TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere
MARK L. CLIFFORD
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world.

For 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was a beacon of prosperity where people, money, and technology flowed freely, and residents enjoyed many civil liberties. In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion.

But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

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

My Review: It is, in light of China's Xi and Russia's Putin inking a deal for "world domination", beyond urgent that we listen to Author Clifford's personal experience on China's until-now slow, patient, and carefully deniable march towards world domination.

After almost thirty years as a foreign resident in Hong Kong, Author Clifford...able, at any time, to leave this city he loves for a solid and certain welcome "home"...was a more than modestly invested resident of what was to be a Special Autonomous Region of China with rights and freedoms guaranteed by treaty in 1984, to take effect in 1997's handover of Hong Kong and be in place until 2047. (I can't help but wonder if the symmetry of that date with the centennial of India and Pakistan's partition and independence was deliberate.) I am sure that his pain, as he's watched the world shrug its shoulders when viewing (at a profitable distance) China's steady, concerted, implacable abrogation of the treaty, is intense. It comes from a genuine love for this unique and vibrant world that is the port on the Pearl River into the South China Sea.

If this year's Beijing Winter Olympics had not focused some attention on the Uyghur Genocide (alleged, in case some troll farm decides I'm good as a target, alleged genocide) and the de-Uyghurization of children in boarding schools, a policy shamelessly, shamefully modeled on US and Canadian Native populations' systematic abuse of the too-recent past, and darn near compelled the regime to require a Uyghur skier to act as torchbearer at the opening ceremonies, no doubt we would all be listening to Author Clifford in a near-comatose indifference.

It is the besetting sin of the capitalist, "democratic" society to look on apathetically when things occur that do not earn or cost them money.

But that said, are we just helpless as the autocratic 2.4 billion-strong Asian/Russian Neues Herrenvolk flex their economic and resource-controlling might? What, then, would be the point of picking up the book? Author Clifford's not Cassandra, nor even Tiresias. He is, though, a keen observer, a skilled craftsman of ideas, and an effective communicator of what he has observed as well as what he has seen work or not work in countering the actions taken by the Chinese authorities. He makes a very plain, inescapable fact crystal clear: China is on a tight time schedule to achieve its goals.

Like the US now, like the Soviet Union in 1989, the population-shrinking bomb's going off in China within the next two decades. The growth, economic and technological, that China has experienced, came at the price of fewer births among Han Chinese (the infamous one-child policy is already scrapped), the real people in China's HIGHLY racist culture. So they need to get their control of Tibet (source of water for over 2 billion people!), of Taiwan (control of the South China Sea, busiest shipping lanes on Earth!), and Xinjiang (mineral wealth beyond belief!) fully consolidated yesterday at the latest.

So it needs maximum Red Army head count. And that's set to decline. Hence the sudden-seeming, multi-pronged, and many-faceted repressions, aggressions, and pacifications we're seeing. Author Clifford, in his wordsmithing, does a more deft and delectable job than I have, but he is not one whit less urgent in his bid for your attention. The world faces a large number of concurrent crises...nothing new there...but one does rather need to step away from the genuine anguish of watching the labor of decades, a century, being dismantled on so many fronts at once. Author Clifford, while his love for Hong Kong doesn't inspire me with similar love, does inspire me to look at the events in Hong Kong and think..."uh oh."

But on an entirely different plane. One of, "wait a minute, that's what the CCP did in Hong Kong!" One of seeing past the mendacious excuses offered for authoritarian groundwork-laying. One of "it can happen here if we let it." There is a level on which reading this book will, and should, cause anyone born in times that called themselves democratic to look long and hard at the political landscape in the US and think "it's not a single second too soon to take decisive action against the home-grown authoritarian movement."

Please.

JAWBONE, making deities out of desperation in MeanGirlLand

JAWBONE
MÓNICA OJEDA (tr. Sarah Booker)
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Literature in Translation!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?

When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

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

My Review: White. Menacing, toothy, bony white. You'll need to recalibrate your horror-meter away from the endless dark.

