Author: Taryn

Twenty-one short stories about flawed, complex individuals who might typically be reduced to dismissive categories. I can’t say I enjoyed reading Difficult Women, but I’m glad I read it. One of the many things that Gay excelled at was creating fully-formed characters and relationships in just a few pages. I felt like I intimately knew each character, even though some of the stories were very short. We’re introduced to a variety of women: jaded women, women who don’t think they deserve love, women who have been hurt by those they trusted or strangers, women who want to feel pain, women who are trying to find their place, women who know exactly what they want out of life, fierce women who instinctively protect their loved ones.

It isn’t light reading. These characters have been pushed to the limit and each story felt like an additional weight on my shoulders. In multiple stories a character begs another not to break their heart, only to be later disappointed. Common threads weave throughout many of the stories: child loss, adultery, abuse, rough sex, twins, the bond between women. My only complaint is that if you read it straight through, it feels like you’re repeatedly reading about the same situations. I got the most out of it when I only read a single story at a time, so that I could focus more on their differences than their similarities.

One of the best parts of this collection were the moments of recognition and vindication–the feeling that someone else out there understands. There’s a part in Difficult Women (Crazy Women) where a woman explains the considerations she makes when walking home late at night and her boyfriend tells her she is crazy. I had this exact same conversation in college and I remember how it made me question my own sanity. It goes to show the importance of having a diversity of voices.

I didn’t feel like I fully understood every story, but I found this great quote from Gay about the creation of Water, All Its Weight: “When I wrote this story I was living in an apartment with a rotting ceiling, and I thought: “What if someone created rot just by existing?” It’s interesting that a lot of people read way more into this story. When I write, there is rarely some grand statement I am trying to make. This story was simply a story about a girl who is followed, haunted by water and its weight. Literally.” (Chicago Review of Books). It made me feel more at ease when thinking about the stories that ventured into magical realism.

THE STORIES

I usually only feature my favorite short stories in these collections, but I felt the need to think through all these stories. My favorites are bolded. Many were shorter, character pieces, but I tend to like longer stories with more plot.

I Will Follow You – A haunting story about the unbreakable bond between sisters. Savvie and Carolina endured a terrible trauma together when they were children. Carolina is married now, but the sisters will always remain inseparable. A perfect opening!

Water, All Its Weight – Everywhere Bianca goes, the water follows–and then comes the rot and mold. Unable to handle the side effects of Bianca’s company, everyone in her life abandons her. My favorite moment is the short time when Bianca’s affliction is celebrated.

The Mark of Cain (link goes to story)- When this husband is with his mistress, he has his twin brother take his place at home. He thinks his wife doesn’t know, but she does–and she prefers the brother. The cycle of violence and the burdens our family can place on us.

Difficult Women – Different categories of misunderstood women: Loose Women, Frigid Women, Crazy Woman, Mothers, Dead Girls. My favorite was Crazy Women.

Florida – A peek into the windows of a Naples, Florida community. There are racial and class divides amongst the inhabitants and employees. New resident Marcy feels out of place next to her perfect neighbors and immediately sees that they “only [exist] in relation to those around them.”

La Negra Blanca – A stripper becomes the fixation of a wealthy client who feels entitled to her body. This man fetishizes black women, but was always taught to keep his distance so as not to “tarnish” the family name.

Baby Arm – A woman who knows exactly what she wants out of a relationship meets a man who gets her idiosyncracies. She conflates love and pain. She regularly attends all-girl fight club with her best friend Tate and other “girls who keep their ugly beneath the skin where it belongs, even though sometimes, it’s hard to keep it all in.” She loves Tate fiercely and Tate always knows exactly what she needs.

North Country – Kate is a black woman, which makes her a “double novelty” at her new university job. She’s welcomed with a barrage of insensitive questions and unwanted advances. She’s not ready for love after the end of a bad relationship and the loss of a child, but she begins to see a possible future with a charming logger named Magnus.

