THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES, cute while being trenchant

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES
GLENN DIXON
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

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

My Review: I was pretty sure this read would be very twee and deeply, annoyingly cute. I might've sat through a few too many playings of The Brave Little Toaster in the late 1980s, resulting in my willingness to read about Kirby the vacuum cleaner's great-grandappliance Scout the Roomba.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I was charmed by Scout as she becomes self-aware, chooses her name based on what she overhears abour Scout in Harold's reading aloud, then decides to become Atticus and fight the Grid (aka AI-dominated society) to keep Harold in his home.

Why Harold and Adrian become aware of the self-awareness of the machines around them and do not immediately light out for the hills, I could not tell you. I went with it because I also watched WALL-E raptly and accepted its lapses of logic because I was enchanted by the pluck li'l guy's selfhood. Same situation here. I did not think the worldbuilding was very well-handled but I was willing to skip it because this is a feel-good story with elements of social commentary that I agree with. As a card-carrying old man I thought Harold was very well-drawn compared to anyone else. Except Scout. She's the star of the show. A Roomba on a mission is clearly not to be messed with. Kate, the daughter he and Edie lost to her own foolish stiff-necked pride, was not much more than a place-holder, and that was just fine by me. I saw plenty of her in the flesh over the decades so no further text needed please and thank you.

So my verdict? Check it out of the library on the day you're a bit bored of the world's evils yet not steaming mad at the idiots who keep shoving their unwanted greed-increasing systems into our homes. You'll be rewarded by a gentle, sweet individual in Roomba form who wants to do the right thing by those she has learned to care for.

I wish Sam Altman and that fuck Zuck were more like Scout and less the bastards behind the Grid.

THE SECRET OF SNOW, cozy, sentimental Swedishness

THE SECRET OF SNOW
TINA HARNESK (tr. Alice Menzies)
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This lyrical runaway Swedish hit follows a reclusive, elderly couple who cross paths with a pair of twentysomething newcomers in a small mountain town, revealing an unexpected, shared history and the reclamation of a nearly extinct culture.

Meet Máriddja: eccentric, eighty-five years old, and facing a cancer diagnosis. She’s determined to keep the truth about her illness from her husband Biera, while also finding someone who can take care of him once she’s gone.

Meet Kaj: a new transplant to the village, recently engaged to Mimmi, and mourning the death of his mother. One day, when Kaj unexpectedly finds a box of Sámi—the indigenous people of Scandinavia—handicrafts belonging to his mother, he unlocks something he never anticipated, something that will change his life for years to come.

A “brilliant debut” (Aftonbladet Söndag, Sweden) full of humor and heartbreak, The Secrets of Snow movingly grapples with grief, love, and the power of history.

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

My Review: As with most bestsellers, this story is pitched right down the middle. Take one old (straight, natch) couple facing end of life issues of varying but intense urgency. Add one young (straight, natch) couple facing relationship teething pains and life traumas. Connect them by geography in a place small enough to breed affinity through enforced proximity. Add a glaze of native cultural issues. Give the old woman an iPhone and have her repurpose Siri as a confidant for comic relief. Serve.

It's fine if this is dessert after a hearty substantial meal. This is presented as the meal. If these were the concluding chapters of a much longer book that dug into Kaj's relationship with his mother and dialed down the awkward obvious coincidence that's telegraphed early and often, and the roots of Mári's anguished love for Biera (though who wouldn't be mad for someone who thinks his wife "was generous with everything, including her dignity" when everyone else thinks she's a madwoman!), I'd be wadding up the Kleenex with the rest of y'all.

It's a debut novel, and as I've said many times I grade on a curve for debut novelists, or I'd be a lot less tactful in expressing my dissatisfaction. I now turn your attention to the marvelous, evocative writing. Particularly effective, probably even moreso in Swedish, is the evocation of Sámi culture...the indigenous folk of the Arctic are about as well-presented in Sweden as First Nations people are in Canada, and only Black people are presented worse than Native Americans in the US. Author Harnesk does not stint on her vocabulary. Menzies, our translator, has worked hard and successfully to render the tone of the original. I don't speak Swedish, but there's a feel, an aura around a really well-made work of prose that comes through in the very best translations. It came through here.

While understanding why this became a bestseller does not add to my desire to praise it, I predict all y'all would love the read if you gave it a try. The Fredrik Backman bus, the Shelby van Pelt posse, the Sally Hepworth squad, should bypass the library hold list and put your credit cards on the line. This book is aimed right at you. Any reader wanting a lingering look at love, grief, and a lifetime of being true to your lights finally being rewarded should get it from the library. Request it if you don't see it in the catalog.

It's built to make you feel the warm glow of goodness.

THE ENCHANTED LIFE OF ADAM HOPE is, in fact, enchanting

THE ENCHANTED LIFE OF ADAM HOPE: A Novel
RHONDA RILEY
Ecco Press
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope is an unconventional and passionately romantic love story that is as breathtaking and wondrous as The Time Traveler's Wife and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

During WWII, teenager Evelyn Roe is sent to manage the family farm in rural North Carolina, where she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier on their property. She rescues him, and it quickly becomes clear he is not a man...and not one of us. The rescued body recovers at an unnatural speed, and just as fast, Evelyn and Adam fall deeply in love. In The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, Rhonda Riley reveals the exhilarating, terrifying mystery inherent in all relationships: No matter how deeply we love someone, and no matter how much we will sacrifice for them, we can only know them so well...

My Review: The landscape of a life is common as pig-tracks. All the same milestones, either hit or missed, all the same parameters laid down by minor variations in genetic code, broadly indistinguishable. So why is it we're always so interested in others' lives? Why read novels about marriages that last or love affairs that sour or basements that exude more than the natural degree of fungal fetor?

Because solitude isn't loneliness, which isn't grief. All involve a person not having companions. All are intense emotional states. But they spring from causes not dissimilar with effects radically, wildly different from each other. Just like we, architects of or tenants in or travelers through out life's landscape, are intensely and inarguably different from each other.

Stories moves us through those landscapes at speed. The milestones are there, but rather than majestic sweeping mountain vistas seen while hiking, they're glimpsed from the highway while moving at speed. This is wonderful on many levels. We experience many different lives this way, fiction being a highway through the landscape of another's life; but it can lead to a jadedness and a sense of "been there, done that" as we whip past the wedding night, the first child, buying a house...read this how many times now?

So with this in mind, hear what I tell you now: Adam Hope and Evelyn Roe aren't the usual suspects. Adam comes to Evelyn in a wonderful and deeply beautiful metaphorical blaze. I won't spoil it for you, but it left me both amused and so touched and moved that I was always ready to well up at the oddest moments in the tale, remembering that first contact and putting the moments of a life against it.

And, in the final analysis, isn't that the thing one most often does not get and resents the absence of in a story? An ordinary, relatable life rendered truly and beautifully Other by a simple reorientation of one detail?

So hear me clearly. Understand my urgency in telling you this. Life feels bad and unfocused and unlivable and unlovable sometimes. The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope will, if you let it, shift your perception that bubble off true that makes rain into rainbows.

My favorite quote from the novel has all the strengths and all the weaknesses of the book in one place:

“Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.”