I think many people are a little skittish about reading books that have truly, deeply dysfunctional women and girls as the predators as well as prey in a "human is wolf to human" tale. It seems to skeeve the Sanctity of Motherhood crowd the most, which is predictable and unsurprising. What it isn't is realistic. The three characters in this English-language debut horror/psychological thriller-adjacent story are actors in psychodramas they both inherited and participated in perpetuating...they are not, not one of them, victims.

I'd give Author Ojeda a gold medal for that, if I had one. I am mortally sick of sending women and girls the unending message that if uterus, then victim is a) immutable fact 2) a good dodge to avoid personal responsibility and accountability and iii) a necessary precondition to discovering one's agency. Anna/Annelise is, plain and simple, a stunningly effective manipulator. She is absolutely in control of her fate. She orchestrates everything around her to suit a narrative she builds, changes, improves to get more of the oxygen she craves: Attention. Fernanda, oh the poor thing I can hear readers thinking, is totally tuned in to her needs: she seeks extremes, she wants to defy and thus define her limits. And when we meet her, she is at last smashed against the hard limit of being immobilized. Fernanda, deeply and darkly aware of her young body's power to seduce, reward, pleasure her victims in motion and action, is never more completely the center of her captor's world than when she is rendered incapable of movement.

But Miss Clara, the nominal adult whose tenuous leash on her id has snapped, the possessor of power over her students as their guardian and cicerone, is utterly unable to exercise even a shadow of that power because she is so cracked and broken by her past. Her charges, like those things that prosecutors level at malefactors, like those vessels of energy that impart their essential power to a needy receptacle for it, are charged with the true nature of the quest in this polyphonic Passion Play: Boundaries.

Miss Clara has immobilized Fernanda to remove her from the harm she causes and is caused by Anna. In so doing, she creates the most brazen crucible for Horror among the "innocent" I've read in a solid decade or more. I've read that other reviewers, as well as some critics, conjure the shade of H.P. Lovecraft in describing the affect of this story. There is an element of the eldritch horror miasma inherent in any book entitled Jawbone wherein that word is used without distancing irony. But I myownself think this is horror of the Our Lady of the Flowers ilk, of the Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded strain. The events herein aren't of the explicit-conduct variety. They are sexual, these women, and they are absolutely sure that sexual is what they mean their acts to be, thus Genet; they are psychologically subtle, they are seeking and thirsting for subtler refreshment than just vaginal wetness, thus de Sade.

It is anxiety-crippled Miss Clara's terrible, terrible luck to meet privileged perverted Annelise. The young mistress of domination's most brilliantly subtle expression, the psychic force of the story on the unbalanced, determines to make of her youth a supreme weapon, the myth of purity. The White God she invents and that god's immediate claim on the unwavering attention of all with whom Annelise shares the words, is so carefully inflected that Miss Clara does not see but feels with blinding intensity the repeated reiterated regurgitated violations that broke her to begin with, that made with White no purity but putridity. No nobility and cleanliness and finality of bone. There is only the powder of mold as it rots flesh in wetness. There is the liminal space of menstrual cloth not yet used as a blood-dam. Annelise conjures the cruel capable whiteness of teeth, hardest objects in a body, necessary to rip and mangle the very stuff Humanity must have or simply lose all power and cease. Die. Though perhaps not entirely, if there is will and enough lust to use it.

As an act of Literature, translation is alchemical. Take this gleaming, golden thing, this extant object of crafted and intended meaning, and use the solvents and reagents of a different meaning-regime to produce gold. Again. In Jawbone, Translator Booker explains her kerotakis and its subtle distillates in a note before one reads the novel. I understand that impulse to assist the mainly monoglot US audience. It feels to me, at least, more like a way to emulate Annelise: I will take all the pain, hurt me and make me bleed, that I may give your dark input of uninterest or unwillingness to work for this experience of distillation into a finer, lighter, more potent Enlightenment its ashes and sands, its heats from sources not like the results. Not for this translator the mere bain-marie. Its coddling of like fluids to make of one the best and most palatable form it can take is too bland for this alchemy of hers. No custard of double-boiled entertainment comes from here. It is the hottest ash, the slowest heat exchange of crater-hot sand that takes the already intoxicating vodka into Everclear, into its superlative...but brutally unforgiving of misuse...form.

