July 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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Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times best-selling author of Wind-Up Girl and The Water Knife comes a sweeping literary fantasy about the young scion from a ruling class family who faces rebellion as he ascends to power.

"You must be as sharp as a stilettotore’s dagger and as subtle as a fish beneath the waters. This is what it is to be Navolese, this is what it is to be di Regulai."

In Navola, a bustling city-state dominated by a handful of influential families, business is power, and power is everything. For generations, the di Regulai family—merchant bankers with a vast empire—has nurtured tendrils that stretch to the farthest reaches of the known world. And though they claim not to be political, their staggering wealth has bought cities and toppled kingdoms. Soon, Davico di Regulai will be expected to take the reins of power from his father and demonstrate his mastery of the games of Navolese knowing who to trust and who to doubt, and how to read what lies hidden behind a smile. But in Navola, strange and ancient undercurrents lurk behind the gilt and grandeur—like the fossilized dragon eye in the family’s possession, a potent symbol of their raw power and a talisman that seems to be summoning Davico to act.

As tensions rise and the events unfold, Davico will be tested to his limits. His fate depends on the eldritch dragon relic and on what lies buried in the heart of his adopted sister, Celia di Balcosi, whose own family was destroyed by Nalova’s twisted politics. With echoes of Renaissance Italy, The Godfather, and Game of Thrones, Navola is a stunning feat of world-building and a mesmerizing depiction of drive and will.

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

My Review: Most reading my reviews will know who Author Bacigalupi is, and might have read at least one of his SF novels. If not, they're readily borrowable. They're worth reading because the author has a deft hand at characterization and a solid world-building technique. All of those skills are on display here. He's using them on an Italian-Renaissance fantasy world that feels like historical fiction with fantasy elements lightly sprinkled on.

What works is the eternal verity of identity formation in opposition to one's family's expectations; what doesn't is the great, oversized length.

Knopf offers the ebook at $14.99. I'd borrow it.

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Shades of Mercy (Porter Beck #2) by Bruce Borgos

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the usually quiet high desert of Nevada, Sheriff Porter Beck faces one of his greatest challenges—a series of unlikely, disturbing and increasingly deadly events of unknown origins.

Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, doing the same lawman's job his father once did now that he's returned home after decades away. With his twelve person department, they cover a large area that is usually very quiet, but not of late. One childhood friend is the latest to succumb to a new wave of particularly strong illegal opioids, another childhood friend—now an enormously successful rancher—is targeted by a military drone, hacked and commandeered by an unknown source. The hacker is apparently local—local enough to call out Beck by name—and that means they are Beck's problem.

Beck's investigation leads him to Mercy Vaughn, the one known hacker in the area. The problem is that she's a teenager, locked up with no computer access at the secure juvenile detention center. But there's something Mercy that doesn't sit quite right with Beck. But when Mercy disappears, Beck understands that she's in danger and time is running out for all of them.

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

My Review: Like last year's series debut The Bitter Past, this entry in Borgos's Porter Beck mystery/thriller series blends fast action, violence, and a powerful sense of time and place. The times are changing, the threats are evolving, and the guardrails on technology do not match human motivations to evade them in pursuit of selfish goals. Borgos uses all this to fashion a take on the reality of policing to bring the Porter Beck series into closer contact with the thriller genre...so be aware that hot-button issues like cybercrime, drug smuggling, and money laundering feature in this read. One more violent scene and I'd push it out of mystery-series territory entirely!

I recommend reading the series starter first, though it's not crucial. This is great for Cotton Malone or Delta Force fans who want something more personal and intimate that still keeps the pace fast and the emotional pitch furious.

Minotaur Books wants $14.99 in ebook format. Read a sample, or better yet, the first book, before one-clicking.

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No Road Home by John Fram

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A young father must clear his name and protect his queer son when his wealthy new wife’s televangelist grandfather is found murdered in this binge-worthy locked-room thriller from the acclaimed author of The Bright Lands—perfect for fans of Ruth Ware, Paul Tremblay, and Alex North.

