Short but jam-packed
As I have mentioned here before, I am generally not a reader of short stories. The last time I blogged about a couple of them that I picked up for my Kindle, I commented that in the future I would resist temptation even if they were written by authors I admire (those two were by Alice Hoffman and Margaret Atwood, so the star power was bright) because I found the brief format unsatisfying, no matter who wrote them. But I didn’t keep that resolution, and this time I’m glad I didn’t, although, alongside the satisfaction they gave me, I still feel a little frustration for the attenuated content.
First I was offered one by John Scalzi, who is one of my latest favorite science fiction authors and, when I saw it was about time travel (a particular fascination of mine), I couldn’t say no. Then one popped up by Alix Harrow, who has written three books since 2019 all of which enthralled me when I read them. This one had a knight in the title, so I assumed it was fairy tale-ish and therefore likely to please me, but it turned out to be something I like even better—a dystopian story.
Why, then, did these impress me so much? In trying to dissect that, the first thing that occurred to me was their immediate impact. In less than a page I knew that I couldn’t stop reading. Part of this is due to something novelists and readers have discussed for years (or millennia or eons): the first line.
When I think of a famous first line, the one that most immediately comes to me is “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” That’s the opener for Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, and if you ask readers on a Facebook page dedicated to books, it’s one that is often quoted. Others that crop up frequently are “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen), and “Call me Ishmael” (Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick), “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy), or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens). These are all from classics, but there are many others nearly as famous that source from books that are popular, perhaps well known, but not considered in that pantheon, such as “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” (Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle), or “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” (The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett) or “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson).
I cite all these because they have the unique ability to cue you to a lot of what’s coming in one simple phrase. You immediately want to know: What or where is Manderley? who is the dreamer? Why did they leave Manderley in the first place? You want to argue that perhaps the last thing a single man with a good fortune might either want or need is a wife to spend it! If you have any Bible knowledge, you get all the deep connections to the name “Ishmael.” You instantly begin debating whether that statement about families and happiness or lack of same is true—you think about your own, and then you want to know why the author has embraced this premise. If you know that A Tale of Two Cities is about the French Revolution, then it must have been a bad time, but then wonder how being in the middle of a war could also possibly be the best. You ponder why someone would write while sitting in a sink; you immediately perceive that this person might be out of the ordinary and therefore worth cultivating. You want to know why Mary had to go live with her uncle, and what it was that made her disagreeable—was it that, or something else? You think about someone driving across Interstate 40 in a drugged state and are presuming you probably know what will happen next, but you don’t…so you keep reading.
Alix Harrow’s story, “The Knight and the Butcherbird,” begins:
Once upon a time,
a knight came riding into the holler.”
It is immediately arresting, because it’s like that game where you see a group of pictures and are asked the question, “what one thing is not like the others?” The “Once upon a time” and the “knight” immediately set you up for the expectation of fairy tale; but there are few areas in the world where someone would call a small, v-shaped, riverine type of valley a “hollow,” and when that gets transmuted to “holler” you know you are in southern Appalachia, most likely in West Virginia. So, what is a knight (presumably wearing armor to distinguish him as such) doing riding into Appalachia? The disconnect drags you in and glues your eyes to the page.
In the next paragraph you find out it’s been 300+ years since “the apocalypse,” that the knight is expected (people are standing around waiting for him), and that the protagonist is a misfit in her community (“I stood among them like a tumor at a birthday party: silent, uninvited. Likely fatal.”)
In the third, you get a picture drawn of the knight—specifically his armor, sewn of fine black steel-corded tire treads, the rusty state of his pauldrons, and the fact that he was “crazy old, maybe even fifty.” He is a Knight of the Enclaves, “tall, raised on multivitamins and clean meat.”
This is all on the first page, and tells us that: something terrible has happened to the world; there are survivors in a backward corner of it who are in need of assistance; and from “somewhere else” there is a person characterized as a knight who has come to help them with their problem. I could immediately, viscerally picture the poor, raggedy, sickly people (the ones raised without the vitamins or untainted protein) standing around at the mouth of their small valley home, waiting patiently for a hero to arrive; and I could also perceive the colossal impact of the knight’s presence.
Wouldn’t you want to keep reading?
John Scalzi’s story “3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years” doesn’t start with quite such an arresting contradiction, but for a science fiction fan and time travel junkie, it still dragged me in:
The time machine is, in itself, not much to look at.
The remainder of the paragraph goes on to describe its physical appearance, concluding with “At the far end is a portal. One takes the client away. The other brings them back.” With this it is established that time travel has become a business (thus the clients), and that the narrator is probably the operator of the machine (confirmed in the next paragraph). The next page and a half describes in extremely simple terms what happens in the chamber when someone takes a trip and comments that, once the client has returned, “Where they go after that, like where they go when they walk through the first portal, is not specifically my concern. I am here to run the time machine.” The client, however, “has aged three days, or nine months, or twenty-seven years. They have been through a time machine, after all. This is how the time machine works.” Then, however, the operator, who sounds like he is describing the daily duties of a fairground carousel operator, comments that this is the theoretical process, but that is almost never what actually happens. “Theory is almost never practice.”
Could you put it down after that leading sentence? I couldn’t.
