Down a Dark Hall
A Lois Duncan Thrillers book
Lois Duncan
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, YA Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: When she first heard her mother and stepfather talking about the private Blackwood School for Girls in upstate New York, Kit Gordon thought it sounded exciting, especially if her best friend could go with her. But somehow only Kit got past the unusual entrance exams, and when she sets eyes on the restored mansion in the remote woods for the first time, she has only one thought: evil.
At first, she thinks it might just be her nerves. The place is old and spooky and the headmistress Madame Duret is peculiar, to say the least. But she can't shake the feeling that something's not right at Blackwood. There are only four students including her, such an odd mix that Kit can't imagine how they were all selected when her own brilliant best friend was rejected. The teaching staff is just one one professor, the headmistress's young adult son Jules, and Duret herself. Then the nightmares begin... and the students start displaying unusual talents, things they could never do before they arrived.
What is going on? What is Madame Duret doing to the children - and why? And can Kit escape before it's too late?
REVIEW: It's a classic setup by a familiar old-school author... but, like the Blackwood School for Girls, something felt a little odd about this story from the start - such as why an old-school author would bring up cell phones, social media, and the internet in a tale that feels like it's from the mid-twentieth century. Apparently, this is an "updated" version of the original, which was published in 1974. It probably would've been best just to leave it in its original time; it does a disservice to modern young readers to assume they're incapable of comprehending or enjoying what, to them, would be "historical fiction". As it is, the updates come across a little forced, like a parent overusing slang from a younger generation without quite getting the nuance and context right, muddling an otherwise reasonably decent (for its original time) and atmospheric thriller.
Kit doesn't want to be at Blackwood from the beginning, especially not without her best friend; her remarried mother and stepfather, however, are going on an extended European honeymoon and need somewhere for Kit to stay, and Blackwood promised a premium experience they couldn't deny. At first, she thinks maybe that's why she has such a visceral reaction the first time she lays eyes on the school, formerly the home of a local eccentric... but, this being a thriller, her gut instinct is correct, and from the moment she sets foot on the property Kit is in more danger than she can understand. Students and staff are familiar characters one would expect in this kind of tale, from the intimidating headmistress (who is clearly hiding sinister secrets) to the bubble-headed blonde classmate to the swoonworthy young music instructor (and Duret's son) Jules to the kindly cook who provides backstory as needed for the plot and more. Nobody is particularly deep, but nobody really needs to be in this kind of plot. It's more about the slowly unfolding horrors, the nightmares and unusual expressions of spontaneous "gifts" that catch all the children off guard and elicit different reactions from each, as Kit slowly pieces together just why the four students were selected and what Duret intends for them. There are some logic stretches, but overall the tale does a decent job immersing the reader in Kit's hellish experiences as the horrors unfold and her efforts to resist and escape (which she does at least try, to her credit) are thwarted. The climax could've been punchier, the wrap-up quick in a way the left me slightly disappointed, but overall the story delivers the boarding-school-with-a-dark-secret thriller that it promised... though I still question the publisher's insistence on the "updates", especially when the first thing the story does is deprive the children of access to nearly all of the modern technology it itself shoehorned into the story. Why bother introducing the tech at all, anyway?
You Might Also Enjoy:
Killing Mr. Griffin (Lois Duncan) - My Review
Every Heart a Doorway (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Three Quarters Dead (Richard Peck) - My Review
Friday, November 15, 2024
Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? (Keith Boykin)
Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race?: 25 Arguments That Won't Go Away
Keith Boykin
Bold Type Books
Nonfiction, History/Law/Politics/Sociology
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Slavery's been over for ages - why keep bringing up the past? Isn't "equal opportunity" just reverse racism against whites? Why can't we just ignore race altogether? Don't all lives matter? Every time someone mentions racial discrimination and inequality, these and more arguments inevitably pop up, shutting down discussions and derailing progress and demanding time and energy to answer questions that have quite definitively been answered innumerable times (just not the way that those who benefit from ongoing racial inequality would like). In this book, writer Keith Boykin dissects 25 common arguments that have been used to prevent real progress on issues of race, racism, and equity from history to modern times.
