THE CHARM OFFENSIVE, keeping struggles real...in a fairy-tale world? Go on!

THE CHARM OFFENSIVE
ALISON COCHRUN
Atria Books
$11.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to open up to the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS FOR LIBRARIES...USE YOURS SOON!

My Review: Reality TV isn't. I realize that's just the most startling thing you've ever read, but it is true. What it is, though, is made by real people and it features real people, with real emotions and feelings; they aren't dolls or puppets or robots. And while that's not something I expect most adults really need telling, intellectually, it's not...um...real. Somehow. (There will be, one day, a better vocabulary for these feelings-at-a-remove. I live for that day.)

But the thing that Author Cochrun did, in creating gorgeous OCD-having anxiety-experiencing Charlie, is something I think the world of reality TV, Romancelandia, and the entire entertainment world could do with a lot more of: She humanized the beautiful façades in a kind, supportive, and genuinely entertaining way. Her decision to make gawky, geeky Dev into a multifaceted man, her decision to have these two men, fractured and frantically trying to keep their heads above the dark, cold waters of mental illness's difficult times, find and learn about and accept each other is something still too rare. It is laudable, and the way she made it believable earns my admiration.

I can see a lot of eyes rolling at the idea of a gorgeously chiseled six-pack-sportin' tech millionaire having anxiety and OCD problems. Truth is many beautiful-looking people are beset by issues that onlookers don't think to wonder if they experience. The very idea is foreign..."if I only had money and/or looked like X I'd be happy all the time!"...but it honestly should shame us how much stock we put in that nonsense. People have problems. And when they're rich or beautiful or famous, they shouldn't. So when they do....

Brava, Author Cochrun, for slapping an ace on top of that tired old trick.

Then there's the Fun-Guy trope! Life of the party, always a laugh...he couldn't be depressed, he's got this great job and look at how many people he laughs his nights away with!...but the same logic applies. It's another good deed done to remind us that there's no one immune from the hurts of being alive. Putting the two of them together in this highly artificial, addicted-to-surfaces world was a great idea, and one that Author Cochrun pulled off with admirable aplomb.

What works well, works well. There's a minor plot-point left dangling, and there were two (2) foul, heinous, scum-dripping w-bombs. So there went that half-star. But there's no reason to go full-tilt ramming-speed mental when a medium-steam rom-com featuring two genuinely love-worthy, genuinely love-giving, thoroughly sweet men gets told in sentences like this:

Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help. People who trustingly hand you all of themselves in PDF form.
–and–
{He} curls into the fetal position inside the shower. This is what regret tastes like: regurgitated tequila and dirty cotton balls.
–and–
“It doesn’t have to be,” she says, “and you’re not obligated to figure it out, or come out, or explain yourself to anyone, ever. But also”—she drops her hands from their spectrum and tucks an arm around his shoulder—“labels can be nice sometimes. They can give us a language to understand ourselves and our hearts better. And they can help us find a community and develop a sense of belonging. I mean, if you didn’t have the correct label for your OCD, you wouldn’t be able to get the treatment you need, right?” {hear the Gospel of Saint Parisa, everybody!}
–and–
He pauses, and {his lover} explodes. “That’s such bullshit! There are so many people who have done actual terrible things who are actively working in tech! Mark Zuckerberg exists! And firing someone for having OCD—that’s got to be illegal."
–and–
"I don’t think happily ever after is something that happens to you...I think it’s something you choose to do for yourself.”

There's just no reason not to get this book, sink into it, and let the beauty of its fantasy world soothe crappy, warlike reality's wrinkles and creases right out of your face to be replaced by smiles.

THE OTHER DR. GILMER, unnerving murder with serious mental health implications

THE OTHER DR. GILMER: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice
BENJAMIN GILMER
Ballantine Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system—a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time.

When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community—right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. He'd been in prison for nearly a decade by the time Benjamin arrived, but Vince's patients would still tell Benjamin they couldn't believe the other Dr. Gilmer was capable of such violence. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong.