How – After years of being taken advantage of, Hanna’s family finally pushes her to her breaking point. She makes a plan to run off with her twin sister and her true love Laura. I loved the structure this story and the mini-chapters with names like How These Things Come to Pass & How Hanna Ikonen Knows It Is Time to Get the Girl and Get Out of Town.
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Requiem for a Glass Heart – A couple that loves each other, but they each need more than the other can give. The stone thrower, a man of flesh and blood, steals away moments where he “does not have to see too much or love too carefully.” Likewise, the glass woman is sometimes frustrated with her husband “who sees too much and loves too carefully.” Their needs overlap, but they’re unable to provide those things for each other.

In the Event of My Father’s Death – A father takes his daughter to his mistress’s house on weekends. She eventually follows in father’s footsteps.

Break All the Way Down – A woman “uses one hurt to cover another” by finding an abusive boyfriend after the death of her child. Her husband stands on the sidelines until he’s unable to watch her self-destruct any longer.

Bad Priest – A priest who “lied so extravagantly that even though he was not a believer, he feared for his mortal soul.” He begins an affair with Rebekah, a woman who “thrived on hopeless relationships.” My favorite part was the explanation of why Mickey became a priest.

Open Marriage – A woman toys with her husband after he suggests an open marriage. She knows he’ll never be able to follow through.

A Pat – A woman extends kindness to a stranger, but her motivations may be more selfish than it initially appears.

Best Features – Milly is overweight and gets involved in unhealthy relationships because she thinks she has no choice. “She knows how difficult it is to change the world. She used to try to change the world, but she learned better.”

Bone Density – A complicated relationship. The couple in this story both have partners outside the marriage, but they still have a strange pull towards one another.

I Am Knife – A powerful woman who uses her capability for violence to protect her loved ones. After the tragic death of her own child, she enviously watches as her twin sister’s pregnant belly grows. As painful as it is, she will always be at her sister’s side. “I wish I could carve the anger out of my body the way I cut everything else.”

Strange Gods – The first story and last story complement each other. A woman details her past trauma and explains to her devoted partner why she sometimes pushes him away.

My favorite two stories were the ones that felt most of out place:

The Sacrifice of Darkness – Every time miner Hiram Hightower goes underground, he comes back up less of a man. Fed up with a life filled with darkness, he causes the sun to disappear by flying an air machine into it. His family is left to deal with the consequences of his actions. A sweet love story with a hopeful end.

Parents hated Joshua because their parents hated Joshua’s father and none of those kids knew how to be any better than the people who brought them into the world.

Noble Things – Takes place after the second secession of South and the New Civil War. Anna married Patrick, son of a celebrated general who led the Southern states into battle. She wants to move to the North where they’ve already sent their young son. Patrick hates what the South has become, but his obligation to his family makes it difficult for him to leave. Sacrifice and the ties that bind us. There are so many chilling lines in this one.

Anna and Parker had the conversations they could only have with each other. They tried to remember the before, when they were children and there was only one place to call home, one country, the flag billowing on windy days in front of homes up and down every street—bands of red and white, fifty stars, one nation, indivisible until it wasn’t, how quickly it all came apart.

Difficult Women is a fascinating collection of short stories that I would love to read again eventually. There’s so much to unpack that it’s impossible to get it all in one go. This was my first Roxane Gay experience, but it certainly won’t be my last!

Kindred is the tale of a black woman who is repeatedly transported from her 1970s apartment to antebellum Maryland. The main reason I requested the adaptation was so that I would finally force myself to read the full-length novel. I’m so glad I did because it ended up being one of my favorites last year! Kindred makes such a great candidate for a graphic novel because there’s much dialogue and historical fiction seems to work especially well in the format. John Jennings and Damian Duffy they did a fantastic job of adapting Octavia Butler’s story. The review below is for the graphic novel adaptation only. My review for the full-length novel is available at this link.

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. – Steven Biko

THE INTRODUCTION

What would you do if you were suddenly pulled into the past and had to find a way to survive?

The introduction is written by speculative fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor. She writes about how Octavia Butler inspired her when she needed it the most. Learning about Butler’s kindness and how she made time to mentor a gifted new writer gave me a whole new level of admiration for her!

