HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, traitorous fascist sympathizers aren't new

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
BRADLEY W. HART
Thomas Dunne Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

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

My Review: It's always been a failing of the left-wing political folk to see the Apocalypse in each and every thunderation from the Christo-Fascist Right as the ongoing battle for the USA's soul continues. There are now, there were in the 1950s, there were in the 1930s and 1940s, traitorous scum whose personal vision of a Perfect World contains only people like them, who are willing to do anything legal or not to enforce their will on the eternal majority who don't want that. In an article in The Nation, the author of the think piece I've linked to comments most saliently on the Red Scare years' school-textbook battles, book burnings, and other such performative outrage with this pithy remark:

Most Americans don’t think that proponents of critical race theory are secretly spreading “Marxism” in the schools, either, or that woke corporations are somehow supporting the same evil project. The people who make such claims are a small minority, just as they were in the 1950s.

The fact is that our country's been under some form of internal attack from fascist and/or authoritarian right-wing rabble since Day One. So has every other political structure. Let's not forget the fate of Periclean Athens. It's the eternal project of greedy, selfish control freaks to get everything they can into their own hands and to control what they can't possess.

Author Hart made a well-researched and -written alarm call against calm, resigned acceptance of the culture coup attempted during the 45th president's term in this book. He uses the well-documented and clearly overcome existence, activities, and failures of Nazi sympathizers in the US. It is an effective technique; it uses as its organizing principle a simple structure: Each chapter is dedicated to a single organization active in promoting German/Nazi interests in the US, and gives some crucial details about how and why this choice was made. It also characterizes and puts into timely context the people who made up the institution in question. This avoids a common trap in histories of zeitgeists or social movements, the dreaded alphabet soup of initialism and too-similar or too-often-repeated names. That admittedly more synthetic approach can weave a tapestry of details. It more often than that causes severe MEGO disease.

The most disturbing take-away of this entire loudly rung tocsin is that these forces of anti-democratic rage failed because they lacked a credible, powerful leader. Today's versions, it is very frightening to realize, do not suffer from that lack. It isn't that Author Hart is unaware of this, it's that he seemed to feel he shouldn't make as much of the echoes I heard in each chapter of current events as I would've preferred. There is something to be said for taking off the gloves and hitting the enemy within hard. It's something "they" do a lot of (see my review of The Obama Hate Machine) and with a lot less factual basis than Author Hart presents.

Why this book only gets four stars from me is the quite startling number of uncorrected typos that made it from the DRC I read into the library copy I checked out. Scandalous! And, in the end, there were moments that I found myself not quite satisfied with the case the author made for some person or organization's motivation for opposing the US entry into WWII. Mixed motives are more common than pure ones on every gradation of the ideological spectrum, as (for example) morally based pacifism is present among right-wingers, too.

Perhaps the most telling thing that I noticed go underremarked was the utter ineffectuality of Hoover's FBI in going after right-wing terrorism. Red Scare propaganda against our nominal allies the Soviets was rife. How telling that is...British intelligence informed the US government better about domestic threats than Hoover's FBI.

I was still angered and unsettled and unnerved by this read. I am recommending it to all and sundry who think the Right's victory in the 2022 midterm elections is somehow inevitable. We who do not wish to have our country scourged by the hypocrites and religious nuts of this book's modern counterparts should heed Author Hart's dictum: "{U}nfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them." Let's plug the holes in our national awareness. It can only help the side dedicated to the rights and duties of citizens against the Right's attacks on them.

JUST LIKE MOTHER, truly horrific, horrifying, horror fiction

JUST LIKE MOTHER
ANNE HELTZEL
Tor Nightfire
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

AUTHOR HELTZEL ON THE CULT OF MOTHERHOOD at CrimeReds.com.

The Publisher Says: A girl would be such a blessing…

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything―and everyone―at a safe distance.

When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn’t even mind that her cousin’s wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry―baby fever comes with the territory.

The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins’ increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come…

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

My Review: The opening scene...Maeve, locked in a closet (!), hearing hideous screams of agony and being quietly comforted by her cousin Andrea as they go on and on, had me riveted. And that is that!

All the momentum drained out of the story for me as we went from following her child-self to the chase narrative laid on for adult Maeve. The reason? I don't like adult Maeve. She's either a bit simple or she's got The Most Trusting nature ever plopped in a human being. Either way I want to shout at her, shake her until the missing connections in her brain click together, until she sees the simplest manipulations are being used on her with appalling regularity and success.

