HYE-YOUNG PYUN'S PAGE: CITY OF ASH AND RED; THE HOLE; THE LAW OF LINES for #WITMonth

THE HOLE
HYE-YOUNG PYUN (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)
Arcade Publishing
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

DEADLINE ANNOUNCED A FILM IN THE WORKS! The team behind it is pretty much the most experienced and excellent one could ask for.

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award
Named One of the Top 10 Thrillers to Read This Summer by Time Magazine.

In this tense, gripping novel by a rising star of Korean literature, Oghi has woken from a coma after causing a devastating car accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed and badly disfigured. His caretaker is his mother-in-law, a widow grieving the loss of her only child. Oghi is neglected and left alone in his bed. His world shrinks to the room he lies in and his memories of his troubled relationship with his wife, a sensitive, intelligent woman who found all of her life goals thwarted except for one: cultivating the garden in front of their house. But soon Oghi notices his mother-in-law in the abandoned garden, uprooting what his wife had worked so hard to plant and obsessively digging larger and larger holes. When asked, she answers only that she is finishing what her daughter started.

A bestseller in Korea, award-winning author Hye-young Pyun's The Hole is a superbly crafted and deeply unnerving novel about the horrors of isolation and neglect in all of its banal and brutal forms. As Oghi desperately searches for a way to escape, he discovers the difficult truth about his wife and the toll their life together took on her.

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

My Review: First, read this:

It was difficult and exhausting, but he quickly accepted the fact that life had to go on without her. He’d lost love, and yet the world was not the slightest bit shaken by his loss. The part of his life that had had J in it went away, leaving behind a cavity, a hollow, and still the world was unmoved. Nothing would ever fill in that empty space. But Oghi’s world would keep on spinning regardless.
–and–
Oghi looked lovingly on his wife’s shallow vanity. She knew exactly what her goals were, and though she believed in them, she failed at nearly everything she set out to do. Yet she brushed off each failure, hardly any worse for the wear. Then quickly found herself a new role model and extolled their virtues ad nauseam. By doing so, she seemed to come to an understanding of the difference between longing and ambition.

Poor, crippled Oghi has survived a horrific car crash only to be confined to his head. He can barely communicate. He is cluaustrophobically trapped in a nightmare of dependence on others for his existence...a man accustomed to being the center of power in his own life and the delineator of Reality itself (he was a cartographer in his previous existence).

Ironic, that...as a mapmaker he relies on others to provide him data so he can graphically represent reality, yet he was completely and utterly uninterested in learning any single thing about his now-dead wife. I'd be surprised if he could describe her knees or fingers, things marital partners know very intimately about their spouse. He certainly took no trouble to learn a single thing about her wants and needs.

While this all sounds pretty tediously familiar to a generation raised on feminist screeds against the awfulness that is Man, it manages not to be the same old, same old by giving us enough of her thoughts by proxy. Oghi remembers things she said, or did; it's more than enough to reveal to the reader the depths of this man's appalling sense of entitlement to all his wife's energy and attention with no hint of reciprocation. As this is clearly something not reserved for his wife (his career success is clearly down to cheating and chicanery), we learn from his own memories he is that worst of all possible characters: the skilled manipulator of the feelings and needs of others, the sociopath.

This is a novella, so it won't eat your time making its effect on you any less powerful with foreshadowing. It's memorably, involvingly written and translated. It offers no moral uplift, or hint of redemption. Instead it breathes life into the very essence of its titular...object, subject, shape, space?...as well as, with its condign ending, gives us schadenfreude lovers of the world a huge chuckle.

The world’s oldest map, the Babylonian Map of the World, had a little circle bored through the center. Scholars explained that the hole had come from using a compass to trace the two outer rings of the map. Oghi was captivated more by that hole than by the geometric shapes engraved in the clay tablet, and had stared at it for a long time in the darkened exhibit room of the British Museum. That dark, narrow hole went as deep as the memory of an age that no one could ever return to. The only way to reach that lost age was through that hole, but the hole itself could never be reached.

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CITY OF ASH AND RED
HYE-YOUNG PYUN (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)
Arcade Publishing
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: NAMED AN NPR GREAT READ OF 2018

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.

But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man’s loss of himself and his humanity.

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

My Review: First, read this:

...the health inspector placed the thermometer directly against the man's right ear. An electric hum buzzed in his ear like an alarm. He barked out a loud cough as if in response to the sound, and the health inspector jumped back.

The inspections were due to the recent outbreak. An illness had been spreading fast, from country zero to most of the rest of the world, like fire jumping from roof to roof. No one knew exactly how it was spreading, treatment was still in the developmental stages, infection rates were high, and there was talk of a growing feud among countries to secure the limited supply of vaccines. And yet, luckily, there'd been few fatalities so far. The man figured the news back home was right: no matter how strong the virus was, he had nothing to worry about as long as he kept his hands clean.

This isn't going to hit the same way in 2023 as it did in 2018.

The unnervingly prescient pandemic thing aside, the story rings its tocsins of warning louder about the hazards of global totalitarianism turned up to eleven in a world with Modi, Xi, and Kim sharing a continent...not to mention Putin squatting just to their north.

Again, setting the essential-to-the-story geopolitics aside, the truly horrifying and visceral descriptions of the unnamed exterminator's environment during his quarantine (presaged in the above quote) and subsequent descent-cum-escape into the utter devastation and foulness of the literal, as well as figurative, underworld beneath the foreign city (whose language he can't speak) that his bosses have sent him to to ply his exterminator's trade are intensely and economically presented. There is no wasted veriage in this book.

There is also no memorable character. The two have always seemed to me to go hand-in-hand. In many ways this is intentional...no one in a totalitarian state should stand out as a memorable individual, or else...but it ended up feeling to my readerly sensibilities a bit foreshortened, lacking in explorable depth.

Accepting that this is almost certainly intentional and not a lack of ability (see The Hole below), I had to acknowledge the intended effect of alienation was simply not to my taste and rate the read a full four stars.