It is a high-wire act, as I would guess translating Joyce's Ulysses into hieroglyphics would be. Surviving tweaks to reality like multi-hyphenated English terms, which would make a Spanish-speaking ear and eye agog with Otherness, aren't readily apparently Othered. I fully understand and support the editorial decision not to use italics to indicate foreignness. For Spanish. But permaybehaps some of these oddities could be italicized for the Othering of English as it would be in an Ecuadorian ear? As it is, they just stub my reader's toe on their odd height and unyielding hardness.

It can feel, in the course of the read, humid to be in the abandoned spaces and the wildlands. I mean this in a visceral way. The reading of the games that Fernanda enacts, at huge, huge existential risk to Annelise, calls forth actual sweat from my reader's brow. In the stories, the words spun to whip the parties to Dionysian ecstasy and Pan-ic from the god itself work. That is not always to the benefit of Author Ojeda's actual novel. Overall, minding my place as bystander and accomplice but not perpetrator, I can't give the entire reading experience a perfect score because of those very few points where The Story showed herself from behind the obscuring mask.

Make no mistake, though, this is Literature and big, big fun entertainment caught in the slick, wet act of making passion real. Read it without your lady-gloves on. Read it with your speed turned lower than usual but used longer. Read it while you're avoiding something Social, some obligation that couldn't be said no to.

But read it now.

OLGA DIES DREAMING, a special book & soon to be a special (I hope!) Hulu series

OLGA DIES DREAMING
XÓCHITL GONZÁLEZ
Flatiron Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

ON BBC CULTURE's Best of 2022 List!

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

SOON TO BE A HULU SERIES STARRING JESSICA PIMENTEL!

The Publisher Says: A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots, all in the wake of Hurricane Maria

It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, are bold-faced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's powerbrokers.

Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.

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

My Spoilery Review: First, read this:

There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.

I spent a chunk of my 1980s in Nuyorican Sunset Park. I grew up around Spanish-speaking people (including my oldest sister, whose command of Mexican Spanish exceeds her command of English) and wasn't thrown by the blended Spanglish interwoven in the book...that's a positive feature to me. Closeted gay guys were a dime a dozen, then as now; closeted gay Nuyorican guys were even more common then than now. And a lot of 'em were/are married, with kids, and a sadly disproportionate percentage were/are also hooked on crack then, heroin now. So I came (!) to this read ready to rumble. Papi dead of AIDS ("this pato disease," as Mami calls it in a letter), Mami in the Cause and effectively dead...yeah, I was feelin' it in all my wypipo leftist soul.

“Debt is one of The Man’s great tools for keeping people of color oppressed.”
–and–
“You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.”

I don't like Olga, or Prieto, at all.

Sellout is the kindest word I have for them, both of them, the grey and compromised souls they got from their rootstock. I think the thing they rebelled against, terrorism in place of activism, makes sense given that they lost their mother to it...and does she have a blinkin' nerve showing back up (even if only by letter) to "take command" after what she left behind!...but. But, but, but.

“Because I understand all the problems, I just fundamentally don’t believe we can fix them. However, I fully support those on the bottom taking as much advantage of the top as humanly possible.”

You are your choices. Own them, and accept the prices they exact; this is what not one of these characters did until something outside themselves actually *forced* them to. And Prieto, for whom the stakes and therefore the costs are so very high, was guilty of the rankest betrayals and most repugnant of sophistic self-justification; in the end, the chickens coming home to roost in the body of Mami...or in the box of worms the goddamned woman sends him...let me just say that this subplot is terrible, realistic, and very, very angering for me on more levels than I can count.

So the story's a banger, right?! YES! This is gonna be epic fucking television! A telenovela in Spanglish for me and my fellow wypipo! (You do not know cross-cultural humor until you've seen English closed-captioned telenovelas.)