In the story universe, Maeve is one of the girl children in The Mother Collective whose purpose is to control matrilineally all the money and power that men have always controlled. They're using that power and wealth as men always have, to oppress and abuse their opposite numbers. Maeve's rescued/kidnapped by the Patriarchy at the ripe old age of eight and, unsurprisingly, is a Survivor and PTSD sufferer for the rest of her life.

When we rejoin her first person narrative, she's a never-was in her thirties, making her meager crusts of bread as a fiction editor. She's naturally quite wary of relationships, having very few...until Andrea comes back into her life. Andrea, her cousin from childhood, is fabulously wealthy and living a dream life as the big boss of a fertility start-up.

If you've read horror novels, you pretty much know what's coming.

It occurs, over the course of some thirty chapters. I'd say if you don't already have a grasp on the end of the book it will come as a shock to you. It did not do so to me. I was along for the ride, though, because I started to want this idiot woman Maeve to suffer some more right here in front of me as Andrea manipulates and sets her up.

The actual ending of the book was pretty clearly telegraphed from the start. I kept hollering at Maeve, "just LOOK AT ANDREA for ten seconds and you will see it!" But she didn't, and I began to suspect her intelligence truly was subnormal.

When, at around the half-way mark, Maeve's friend-with-benefits pays one hell of a price for her vague, unconnected relationship to life, I was ready to say "sayonara." I decided to do something I don't usually do: I read the epilogue. There was another vile w-bomb aimed by Maeve, there was a moment of clarity for Maeve, and there was something so deeply schadenfreude-inducing that I had to get there step by step.

This is a horror novel for those, like me, who aren't in the Cult of Mother, and whose belief in the goodness of Woman is so frayed and chopped that it can no longer be discerned from a streak of extra-dark dirt etched on my skin. I think Author Heltzel has created a dark, dreadful mirror of the life men have forced, and continue to force, women to lead. There is nothing innate in the desire to Mother someone for many women. Uteruses are not always the only important organ in a woman's body, and her existence should never be presumed to revolve around that organ's use in any way.

If you can read this book and not see that the nightmare is very real, and that its fictionalization is merely cosmetic, then you're at Maeve's level. I don't think I know many folk like that. But if one reads this: Go back and look carefully at every decision Maeve makes. What that will tell you is all you need to know.

BRISBANE: A Novel, one of the surprise joys that literary life offers

BRISBANE: A Novel
EUGENE VODOLAZKIN (tr. Marian Schwartz)
Plough Publishing House
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the winner of Russia’s biggest literary prizes, a richly layered novel in which a celebrated guitarist robbed of his talent by Parkinson’s disease seeks other paths to immortality: by authorizing a biography and by mentoring a thirteen-year-old virtuoso battling cancer.

This personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning will resonate with readers of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Umberto Eco, and Solzhenitsyn. Expanding the literary universe spun in his earlier novels, Vodolazkin explores music and fame, belonging and purpose, time and eternity. At the stunning finale of Brisbane, all the carefully knit stitches unravel into a riddle: Whose story is it – the subject’s or the writer’s? Are art and love really no match for death? Is Brisbane, the city of our dreams, our only hope for the future?

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

My Review: A guitarist with Parkinson's. A son without parental care...with a grandmother's undivided devotion. A half-Ukrainian, half-Russian child caught in between identities, whose life's course was taken *despite* not because it mirrored his father's...and he exceeds the father who didn't believe he was suited for the life of a musician.

Plough Publishing House, linked above, is a christian-focused organization whose primary focus is on the *good* that religion can do...the support for the unsupported, the care for the abandoned, and justice for the victims, that defined the main character's entire identity in the badly plotted, overwritten fantasy novel they build their philosophy on.

What? You thought I wouldn't insult religious nuts for their delusional identity basis? More fool you.

That said, this Ukrainian-Russian story of the pain associated with finding, building, losing, and loving an identity is an excellent example of what this publishing enterprise does best: Bring us the best there is of what there is that aligns with their worldview. This allows all of us to find the places we can stand together, to be in solidarity with even those who aren't like us and might not even like us.