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural is one of the most memorable books from my childhood book collection. The scratchboard illustrations by Brian Pinkney shaped how I visualize the antebellum South (one of the illustrations). While the artwork of Kindred is unique to artist John Jennings, the earthiness of the illustrations made me immediately recall that book. Jennings’s style somehow made me feel settled in both the 1970s and 1800s. There’s a frenetic energy to the illustrations that convey the extreme stress that Dana’s body is being subjected to. His choice of presenting the 1970s in sepia tones and the 1800s in full-color was brilliant and reminded of how differently Dana processed the two different worlds:

Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse … Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.

I appreciated the art even more after viewing Jenning’s Tumblr and seeing how the art for Kindred differs from his usual style. Here is a link to one of the Kindred spreads, but you can see some more of his process for his various projects if you scroll through his blog.

THE STORY
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An adapted version won’t include everything. The omissions are going to be harder for me to pinpoint because I read the two books so close together. However, I missed the part where one of the plantation slaves explains the reasoning behind her children’s names. That part was probably easy to cut because many could probably make that connection on their own!

While there are necessary omissions, there are also parts where the illustrations add so much emotional power to the text. Being able to see Dana’s facial expressions tempered my only complaint of the full-length novel—that Dana seemed so detached, unusually accepting of her situation. At one point in the original novel, Dana has to put her copy of Gone With the Wind aside because she’s unable to stomach its representation of slavery after what she has experienced. I mentally pictured her throwing it across the room. The illustration shows her tossing it in the garbage can, which I thought was an appropriate visual.

Some of the most powerful spreads were the ones with the fewest words. One of the pages that impacted me most was after Dana convinces one of the slaves to submit to her owner’s desires. “She didn’t kill him . . . but she seemed to die little. Rufus mailed another letter for me. Payment . . . . for services rendered.” (pg. 158, The Fight) Minimal words, but the illustrations pack such a punch. Another page that I found memorable is at the end of The Fall (pg. 99), when Dana is reaching for Kevin as the whip comes down and she disappears.

The graphic novel is such an awesome format for Octavia Butler’s classic book and would make a great gift for her fans. It would also be a great way to introduce yourself to the story if you’re not ready to commit to the whole novel or you don’t think you’ll be able to make time for it anytime soon. I do recommend reading the novel first because it’s a very fast-paced and action-packed experience!

______________

If you are interested in John Jennings’s artwork, his Hoodoo Noir graphic novella Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road (pub. date 3/1/17) is currently available in the ‘Read Now’ section Netgalley.

I’m beginning to think that I have a bias against books centered around college professors! (See also: Listen to Me, All Things Cease to Appear) I didn’t dislike Two Days Gone. I just couldn’t get into it. The writing was lovely, but the story and characters were just okay for me.

Tom Huston’s wife and three young children were stabbed to death and he’s on the run. Could the beloved college professor and bestselling author have slaughtered his family? Sergeant Ryan DeMarco leads the search for the missing professor. Perhaps Tom’s latest manuscript holds the answers to this mystery? The investigation takes DeMarco from the campus of Tom’s university to seedy strip clubs.

I’m reminded of Nabokov’s contention that there are always two plots at work in a story. The first is the plot of the story, but above it, hovering ominously like a fat-bellied cloud, is the writer’s consciousness, which is the real plot of everything he writes. If a book is filled with love, it is because the writer longs for love. If the book drips violence, it is because the writer burns to levy justice, to decimate his enemies. The writer composes such books as a means of survival. Otherwise, his psyche would unravel. And the unraveling, depending upon its form, can be either pitiful or disastrous.

RYAN DEMARCO

Amazon calls this book a Ryan DeMarco Mystery, so I’m assuming it will eventually be part of a series. DeMarco is the character we spend the most time with. He was the inspiration for one of Tom’s fictional characters, so they had previously become acquainted during Tom’s research. DeMarco is disdainful of academics, but he immediately identified with Tom despite their many differences. He is shocked when the picture perfect Huston family is found murdered, presumably by Tom’s hand.