I’m not going to go into any more detail here on either story; I will just say that there is an exception to every rule, and I’m glad I made these exceptions to my “no short stories” one. They are special cases because they do absolutely everything that a good novel does: They each have a clearly worked-out premise; they are both amazing at both world- and character-building in the space of a few short sentences or paragraphs; there is a set-up, a conflict, and a resolution; and, best of all, they made me think about issues I had never considered, despite being a long-time reader of fairy tales, dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, and time travel theories. I finished both of them two days ago, and they keep on wandering through my mind, inspiring more questions. And yes, one of these is to ask the authors “Why not write the BOOK?”—but many more of them are diverting inquiries into the nature of time, anomalies, and serendipity, or thoughts about the eventual evolution or dissolution of humankind, depending on the paths taken (or not).
Thank you, John Scalzi and Alix Harrow. Keep writing.
Culture war
In Hazel Says No, by debut novelist Jessica Berber Gross, we explore the intricacies of the MeToo movement and the consequences of cancel culture in a small town in Maine. This author is being hailed by many as a new voice in feminist contemporary fiction, but for me it was an interesting exercise that didn’t quite make the transition to a leap-off-the-page story. There were fascinating nuances that explored areas I think no one considers, and for that I appreciated it, but the story dragged out far beyond the original dilemma and became less impactful as it did so.
The basic premise also had me wondering, Would this really happen at this moment in time?
The Greenberg-Blums, a Jewish family from Brooklyn, move to a small town in Maine after the father, Gus, receives an attractive job offer from a college there. His daughter, Hazel, is 18 and will start her senior year in high school in the fall, and his son, Wolf, is going into middle school. They move at the beginning of summer, and the kids spend most of it at the public pool, where Hazel encounters the high school principal, Richard White, there to supervise his daughter, Gracie, a future classmate of Wolf’s. He strikes up a conversation with her after noticing that she is reading a variety of fairly high-level literary novels while basking on her lounge chair, and suggests that perhaps Hazel should consider initiating a reading or writing club when she starts school in the fall. Their encounters are friendly but strictly surface, confined to a casual greeting or comments about reading and classes.
On the first day of school, a voice over the P.A. system calls Hazel Blum to the principal’s office. When she arrives, the principal chats with her for a few minutes, then sits down beside her, puts his hand on her knee, and informs her that each year he chooses one student with whom he will have sex during the year, and this year he has chosen Hazel. Her mind whirling with all the responses to this unbelievable statement, Hazel finally blurts out “NO!” and runs out of his office.
The rest of the story involves what happens when Hazel tells her parents, they confide in the college dean (a feminist studies scholar), and from there the news becomes public.
The first thing that hit me about this set-up was, Who in their right mind, in the aftermath of the immense blow-up of MeToo in the media, would actually do this? Smith not only propositions Hazel, but also explains that he has done this repeatedly in the past; although he has apparently gotten away with it up until now, does he really think that, after the profound cultural shift that came about as a result of the “outing” of sexual predators in powerful positions, his behavior could continue to go unremarked? Or that, once acknowledged, there would be no repercussions? Part of the MeToo phenomenon was the public scrutiny and accountability it promoted, paired with support for the survivors of sexual harassment and violence. For that reason, I was unable to overcome my disbelief that anyone would so blithely and transparently risk exposure by trying this on.
The parts of the book that I did like were how everything played out to conclusions that were not always expected. For instance, it explored the insular nature of a small town unable and unwilling to believe this accusation of a beloved public figure and how, for some, it provided an outlet for bigotry as they not only slut-shamed Hazel but also targeted her family because they were outsiders. It took into account the effects on Hazel and her family, but it also explored the consequences of being the wife and young daughter of the sexual predator. And, as Hazel’s story goes wide, we were also privy to how a story like this is taken up by the media in ways that go far beyond the initial scandal to perhaps exploit the situation to enhance their own agendas.
On a separate note, there is a scene in the book that was reminiscent of something that happened to me when I was a professor of library science teaching Young Adult Literature. The father, Gus, is an American Studies professor who teaches a class that considers the historical evolution of the family on television, as a microcosm of the larger culture. In his first class lecture he begins with Leave It to Beaver, the picture of 1950s traditionalism, then transitions through a few other sitcoms to All in the Family, with Archie Bunker’s misogyny and racism battling against his daughter and son-in-law’s wider sensibilities. After this, he moves to The Cosby Show as an example of the shift in the way black people are portrayed on television, featuring a family in which the father is a doctor, the mother a lawyer, and the children are benefiting from a lifestyle not previously seen on TV as part of the black experience. But although the show was a legitimate historical landmark, the minute he mentions the show in his class, certain of his students are outraged that he would dare to represent Bill Cosby in any way except as the outed serial predator we all later discovered him to be. Dr. Blum attempts to explain that the show, which aired from 1984 to 1992, could be looked at separately from the later discoveries about its star, but his students are unwilling to consider Cosby in any context, and several of them promptly start a petition to “Fire Gus Blum” that goes college-wide and then begins to attract attention that threatens his position.
In my YA Lit class, several students took issue with the fact that the first few weeks’ reading list consisted of books by and about white people. They demanded that I feature books by and about people of color, people of different socioeconomic status, and so on. I explained that since the first few weeks were dedicated to the history of young adult literature, which began to be considered a separate segment of fiction early in the 20th century, the assignments were consistent with the books that were being published at the time, which were written for white teens and did not begin to include people of color or LGBTQ+ as characters or talk about real-life issues until the 1960s.
I did however (like the father/professor in Hazel Says No) take a good, hard look at my syllabus and came to the conclusion that while i stood by my decision to represent those historically significant books, I could have done a better job with diversity when it came to updating my selections for the rest of the quarter, so I revised the choices by adding or substituting more inclusive works, both as regards authors and characters/stories. I also allowed the students themselves to suggest and select alternative books to read, if they found one that spoke to them. But, as happened in this novel, a certain small number absolutely refused to give up their first conclusions about me as an old white woman who was, at best, tone-deaf, and at worst, discriminatory and offensive. They felt free to gossip about me with each other, complain about me to my supervisor, and malign me in written comments that affected my livelihood.
