Reimagining
I just read James, by Percival Everett. Despite being 300 pages, it was a quick read, unlike the story from which it was taken, which took me twice as long to reread. I think there were two reasons for this one going so quickly: One was that it leaned on the presumption that you already knew the original tale and therefore the author gave himself permission to shorthand much of the action and description from that book; the other was that almost the whole story took place in either internal or external dialogue, without a lot of world-building, scene-setting, or exposition.
These things led to an interesting experience if you were hoping to confront this old story from a completely new perspective. I wanted to embrace this book, but I struggled a bit.
The premise that the slaves spoke patois in front of the white “massas” but used the common language when alone seemed a natural outgrowth of their situation; they had to communicate important information with one another without the white people catching on to what was being said, and they had to hide their real personalities behind a façade of ignorance, foolishness, and passivity, so they learned code-switching from childhood. Everett completely enthralled me with this; but then he took it a little too far. I expected the character James to be a bit more than ordinary, given his interactions with Huck and others in the original, but did his life experience really allow him the latitude to become as extraordinary as Everett has written him?
He is painted as an educated man—not just a slave who has learned to read and to speak with a careful use of diction. Would the surreptitious reading sessions in Judge Thatcher’s study in the wee hours really lead to a thorough understanding of the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke? Even southern college-educated men of that day were not necessarily cognizant of the intricacies of philosophical thought, so the requirement that we believe it of a man who has had to gain all his education on the sly in stolen moments is a little hard to meet.
This was, to my mind, a central flaw of this book, for the simple reason that we went from perceiving the disguise the original “Jim” presented to the world—the stereotypical shuffle-footed, awkward, ignorant, well-behaved and possibly well-intentioned slave—to yet another disguise for “James”—the cynical, perceptive, erudite man who is playing that character for half his world while laughing about it with the other half. I actually liked that for its dark irony; what I’m trying to say is that there was an opportunity here for us to get to know the real person, but except for some tantalizing and admittedly affecting glimpses here and there, we went from one façade to another. With as much internal dialogue as there was from James, there was nonetheless too little understanding of the man himself. While being able to recognize that he is quick-witted, thoughtful, and compassionate, I didn’t feel that I really understood how he acquired all those positive character traits, because he doesn’t let us in.
The other thing the book thoroughly exhibits is the two-faced nature of slave owners who wish to be regarded as benevolent protectors of their “childlike servants,” but turn on a dime, when challenged, to become brutalists who exult in wielding a belt or raping a child. And again, I found myself applauding the exposure of the stereotypes but wincing at the one-dimensional portrayals—not so much of the slave-owners, but of the slaves! Several other reviewers have noted that the women in this book seem to be present on the page merely to highlight their own ill treatment; they have no agency and almost no personality but are merely offered up as horrifying examples of the results of human ownership. Again, I have no quarrel with exposing the heinousness of the practice, but how much more affecting would the book have been had readers been able to better identify with these women as individuals with personality?
I don’t want to come across as hyper-critical of this book. I admired what he tried to do and was caught up in it while reading it. I am also a fan of his writing style and language, which can be beguilingly beautiful. It actually troubles me to go against the reviewers who gave it unreserved praise (not to mention the National Book Award!). But afterwards, while reflecting on what I had read, I also wished there had been more—more story, more depth of character, more nuance, more exploration. I am curious, now, to read others of his books to see what my reaction to him as a writer might be when not influenced by the rewriting-of-a-classic aspect of this one. I’m sure you’ll hear more about it from me eventually.
The Empyrean “trilogy”
This series by Rebecca Yarros has been hyped a lot. I usually shy away from that, because I have discovered it’s more often than not the kiss of death to my enjoyment. But…dragons. I love dragons. I read all of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books at least three times. I adore the dragons of Patricia Wrede, Bruce Coville, Diana Wynne Jones, and Angie Sage, and also those in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham. I put up with Jane Yolen for the sake of dragons. Dragons gave added value in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books and in the various trilogies by Robin Hobb. One of my favorite series is The Last Dragonslayer and sequels, by Jasper Fforde. I was intrigued by Rachel Hartman’s dragon/human shapeshifters in Seraphina and Shadow Scale. Robin McKinley’s Damar books use dragons as more of an excuse for a story than as a major plot element, but I still loved them. So. I was perhaps predestined to read these.