But Gleb, whose story we're being told, is in the hands of a storyteller: A writer called Sergei whose work in writing Gleb's story of average beginnings and a rocket-ride to success and stardom comes just as the trajectory enters its terminal velocity. As must happen to us all, Gleb's facing mortality and the sad end of productive life. What he does, in chronicling his life with Sergei's help, surnamed "Nestorov" or "of Nestor's line" which gave me quite the chuckle), is bridge the ever-widening gap between the past's ghostly and fantasy-based "unity" and the present's angry animosity. Gleb's life, his struggle to win through to a meaningful use of his passion and his loneliness in abandonment by his Russian mother and his obsessive, judgmental Ukrainian father, is Ukraine's story. It seems to Gleb that he loses his life to no end, to no result...then he orients himself towards a future of hopeful and fruitful action in mentoring a young, lost, rejected soul. Pay it forward.

If you've read Author Vodolazkin's award-winning book Laurus (the genus of evergreen trees called "Laurels" and used, as your history brain will remind you, as victory-wreath material), the themes of christian redemption through works and the need to seek a purpose to make life into A Life won't be unfamiliar. Where that book was a medieval fantasy, and one of rare and joyous elegance and compassion, this is a modern and more basic, more brutal in a sense, version of the story. Death plays its part in the proceedings but it is the death that you and I, Westerners and rationalists, know; in Laurus, Death like all other supernatural forces is embodied, personified. Our names for him have changed (eg "Parkinson's disease") but his dark, demanding, denying power have not.

It is in the face of Death that some people find their only moments of clarity. Gleb isn't exactly one of them, he's organzied his life around music and willed into being a life centered on making music count. But he hasn't, until he meets Sergei Nestorov, put his lived experience into an ordered, planned, meant-to-be-shared form. This is a major act of grace. He's done something so selfless in this examination of the pain of being not enough, discovering he can make others experience joy, then losing it all.

When Gleb finished writing his rain compositions, people told him they bore traces of despair. Gleb didn't respond. He remembered the particular expression in his father's eyes, an expression that could only be defined as despair. What really happened then? Was Irina frivolous? More likely, she took everything light-heartedly, showing a marked preference for the sunny side of life. And was disinclined to delve particularly into its shadowy aspects. She often repeated that she'd like to live in Australia: for some reason, that country seemed like the embodiment of the carefree life. Jokingly, she would ask people to find her an Australian husband she could travel the world with. It was in one of those conversations that Gleb first heard the word "Brisbane." Talking about the city of her dreams, his mother named Brisbane.

–and–

Irina allowed Gleb's father parental visits but derived no joy from them. Strictly speaking, neither did Gleb himself. When Fyodor took the boy for a walk, he mostly was silent or recited poetry, which for Gleb was worse than silence in a way. Sometimes, when Gleb got tired at the end of their walk, Fyodor would pick him up. Their eyes were on a level then, and the son would examine his father with a child's unblinking gaze. Under this gaze, tears would well up in Fyodor's brown eyes. One after another, they would roll down his cheeks and disappear forever in his fluffy mustache.

It can't escape your attention in either of these passages that the child isn't centered. It won't surprise you to learn that neither parent was There for their son. It can't escape your notice that, in that case, a child is left to his own devices, no matter the other sources of support he discovers over his life, to define what love and care are.

It won't shock you then to learn that Gleb married music, and focused on becoming a star when the Universe presented him with the possiblity. And now...ending that life and without another prepared for himself...now he gifts all that he's learned to a writer who will tell of his lifelong struggle to be whole when his antecedents left him to figure out for himself what that would mean, what that would look like.

Much the way Ukraine is experiencing its national-identity crisis in a cruel war with its cold, needy, selfish mother who abandoned it when it was in need. Time after time after time.

Gleb forgives, accepts, and gives his all to the future, to the child he mentors, the child challenged to remain alive...does she have his luck, does she have his singleness of purpose to make music and make Life give him more music to make?

And Nestor(ov) does what he must do, he brings the legend to life by writing a life of the legend. I hope you'll read Vodolazkin's work. It is beautifully translated, with none of the stiltedness of transferring meaning from one tongue to another; Translator Schwartz started from a high mountain, it's true, but she also blazed her trail there with surefooted grace.

BITTER ORANGE TREE, vibrant, passionate, *alive* woman's dark desires & MISTER N, a frank discussion of getting old and its price (not what it costs)

BITTER ORANGE TREE
JOKHA ALHARTHI (tr. Marilyn Booth)
Catapult
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Trade Paper Edition On Sale: 07/11/2023 | $16.95

Read the Electric Literature mutual interview between Author Alharthi and Translator Booth!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish.

Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can’t help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Amir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhour left the Arabian Peninsula.

As the historical narrative of Bint Amir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhour’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips and dreams mingle with memories.