For years, single father Toby Tucker has done his best to keep his sensitive young son, Luca, safe from the bigotry of the world. But when Toby marries Alyssa Wright—the granddaughter of a famed televangelist known for his grandiose, Old Testament preaching—he can’t imagine the world of religion, wealth, and hate that he and Luca are about to enter.

A trip to the Wright family’s compound in sun-scorched Texas soon turns hellish when Toby realizes that Alyssa and the rest of her brood might have some very strange plans for Toby and his son. The situation only grows worse when a freak storm cuts off the roads and the family patriarch is found murdered, stabbed through the heart on the roof of the family’s mansion.

Suspicion immediately turns to Toby, but when his son starts describing a spectral figure in a black suit lurking around the house with unfinished business in mind, Toby realizes this family has more than murder to be afraid of. And as the Wrights close in on Luca, no one is prepared for the lengths Toby will go in the fight to clear his name and protect his son.

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

My Review: Fun, unbelievable Gothic suspense tale. I liked it best when Dad-mode was engaged, and Toby was fiercely defending Luca and his right to exist from fundy jerks. I was completely appalled that Toby would've gotten himself and his son tangled up with these assholes in the first place. Still, suspension of disbelief and all that...but that's what happened to my fourth and fifth stars.

The half-star I put back is down to the Texas-ness of it: the freak storm resembles one I experienced in my own decades in Texas, the supernatural-adjacent events also rang my atmosphere bells, and Author Fram's characters each have voices I relate to. In fact, I have relatives who sound like Aly's entire clan. I fully delighted in this Dad-beast, protective story's object, too. Luca's predicament is achingly familiar, and I liked the ending.

Atria Books offers an ebook for $14.99. I say that's reasonable.

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Boystown Heartbreakers by K.C. Carmichael

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago hairstylist Bastian Russo has only three things to his name: a pair of $1,200 shears, a Boystown studio apartment, and a list of men's names written on his closet wall. His constant worry that he's not good enough and his chronic inability to trust are what leaves him heartbroken time and again.

After he adds the latest name, he turns to his best friend, Andres Wood, for solace. But instead of treating Bastian to dinner, drinks, and the usual effortless banter, Andres makes an interesting suggestion: that Bastian should get over the breakup by dating ... Andres.

Sure, Andres is successful and attractive, but he also knows everything there is to know about Bastian—including what an insecure pain in the ass he is. Meanwhile, everyone in Bastian's life, from his mother to his co-workers, thinks he's an idiot for not having dated Andres already. So, what could go wrong?

Everything.

Now Bastian has to sort out his inadequacy and trust issues to prove he's worthy of transitioning from Andres' best friend to his lover. Otherwise, it's a matter of time before one or both of them end up on Bastian's list of Boystown Heartbreakers.

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

My Review: Fun, frothy summer read about a waffling, anxious gay guy grabbing his balls and manning up to exit the Friend Zone. It was a relatable source of anxiety. My issue about this iteration of that story is how extremely annoying I found Bastian. This could be a mood-driven thing, since the writing's okay, so I'm just not warbling about it instead of slagging it off.

Angst-friendly romance readers likely won't have this issue. Anyone who read and loved Boyfriend Material should at the very least sample it. It's more prolonged angst but it's got the same kind of HFN payoff.

Rising Action Publishing asks you for $16.99...borrow it, says I.

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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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This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder by Alan Townsend (38%)

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: A compassionate, vulnerable, and transformative exploration of the nurturing and spiritual power of scientific wonder, as illuminated through the tragic dual cancer diagnoses of author Dr. Alan Townsend’s wife and daughter.

A decade ago, Dr. Alan Townsend’s family received two unthinkable pieces of catastrophic news: his 4-year-old daughter and his brilliant and vivacious wife developed unrelated, life-threatening forms of brain cancer. As he witnessed his young daughter fight during the courageous final months of her mother’s life, Townsend – a lifelong scientist – was indelibly altered. He began to see scientific inquiry as more than a source of answers to a given problem, but also as a a lens on the world that could help him find peace with the painful realities he could not change. Through scientific wonder, he found ways to bring meaning to his darkest period.

At a time when society’s relationship with science is increasingly polarized while threats to human life on earth continue to rise, Townsend offers a balanced, moving perspective on the common ground between science and religion through the spiritual fulfillment he found in his work. Awash in Townsend's electrifying and breathtaking prose, This Ordinary Stardust offers hope that life can carry on even in the face of near-certain annihilation.