I will say that I was not initially disappointed by the dragons themselves. They are pretty cool, and the two we get to know more intimately through their association with main character Violet Sorrengail (Tairn and Andarna) have real personality. But there was much less thought put into all the rest of the dragons who appear in the books and, aside from their names being linked as a bonded pair with various characters, they were sadly both interchangeable and underutilized.
As for everything else, well, let’s break it down:
The writing was somewhat pedestrian—way too much exposition, language that was overly ornate but never coming to the point, and modern anachronisms (“for the win” and “shit’s about to get real” are the biggies that come to mind) that took me right out of the fantasy illusion. Sentence structure was awkward. (One reviewer actually counted and said “Yarros used 493 ellipses and 1,089 em-dashes in the 634 pages of Iron Flame.”) Both the meandering plots and the effusive, exclamatory style made me wonder how much power the editor was given over the content of these books (and why it likewise went underutilized).
The character building was good in the first half of the first book, and then disintegrated with each subsequent encounter. The protagonists, Violet and Xaden, had great potential, but knowledge of them stays on a shallow level because the author keeps describing them over and over without adding anything new, and the encounters between them are equally as repetitive. Both the heroism and the villainy become boring, because there’s little depth or explanation. And we might as well go on here to talk about the “romance” between the main characters, because this was an element that made them work even less for me. The first (explicit) physical encounter between them felt hot and daring, but by the time I got through the third book I was cringing and skipping the sex scenes because they were unoriginal replays both physically and verbally.
The secondary characters (Violet’s squad and siblings, the rebels closest to Xaden) had individual quirks that made them lovable or frustrating or inspiring or whatever, but I was disappointed that there was so little growth beyond the naming of that one element that characterized each of them. Much like the dragons, their characters and camaraderie could have been so much more of a feature, had the author cared more, but they were essentially one-dimensional.
The world-building was sloppy. It seemed like the only time it happened was when it was bolstering some plot point, so it became wearisome, for instance, to find out brand-new information well into the second or even third book simply because it was necessary to further the story. The fact that magic dwells only on the main continent, protected by wards, but there are whole archipelagos of islands without it, or that dragons are companions to the people in the warded lands but hated, feared, and targeted by the others would have been enlightening to know halfway through book one, not two-thirds of the way through book two (or later). And as for what magical abilities everybody has, it definitely felt like Yarros was making that up as she went along and needed a Hail Mary to get her out of the situation into which she had written herself. Everything we learned seemed less like a planned surprise and more like a decision in the moment as the author thought of some way to turn the story—oh, did I forget to mention this? Well, let me explain it here for you and then we can move on.
I will also say that since I am not a big fan of romance, maybe “romantasy” wasn’t as appealing to me as it might be to some; but I don’t think that’s really the problem. The problem is the endless, repetitive nature of the supposedly romantic encounters, which is a euphemism for the fact that every time the two protagonists saw each other, it was immediately sexual. Some non-fraught conversation would have been nice. Some peeks into childhood, some sharing of philosophy, a picnic, a book recommendation? Something.
Fourth Wing was good, despite some of these deficits, because we were discovering brand-new information—the challenges of getting into and surviving battle school, the intricacies of bonding with dragons, learning how to navigate the politics of both school and kingdom. It was interesting to learn that Violet had planned and thought she was destined to be a Scholar but was forced, despite her physical frailties (readers said the description of these sounded like she had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) and small stature, to choose to be a dragon-riding warrior because her mother was a big-deal commander and wanted all her children to choose that path. The details about Xaden and the other tattoo-marked riders being the children of rebels, basically conscripted into the dragon army to atone for the sins of their (deceased, executed) parents were intriguing. And the physical and mental obstacles Yarros sets up to test the potential riders to prove they could do the job were exciting.