The banter between DeMarco and his boss (his former subordinate) at the station was sometimes amusing, but I felt like I’d missed an earlier book in a series. I liked DeMarco most when he was doing fieldwork because the investigative interviews allowed me to know Tom from different perspectives. The two worlds that Tom was traveling between couldn’t have been more different: (1) a university campus filled with grudges and professors fighting to make a name for themselves & (2) the strip club with tight-lipped employees who would rather stay off the grid. The closer DeMarco gets to finding Tom, the more he has to look to the literary greats to get a view into the suspect’s psyche.

DeMarco suffers from a lonely and empty home life. His personal life slowly takes over the narrative, which might have been why I wasn’t overly enthused by the story as a whole. He and his wife Laraine separated after the tragic death of their only child. Laraine lives in a cottage where she entertains random lovers. DeMarco sits outside her home and watches, occasionally becoming one of his wife’s nighttime visitors. (Their story would have been right at home in Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women!) While I wasn’t that interested in DeMarco’s personal life, the description of his relationship with his estranged wife had a good mix of the intimate and the everyday that made their relationship feel authentic.
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THE HUSTON FAMILY

He was both a fiction and the truth. The stronger of the two was truth, however, and the truth sickened him and hollowed him out.

When we first encounter Tom Huston, he has just disposed of a large knife and is on the run. Unable to process what happened to his family, he begins to disassociate and think of himself as a fictional character. He decides to contact the mysterious Annabel, the only person who can help him piece together what happened. I was disappointed when his frenzied perspective became less frequent as the story continued!

The death of Tom’s entire family was objectively horrifying, but I never got a real sense of Tom as a family man so I had a hard time linking into his grief or caring whether he was guilty or innocent. The humanizing parts where there (victim intros and the Huston/DeMarco interviews), but I wasn’t completely sold–maybe because the family was just a little too perfect. At round 75% there’s a picture of family life which gave me inklings of emotion, but it was already too late.

Tom’s beautiful wife Claire is such a perfect extension of him that her portrayal, as minor as it was, irritated me. She felt more like wish fulfillment than a real-life person. The most interesting thing about her was that she and Tom used to spend nights in abandoned buildings, “places where their only real concern was how far through the night Claire’s cries and moans might carry.” I was rolling my eyes by the time she murmurs “Baby, make love to me again. I can never get enough of you.”

Doesn’t every guilty man hide his deeds behind his words and hid his thoughts behind his smile? Or behind other deeds?

I liked what I assumed was the dramatic finale, but the story just kept going and added an unnecessary complication. It was beautifully-written. Even the acknowledgments were a pleasure to read! I just didn’t care about the characters enough to care about the other elements. Since what makes a character and their relationships compelling differs for everyone, I’m going to end with links to two positive reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly.

“What I have to do now is that which is not easy. That which I most fear. If I keep accommodating my fears, I can only move in reverse. That would be fine if by moving in reverse I could move back through time, but the past is a wall, a solid and impermeable wall. The past is a fortress that cannot be stormed.”

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.

A collection of twenty-six short stories & essays written by Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls, Broken Monsters, and Zoo City. Why haven’t I read any of Lauren Beukes’s work before? This book was my favorite kind of strange!

You might think of a city as a map, all knotted up in the bondage of grid lines by town planners. But really, it’s a language—alive, untidy, ungrammatical. The meaning of things rearranges, so the scramble of the docks turns hipster cool while the faded glamor of the inner city gives way to tenement blocks rotting from the inside. It develops its own accent, its own slang. And sometimes it drops a sentence. Sometimes the sentence finds you. And won’t shut up. (Ghost Girl)

The stories in this book address a wide range of topical issues: corporate and government exploitation of the underprivileged, the effects of reality TV and social media on culture, government surveillance, obsession/toxic relationships/domestic violence, and creativity. Most of the stories are set in South Africa, but we also visit Pakistan, Japan, and unfamiliar planets. The author occasionally uses language specific to South African culture, so be sure to turn to the glossary at the end if you have trouble with any unfamiliar terms.

Dehumanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted, too. Switch off the light behind your eyes. Focus on the lowest rungs of Maslow. Get through the day, however you can. (Inner City)

The overall atmosphere is dark and disturbing. Many of the stories are spine-chilling in a “sensing a sinister presence while walking alone in the dark” way. Most of the characters seem to have a deep longing for something better and are doing the best they can to survive in the harsh and unforgiving world they were born into. There’s a mix of realistic stories and science fiction, but even the ones set in a strange environment have a recognizable tinge. Throughout the entire book, I felt like I was in the middle ground between fantasy and reality. Beukes takes the current state of affairs to an extreme using familiar attitudes and rationalizations. Strip away all the strange details and it’s all uncomfortably real!

The young people don’t see it. It’s all nonsense, they say, apartheid is over and done, leave it behind. But the past infests everything, like worms. They’ve cut down the old trees, the new government, but the roots of the past are still there, can still tangle round your feet, trip you up. They go deep. (Smileys)

My seven favorites in the fiction section:
• Slipping: A young woman with a disability has the opportunity to lift her family out of poverty when she agrees to be enhanced with biotechnology. Her custodians use her as a showpiece to obtain military and pharmaceutical contracts.
• Pop Tarts: Sponsorships are king in a competitive market where everyone has the opportunity to broadcast their lives on television. These new celebrities are willing to go to extreme lengths to improve their ratings and keep fickle audiences entertained.
• Tankwa-Karoo: An eclectic mix of people gather together at a music festival as society collapses around them, but the situation at “civilization’s last stand” quickly deteriorates.
So in order to avoid the same anxieties or doubts it’s possible that he now looks to avoid any situations that buy generic levitra amerikabulteni.com can become intimate. It is hard to swallow tablets or capsules. buy cheap levitra You don’t want them to ask questions and discuss buy tadalafil canada your sexual condition. It is essential to be secure when buying prescription drugs on the lowest price for cialis internet. • Riding With the Dream Patrol: Written as a news article, correspondent Lauren Beukes interviews a government surveillance unit that’s dedicated “watching the greatest show on earth. You.”
• Easy Touch: A 419 scammer preps his next victim.
• Algebra: The tale of a complicated relationship told from A to Z.
• The Green: A corporation recruits people with underprivileged backgrounds to travel to a dangerous planet and mine a unique substance that’s potentially valuable to the military.

At least in fiction, unlike real life, you can get justice. (All the Pretty Corpses)

There were only five essays/articles in the non-fiction section and I wished there were more! The five non-fiction pieces included reveal how Beukes’s career as a journalist informs her fiction. In Adventures in Journalism, the beginnings of the short story Smileys come to light. In All the Pretty Corpses, she addresses the media treatment of murder victims and explains why she wrote The Shining Girls. There is also a really touching essay, On Beauty: A Letter to My Five Year Old Daughter, that I hope every young girl has the opportunity to read.

Real beauty is engaging with the world. It’s the courage to face up to it, every day. It’s figuring out who you are and what you believe in and standing by that. It’s giving a damn. You are interesting because you are interested, you are amazing because you are so wide open to everything life has to give you. (On Beauty)

As is the case with many collections of short fiction, not all the stories resonated with me. Sometimes the weird little details are so distant from my own frame of reference that I have a hard time visualizing what was going on and/or feeling like I had a full grasp of the message being given. The absolute weirdest–and most fun–story was Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs (available at link), a short story that readers of Haruki Murakami will appreciate. It’s hard not to be intrigued by a badass flight sergeant wearing “knee-high white patent combat boots made from the penis leather of a whale she had slaughtered herself”!

This author is definitely on my must-read list now. I love her empathy, imagination, and how she explores important issues in a creative way. If you like this book, I think you might also like Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips or Children of the New World: Stories by Alexander Weinstein. You might also want to check out director Neill Blomkamp’s movies: District 9, Elysium, and Chappie.

Fast-paced and engaging story about the dark side of the chocolate industry. For 12 & up.

I don’t count how many trees we pass because I don’t count the things that don’t matter. I don’t count unripe pods. I don’t count how many times I’ve been hit for being under quota. I don’t count how many days it’s been since I’ve given up hope of going home.