The incident in this book that was reminiscent of my own experience of feeling canceled made me consider so many issues that are confronting our culture, and wonder how they will ultimately be resolved. On the political front right now, the current regime is intent on hurting people: They are whitewashing the past by removing historical websites about slavery, refusing to provide healthcare to women and others who don’t strictly conform to their restrictive view of humanity, and considering everyone not exactly made in their image to be “other” and open to attack. But there is also the faction who refuse, for example, to read the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of its lack of “political correctness,” despite historical context, or the fact that the main character rises above his culture with an epiphany that causes him to choose empathy over “doing the right thing.” (See my review, here.) These are the people who refused to vote for a candidate who represented 90 percent of their views because they disagreed with the other 10 percent, despite the fact that their refusal would plunge us into fascism. My hope for us is that we can manage to keep dialogue open, and calm the extreme pendulum swings so that both reason and empathy may prevail.
At any rate, Hazel Says No is definitely a conversation-starter (with others or in the privacy of your own mind!).
Through-story
I ran out of time and out of steam before completing Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven this week, and didn’t make it to the finish line. To tell the truth, I lost impetus before the library due date arrived, and switched to another book.
It’s not that I disliked Horse Heaven; in fact, the stories, characters, and language are actually quite wonderful. But that’s what it seems like—not a novel, but a series of short stories, strung together because they are all about the same subject—horses and all the people who surround them (owners, trainers, jockeys, etc.) in the racing business. And while I love horses and stories about them, I have never been a short story person. Short stories are, to me, like all the worst parts of starting to read a new book, with none of the payoff of getting to enjoy it once I’m invested.
As I kept going, the anecdotes and vignettes were beginning to add up, and I had hopes they would eventually converge into something, but it was taking a long time. I liked the picture she was painting, but a “through story” never developed, so the book didn’t drag me along in the way a novel would, making me want to know what would happen next.
While “through-story” isn’t a concept commonly used in readers’ advisory when we talk about appeals, maybe it should be. Without it, a compelling quality of story—momentum—is missing, and without momentum some readers have trouble getting to the end of a book. Even those of us who revel in language, character development, and world-building can have trouble with a book essentially lacking a plot—that ordered sequence of events that includes exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. While a plot may exist in Horse Heaven, its presence is so diffuse as to be indiscernible (at least to me).
After reading it for at least an hour a day for about a week, I received an email notice from the library that my book would be due in three days. I felt sure I was getting close to the end, or at least the three-quarter mark, and could beat my deadline, but when I checked the page count on my Kindle I discovered that I was at page 267 out of 543! At that point I decided to go read something (shorter) with a beginning, middle, and end that is all of a piece. I’ll come back to Horse Heaven someday when I’m in a different mood.
Harking back
After I finished the latest Vera Wong, I decided to reread yet another of Rumer Godden’s books. I recently described the plot of In This House of Brede to my cousin, and it made me want to experience it again for myself after so long. It was kind of a masterpiece of its day, although it’s a weird book for an atheist/agnostic like me to enjoy so much, considering that it’s about the life of a cloistered nun and her abbey; but I have a soft spot for it because it was my introduction to her writing.
I remembered finding it on my parents’ bookshelves, which is equally strange, because as fundamentalists, they didn’t even consider Catholics to be Christian. But I finally figured it out: My parents loved to read but weren’t good about going to the library and also didn’t frequent the bookstore. My mom did, however, have a subscription (de rigueur back in the 1960s and ’70s) to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. During the long, sometimes boring summers of my youth (I was an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids my age), I would lie on the floor of my dad’s study and devour all the stories contained therein, and that was how I happened upon this book. (I was amazed, in later years, to pick up and read the uncut versions of some of those books and realize all that I had missed!)
The book begins with the protagonist’s life-changing decision to give up her exceedingly busy and successful life to try to become a cloistered Benedictine nun. Philippa Talbot is 42, a widow who has made a great success in a government position in finance in the days after World War II when she would have been the only woman in the room who was not taking dictation. The story begins with her leaving her job on her last day—handing out her treasured possessions to some of the people who worked for her, entrusting her cat to her beloved housekeeper of many years, and getting on a train, with one small carry-on bag, to travel to the 120-year-old abbey in Sussex in the south of England. Should she successfully stick out her years there as a postulant and a novice, receive her preliminary clothing, and take her final orders, she would become a permanent fixture for life at Brede Abbey.
The humanity of each of the characters strikes you from the first page. The interaction between Mrs. Talbot and the young secretary from the typing pool; her detour, once she gets off the train, to the nearest pub for a last whiskey (or three) and a farewell cigarette; and her admission through the door into the enclosure, surrounded by the entire community (90-some nuns) in their wimples and habits, is vivid and engaging.
The story remains so throughout. It is a neat balance; it depicts life within the walls of the abbey—the structure of ceremony and ritual, the customs, the traditions, the pageantry—but it also focuses in on each of the characters, describing the tests, the deprivations, the stumbling blocks, and also the joys as they struggle to live with purpose, outside of the mundane world of competition and financial success. The nuns and other characters are beautifully drawn, both individually and in their complex interactions with one another. The back stories are not dictated in a straightforward way, but are instead dropped here and there between the recounting of the current day-to-day life of the cloister, giving the entire book a freshness and cohesion despite the rapid switches in time and perspective.