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

My Review: Celestial Bodies, Author Alharthi and Translator Booth's previous literary collaboration, revolved around three women and their men...present, absent, loved, loathed, and longed for. It received the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, as it was called then. I myownself checked it out of the library and would've given it a three-star review had I bothered to review it at all...stories centering women organizing themselves and their worlds around men don't appeal to me. The prose was lyrical and pungent.

That last is what I love about this read:

I had gone. And then she had gone. And it wasn't possible to change anything. What the hand of fate had written could not be unwritten. That ancient line of poetry: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. For I had gone, and I went away without smiling. I just went, in my cocky presumption that I could look the other way. That I didn't know; that I didn't need to know. And then remorse. Harsh, grating regret, making me more fragile than the brittle autumn leaves crumbling under the janitor's broom beneath my window.

–and–

"My grandmother would've given anything to be a peasant farmer," I said. And then immediately I regretted my abrupt reaction. Suroor raised her head. "Your grandmother?" Right. The words had come out and they couldn't be put back. I had said it: my grandmother. Why don't words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached. Those words had been said. What's done is done.

It's all there. Author Alharthi's style, the sentences not too terribly complex but the interrelationship of the words and images is dense, is active, is trellising the reader's vines of awareness into specific patterns that cast wildly distorting shadows on the life in the text.

It is exhilarating to read a simple story that reaches into shadows and under storage shelves and behind armoires in the reader. It means the writer and the translator have offered us everything they found when they rummaged through those spaces in themselves. If you, as I strongly suggest that you do, read the Electric Lit piece I've linked above, you'll come at this read with a vastly bigger experience of the intentionality of the writing. I think the best thing about that awareness, acquired before (in your case) or after (as in mine) finishing the novel, is its honing, its sharpening, of the decoding tools you have at your disposal to be in the read. I've chosen those two passages from the same early section of the story to illustrate that enriching quality.

What reading Bitter Orange Tree offered me was a stroll in a garden planted with almost-familiar-scented plants in service of a geometry slightly not what I am accustomed to (read: not centered so heavily on the women's men). The way the choices I've selected above interrelate and build on the character of Zuhour's perceptual world, the sensory and the eidetic, are the principal pleasure of this read. Like my stream-of-consciousness idol Virginia Woolf, the words build images and the images are shaped by the words as well as by the things the words evoke from us in their saying. Everything Zuhour senses is an image from her startlingly acute inner world...no fogs of forgetfulness (even when summoned, as above) cloud her quietly desperate longing for one more, once again, please just this single time.

Of course she gets none. No one does, and no depths of longing can break the iron arrow...crossbow quarrel, more like...of time. No matter how many times one says ignore, actually performing the act of ignoring is entirely different and often opposed by the metaphysical gravity of love. (I think it was this strange, off-kilter perceptual frame that reduced my rating from five to four stars, though....)

Because yes, this is a love story. Aren't they all. Yes, they all are but this love, Zuhour's love, is so tragically lacking self-love that it's the desperately sad kind of love-ungiven story that can reshape a life. Yours, o reader, if you will allow it; better or worse, as you use it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MISTER N
NAJWA BARAKAT (tr. Luke Leafgreen)
And Other Stories
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel—he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: poverty, violence and fear.

How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his “real life” of a character from one of his early novels – a vicious militiaman. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself…or just seek psychiatric help?

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

My Review: And Other Stories publishes unusual and often puzzling books. This one feels a little bit like someone found Kafka's Akashic records and channeled them through a Lebanese American writer's intense psychedelic dreams.

He liked precision and hated rough estimates. The approximate was arbitrary, the arbitrary was random, the random was chaotic, and chaos was a killer. Mr. N liked to cut away the imprecise, as he did with his pencils when he sharpened them, shaving their tips into points to make their lines clear and defined. Pens? Pens were unacceptable. Pens could leak, flooding pages with smothering ink. Ink behaved like a dictator: ordering, forbidding, controlling, brooking no dissent. Lead, meanwhile, was merciful, quick to forgive mistakes. Whatever your soul was brooding over, lead would let it speak. Ink soiled the white page; lead dissolved upon the surface, exactly as pain dissolved in the act of writing…

–and–

The human ability to adapt—to things positive and negative, to plenty and scarcity, to life and death—is terrifying. I watched {her} transform day by day. She contracted within the apartment; then she expanded to fill it. She feared her pimp would find her; then she relaxed into her new situation and her new identity. … …I felt her skin expanding, her limbs lengthening, her face settling into gladness. I saw her unwinding into something more tender, like dough when it relaxes.

