EXQUISITE THINGS, time-travel immortality and True Love your thing? Here 'tis!

EXQUISITE THINGS
ABDI NAZEMIAN
HarperCollins (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Stonewall Award–winning author Abdi Nazemian (Only This Beautiful Moment) comes the epic queer love story of a lifetime. Perfect for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Shahriar believes he was born in the wrong time. All he’s ever wanted is to love and be loved, but 1895 London doesn’t offer him the freedom to be his true self, and Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency has only reaffirmed that. But one night—and one writer—will grant Shahriar what he’s always wished for: the opportunity to live in a time and place where he can love freely. Rechristened as Shams and then as Bram, he finds what feels like eternal happiness. But can anything truly be eternal?

Oliver doesn’t feel that 1920s Boston gives him a lot of options to be his full self. He knows he could only ever love another boy, but that would break his beloved mother’s heart. Oliver finds freedom and acceptance in the secret queer community at Harvard that his cousin introduces him to. When he meets a mysterious boy with eyes as warm as a flame, his life is irrevocably changed, forever.

Spanning one hundred and thirty years of love and longing, this tale of immortal beloveds searching for their perfect place and time is a vibrant hymn to the beauty of being alive, a celebration of queer love and community, and a reminder that behind every tragic thing that ever existed, there is something exquisite.

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

My Review: It's a tale as old as time: boy longs for True Love; the gods hear him, and grant his wish, with the catch that he can't have him; something, no specific Power attached, says "...but you will live to meet him," and Oscar's your uncle you're living out Dorian Gray's life!

Immortality seems a terrible curse to me, when plodding through another Thursday can feel like Hell or at least Purgatory. In this case, at least poor Shahriyar (I went to high school with a queer guy named Shahriyar, wonder whatever became of him?)...going by Shams makes a lot of sense to me with a name like that in Anglophone, Victorian London, better still Bram...gets rewarded by living through very, very interesting times indeed.

The central thesis of the immortality...thing...seemed to me to have a sharp cutting edge in freezing the boys at seventeen. How awful to have adult-strength emotions, unmitigated by adult perspective! The angsty solipsism of eternal youth sounds horrifying to my closer-to-70-than-50 self. We follow them through three timelines in their immortal journey, and spend enough time in each to know they *are* seventeen in them all. It presents the expected problems...remember your dating life at seventeen? *shudder*...but the basic truth of Bram/Shahriyar and Oliver's lives is that they are in love with each other. Men come, men go, but these boys come back into orbit around each other because they're each made the way the other needs a man to be.

It takes forever, it seems, but they own up to their own nonsense and discuss their love of each others' essence, so a lot of the silly acting out does get dealt with. It's thus not purely the angsty nonsense of trying to figure out what works. A lot of time spent doing it, though....

I had procedural questions like I always do in immortality stories...how'd they survive the 1980s with databases and licenses and passports and birth certificates? how'd they get bank accounts? credit cards?...but mostly this book is for the reader to enjoy True Love that withstands the fallibility and failings of human beings. The supporting cast is a hoot and a holler. I think any one of 'em would tentpole a novella at least! Still, my niggles lost a half-star off the read. I wasn't swept up enough not to notice them until I thought about it after the read; these were in-the-moment grumbles.

My reason for dropping the majority of fifth star, though, was the ending...cramming way too much into way too little space made me feel like the author saw someone over my shoulder he'd rather talk to and just dropped me. Either adding 50-60 more pages onto this book or splitting the story and make it two volumes would address that rushed, inelegant ending.

Good fun was had, a very satisfying evening of smiling nodding shouting at the pages...not perfect, but what is?

THE BUCOLIC PLAGUE, hilarious story of two wealthy-ish gay guys who leave Manhattan for Upstate! Scary!

THE BUCOLIC PLAGUE: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir
JOSH KILMER-PURCELL
HarperCollins
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Michael Perry meets David Sedaris in this follow-up to Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s beloved debut memoir. Another riotous, moving, and entirely unique story of his attempt to tackle the next phase of life with his partner… on a goat farm in upstate New York.

My Review: Oh no you don't! No sighing, sneaking past this review, and saying how good it is! Sit there and READ this.

Josh and Brent, two of the most annoyingly perfectionist queens Manhattan has ever sucked into its lapidary drum of the effete, are bare-naked and warty as all get-out in this hilarious, touching, brutally honest memoir by the tall one. (Josh.) And he memoirs the way it feels to be human, alive, selfish and self-absorbed and sweet and lovable better than most. He's honest about how hard it is to work like a (highly paid) slave so you can have a dream come true. Then, as so many before him have, he wonders when in the HELL he's going to have time to enjoy the said dream.