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

My Review: I very badly want to find books to recommend to those skeptical of science who are religious. This book deals with one man's grief and rage about a truly horrendous dual blow delivered by cancer. He retains his faith and uses his extensive education in science to inform his healing, coping journey.

Since I lost any hope of finding faith (a doomed project, given my rejection of religion dates to 1965...it's older than most people on planet Earth!) watching religious-nut moms coming to their dying AIDS-stricken sons' bedsides (never once saw a dad) to reject them again one last time for the road, all *I* got from this read was disgusted and outraged that the author puts his name among the "faithful" despite being well-educated. I can't tell you if it's well-written or not because my rage-blinders are blocking any clear view of his writing. A look at reviews of those of the opposite persuasion suggests to me that the anecdotal, snippety style that deals very little with science means this isn't the book I was looking for, the one to bridge faith and reason, from inception to execution.

Grand Central Publishing wants $14.99 for its ebook edition.

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The Poverty of Growth @ 47% by Olivier De Schutter (foreword by Kate Raworth)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: How do we combat poverty and rising inequality? In our age of impending climate catastrophe, the conventional wisdom around GDP and economic growth is no longer fit for purpose; a rising tide sinks all boats.

Oliver De Schutter argues that we must rethink the fight against poverty. The quest for economic growth not only clashes with the need to remain within planetary boundaries, but in fact creates the very social exclusion it is intended to deteriorating human rights, widening the gap between the richest and the poorest, and merely modernising poverty without eliminating it.

The Poverty of Growth makes a clarion call to social movements, trade unions and environmental NGOs alike to forge a new pathway towards a 'post-growth' development, and a narrative of progress that is no longer orientated around wealth and profit.

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

My Review: I reached the end of Part 3, realized I was *dreading* Part 4, and stopped reading.

Well-sourced, tediously written klaxon of warning that was meant to be...and presented as...a clarion call drawing attention to a different approach to the process of running an economy. It does the depressing, and depressingly common, leftist thing of assuming you will agree that this solution is THE solution. That feels like bullying to me, no matter if the arguments and solutions presented make their case or not. (I think a little more "not" in this case.) I do not expect this book to convert even those on the fence, still less those not terribly interested in making changes but aware there's a problem.

You could easily feel differently.

Pluto Press offers the ebook for 1¢ so go get one.

April 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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Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: How do we talk about porn? Why it is that when we do talk about porn, we tend to retreat into the abstract? How do we have meaningful conversations about it with those closest to us? In Porn: An Oral History, her extraordinary second book, Polly Barton interrogates the absence of discussion around a topic that is ubiquitous and influences our daily lives. In her search for understanding, she spent a year initiating intimate conversations with twenty acquaintances of a range of ages, genders and sexualities about everything and anything related to porn: watching habits, emotions and feelings of guilt, embarrassment, disgust and shame, fantasy and desire. Soon, unfolding before her, was exactly the book that she had been longing to encounter - not a traditional history, but the raw, honest truth about what we aren't saying. A landmark work of oral history written in the spirit of Nell Dunn, Porn is a thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.

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

My Review: I really wanted a deeper experience of this read, something that didn't simply slip into my eyeholes frictionlessly, leaving behind a vaguely dirty, slightly disappointed emptiness.

Quite a part from the awful wordplay, that is my sincere opinion. Where the idea was a very interesting opportunity to dive into the deep end of a human obsession with porn with ample evidence that dates back to dynastic Egypt, five thousand years!, it left my old-man self instead with the skeevy sense of having eavesdropped on my grandchildrens' drunken dissection of what they and their friends thought about sex. I guess it would open up a young, or a sheltered, person's eyes, but for me the conversation I wanted to participate in was not here.

A Kindle edition is $5.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link), should you be sheltered.

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Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies (The Vacation Mysteries #1) by Catherine Mack

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Ten days, eight suspects, six cities, five authors, three bodies . . . one trip to die for.

All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next in her Vacation Mysteries series―is that too much to ask?

Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life―the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with ten years ago and now can't get out of her life―Eleanor’s enlisted to help solve the case.

Contending with literary rivals, rabid fans, a stalker―and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly―theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts, and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies is the irresistible and hilarious series debut from Catherine Mack, introducing bestselling fictional author Eleanor Dash on her Italian book tour that turns into a real-life murder mystery, as her life starts to imitate the world in her books.

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

My Review: Funny. Goodly quantity of witty fourth-wall-breaking zingers, pleasant travelogue-y feel of the my friend texted me from Italy variety. Cozy atmosphere, by which I mean the amateur sleuth never being in any believeable danger.

Too long, a bit too fond of its own wit...the comedian who stays one joke too long...and lacking suspense; the right combo for those who miss Joan Hess or Katherine Hall Paige. Will amuse and entertain when that is what is needed.

Minotaur's accepting preorders, wants $14.99 for an ebook edition delivered on May 14.

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Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Three women scheme to avenge an old friend in a darkly witty short story about loyalty, ambition, and delicious retribution by Margaret Atwood, the #1 bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Myrna, Leonie, and Chrissy meet every Thursday to sample fine cheeses, to reminisce about their former lives as professors, and lately, to muse about murder. Decades ago, a vicious cabal of male poets contrived—quite publicly and successfully—to undermine the writing career, confidence, and health of their dear friend Fern. Now, after Fern has taken a turn for the worse, her three old friends decide that it’s finally time to strike back—in secret, of course, since Fern is far too gentle to approve of a vendetta. All they need is a plan with suitably Shakespearean drama. But as sweet and satisfying as revenge can be, it’s not always so cut and dried.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Revenge fantasies are having A Moment, aren't they? When the cautionary-tale-teller par excellence feels called to speak nasty vengeful thoughts, you know critical mass...even a tipping point...has arrived.

May I ask of the hive mind what it is with Thursdays and old people? I'm old, and I have no special thoughts or feelings about Thursdays in regards to socializing with my peers. Did y'all pick it because it alliterates with good, violent words like "thuggery" or something? Nothing about this iteration of the current fantastical storytelling fad stands out...humor's blah, plot's as incredible as any of the others out there...either pro or con. Fills some time, and Atwood's bank account. That's fine. But I won't do it again.

Cheap at $1.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link) or free if you have Prime.

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Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre (tr. Sophie Lewis)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: As Lyon is consumed by protests, a darkly comic exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write.

A state of emergency is declared in "the good city of Lyon" and protesters and police clash in the streets. At the unemployment office, there are few job opportunities for poets going around. So the poet reads accounts of life under the Third Reich and in Nazi language, smokes cannabis, walks through the streets, and eats bananas, drawn by an overbearing father into a hilarious and often cynical exploration of the push to be employed and the pull to write. In this Oulipean experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.

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

My Review: One of those ever-so-French récits that I like, but often don't love. This one is, to be honest, untranslatable. In French everything has a gender. This story does not gender its narrator, and like all récits this one takes place entirely in its PoV character's head; unless actively thinking about sex, we don't gender our own thoughts. So this genderless tale of a slice of the life of a nameless genderless soul at a crucial moment in recent French history is far more trenchant when ungendered in a highly gendered language...a lot of the impact is lost in neuter-English.

Perfect for the moment when a story is too short, a novel is too long, and one wants to think in the worldview of an aspiring-to-success poet. And is in the mood for sly, leftist humor. And does not care a fig for conventional, plodding storytelling but still craves a story.

A purchase from Transit Books supports a literary press, and only sets you back $15.95, a price I call cheap for the fun you could have.

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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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No Charity in the Wilderness: Poems by Shaun T. Griffin PEARL RULED @ 28%

Rating: 3 very generous stars of five

The Publisher Says: No Charity in the Wilderness is a book of poetry focused on the Great Basin and on the Mexican/American border, along with family and the people with whom the author, Shaun T. Griffin, works. A tender observation of the natural world and our place in it, the collection invites readers to open their hearts to offer tolerance and understanding.