Mister N is a guest in a swanky hotel. Mister N's a writer...published several novels, well-received ones...whose home is Beirut with all that implies. Mister N's...not feeling himself. Mister N's been through some stuff. Mister N's older brother is the last vestige of family he has, dead father, dead mother, in fact only his old, established nemesis, his Moriarty, a man called Luqman, is visiting Mister N despite his many vociferous complaints to Mr. Andrew, the, um, concierge or owner or someone like that, that these are unwelcome and invasive occasions of great upset.

The blows to Mister N's fragile peace of mind never really stop coming. There are so many old issues that need to be put to rest. There are absurdly youthful old people acting like hormonal kids! (Not Mister N...beta blockers, don't you know, those desire-slayers, are among his meds.) Mister N witnesses a...a...hanging, certainly, though not actually a murder as Mister N tells it. Mister N rides herd on the unruly voices in his head, the ones that enable Mister N to write their stories. As I've always said, being a writer is actually the socially acceptable face of schizophrenia. And sometimes just barely that.

The blows to Mister N's reality don't stop coming. Author Barakat is not kind. In memory, in fantasy, in reality...none of these states, and they all exist in the course of Mister N's time with us, are delineated. I don't think one gains a single, solitary thing trying to tease out the "different" frames of reference in this story. It won't make passages such as this:

Our mosquitoes and other local insects have developed quite the work ethic in recent years. They toil now not only to feed themselves, but from the pleasure of causing pain, which, having tasted once, they find impossible to relinquish. Rats, mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, feral cats, pariah dogs: all of them are vicious now and liable to get drunk on the simple taste of killing, much as humans do.

...one whit more or less effective to think of them as belonging to "reality" or "fantasy" within the book's constructed world. Mister N, you see, is not in the least who he thinks he is; and, as we are all the sum of our memories, that simple fact makes Mister N a construct, a chimera of parts from we can never know where. More to the point, neither can Mister N:

My head is a train of many cars, each of them going in a different direction. All I need to do is put them back in line so they might travel in the correct direction. Is this my entire life that I have put on the wall? How old have I become now?

The only necessary answer to this question, directed from and/or to wherever one may, is "as old as my eyes, a little older than my teeth." (The Santa Claus response.) Mister N can not really answer it as phrased. Reality passes at different rates on different scales...the days drag, the years fly by...for us all, but most of all for those of disordered thinking. And to some degree, that's my beef with the read. I don't think the story itself comes out of the time-frame-hopping all the way intact. I grant that characters in this récit are all internal to Mister N, but they still jar with their sudden vanishings and dangling conversations. An itchy lack-of-closure feeling pervaded my reading experience.

Exactly how disordered Mister N's thinking is, for all that, is one of the pleasures of reading this short, powerful, frequently authorially self-referential récit all the way to the end. I recommend you do that soonest. Preorder it now!

FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING, which is why you should read it

FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
HENRY FRY
Ballantine Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Danny Scudd is absolutely fine. He always dreamed of escaping the small-town life of his parents’ fish-and-chip shop, moving to London, and becoming a journalist. And, after five years in the city, his career isn’t exactly awful, and his relationship with pretentious Tobbs isn’t exactly unfulfilling. Certainly his limited-edition Dolly Parton vinyls and many (maybe too many) house plants are hitting the spot. But his world is flipped upside down when a visit to the local clinic reveals that Tobbs might not have been exactly faithful. In fact, Tobbs claims they were never operating under the “heteronormative paradigm” of monogamy to begin with. Oh, and Danny’s flatmates are unceremoniously evicting him because they want to start a family. It’s all going quite well.

Newly single and with nowhere to live, Danny is forced to move in with his best friend, Jacob, a flamboyant nonbinary artist whom he’s known since childhood, and their eccentric group of friends living in an East London “commune.” What follows is a colorful voyage of discovery through modern queer life, dating, work, and lots of therapy—all places Danny has always been too afraid to fully explore. Upon realizing just how little he knows about himself and his sexuality, he careens from one questionable decision (and man) to another, relying on his inscrutable new therapist and housemates to help him face the demons he’s spent his entire life trying to repress. Is he really fine, after all?

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

My Review: It's far from my first time for...well, almost anything. Yet this British tale of being a twentysomething soul whose entire world turns upside down, whose every point of trust in his relationships is called into question because he wasn't having the same relationship with others they were having with him, just called to me.