I have some problems. My rating says so.

Mami's an evil bitch, a stone-cold rotten-souled foul excrescence of a person whose cold, cold heart would shame the Devil Herself.

"Olga, I love your mother as much, if not more, than my actual sibling. But there's a reason that I never had kids. Mothering and birthing a child are not the same. Children don't ask to be born. They don't owe anybody anything. This is one area your mother and I never saw eye to eye on, frankly."

Her heartlessness is a calculated creation by an author to make a point. Yes, yes, yes, I am a reasonably skilled decoder and can in fact separate reality from fiction. But this is fiction that illuminates a reality far too often ignored in our world. Wrong is being done everywhere, wrong met with wrong, and perpetuating a cycle of use and abuse and victimization that simply won't end.

The price of Imperialism is lives. —JUAN GONZÁLEZ (epigraph of the book)

And what is new about that, you ask. Nothing, not one thing, and that's where I got off the train. Because there needs to be some reckoning for whose lives are paying this price, and not on an institutional level....

Olga and Prieto are compromised, like I said above; I like to read about grey characters because frankly ain't too many all-pure-n-shiny knights out there. What I find so hard to make part of this as a tale of feminist redemption is the fact that Olga knowingly fleeces her clients, launders money for people best left to God or the Devil to deal with, and still manages to fuck up her response to Hurricane María by deciding she shouldn't be a "white savior" and go help the suffering to recover.

Prieto, meanwhile, faces off against their mother in her native element—Revolución!—and comes away knowing 1) she doesn't love him; 2) she's known he's gay all his life; 3) she thinks he's weak and useless, like his (crack-addicted) father. And this is touching bottom for him. This, not the HIV he could've avoided possibly passing on to someone before he knew he had it; this, not allowing his moral compass to be set by vile, evil people because he wanted to stay in politics.

Not down with this, Author González. Not at all, these are some bad actors becoming "good"...okay, they wouldn't claim that, better...by force majeure. And that sits wrong with me, not that it took this to get them to face up to themselves but that this is what it took to get them to face up to themselves. There's compromised and then there's complicit, and these're some complicit folk here.

So my fifth star went away, maximally I was at four.

But then there was that epilogue-y thing set in 2025. Another half-star. It was not a good idea. It wasn't any better or worse, writing-wise, than the rest of the book, but it was...ill advised, I'll stop there. And that's how a delightfully fun, deeply absorbing, hard-charging and target-aiming home run of a read turned into a sacrifice bunt that put the runner in scoring position.

And left her there.

LOVE & SAFFRON: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love, a one-sitting buffet of reading goodness

LOVE & SAFFRON: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love
KIM FAY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$24.00 hardcover, available TODAY!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter—as well as a gift of saffron—to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as a writer for the newspaper food pages. Imogen lives on Camano Island outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific Northwest magazine, and while she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s never tasted fresh garlic—exotic fare in the Northwest of the sixties. As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives.

Food and a good life—they can’t be separated. It is a discovery the women share, not only with each other, but with the men in their lives. Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen’s decades-long marriage blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that true love does not always come in the form we expect it to. Into this beautiful, intimate world comes the ultimate test of Joan and Imogen’s friendship—a test that summons their unconditional trust in each other.

A brief respite from our chaotic world, Love & Saffron is a gem of a novel, a reminder that food and friendship are the antidote to most any heartache, and that human connection will always be worth creating.

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

My Review: First, read this:

We’ve never had mussels before. I’ve always thought of them as freeloaders clinging where they’re not wanted, and you must agree, their beards are unappetizing.
–and–
Our ten days in Paris felt like the blink of an eye. Or a dream. An elegant, buttery, wine-soaked dream.
–and–
When a new experience comes into my life, it doesn’t feel real anymore until I share it with you.

I'll be honest: I asked for this DRC because the subtitle uses the series (or Oxford) comma correctly, which is as promising a start as I can conjure in these degenerate punctuation-heretical times, and the tale is told in epistolary format. I am in the mood for a story of friendship. I am always gruntled by the effective use of epistolary storytelling. And I deeply love reading about people sharing their love of food.