But after the first shocks of a new environment, a new protocol, a forbidden love, the rest seems disappointingly like nothing but reiteration, filler, and false obstacles created to provide constant peaks and valleys in the relationships and the plot without ever taking us much of anywhere new. So (for instance) every time Xaden appears on the page, Violet has to lustfully re-react to his physique, his tattoos, his smoldering expression, his shadow-wielding. Every action or battle scene exists so that brave, impulsive but fragile Violet can be in peril or injured and Xaden can magically turn up to save her, scold her, and have his way with her (after the healers put her back together). And both the action and the storyline depend way too heavily on the life stories of just these two characters. It makes a dull read out of what could have had more significance and nuance.
My biggest beef, however, is that I was ignorant of what was apparently some fairly recent news. This was billed as a trilogy and I was, frankly, delighted to hear that. I wanted to read a series that had a beginning, a middle, and an end within a limited framework. So many fantasies just keep going until they exhaust either their author or their readers, but I thought I had discovered a tale that would be neatly told in three admittedly long but finite books. Nope. I kept reading book #3, at first thinking I should surely be farther along than 37 percent because what was left to say? and then thinking oh, there has to be at least 20 percent more to go because this doesn’t feel anywhere close to wrapping up, and then turning a page to discover, uh-oh, it’s over; WHAT?! I reread the ending of Onyx Storm three times and could make no sense out of it, only to discover (in a footnote on Goodreads on Yarros’s author page) that the rather cryptic close of that book was intentional because…dum dum DUM…there are two more books slated to be published. And after struggling through all the sturm und drang of book three without getting resolution of the central issue in a whopping 527 pages, I was, frankly, pissed off. I think I am done with Rebecca Yarros, despite the dragons. And that’s a big, big deal. Phooey.
Breaking a curse
I picked up Abby Jimenez’s book Just for the Summer from Kindle Unlimited thinking it was written by Abbi Waxman, whose books I have enjoyed twice before. I later figured it out, but the plot sounded sufficiently appealing that I read it anyway, and I’m glad I did, because I really enjoyed it. It’s a “relationship” story along the lines of Emily Henry or Christina Lauren, some sort of meet-cute with complications and a hopefully HEA ending, but it’s better than many/most I have read.
It’s billed as third in a series, but it’s not one that is dependent on having read the others; they share some characters in common, but there’s not really a through-story here. This one is about Justin and Emma, two unfortunates who suffer from the same “curse”: Whenever they date anyone and then break up, their exes go on to find their “soulmates” in the very next person they date. (There’s a 2007 movie called Good Luck Chuck with this same “syndrome,” but in that case only the guy exhibits it.)
Justin does a funny “am I the asshole?” post about this on Reddit, Emma replies by saying she has the same problem, and after enjoying chatting with one another, they come up with a plan: They will date each other, break up, and cancel out the curse, so that each will then meet the love of his/her life. They do some calculating and figure out all the common denominators: They have to go out at least four times, communicate daily by text or by phone over the course of a month, kiss once, and then break up.
It’s a great plan, but there are a few problems: Emma is a traveling nurse, currently located in Colorado and planning to go with her friend Maddy (also a traveling nurse) to Hawaii for a three-month gig as their next stop, while Justin, who lives in Minnesota, has a big life-change coming up that will limit his freedom, so he can’t follow Emma to Hawaii even if he wanted to, and certainly not to stay for a month. So Emma persuades Maddy (with some judicious bribery) to go to Minnesota for the summer, and the experiment is set. But an unforeseen complication in Emma’s life plus the possibility of actual feelings between the two threaten the whole plan…
This was a story with a little more depth than some from this category; I liked the characters, who were all delineated precisely and filled out their roles in the plot. I liked that the complications weren’t manufactured but were things that actually happen to people, messy events and emotions with which they struggle. And the story arc was really well distributed, not building up to a rushed and idyllic ending—the pacing was measured, something that, again, felt real. Sure, there are a few of the standard clichés, but in this case they are made to work with the story and not against it.
Based on this book, I would definitely consider reading others by Jimenez.