Danny is our PoV character, a young man who's daring to think his life is going well and he's among the people who understand and love him. It's a heady place to be. So, this being a story, we know it's not the way things will stay. First, Tobbs (his long-term love) brings home an STD. So there goes that whole monogamy fantasy...and his love says some self-serving things about it being heteronormative and I cringed so hard I looked like I was trying out for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've used that line, though I hasten to say not to excuse my transmission of an STD! Just...well, Author Fry, you scored a point with me by holding the Ouch Oculus up to my face.

Thank goodness, given this, that Danny doesn't live with that knob Tobbs. Laura and her husband seem...nice. Do please note I said "husband" and extrapolate from there that there is procreative activity taking place. We who have paid attention in sex-ed classes (or just had families) will be unsurprised to learn that Danny's rent payments are less desirable than the space he's taking up when the inevitable pregnancy occurs...just as his relationship with that knob Tobbs is over.

Danny's in therapy...terrible anxiety issues...and that completely won me over. Nina, Danny's therapist, is brilliant (in the UK sense) and comedy gold. She's not a comedy therapist, the kind you read in older books who either bumbles or is sibylline. She's commonsensical, not here for self-pity, and deeply committed to Danny learning to manage his issues. Her solidity and warmth were equaled by the obligatory wild BFF: Jacob. They are enby (non-binary), ace (asexual), and so utterly FABULOUS that I think they should have a book of their own.

Hint, hint.

The things that happen in Danny's world, in hindrance that proves to be help, are all relatable. The voice the story's told in makes the project of reading it a pleasure, and the laughter it evokes is frequently tinged with sad recognition as well as joyful anticipation. Given that Author Fry, in an interview with Debutiful.com, says he was inspired to write this story in part by television sitcoms, it's no surprise that he's already got an adaptation in the works from Aussie production company Moonriver as it expands its UK footprint.

This debut novel is a delight from giddy-up to whoa. I'd've kept this review back until my June Pride Month cavalcade of Queerness but I just couldn't...I want you to go get one and read it now.

STARRY-EYED LOVE, my first Helena Hunting, second in Spark House series

STARRY-EYED LOVE
HELENA HUNTING
St. Martin's Griffin Books
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Charming, hilarious, and emotional, Starry-Eyed Love is Helena Hunting at her very best!

Having just broken up with her boyfriend, London Spark is not in the mood to be hit on. Especially not when she’s out celebrating her single status with her sisters. So when a very attractive man pays for their drinks and then slips her his number, she passes it right back to him with a ‘thanks, but no thanks’. As the business administrator for their family’s event hotel, the Spark House, London has more important things to worry about, like bringing in new clientele.

As luck would have it, a multi-million-dollar company calls a few months later asking for a meeting to discuss a potential partnership, and London is eager to prove to her sisters, and herself, that she can land this deal. Just when she thinks she has nailed her presentation, the company’s CEO, Jackson Holt, walks in and inserts himself into the meeting. Not only that, but he also happens to be the same guy she turned down at the bar a few months ago.

As they begin to spend more time together, their working relationship blossoms into something more. It isn’t until their professional entanglements are finally over, that London and Jackson are finally ready to take the next step in their relationship. But between Jackson’s secretive past and London’s struggle with her sisters, London must question where she really stands—not just with Jackson, but with the Spark House, too.

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

My Review: It's a very, very different experience to read a straight-people romance than my usual M/M reads. In this case, I think I came in after some character work had already been done in the first Spark House book, When Sparks Fly, on this entry's PoV character. London Spark, to those who might not know her from before, is a rather serious-minded and goal-oriented participant in a family enterprise called Spark House. It is an event hotel-cum-venue, and London has somehow been foisted the job of numbers lady. She's not a natural number-cruncher but she knows about sacrificing for a greater goal and gets her considerable wits marshaled to the task of making the finances run.

I, like all other readers, am meeting Jackson the love interest with London. He lets her know he's interested without being more than ordinarily persistent. She declines; he leaves her possessed of his details and accepts his rejection without drama. So far, so good. When a time has passed and Spark House attracts business interest from a tech-bro investor, one who's made to sound like Elon only hot, absolutely not one soul is surprised it's Jackson the rejected suitor.

We know this drill: what's going to happen, the misunderstandings, the idiotic miscommunications, the resolution of HEA or HFN; so the point of reading this book is *how* not what.