Two years ago, Amadou (15) and his brother Seydou (8) left their home in Mali to find a seasonal job and earn money for their family. Instead, they were brought to the Ivory Coast and sold into slavery on a cacao farm. The work is dangerous and the children are beaten and starved if they don’t meet the undefined quota. The bosses promise they can return home when they pay off their debt, but Amadou has never seen anyone being released from duty. One day, a girl is brought to the camp. Khadija (13) is defiant and determined to escape. Amadou had lost all hope of ever going home, but her willful spirit makes him start thinking about the outside world again. When Seydou’s life comes under threat, Amadou sees no other choice but to attempt an escape.

“A lot of bad things happened to us . . . Just because you were there when they happened doesn’t mean they’re your fault.”

The story is told from Amadou’s perspective. Amadou feels guilty about bringing his beloved brother into this horrific situation. He’s done everything he can to protect Seydou, but he’s beginning to feel resentful. His brother is young and doesn’t fully understand the consequences of his actions. The farm bosses know Seydou is Amadou’s weak spot and they exploit that weakness when they can. Seydou wants to be treated more like an equal than a baby brother. He’s frustrated that Amadou doesn’t see him as capable.

A girl has never been brought to the farm before and all the boys at the farm are fascinated when Khadija arrives. Khadija is different from the girls in Amadou’s village. He assumes her family must be wealthy because she’s well-fed and educated. He wonders how she ended up at the farm, but she isn’t ready to tell her story. Khadija’s defiance makes his life difficult, but they have no choice but to work together as their situation grows worse.

It hurts too much to think that, after all this work, there may be some journeys that you just never come all the way home from.

While this book isn’t extremely graphic, there is disturbing content: beatings, descriptions of bodily injury, starvation, and rape (Chapter 6, the description of what Amadou is witnessing is vague). The journey these kids embark on is terrifying. They have little food or money. They have no means of communication, so help is not just a phone call away. No one can be trusted and they have to worry about encountering wild animals. They have to come up with creative solutions to get out of terrible situations. Their survival didn’t feel guaranteed at any point. Amadou has to make some very adult decisions by the end. The anxiety I felt for these characters was real. I could not stop turning the pages, yet I was also scared of what these kids would come across next.

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There are thousands of kids like us, working across the country to make a sweet for rich kids in other places. Thousands. It’s a number that matters so much I can’t wrap my mind around it.

This book sheds light on the industry practices that bring us our cheap sweets. The major chocolate companies distance themselves from the actions of the farmers, even though low compensation and lack of oversight contribute to the situation. While there are laws against child labor in many countries, over 150 million children around the world live and work without those safeguards. The Bitter Side of Sweet is a reminder of the importance of being an informed consumer. It shows how our dollars may be indirectly funding things that go against our values and actively harming our fellow man. As Sullivan writes in her author’s note, “chocolate companies cannot exist without consumer demand.”

Relevant Links:
A six-minute video that shows cacao farmers taste chocolate for the first time and also shows some of the harvesting process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEN4hcZutO0
The Dark Side of Chocolate – 2010 documentary recommended by the author
List of Ethical Chocolate Companies
Chocolate: the industry’s hidden truth (and the easy stuff we can do to still enjoy it) – This writer suggests looking for chocolate that has a short supply chain and/or purchasing chocolate that is produced in Central America and South America.

Expertly curated anthology of short speculative fiction by Chinese writers.

I’ve really enjoyed reading short science fiction lately and Invisible Planets is a fantastic addition to my collection! It features thirteen short stories from seven Chinese writers, collected and translated by writer Ken Liu. Liu is upfront about the book’s limitations and he cautions the reader to not draw any broad conclusions from the selections. He selected works that were most accessible to a wide audience. Liu urges Western readers to abandon their preconceived notions of China and remember these writers are “saying something about the globe, about all of humanity, not just China.” I assume a greater knowledge of Chinese history, culture, and anxieties would add an extra layer of nuance to many of the stories, but the themes are resoundingly universal. One thing I love about science fiction is that it takes modern-day anxieties and pushes them to the next level. Sometimes it’s easier to see clearly when you’re looking at another world.