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THE LAW OF LINES
HYE-YOUNG PYUN (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)
Arcade Publishing
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of several of Korea's top literary awards, The Law of Lines follows the parallel stories of two young women whose lives are upended by sudden loss. When Se-oh, a recluse still living with her father, returns from an errand to find their house in flames, wrecked by a gas explosion, she is forced back into the world she had tried to escape. The detective investigating the incident tells her that her father caused the explosion to kill himself because of overwhelming debt she knew nothing about, but Se-oh suspects foul play by an aggressive debt collector and sets out on her own investigation, seeking vengeance.

Ki-jeong, a beleaguered high school teacher, receives a phone call that the body of her younger half-sister has just been found. Her sister was a college student she had grown distant from. Though her death, by drowning, is considered a suicide by the police, that doesn't satisfy Ki-jeong, and she goes to her sister's university to find out what happened. Her sister's cell phone reveals a thicket of lies and links to a company that lures students into a virtual pyramid scheme, preying on them and their relationships. One of the contacts in the call log is Se-oh.

Like Hye-young Pyun's Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel The Hole, an immersive thriller that explores the edges of criminality, the unseen forces in our most intimate lives, and grief and debt.

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

My Review: First, read this:

When does evil intent become evil itself? Is it evil simply to imagine and harbor an idea? Does it begin when a thought is put into action? And if that action fails, then did evil never exist to begin with? If indeed there was no evil, then is it okay to allow bad intentions to make you change your behavior, move to a new place, change your lifestyle? Does that mean that evil thoughts are no worse than a daydream, a mere fantasy? Even fantasies and daydreams can sometimes alter reality.
–and–
There'd been good, and there'd been bad. That was all. At the time, she'd thought that all of it was bad. Because happiness had flitted on by while bad things had a way of lingering.
–and–
She'd felt the unfamiliar thrill that comes only when you amplify your malice.

Nothing in life ever prepares us for the rude awkakening to our utter insignificance and unimportance to others. The day someone, known to us or not, acts in a way that utterly changes our world and not for the better, for no reason that has anything to do with us, our needs or wants or just deserts, is hideously and often disfiguringly painful:

Those sounds and sentences were lost to her now. His unconditional love, his wordless yet tender gaze, his steely look of fatherly responsibility. All gone. They were each different, but to her they were all synonyms for a father.
–and–
The future was a dark corridor. And though she would grope her way through it, the door at the end would be locked tight.
–and–
The whole time she had stayed locked up at home, she had imagined the outside world as a place that could swallow her whole at any moment. But in truth, it was a place that paid her no attention at all.

The pain of changing from innocent to worldly is not to be underestimated. It is the primary driver of the action in this story of two women, disadvantaged by the mere fact of their sex, coming to terms with the knowledge that they are tiny, worthless objects in a world that belongs to venal, cruel, or simply indifferent men. The horrifyingly sadistic way poor people are treated and thought of (when they even are) rang exactly true to me after my experiences living as a poor person in Texas.

Both women set out to answer questions about their fresh life-losses because it's completely clear no one else will bother. Both women become entangled in the horrifying world of endless indebtedness that is many, many people's downfall, and was proximately responsible for their losses. The Dantean underworld of edging-on-illegal, all-the-way immoral collection tactics presented here should open some privilieged people's eyes.

Bleak and dark and unhappy as the story is, the reason it is worth reading is both the light it shines on live not like one's own, and the trademark incisivenss of the author's observations of people and places. Some of the darker characters do, unfortunately, veer into mustachio-twirling villainy. Hence that missing half-star. There are several predictable set-ups for the women to fall into. These aren't constantly appearing, or I'd be a lot harder on the work than I am. They're undeniably there, and I couldn't imagine that these characters were really THAT foolish so as to fall into them.

The end of the read, however, left me with the certainty that this is a book saying things I really want people to hear. The last word, then, is:

People don’t end up poor because they’re stupid. They end up poor because the system is fucked.

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The Owl Cries by Hye-Young Pyun and translated by Sora Kim-Russell is available now.
The Publisher Says: From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a slow-burning noir thriller with a touch of horror and the uncanny.

A lawyer asking questions. A disappearance. And a vast forest in the mountains—the western woods—where the trees huddle close together, emanating a crushing darkness, while a chill dampness fills the air. The forester, Bak Insu, is a recovering alcoholic. He claims no knowledge of the man who disappeared, even though the missing man had worked as a forester just before him. In the little village down the mountain, the shopkeepers will do the same and deny they ever saw or knew the man, though they’re less convincing, and his former supervisor at the forestry institute, Mr. Jin, dismisses his importance. But when an accident and a death derail the investigation and someone attempts to break into his office, Bak Insu finds himself conducting his own inquiry into the goings-on deep in the heart of the western woods—spurred by the mysterious words he discovers on a piece of paper in his desk drawer: “The owl lives in the forest.”

The Owl Cries is a treat for fans of Stephen King, David Lynch, and the nightmare dystopias of Franz Kafka.
Read my review here!

A CRIME OF SECRETS (A Donner & Longstreet Mystery #1) lesbian-led Gilded Age New York series you need to read

A CRIME OF SECRETS (A Donner & Longstreet Mystery #1)
ANN APTAKER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: New York City, 1899.

A city on the cusp of a new century. A city growing taller, faster, a city of new inventions, new ideas—and old dangers on its shadowy streets where crime, misery, and murder lurk.

When Pauline Godfrey, a young woman embodying the coming modern age, is viciously murdered, her throat cut, private inquiry agents Finola “Fin” Donner and Devorah Longstreet must navigate a world of violence and passion, lust and betrayal, where duty is twisted into bitter obedience and love is soiled.

Fin, a tough survivor of the dockside slums, and her beloved companion, the elegant, intellectual socialite Devorah, probe deep into the festering secrets of a family, the rot and corruption of the police department, and the sinister world of the city’s thieves, whores, and thugs to find the killer.

