Month: December 2016

It was a cry that had come from too many lips since he’d returned to Kiewarra. If I’d known, I would have done things differently. It was too late for that now. Some things had to be lived with.

Times are tough for the people of Kiewarra, Australia. Crops are drying out because of a never-ending drought and money is running out. Tensions are already high in the community when a respected family is found murdered. Karen Hadler and her six-year-old son Billy are found shot to death in their home. The father Luke Hadler appears to have committed suicide in a nearby field. Only thirteen-month-old Charlotte was left unscathed. Federal Agent Aaron Falk, Luke’s childhood best friend, returns to his hometown for the first time in twenty years to pay his respects. The problem is no one wants him there. When Luke and Kyle were sixteen, their friend Ellie was found submerged in the river with rocks in her pocket. No one believes the boys’ alibi and both Aaron and his father suffered under intense suspicion.

“Born and bred here, or forever an outsider, seems to be the Kiewarra way.”
“Born and bred isn’t a free pass either,” Falk said with a grim smile.

Aaron planned to get out of town quickly, but Luke’s parents want him look through Luke’s financials and see if he can find a motive or possibly something that might exonerate Luke. Aaron is reluctant to stay in this suffocating town for one second longer than necessary, but he has a hard time saying no to Luke’s grieving mother, who was also like a mother to him. He begins working with Sergeant Raco, who was only employed one week before the murders rocked the community. New clues are few and far between and the investigation is slow. The case has a few weird anomalies, but most of the evidence points to Luke being the killer. Aaron knows that Luke wasn’t always the easiest guy to be around, but could he have really slaughtered his family?

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared from sight, [city natives] gazed around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.

I knew I was going to like this book from the moment I finished the creepy prologue where we follow the blowflies! It was totally a pull-the-covers-a-little-tighter moment. Despite the wide open spaces, Kiewarra feels oppressively claustrophobic. The town is like a powder keg about to explode. Even the children can’t escape the looming feeling of disaster: “the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids’ paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes.” I loved the moments of Aaron wandering around town getting a fresh look at his old stomping grounds. One of my favorite scenes was the horror Aaron experiences after seeing the current state of a river he spent so much time in. I’ll probably never say something like this again, but the occasional redback or huntsman spider lurking in the corners added a lot of character!
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Scattered through the present-day story are flashbacks revealing the history between the high school clique of four: Luke, Aaron, Ellie, and Gretchen. Luke was the big personality of the group and kind of an ass. He got entertainment out of making his friends squirm. Sensible Aaron was Luke’s faithful sidekick. He was starting to develop feelings for Ellie and thought he’d have better luck with her if he was more confident like Luke. Ellie was moody and mysterious. She tried to spend as much time as possible away from her drunkard father. Gretchen, the newest member, was the bubbly blonde who Luke latched onto immediately. The group spent much of their after-school hours together, but they drifted apart after Ellie’s death.

The relationships between the townspeople all felt authentic. Aaron’s badge impresses no one: “Out here, those badges don’t mean as much as they should.” No one wants Aaron digging around to expose the town’s secrets and his former classmates are eager to put him in his place. Rallied together by Ellie’s father and cousin, many of the townsfolk are committed to running him out of town by any means necessary. But it isn’t all trouble for Aaron. He strikes up some friendly relationships with some of the town’s newcomers. After an awkward funeral scene where people begin to recognize him, he reunites with Gretchen, the only other surviving member of their crew. Their history comes bubbling to the surface with their easy rapport and subsequent flirtations.

“Death rarely changes how we feel about someone. Heightens it, more often than not.”

The past and present collide in the insular farming community of Kiewarra, Australia. Did Luke kill his family or was he framed? What happened in Ellie’s final moments? Are the two mysteries linked somehow? Being back in his hometown is difficult, but Aaron can’t help but want to know what really happened and maybe even clear his name, even though it’s too late to salvage his most important relationship. The Dry is a compelling mystery with an immersive setting and complex relationships.

Without any warning, Dana Franklin is thrust back through time and space. It’s 1976 and she’s settling into her new California apartment when she starts to feel dizzy. Her modern surroundings fade away and suddenly she’s in antebellum Maryland. She seems to be inextricably linked with Rufus Weylin, the young son of a plantation owner. Dana is pulled to Rufus anytime his life is in danger, which happens with surprising frequency. The era is dangerous for Dana–she’s black and has no enforceable rights. It turns out that she and Rufus both need each other to survive, but they are also capable of destroying each other.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

Kindred is a quick read because the language is plain and it’s dialogue-heavy, but there’s so much to unpack. I was surprised that the logistics of Dana’s time traveling were never addressed, but the time traveling is just a framework to explore the themes. Octavia Butler describes it as a “grim fantasy” and there’s no science. Dana’s story begins in 1976, two hundred years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It’s such a whirlwind! Because of the mechanics of Dana’s time traveling, each chapter begins and ends with a life-threatening situation. The chapters have titles like The Fire, The Fall, etc. that give hints of what’s to come and add to the intensity. Rufus is a few years older every time Dana returns to the plantation, so we get to watch him and the other characters as they grow up and their roles on the plantation evolve. Dana is always marked by her experience when she’s transported back to California, sometimes permanently. When we first meet Dana, she is laying in a modern hospital bed after her left arm has been amputated.