Presumption
I recently watched the 2024 miniseries revamp of Presumed Innocent, based on the 1987 book by Scott Turow. I had seen the original movie, made in 1990, starring Harrison Ford, Raul Julia, and Greta Scacchi, so I was intrigued to see what Jake Gyllenhaal would make of the lead role as Rusty Sabich, and how an eight-episode miniseries would differ from a two-hour movie. My reactions were mixed: Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga, who plays Barbara Sabich (the wife) were amazing in their roles; but I thought the woman cast as the notorious Carolyn Polhemus was so mundane and uninteresting compared to Greta Scacchi, for whom that role seemed to be custom-made, from her manner to her appearance.
Watching the miniseries brought up another whole series of questions, however; I believe I did read the book at some point, but the 1990 movie took precedence in my memory and the only way I really recalled the plot was from that. Since the miniseries has a couple of extra characters not in the movie, alters the gender of some of the original characters (which in one instance shifts the plot), and also ends differently, I was curious enough to find out whether I was remembering the book correctly by checking it out of the library for a re-read.
For those who don’t know the story: Rusty Sabich is the chief deputy prosecuting attorney, working directly under boss prosecutor Raymond Horgan, in 1980s Chicago. It’s an election year, and one of Sabich’s colleagues, Nico Della Guardia, is running against Horgan. Just a few months before the election, another colleague, Carolyn Polhemus, is murdered in her apartment, and Horgan, busy with the election, details Rusty to cover the case, hopeful that it will be a quick solve that will boost his campaign. It’s a complicated tale with a lot of stuff I don’t want to reveal because that is the main pleasure of the book—discovering the details as they unfold—but things get distinctly sticky for Sabich.
Turow has a pleasing way of combining suspenseful story-telling with the necessary legal details to create an engrossing courtroom drama. Although there were a few “wince” moments when it came to the language used around both racial and sexual identity (which surprised me a little, given when the book came out), I guess it’s easy to forget when certain language exited the approved lexicon of political correctness, and otherwise the book was not heavy-handed. Over all, it was enjoyable to experience the story one more time, and I confirmed that the first movie was more true to the book. That doesn’t take away from the impact of the miniseries, but it is a different kind of tale in some ways.
I have never read any of the follow-up books (I believe there are eight set in this universe, at least a few of them also starring Sabich), but I may do so now, because I enjoyed the characters Turow created and would like to see what happened to them after this part of their lives was over.
Revisiting in preparation
When I learned that TJ Klune had written a sequel to his book The House in the Cerulean Sea, I was excited. I was less pleased to discover that there were 706 holds on 171 copies at the Los Angeles Public Library. But this allowed me time to renew my delight in this quirky fantasy with a reread. I won’t rehash what I wrote the first time, I’ll just link it here for those who wish to read my review, and I’ll repost the art inspired by my first read, of orphans Chauncey and Sal. And I will read and review some other stuff on my list while patiently waiting for Somewhere Beyond the Sea to make its way to me.
The green blob is Chauncey, whose sweet nature belies his monstrous form, and whose most dearly held wish is to become a bell-boy at a hotel in the city (thus the bellman’s cap). The Pomeranian peeking out from behind him (and faintly visible in his entirety through the amorphous blob of Chauncey’s body) is Sal, a large, shy, silent boy who shifts, in moments of panic, into the form of a small dog.
Read the blurb!
After my foray into depressing post-apocalyptic water-world, I didn’t feel quite up to broaching a new nonfiction book about politics that my friend Marya told me it was essential that I read. I am dreading the takeover of the new regime, and the novella by Jenny Colgan wasn’t sufficient to lift my spirits. So I decided I would deliberately read something fun, and the author whose name popped into my head was Sophie Kinsella. I mean, Shopaholic, right? I pulled up her list of e-books on the library website, checked out the most recent—called What Does It Feel Like?—and sat down yesterday at breakfast to lose myself in fluff.
Okay, a successful writer, a lovely husband who takes care of the five kids while she’s writing, a book optioned for a movie, a walk on the red carpet, so far so good. And then…a stage four glioblastoma in her brain lands her in the hospital, where she has surgery, loses her short-term memory and most of her mobility, and has to start from scratch to relearn how to be a functional human while receiving chemotherapy and radiation, because of course it was malignant. C’mon!