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

My Review: Sapphic sleuths in Gilded Age Manhattan? ANN APTAKER penned?! Sign me right the *bleep* up! Do I particularly care whose murder this concerns? Nope! I want the pleasure of watching as Author Aptaker upends the worldview of the hoi polloi with two people who decline to participate in their tedious little black-or-white, top-or-bottom nuanceless tosh.

That, comme d'habitude, she does. *happy sigh*

A new historical fiction crime series is always a welcome development for me.I like the QUILTBAG worlds that they inhabit to come back alive and crack the false front of heteronormative society's homogeneity without our homosexuality into flinders. Author Aptaker has done this before with the Cantor Gold Crimes series in New York's pre-Stonewall art world. They're refreshingly nonconformist and still part of the long mystery novel tradition of upholding ma'at.

I don't use "law and order" here, because cruel, immoral laws are passed daily all over the world, and vicious repressive order maintained by the small-souled pursey-lipped fear-driven fools that abound in every single time period of human history. Ma'at means something altogether more agreeable to me (and I suspect to most others): The rightness and fitness of things in the world; the always joyous sense of your world running well. Ma'at herself is the center of the Afterlife as the one who weighs the dead person's heart against her feather; if the heart is heavier than the feather, that person is utterly expunged; is prevented thereby from participating in an eternal existence of harmony and pleasure. I wonder often how many righteous crusaders for Truth God and Justice will pass this test....

Certainly the outwardly, conformally Proper and Good Citizens in this story won't. How this series will take that inner-vs-outer duality ball and run with it is set up with clarity and simplicity in the choice of main charcters. Fin and Dev are from wildly different milieux, one a rough-and-tumble survivor of the wild and violent streets and the other a Lady of Quality. Very much like Nick and Nora, Author Aptaker's couple are beautifully suited in ways they continue to discover as their time together expands and their experience of each other's kindness and blindness deepens. In this initial outing, the glossy surfaces are just not quite ever matched by smooth underpinnings. Rough exteriors can, and most likely will, smooth out. Long-unquestioned shibboleths fall, leaving no thick coatings of dust just light blurrings of their outlines. It's a gift to be allowed to see a character's growth instead of meeting them fully formed here in the first book. Well chosen, Author Aptaker!

The web of lies and vileness that Fin and Dev unravel in 1899 Manhattan is nothing if not relevant to today's world where misery is considered the proper condition of the poor, the disabled, the Other. The horrible perpetuators of that misery appall and offend these upright people, who subscribe to the ma'at I described above. The fact that they come at it from very different starting points gives rise to some of the most relatable conflicts in the story: Dev feels, for example, the ugly gnaw of jealousy; Fin the hollowness of insecurity. These being inevitable in any long-term relationship, it's good to see them here, and see them seen off by the women...together.

What I most needed on a hot July weekend when going outside was, for multiple reasons, not a great idea. It kept me engaged in, interested by, rooting for, our ma'at-maintaining duo. There's not a lot stronger recommendation I can give you.

July 2023's Burgoine Reviews & 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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THE BITTER PAST by BRUCE BORGOS

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the tradition of Craig Johnson and C. J. Box, Bruce Borgos's The Bitter Past begins a compelling series set in the high desert of Nevada featuring Sheriff Porter Beck…

Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas. Born and raised there, he left to join the Army, where he worked in Intelligence, deep in the shadows in far off places. Now he's back home, doing the same lawman's job his father once did, before his father started to develop dementia. All is relatively quiet in this corner of the world, until an old, retired FBI agent is found killed. He was brutally tortured before he was killed and clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age. If that wasn't strange enough, a current FBI agent shows up to help Beck's investigation.

In a case that unfolds in the past (the 1950s) and the present, it seems that a Russian spy infiltrated the nuclear testing site and now someone is looking for that long-ago, all-but forgotten person, who holds the key to what happened then and to the deadly goings on now.

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

CW: torture, misogyny
My Review: Lots of names to keep track of, a shifting timeline, point-of-view changes...there are things to work at in this read, as well as a graphic account of torture and aftermath. They are all necessary, not just stylistic choices.

What I liked the best about the read was the melding of police procedural in the present with espionage thriller in the past told with a good leavening of snark. This is a read that agreed with my desire to be involved in a story not just a passenger on a train to a known destination. The publisher's comparisons to C.J. Box and Craig Johnson are apt. I'm a sucker for a series set in a place I don't want to go, and that included all deserts...especially irradiated ones! I could *feel* the dryness as I read along.

I found the polygamous-Mormons subplot to be tacked-on and found it contributed nothing to my experience of the read.

Available in hardcover and ebook now from Minotaur Books.

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The Decagon House Murders (House Murders, #1) by Yukito Ayatsuji (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The lonely, rockbound island of Tsunojima is notorious as the site of a series of bloody unsolved murders. Some even say it’s haunted. One thing’s for sure: it’s the perfect destination for the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip.

But when the first club member turns up dead, the remaining amateur sleuths realise they will need all of their murder-mystery expertise to get off the island alive.

As the party are picked off one by one, the survivors grow desperate and paranoid, turning on each other. Will anyone be able to untangle the murderer’s fiendish plan before it’s too late?

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

My Review: It's And Then There Were None with a Japanese accent. It works the same way, it has the same strengths (puzzles are fun!) and weaknesses (set-up is improbable in the extreme). This iteration is satisfying to me in that it doesn't ignore the conventions as does make use of its own vernacular. The translator chose, for example, not to switch family names and personal names around to suit western usage. I like that, others won't, so be aware of the fact.

The prose, as translated, is a bit flat. The world the tale takes place in is largely nuanceless, so it feels like it's a kabuki performance in front of scenery instead of an equally artificial film set where volumes flicker in front of our eyes fast enough to fool them into thinking they're real. That's not a flaw to me, but it does obtrude when I try to find an emotional resonance to the killings. Maybe that's a good thing? Whatever it is, good or bad, it's a choice that left me without a fourth-star's worth of involvement.