“The ease seemed so frightening,” I said. “Now I see why.” “What?” “The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

Dana was intellectually aware of the horrors of slavery, but her education doesn’t prepare her for the brutality she actually experiences. She sees how inadequate Hollywood is at portraying the real thing. Dana is shocked at the ease with which people settle into their institutionally-defined roles, herself included. She’s especially shaken when she sees the children playing slave-trading games. Dana notices that despite the disdain with which we view slavery now, wide-scale, government-sanctioned oppression has been allowed to occur repeatedly in the modern era. She specifically mentions Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa.

“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.

Like many slave-owners, the Weylins use family attachments to keep the slaves in line. Dana’s hands are similarly tied by family; her entire ancestral lineage depends on Rufus. Dana has to betray her modern values in order to ensure her eventual birth. In an era with only bad and worse choices, she begins to empathize more with the slaves on the plantation. With hindsight, it’s easy to create caricatures of those in the past and forget that they are complex human beings with nuanced relationships. Dana sees firsthand how privileged it is to judge someone’s actions from a safe distance and how sometimes what seems like the best course of action can have terrible ramifications. But even Dana falls into the trap of feeling superior to others: “I looked down on her myself for a while. Moral superiority. Here was someone even less courageous than I was. That comforted me somehow.”

His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

In Han Kang’s Human Acts, there’s a section about how everyone has the potential for good and evil and the character wonders how humans can be directed towards the more humane path. Kindred explores how institutions drive behaviors and make it hard to change anything. Sometimes there were glimpses of potential goodness in the Weylin men, but the brutality always wins out. Dana tries to exert a progressive influence on Rufus, but it’s an impossible task when everything else in his world is working against her efforts.

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Strangely, they seemed to like [Rufus], hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.

At one point Dana’s husband Kevin, a white man, is also transported to the Weylin plantation, which adds some additional complications. His presence makes it safer for Dana because he can pretend to be her owner, but what happens if she gets transported back to 1976 and he’s unable to grab onto her in time? She’s also worried about what this era will do to him. Will it destroy him or rub off on him? Kevin is essentially a good man, but sometimes clueless. I expected more from him, so sometimes I’d be as angry with him as I was with Rufus. Like Rufus, he is more progressive than his forebearers but he’s still a man of his time. There are times in both 1976 and the 1800s where he’s unable to see outside the lens of his own experience. He remarks on how plantation life isn’t as bad as he would’ve expected, unaware of how different Dana’s experience is and unable to confront the true horror of something he’ll never be subjected to.

Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.

The most jarring thing about Dana’s character is she quickly accepts her fantastic situation. She seems somewhat detached from her experiences. Much of that is purposeful as she eases into her role but maintains an observer’s distance. However, from the beginning she remains remarkably levelheaded. While Dana sometimes felt “empty” to me, Butler really brings the supporting cast to life: Alice, Luke, Nigel, Carrie, Sarah, and even characters with smaller roles like Sam. Maybe Dana was written the way she was so that the reader could essentially “inhabit” her body and become a time traveler themselves.

My edition included a critical essay by Robert Crossley, which includes information on Octavia Butler’s background as well as analysis of Kindred. There were some aspects I picked on, but many I didn’t. Because of my prior knowledge and the book cover, I didn’t notice that Dana’s race was withheld until a specific moment. I loved learning about Butler’s mischievous reasoning behind choosing a spouse for Dana. Crossley also writes about how the science fiction landscape and the nature of the “alien” changed with the inclusion of female authors, which was really interesting.

I’ve been meaning to read Kindred for a long time, but I just now made time for it in preparation to read Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (review coming soon). One thing is clear: I need more Octavia Butler in my life! I think those that enjoy this book might want to try The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which addresses slavery but plays with time in a different way. Even if you didn’t like The Underground Railroad because some of the liberties the author you took, you might want to give Kindred a try. Despite the time travel, it keeps an accurate historical timeline.

Eighteen-year-old Hattie Hoffmann has big dreams of leaving her rural Minnesota town for New York City and becoming a professional actress. Hours after her well-received performance as Lady Macbeth in a high school play, she goes missing. The next day her body is found in an abandoned barn. It turns out that her acting was not just reserved for the stage; the investigation reveals how much of a performance Hattie had been putting on for everyone around her.

