Tag Archives: book review

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

arton165-e4a97It’s Cinderella in Japan!

Seriously, though, one of the fascinating things about reading this book was its blending of West and East. Author Arthur Golden has clearly done his homework here and he does an excellent job of transporting us to the world of mid-20th-century Japan. On the other hand, the Cinderella angle gets kind of obvious sometimes. Read it and see if you can identify Cinderella, the stepsister, the stepmother, the godmother, Prince Charming, and the shoe.

This book is beautiful, just beautiful. It’s so beautiful that this trumps everything that I find disturbing about the book. The language is so powerful that you see this other world and culture in vivid colors. You feel for Chiyo and her struggles even though she’s this heroine whose sole ambition in life is to become a particular man’s mistress. The ending packs a punch and was not at all what I expected.

The story’s written in the form of a memoir, so one gets the funny feeling that Chiyo might not be telling us the whole truth. This unreliable narrator presents herself as such a perfect little damsel in distress. What really happened here? Were Hatsumomo and Mother really as evil as they were made out to be? What was the deal with Pumpkin?

But seriously, just read it for the metaphors.

Tik-Tok of Oz

Courtesy of alancook.wordpress.com.

Courtesy of alancook.wordpress.com.

Or, what happens when you take a book that you vaguely remember from your early childhood and re-read it as an adult.

When I was a little kid, I remember going to Grandma’s house to look at her shelves of first-edition Oz books. A lot of people don’t realize that Oz was a series – there was way more to in than The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. They had these fabric bindings that were falling apart at the edges and these wacky lineart illustrations, like the one in the corner of this blog post. We kids would get stern injunctions from the adults around to handle the books carefully, but if we did, we could pick some out to take home for read-aloud.

I don’t remember a whole lot of the plot of these books, except that there was a Jack Pumpkinhead and a creature made out of a sofa and a bunch of palm fronds. Fast-forward to 2013 and I have this handy-dandy Kindle, and I think to myself, why not download the e-text of Tik-Tok of Oz from Project Gutenberg?

That’s exactly what I did, and whoa.

The plot of Tik-Tok of Oz isn’t all that important. In a nutshell, Betsy Bobbin shipwrecks on the shores of the land of the Nome King and there she meets a variety of fantastical creatures, including a Shaggy Man, a Rose Princess, Polychrome the Rainbow Princess, Tik-Tok the mechanical man, and Queen Ann of Oogaboo and her army (it consists of sixteen officers and one soldier). Together they all go to rescue Shaggy Man’s brother from the Nome King. What got me, though, is that there are things going on in the text that I would never have picked up on as a little kid. I cannot help reading this as a liberal arts college graduate now. For example:

  • All the women of Oogaboo appear to be shrews. Betsy Bobbin is all right, but Polychrome and the Rose Princess are completely helpless. The Empress Ozma is a strong and just leader, but she’s still a total female stereotype. Is Tik-Tok of Oz feminist or not??
  • Come to think of it, why are there so many beautiful princesses here? Did Baum have a thing for that?
  • The other characters casually treat Tik-Tok as almost as good as a human being. But not quite. What’s Baum trying to say here?
  • Glinda has a magic mirror that she can use to spy on anybody in the realm of Oz. Anybody. Whoa, you could abuse that.
  • Shaggy Man has a Love Magnet that he can show to people and force them to love him. He uses it as a weapon repeatedly. And he’s supposed to be one of the good guys.
  • Speaking of abuses of power, hasn’t anybody around here heard of a representative elected government?
  • Empress Ozma has a magic mirror with a radium frame. Gaa! Unclean! Somebody get that thing into a lead box and bury it!

I don’t know if my childhood memory has been ruined or suddenly gained greater depth. I’m going to go with depth, though, because I thoroughly enjoyed having my eyes opened.

Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

tumblr_m1ioq2wd4H1r0qbppI have to admit that I started reading Carmilla naively. I picked the book up knowing only that it was about a vampire, and that it was very old, predating Dracula. What I found when I started reading it was… Well, in the words of George Takei, oh, my.