It is an earnest look at the examined life of a community formed by diverse personalities who share a world view, but it is also a gorgeous, colorful kaleidoscope in its descriptions of the minute details of living in this world with its sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings. The sacred and the mundane are present in equal measure, as are Godden’s luminous observations of the natural world and the beauty to be found in a cherry tree against the sky, a soaring lark, a stone statue, or the transcendent face of a soloist whose voice rises to the rafters in devotion.
It may not sound like your cup of tea, but you never know; it certainly gave me a few totally absorbed afternoons, and this was for the third time!
The Wong way
Vera Wong rises to another occasion in Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (On A Dead Man), by Jesse Q. Sutanto, the second (but hopefully not the last) in the saga of this intensely curious proprietor of a Chinatown tea shop in San Francisco. (The first was Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, reviewed here.)
Although the dead body didn’t land on the floor of her shop this time, he did, in some sense, seek her out. When Vera pays a visit to the police station to see Officer Selena Gray (the woman she hopes will marry her son, Tilly) about a problem of her own, she notices a troubled girl lurking outside the station, pacing back and forth and wringing her hands but unable to bring herself to enter. Vera knows, as a Chinese grandmother, that it is her duty to interrogate, er, offer a sympathetic ear until the young Millie gives up whatever is bothering her, so Vera takes her back to the shop for a sustaining cup of tea. Millie tells Vera that her best friend, Thomas, is missing…but Vera knows there’s a lot Millie is holding back.
That weekend, while cat-sitting at their apartment for Tilly and Selena, Vera discovers a treasure trove of information (she looks at the files in Selena’s briefcase) about a young man who has been fished dead out of Mission Bay, presumably a suicide, and although the man is listed as John Doe, it soon becomes clear that this is Millie’s missing friend. But as events progress, we learn that he had a public face as well, under a different name, as a prominent “influencer” on social media; four other people besides Millie who have possibly suspicious connections to the dead man convince Vera that this was murder, not suicide. Vera, bored since her last adventure as an amateur sleuth, jumps in with both feet to meet, interrogate, and adopt her new list of suspects into the chosen family she acquired the first time around. Despite Selena’s warnings to stay out of her investigation, Vera is determined to be one step ahead of everyone in figuring out this mystery, thus proving she is as intrepid at solving it as she was last time.
I think I liked this book even better than the first, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Vera has no filter, and her misunderstanding of American slang and her slyly manipulative cozening of people to get what she wants—which also usually corresponds to what they need from her—provides a lot of humor. It also lets us get acquainted with the cast of characters much more quickly as Vera grills them mercilessly in her quest to solve the murder. But although she can be a bit much, Vera makes up for it with her caring, which she exhibits in her preparation of vast quantities of food and tea for all and sundry. (Don’t read this when you’re hungry. You will immediately spend a fortune on DoorDash, and then be disappointed that it doesn’t measure up to the cuisine of Vera Wong.)
I was initially a little put off by yet another book with a prominent character who is an Instagram influencer, especially having recently read Sutanto’s previous book You Will Never Be Me, which was a much darker tale about two women obsessed with their online presence as “momfluencers.” But before I decided to put it down, I was drawn further into the story as each subsequent character revealed what they knew and a complicated back story emerged about the actual life of “Thomas” that led to his death.
I loved the moments in the story when each member of the motley crew that Vera assembles has the realization that…
“[L]ife gets much easier when you hand over the reins to Vera.”
Some on Goodreads said they didn’t like it that Sutanto took the story in that more serious direction, but I felt it was the perfect balance—a cozy with substance when it comes to societal issues such as family relationships, loneliness, generational differences and expectations, and also the fatal effects of greed and exploitation. It had a little bit of everything, but for me the Wong way was the right way, ha ha!
And, judging from the closing chapter, we may not have seen the last of Vera…and the next adventure could take in a much wider world than San Francisco’s Chinatown!
The Mare (the girl)
Having read Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, a few months back, when someone recommended the book The Mare, by Mary Gaitskill, I was primed to read it, especially because the teenage main character was named Velvet, immediately transporting me back to the joy of reading National Velvet in my childhood. And, similar to that book, this story was about a disadvantaged child whose encounter with horses changes things for her, although the child in this one is a much more extreme example. I didn’t grow up in a financial or social environment that would indicate the need for escape, but I was an introverted, solitary child who longed for the connection with horses in lieu of any relationship with people, so books like this spoke to me, and still do.
Velvet (short for Velveteen) Vargas is the daughter of a single mother, Sylvia, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic. They, along with Velvet’s little brother, Dante, live in Crown Heights (an inner city section of Brooklyn), and it is a limited, hand-to-mouth existence. Sylvia is hard and bad-tempered, shaped by the fearful responsi-bilities she has been forced to take on from a young age, and she is alternately loving, manipulative, and abusive with her children. The effect on Velvet’s sense of self, in particular, is both negative and confusing, and Velvet is a troubled, conflicted child.
Through Velvet’s school, they find out about the Fresh Air Fund; although the actual organization apparently sends children to six-week summer camps so they can have outdoor experiences and take leadership workshops, the program in this book pairs up inner-city children with more well-to-do host families from the country, with whom they spend a couple of weeks’ holiday. Both Dante and Velvet participate, although we never hear any more about Dante’s experience after he is put on a bus at Penn Station that first summer.