You'll be looking up at that not-quite-four-star rating about now. I can explain.

All of my initial conditions were met, and met fully. I got the epistolary format used well: These are friends by post. There are gaps, lacunae in communicating with each other, and that enables the author to move the pace along in a more natural way. The fact that each letter was a crafted document, a thing one sat down to make and to serve a purpose...evoking in the friend an emotional response...that requires thought. Attention. Serious choice-making. That was evident in the prose (see above).

In Part I, the friendship developed from an initial fan letter that touched Imogen, the recipient, because of its inclusion of a packet of saffron. Now's the time to talk about the 1960s in the USA. As the world is now, a packet of saffron is a welcome gift because it's not cheap. As the world was then, a gift of a narwhal tusk would have about the same impact as saffron. "Whatinahell's that?" Imogen, who can dig clams or hunt an elk, hasn't tasted fresh garlic. In her life. Imagine the impact of SAFFRON! And no, those under 50, this wasn't in the least bit unusual.

I grew up in a household that had WAY more in the way of culinary adventurousness than the average. My parents were older when I was born, we lived near San Francisco, California, which had Chinese, Italian, Mexican, Japanese cuisines and ingredients all over, and my mother loved to experiment with weird, Gourmet-magazine type dishes. (Tuesday dinner, not so much. Feasts, though....) Then my mother and I moved to South Texas, where she hailed from, and I found the goddesses' natural food: Tex-Mex. BUT no one in 1967 Mercedes, Texas, had ever seen a fresh apricot or tasted General Tso's chicken. And that is where I can relate to this story: Joan is possessed of knowledge that Imogen simply doesn't have, or have any way to know she lacks.

So this cultural exchange is one I loved reading about. The historical moment...Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK assassination, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ("a rrrrrrilllllly big shew!")...was the background of my childhood. They write to each other about it all. They write to each other about their cooking adventures. Single Joan has a lot to offer long-married Imogen because she (figuratively) listens and isn't invested in a particular outcome. What Imogen offers Joan is the simple, invaluable resource of being older, and experienced, and generous with her time, too. In a long novella/short novel, the two forge a perfectly balanced and genuinely moving friendship.

And now about those missing stars.

I am not nit-picking when I say that a book with the delicious recipes in it that this book has (the carne asada!!) needs to hyperlink them somewhere. I don't have a final copy, of course, but the paper copies don't appear to have an index either. (This is as of 6 February 2022, 6pm EST, when I went trolling for reviews last.) Yes yes yes, one can highlight them on the Kindle, but this is an oversight that would make the book even better if it were addressed. There's one quarter star.

Francis, Imongen's husband, blossoming into a passionate foodie during the course of the correspondence is a pleasure, insofar as it's presented to us...but Imogen is reporting it, of course, as it's an epistolary novel between Joan and herself. It's a feature, not a bug; but it left me feeling distanced from Imogen's lived life. I don't think this was a deal-breaker because epistolary...it's in the description...but I do think its impact on Imogen wasn't able to be explored quite as well as would've served the tale told. A quarter-star, and a sigh of regret for a too-short third-person catch-up in Part II.

Joan's life as a secretary at Rexall Drugs was, of course, the kind of job a girl (in the lingo of the time) could expect to get. Imogen encouraging her, boosting her, being there for her as she worked through anxiety and internalized misogyny and pursued her dreams of life in the newspaper world, was just a balm.

But then what? I didn't feel Joan got the spotlight enough as time went by...and that is down, again, to the format chosen to tell the story. But it felt unfinished as it was, with a too-short third-person wrap-up for Joan, too. Not because it wasn't a complete story! Because there was more story I wanted. Another quarter star forgone for expectations raised but not quite met.