Vince knew, too. He complained from the time he was arrested of his SSRI brain, referring to withdrawal from his anti-depressant medication. When Benjamin visited Vince in prison, he met a man who was obviously fighting his own mind, constantly twitching and veering off into nonsensical tangents. Enlisting This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig, Benjamin resolved to get Vince the help he needed. But time and again, the pair would come up against a prison system that cared little about the mental health of its inmates—despite an estimated one third of them suffering from an untreated mental illness.

In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime. Rather than get treatment, Vince Gilmer was sentenced to life in prison—a life made all the worse by his untrustworthy brain and prison and government officials who dismissed his situation. A large percentage of imprisoned Americans are suffering from mental illness when they commit their crimes and continue to suffer, untreated, in prison. In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer argues that some crimes need to be healed rather than punished.

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

My Review: The carceral economy that makes corporations wealthy is evil.

That's my bias, right there; I make no apologies for it, and if your opinion is otherwise, this review will make you angry and upset, and feel (correctly) that you are being shamed and blamed for your absence of empathy and decency. Doubled if you claim to follow a religion.

A man with Huntington's disease, who was sexually abused by his parent, is serving a life sentence in prison for murdering that parent. Here is what the incarcerated man said to the author, when asked what he wanted this book to show the world when it was written:

Before I left the prison that day in 2018, I asked Vince to tell me the most important things he wanted this book to say. This is what he said:
Prison is torture.
Sexual abuse changes you forever.
We are all at the mercy of our brains.
Listening is healing.

Dr. Vince Gilmer will, it is almost certain, die in prison. There is no cure, or really any treatment, for Huntington's disease. His entire lifetime of service as a family physician in a poor area counted for nothing when weighed against the awful crime of strangling his abuser.

That's the nature of the system. For-profit prisons need prisoners; mental-health services cost a lot of money but make no one any profits. Guess which one we-the-people fund, generously? Mental health services can't guarantee good outcomes, some people can't be helped (Vince Gilmer, for example), so spending taxpayer money on the off-chance that this specific person who has committed a violent crime might be able to benefit? What a waste...there are corporations whose bottom lines could get fatter if he's jammed into jail.

As a result of untreated intergenerational trauma, exacerbated by a fatal degenerative neurological disease likely inherited from the parent who abused Vince Gilmer in childhood, he will die alone, in misery, in a corporate profit center. At the very least his life should end in a cold, uncaring corporate medical-profit center. (There is, at long last, some glimmer of hope for those crushed by medical debts; tiny, inadequate steps towards economic justice are better than the great race backwards occurring on so many fronts.)

If you've read The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row and enjoyed it, you're in the target demographic for the book. If you're thinking "oh pew! this is too hard, too much, too unhappy" then you *should* read it...because your empathy circuits need a bit of exercise. If you're sure peope who commit murder belong in jail, what on Earth are you doing here in the first place?!

SLASH AND BURN, art born of the eternal agonies of civil war

SLASH AND BURN
CLAUDIA HERNÁNDEZ (tr. Julia Sanches)
And Other Stories (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe.

As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution.

Hernández’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.

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

My Review: I think you'll get the real gestalt of this read, of this review and possibly...just possibly...this story, if we listen to Author Horacio Castellanos Moya (my review of his book, Senselessness, will give you a feel for his own emotional-overload storytelling chops) praise Author Hernández:

“Claudia Hernández is one of the most groundbreaking short story writers from Central America, with a way of approaching the story that is closer to Virgilio Piñera or Felisberto Hernández than to the realist tradition. Her five story collections prove this. Now, with her first novel, Claudia Hernández takes on a new challenge: telling the recent history of El Salvador through three generations of women scarred by civil war, poverty and emigration. A pulsating feminine universe, full of strength and courage, in permanent wait of the violence that surrounds it. An intense and moving novel, and a very revealing way of storytelling that will captivate the reader.”