Velvet, age 11, is matched with Ginger and Paul, from rural upstate New York. Ginger is a painter, although she has been blocked for a long time; she is also a recovering alcoholic. Paul is a teacher, and met Ginger at an AA meeting. They have been together for some time without having children, and Ginger longs for some kind of connection; they initially sign up to host because Ginger wants to experience what it might be like to adopt an older child. (Paul has a daughter from a former marriage and is lukewarm, at best, about this.)
Ginger and Paul live near a horse stable, and it is the incentive of being able to ride horses that most appeals to Velvet about the experience. The book carries its characters through several years, as Velvet transitions from child to teenager while paying sporadic weekend and holiday visits to the couple’s home, and is told through the primary viewpoints of Velvet and Ginger, with a few scattered chapters giving added perspective from Paul and Sylvia.
The surface story is a coming-of-age saga, but the underlying context is the stark contrasts inherent in race and socioeconomic class. The switch between Velvet’s world and Ginger’s holds up the realities of inequality in our country by showcasing minority poverty and its relationship to white liberal guilt and its accompanying savior complex.
My reaction to the first part of the book was positive; it’s written in a rather quirky style that appealed to me because it was so internal. Conversations are had, but they don’t exist as present-tense dialogue; rather, each person is narrating from her sole point of view, and relating the conversations second-hand as she perceives them. It makes for an experience that is simultaneously cerebral and intimate.
The path of the story is choppy; sometimes we get to see the same scene and actions as experienced by Velvet and then again by Ginger, but at others we see things only from the one point of view and then the timeline is continued by the other, as when Velvet narrates her day at the barn and Ginger takes up the story when Velvet returns to the house and Ginger tries to get an account of the day’s events out of a recalcitrant and somewhat inarticulate teenager. Everything about the story is filtered through one or the other psyche (with the exception of the few short chapters related by Paul or Silvia), so there isn’t really a factual feel about it, since both viewpoints are opinion colored by personality and emotion.
Where the book started to break down for me was when Velvet (at home in Brooklyn) started paying attention to boys, and one boy, Dominic, in particular, and her attention is riveted on him to the exclusion of her own family, her host family, and the horses. Although it was probably a natural development in the life of a young girl from this neighborhood and, more widely, that of a pubescent girl from any neighborhood, it was a disappointing distraction from Velvet’s previous one-track focus on her almost mystical relationship with the horses and with one mare in particular.
The mare was a problem horse from whom everyone was warned off, as she was both unpredictable and occasionally vicious, but Velvet felt a kinship with the horse that developed, over the course of several years, into something so compelling that to draw the attention away from that to a helpless crush on an older boy who doesn’t really want her was disappointing. (Some of the best writing in the book is when Velvet is trying to articulate the feelings and internal dialogue between herself and the horses and how those translate into action.)
I also have to say that although I don’t mind stories that are more character- than plot-driven, I truly loathe ones that are open-ended, and when I got to the last page of this book I had a momentary flare of irritation that I had spent so much time persevering to finish reading it. In retrospect I don’t exactly regret it, but I really wish there had been a more definitive story arc with an end as engaging as its beginning.
Boarding-school books
I’m off on my own personal nostalgia kick right now, re-reading Georgette Heyer novels to escape from the depressing real world of politics and sub-optimum health. But on one of the book-lovers’ pages on Facebook, a mom was asking for recommendations for her teenage son who is a reluctant reader, so I combed through my various categories of YA fiction for some and was thus inspired to write about this sub-set of coming-of-age fiction, the boarding-school book.
I think those who have never attended a boarding school are in some way fascinated with the culture—I know I always have been, from the time I read my first children’s book with a protagonist who had been posted off by their parents to “sleep-over” school. And there are a lot (hundreds) of examples out there of the away-from-home scholastic experience, from Harry Potter to A Separate Peace. There are books in every genre, for almost every age, so I thought I’d mark some of my personal favorites and some that seem to be perennially popular.
The boarding-school book is by no means limited to children and teens—there are many written for (and sometimes about) adults as well, especially if you include the college boarding experience. I’ll give age groups and categories and (in some cases) some brief synopses, and if you have the same interest I do, you can gravitate to whichever piques your interest.
For children, a classic example is
A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, about a young girl sent home to England from India, where her father is a successful merchant, because it was believed that the climate of India was not salubrious for British children. They were separated from their families and entrusted to the care of an English boarding school, where they would hopefully get an education and a proper upbringing and be reunited with their families when they were grown. Young Sara Crewe goes from riches to rags when her father disappears and is presumed dead, and Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary can no longer collect hefty fees for her maintenance. I sometimes think of this book as the child’s version of the first third of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (although Sara is much better-natured than Jane ever was!). It’s a romantic story with a protagonist who remains upbeat and optimistic in the face of cruelty, guaranteed to appeal to the kind of reader I was at a young age.
There are many boarding-school books with more fantastical settings, the most well known probably being the Harry Potter books, in which gifted children are sent to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to hone their talents. But in the fantasy category are also the Harper Hall books by Anne McCaffrey, which take place on the planet Pern and feature dragons and fire lizards in these stories of children studying to be professional musicians; and The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson, featuring another magical school, this time for math geniuses with a little something extra. These are all for younger children and teens (maybe 4th through 8th grades?), although older teens and adults can (and do) enjoy these books as well.
In the specifically Young Adult category, there are fantasies, mysteries, and realistic fiction all set at private academies that either offer the standard schooling or are geared towards inhabitants with a specialty. For the middle school set: One realistic one in which the rule of the bullies and the plight of the bullied are revealed is The Mockingbirds, by Daisy Whitney. Another fairly normal boarding school that is the site of a mystery is the backdrop for the Truly, Devious trilogy by Maureen Johnson, in which death visits Ellingham Academy. And the Gallagher Girls series by Ally Carter (beginning with I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have to Kill You) showcases a girls’ school that is supposedly for the upper-crust daughters of the snobby set but is actually a training curriculum for those who wish to become undercover agents for the CIA and like agencies.