When we return to epistolary format in Part III, the magic's worn off...the sweet, nostalgic sense of familiarity at a safe remove isn't there any more. But that isn't a deal-breaker so much as the force of the narrative doesn't have a chance to recover, so the half-star goes because, for the very first time, I noticed myself noticing I wasn't as ensorcelled as I started the read being. (Maybe if the third-person narratives had been diary entries...? I am Monday-morning quarterbacking here, so I'll stop.)

What I'll end on is the sheer pleasure of reading that this one-sitting tale offered. I think any book group that needs to lighten the tone and pick up the pace after a tough read should get this book onto their lists ASAP. I think pandemic-weary people whose lives have shifted into a new configuration through discovering food and cooking would like this for a February Sunday afternoon's pleasure. Most of all, I want to assure anyone thinking "this old man's a nutbar for pushing the read at me with this 3-3/4-star rating" is correct. This old man is, in fact, a nutbar. And one whose purpose it is to tell you what's worth reading.

This is worth reading.

DESTROYER OF LIGHT, second novel from Afrofuturist monadnock Brissett & SORROWLAND, sad, powerful, painful read

DESTROYER OF LIGHT
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Tor Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett's Destroyer of Light

20 Must Read Space Fantasy Books for 2021—BookRiot
Most Anticipated Fall 2021 Sci-fi, Fantasy & Horror—BiblioLifestyle

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the four habitable areas of the planet—Day, Dusk, Dawn, and Night—the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:

*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.
*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes.
*A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.

Their stories, often containing disturbing physical and sexual violence, skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all—human and alien—balances upon a knife’s-edge.

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

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

Humanity is clinging to existence on the tidally locked planet called "Eleusis." Their enemies, the krestge, have destroyed Earth (no one knows why) and evacuated them to Eleusis without doing anything more to complete the extermination (no one knows why). But life must go on. Being humanity, you know what this means: infighting, resource grabs, atrocities, all the usual stuff.

We follow the entire nightmarish fight between people, used in the sense of "humans," who would do better to question the hows and whys of the aliens who exist among them, as the entire planet careens towards some climactic cathartic cleansing of...of...of what, exactly? Is it time for Humanity to finish its extinction at the hands of its squabbling selves? Or is it just barely possible that this awful mirror is held up to make Humanity confront its worst and most enraging aspects?

You don't know Author Brissett's work if you think she provides an answer to that question.

Intricately interconnected strands of Eleusis's enhanced and unenhanced human remnants, violently abusing themselves and each other, aliens with the demonstrated capacity to end the entire human lineage sitting still and doing nothing are some of the mainstays of this book's architecture. The manner in which Author Brissett makes one care about the architecture is, in common with the subtle and unjustly undercelebrated Elysium, left for you to discern. The clues are there. The point of the read is to get out of it what you put into it. While I myownself am indifferent to spoilers, having watched The Crying Game decades ago and thinking The Big Reveal was...kinda obvious...but in any event anticlimactic, I still think you'll enjoy the read more if you're left to mull over the roles of the krestge, the enhanced humans, the nature of the need for child soldiers, and the book's title. Hang on until the ending, and you will feel so very rewarded for your efforts.

There is MUCH to unearth. The pleasures in these words are very significant.

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

SORROWLAND
RIVERS SOLOMON
MCDxFSG
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST HORROR NOVEL! Winners announced 25 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

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

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

There are almost no good people in this world, and Vern meets the worst of them. What makes this a deeply satisfying read is that teenaged Vern, in their unbelievable indomitable drive to thrive not just survive, manages to do exactly that. Overcoming all-too-real obstacles? Check. Guiding new lives through a terrible world, explaining how to be better? Check. Vern raising their children is the single brightest take-away I have from this unhappy story.

Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

If I were to seek my mental filing system's catalog for closest comparables, I'd have to go with Toni Morrison's deathless Beloved admixed with Octavia E. Butler's more trenchant Kindred, as written for Quentin Tarantino to film. Yes...violence and menace are imbued in every scene. No, it isn't a splatterfest. Yes, every single thing that happens evokes an emotional response. No, there are no "answers" or fancy nostrums to help us deal with the underlying hate, like the lava in a volcano, erupting for as long as it erupts.

Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

If you've read 2017's An Unkindness of Ghosts or 2019's Blood is Another Word for Hunger, you're ahead of me in this realization. If you haven't, read this book. You will not regret your introduction to the magical prose that Author Solomon uses being this story. I'm willing to bet you'll get on to their back catalog after finishing the read. If not, if this is just all too much for your sensibilities at the present, read their free online short work that's part of The Verge's "Better Worlds" project: St. Juju.

This writer is a Talent in a world that needs more of them.

THE FASHION ORPHANS, a sweet and poignant story of sisterhood that's about malignant motherhood instead

THE FASHION ORPHANS
RANDY SUSAN MEYERS & M.J. ROSE
Blue Box Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Two estranged sisters find that forgiveness never goes out of style when they inherit their mother’s vintage jackets, purses… and pearls of wisdom

Estranged half-sisters Gabrielle Winslow and Lulu Quattro have only two things in common: mounds of debt and coils of unresolved enmity toward Bette Bradford, their controlling and imperious recently deceased mother.

Gabrielle, the firstborn, was raised in relative luxury on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. Now, at fifty-five, her life as a Broadway costume designer married to a heralded Broadway producer has exploded in divorce.

Lulu, who spent half her childhood under the tutelage of her working-class Brooklyn grandparents, is a grieving widow at forty-eight. With her two sons grown, her life feels reduced to her work at the Ditmas Park bakery owned by her late husband’s family.

The two sisters arrive for the reading of their mother’s will, expecting to divide a sizable inheritance, pay off their debts, and then again turn their backs on each other.

But to their shock, what they have been left is their mother’s secret walk-in closet jammed with high-end current and vintage designer clothes and accessories— most from Chanel.

Contemplating the scale of their mother’s self-indulgence, the sisters can’t help but wonder if Lauren Weisberger had it wrong: because it seems, in fact, that the devil wore Chanel. But as they being to explore their mother’s collection, meet and fall in love with her group of warm, wonderful friends, and magically find inspiring messages tucked away in her treasures — it seems as though their mother is advising Lulu and Gabrielle from the beyond — helping them rediscover themselves and restore their relationship with each other.

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

My Review: I have a personal connection to this story, in that this could be my family. My sisters are a lot older than me, and our mother was the same kind of borderline personality that the dead woman was. After our mother's death, there wasn't anything left except stuff...lots and lots of stuff...and there's a long, long history of unkindness, rancor, and just plain nastiness all over our "family." I was very curious to see how things would play out fictionally.

It's not like I wasn't expecting the happily ever after...I was...but I was simultaneously frustrated and amused at how these deeply estranged siblings navigated this emotional passage without either death threats or theft taking place.

What drew me to the read was that sense of familiarity, of fellow feeling, for the characters. It was a fun way to work through my own bad past. And in the end, while I wanted the story to end the way it did, I was...curiously detached. Neither Lulu nor Gabrielle ever cohered to me, never took on the full volume of characterhood. The real character here was their horrible mother! She emerged in all her shallow, self-centered, controlling awfulness. If you've never seen The Little Mermaid, you won't know this reference, but this old baggage out-Ursula'd Ursula!

I was drawn in by the deep Chanel lore on display here, and found myself grateful for the Fire tablet's ability to browse the web. There's a lot I didn't know, and a lot I half-knew, about Chanel, so being able to check references and to see aesthetics I was ignorant about helped me to *get* this read. The sisters "playing dress-up" in Mama's clothes was a hoot. But in the end, that's just what it felt like: Playing a game in which Mama would, in the end, step in to decide who wins. (Or her lawyer, in this case, who must approve any plan for the huge collection of Chanel artifacts to be disposed of.)

So there's me, all irked with "Mother" Bette being her borderline-personality tantrummy self...there's the source of my sour, not-quite-four star rating. I was certainly drawn in by the collaborators' ability to merge their prose into one authorial voice. It shows that they're different people mostly in the hilarious older women who formed Bette's coterie of ladies-who-lunch, and Lulu's adult sons. These very, very different types didn't emerge from one brain! But they each contributed to the sense of rightness and reality that the story definitely has.

