THE SHUTOUTS, keeping apocalyptic tales oddly fresh

THE SHUTOUTS
GABRIELLE KORN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.

The year is 2041, and it's a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly's on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she's no longer sure she believes in.

Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they've spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.

At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.

Set in the world of Gabrielle Korn's Yours for the Taking, The Shutouts tells the captivating story of those who have been shut out from Inside, their fight to survive, and an interconnectedness larger than all of them.

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

My Review: A woman who's a teenager right now is writing letters to Orchid, her young daughter in 2041, a daughter she has not seen in some time. It is heart-wrenching because Kelly's letters are written as a mother who did the best she knew how to do tries to cross a ravaged US in a planet-scale climate apocalypse. She is not having an easy time of the trip. It is a terrible world and a terrible personal situation in that world—no one ever *wants* to leave their child behind. Switching to 2078, we have the second strand of the story, not epistolary but Orchid's third-person cinematic PoV, very close to the character.

This is the main way Author Korn creates investment in her not-very-active story. I have not read the first book, and I didn't feel the lack of the background mostly because I was always inside the field of vision of the narrator of each section. There might be apocalypse unfolding around them, but I'm...insulated...in their bubble of awareness and attention. It *should* feel slow, cut off from the world, instead I'm deeply enmeshed in the characters' feeling world, connected to their emotional responses to the situation. It works a lot better than I thought it would.

In large part, I think, because by using this technique, Author Korn is able to bring the reader through almost sixty years of immense upheaval without making that upheaval the matter of the book. I've sort of reached a saturation with The Climate Apocalypse as the story. Author Korn doesn't make me do the day-by-day; she lets me see the horrors through the eyes of a survivor of the horrors. In 2078, I'm in the world the apocalypse left, and as I'm in the limited viewpoint I'm seeing and responding to the parts that are in Orchid, the narrator's, attention. The centrality of Ava and her daughter Brook pull the mother/daughter bond along with us as we experience with Orchid the toughness needed to survive in this world.

It's an intense experience, and it's all queer all the time. It's that piece that warmed me the most. The world's collapsed and we're still here, we're in the survivors and doing great things with the space we take up. The intense personal commitment to mitigating the horrors, to ameliorating the suffering of all while incurring intense personal suffering from sacrifices made...well...it's quite a step from the usual queer fare I see everywhere. As the world fractures and fragments it's so lovely to see these queer folk making their very best efforts to extend survival and the opportunity to thrive so generously.

I'd give it all five stars if I hadn't felt rather pulled around to little enough purpose by some of the parts where Kelly's narrating her efforts to reach Orchid...I get it, it's really demanding, let's focus on how it makes you feel not what it's exacting from you. Likewise there are moments where Orchid's in motion for, well, for the sake of it it seemed to me.

I cavil; I would not say these issues were terrible, only niggling. It's a read that stands alone, yet makes me wish I'd already read its predecessor. Fine work indeed.

#The1976Club: WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy...well titled indeed ***SPOILERS***

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
MARGE PIERCY
Ballantine Books
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before.

Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.

THIS READ WAS PART OF A LOOSE BLOGGER READ-A-THON CALLED THE 1976 CLUB. THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING BELOW.

My Review: I began this read eager to know why I've owned several editions of this book over the decades...one from my bookstore-having sister in the Seventies, one from my Manhattan years in the later Eighties, a British one from the Aughties...but never remember reading it! And now that I've read it again, I remember why I don't remember.

What a disappointment.

The ending just...isn't. The sense of resolution, of the fit between story and ending, is unsatisfying to me. And it took over sixty pages to get there.

You know from the publisher's synopsis that Connie Ramos, our third-person-limited PoV character, is a mental patient. It's the 1970s and psychopharmacology wasn't as advanced as it is now (I'd argue it's still roughly where surgery was in the pre-Lister 1840s). Much that is wrong with Connie is situational, and it's utterly unsurprising. She's "treated" by the standards of the day, which is to say confined and contained and circumscribed so she can't act out her acute agony. She's in need of psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; she gets diagnosed as schizophrenic and the full machinery of experimental psychology gets to work on her.

But are they wrong? She claims she's been to the year 2137. And the world is....