Then there's the short one. (Brent.) He isn't writing the book, so of course he doesn't get all the best lines. Just most of them. He's the alpha perfectionist of the pair...good gravy, he worked for MARTHA STEWART!...and he decides, on hearing the tall one articulate his dream to live in their fantabulously gorgeous mansionfarm full time, that He Will Make This Happen. Because he loves, so much, the tall one. The scene in the book where they have that conversation, about why they'd have to give the place up in the rancid economy of 2008, made me cry. What they wanted, what their dreams hung on, *pffft* because the rotten shits on Wall Street wanted morebiggerfatter bonuses.

Now these two aren't guiltless little cogs in the Murrikin Machine, mind. They were both in the sizzle biz, taking home oodles of the spondulix selling people an unattainable dream's unattainable health goals for old farts (the short one) and unnecessary, overpriced goods and services (the tall one). But they made so much more out of their lives...they worked hard, they deserved their success...than the standard script for rural gay boys reads.

And then they found, accidentally and because the tall one is a lousy navigator, the perfect place to turn their well-honed swordsmanship skills at these useless pursuits into the plowshares of a real, and really funny, and very satisfying life.

Their website makes me drool. (Not over them, keep your minds out of the gutter.) The farm, the recipes, the products, the involving and addictive blogs, and of course Polka Spot the llama are tremendous pleasures.

Their TV show, The Fabulous Beekman Boys, was a gem and it's worth seeking out on Amazon Prime. I know that Discovery Networks pulled the plug on the whole channel they ran on, but I'm not over it yet (ten years isn't long enough to forgive). This is Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House for the 21st century (also Amazonable!). Buy it, read it, and heavenly days, recommend it to your friends! The boys need money! Farmer John's goats don't eat air, and that hip replacement wasn't free, and the boys have aging parents who'll need to come live with them soon enough.

Think of the scuff marks. Poor short one. (Brent.)

THE UNINVITED GUESTS, an almost-good ghost story lushly described

THE UNINVITED GUESTS
SADIE JONES
HarperCollins
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

KINDLE EDITION IS $1.99 UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2022

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savory survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor—and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief.

The cook toils over mock turtle soup and a chocolate cake covered with green sugar roses, which the hungry band of visitors is not invited to taste. But nothing, it seems, will go according to plan. As the passengers wearily search for rest, the house undergoes a strange transformation. One of their number (who is most definitely not a gentleman) makes it his business to join the birthday revels.

Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant parlor game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking.

The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from the critically acclaimed Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises—where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety—and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

SURPRISE TWIST ENDINGS ONLY WORK WHEN THEY LEAVE YOU BREATHLESS. TELL TOO MUCH, MAKE YOUR SURPRISE TWIST A SAD BID FOR APPROVAL.

My Review: Emerald Torrington turns twenty today. Her shabby-genteel mama Charlotte, bratty brother Clovis, and afterthought baby sister Smudge, née Imogen, are celebrating with a dinner party, to include Emerald's old friend Insignificance, née Patience, and her brother Ernest; and a last-minute addition, rich local businessman John Buchanan. Charlotte is hoping John will marry Emerald, who Does Not Fancy him and wastes no time letting him know this; he responds by laughing at her arrogance (go John!), yet he still gives her a beautiful cameo as a birthday gift, and still feels...well.

The the Railway wishes upon the family an entire carriage-load of strangers due to an accident which occurred on the branch line. Florence, the housekeeper tasked with keeping house and making a party with one maid who's time is in demand as a hairdresser-cum-lady's-maid for all the abovestairs women, fetches them tea and then the whole household, and invited guests, forget about them.

Except Charlie. Charlie, from First Class unlike the ragtag and bobtail who arrived before him, moves right on in to the birthday party, with surprising...shocking, in fact...results.

Some guests are more uninvited than others. Poor Emerald...such a decent sort trapped in that last moment of adolescent intolerability and intolerance. Well...not any more.

Three stars? Does that seem a bit mingy? It isn't. I'll tell you why.

What begins as a species of Edwardian-style Heyeresque silliness turns into The Turn of the Screw, and for no really good reason. It's nicely written, being a Sadie Jones novel, and it's plotted with some care, but the mash-up takes a lot of suspension of disbelief and it's not asked of one until too late in the game. I don't think of myself as an inattentive or oblivious reader. No adequate set-up was done for the surprise twist, and so instead of feeling excited and pleased, I felt slightly seasick at the sudden change of direction as the boat, previously making for a harbor I could see miles away, goes across the waves' direction towards a more distant island.