[We are] only pawns, stones, worthless counters in the Great Game. All we can see is just the few grids of the board before us. All we can do is just follow the gridlines in accordance with the rules of the game: Cannon on eighth file to fifth file; Horse on second file to third file. As for the meaning behind these moves, and when the great hand that hangs over us will plunge down to pluck one of us off, nobody knows. But when the two players in the game, the two sides, have concluded their business, all sacrifices become justified. (The Year of the Rat)

The short stories featured are diverse, ranging from surreal fantasies to hard sci-fi. One is even written like a fairy tale (Grave of the Fireflies). In a collection with such a variety of styles, it’s going to be difficult for each story to appeal to every reader. I didn’t enjoy the surreal stories (A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight or Call Girl) as much as the more traditional selections, but I could still appreciate the skill of the writer. While the stories are all very different, a few themes popped up more than once: government manipulations, corporate exploitation of workers, social class divisions, aging populations, and the impact of storytelling. Most of the stories take place Earth. The last section includes three essays about Chinese science fiction that serve as historical context and a starting point for analysis.

My favorites:

• The Year of the Rat by Chen Quifan – Programmed rats have become an important export, but everything goes horribly awry when the rats escape their farms. College students who can’t find jobs are enlisted in a war against these genetically modified creatures. Some begin to question their duties when they see that the rats have developed signs of intelligence. Not everything is as it seems: “The truth is ever elusive.” If you like this one, you might also enjoy The Green and Unaccounted by Lauren Beukes or the Men Against Fire episode of Black Mirror.

• Tongtong’s Summer by Xia Jia – This was the most emotionally affecting one for me! Tongtong’s grandfather moves in with her family after an injury, but he is not the grandfather Tongtong remembers. He’s depressed about losing his independence and lonely from isolation. Tongtong’s family buys a robot caretaker and eventually the technology is harnessed so that those that are homebound can actively participate in society. My favorite part of this story was Tongtongs’s sweet relationship with her grandfather and her evolving understanding of the aging process. Xia Jia dedicates this short story to her own grandfather in a touching author’s note. If you like this story about the positive aspects of technology, you might also enjoy the short story Saying Goodbye to Wang by Alexander Weinstein.

• The City Of Silence by Ma Boyong – This one takes Orwell’s 1984 to a modern level: “The author of 1984 predicted the progress of totalitarianism, but could not predict the progress of technology.” In this oppressive society, the citizens are constantly pushing the boundaries of language and the government’s surveillance technology is always improving. The constant battle between the opposing groups is causing the list of “healthy words” to shrink to the point where communication is becoming impossible. Arvardan is exhausted with his monotonous life. He requests access to the BBS forums in hopes of freer communication, but the online situation is even worse. He begins searching for clues of other’s discontent and the journey leads him in unexpected directions.
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The real key isn’t about whether what I say is true, but whether you believe it. From start to end, the direction of narrative is not guided by the tongue, but by the ear. (Invisible Planets)

• Invisible Planets by Hao Jingfang – The narrator describe their travels to far-flung planets across the vast universe and the diverse alien cultures they encountered. Are the narrator’s stories true? Does it matter if they are? Even though these alien civilizations seemed strange on the surface, I was reminded of the many different people who make up human civilization. My favorite society was Amiyachi and the Aihuowu, who “live on the same planet but belong to entirely separate worlds.” Both cultures are unable to see the other one as intelligent beings because they’re only able to contextualize the other within the framework of their own experiences.

When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation. (Invisible Planets)

• Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang (Winner at the 2016 Hugo Awards for Best Novelette) – A fascinating story about a father’s love and economic inequality. Beijing is a complex folding city, with a portion of the city always hidden underground. There are three separate spaces divided by social class. The space a citizen lives in determines the amount of time they have to live their lives; First Space gets 24 hours, while the more densely populated Second Space and Third Space get twelve hours each. A Third Space waste worker decides to go on a dangerous and illegal journey across the other two areas, in order to earn money for his daughter to attend a decent school. Will he be able to complete his task while escaping detection?

Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake. (A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight)

• Taking Care of God by Liu Cixin– Three years ago, 21,530 spaceships descended to Earth. Millions of elderly people appeared in cities around the world, all repeating the same phrase: “We are God. Please, considering that we created the world, would you give us a bit of food?” Earth’s citizens were initially happy to help their creators, but the resentment builds as the Gods become seen as burdens on their new families. Why have the Gods come back to Earth?