Satisfying read, though not in the ordinary ways of series mysteries. I will, however, read them as Pushkin Vertigo publishes them.

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The Mill House Murders (House Murders, #2) by Yukito Ayatsuji (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident. This year, however, the visit is disrupted by an impossible disappearance, the theft of a painting and a series of baffling murders.

The brilliant Kiyoshi Shimada arrives to investigate. But will he uncover the truth, and will you be able to solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders before he does?

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

My Review: Another more-than-competent hommage à Dame Agatha. This one, though, is much, much more dependent on you to pay careful attention to the dramatis personae on page 11. And pay close attention to the times on chapter opening pages! Most Anglophone readers aren't going to parse the Japanse names with the ease of those culturally familiar to us, so bookmark that page and save yourself confusion.

Enjoying, or even solving, the puzzle set before us is very dependent on you keeping track of dual timelines, and since all the same characters appear in both, this can be a challenge. It was my mistake to read this book so soon after the first one, The Decagon House Murders...it reinforced my opinion of the prose as flat to my more western reading-ear as the stage-sets of Japanese theater. The ending of this entry in the ongoing series is, peculiar though it sounds in light of my comments about the prose, melodramatic. Delightfully so, I hasten to add. Made me smile and even lift my hand in a fond salute. After a gap, I will certainly read more of these Pushkin Vertigo-published pleasures.

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A Stranger Here Below (Gideon Stoltz #1) by Charles Fergus

Rating: 3.5 of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of C.J. Box's Joe Pickett series, a fabulous historical mystery series set in early America.

“Deeply imagined and intricately plotted, A Stranger Here Below marries richly textured historical fiction with the urgency of a mystery novel. Fergus knows certain things, deep in the horses, hunting, the folkways of rural places, and he weaves this wisdom into a stirring tale.” – Geraldine Brooks, author of March and People of the Book

Set in 1835 in the Pennsylvania town of Adamant, Fergus’s first novel in a new mystery series introduces Sheriff Gideon Stoltz, who, as a young deputy, is thrust into his position by the death of the previous sheriff. Gideon faces his first real challenge as death rocks the small town again when the respected judge Hiram Biddle commits suicide. No one is more distraught than Gideon, whom the old judge had befriended as a mentor and hunting partner. Gideon is regarded with suspicion as an he’s new to town, and Pennsylvania Dutch in the back-country Scotch-Irish settlement. And he found the judge’s body.

Making things even tougher is the way the judge’s death stirs up vivid memories of Gideon’s mother’s murder, the trauma that drove him west from his home in the settled Dutch country of eastern Pennsylvania. He had also discovered her body.

At first Gideon simply wants to learn why Judge Biddle killed himself. But as he finds out more about the judge’s past, he realizes that his friend's suicide was spurred by much more than the man’s despair. Gideon’s quest soon becomes more complex as it takes him down a dangerous path into the past.

A Stranger Here Below is so atmospheric, so compelling and convincing, that readers will taste the grit of the dirt roads, cringe at the unsanitary conditions and medical superstitions that inflame a flu epidemic, and marvel at the immensely arduous task of carrying out an investigation using the primitive tools of the early 1800s. Fergus leaves us breathlessly waiting for the next Gideon Stoltz mystery.

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

My Review: Sometimes someone dies who just needed killin'. As this very deliberately paced mystery unfolds, that's the victim. I wasn't sorry he was dead, and was a little peevish about Gideon caring so much as to keep pursuing the matter. Well, anyway, if you're in the mood for a really atmospheric historical read, here's a very good candidate.

The blurb from Geraldine Brooks should tell her fans what they need to know: It's very immersive and has three-dimensional characters. I don't rate it higher because it was slow to get moving and occasionally wandered off down interesting but unnecessary tangents. I will, however, read the next one when Skyhorse Publishing brings it out.

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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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PEARL RULED @ 13%

An Improbable Pairing by Gary Dickson

I gave up when, a the end of chapter ten, I read this:

Was there room enough in Scott's life for Geneva's pleasues and scholarly pursuits? Though it might tale a while, he was confident he'd find the right balance between his newfound friends, social diversions, and schoolwork.

His editor needs to be sent back to school. That is a wodge of stodge that couldn't possibly be a worse way to end a chapter...it kills any sense of momentum, debilitates any emotional investment in the character, and, if it's absolutely crucial to the plot later, would've been better phrased as a letter home. It's believable as a twentysomething naïf's epistle to his worried Mama but dear GAWD not as a third-person omniscient narrator's voice!

As the book's now out of print, I guess I am not the only one who thought so.

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PEARL RULED @ 49%

Offerings: A Novel by Michael ByungJu Kim

Rating: A very generous, probably unwarranted 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The national bestseller that Gary Shteyngart has called, "A potent combination of a financial thriller and a coming-of-age immigrant tale. . . . Offerings is a great book."

With the rapidly cascading Asian Financial Crisis threatening to go global and Korea in imminent meltdown, investment banker Dae Joon finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default. For Dae Joon—also known by his American name of Shane, after the cowboy movie his father so loved—the stakes are personal.

Raised in the US and Harvard Business School–educated, Dae Joon is a jangnam, a firstborn son, bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. But rather than pursue the path his scholar-father wanted, he has sought a career on Wall Street, at the epicenter of power in the American empire. Now, as he and his fellow bankers work feverishly with Korean officials to execute a sovereign bond offering to raise badly needed capital, he knows that his own father is living on borrowed time, in the last stages of a disease that is the family curse. A young woman he has met is quietly showing the way to a different future. And when his closest friend from business school, a scion of one of Korea's biggest chaebol, asks his help in a sale that may save the conglomerate but also salvage a legacy of corruption, he finds himself in personal crisis, torn by dueling loyalties, his identity tested.

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

My Review: When, oh when! will I learn from my own oft-repeated lessons?! IF SOMEONE WHOSE WRITING YOU HATE BLURBS A BOOK, AVOID IT.