Surprise me, yes; do a hard one-eighty, and you risk making me feel duped instead of pleasantly surprised. And that is where The Uninvited Guests left me. Looking for clues as to why I ended up in Calais when my ticket says Southampton.

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, Goodreads Choice Awards nominee in Horror merits your vote

LOVECRAFT COUNTRY
MATT RUFF
Harper
$16.99 trade paper, available now

2 OCTOBER 2021 THE KINDLE EDITION IS $2.99 TODAY!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy

Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, twenty-two year old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned Atticus’s great grandmother—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.

At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.

A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of one black family, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. I reviewed BAD MONKEYS not long ago, in preparation for reading this book. That was a three-plus star read, mostly for the sheer audacity of the ending, and I do love me a twisty ending.

This book gets four glowing platinum stars because, from giddy-up to whoa, there is no let-up in the wildly inventive excitement blasting from Ruff's imagination/fire hose. Not a moment when things slack off, not a corner left unscoured for dramatic (and amusing, lots of in-jokes of which nothing is made because it's enough that they're there) possibilities. And let me step outside the fiction's pleasures for a moment and say that this treatment of the vileness that is racism is both inventive and appropriate. For that reason alone, and there are plenty of others, this book merits your vote in the Goodreads Choice Awards.

Why not five? Because ending. Ending okayness after this wild ride? Hmph. Gimme more. You have before, Mr. Ruff, and if ever a tale deserved a slam-bang ending it's this one.

BAD MONKEYS, Matt Ruff's riff on Human Conditional crises

BAD MONKEYS
MATT RUFF
HarperCollins
$13.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder.

She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons--"Bad Monkeys" for short.

This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy--or playing a different game altogether. What follows is one of the most clever and gripping novels you'll ever read.

My Review: "Clever" is a good word for this book. In fact, maybe "clever-clever" is better. "Jane Charlotte"? She needs a boyfriend named "Austen Brontë" in that case.

And that is the very last and final connection anywhere within the oddly shaped covers of the book to Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë. From here on, we're on a profane and sometimes profoundly blue trip through the Halls of Micturation that form Jane's psyche. Is she addled? Drugged? One helluva fast-thinking sociopath, like in The Usual Suspects?

Dunno. About half-way through, I lost steam. See, this is the issue I perceive in so much bizarro/New Weird fiction. It goes on too long. It takes the joke, beats that sumbitch to death, scoops up the jellified meatiness, and then sets to stompin' on it in hobnailed boots. And after a while, one loses the desire to be on the sidelines looking on.

So, a month went by, and I picked the book up again. (It was stabbing me in the kidney as I got into bed one night.) Idly flipping to the Book Dart (if you don't have these, get some, they're amazing), I resumed reading with a slight smothered yawnlet.

*slog slog pantpant slog*

And I finished the book, unable to toss it aside for one reason: I had to know how the HELL this guy was gonna get off the horse at the end of the ride.

Good, good job, Sir Matt the Ruff. I did not see that ending happening.

Futures That Never Were: YOUR FLYING CAR AWAITS by Paul Milo

YOUR FLYING CAR AWAITS: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century
PAUL MILO
HarperCollins
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Talking dolphins . . . Underwater cities . . . Two-hundred-year life spans . . . Welcome to the present!

People have always imagined what life would be like in the future. Most of the time they've been wrong. Often they were really, really wrong. Your Flying Car Awaits looks at the most outrageous predictions from twentieth-century scientists, novelists, and social commentators, detailing the technologies and philosophies that led some great (and not so great)minds to think the ridiculous was achievable. Includes phenomenally inaccurate predictions such as:

Space tourism will be ubiquitous by the year 2000
Nuclear explosives will be used for commercial demolition
Engineered and man-made oceans will cover the planet
Weather will be as predictable and controllable as a train schedule

An eye-opening, fascinating, and endlessly entertaining collection of truly boneheaded scientific predictions from the past hundred years, Your Flying Car Awaits shines an illuminating light on the people of the previous century by examining the ridiculous theories they envisioned about this one.

My Review: A fast-paced, entertaining overview of how Today was supposed to look. The author's narrative voice is conversational, so reading the book is like barstool/family room sofa beer-fueled chats with your best buddy.

In my youth, predating the author's by a decade or so, I loved finding the old issues of Popular Mechanix and the others of that stripe in my father's pack-rat piles or the library's musty old boxes. The illustrations on the covers...! Oh, and the headlines: "You Will Have Robot Slaves by 1965!" "First Moonbase by 1970!" "Mars is Ours!"