Time flows like a river, halting for no one. There’s nothing in this world that can outlast time itself. (Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse)*

Invisible Planets is a great introduction to contemporary Chinese science fiction and I’m grateful to Ken Liu for translating these fantastic stories. This book exposed me to many writers that I wouldn’t have been able to read otherwise.

So what’s next on my reading list for when I’m in a science fiction mood? I’ve added translator Ken Liu’s collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories to my list. I recently saw the movie Arrival, which is based on the short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I couldn’t help but think of this collection as I watched it, especially Taking Care of God. Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life is on my priority to-read list now. For more collections of short science fiction, you might also like Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein, Slipping by Lauren Beukes, and Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips.

*Check out this video of dragon-horse in action! Such a magnificent machine!

Katya Grubbs is the owner of Painless Pest Relocations, a humane pest control company. A successful pest removal at the home of property developer Martin Brand earns her the opportunity to tackle the pest problems at Nineveh, Brand’s residential sanctuary for the wealthy in the middle of bustling Cape Town, South Africa. The mysterious “gogga” has invaded the gated paradise, making it uninhabitable. The job is more challenging than expected because there are no obvious signs of an infestation. As Katya searches for any clue related to the hidden bug problem, she also has to address the past that she’s attempted to distance herself from.

Caterpillars, like migrating wildebeest – very slow, small ones – have a strong herding impulse. They sense a stirring, they start to push. Perhaps they feel some dim invertebrate anxiety: that the swarm has not yet been consummated, that this is not the right tree, that a better tree awaits, that they will be left behind. This is as far as her study of caterpillar psychology goes.

Katya is a complex and irritable character. She got her start in the pest control industry by working for her father’s extermination business, but they are now estranged. She eschews attachments and hates change. Her relationship with her sister Alma is difficult because of their unconventional childhood. Their undependable, dishonest father never gave them the opportunity to put roots down anywhere and both sisters are marked with scars from the past. The sisters live completely opposite lives as adults. Alma has settled down into a manicured community with her perfect family, while Katya lives alone in controlled chaos. It’s in her family where Katya begins to search for signs of her father escaping his boundaries, as she seeks hints of the Grubbs’ bloodline in their features.

[Katya looking through a book that compares old photos of Cape Town to how it looks now:] “Each person snapping the shutter had been trying to fix the city as it was, but there is no fixing such a shifting, restless thing as a discontented city. If you strung these pictures together in a giant flip-book, or put them together to make a jerky film reel, year on year, the city would be hopping and jiggling, twitching and convulsing in a frenzy of urban ants-in-the-pants. Colonial cities are itchier than most, no doubt, fidgeting in the sub-Saharan light; harsh, even in a sepia world.

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She likes to put distance between herself and her father. It’s necessary, she thinks, for both of them. She is like a ball of string unravelling, always connected, but lighter the further she goes.

This short book will be interesting for anyone who likes strange, character-driven stories with atmospheric settings that are an integral part of the story. The descriptions of nature and architecture give us insight into Katya’s state of mind. Her family issues, professional struggles, personal growth, and the world around her are all intertwined. I usually prefer more human interaction, so the abundance of descriptive settings and inner reflection were sometimes a little too much for me. A scene at the end was so descriptive and almost unreal that I lost my ability to visualize. Even so, I loved the strangeness and the complexity of Katya’s story. The author is brilliant! All the interwoven layers would reward a reread and a discussion. This isn’t science fiction, but I think fans of Lauren Beukes (Slipping) and Helen Phillips will appreciate the uniqueness of this author’s work.

Everything’s in motion, changed and changing. There is no way to keep the shape of things. One house falls, another rises. Throw a worn brick away and someone downstream will pick it up and lay it next to others in a new course in a new wall – which sooner or later will fall into ruin, giving the spiders a place to anchor their own silken architecture. Even human skin, Katya has read, is porous and infested, every second letting microscopic creatures in and out. Our own bodies are menageries. Short of total sterility, there is no controlling it.