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

My Review: Okay. Read this:

By a Fire in Ballyhinch Castle
She lies close—the hydrangeas
folded in rainy abandon,
this fall day in the roadside wet,
the Celt below this bog, and last night
in the pub of poets and singers
who luted and tin-whistled
at the Alcock and Brown—

to burn the moisture from
the wood, from she who
dries beneath a canopy
of nerine lilies and fuchsia.
On the road home, she picks
blackberries from the thicket
and licks the sweet wine from her hands.

What. The Actual. Fuck. Is. This.

They're all pretty much like this. Text messages that he sent when he was drunk and has now printed out and then gave titles to. I still hate poetry. I rate this three stars because, for all I know or can tell, this could be genius and I, as always with this form of expression, am insensible to its charms.

It's $18.95.

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The Snatch Racket: The Kidnapping Epidemic That Terrorized 1930s America by Carolyn Cox
PEARL RULED @ 20%

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Although the 1932 kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was a worldwide sensation, it was only one of an estimated three thousand ransom kidnappings that occurred in the United States that year. The epidemic hit America during the Great Depression and the last days of Prohibition as criminal gangs turned kidnapping into the highly lucrative “snatch racket.”

Wealthy families and celebrities purchased kidnap insurance, hired armed chauffeurs and bodyguards, and carried loaded handguns. Some sent their children to school or summer camp in Europe to get them out of harm’s way. “Recent Kidnappings in America” was a regular feature in the New York Times, while Time magazine included kidnappings in its weekly list of notable births, deaths, and other milestones.

The Snatch Racket is the story of a crime epidemic that so frightened families that it undermined confidence in law enforcement and government in general. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt waged a three-year War against Kidnappers with J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men (newly empowered to carry weapons and make arrests) on the front lines. This first U.S. war against terrorism revolutionized and modernized law enforcement in the United States, dramatically expanding the powers of the federal government in the fight against not only kidnapping but many new types of interstate crime.

At the heart of the narrative are some of the most iconic names of the twentieth Rockefeller, Ford, Lindbergh, Roosevelt, Hoover, Capone, Schwarzkopf, and Hearst, all caught up in the kidnapping frenzy. The Snatch Racket is a spellbinding account of terrifying abductions of prominent citizens, gangsters invading homes with machine guns, the struggles of law enforcement, and the courage of families doing whatever it took to bring home the ransomed.

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

My Review: Copaganda. I am appalled at how completely the FBI's most horrific excesses of past and present owe to this manufactured crisis, flames fanned by that vile scum J. Edgar Hoover. The USA-PATRIOT Act and its modern kin have a deep set of roots in US authoritarian trends.

Not boring, if a bit dry in its presentation; and if one is not a convinced leftist, and not utterly repulsed by the cynical manipulations of the "law enforcement" parts of the establishment, permaybehaps a good read. Be prepared to Do Your Homework, though. This isn't my jam but I am not everyone.

Potomac Books wants $34.95...the library is free. What's your budget?

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, much-anticipated and praised successor to ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
ANTHONY DOERR
Scribner
$30.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 32ND ANNUAL READING THE WEST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION!

A bargain at $7.99 on Kindle (non-affiliate link) until Monday, 27 June, that is.

Rating: 3* of five

On The Guardian's Best Fiction of 2021 list

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Publisher Says: Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

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

My Review: My rating seems mingy, doesn't it. It did to me...I was fully expecting to five-star this bad boy. I wanted to five-star it. I five-starred All the Light We Cannot See, and it was (like this book) a braided-perspectives structure telling a deeply felt and emotionally fraught story.

I blame it on the sci-fi bona fides I have learned to demand of mainstream writers.

Author Doerr's gorgeous sentences are all here:

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.
–and–
“Repository… you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
–and–
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.

His gift for the pithy aperçu is on display, too:

“Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”
–and–
"Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up."

That last is particularly resonant to me. Cloud-cuckoo Land, invented by Aristophanes in his play The Birds, never existed (as far as I am aware) in the form posited by Author Doerr in this story. Big ups to him for actually fooling me into looking up "Antonius Diogenes Cloud Cuckoo Land" to be absolutely sure of it, though.