The satisfaction of a superior craftworker's results is this very thing. Now, the M/M romance world will usually have something very sexy pretty early. Not so this book. London's been burned and isn't in a huge hurry to try the waters with a tech bro. She is, once he shows back up as a potential financing source, perfectly happy to work with him. They come to know each other, and the readers each of them, as their work brings out facets of their lives quite naturally and unforcedly. Again to no one's surprise Jackson is a good guy, and he's got a solid head on his shoulders; he comes to like and respect London, he fully engages with her as an equal in business (if one with different skills from his); the result is a slow-burn low-steam character study of two young people whose lives are pressurized by goals instead of ambitions.

Why I enjoyed reading it enough to rate it more than a solid three or possibly three-and-a-half stars of five was London's affectionate but exasperated relationships with older sister Avery and younger sister Harley. They were...warm. They didn't ring swords of wit in battles for prominence, they half-ribbed and three-quarters snarked and generally behaved the way friends do. It worked to give me a sense of their bond that was less intense than the Three Musketeers and more positive than the Three Stooges but still very real.

You can't go wrong with a read that does this kind of work when one accidentally reads book two in a series. I am glad I spent time with the Spark family.

MERCURY RISING, alternate space-race history with waaay trippy nukes

MERCURY RISING
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, preorder now

Rating: 4.75* of five (the w-bombs! the w-bombs!)

The Publisher Says: Alternative history with aliens, an immortal misanthrope and SF tropes aplenty

Even in a technologically-advanced, Kennedy-Didn’t-Die alternate-history, Brooklyn Lamontagne is going nowhere fast. The year is 1975, thirty years after Robert Oppenheimer invented the Oppenheimer Nuclear Engine, twenty-five years after the first human walked on the moon, and eighteen years after Jet Carson and the Eagle Seven sacrificed their lives to stop the alien invaders.

Brooklyn just wants to keep his mother’s rent paid, earn a little scratch of his own, steer clear of the cops, and maybe get laid sometime in the near future. Simple pleasures, right? But a killer with a baseball bat and a mysterious box of 8-track tapes is about to make his life real complicated…

I PRACTICALLY HAD TO BEG THE AUTHOR FOR A DRC. I *THOUGHT* WE WERE FRIENDS. MY FEELINGS ARE STILL HURT.

My Review: No, really. Mortally wounded that this wingèd not my way until I groveled. *sniff* (And seriously NO MORE W-BOMBS. Cut that crap out, dirty-old-man-in-training!) I was calmly enjoying the mental soundtrack, the 1970s jukebox that's permanently cued up in my head, when *wham* another revolting w-bomb.

But about that jukebox...would we, in fact, have the precise same pop-cultural artifacts in a world that didn't slow down its climb to the stars? The 1968 Cougar, well, okay, that was already on course from 1958. The planning window of a car in those days was five years...so the 1958s wouldn't've been much altered from our world, as I understand the timeline, which diverges first in the middle 1940s and so those cars can be explained. Pop culture spins on a nailhead. Elvis electrifying the country is one example, the Beatles knocking off his cool-cat cap is another, but both of those came in response to specific cultural stimuli. Wouldn't the world be more law-and-order oriented when the Oppenheimer Nuclear Drives are dangling before the lust-drenched gaze of every young testosterone factory? Can't get in one of those unless your nose is clean.

Which, of course, our PoV character (Brooklyn Lemontagne) flouts. But the reason he's able to flout that social control mechanism is simple: Invaders from Outer Space! The ultimate Golden Age of SF trope. This time they're Mercurians, the patent absurdity of whose existence gives even the Hero of the piece (who apparently dies early on) some pause. Can't argue with the presence of stonking hostile warships and evaporated cities, can you.

This takes place among Americans! Of course you can! The whole planet pulls together to combat the Enemy from Beyond...and there are ignorant goofballs talking conspiracy theories, there are hemi-hippies rebelling against the controlling hand of the grown-ups. This is the world, and honestly I agree with Author Greene's take on it. I quibble with some details, but I believe he's exactly correct that even an existential threat with ample death and destruction to demonstrate its reality won't create more than a façade of unity among the irredeemable mass of humanity. (Look around, tell me, and him, we're wrong.)

So I buy the premise. So I consent to set aside my niggling nuh-uh generator. I'm in for the ride.

Part One: Mercury Rising is straight out of Astounding's *1956 volume. Brave Americans and honorable Soviets lay down their grievances and get on with the job of killin' them some Mercurians. (Mercurians!) The Ultimate Price? Paid. Now what? When and where are we going next? I'm almost sure my Kindle screen cracked under the thumping of my thumb.