Off we go! Luciente reaches her to show her a beautiful, granola-and-grown-out-hair Seventies egalitarian-hippie-commune future that I loved. "Gender" roles? Umm...what is per (their all-purpose pronoun, love that!) talking about, Luciente? Sex is biological...what is gender role? Part of the false dichotomies we've left behind.... What *wasn't* left behind was the of-the-time disrespect for sex work and workers, equating them to slaves. Reductive, shown to be inaccurate, but very feminist-70s. What isn't left behind is the disrespect of the future for the past. Luciente and all per people in Mattapoisett seem to know less than a US grade-school child about their own history. Connie says things that dumbfound these folk regularly...did all the books and digital records get destroyed? Then find a way to tell me so! (Goodness knows Author Piercy isn't afraid of infodumps.)

What I mostly didn't love was the way Connie, my PoV!, didn't look around and note things! But...well...this is a story about an abused and frankly impoverished and ethnically othered, therefore expendable, woman. All of those things are still stigmas, but they were a great deal moreso in the Seventies, and as Luciente's world (is Mattapoisett a Utopia, really, because war and societal conflict still exist there and then) bleeds into her own reality the Seventies Bellevue staff become less and less empathetic, more and more afraid of and for her, and act with more controlling behavior. It wasn't a joyride for Connie before but, as the life with Luciente recedes and Connie becomes mired in the mental hospital's horrors, the way she copes is...awful.

The aforementioned sixty-plus pages. I didn't like 'em. I did, however, recognize 'em. The months I spent in a locked ward in 2014 were a real eye-opener for me, and this might be why I didn't much enjoy the ending. My roommates were schizophrenic men. I had a really strong introduction to the hopelessness of schizophrenia and its utterly ineffective treatments. I think a big part of my getting my own brain back under my control was my sense of deep, abiding gratitude that I don't have *that* problem.

But does Connie? Is that really what's going on here? In her records, which we see, it says her intelligence is "Average" and is this detailed, consistent fantasy really something a person of average intelligence could come up with? It was here that I began to think the ending, besides just not being to my taste, actually missed a trick. What occurs isn't unrealistic. What it is, though, is without nuance. It asserts that Reality Is Reality. That's what we've just spent over three hundred pages interrogating! Taking that tack over quite an extended ending is...well...why not keep the interrogation, is Connie mad? is Connie telling us the truth? is Connie ever going "home"? going, that is, back to Mattapoisett. Instead the story ends with a THUD. And that wasn't at all on my Bingo card.

Author Piercy's prose is adequate.

“Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”
–and–
“Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.”
–and–
Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Never that I saw did it get better than that, and those are peaks that I've chosen. They're good, they're good, before someone says I'm saying otherwise. What they aren't is...tingly. That feeling you get when someone writes something that spears you with its sounds and feelings. I never got that in this read...and I'm pretty sure most others didn't either. What I saw praised, when I read the reviews others had written of the book after I finished my own read, was the ideas Author Piercy presented for the future, the cold analysis of the present...but not the prose. It's fine! It's not awkward, or lumpen; it's...fine.

But that's all it is. And that, I think, is my best summation of this read: It was fine, it had much to recommend it, but its heights weren't all that high and its lows weren't low.

It was fine.

THE 1976 CLUB...not a title, an Event

I periodically participate in the Internet-wide read-and-review year-based "Clubs" that some book bloggers do. This one coming up is The 1976 Club.

First Alfred A. Knopf edition, 1976
I decided to read Marge Piercy's feminist SF time-travel classic, Woman on the Edge of Time. It's been on my TBRadar since ~1977, has come so close to being read that I have purchased it at least twice, but somehow hasn't made it to the top of the pile...until now. If not for Neglected Books, Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, and Simon from Stuck in a Book (linked above), who knows when/if it'd ever have happened.

                                   My 2016 Del Rey Books edition
So, anyone else want to try something from 1976? Look at your library on your cataloging site (on LibraryThing, a free site, you can sort by copyright dates!). Wikipedia has a handy-dandy listicle of "notable" things published that year; the various awards given all have their honorees listed by date, eg the World Fantasy Award lists annual winners at this link and it includes multiple categories! There's no reason to limit yourselves...read a/some/all the novel(s)/story(s)/poem(s) on the Pulitzers list, or any other list of Awards/Prizes/Medals given in 1976 at the Awards Archive.

This is a chance to read something unexpected, read something new to you, read something exactly like/opposite to your usual preferred length, category, genre. Or embrace your guilt, choose something you already own that was published that year. Do it, in other words, however the heck you want...and still have a special time period to do it in (or by, if you read slowly)...with as many or as few others you'd like to tell about this fun Internet Event.

Sounds pretty much can't-lose-ish to me.