The future was such a cool place back then. I was looking forward to flying TWA to the Moon Marriott. I couldn't wait to board the Concorde, which I got to do one round trip in the 1990s...noisy damned thing. It was the closest I ever got to anything I saw in the magazines. The beautiful turbine cars! The personal copters!

*sigh* Reality sucks.

But one thing I can truthfully say I'm delighted has not come to pass: Flying cars. Most people can't drive the ground cars they have with anything like expertise. Put 'em in charge of something heavy, unstable, and 500ft in the air...the mind boggles.

Another area of contention that was predicted to be a Wild West bonanza: designer babies whose genes were totally under the parents' control. It seems to be an area that makes all the atavistic need for control of our bodies go on Red Alert. Even though the possibility of ending most birth defects through gene therapy is on the horizon, in a world with anti-vaccine loopy goofs it seems likely that we'll be in for another round of silly, time-consuming arguments about "just because we can doesn't mean we should." *yawn*

All in all, reading this light essay on man's hubris in assuming he can predict the future was entertaining, enjoyable, and time I felt was well-spent.

BEASTS OF NO NATION, art of a high order and indictment of an entire species

BEASTS OF NO NATION
UZODINMA IWEALA
HarperCollins
$13.99 trade paper, available now

This title is one of 2021's Olive Editions and it's a whopping $10!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact.

In a powerful, strikingly original voice that vividly captures Agu's youth and confusion, Uzodinma Iweala has produced a harrowing, inventive, and deeply affecting novel.

WINNER OF Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction–Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction–Los Angeles Times Book Award

My Review: Men writing in the voice of a child are at a disadvantage because childhood is traditionally thought of as a woman's preserve. Iweala writes about a boy who is only nominally a child, though; one of the thousands of boys who are compelled to serve in the civil wars and rebellions of Africa's troubled states.

He does this with force, beauty, and horror.

This moment is the narrator's first moment of joy:

Nobody is seeing me as I am getting up and walking through the tree right to the road. I am feeling breezes to my back that is pushing me to walk far far away from here and I am moving quickly quickly onto the road where I am just walking walking walking to where the sun is setting. I am looking at it and wanting to catch it in my hand to be squeezing until the color are dripping out from it forever. That way everywhere it is always dark and nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world.

I can't stress enough that this first novel is To Be Read! The passage above, in the context of the story, brought me to tears. It's a lovely piece of writing no matter what...but coming where it does in this wrenchingly infuriating story, it's got a wallop that must be experienced.

Beasts of No Nation was published in 2005. It's written by a Nigerian man of (then) some 23 years of age. Jamaica Kincaid acted as his advisor. Someone explain to me, that all being said, why the Adichie (of similar background and age) cult got rollin' and there was not an Iweala cult...?

This author deserves your attention. Please read his work. It's not flawless, but it's head and shoulders above most things that clutter our shelves!

Strongly recommended.

AMERICAN ON PURPOSE: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, wonderful anecdotal and warm

AMERICAN ON PURPOSE: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
CRAIG FERGUSON
HarperCollins
$11.99 trade paper, available now

Ferguson has a new project: Joy, A Podcast, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson delivers a moving and achingly funny memoir of living the American dream as he journeys from the mean streets of Glasgow, Scotland, to the comedic promised land of Hollywood. Along the way he stumbles through several attempts to make his mark—as a punk rock musician, a construction worker, a bouncer, and, tragically, a modern dancer.

To numb the pain of failure, Ferguson found comfort in drugs and alcohol, addictions that eventually led to an aborted suicide attempt. (He forgot to do it when someone offered him a glass of sherry.) But his story has a happy ending: in 1993, the washed-up Ferguson washed up in the United States. Finally sober, Ferguson landed a breakthrough part on the hit sitcom The Drew Carey Show, a success that eventually led to his role as the host of CBS's The Late Late Show. By far Ferguson's greatest triumph was his decision to become a U.S. citizen, a milestone he achieved in early 2008, just before his command performance for the president at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson talks a red, white, and blue streak about everything our Founding Fathers feared.

My Review: Scottish prole grows up in emotionally chilly, physically cold as hell Glasgow, turns to drugs and alcohol to fill gaping emotional void, screws over a variety of people as all alkies do, and one day wakes up to learn he doesn't like himself, his life, or his future. Rehab, restitution, success, and true love follow.

I herewith confess: If Craig Ferguson was even a teensy hint queer, I'd be on a plane to Cali and camped on his doorstep with flowers, candy, and a leg iron. He amuses and impresses me even more after reading his pretty darned candid memoir.