At the end of chapter 15, almost halfway through the book, I encountered what was for me the last straw...an extended metaphor of submission to authority in order always to be protected from the hideous dangers of your baser nature, and simultaneously a warning that the most comfortable illusions mask a genuinely threatening reality, in the form of a Korean folktale about a fox-spirit mother guarding her son.

It might work better for you than it did me, because the writing is...competent-plus...and has descriptive passages of some charm; Arcade Publishing is offering it and doing okay with it. I wasn't sufficiently invested to keep going after that smack upside my li'l punkin haid.

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PEARL RULED @ 42%

Sucker Punch: Getting Killed Can Be The Least of Your Problems by Jim Carroll

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: Johnny Mack wanted to be an airline pilot who flew all over the world, made great money and met lots of girls. At 18 that seemed like a fair trade for a few years in the Army.

Johnny found out too late that in 1971 the Army only needed helicopter pilots. And they only needed them in Vietnam.

After an unfortunate incident involving a General’s daughter, Johnny ‘volunteers’ to go undercover on a Medevac crew suspected of selling Army medicines to the enemy.

Johnny’s control officer’s incompetence is deadlier than any enemy. Johnny’s crew are psychopathic pirates.

Then there is the regular job. Coming into hot landing zones. Loading the dead and wounded. Ignoring the screaming and thrashing about in the back. Holding the helicopter steady as bullets rip through the bird. Cleaning out the blood and gore as part of the regular post flight.

There is no one to trust. Death is coming from every direction.

As life spirals out of his control, Johnny realizes that getting killed may be the least of his problems. His sanity, his soul and everything that he believes himself to be, are in as much danger as his life.

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

My Review: A double-agent black-market-busting thriller in Vietnam by the author of The Basketball Diaries? Sign me up!, said my twentysomething avatar within.

I'm sixty-three, and the outer me trudged through horny-straight-boy stuff until he was ready to scream; then, at the end of chapter 23, the final blow to my youthful avatar was struck: "We'd never been called by the Ghost 4 call sign either. Everybody else just called for a Dustoff."

Absent a lot more typing, I can't give you the whole context for that, but it was too much of the same kind of Army-speak in too little space for my tolerance. Which, I think I mentioned was already over-stretched by horny-straight-boy boob-obsessed boringness.

I had the thought, as I read along, that Waino Mellas of six-stars-of-five must-read Matterhorn fame, never once gave me this kind of eyerolling impatience. It seems not to be the subject matter, then, but the execution I'm not responding well to.

BROUGHT TO BOOK, first of ten very, very cozy English-village mysteries

BROUGHT TO BOOK (Rona Parish #1)
ANTHEA FRASER
Severn House
$6.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Rona Parish is asked to write the biography of an acclaimed thriller writer who drowned in unusual circumstances, is she diving into danger?

Biographer Rona Parish is exhausted after finishing her latest project on Arthur Conan Doyle, but her hope for a break between jobs is dashed when the wife of late bestselling thriller writer, Theo Harvey, asks her to write his biography.

Theo Harvey drowned mysteriously six months ago. No one knows why . . .

Theo’s inexplicable death six months ago left many unanswered questions. Why did he retreat from the limelight six years ago, only to reappear three years later and produce two outstanding, if much darker, novels? And what is the truth behind his mysterious drowning? Rona Parish is determined to uncover the truth behind his death, but at what cost?

Intrigued, and with her golden retriever Gus by her side, Rona starts to piece together the author’s life. But someone doesn’t want her to uncover Theo’s secrets. And they’ll go to any lengths to make sure they stay hidden . . .

A page-turning cosy mystery set in the fictional English market town of Marsborough in the stunning Chiltern Hills.

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

My Review: First published twenty years ago, this supremely cozy, very definitely page-turning first-in-series mystery introduces a biographer sleuth...first time I've run into that one!...with a happily unconventional home life, a tidy income from her main career, and a bottomless well of curiosity. It felt to me like a story, and is told in a style, from sixty years ago.

I do not intend an insult with this statement of an observation.

Gender politics will derail any discussion of why I personally find myself squicked out by stalkery behavior. The cultural conversation about this behavior was only just getting started back then, so I can't really point a shaming finger at it; just something I myownself find unpleasant to read. This book, like some of the ones we labeled "romantic" many decades ago, valorizes some things I characterize as really stalkery behavior. That's a very big nope from me. I get it, in the sense that, at a point near the end of the story, the plot really needed something to happen at precisely that juncture. Why the other something that was in already set in motion by a different character and was, in fact, in progress and that occurs with near simultaneity wasn't enough for the author only she knows. A choice she made that I was appalled by, and it really caused me to reassess the prior appearances of the stalkery character in a much less flattering (to the author) light.

A trope that just won't die is the villain infodump. There is one of these at the end. I really rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain as the guilty party settles in for a cozy chat with people whose murders are essential to the sociopath's happy getaway. The sociopaths I've known wouldn't be that careless. This is, from their point of view, a necessary act not to be lingered over because the risk to them getting away with their awful decision decrease with every delay or diversion from its accomplishment. I've never known a stupid sociopath.

The age of the story shows in multiple ways, eg the fact that Rona goes to her publisher's office and hands him an envelope with a printed version of an article she's submitting. Wow, does that take me back...no one even five years later would conceptualize this as a possibility! It's actually a bit wistfully charming. It dates events, but that's not necessarily bad...just a passing note for informative purposes.

The series character's world is most charmingly set up, and I would absolutely love to live in that village. I would be seriously surprised if a revelation that genuinely shocked me regarding Rona's twin wasn't going to loom large in a future installment. The changing technology of the day wasn't ignored, because Rona does look up the subject of her proposed biography on the Internet (still capitalized back then) and discusses what she's found with the subject's widow. Rona also notes the biography subject's lack of a computer to the widow. So it became even more odd in my eyes that she submitted her article on paper.