So what was the problem? It was the generation-ship element in which Konstance, in all our future, resides. An Earth that can muster the resources to create such a massive object, which has AIs as sophisticated as Sybil (I had to check...I'd've named it "Sibyl," so I verified that it wasn't before typing this), would not need to flee their home world. (Also, is running away from home because we've made a mess really all that hopeful a message in the first place?) It's part of the charm of 1950s sci fi that there were generation ships launched to escape nuclear-war ravaged Earth without anyone saying, "waitaminnit waitaminnit all those resources would be just ducky used on Earth to help people!" but it's 2021 and those sorts of naïve assumptions are scrapheap-of-history material. And yes, I got to the end... I know about the twist...but it comes very late and, for me at least, doesn't change the jarring code-switch from its intended if not entirely successfully sold hope-full to hope-less. The point of making this last-minute course correction was simply lost on me. It ended up making the whole narrative line feel like a cheat.

Another thing that *needs* to be scrapheap-of-history'd is the coding of villains as neurodivergent. One entire star vanished for that. This is all I will say on the subject.

In the end, though, it's the gestalt that doesn't happen that costs this beautifully told tale another of my stars. I expect, if I'm following five (or six, depending on your take on Aethon) main threads, to experience a coming-together, a thematic unity that makes each strand of the story stronger after I've reached it. This was, I'm very sad to say, missing in my reading experience, much as it was in my unhappy read of Cloud Atlas. A much more successfully gestalted example from my own reading is the near-future India of SF chunkster River of Gods, or the outstandingly exciting present-day crime-story chunkster also set in India, Sacred Games.

It verges on misery porn to use children's PoVs in highlighting the cost to innocents of the great human-caused upheavals of History. I'm very glad Author Doerr presented the misery of unnatural change from both sides of the 1450s fall-of-Constantinople story; no triumphalism allowed here. I was less convinced that the overarching thematic reach for Hope was successful, in that these children are all facing the awful, wrenching adjustments whether or not the world actually collapses around them. I mean by that, that the collapses are hard-wired and the survivors are going to be powerless to do more than respond to the New World Order. This vitiates any real hope, at least to my mind it does. That's more than the usual problem for me in this book's case because by its very nature...a story about stories and libraries and words in their eternally exciting welter of meaning, connotation, metaphorical freight...Hope should be the one thing that each character finds, retains, develops, has by the end of the tale.

In the final analysis, this is an Anthony Doerr book. Reams and reams of printer paper, a metric ton of toner, all used to commit the MS's supremely descriptive language to the page. Deeply felt and beautifully written dialogue. Thought-provoking and well-presented explorations of significant thematic concerns of the world right now. But this many pages in the present tense? I felt pummelled with the immediacy! urgency! of that choice, the sense that I was being asked to move through the story at far too rapid a clip. Your book club will, I am pretty sure, love it anyway or even because of this, will discuss it for the required hour and probably go over.

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
–and–
It's never easy. Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that makes him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness.
–and–
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

I needed things I didn't get...a faster pace in each timeline, fewer flowery passages (though they are gorgeous!)...got things I didn't want (coughSeymourcough), and yet read the book from giddy-up to whoa. Never once did I so much as contemplate abandoning the read, and that is saying something.

This title is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Fiction Award! The winner will be announced on 17 November 2021. My most sincere well-wishes to the author and the publisher for their success in this contest.

UNLIKELY ANGEL, the songwriter whose performance-art career you might've heard of

UNLIKELY ANGEL: The Songs of Dolly Parton
LYDIA R. HAMESSLEY
University of Illinois Press
$14.95 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The creative process of a great American songwriter

Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.

Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.

Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.

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

My Review: I was a teen in the 1970s, when Miss Dolly was really gaining fame. In my social circle, such as it was, country music was not the first choice of listening on the car stereo. We ran to Rick Wakeman and Electric Light Orchestra and show tunes. (Drama fag here, if you're wondering.) As I, almost alone among my friends, had much-older sisters, I'd hear things overlooked by the pop-pups. Joni Mitchell wasn't big among them, but my sister gave me her old copy of Hejira when she moved, starting a love affair with Mitchell that's lasted to this very day. Then came the day she played "I Will Always Love You" and we laughed our snobby selves silly! "She sounds like a 45 played at 78," I commented, and got an approving laugh from the older audience. But that's a beautiful song, and if one is even a little bit susceptible to sentimental love poems, it's a gripping story. It's been remade and made into a hit in every decade since its first release in 1974.