I'm a complete pushover for a man in a kilt anyway, but when he can act and tell jokes the way this man can...! Ferguson, when hosting The Late Late Show, made me laugh so hard I cried when he said of his son's mother: "No, really, she's a lovely woman. For legal purposes." I heard nothing of his show for the next five minutes because I was shouting with laughter, and Mr. Man was a little put out that I kept referring to that line (okay, I shamelessly stole it, and I still use it, and unless I get a cease-and-desist letter I'm gonna keep right on) to the point of having a jealous fit. (Thanks, Craig!)

I am also a sucker for men who come to the USA with dreams of success and end up in love with our amazing, incredible, flawed, imperfect, conservatism-ridden paradise. Ferguson fell in love with the USA in its warty glory, and he rightly credits this astonishingly open society with a goodly measure of his own success. His talent plays an acknowledged role, but he makes sure to tell his readers that his life wouldn't be possible anywhere else. It's very heartening to me, and it's an instructive reminder that, problems and blemishes be damned, the rest of the world rightly and justly thinks we're on to something here.

Lastly, but far from least, I'm a complete sucker for a good story told by a good storyteller, and this book most certainly is that. Ferguson can't resist telling tales, no doubt polishing them up a wee bit, but not always in his own favor. He can't resist making light of things that sink many an alkie person's life, and sank his own, and thus takes the ponderousness out of the idea of recovery. I've read a fair bit of recovery literature but I'm always fatally put off by the earnest, well-meaning "Amazing Grace"-ness of it all. A person's personal spiritual awakening is, and should remain, just that: Personal. In other words, BELT UP ABOUT JESUS. Ferguson not only does, he makes it clear that he has a BIG problem with religion. *swoon* My lands, just when I thought he couldn't get more magnetically, hypnotically gorgeously attractive!

So should others read this? Yes. It's fun, funny, and touching; it's honest and it's gritty; and in the end, it's a pleasure to get to know Craig Ferguson as well as if he were the bloke on the barstool next over.

RED TO BLACK, A not very thrilling thriller that'll scare you witless

RED TO BLACK
ALEX DRYDEN (Anna Rensikov #1)
HarperCollins (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Finn is a veteran MI6 operative stationed in Moscow. In the guise of an amiable trade secretary, he has penetrated deep into the dangerous labyrinth that is Russia under Vladimir Putin to discover some of its darkest secrets, thanks to a high-level source deep within the Kremlin.

The youngest female colonel in the KGB, Anna is the ambitious daughter of one of the former Soviet Union's elite espionage families. Charged with helping to make Russia strong again under Putin, she is ordered to spy on Finn and discover the identity of his mole.

At the dawn of the new millennium, these adversaries find themselves brought together by an unexpected love that becomes the only truth they can trust. When Finn uncovers a shocking and ingenious plan—hatched in the depths of the Cold War—to control the European continent and shift the balance of world power, he and Anna are thrust into a deadly plot in which friend and foe wear the same face. With time running out, they will race across Europe and risk everything -—career, reputation, and even their own lives— to expose the terrifying truth.

My Review: I enjoyed this read more than I expected to, and less than I should have. It's a very, very scary and plausible tale of a plot to use the West's greed to bring it down. After all, Marx wrote, “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” He was a prescient thinker, was Marx.

I'm not going to go into the bits of the story because the spoilers would be epic. And also, the story told is either instantly obvious...the New Russia is a viciously capitalist and socially Darwinian funhouse mirror of the West's nastiest, least admirable qualities, and will therefore succeed in out-competing the West...or completely incredible, as to a triumphalist Teabagger idiot.

I'm on the instantly obvious side, obviously, and that's why I enjoyed the book more than I expected to. Russia's manifold social problems are all traceable to its insanely lopsided wealth distribution. That should ring an entire cathedral's worth of bells for anyone in the USA. If it doesn't, then the Teabagger idiot triumphalism is likely to obscure the evidence of a calculated takedown of Western economies.

Anyway. What didn't work well for me was the narrative structure of the book, with its reported-not-experienced quality, and the fact that the main characters were sketched more than drawn. I need to feel some sense of connection, positive or negative, to the people who are taking me on the journey that is a book. Here, in Anna and Finn, I felt I was being told a bit about the people in a not-very-close friend's long, detailed story. That was, I think, a result of the all-flashback narrative structure. The past can enhance the present in a story, there is no doubt, but the past doesn't enhance the past with anything like as much intensity. It simply becomes more flashback.

Overall, in the scheme of things, is this a thriller I'd recommend to a fellow subway rider? Maybe not, since it's so slow-paced. But for me, and those like me who lean to the political left, it's got a lot of confirmation-bias appeal. The fact that the author makes a very strong point of thanking Russian sources who need to remain anonymous is telling. And unsurprising.

And very, very disheartening.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.