Here’s the basic plot: Laura, our heroine, lives with her father in an isolated Austrian castle. They wind up receiving a houseguest, the beautiful young Carmilla, under mysterious circumstances. Laura and her father start to notice strange things happening. Carmilla appears to have fangs. There’s a portrait of a medieval noblewoman named Mircalla in one of the castle halls, who happens to look just like Carmilla. Laura starts to wake up feeling woozy and with a bruise at the base of her neck.

They suspect nothing, which may seem incredible to a modern reader, but keep in mind that this book was written long before the vampire genre became established. A friend of Dad’s eventually explains to them what’s going on and together, they all go and destroy Carmilla.

One of the notable things about Carmilla is that it establishes some of the conventions of the vampire genre, such as the moldering old castle in eastern Europe. But the most important thing is that it’s not really a vampire story. It’s thinly veiled lesbian erotica. Look:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

How the heck did J. Sheridan Le Fanu get away with this in Victorian England? Well, for one thing, plausible deniability. You have to have a dirty mind to understand what he is driving at here. Also Le Fanu throws in an explanation at the end that Carmilla is so fascinated with Laura because she’s a vampire and she wants to eat Laura. Ayup. “Eat” her. Sure, Le Fanu.

By modern standards, the book wouldn’t be considered very good. Much of the plot doesn’t make any sense and Laura doesn’t ever play an active role in the story. Yet I loved reading this book just to watch Le Fanu so brazenly push the envelope. I recommend it.

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum

Poisoners-Handbook-coverI have to admit I felt a little weird about leaving this book lying out on my kitchen table.

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum isn’t a how-to guide (no, honestly). Rather, it’s an investigation into one of the most toxic eras of U.S. history: the 1920’s. It follows the story of Charles Norris, the first chief medical examiner of New York City as he investigates case after case of people killed by common household products.

Each chapter focuses on one particular poisonous substance and is organized like a murder mystery, which I thought was a great decision. The suspense of trying to figure out whodunit by the end of the chapter causes you to forget that this book is a work of nonfiction and everything in it actually happened. It’s horrifying to read about what people were exposed to in an era when the FDA was little more than a joke and we didn’t know much about toxicology. We used to fumigate houses with cyanide gas and burn pure carbon monoxide as a lamp fuel. That’s pretty bad, but how about arsenic in makeup? That still doesn’t take the cake. Radium, the stuff that’s so radioactive that it glows blue in the dark, was in people’s health tonics. There were as many cases of accidental poisonings in this book as there were murders.

Throughout the book, Norris and his chief toxicologist Alexander Gettler use science to tease out what happened to the bodies that show up in their morgue. Their evidence helps to catch several murderers, and even more gratifying to read about, they clear the name of people who didn’t do it. If you’ve got a morbid streak, or even if you’re just curious about the history of science, I recommend it.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

curious-dog(Note: this review contains spoilers.)

I have to write my book review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with mixed feelings because it is a book with a schtick. I don’t ordinarily like books with schticks, and I don’t ordinarily like mysteries, but I liked this book. Here’s the schtick: the whole story is told from the point of view of an autistic boy, Christopher Boone. One evening Christopher discovers his neighbor’s dog impaled on a garden fork, so he sets about trying to discover who the killer was.

What I didn’t like about the book is that Christopher is a poster boy of high-functioning autism. He has all of the symptoms and all of them have a classical presentation. If you want to get a good idea of Christopher’s personality, WebMD’s entry on Aspberger’s disorder (which is part of the autism spectrum) sums him up a little bit too neatly. I think I know why Haddon is doing this, too. He has an agenda to write the Great Autistic Novel. It’s a perfectly laudable agenda, since people need to be made more aware of this condition and raising awareness through story is a good way to do it. But as a result, I had a hard time believing Christopher as a person and not just a collection of symptoms.

The thing is, though… The thing is, it works. Mark Haddon has written the Great Autistic Novel. Damn it, Haddon, you’re breaking my heart with the end of that book. Christopher’s struggling to do something he’s never done before and to do it independently, and all the while he’s putting his parents through emotional turmoil and he’s oblivious to it. Christopher wants to be an astronaut when he grows up. By the ending, you still don’t know whether he gets to be one, but Christopher does have this to say about it to his school psychologist:

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders. Also I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Recommended. But have a box of tissues handy.

Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett

618150Happy Boxing Day, everyone! Hope you had a great holiday.

If you pick up a Terry Pratchett book, there are certain things you can expect from it. First of all, you can expect it to be a good read. You can also expect multiple interweaving storylines without any real chapter breaks, very human characters with lovable foibles (even though many of the characters aren’t technically human), and satire. Pratchett’s Feet of Clay delivers on all these expectations.

As the third of Pratchett’s Night Watch books, ostensibly the plot of the book revolves a mystery: who is poisoning Lord Vetinari? But really, the mystery is just an excuse for all the cool Discworld stuff that Pratchett puts into his novels.

First of these is Cheery “Cheri” Littlebottom, the Watch’s first openly female dwarf. As Angua, another female cop, takes Cheery under her wing, expect lots of interesting reading about gender expression. And explosions. Cheery is the Watch’s new forensics guy and her tests tend to explode.

We also get to learn a lot more about Dorfl and Ankh-Morpork’s golem population. I love a good robot story, so I’m picky about how they’re portrayed, but Pratchett does not disappoint. Expect a lot of deep examination of the nature of freedom and slavery.

One of the storylines made me feel like an American in a strange land, though. The characters of Ankh-Morpork are obsessed with finding themselves a new king, but why? What is it with Discworld (and by extension, Great Britain) and hereditary nobility? Where I come from I guess we have movie stars and business tycoons, but it’s just not the same.

Pratchett draws all the plotlines to a satisfying conclusion, as usual, but you should check out this book for the wild ride.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente

Wow.

I first discovered Catherynne M. Valente through a short story on the Internet that I cannot, for the life of me, find anymore.  It was a story about a demonness who got kicked out of Hell and plopped into New England long before any European settlers arrived there.  Since she’d been Hell’s baker before, she plies her trade with the mortals as the continent industrializes around her.

The story was dark and complex, just the way I like them.  It’s kind of like Gormenghast, the original Grimm’s tales before they got bowdlerized, and Gothic horror.  So I decided to pick up Valente’s latest novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.  It’s a quick read.

At first I thought, oh, okay, Valente’s taking a break from her dark stuff to write a fluffy book.  The story starts off with a girl named September, who grows bored with her life in Omaha, Nebraska and gets whisked off to Fairyland on a green wind.  Hijinks ensue as she makes friends with a Wyverary and a Marid and gets tasked with stealing a spoon from an evil Marquess.  But then the story gets darker, and darker, until you realize that it’s not a fluffy book at all.  I won’t tell you the kicker of an ending, but I’ll share with you my favorite passage from the book:

Of course not.  No one is chosen.  Not ever.  Not in the real world.  You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a Leopard.  You chose to trade your shadow for a child’s life.  You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friends – you chose to smash her cages!  You chose to face your own death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in.  And twice now, you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends.  You are not the chosen one, September.  Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.  You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime’s worth of novels.  But you didn’t.  You chose.  You chose it all.  Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting.

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch

Hello, everyone.  Today Carrie Slager from The Mad Reviewer is doing a guest post on The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch.

(Cover picture courtesy of Midnight Bloom Reads.)

Sometimes the only way to survive is to keep moving.  America is a vast, desolate landscape left ravaged after a brutal war.  Two-thirds of the population are dead from a vicious strain of influenza.  People called the sickness the eleventh plague.

Fifteen-year-old Stephen Quinn was born after the war and only knows the life of a salvager.  His family was among the few who survived and look to roaming the country in search of material to trade.  But when Stephen’s grandfather dies and his father falls into a coma after an accident, Stephen finds his way to Settler’s Landing, a community that seems too good to be true.  There Stephen meets Jenny, who refuses to accept things as they are.  When they play a prank that goes horribly wrong, chaos erupts, and they find themselves in the midst of a battle that will change Settler’s Landing—and their lives—forever.