Now, I can't even imagine anyone over ten years of age, not from a place that has no electricity, will not know who Dolly Parton is. So I will spend no time explaining her. Still, on the off chance you've never heard of Miss Dolly, go here.

All done? Good. Now that I'm all the way sure that you know the basics, let's us have a come-to-Jesus about the parts of Miss Dolly you've been ignoring, were foolishly dismissive of (like me), or were unaware of. The lady acts and performs and sings. But she IS a songwriter. "I Will Always Love You", written to mark the end of her early and formative loving partnership with Porter Wagoner (man charted eighty-one singles in his life, betcha most people reading this blog never heard of him!), is in the American Songbook by virtue of it ubiquity and popularity with singers and audiences alike.

Author Lydia Hamessley is a musicologist, a scholar of Southern Appalachia's musical heritage. She is a thorough academic, and that is not bad thing because her subject here isn't the media star Dolly Parton!!! but the creative dynamo songwriter behind the entertainer. Many thousands of songs have come forth from Parton's pen. Many hundreds have been recorded by herself, and many other artists. (By the way, did y'all know Miss Dolly wrote a song called "Backwoods Barbie"?!
"Don't let these false eyelashes lead you to believe
That I'm as shallow as I look,
'cause I run true and deep"
This is the same smart businesswoman whose public persona uttered the deathless aperçu, "You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!" and variations thereon, in countless interviews.)

Oh, sorry. Anyway, Author Hamessley's text is academic in purpose and execution, so I won't lie and say it flowed past my eyes like limpid creek-water down a holler. Miss Dolly wrote an autobiography for you, if that's what you're looking for; I wasn't, and I asked for this book because I wanted to know about the creative, and also the businesswoman behind the persona.

And that is precisely what I got. Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee!

In Author Hamessley's (overlong; I did say she was an academic!) Introduction to the book, she wrote this:

Two of Dolly's comments have been foundational for my work and analyses of her songs. First, "I can't stop writing songs. That's what I mean—I am so serious. If people really knew how serious I was about my music." Second, when Dolly set out on her solo career she asserted, "I'm saying a lot more in my songs than a lot of people may know. Even the simplest of my songs, I've got really deep feelings inside of them."

The fact is that this↑↑↑right here is the beating heart of Unlikely Angel, this is the thing that you're going to get in the case studies and the anecdotes: Dolly Parton is no more "just" a simple country gal who boobed her way to the top of a killer cutthroat business than she is a cold, calculating manipulator with steely discipline and rampageous ambition. She's all that, and she's more. The producer of her first solo album, Hello, I'm Dolly, (the Broadway-based story behind this is another brick in the foundation of my love for Miss Dolly!) said of her "All the same things put together made something different this time."

So Author Hamessley set out to unravel, in nine songs, one in a chapter..."In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)," "Coat of Many Colors," "My Tennessee Mountain Home," "These Old Bones," "I Will Always Love You," "Just Because I'm A Woman," "Me and Little Andy," "Light of a Clear Blue Morning, and last but not least "There'll Always Be Music"...the creative and cultural arc of a six-decade career built on entertaining others and comforting the needy, loving the good times and defying the hard ones, and generally letting her force-of-nature personality loose on a gobsmacked world. (As an aside, I'd like to suggest to readers of the book that they make a playlist of the songs each chapter focuses on. I did; I listened to the whole playlist all the way through, then put the songs on as I got to a chapter. Sometimes two or three listens during a chapter helped me really get slightly abstruse-to-me points.) It's greatly to her credit that she accomplishes as much pure-D unadulterated entertainment as she does.

What she doesn't accomplish is, I suspect, down to the fact that she's telling a story while making a point. Academia requires a point beyond just spinnin' a good yarn. It's not like she fails to identify multiple very good points in the book...woman-in-business, artist-responding-to-the-world, public/private dichotomy...but she's not humanizing them with gladsome prose. This isn't, I acknowledge, her brief in a book for Univerity of Illinois Press! But it does tend to militate against a truly casual reader's sense of value recieved justifying the pricey purchase. This is something I want to be clear about.