MAMMOTHS OF THE GREAT PLAINS, underknown alternate history of modern America with mammoths

MAMMOTHS OF THE GREAT PLAINS
ELEANOR ARNASON (Outspoken Authors series #4)
PM Press
$8.00 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Shaggy herds of mammoths still roam the Great Plains—to the delight of President Thomas Jefferson—in this imaginative alternative history in which the beasts thunder over the grasslands as living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. This unforgettable saga soars from the Badlands of the Dakota Territory to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the American Indian Movement protests of the 1960s and one woman’s attempt to harness DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage. In addition, this volume includes the essay “Writing During World War Three,” a politically incorrect take on multiculturalism from a science fiction point of view and an outspoken interview with the writer of some of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative fiction.

My Review: Honestly, I think I should simply put this in front of you:

"The thing your teachers may not have told you is how full of hope the late '60s were. Yes, there was violence. The police and FBI and Natiional Guard were dangerous. Plenty of people—good people—died in fishy ways; and plenty went to prison for things they almost certainly did not do. But the times were changing, and many of us thought we were building a new world in the shell of the old. As it turned out, we were wrong, at least for the time being. The '60s wound down slowly through the '70s, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan began a long period of reaction."

...issue an apology for my entire generation for allowing the calamity that was Reagan's rule, and go quietly away. In fact, I suspect many (some even related to me) would like that a lot. So I won't do it.

Emma, biracial daughter of an Indian woman and a man from the Ivory Coast, leaves Minneapolis to visit her grandmother on the Standing Rock resevation in Western North Dakota. The child is riding the train, she sees things on her trip that clue us in to the fact that she's not living in *our* 21st century, like...well...mammoths.

Mammoths. Mammoth Bill Cody. Mammoth spirits in a woman's dream. An entire history of mammoths in the 19th-century west, starting with the delight of President Thomas Jefferson at Meriwether Lewis's gift of a tusk. Okay...I'll bite...how's this one come about, playin' out? Why wasn't Reagan and his horrorshow administration butterflied away by this weird development? But sit back, I told myself, listen and learn. Be like Emma, the patient city-child absorbing the world from her Native American elder. Not least like the patient, abused, angry Native people white people have stuffed onto lands that can't support them in order not to have to kill them outright.

Ahem.

Emma listens to her grandmother speak of the grandmother who raised her, Rosa the white-inside middle-class matron whose life was dedicated to preserving the maximum amount of tissue from the last living mammoths on the planet. Her struggles, adventures, all the stories she kept in her heart while she went to white schools, white universities, teaching white college students a continent away from the grandmother who was always there for her. Emma has to learn, of course, but these are big lessons, not easily absorbed at any age. We, the readers, know how much of this will come back to her one day...but now Emma's got to learn the hardest truth as her grandmother describes, in detail, the end of her early adulthood at her own grandmother's death. She has a house...but it comes at a price: The mammoth tissues her grandmother treated so very carefully need tending. A trap, thinks Emma's grandmother resentfully:

"'Are you sure you are Indian spirits? You know a lot about biology.'

"'First of all,' the crone said, 'we are in your dream. Obviously, we know what you know. And we, like you, are at the end of the 20th century. White people have a god who exists outside time and history and pays far too little attention to his creatures' misbehavior, in my opinion.

"'Indian spirits live in the world we helped make. Why not? We did good work! It's a good place! And like people of every kind—the two legs and four legs, birds and fish and insects—we change in response to time and events. Don't expect us to be like the spirits in an anthropology textbook.'

"'And don't drink so much," {the other spirit} said. 'It isn't good for you.'"

"That was the last thing the women said to me. I think they turned into mammoths, and the house vanished...Maybe I made everything up. I have never been certain about dreams, Emma, though many other people are, and I respect their opinions."

You can't just throw the past away without serious consequences, Emma. I hope and pray you remember that.

Much compressed storytelling feels rushed, or slighted; Author Arnason is a master of the art of compressing without disappointing. As Emma's grandmother tells her story, it feels organic that some things don't quite get the attention one would want them to as a reader. A kid's got a limited capacity to *get* adulthood; Emma's getting socked with a lot; but her gentle, loving grandmother is giving her roots to grow better wings. Of course the story gets less fully detailed as the long single sitting goes on. But equally "of course" is the fact that there is a point, a purpose, if one wants to be gross about it, a lesson for Emma in this tale of the women in her lineage:

"History is a collaborative process. The important thing is to be a part of history on the right side, which is not always easy to determine. It's not enough to hold onto the past, though we Indians proved that losing the past is dangerous. We almost died trying to be white. Not that white people have done much better. They almost destroyed the planet by getting and spending and laying waste.