Castellanos Moya links Author Hernández to men marginalized by their poverty, and sexual natures, whose immense talents were never appreciated in their lifetimes. They were foundational figures in the creation of a magical realist Latinoamericano fiction, famously and fully developed in the hands of Julio Cortázar and García Márquez. That's some heady company Castellanos Moya puts Author Hernández in...and not without reason.

But let me be clear: This read is not a spoon-fed milk-toast cinch. I know a number of people found Anna Burns's name-free labels of her characters in her 2018 Booker-winning novel of civil war, Milkman, to be difficult and off-putting. I am not among their number. Heck, I enjoyed Robert Pinget's The Inquisitory, and that has no names and no punctuation at all. This read is spang in the middle of a continuum between Burns and Pinget. There aren't names ("A name was just a name. In times of war, it served the same purpose as a number or a tattoo or a dog tag you wore around your neck: it was a way of identifying the dead," we're told very, very early in Slash and Burn), but you've got dialogue tags and punctuation...just no clear path to knowing instantly and unequivocally who's speaking, when we are supposed to be...it all makes a lot of sense, in my opinion, as the entire point of reading a woman's take on war is about getting into the stakes of her participation.

She's not anything more than one woman among the thousands, the millions, the billions whose world is trying to defend the girls she's doing her goddamnedest to get through childhood into their own womanhoods.

She'd wake up in a sweat with tears in her eyes because she always lost one of them in the dream. Sometimes it was the eldest girl she'd raised; sometimes, the littlest. Sometimes she lost the girl she'd actually lost, and sometimes the girl lost her. The only one she never misplaced was the third girl she'd raised. Her daughters asked why. She could never say. The girl in question said it was because she loved her more than he rest of them, though she'd later complain that she loved her least of all: she didn't spoil her like she did the littlest or support her like she did the eldest daughter she'd raised; she didn't search the world for her like she had the first girl she'd given birth to or let her study in the capital like the second sister she'd been brought up with.

These aren't happy-clappy figures of Survivorhood. These aren't the women who run charities and organize microlending cooperatives. Author Hernández's women are the ones that make the world, the vicious one they inhabit, function in spite of and in parallel to the wars destroying the world.

To her mind, it was soldiers who raped. They were always the culprits in the stories she’d heard of assaults. But what her neighbor had said was true, at least partly. The boys had been at the camps. But as soon as they'd earned the guerrillas' trust and their weapons, they'd set off on their own path and followed their own goals. They took advantage of the fact that everyone was busy running from soldiers and advancing their positions to go to unprotected zones and take as many women as they could.

They'd take the girls to the hills for three or five days. Then they'd bring them back and take others. They'd rape grown women in their homes and make them cook for them while they raped their young daughters. Later, it became known that just one of the boys also raped elderly women. His compañeros abstained, one out of fear it would mean some additional kind of punishment at the final judgment (if it ever arrived) and the other because he found no pleasure in a woman without the strength to resist or a future to compromise.

Nor did the boy rape all the elderly women he found or come down from the hills to search them out. It was more a matter of circumstance, of making the most of their efforts, so long as the woman looked at him badly for it. He'd never touch her grandmother, for example, because, even after he'd provoked her a little, he didn't see in her the sort of response that inspired him to humiliate.

It's simple, to her. It's the world, it's not going to do her a blind bit of good to do more than make her odds, of being murdered by these uncontrolled armed fearless and foeless monsters, as low as she can. But there is nothing in this world that isn't violent and abusive on levels unthinkable to most of us reading the story in our warless, unchaotic surroundings.

