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.
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