There is an instance of an animal being harmed, but it is set up so that the event, while bad, doesn't kill the animal in question. It is used, I felt, gratuitously, though it's later revealed to have been the last straw for the one committing the harmful act. It fell short of my slam-the-book-shut threshold because it's clear there's not going to be fatal outcome very soon after it occurs.

What I most want to convey to you is how high my hopes were set up, and then to be let down by the issues I've detailed above was a deep disappointment. There was every reason to think I'd found a ten-book series that's clearly complete (the most recent was published in 2017) to dive into.

Unfortunately that's not to be. I don't care to risk my own money on books that bid fair to repeat these kinds of unwelcome to me tropes.

Sandhamn Murders series 7 & 8

DOUGLAS SKELTON's Rebecca Connolly series: THUNDER BAY, THE BLOOD IS STILL, A RATTLE OF BONES

THUNDER BAY (Rebecca Connolly #1)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Stoirm’s secrets are worth killing for in this gripping thriller for readers of All the Missing Girls and Neon Prey.

When reporter Rebecca Connolly gets a tip that suspected murderer Roddie Drummond will be returning to the island of Stoirm, she smells a story. Though never convicted in the death of his girlfriend Mhairi fifteen years earlier, Drummond is still guilty in the eyes of many islanders, and his return for his mother’s funeral is sure to stir up old resentments, hatreds, possibly even violence. Rebecca has another reason for going to Stoirm. Her own father came from there, but he never went back, and he always refused to speak of it or say what drove him away.

Defying her editor, Rebecca joins forces with local photographer Chazz Wymark to dig into the mystery surrounding Mhairi's death and her unexplained last words, “Thunder Bay”—the secluded spot on the west coast of the island where, according to local lore, the souls of the dead set off into the afterlife. When a string of violent events erupts across the island, Rebecca discovers the power of secrets, and she must decide what to bury, and what to bring into the light.

Longlisted for Bloody Scotland's McIlvanney Prize for best crime book of the year.

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

My Review: Journalists make great sleuths for a series because asking questions and poking into stuff others would prefer to leave alone is literally their job description. They're also, by training, very, very sensitive to being lied to and misdirected. Plus the police know they really need what journalists have...the public's attention...so they tend to understand that cooperation is the best way forward if both sides are to get what they want and need.

This series opener relies on an investigative journalist, Rebecca Connolly, ignoring her editor's instructions to leave a juicy story about a past crime alone. A murder happens, the perp...in everyone's eyes a guilty man...fled his little gossipy island community after the Scottish verdict is handed down (loosely translatable as "not guilty but don't do it again"), leaving all islanders convnced that he absolutely murdered the beautiful, popular girl he was living with. Now, fifteen years later, he's back. Things on the island are changing, luxury vacation destination development is being proposed, opposed, and debated, and here's Roddie coming home to a place that emphatically does not want him.

What unfolds is a corking raking-up of old secrets, including some from Rebecca's family that's from this island. There is an expected amount of anti-social behavior, mostly in the past, but the homophobia and domestic violence here could offend a sensitive reader. It isn't prurient in its use but it is present and neither downlayed nor valorized. Your personal thresholds for this kind of action should be your guide in picking the book up.

The very best thing about this story is the intensity of place in it...the island, the islanders, the outsider (Rebecca) come to stir things up and ask questions about her own family connection to the place...all vividly described and strategically deployed to lure the reader in and cause the readerly radar to see false images and think they're facts. This requires Author Skelton to deploy an unweildy cast of characters and to require the undivided attention of his reader. The late Connolly père backstory, and its deep-past relationship to the story told here, felt like that one-too-manyeth bite of pecan pie with whipped cream...so tasty but just should've stayed on the plate because now it's all a wee bit much. The rhetorical palate-cleansing swig of coffee that is Rebecca's full comprehension of her father's reason for being so closemouthed about his youth on the island wasn't quite enough to keep the fifth star on this stellar debut effort. The big reveal of it was, to be honest, anti-climactic to me because I thought "...really...? this is what you were traumatized by, with all the other stuff going on?"

So, not a perfect read but, as a series-starter, darn good entertainment. Worth your eyeblinks and your gold.

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THE BLOOD IS STILL (Rebecca Connolly #2)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Investigative journalist Rebecca Connolly returns in this riveting, immersive thriller from the author of Thunder Bay—for readers of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina

When a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is found dead on the site of the Battle of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie led his forces to a rout seared into Scottish memory, Rebecca Connolly takes up the case for the Chronicle. A controversial film about the rebellion and battle is being shot nearby, and it has drawn the ire of the right-wing nationalist movement Spirit of the Gael. Is there some link between the murder—the weapon used to impale the man leaves no doubt it was murder—and Spirit of the Gael or the shadowy militant group New Dawn, thought to be associated with them?

Meanwhile, in the working-class part of town, Rebecca's assignment to cover a protest against the placement of a convicted child molester into the community leads her to Mo Burke, the unlikely protest leader. Mo is a formidable woman, but she is also the matriarch of a known crime family and usually prefers to shun the spotlight. What has drawn her out? And what of her two grown sons, who share in the family business? The older one, Nolan, with Ben Affleck good looks, is clearly intrigued by Rebecca, as she is by him, despite her better instincts to steer clear of their dangerous, violent world.

And then another body is found, this one wearing the Redcoat uniform of the victorious British army.

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

My Review: There's a theme developing here...huge casts of characters, this time with lots of Scots Gaelic spellings for many things, people, organizations. Rebecca, our sleuth, stumbles into another community buzzsaw as she covers the protests against a convicted pedophile being housed in a working-class neighborhood that happens to be the turf of a crime family...in its most literal sense. The matriarch, Mo, is an understandably publicity-shy person. She has broken her public silence to lead the protests against the pedophile's housing among her people. Add in a right-wing politico out to woo voters to his vile cause by stoking paranoia (*sigh* in Scotland, too?) to a terrorist organization sowing fear and distrust plus a major motion picture using the touchy site of the Battle of Culloden and we're away!