One of the not-emphasized truths about a career containing over 3,000 (!!) songs written is that not all of them are autobiographical. Author Hamessley doesn't bear down hard on this fact. She does, in ways subtle or oblique, make it part of the idea of a chapter. This is all to the good, in my opinion; there's nothing more absurd and prurient to me than the urge to conflate performer and performance.

Steve Buckingham, author of the Preface and long-time friend of Miss Dolly's, gets the last words because I think they say everything you need to know about Miss Dolly and about this book she so generously helped bring into the world:

Over the decades Dolly and I sometimes talked about how the "cartoon" she created (her word, not mine) often overshadowed her talent as a songwriter and musician. We always strove to put the music first. ... Make no mistake, Dolly Parton is a phenomenally gifted songwriter who neverruns out of ideas. Just ask her peers. And don't let the long fingernails fool you!

Author Hamessley, thank you for this delightful deep dive into a world-beating talent's work.

THE SHORTEST DAY, a quick hit of Irish magical realism from Colm Tóibín

THE SHORTEST DAY
COLM TÓIBÍN
Amazon Original Stories
$1.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In Ireland, a man of reason is drawn to a true mystery older than the Pyramids and Stonehenge in this enthralling story about ethereal secrets by New York Times bestselling author Colm Tóibín.

During the winter solstice, on the shortest day and longest night of the year, the ancient burial chamber at Newgrange is empowered. Its mystifying source is a haunting tale told by locals.

Professor O’Kelly believes an archaeologist’s job is to make known only what can be proved. He is undeterred by ghost stories, idle speculation, and caution. Much to the chagrin of the living souls in County Meath. As well as those entombed in the sacred darkness of Newgrange itself. They’re determined to protect the secret of the light, guarded for more than five thousand years. And they know O’Kelly is coming for it.

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

My Review: I can't imagine too many people I know need to be told what and where Newgrange is.

this image via newgrange.com

It is a stunning and majestic sight, though the location you see has been reconstructed...a fact whose advisability is, to put it mildly, debated in the archaeological community. No matter; here it is, here it stays, and good goddesses isn't it *spectacular*?!

The story Author Tóibín tells us is a simple one: a man of resolutely practical materialistic worldview is contemplating his imminent visit to Newgrange. It is almost Christmas, and in his deeply rooted preciseness of action, he has arranged to be gone *just* until Christmas Eve morning so as to, as always, spend his holidays with wife and children.

The Yule Solstice, a time of great power in Neolithic societies (if the number of archaeological sites with demonstrable connections to the Sun's position on that date is any evidence), has come to his attention as an important time at Newgrange as well. He feels duty bound, as the first archaeologist to possess this information, to investigate despite his unshakeable materialism:

The job of an archaeologist was to make known only what can be proved. The rest was idle speculation.

So two things are immediately apparent from this. First is that this is a story set in the past, as the site in its present state dates from after 1982 (see link beside the photo). Second is that there are those who know more than they have told about the site in the many years of Ireland's fussing about with it. That's very interesting....

As the tale is a short one, I don't want to give too much away. I am sure that the author's fans will, or already have, preordered the story. I know they won't want to know everything...but the story's best qualities are those that Author Tóibín uses in all his works, that remarkable ability to bring you with him as he astrally projects himeself (or whatever sorcery he actually does) into the worlds and eyes and minds of people perfectly real.

His gift is deployed on several strands. It makes me feel completely and happily immersed in the world he's created for them to enact this delightful confluence of streams of thought. It is a damn near perfect read for this wonderfully numinous time of year. Why, even Professor O'Kelly experiences an unaccustomed immanence while he is at Newgrange on the morning of the Solstice:

The professor was almost tempted to note that these people, if studied in the light of these designs on stone, knew something about what was palpable and also what was tangible: they knew about spirit, and they knew about line.
–and–
They must have loved the sun, or trusted it. They lured it down this corridor as though they were pulling it into the chamber by rope.

Even if it's just a hair too ungenerous with the Professor's character-building (that missing quarter-star explained), it is a delight and a worthy enhancement of your avoidance of the stressful events awaiting us on the third.