Turns out it’s an autobiographical novelization of Kinsella’s recent experience. Oh, no! But she has apparently survived to write a book about it, so I finished it, even though I didn’t want to. (It’s only 144 pages, another novella.) If this is something you are experiencing, however, it’s a good read to get you through, cheer you up, and give you hope plus some wry jokes about bucket lists.
Next time, I will definitely read the blurb first.
Rare books and romance
Looking for something a little more lighthearted after my foray into a post-apocalyptic flooded world, I eagerly picked up a special on Kindle, written by Jenny Colgan and billed as a short story. The Christmas Book Hunt seemed to me more like a novella, being 127 pages long (most short stories don’t exceed 30 pages), but I never mind if something is a longer read than it “should” be, especially if I’m a fan of the author, so I was happy to jump in. Besides, it’s about books…
It’s a story about Mirren, a London-dweller whose beloved, elderly Aunt Violet is fading away. Mirren is anxious to make her last days happy ones, and Violet has expressed a desire to see a book she remembers from childhood—an extremely rare one-off of a well-known children’s classic hand-illustrated by a famous artist—but Violet has no idea what happened to the book after her father was gone and her life took a turn for the impoverished. It’s likely the book was sold, along with most of their other possessions, but it was such a rare and beautiful thing that hopefully it’s still out there somewhere.
Mirren eagerly jumps online to search for it, but can’t find more than a whisper that it even exists; she then decides to venture into the real world of rare books to see if she can track it down by Christmas. But canny dealers are alerted by Mirren’s search and, as she makes her way to bookstores from London to Hay-on-Wye and then to Edinburgh, her progress is being followed by several people who desperately want the book for themselves…
Although the story is billed as a “meet-cute” romance, the parts that deal with this are much less satisfying than is the relationship depicted between Mirren and her aunt, the real love story here. Because of the way the romantic interest (the nephew of a greedy rare book dealer) is introduced, then dropped, only to pop up again at the end, the happily-ever-after possibility that seems to present itself felt unlikely, as well as somewhat insincere. But I really enjoyed the hunt for the book and the unexpected turn of events for Violet. I’m hoping (after the close of the story) that Mirren shows some good sense and treats Theo with the lack of trust that should have been engendered from the beginning if not for her naïveté.
Water, water everywhere
I love dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels. I have a fairly long list on Goodreads of those I have already read, and I continue to look out for others amidst all the book recommendations I see online. Included in my favorites are A Boy and HIs Dog at the End of the World, by C. A. Fletcher; Starhawk’s Maya Greenwood trilogy set in San Francisco about the division of California into the good, bad, and ugly that includes The Fifth Sacred Thing (the best of the three); the seemingly neverending post-nuclear-war saga detailed in Obernewtyn and sequels by Australian writer Isobelle Carmody (that has taken her decades to complete); the weird and horrifying Unwind series by Neal Shusterman; and a few oddball stand-alones such as The Gate to Women’s Country and The Family Tree, by Sheri S. Tepper; Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; and War Day, by James Kunetka and Whitley Streiber. I have about two dozen more on my list, and probably that many again that I still want to read. But Kassandra Montag’s After the Flood crossed paths with me purely by accident.
In December, I found a vendor on Etsy who put together cute “blind date with a book” packages including bookmarks, teabags, and a book, and thought this would be the perfect Christmas gift for a friend who seemed to be in an emotional slump; so I purchased the package and told the seller what book I would like her to include. Her response was to say that she didn’t take specific requests, but would try to accommodate if I gave her a list of preferred genres and some example titles. I felt that her advertising had been misleading, but ultimately went along with the program by giving her my friend’s favorite genres (romance and science fiction), with my sole request being that she send an upbeat story, since the whole idea was to cheer up my friend. Her choice was this dystopian novel by Montag, whose description alone should have warned her off.
After apologizing to my friend for this weird choice, I decided that I would read it myself to see just what she was in for; and after having finished it, I can say that it’s wholeheartedly depressing and that I’m really wishing I could get my money back. Not so much for me, but it definitely won’t be lifting my friend’s mood!
It’s set about 100 years in the future, when global warming has (presumably) done its worst…
We still called oceans by their former names, but it was really one giant ocean now, littered with pieces of land like crumbs fallen from the sky.