Among the boarding-school franchise for older teens, there are also a variety of settings. In the realistic category are such mainstream stories as Winger, by Andrew Smith (at a boys’ school focused on rugby); and Looking for Alaska, by John Green and Saving Francesca, by Melina Marchetta, both with a challenging co-ed population. A fun book in its development of one character from age 14 to 16 as she figures out how to dominate her environment is The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart. Another is the trilogy by Stephanie Perkins that begins with Anna and the French Kiss, following a Georgia girl who is transplanted to an American school in Paris for her senior year.
A huge boarding-school subset is the paranormal category, with vampires dominating and witches coming in a close second—the Vampire Academy books by Richelle Mead, the Hex Hall series by Rachel Hawkins, the Gemma Doyle stories by Libba Bray, and Evernight, by Claudia Gray. One series that I particularly like and admire is Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire, which could arguably be classed as either YA or adult; the books are unusual, smart, and varied in their approach. I reviewed them on this blog when I first discovered them, and continue to find them unique.
Moving on to books more appropriate for adults, there are some in every category. The Magicians (and sequels) by Lev Grossman have been billed as Harry Potter for grown-ups. Mysteries that feature boarding schools include Well-Schooled in Murder, from the Inspector Lynley mysteries by Elizabeth George; The Secret Place, one of the Dublin Murder Squad books by Tana French; and The River King, by magical realism author Alice Hoffman. A book that is written about young people but is (in my opinion) too intense for their age group to read is Brutal Youth, by Anthony Breznican, a co-ed Lord of the Flies set in a Catholic private school in Pennsylvania. I didn’t so much enjoy reading it as remain fascinated and unable to put it down. It’s definitely powerful, and in some ways brilliant, but also stark and frightening. Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris, is written from the point of view of the teaching staff at St. Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys, a cat-and-mouse tale of revenge as one staff member with secret ties to the school tries to destroy it from the inside. Finally, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is dystopian literary fiction with a boarding school setting that may not be what you had in mind when you read the initial description, but it’s a fascinating premise with a heartbreaking (and kind of depressing) outcome.
This is a mere drop in the bucket of what’s out there; if you want to research this category further, go to Goodreads, select “browse” and “lists” and type “boarding schools” into the search box, and you will find multiple lists containing all these and many more. But the books mentioned here are a great start if you, like me, enjoy that particular setting for your fiction.
Momfluencers
What kind of word is THAT? Ask Jesse Q. Sutanto, author of the thriller You Will Never Be Me. The book is set in the worst cliché-ridden version of Los Angeles (as a 52-year resident of this city, I beg to differ with the exaggerated depiction!), and its two main characters are social media “influencers” who are also moms touting their lifestyle—thus that ghastly splice.
I had previously read Sutanto’s romcoms (the “Aunties” trilogy) and her delightfully silly mystery Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, so when I was looking for some lighter dark reading, I decided to try one of her thrillers. The library had this e-book on hand, and as a relative novice to Instagram with fewer followers than I would like (this is for my page featuring my portrait-painting), I thought it would be fun to read about some of the people who have made a true success out of their presence in such forums.
In some ways, it was fun; but I felt at a disadvantage with this book because, although the moms were supposedly besties in all things, the truth that they were jealous competitors who had trouble celebrating each other’s wins (particularly when one substantially overshadowed and outperformed the other) made both of them inherently unlikeable. And although I don’t mind villainous characters, I usually like it better when there is one sympathetic person in the story for whom I can cheer. You know, someone with at least one redeeming quality….
In the beginning, Meredith was the popular rising star and Aspen was the eager but slightly gauche fan. Before Meredith met Aspen, there was a friend-gap in her life; she was so busy trying to become popular to legions of online strangers that she didn’t have time to cultivate people in real life. But when she runs into Aspen at a Hollywood pretty-people party and realizes just how out of her depth she is, Meredith takes a shrewd look at Aspen’s potential and, flattered by her naive, awed admiration, decides to help her. She teaches her about hair and makeup, shows her how to make videos to entice both followers and sponsors, and gives her a leg up into Meredith’s world.
A few years later, Aspen’s star has risen exponentially, while Meredith’s influence has waned—her “brand” is a little tired, a little old. Aspen has crafted a new, polished look, married Ben, and given birth to darling twin girls Noemie and Elea; fueled by motherhood and the need to be the breadwinner in an unequal partnership (her husband is in real estate but not a player), Aspen has switched her brand to become a “momfluencer.” She films the daily routine, presenting herself and her family as living an idyllic existence—the twins always dressed in adorable matching outfits, every meal gourmet and served with panache, home decor curated to shine online. When you collect as many followers as Aspen, the deals for product placement follow, and the dollars flow in.
When Aspen gets pregnant with a third daughter, Meredith decides she has waited long enough for Mr. Perfect and chooses to become a single mother with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. While she wouldn’t go so far as to say she gave birth to baby Luca so that she, too, could go the momfluencer route, well…that’s what she has tried to do. But somehow she just can’t pull it off with the seamless brio of the successful and somewhat patronizing Aspen, who is too busy now to hang with her best friend Mer, drinking wine and gossiping as they used to do. The tables are turned; Aspen is on top, and Mer is, well, not either admiring or in awe. She resents Aspen’s success and especially her lack of willingness to share her ideas and methods the way Mer had shared with her when Aspen was the one at the bottom. Meredith discovers it’s not fun to be ditched, and finally, in frustration, she blows up at Aspen and says some unforgiveable things, and the friendship is over.
