are beset by worries and doubts. They wonder if things are worth it if they hurt this much, demand this much of them. They stumble, fall, and fail. But they never stay down for good.

It is a distinction, not a difference, but it is a consequential one that speaks to the author's intent. She is not going for the facile road to storytelling success. That is clear from the start. For this old white man, that made the read all the more interesting and involving. Some of that could be down to the slightly more...distant...way the narration is deployed, it gets an overview feeling across. Back to that polyphony of PoVs. This is a natural outgrowth of it. I found it enhanced my reading experience, in part because it enabled Author Sennaar to put me more firmly into the time and place the different strands of her story-web flow through.

I found I was disgruntled by one big, star-losing thing: Like Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (whose author flatteringly blurbed this book), every one of these women is circling a man. The story's center is a man (absent though he be). Is it that hard to make these women interrelate around themselves and each other?

A crotchet of mine. The Bechdel test still matters to me because the queer equivalent is abysmal still...gay characters feature more than ever, less than reality says is fair. So, no fifth star for you, debut novel. Author Sennaar is deeply talented and should be supported, make no mistake.

Maybe she's got more to say, soon. Let's show we're listening.

HEAVENS ON EARTH, as though such a thing could exist...which is the point of the read

HEAVENS ON EARTH
CARMEN BOULLOSA (tr. Shelby Vincent)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.

Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.

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

My Review: Deeply, deeply examines our modern-US obsession with The Past. Every excursion into The Past requires acts of translation. You and I, reading and writing on our devices, pushing our words into strangers' faces as a matter of course (possibly detrimentally to discourse) can't know what anyone in The Past really meant to say. We can see the words. We can, but mostly won't bother to, study the time and thus learn some cultural facts that help us get a hint. But, like the radical fascist folk who assert their politicosocial ideas as representing those of the US "founders," we're translating words, not recovering facts. Author Boullosa uses multiple narrators in multiple timelines to examine the role of History and Tradition as anchors, as dead weights, and as foundations. What even is The Past, a key question for each narrator. The same events look hugely different to people with different perspectives.

I am usually a bit iffy on this narrative technique. In this case, I lapped it up because Estela in the present, Learo in the future, and Don Hernando in the past each explore this story's central thesis, the nature of narrative in shaping culture, without resorting to speeches. No one says, "if they/we had only known" or the equivalent. They tell us, their readers, the reality they live in as seen from their differing levels of privilege granted to each one's identity. Fair warning, there is frank...but uncelebrated...homophobia, colorism, and racism. They are facts of the past and present. The future, well...we won't know for a while, will we?

The narrative conceit is of a manuscript written in Latin when the Conquest was within living memory. Its author's a gay man in Holy Orders; not so shocking an idea for the time. It falls into the hands of a present-day scholar, Estela, who translates it (into Spanish). She is living in the failing Western country, Mexico. She annotates the manuscript with an academic eye on the roots of the present-day struggles in the clueless past, intending to make it public. Somehow the manuscript reaches Learo living in a wildly posthuman, post-scarcity future where The Past is not discussed, not heeded, not mined for clues or used as either guide or horrible warning. Learo's narrative is, unsurprisingly, polyphonic with Don Hernando's account of how the Conquest violently and cruelly mangled the memories and the bodies of the dwellers in "New Spain," an utterly invented and brutally enforced culture. As is always the case in examples of conquest, the ordinary person is required to graft a new identity onto their lifelong one, an intimate violation of self that begets more and more violence.

It is a stunning psychic violence that pollutes every facet of the future.

Yet without an honest reckoning with it, the present is unmoored, is prone to equal, congruent violence. The future that creates is...chilling. I'll say, for fear of spoilers, what Author Boullosa says: this novel explores "the prohibition of memory that will take us to the abolition of language, the repercussions of which the reader will witness."

"Repercussions" might be the best-translated word Shelby Vincent chose.

This novel, in its translation from Spanish to English, offers a far more trenchant riposte to foolhardy US politicosocial "essentialism" than a dozen more "factual" analyses could. A story does something an analysis can't: Personalizes the reverberations of actions taken or not taken, of salvations offered and denied. How we read this novel, in English, is already a thing apart from how it was written in Spanish. Its echoes of Anglophone sensation Cloud Atlas will be seen by the myriads of y'all who read (and mostly loved) that timeweaving narrative. More recently we had the multiversal Everything Everywhere All at Once pursuing the layering of causality in its own specially fraught way. The topic is a delightfully rich one, offering many opportunities to contemplate the story, its message, its execution, and its presentation in an enhanced framework. The effort of following the story through its curlicues and oddly bent pathways is richly repaid.

What effort you make at translation is always a life-altering thing. Reader be aware. You will leave a different soul than the one you entered as.

HUM, Helen Phillips reveals a terrifying, sobering prediction for a possible future

HUM
HELEN PHILLIPS
Marysue Rucci Books/S&S
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost? In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

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

My Review: SciFi from a woman's PoV by an actual woman is not as rare a thing as it once was. Even women SF writers of the comparatively recent past wrote a boy's or man's PoV as often as not. Now this ignoring of The Future (as seen by women in it) is passé. We still don't see a ton of mothers as PoV characters, though.