I know what you’re thinking: male protagonist + mysterious plague = zombies.  That’s what I thought too, but I was mercifully wrong.  It’s not that I don’t like zombies, but they are definitely overused.

The Eleventh Plague is different from a lot of the speculative YA you see on the shelves right now.  The biggest difference is that there’s a male protagonist, but there are more subtle differences as well.  Jeff Hirsch has actually paid attention to world politics and invented a plausible scenario for how the plague started and why civilization in America is basically non-existent in his novel.  He shows us how some people adapt well to the new world where the only skills that matter are survival skills, but he also shows us people like Isherwood Williams from Earth Abides who try to keep civilization alive by educating the next generation.  It’s an interesting contrast and the main character Stephen is torn between both sides.  On one hand he loves reading, but on the other his grandfather told him repeatedly that it was useless and a waste of time.

Stephen is a great character readers can sympathize with.  He’s tough and goes through a lot during the course of the novel, but he also has a more tender side which we see when he falls in love with Jenny.  For those of you already cringing at the mention of yet another teenage romance, never fear!  It is not the focus of the novel and it certainly is unconventional.  Jenny is also an excellent character in her own right and although she may seem like the typical tough rebel at first, her backstory makes her personality a lot more believable.

I wouldn’t call the plot of The Eleventh Plague on-the-edge-of-your-seat thrilling, but it does move along quite nicely and Jeff Hirsch never got bogged down in excessive descriptions.  It has some great plot twists and the ending isn’t exactly happy, but it’s not tragic either.  Some say the ending isn’t satisfying at all but I liked it because it stayed true to the characters.  That, for me at least, is far more important than a fairytale ending.

I give this book 4.5/5 stars.

Amazon     Barnes and Noble

Some Thoughts on Steampunk

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

The other day I was cruising about The Mad Reviewer, Carrie Slager’s very prolific book review blog.  If you haven’t seen this blog before, check it out.  If a YA book exists, chances are that Carrie has read it and has something to say about it.  I asked her what she thought about the recent trend of steampunk books, and she replied with this guest post:

.

.

So Margaret asked me: “Hey what is your opinion on the sudden hotness of the steampunk genre?  Do you thin kit’s going to last?  I remember having a conversation with some friends last year, and they said that the problem with steampunk is that nobody’s written anything serious in the genre, only frivolous books.  Could you write a blog post about that?”

Why yes I can, Margaret.  Yes I can.

Do you guys remember when pundits were predicting the death of the Western?  How about science fiction?  Fantasy?  Historical fiction?  Romance?  The book itself?  My point is that although so-called experts have predicted the disappearance of practically every genre, they’re still here.  Steampunk is definitely a fascinating sub-genre and I suspect that it’s here to stay, no matter what literary experts say.

However, that’s not to say the trend won’t cool off.  Genres go through trends, just like music, movies, clothes, you name it.  Steampunk is on a current high, but it will drop as people tire of it and move on.  Remember the huge paranormal romance craze after Twilight’s success?  That’s mostly died down now and general fantasy and steampunk have replaced it temporarily.

Contrary to what some of Margaret’s friends and many pundits seem to think, steampunk is  a serious genre.  As for the claim that no one has written anything serious, define ‘serious.’  If you definite serious as ‘a sweeping epic that questions our fragile mortality and the futileness of it all in a Margaret Atwood-esque style’, then you won’t find anything mainstream, let alone steampunk.  However, if you use a less narrow definition like ‘it’s meant to entertain and may or may not impart some important life lessons’, then yes, there is a high volume of serious steampunk.

Take Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy, for example.  It’s set in an alternate version of 1914 Europe and I really don’t think there’s anything not serious about how the First World War started.  Alek and Deryn, the novel’s two main protagonists, are serious characters because they get into very real danger and suffer very real consequences.  There may not be many grand themes you can over-analyze in typical novel study-like fashion, but that doesn’t mean they’re not serious books.

So yes, steampunk will cool off but it’s here to stay and yes, it is a serious genre.  Literary snobs and my fellow self-appointed critics, you may begin writing your hate mail now.