She turned to face the enormous body of water and said, Thank you, Lord, even though she didn’t know who the Lord she was thanking was, or if there was any Lord to thank. It felt incredible to be on the other side. Her sister, meanwhile, had started crying, not because she’d choked on any water, but because she’d lost a little bit of masa as they crossed. She thought her mother would punish her for it. The girl convinced her sister that nothing would happen. She was certain her mother wouldn’t notice any masa was missing. And if she did, she’d take the blame for it. She swore to her little sister that their mother would believe her, even though she herself wasn’t convinced. She was sure her mother had keen instincts (although what she actually had was a watch) and that they’d be found out one way or another. So instead of telling her, she told her father, who’d come home early that day.

Days later, they moved away. The official story was that her father didn’t want to keep living on her maternal grandpa’s land now they had their own parcel in a place named after a plant. But she suspected he was trying to protect her: there were no bodies of water to cross around there. She was his little girl, the first of the daughters who’d survived.

In that region, where her dad’s sister also lived, she came across more people who hit her, such as the girls next door. They picked fights with her because she was new and because she was always the first to arrive to fill her earthen pitchers, and always clean and buttoned-up. They called her vain. Then they pulled on her skirt until it fell to her feet, knocked over her pitchers or stuck their muddied hands in them, spoiling all the work she’d done and making her task harder. She wanted to defend herself, but her mother had warned her never to hit anyone. She didn’t want any trouble. She didn’t want her to respond to their attacks, not even with words. If anyone said or did anything to her, she was to take it in silence. If she didn’t, she’d hit her even harder.

This is just...life. Life the way people in a war zone that hasn't been anything but a war zone for a generation know it, and so how they do the mechanics of living. It isn't sweet, it isn't about redemption or Coming To The Realization That x; this is what gutting it out, putting food on the table and a roof of some sort over your heads, means.

I've said I don't find the unmoored "she"s troublesome. The reason is that I don't do more than the minimum to associate the references to a general roster of possible identities. I think the read made sense to me because I realized these aren't Characters. These are types, a sort of massive and mostly undifferentiated Woman-ness. Author Hernández isn't telling Maricela's story then Marisol's story then Ludivine's; she's telling their story as the topology of the War they're doing their individual bests to avoid dying in brings them into relevace.

It isn't easy to adjust the novel-reader's expectations to this, or the wealthy-country educated book-consumer's preferences for delineated and labeled identities. Accustoming myself to a more base, earthen interchangeability, fungibility of women playing similar roles at different times was the best adaptation I could make. It felt unnatural for about 30 pages, 10% of the Kindle file. But thinking it through and considering the magical-realist underpinnings of flexible identities and the feminist rage of reducing women, the centers of this unnatural Life, to faceless nameless utilitarian labor units added a nauseating note of indifferent and amoral cruelty to the entire tale. And that is, I strongly suspect, a good deal of Claudia Hernández's point. The title...Slash and Burn is sort of the sense of it, "Roza tumba quema" or "fondle fall burn" in that order...feeling indicative to me of a soldier checking out the goods, knocking them over, not-quite-accidentally, not entirely purposefully, but carelessly in all its senses, setting them on fire. This is a solid preparation for the hard, unyielding world that the mass of women, the Woman if you will, simply bends herself into whatever shape she has to so as to make her way into another morning, through its day, and out on the other side of another night.

I found great value, solid art, and a seriously important and timely reminder of the way that war's costs are distributed is violent and unconscionably cruel, in this intense read.

IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE & A GENTLEMAN NEVER KEEPS SCORE, the first two "Seducing the Sedgwicks" queer Regency romances

IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE
CAT SEBASTIAN (Seducing the Sedgwicks #1)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Some of Ben Sedgwick’s favorite things:
    Helping his poor parishioners
    Baby animals
    Shamelessly flirting with the handsome Captain Phillip     Dacre

After an unconventional upbringing, Ben is perfectly content with the quiet, predictable life of a country vicar, free of strife or turmoil. When he’s asked to look after an absent naval captain’s three wild children, he reluctantly agrees, but instantly falls for the hellions. And when their stern but gloriously handsome father arrives, Ben is tempted in ways that make him doubt everything.