I’ve always gravitated to the tragedies, where even witches and ghosts couldn’t distract the audience from this central psychological truth: our own natures, we are all inherently doomed. Shakespeare didn’t write anything new. He didn’t invent jealousy, infidelity, or the greed of kings. He recognized evil as timeless and shone a spotlight directly, unflinchingly on it and said, This is what we are and always will be. [Peter]

Pine Valley is a farm town where everyone knows each other and nothing ever happens, so the close-knit community is shocked when one of their own is brutally murdered. The plot will be familiar to many, but it’s still an enjoyable and addictive read. The small town investigation isn’t heart-pounding or twisty, but I really liked the steady pace it maintained throughout. The most interesting part was not the investigation, but how the characters confront the situations they end up in. Two of the narrators are well-read and all the literary references (Macbeth, Jane Eyre, V., etc.) add richness to the narrative. It’s interesting how they were able to be so analytical about the lives of fictional characters, yet they still make similar mistakes.

Every book changes you in some way, whether it’s your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world. Literature gives us identity, even terrible literature.

The story alternates between three perspectives:

• Hattie, the victim – Her chapters take place over the 2007-2008 school year, her senior year of high school. Her brother Greg was deployed to Afghanistan and the Hoffman’s thought Hattie was the child they didn’t have to worry about. They had no idea how many secrets Hattie was keeping. She spent most of her life playing a different character for everyone she encountered, even her family members. Sometimes I got the feeling that I was supposed to see her as a budding sociopath, but most the time she comes across as your average high-achieving, impulsive teenager. She’s more mature than most of her classmates, but her life inexperience is conspicuous. She’s manipulative and unrelenting when she wants something. She feels completely in control of her life and those around her, but is she prepared for when people go “off-script”? I liked Hattie, but I enjoyed reading about her more through the other character’s eyes. One of my favorite lines describing her: “girl who kept shedding masks like a matryoshka doll, each one more audacious than the last, a psychological striptease that racked me with the need to tear her apart until I found out who or what was inside.”

• Del, the local sheriff – His chapters take place after Hattie’s death. Del is best friends with Hattie’s dad and has known Hattie since she was born. He faces the challenge of leading an investigation while intimately knowing most of the parties involved. He wrestles with his legal obligations and his duty to his friend. The fact that he’s even considering putting his friend first is a huge blow to his self-image as a lawman.
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• Peter, new high school English teacher – His chapters take place over the 2007-2008 school year. Peter and his wife moved to Pine Valley from Minneapolis to take care of his ill mother-in-law. He always thought of his wife as a sophisticated urbanite, but she immediately settles back into farm life. His mother-in-law is dismissive of him and he feels like an outsider. He assumed the move was temporary, but there’s no end in sight. His repeated attempts to reconnect with his wife are consistently rebuffed and he starts looking for an emotional connection in inappropriate places. Peter had a higher opinion of himself than I did, but I thought he was the most interesting character because he seemed to have the furthest to fall. I successfully predicted how his story would play out, but it was still fascinating to watch him circle an ethical line.

A child with a woman’s body. [Hattie] didn’t even know how young she was. She probably thought she was grown up and ready for the world, with her acting career and her endless quips and comebacks and that brain that soaked up everything around her. She probably thought there were only a few years between us, but it was a lifetime—dark, undiscovered caverns of disappointment and compromises. She was the adult idealized. I was the adult that really happened.

In Everything You Want Me To Be, desire and hubris become the characters’ undoing. They make choices they know are wrong and succumb to temptation despite being cognizant of the potential consequences. Identity also plays a huge part. Hattie wears many masks, often to elicit specific behaviors from others. Can you spend your life pretending to be someone else without losing yourself? Other characters either become someone they don’t recognize or watch someone they thought they knew morph into a completely different person. Can you ever truly know anyone—even yourself? Do we all have a dark side? I’m always going to be drawn to stories about the dark side that most people keep hidden and the secrets in a small town! I’d rate it a little lower if I was only thinking about plot, but all the other elements elevated it for me. I’ll be anxiously awaiting Mindy Mejia’s next book!

Books I thought about while reading:
• Everything I Never Told You: the title, a teenager who was pretending to be someone she wasn’t, a broken marriage between two people who want different things, and the addictive quality of the writing. Admittedly, EINTY is on a completely different level (mystery isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of it), but the part of me that loved reading EINTY liked Everything You Want to Be.
• Theme-wise it reminded me of Tana French’s The Trespasser, the disastrous consequences of trying to exert extreme control over your life and treating other people like puppets.
• Cruel Beautiful World: Some of the character dynamics.