The ice caps melted and the water rose, first engulfing the coastlines and then, with the Six-Year Flood, the flatlands were likewise covered by water, and the remaining land consisted of mountaintops sticking up above the watery horizon. People fought to cling to the small settlements carved out of those elevated spaces, or they took to the water, living their lives on the sea and only docking to trade fish for vegetables, flour, fabric, and materials to repair their boats.
Myra and her daughter Pearl are eking out a precarious existence on their boat Bird, built by Myra’s grandfather when the water began to overwhelm their Nebraska farm. Myra’s husband Jason was so terrified of the encroaching floods that he decamped in a friend’s boat, kidnapping their five-year-old daughter, Row, while Myra was in her last month of pregnancy. Her grandfather and her mother didn’t survive the floods, and Myra was forced to set sail when Pearl was an infant still carried swaddled on her mother’s chest.
Now it’s seven years later, and Myra and her daughter are living day-to-day, keeping their heads down, avoiding other people for fear of their intentions. But one day Myra encounters a raider who inadvertently gives her news she never expected to hear; her older daughter, Row, is still alive, in a settlement up in Greenland. This hopeful news is offset by his comment that she’s nearly old enough (13) to be sent to a “breeder” ship, which is exactly what it sounds like; and Myra becomes determined to go and get Row, whatever it takes, to protect her from this fate.
Unfortunately, luck and nature are against her, and she has to team up with others to pursue her goals. But how many people is she willing (or right) to endanger to get what she wants?
The world-building in this book is excellent: visceral, realistic, and detailed. The disintegration of the moral integrity of desperate people also rings true, and many of her characters are compelling. But…there were a few things that work against elevating this to among my favorite dystopian novels. I found myself disliking the main character quite a bit for her ever-shifting moral compass and especially for all her justifications; so living inside her head in order to follow the story proved both exhausting and occasionally distasteful. And while the synopsis given by the publisher promises to serve up hope along with the angst, it seems like there is pitifully little room for that amidst all the catastrophe, and I didn’t feel like the end of the story justified the means.
Still, it was fairly engrossing, especially in the action-packed parts, and it also painted a poignant picture of the joys, the pains, the requirements of motherhood. So I would recommend it as a solid dystopian tale, but I wouldn’t rank it in my top ten.
Harking back
Somebody on Friends and Fiction (Facebook group) asked for a list of time travel books and, amidst the ones by Connie Willis, Diana Gabaldon, and Bee Ridgway that I have cataloged, I saw an old favorite from the late 1970s and decided to do a reread.
The book is The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein, and it has the distinction of having been written in the 1950s with the expectation that by the 1970s we would already have things like autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners (i.e., android-shaped Roombas), and by the year 2000, well, sky’s the limit—teeth that regenerate, cream that removes a beard, “stick-tite” clothing fasteners (fancy velcro) and so on. It’s kinda fun to hark back to early science fiction and see the optimistic expectations with which the authors pictured our world. We still don’t have those hoverboards from Back to the Future, let alone a lot more practical gizmos, and humans haven’t colonized any other planets just yet, but on the other hand we do have stuff (like the internet and various fancy Apple products) that none of those sci-fi writers ever envisioned.
In this particular book, the protagonist, one Daniel Boone (D.B. or Dan) Davis is an engineer who retires from the military and hangs out his own shingle with his best friend Miles Gentry, with Dan doing the designing of fancy housewives’ helper-type machines while Miles (a lawyer) runs the business end. They are shortly in need of an office manager/secretary type, and hire Belle Darkin, with whom Dan immediately becomes romantically involved. Dan, being a mechanical genius but otherwise a naive trusting soul, leaves the daily doings to these two, who are up to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans and ultimately cheat Dan and expel him from the company. Dan, having lost both his life’s work and his fiancée, resolves to take “the long sleep,” which is basically cryogenic freezing of people, for 30 years. The idea is that you invest your money, go to sleep, and wake up however many years later with your investments having paid off, still young enough to enjoy them. But do these kinds of things ever work out as promised?