May is such a PoV character, and she resonates powerfully with me. Her steely determination to provide for her family is the bedrock of the story. The worldbuilding is subtle, as one would expect from an author working in the (very) near future. Probably my single favorite touch of worldbuilding is one I think is largely invisible to most: May, our main charater, is married to Jem; their children are Sy and Lu.

Even their names are minimized. That most human of sounds, our names, is clipped down to the minimum of syllables, squeezing these beings into a narrower, and narrowing, bandwidth. One better suited, not coincidentally, to the vocal apparatus of the "hums" of the title.

Ah, the hums...the titular beings who represent the next (?) generation of the smartphones now falling out of favor among the young (to me) user base. If, as I suspect, their increasing disenchantment with these devices is being quietly steered, I suspect the course they're being steered ON is the one Author Phillips is showing us in this story.

The worst nightmare of a parent is to lose their children. Especially very young ones whose understanding of the World around them is unformed. Why else did the Satanic Panic/Stranger Danger epidemic get rolling? Losing a child to death by disease is less and less common...thank all those useless gods for that...but accidents, and malicious actions like addictions, malefactors who prey on the innocent are still there to obsess the fretful. Now add AI to that mix, and Author Phillips is on a winner to speak to this seething mass market. She does not do this cynically. Her brushes against the eerieness of the surveillance capitalism around us border on entry into the Uncanny Valley. Her own previous writing has been used without permission or compensation to train the generative AI we're being told will take over. I myownself think, however, that Sabine Hossenfelder's got the right handle on the reality of the eventual results. Author Phillips is wise to point to the ways this borning system is likely to fail Humanity, to the humans who still have time to change course.

Hum traverses nightmarish loss, dystopian social catastrophe, and failures of a deeply human sort in this tale. I wish I could pooh-pooh its premise, or its cconclusions, but I can't. I think all y'all who read my reviews will know what you need to know about my opinion of the read by the fact that a) I published a review on a Tuesday, 2) I was apprived for this DRC on 2 August and am reviewing it four days later, and iii) have not said, and do not intend to say, one critical word about its conception or execution.

Many of y'all do not like anything SFnal or speculative. I encourage those folk most especially to get this from the library and read it.

You're going to live it soon enough.

THE NIGHT WILL HAVE ITS SAY, historical fiction about the Muslim Wars of Conquest

THE NIGHT WILL HAVE ITS SAY
IBRAHIM al-KONI
Hoopoe Books
$18.95 trade paper, available now

20% Off when ordered on their website (link above)! Just enter promo code: summer24 at checkout. Valid until 10 August 2024 in North America, the UK, Europe, and (naturally) Egypt.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu'man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Nu'man's forces.

The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the seventh century CE, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni's unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts.

Al-Koni's masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile—from language, the desert, and homeland.

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

My Review: I'm kind of an outlier among this book's Anglophone readers: I like the formal, "speechifying" tone. This is historical fiction about the incredibly consequential events surrounding the Arab Wars of Conquest, specifically of the Maghreb. This century-long expansion of Islam and political control by Baghdad's rulers formed the fault lines of our present-day world. It felt appropriate to me that the words they spoke on the page were...heightened...not quotidian, not the same ones you'd use to ask your housekeeper why your nan's vase is suddenly chipped.

So, please understand that I'm aware of the formality, the speech-giving style, the focus on the characters as actors on the world's stage, and am okay with and invested in that. The consequentiality of the events in this book very definitely merit it. The author is telling this story from the PoV of the conquered, not the triumphal and celebratory version preferred (see the linked Wikipedia article) by the conquerors. In many ways the story is so very astonishing that it feels a bit like a fantasy epic. This story's The Lord of the Rings, only for real...and y'all lap up that deep-purple prose.

Give this a shot.

About the story itself I am so ignorant that I can point to no departures from History's pages. The North African civilizations were very old indeed. Pharaonic Egypt had diplomatic ties and cultural interchanges with the Libyan cultures millennia ago; the Berbers are, I think, their descendants. Roman, Byzantine, and then Arab Muslim conquests have overlaid rulers and rules and religion on the enduring people. The book's assumption of the conquered ones' voices is delightful to me, who daily bumps against the heterohegemony and religious restrictiveness on my right to exist. To have a woman assering her and her people's right to exist as they are and have always been, against a man sent to chnage them on a basic level, seems like a story you're going to want to read just now. It's not like it's got any modern resonances, is it? A woman standing up for freedom to exist unchanged against an overbearing, bloviating hypocrite of a man?

I'm suddenly seeing an orange haze between me and the screen....

However much I want you to read this story, I feel there's a resistance inside my mostly Anglophone and largely American readers. It's about people you know (most likely) nothing about. It takes the side of the powerless, to induce you to get over that hurdle. It's negatively focused on religion. The main character is a woman asserting herself, to get you over that hurdle. The prose is...well...I said above it's heightened, and really, given the stuff I see y'all reading, I don't think that's a hurdle you need much help getting over in and of itself. I suspect most objections like that are more about resisting the unfamiliarity of the subject matter. I strongly encourage you to get over that hurdle. This story is deeply rooted in an entire ancient civilization's resistance to being restyled and remade to suit the opinions of powerful men with an arsenal of weapons superior to its own and fueled by rage and the lust for Control.

These stakes should resonate with all y'all in the Anglophone world, and I hope inspire you to resist what we see around us from becoming normal.

Again.