A few months later, Mer, who has been stalking Aspen (just a tiny bit, right? nothing serious) gets lucky. Little Elea leaves her iPad out on the patio where an enterprising person can appropriate it. Mer isn’t sure why she took it, but when she discovers that Aspen has created an online calendar that updates automatically onto all the family’s devices, she has access to Aspen’s social media schedule. At first she just tweaks things, causing Aspen to arrive late at a lunch date or forget to pick up the dry cleaning; but soon she is erasing meetings with sponsors and turning up in Aspen’s place to sign lucrative contracts. Meanwhile, Aspen can’t figure out what has gone awry—has the pressure of having to (appear to) be the perfect mom in front of millions caused her to lose her mind and her mojo?
Then something happens that turns the relationship on its head and sends Aspen’s and Mer’s story in a whole new direction…
It sounds like big fun, right? And some of it is. But until the twist 50 percent of the way through the book, there is a lot of snark. We don’t get to live through any of the harmonious early days of Meredith’s and Aspen’s friendship, we are instead dumped directly into the bitter rivalry felt by Meredith and the somewhat dismissive, too-busy inattention exhibited by Aspen. And neither of their lives is the shining example they present online because, let’s face it, motherhood is never that easy. Aspen and Ben have grown apart as he has become increasingly resentful of being on camera 24/7 (and having his nose rubbed in the fact that he’s not the breadwinner), while one of the twins is acting out like she’s 16 instead of seven. Mer is constantly exhausted by the unending round of nursing, changing, and being awakened by baby Luca, and upset by her inability to make more money and have the nice things Aspen has already achieved. None of the supporting characters—Ben, Mer’s sister Claire (or Clara? I could swear her name switched halfway through the book)—is a sympathetic one either. So the whole recitation becomes tiring if you are looking for some comic relief amidst all the anger and angst.
But…that twist. It makes things interesting. And there’s another one later on that takes things in an even more extreme direction. So although at 49 percent I was ready to give this book faint praise (not pan it, exactly, but not promote it either), it turned out to be a much better story than I had expected at the halfway mark. And it’s definitely eye-opening about the online popularity that people who want success must pursue. Although I wish I had the 17K followers my friend Phoebe has scored, and that I sold the bulk of my paintings the way she does, I’m certainly not going to be ruining a treasured friendship over it! (Even if I only have 879 people looking at my portraits today…) How DID she do that?
(If you’d like to follow me and save my friendship with the lovely
and talented Phoebe, you can find me at https://www.instagram.com/losangeles_melliott/.
I’m just sayin’…)
Horse
Although I started out as a little girl who liked dolls, as I got older I turned into a horse fan(atic). (My mother continued to collect Madame Alexander dolls on my behalf long after my interest waned.) I went through that stage around 9-13 years old where I read everything horse-related I could find: the Marguerite Henry tales of the wild ponies of Chincoteague; Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell (multiple times); My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara; National Velvet, by Enid Bagnold; and all the Black Stallion books by Walter Farley. With my parents and their best friends, I spent two spring vacations at a “dude ranch” in Arizona, riding daily for two weeks each year (the photo is from there). After that I begged for riding lessons in my home town of Riverside, California, and spent some months riding an ornery “rental” horse named Shadow who dumped me off more than once in the (thankfully soft) dry river bottom of the Santa Ana river. (I wasn’t that bad a rider; I was jumping him over logs and bushes at the time, fantasizing about being Velvet Brown in the Grand National, and he had a spiteful habit of blowing up his belly when his girth was being tightened so that the saddle would go sliding at inopportune moments.)
My ultimate goal was, of course, to have my own horse, and I almost fulfilled that wish; my grandfather, a farmer who was essentially a childlike man notorious for making rash decisions without considering consequences, went to the local livestock auction in Chowchilla one Saturday morning and bought me an unbroken palomino colt. I was overjoyed, but my parents sat me down and explained to me that it wouldn’t be realistic to keep a horse in Riverside, where he would have to be boarded out and I, with my crowded schedule of academics, piano lessons, and thrice-weekly church, would have scant time to see him, let alone ride or care for him. There was also the matter of the expense of both training and boarding him, which we couldn’t really afford. I was devastated, but I was at heart a sensible and agreeable child, with the result that Granddad sold him on to another buyer, and I went back to my books. I never did, however, wholly lose the longing for a horse companion; I wasn’t so much into riding, I just liked being around horses. Their energy and temperament held a fascination for me that has never waned.
It was, therefore, probably inevitable that I would at some point get around to reading Geraldine Brooks’s book Horse. I resisted for a while, for a couple of reasons: First, I’m not drawn to historical fiction; it seems to me that the history so often interferes with the author’s ability to tell a good story, being constrained by actual events (and feeling the need to include them all!). I tend to steer clear of anything “based on a true story.” I have discovered a few exceptions that I love, but mostly I avoid these books for fear of disappointment. (Also, does everyone in the world have to write a book set during World War II?!) The other reason was because I read her book March and, contrary to the popular opinion, didn’t care for it much. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women books were cherished childhood favorites, and Brooks exploded some of the myth in her tale of Mr. March in ways I didn’t appreciate (and also, I found parts of it vastly boring).
But…horses. HORSE. So I put my name on the library waitlist and was finally granted access to the e-book last week. It was both more and less than I was expecting, and I thoroughly enjoyed some parts while being put off by others.