Two additional crucial characters are Dan’s cat, Petronius “Pete” Davis, and his (former) buddy Miles’s stepdaughter, Ricky, a precocious 11-year-old who adores both Pete and Dan. Since I have already perhaps given away too much of the story (although there’s a lot more to it), I’ll say no more about the plot. The title of the book comes from an anecdote about Dan and Pete; they lived at one point in an old farmhouse with a dozen doors, and in the cold and snowy winter-time Pete persists in crying to be let out of each door in turn, getting progressively more agitated that one of the doors doesn’t lead to better weather—obviously a metaphor for the rest of the activity in the story.
Heinlein is at once revered and denigrated for his career as a science fiction writer. On the one hand, he wrote some of the best “hard” science fiction stories (meaning he valued scientific accuracy in his books) from the period between 1941 and 1988 when he died (he was born in 1907). But he was also derided for his right-wing ideology, for the rampant misogyny (the condescension is palpable) in his books, and also for a kind of creepy obsession with very young women, all of which got more radical as he aged. This book has a bit of that (the focus on Belle being primarily on her buxom figure), but mostly it’s just a fun and offbeat story about the possibilities of time travel from dual aspects, and (with the caveat that parts are laughably old-fashioned) I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it (as Heinlein himself would probably characterize it) as a “cracking-good” read, a nice change of pace from today’s fiction offerings. I seem to have been afflicted, as I read it, with a quaint language “bug,” so I’ll say give it a whirl.
One last book
I managed to fit in one more before the artificial barrier that is New Year’s Eve divides us from our past and pushes us into the future. Don’t we as humans have weird customs? I mean, I understand turning-point events like the solstices and equinoxes, where something actually happens (the day becomes longer, the night becomes shorter, or vice versa, the seasons change, etc.), but artificial constructs like New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day are a bit baffling. It would seem more logical that the winter solstice would be the year’s turning point, but no, it’s 10 days later. Why?
Anyway, enough with the futile speculation; I read another book! And although I technically finished it on New Year’s Day, since I read 93 percent of it before the turn of the year, I’m counting it as last of last, instead of first of next.
This one is called The Twilight Garden, by Sara Nisha Adams, author of The Reading List, which I previously reviewed here. That book caused a rather lengthy rant about all the things authors don’t know about librarians when they write their supposedly library-centered books; but while her research left a lot to be desired, she was a good storyteller and I like books about gardening, so I decided to give this one a try.
It takes place in a small neighborhood called Stoke Newington in the city of London, where two brownstone-like side-by-side residences (one owned, one rented) share a common garden space that was obviously at one point well cared for, but has been neglected by a string of tenants until it has become choked with nettles and bindweed, showing only faint outlines of its former glory. Living in one side of the property (renters) are Lewis and Winston, a couple who began as bankers at the same institution but who diverged sharply in their goals and aspirations when Winston decided the financial scene wasn’t for him and instead found a job as a clerk in a local grocery, while Lewis continued up the competitive ladder. On the other side (owners) are divorcée Bernice and her 11-year-old son, Sebastian (Seb), the mom prickly and privileged (Winston has nicknamed her Queen of Sheba) and the son friendly and disarming. None of them (except Seb) has any desire to spend a minute with the others and, in fact, Winston and Bernice have an initially adversarial relationship that annoys them both to no end. But when Winston, in the midst of life changes that make him desperate for something to occupy his time and his mind, begins laboring in the garden, prompted by some unexpected input, Bernice is first irritated but then intrigued. Soon the garden begins working its magic to bring these two and others together…
The book takes place with dual casts in two separate timelines, with the property as the unifying element; one timeline is in the 1970s-80s, while the other is (almost) present-day (2018-2019). With the exception of three people, all the major players are Indian immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants, so there are some nice scenes featuring Gujurati cuisine and traditions accompanied by some less pleasant events tied to racism and prejudice. But the heart-warming scenes are far more prevalent than are the hints of discord, and the book is a lovely picture of what happens when people come together to celebrate their triumphs and share their losses while creating a beautiful garden that will have longevity. It’s populated by interesting and memorable characters and has enough specific gardening details to satisfy those who were drawn to it for that reason. A lovely read—not too heavy, but with plenty of depth. I also liked the perfectly narrative art of the cover.
The Book Adept 