Some of Phillip Dacre’s favorite things:
  His ship
  People doing precisely as they're told
  Touching the irresistible vicar at every opportunity

Phillip can’t wait to leave England’s shores and be back on his ship, away from the grief that haunts him. But his children have driven off a succession of governesses and tutors and he must set things right. The unexpected presence of the cheerful, adorable vicar sets his world on its head and now he can’t seem to live without Ben’s winning smiles or devastating kisses.

LIBRARIES ARE AWESOME! SUPPORT THEM! USE THEM!

My Review: First, read this:

He didn’t even stop himself from thinking about the man, the taut muscles of his arms and the habit he had of biting back a smile as if smiles cost extra and he was saving up for an especially big one.
–and–
He wanted to watch the trees lose their leaves. He wanted to watch his children and the changes each day wrought in them. He wanted to belong here, to belong to his children and to Ben.
–and–
“This is all new to me. I’m in a new world without a map or a chart, but you’re my compass, Ben, and I know we’ll find a way.”

What a pleasure to escape into a late Regency world where two men grab their happiness instead of allowing the world to order them around. I think this happened, then as now, more often than They thought/think it does.

Several things got under my saddle and rubbed me wrong, but as they were reasonably minor and mostly ignorable, I flowed on past them with mere surface ripples in the stream of my enjoyment.

This mixing metaphors thing is fun. I'm gonna do it more often.

Some just lovely phrase-making, isn't it. There's humor and there's a bit of sentiment and then there's Author Sebastian's way with writing about horny men without making it crude. I'm becoming a Sebastianista. On to volume two!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A GENTLEMAN NEVER KEEPS SCORE
CAT SEBASTIAN (Seducing the Sedgwicks #2)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Once beloved by London's fashionable elite, Hartley Sedgwick has become a recluse after a spate of salacious gossip exposed his most-private secrets. Rarely venturing from the house whose inheritance is a daily reminder of his downfall, he’s captivated by the exceedingly handsome man who seeks to rob him.

Since retiring from the boxing ring, Sam Fox has made his pub, The Bell, into a haven for those in his Free Black community. But when his best friend Kate implores him to find and destroy a scandalously revealing painting of her, he agrees. Sam would do anything to protect those he loves, even if it means stealing from a wealthy gentleman. But when he encounters Hartley, he soon finds himself wanting to steal more than just a painting from the lovely, lonely man—he wants to steal his heart.

Content Warning from Author: This book includes a main character who was sexually abused in the past; abuse happens off page but is alluded to.

LIBRARIES...MAN, JUST CAN'T SAY ENOUGH ABOUT THEIR AMAZINGNESS!

My Review: First, read this:

“Oh, to hell with decent people. They’re exhausting. Make one feel so evil, when really one simply has one’s own concerns.”
–and–
“Let me make this equally clear to you, because I think I've failed you on this score. I want to be with you, in rooms above a pub or anywhere you happen to be. A cave, a pirate ship, a desert island, doesn't matter.”
–and–
“Maybe you need to get rid of your idea of better. Your boots are better than mine, but they won’t fit my feet.”

I seriously love a pithy aperçu!

I quite like all the interconnectedness of these stories, and was gratified that Ben showed up despite being happily hooked up with his Phillip.

Not quite as easy for me was the nature of Hartley's problem barring him from easy intimacy with Sam. Saintly Sam got a smidge saccharine if you want to know the truth. The big problem separating them was, in the end, less resolved than treated with a massive injection of handwavium. I was in the fullness of my go-with-the-flow mood from Ben and Phillip's tale so I bobbed past that rock.

Right into the one that holed my boat and resulted in that missing star: Martin. I gather that Martin and Will are next in the series, so I will say nothing except: "Really."

My review of the third Seducing the Sedgwicks series, TWO ROGUES MAKE A RIGHT, comes out tomorrow is right here!