The narratives are as expected loaded with wonderfully observed and described moments, people, emotions, and places. Possibly a bit harder to take in with equanimity are the anonymous narratives of a survivor of sexual assault. I was put off by them, but as the ending unfolded, I understood why Author Skelton made that particular choice. Be aware that it exists in the narrative, but also that it serves a plot purpose beyond prurience.

Journalism is undergoing a lot of changes in the internet age. Rebecca's job is, she feels, unstable because there have been some executive ownership shifts at her paper. What that means for her future is, clearly, to be determined...along with her interesting taste for local crime-family man Nolan. His mother, redoubtable Mo, isn't at all pleased with her son because he's done with crime and because he's been clear with her that he's not going to back away from fascinating, exciting Rebecca. This conflict is very clearly going to cost all concerned a lot of tears, stress, and heartache. *eager hand-rubbing*

The deaths at Culloden and the ugly truths undergirding their choice of methods and victims are part and parcel of the changes Brexit and the forces underlying it have revealed in Scottish society. The passions that nationalism, or I suppose tribalism is closer to the meaning I want, evokes in people are never more blatant than when History puts on her Mythmaking apron and brews up social poisons of stunning strength. What Author Skelton does with this, as with Mo and her criminal family, is scrape off the filthy film of facile propagandizing (he reserves that for Finbar the politico) for a clear-sighted look at why people adhere to often deeply destructive Causes and ideals. Means are never separable from ends. Ends are never separable from needs. Needs dictate the means at one's disposal. Round and round we go, where we'll stop nobody knows...even up to the moment that death results from in/actions that seem perfectly reasonable on their face.

There's a truly terrible sacrifice demanded by Justice, of course, and it strains everything in Rebecca's journalistic world, as well as in her emotional core. The journalist's liaision she of necessity maintains with the police is costing her dearly, and won't stop in the future. Her enemies have chosen her, as she would prefer not to make enemies at all. But that's what makes the complexity and enmeshment of the reader's intellect in the casuistries Rebecca must purvey, or puncture, or both in turn, so worth the effort.

You won't be surprised that I can't give five stars to a series mystery, given the nature of the beast is to scratch the ma'at rash that murder represents erupting on the body politic. Treading the same ground comes with costs. One of them is breaking new ground, so this four-and-a-half star read is as close to five as I myownself feel I can come.

I will say that the ending is both condign and very sad. It sets us up for some dark future probabilities and honestly I can't wait to see them.

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A RATTLE OF BONES (Rebecca Connolly #3)
DOUGLAS SKELTON
Arcade CrimeWise
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1752, Seamus a’Ghlynne, James of the Glen, was executed for the murder of government man Colin Campbell. He was almost certainly innocent.

When banners are placed at his gravesite claiming that his namesake, James Stewart, is innocent of murder, reporter Rebecca Connolly smells a story. The young Stewart has been in prison for ten years for the brutal murder of his lover, lawyer and politician Murdo Maxwell, in his Appin home. Rebecca soon discovers that Maxwell believed he was being followed prior to his murder and his phones were tapped.

Why is a Glasgow crime boss so interested in the case? As Rebecca keeps digging, she finds herself in the sights of Inverness crime matriarch Mo Burke, who wants payback for the damage caused to her family in a previous case.

Set against the stunning backdrop of the Scottish Highlands, A Rattle of Bones is a tale of injustice and mystery, and the echo of the past in the present.

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

My Review: First, read this:

              Near Ballachulish, the Scottish Highlands, 1755
The red-coated soldier was a bloodstain against the dull sky and drab scrub on the hill.

It had a name, this desolate lump above the waters, a heathenish Scotch concotion of sounds, but he was damned if he could pronounce it. To him it was little more than a pox-ridden mound of dirt that drew the elements like a hedge whore did corn-faced beard-splitters.

The waters of the lake shivered as chill breeze weaved its way up the hill to find his solitary figure standing post. Private Henry Greenway huddled deeper into his coat, watching the small ferry being rowed across the narrows. He wished he was in his billet, a cup of hot grog in one hand and a mutton pie, warm from the oven, in the other. This was a pointless duty, a punishment for not taking proper care of the Brown Bess he now crooked loosely in one arm. His sergeant would be displeased to see him cradle the gun so carelessly, except there was no one here to bear witness, except the blasted elements and the one he guarded, who was beyond caring, Greenway wagered.

There's no question that scene sets a very clear tone...and it's one that very much resonates through this third entry in the Rebecca Connolly thriller series.

With the new life she lucked into at the end of book two lurching into gear, Rebecca Connolly can truly feel the cold truth of freedom on her neck: No one can say no but no one needs to answer her questions, or give her leads, or so much as consider offering her the chance to do what she most wants to do: fix stuff.

She's got to build her reputation all over again, in a new and different world of newsgathering, and she loves it. When Rebecca's last adventure ended in so much loss, yet so much opportunity being spread before her, this story is the one that unfolds to her horrified fascination. James Stewart, Tanist of Clan Stewart and a wrongfully convicted victim of judicial murder, has a strong resonance with an imprisoned modern-day James Stewart convicted of murdering his politician lover...though to be honest there's pretty much no sensible motive (at least to my mind) for him to have done so, and he insists that he didn't, just as the eighteenth-century James did. Because I am indifferent to spoilers, I wikied up the long-ago story and spent the rest of the book looking for the ways the current story resonated with it. Rebecca, not having my information, gets involved in this fearsomely complex muddle blind to these clues. This situation is, unsurprisingly, one that draws in her old foes from the last book. It was handled in what I found to be a plausible way.

The main character is one I love spending time with, and love sharing troubles with. This outing into the world of crusading journalism is as deeply satisfying as before. Rebecca has a difficult group of folks whose involvement in her current investigative project is central...the mother of a jailed innocent, for example, has every reason not to respond positively to a journalist...but no access to an established powerbase to give her an effective lever to prise open their minds. All she's got is her tenacity and her inability to admit defeat.