The story is set in three time periods and jumps back and forth between those and also between multiple narrators in each one. The first takes place in the years just prior to the Civil War, and begins with the birth of a bay foal who will become the famed and gifted racehorse Lexington. The enslaved boy Jarret becomes first his groom, later his trainer, and his fiercest advocate as they essentially grow up together. The other spokesman in this time period is an equestrian portraitist, Thomas Scott. The second (much less significant) storyline is set in New York City’s art world of the late 1950s, from the viewpoint of art dealer Martha Jackson. The third, contemporary tale occurs in Washington, D.C. in 2019, with Jess, an Australian woman who works at the Smithsonian Institution’s Osteology Prep Lab (she articulates skeletons for display), and Theo, a Nigerian-American Ph.D. student writing a dissertation about American equestrian art (specifically focusing on images of slaves in paintings of racehorses). All these timelines are connected by a portrait of a horse and his black groom that Theo discovers abandoned on his neighbor’s curb. The horse is Lexington, the groom is Jarret, and the book weaves together all the connecting threads.
The relationship between Jarret and Lexington is moving, poignant, and sometimes heartbreaking. The back story of the history of American horse-racing, specifically in the South, was fascinating to me, as were the contemporary details about the science of the preservation of natural history and the restoration of paintings.
There is, of course, a subtext to the entire book, which is racism. It is effectively and affectingly dealt with in the pre-Civil War sections by the clear depiction of the sale of humans being much more common and vastly less considered than the sale of horses.
I found the theme less compelling when Brooks moved to the present-day embedded culture of racism in America. The societal injustices of slavery were clear-cut, anger-provoking, and heartbreaking; but I felt like once she approached the more subtle but nonetheless ubiquitous prejudices of the present day, she fell too often into either avoidance or cliché. I particularly didn’t like the egocentric behavior of Jess, who let her initial reaction to Theo become an ongoing mea culpa that was much more concerned with her own embarrassment than it was about her injury of Theo.
Despite those caveats, the depth of the research and Brooks’s deft mix of history, science, and art were enthralling, especially due to her evocative writing. The horse-racing scenes were both powerful and visceral, and the pictures she paints of the various settings and environments are beautiful and memorable. Even with its flaws, I’m glad I read this book.
Beyond Cerulean
Just as I began my review of the first book (The House in the Cerulean Sea) with the words
“I had high hopes that I would love this book,” I hoped to wrap up my review of this one, its sequel, with the same conclusion I drew then—”This book was an unalloyed delight from start to finish.” Alas, I can’t quite say that.
Many of the same delights were present, the chief of them being the wonderful characters. A big pleasure of this book was to see how the children of the Marsyas Island “orphanage” have grown and come into their own under the positive attention of Arthur Parnassus and his partner, Linus Baker. My favorite parts of the narrative were the insights and revelations from Sal, Phee, Chauncey, Talia, Lucy, and Theodore, and the fresh perspective from David, the yeti child new to the family. The interactions, in particular, between David and the other children were such lovely models of how to bring someone into your orbit and make them feel wanted.
I also initially liked the political nature of the tale—the defiance of those in power when they try to use fear to silence and censor outliers. The opening—in which Arthur Parnassus testifies in public to the committee overseeing DICOMY and DICOMA about the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of the department supposedly detailed to protect him—was a dramatic kickoff to the book-long campaign setting Arthur and Linus and their little band of hopefuls against the gaslighting of a self-serving, unaccountable government. The book is obviously meant to encourage people who have been “othered”—LGBTQ, as well as those who are racially and ethnically diverse—to stand up in solidarity and resist oppression and marginalization. The continuing revelations about the treatment of the magical community hark back to indigenous colonization and even genocide, and the story is also plainly intended to enlist “the rest of us” to stand with the othered, as Klune illustrates with his conversion of the townspeople of Marsyas into allies and supporters.
There are some dramatic moments that live up to this goal. I found it quite arresting when there was suddenly a realization by Arthur that rather than constantly fighting, he can just refuse outright to play the game. Instead of either resisting or buying into the government constraints, he has the ability simply to refuse to acknowledge their authority. It was a textbook lesson in how to leave someone flatfooted—stop collaborating with them in their appropriated self-importance.
But there are also a number of events that are so preachily on the nose (and in some cases either patently ridiculous or hail-mary impossible) that they actively take away from the message. I feel like those were a direct result of the “elephant in the room,” who appears by name in the acknowledgments but is caricatured and parodied in the book in the person of Jeanine Rowder, villainous government official. The choice Klune made to take on the anti-trans author J. K. Rowling by writing her into his book as the villain is the moment at which he lost the plot for me. The book morphed into a vehicle to scapegoat and belittle, on a too-personal level. Am I saying she doesn’t deserve pushback for her targeting of people who do her no harm? No. But there are many more egregiously hateful people in this world on whom a book villain might have been modeled, and perhaps the story wouldn’t have become so pointedly petty in the process. It felt like the set-up of a straw man to symbolically knock down. I wanted more nuance.
I still enjoyed most of the book. But the turn things took did make me sit back and wonder: Was there sufficient purpose to this sequel? Or did the personal agenda derail it from being what Klune intended? I’m honestly not sure.
I am also not fond of a deus ex machina-type resolution, so…there’s that.
My final conclusion is that I don’t regret reading the book, and would encourage others to do so—with the caveat that they take from it the intended message, the parts that are true heirs to the sentiments of the first one. Is that good advice? I don’t know. You’ll have to take your chances and come back to me on that.
The Book Adept 