"What do we keep from the past? What do we discard? How do we change? These are all important questions, which all of us have to answer. ... There's plenty left to do to remake the planet, but we have achieved a fair amount already. One step forward and two steps back, then two or three steps forward. We dance into the future like dancers in a Grand Entry."

We do that dance forever, or for as long as we are allowed. We all rely on that dance, and rely on the dancers to know where to move and when to move away. And, sadly, unlike Emma's grandmother and her world, it seems as though we're lacking in the mammoth-sense to right past wrongs.


Writing Science Fiction During World War Three reminded me, in its footnotes, of the succinct formulation popularized as Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Yes. Indeed, yea verily, uh-huh, oui, sí, mm hmm, right on Sister Woman!

Anyway. Author Arnason last updated this essay more than a decade ago, for this volume, and of necessity many of the decade's disasters go unremarked. Her blog (linked at the top of this post with her name) hasn't been updated regularly since 2018, though there is no doubt that she was alive and kicking on 12 May 20, so that's a tidbit of good information. The burden of her refrain is so in tune with mine: Capitalism is dying, the next thirty-five or so years are so incredibly crucially important to what comes next for us as a nation, society, species even (climate change is real, happening, and do not think it's going to be easy to deal with) that we must all link arms and march again and again and again.


"At the Edge of the Future": Eleanor Arnason Interviewed by Terry Bisson is a twenty-five page Q&A between the two, in which Arnason details her extremely odd and interesting childhood, her inevitable student rebellion (not so tacitly supported by dear old mom and dad), and her path to becoming one of the SF field's few working woman writers with her own career...that is, not one that supported her, but rather one that happened on her own terms, following her own interests. She was, as a result, the winner of the inaugural Tiptree Award (now called the Otherwise Award, which Arnason expressed deeply mixed feelings about) for her novel A Woman of the Iron People, q.v.

It was a delight to spend a day in Author Arnason's good company. I recommend the experience.

ALICE PAYNE RIDES, second time-travel novella with badass mixed-race lesbian highway"man" Alice Payne

ALICE PAYNE RIDES
KATE HEARTFIELD
Tor.com Publishing
$3.99 eBook, $14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

2020 NEWS THIS DELIGHTFUL BOOK IS NOMINATED FOR A PRIX AURORA!

The Publisher Says: After abducting Arthur of Brittany from his own time in 1203, thereby creating the mystery that partly prompted the visit in the first place, Alice and her team discover that they have inadvertently brought the smallpox virus back to 1780 with them.

Searching for a future vaccine, Prudence finds that the various factions in the future time war intend to use the crisis to their own advantage.

Can the team prevent an international pandemic across time, and put history back on its tracks? At least until the next battle in the time war…

—ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES IS REVIEWED HERE—

My Review: Back we go to the 22nd century, the Time Wars, and Prudence Zuniga's new base of operations with 18th-century pals Alice Payne, the lover of Jane, as well as the Holy Ghost...a mixed-race highway"man", and all-around badass; Fleance Hall, where she makes her home with Jane and her American Revolution veteran father and is dear friends with Constable Wray Aubry, her father's compadre during their time fighting the rebels in South Carolina.

Of course things on the Time War front are not easy: King Arthur of England is kidnapped from Brittany before John can kill him to become the Bad King John of the history you and I know. Who does it? Take a guess...I'll wait...and, once ensconced in Fleance Hall, Arthur's not going back to *become* King because he likes the 18th century too much. Check? Checkmate? Or just another day at the office for the Time War soldiery? Actually this bit is radically underdeveloped for my taste. We don't see much, and certainly nothing substantive, of young Arthur Duke of Brittany. He's never been King in *my* memory, and I'd've liked to see some hard graft in developing some kind of purpose for him. Never really happened, sad to say. The focus in a novella needs must be tight, and he's outside the cone.

Prudence, aware of the timeline's malleability to focus change, careful to keep her memories in a book outside the time stream. She realizes that General Almo has butterflied away her older sister Grace...of whom she carries no memories or attachments...and sets herself to Get Him Back while retrieving the sister she knows she loved. Even if she can't feel it anymore, the knowledge that someone used their power over the time streams to deliberately deprive her of her family makes her so boiling mad that her love for Grace might as well still be within her.