The obvious comparables to this story are Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada (actually, Author Weisberger, she wore and collected Chanel), but those aren't direct cognates. Bushnell's book and its offshoots are about navigating complications unique to upper-class modern life; Weisberger's bildungsroman takes a greenhorn into adulthood wearing amazing shoes. Here we have what happens when the Bushnell women, now mothers of another Weisberger generation, have to deal with their own mothers' deaths.

It *is* in a tradition, then, but it is *not* something you've read a dozen times already. It's the next step, it's the Bushnell women's ascent to cronehood, it's the education of the adults in the arts of being elders. It works fine. It isn't quite as full-bodied as I expected it to be, since the real main character turns out to be the dead mother; but it was more than worth my time to read. I'll venture to say that it's worth yours, too.

BLACK BUCK, savagely funny & supremely fun send-up/roast/take-down of US business culture

BLACK BUCK
MATEO ASKARIPOUR
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$26.00 hardcover, available now

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Young Lions Fiction Award shortlist has the author on it! The New York Public Library will announce the winner on 16 June 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

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

My Review: Please, please, someone in Black Hollywood make this into a movie! I can't think of a better time, or a better story, to use this terrific twist on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to skewer the shrinking opportunity pool! The Economist cites statistics that show that white bros are more eager than BIPoC employees to return to the office, stop remote working. Reading this book will give you a visceral, intense sense of why that most likely is true...and what the grim consequences for diversity in the workplace could turn out to be.

Not, however, if Author Askaripour has anything to say about it.

You see, there's some truth to the old adages "be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be 'yes'" and "you get back what you give out." Darren, twenty-two and a barista with a pretty good life (he thinks; his mom disagrees), sees one of his regulars ordering the same boring thing every morning. He does what a good sales person always does: suggests an alternative, a different and more interesting drink. Without being crappy about it, he persists until the customer agrees to try the new item. Which he loves.

Darren's brewed his last latte. He upsold the founder of SumWun and now he has a high-powered sales job waiting for him. That maybe he doesn't want...or isn't sure he wants...but let me tell you, when someone who's got what it takes to grab enough money to found a viable tech company wants you, it would do you best to get your stuff out of your locker and go with him right then. There will be no rest until your onboarding process is complete and your world revolves around Selling the Widget.

Author Askaripour chose to frame this narrative as one of those metastatic "positivity/self-help/I succeeded you can too" memoirs recrudescing all over bookstores like lesions on a cancer patient. It was, I thought for about two chapters, going to make me a crazy person. "I have to bail," I whimpered to my Young Gentleman Caller. "I might get seriously ill, this is reminding me of all those years selling!"

"Read me some," he said, "just enter {position number} and let's go."

“Ain’ no Black people need no therapists, ’cause we don’ be havin’ those mental issues. OCD, ADD, PTSD, and all those other acronyms they be comin’ up with every day. I’m tellin’ you, the only acronyms Black folk need help with is the NYPD, FBI, CIA, KKK, and KFC, ’cause I know they be puttin’ shit in those twelve-piece bucket meals to make us addicted to them.”

"That was funny! You haven't got that far yet, you have to find out why that's there," I was ordered.

You rock, Rob. I took the ride, I enjoyed the whole ride, and you're the one who made it happen.

It was sometimes cringe to me how close Author Askaripour sailed to the winds of snottiness. It was often the case, however, that he found my ticklish spot right after that. I am not going to say I think everyone should read the book because the humor-deficient will be blankly confused why it's supposed to be funny or outraged that their demographic is being scored off ("He reeked of privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks" is one of the most memorable snorts of derision). For me, possibly for you, there's an aesthetic hill to climb in the format being parodied; but there is something so very good to gain by persevering: Belly laughs at the sheer inventive snark leveled at targets who could use some dings and scratches on their cheap veneer.

Recommended for some good, cathartic belly laughs.