These qualities work wonders. They usually do. Afua, the mother of the present-day innocent James Stewart, is a vividly drawn rageball, betrayed and abused by those with power over her and her son's fate. She's inflexible...it's cost her a lot, but when you have no one to turn to you need to be strong...and she's got a mother's outrage at her child's ill treatment fueling her. Watching as she learns to tolerate Rebecca's "interference" in her own chaotic efforts to free her James was frustrating for me. Stiff-necked inflexible people are maddening!

What makes The story satisfying to read is the usual tension between a homophobic culture and the reality of the ease with which anyone Othered can be used to hide real criminals on the one hand, and Author Skelton's clear and unwavering presentation of these gay people as ordinary, average people. It's distressing but refreshing to see the sexual nature of the characters simply be a fact, and only the bad actors and evildoers investing in their Othering for the lowest of motives.

Literally everything about these reads is immersive...landscapes, relationships among the characters, the background concerns of twenty-first century Scotland and of news media outside major cities and underneathe international radar, which is of course where all of us live our real lives. They're present and they're intentional but they aren't competing for your readerly attention. Author Skelton makes the propulsive story much richer by allowing the reader to choose how much thought to devote to these interrelated parts while assuring the main focus is always what we saw on the marquee.

Far and away my favorite of the three reads to date.

LOW EXPECTATIONS, riffing on Dickens goes right for a change

LOW EXPECTATIONS
STUART EVERLY-WILSON
Text Publishing
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: I begin to record the history of it all, because if I don’t I will explode, leaving nothing to tell of me but a pile of ash. In this history I will try to leave nothing out, but I will also be careful not to incorporate any extraneous unnecessary shit. Like objectivity. Objectivity is for those who don’t have a point to make, or a side to take. There is only one side to this story and that’s mine.

1970s, Western Sydney. A boy and his mum living in a street where neighbours keep an eye on everyone else’s business. A detested bully. And a family secret, barely hidden.

Devon Destri flies under the radar. He doesn’t talk to anyone, calls himself hard of speaking, and doesn’t correct anyone’s assumptions of his low intelligence. If no one knows otherwise, no one will expect anything of him, and maybe he won’t need to expect anything of himself—that is, beyond running a highly lucrative porn-magazine racket. Only his fiercely loyal friend Big Tammy and Krenek the Hungarian refugee know that Great Expectations is his favourite book, or that he can read at all. But when Devon starts to piece together his mother’s secret, his intellect and charm are put to startling and devastating use.

Stuart Everly-Wilson’s Low Expectations is a heartbreaking and hilarious story of resilience, revenge and love that captures the complexity of vulnerability and bravado. Devon Destri, with his sharp wit and gift for one-liners, is a character you’ll never forget.

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

My Review: Anyone who's read anything I've written here in the past ten years knows that I admire one thing about Dickens: nothing. A chore to read at best, an excruciatingly twee sentimental boor at least, he's famous wherever English is spoken because he makes average people feel smart, and smart people feel godlike, for "getting" his stories and their layers. To me, that's like congratulating yourself for knowing tomatoes are fruits but having the sense not to put them in fruit salad.

Low Expectations stars a teen, one with multivalent social and physical challenges, whose favorite book is Great Expectations. So coming of age, Dickens veneration, and Australian setting. Not an immediate fit for my US-centric, anti-Chuckles the Dick self, then.

I got within an ace of giving it five stars just for being raucously its ownself.

You who belong to the Church of Chuckles know he's fond of the sesquipedalian sentence, the orotund ekphrasis, the hifalutin verbiage. Quite why Devon, our PoV character, loves him, then is Dickensianly (in the "stop-hitting-me-with-the-message" sense) clear. He's "hard of speaking," a beautiful little Dickensian (in the best sense of fulfilling a need for a phrase that no one knew was there except him) creation for someone who simply doesn't want to speak much. Better not to let anyone in on his secret: he is a smart, observant, sensitive guy stuck in a world that just has no place for that kind of time-wasting, but expects people to be hard, both -working and -hearted, to make it in their working-class world. Devon feels safe in his hidey-hole with the special needs kids, he refers to it as the "spaz Gulag" and now let's talk about lanuguage. Diametrically opposite to Dickens, Devon's narrative voice is choppy and frequently heavy on the "worty dirds," as a teacher of mine called them. He absolutely has no respect for anyone who isn't worthy in his eyes, including himself. For the 2020s US audience this can lead to pursed lips and furrowed brows. Either check your fifty-years-later, wildly different culture expectations of politeness at the door, or don't pick the book up...and I strongly encourage the former choice. The alchemy of the story is, like Devon's favorite story, in the way the entire experience of reading it subverts the thoughts and expectations you started out with so often that the wonder is you emerge with any expectations left.

This bitter draft of gall and wormwood comes about because our hard-of-speaking narrator learns a truly life-changing secret about the mother he disrespects and denigrates. As she's raised him by herself, I don't think you need a lot of brainpower to figure out what it's about. I will say that it didn't seem hugely surprising to me when it was revealed; I was by that time exasperated with Devon for not picking up on it before he did. What matters in this rough-tongued kid's world is keeping himself a small enough target to avoid more than the irreducible minimum of abuse and also attention. It makes him a more-than-ordinarily solipsistic adolescent. His eyes are sharp...his attention is not focused outside his self-defined sphere of defense. As he's breaking the law, he's wise to keep his thoughts from straying too far afield. Adult readers who're parents will, I'm sure, think the right thoughts about how the family-related things end up before they do.

With the laundry list of CWs, why would I rate this book so highly? Because I'm Devon's age and, even though I grew up in Texas, the culture of cruelty wasn't a lot different there. Instead of someone telling a loudly pruriently foulmouthed and prejudiced tale of the modern day in order to shock and appall and titillate, this story recounts the way it was in that time and place, and does so with clarity and purpose. The world was what it was, but Devon is a work in progress, and by the end of the book the Devon we met is appreciably more adult in the postive ways than I ever expected him to be.

But for all that, peruse the CWs and make sure you're not going to pass out when they come to pass because they all do.