And Alice? Alice loses her father in 1789, but takes Jane back to 1780 to find out why he returned from the American War so changed. Bad move...the ripples in the time streams from their actions taken there are what put General Almo in mind of the plot to hurt Prudence...and now he has a new, truly terrifying, terrible weapon that bids fair to deprive Prudence of her wonderfully weird made family.

Here, at last, we confront the primary problem that plagues time travel fiction: If you're fighting a Time War, you can never truly win. The enemy can always jump before your latest victory and prevent it. Bummer, right?

Prudence is not a quitter. She's a brilliant, out-of-the-box thinker. And she's HIGHLY motivated to come up with an effective solution to that problem in order to use it on General Almo.

Reader, she succeeds. One of the cleverest endings for a time-travel tale I've read! The title aside, most of this book centers on Prudence, so let me share some of Author Heartfield's more pithy, elegant "tells" on Prudence's delightful character:

Prudence will seldom be drawn on the subject of the future. She protests that “the future” does not exist, that there are many possible futures, and that the future whence she came very likely no longer exists.
***
Prudence has long been a time traveller by profession; she is used to combing vocabulary and references out of her speech.
***
My mentor at the Academy used to say that time travel is like life: there are no rules, only consequences.

To cast Prudence in proper relief, there's something rotten about General Almo that is best shown, not told:

Your sister, like any other human or plastic fork or oak leaf on this planet, was the result of a million events that could have gone any other way. The individual has no inherent existence. A human life is ephemeral. A conjunction of cause and consequence. Each of us is just . . . information. And one piece of information is not any more valuable than any other. If time travel has taught me anything, it’s that individuals don’t matter.

But perhaps the best summation of the sheer joy of being alive and well in this topsy-turvy time-travel-enhanced Universe is Alice's rumination on what the point of it all truly is:

Does any of it matter? All things are true, might be true, have never been true. Knowing that makes the warmth of {her horse}’s neck, the flare of her nostrils, no less real. This life is all there is, all there ever is.

Yes indeed.

SALVAGE, Alexandra Duncan's cli-fic/feminist/SF/dystopian door-stopper of a good read

SALVAGE
ALEXANDRA DUNCAN (Salvage #1)
Greenwillow Books
$17.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated, conservative deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean.

I think that's pretty damn skimpy, so here's the flap copy as well:

Her life is a shadow of a life. Her future is not her own to fashion. Her family is a tangle of secrets. She cannot read. She cannot write.

But she is Parastrata Ava, the Captain's eldest daughter, the so girl of a long-range crew—her obligations are grave and many.

And when she makes a mistake, in a fragrant orchard of lemons, the consequences are deaadly.

There are some who would say, There but for the Mercies go I.

There are some who would say Parastrata Ava is just a silly earthstruck girl who got what was coming to her.

But they don't know the half of it.

My Review: Well now, wasn't this a long damn book. Luckily I liked it, so it wasn't a looooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnggggg damn book.

Feminist dystopian SF as a category description doesn't get me in a lather of urgency to read a book. It might be more likely to lather me up now, since Duncan's gift for poetical description is deployed to create such a series of parallel worlds. The Crewe of Parastrata, Ava's birthplace and homeland, are misogynistic patriarchal violence addicts. The strange society of the Gyre, where Ava finds lovingkindness, is worthy of an entire book of its own. The horrifying megamega-megalopolis of Mumbai, 170 MILLION strong, made me claustrophobic, and the modren tecknowledgee was more like what we'll have in 2020 than futuristic...my one big complaint.

But listen, if your Firefly love was at least partly rooted in its unique linguistic take on the future (if you DIDN'T love Firefly you wouldn't be my friend and therefore shouldn't be bothered by reading this review), this book will scratch the bump left by its short life. Like Firefly as well is the more-or-less libertarian bent of this book's worlds. It's completely impossible to closely govern a dense population the size of Mumbai, no matter how high your tech.

The pleasures of reading lovely sentences are sometimes lessened by those sentences serving a slow-paced story. For my part I found the leisurely pace of the novel added to my sense of getting to know the worlds Duncan was giving me in some depth. Some things still managed to get sprung on me. I found Ava's about-face from Obedient Girl to Power Ranger a bit unfounded, for example. But in the end, it was a small cavil in the larger picture of empowerment and growth.

In my quest never to ossify above the neck, I choose a genre to read a book in that I normally avoid like it gots the cooties. YA is one of those genres for me. This YA novel was a pleasant surprise, and it contained a message that I would very much like any teenaged girl in today's world to receive. No one will empower you. Empower yourself and refuse to listen to "no."