Part Two: Bad Blood shifts gears, gives us the rest of the battle story very effectively, and sends Brooklyn, our new PoV man, into some nasty corners. And not one of 'em anything but his own idiot fault. Some gross and very personal violence perpetrated later in the section...it starts to feel like we're going to be in Peckinpah territory through the book...and, on schedule, the fecal matter impacts the rotary air circulation device at warp speed.

The thing about living your life outside is that you learn to watch simple things like a hawk. It takes Brooklyn about three times as long as it should to come up with his get-out-of-jail-free card. But he decides there's nothing else for it: Go to space, full decade enlistment, and get the whole shootin' match handled...crimes forgiven, mother fed, and future still neatly fucked, same as if he'd gone to jail without solving the problems he most cares about solving. Yay...?

Part Three: Squeeze Box details the adjustments of life in military training. It's not like I wasn't expecting it. But I also wasn't enjoying it much until I suddenly twigged: Brooklyn's assigned buddy, Tommy, is gay. And nothing at all fazes Brooklyn, or anyone else it seems, about it.

It seems that the Mercurians (!) destroying Cleveland and causing climate change as well as serious ashfall issues gave people something more interesting than who's zoomin' who to fret over. As well as feed innumerable conspiracy theories that, oddly prove to be correct but misaimed.

Part Four: Take the Money and Run did very little for me, but brightened up the contrast between Brooklyn's America and my 1976 US.

There's a goodly amount of interpersonal violence in this story, fisticuffs to donnybrooking (to use old-fashioned terms); appropriate for a dead-end life such as Brooklyn was living and (I hope) merely his own process of molting that no-longer-needed carapace. The end of the part was oddly assorted with its beginning if that isn't to be the case; our man Brooklyn gets out of his mind instead of out of his head, and does so in the place I think something like Coachella or Burning Man *should* take place: The mass grave of an entire city's populace.

Part Five: The Rubberband Man pretty much just cemented the crazy-shit-men-do-together trope for all time. It's an adventure story, that was an adventure, but...not quite the thing I'd've chosen to prove "once a scofflaw, always a scofflaw" to ye olde readere.

Part Six: Flight '76 was apparently meant to earworm me in the most appalling possible way, including a w-bomb in the first five seconds of the awful, terrible, well-below-mediocre tune that refuses to get out of my head. I think SOMEone owes me some sort of reparations.

Part Seven: Boogie Nights starts with a much better earworm, thank the Nine Goddesses. But it's more transition time treats, ABBA on the Moon (!), and some interesting-to-me alt-hist entertainment...Vice-President JACKSON...then off into the Wild Black Yonder. It goes by really fast.

We do see a good, solid character whose trajectory is geting more interesting, though it's a glancing blow. I'm mostly intrigued by this *McCartney singing political rock opera....

Part Eight: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood is an earworm I can live with, if without the good memories of Boogie Nights. It's also the best shorthand for the events of this part...there are so many mistakes and screwed-up connections to work out, the metaphor of upgrading the computer is especially apt.

The ship names are giving me little frissons. The (Marie-Madeleine) Fourcade is a woman-captained solo spy ship, the Baron von Steuben old-fashioned, obsolescent, and largely overlooked haven for the queer boys too useful to get rid of but not important enough to keep secure (much to the PTB's cost), each carrying its subtext like a homing beacon and not just one of the darn things. I mean, what did von Steuben do? And where (in Ohio) is Steubenville? And why is Carruthers so shifty?

Part Nine: Runnin' on Empty truly sets new stakes for literally everyone in this, our one wild and precious life. Titanically, existentially reorders whatever priorities you thought you'd formed by utterly altering the ground you plonk your trotters onto every time you think to move.

I do not know of an Odysseus I'd rather see handle this situation than the one who is.

Part Ten: Flash Light wafts its foully malodorously vapid earworm through the four-foot speaker towers in my mental disco.

But that is as nothing to the sudden but inevitable betrayal that This Land endures at the foul, gangrenous typing digits of Author Greene. I am too traumatized to say more.

Part Eleven: Boy from New York City introduces us to the real Jet...short for Jethro...Carson. And now the first part has closure. What we're doing I won't tell you, but I will say that there's a reason you'll want to read this and it's in this part.

Part Twelve: Take a Chance on Me is the first time I haven't wanted to claw my brain out to wash the earworm ichor off it.

There's a lot to cheer for, and a lot left to learn. This is a good solid familiar story arc and it's got lots of good gauds and gew-gaws bejazzling its basic curves. We're going to be offered another trip, right?

Rapture Right!