REVIEW: Reading this after the election of November 2024 - when a significant portion of the American public deliberately and definitively rejected progress on race (and pretty much every other front), setting the stage for a near-inevitable rapid race backwards on a scale I doubt I'll see recovered in my lifetime - puts a certain painful spin on this book, which deftly explores America's history of racial injustice and its often haphazard and temporary attempts to correct a problem of its own making. Boykin draws on history, personal experience, and current events to demonstrate how racism infiltrates every aspect of policy and life; the reason "everything has to be about race" is because there's no way for any remotely meaningful discussion on any problems facing the country today to occur without acknowledging how race has skewed America and its ostensible promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness since before the founding documents were drafted. It would be like trying to discuss forestry without talking about all that pesky woody plant life everyone keeps dragging into the conversation. The fact that these policies rooted in historic and ongoing racism also tangibly hurt other demographics makes it all the more urgent that they be addressed, but arguments like the ones presented here are designed to keep the topic muddled and turn those demographics against each other, tiring themselves out with explanations and infighting and semantics.
By turns informative, inspiring, and depressing, it makes for interesting reading, though I sadly can't help but suspect that a nation that hasn't apparently learned a thing in over two hundred years of existence - that apparently would rather slit its own throat and throw itself into the grasp of an avowed and proud traitor and authoritarian, potentially abandoning democracy altogether, in a pivotal election where race was very much a factor - is unlikely to ever actually address the problems of race and racism and systemic inequality without near-complete self immolation first... and maybe not even then.
You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) - My Review
Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - My Review
They Called Us Enemy (George Takei) - My Review
Keith Boykin
Bold Type Books
Nonfiction, History/Law/Politics/Sociology
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Slavery's been over for ages - why keep bringing up the past? Isn't "equal opportunity" just reverse racism against whites? Why can't we just ignore race altogether? Don't all lives matter? Every time someone mentions racial discrimination and inequality, these and more arguments inevitably pop up, shutting down discussions and derailing progress and demanding time and energy to answer questions that have quite definitively been answered innumerable times (just not the way that those who benefit from ongoing racial inequality would like). In this book, writer Keith Boykin dissects 25 common arguments that have been used to prevent real progress on issues of race, racism, and equity from history to modern times.
REVIEW: Reading this after the election of November 2024 - when a significant portion of the American public deliberately and definitively rejected progress on race (and pretty much every other front), setting the stage for a near-inevitable rapid race backwards on a scale I doubt I'll see recovered in my lifetime - puts a certain painful spin on this book, which deftly explores America's history of racial injustice and its often haphazard and temporary attempts to correct a problem of its own making. Boykin draws on history, personal experience, and current events to demonstrate how racism infiltrates every aspect of policy and life; the reason "everything has to be about race" is because there's no way for any remotely meaningful discussion on any problems facing the country today to occur without acknowledging how race has skewed America and its ostensible promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness since before the founding documents were drafted. It would be like trying to discuss forestry without talking about all that pesky woody plant life everyone keeps dragging into the conversation. The fact that these policies rooted in historic and ongoing racism also tangibly hurt other demographics makes it all the more urgent that they be addressed, but arguments like the ones presented here are designed to keep the topic muddled and turn those demographics against each other, tiring themselves out with explanations and infighting and semantics.
By turns informative, inspiring, and depressing, it makes for interesting reading, though I sadly can't help but suspect that a nation that hasn't apparently learned a thing in over two hundred years of existence - that apparently would rather slit its own throat and throw itself into the grasp of an avowed and proud traitor and authoritarian, potentially abandoning democracy altogether, in a pivotal election where race was very much a factor - is unlikely to ever actually address the problems of race and racism and systemic inequality without near-complete self immolation first... and maybe not even then.
You Might Also Enjoy:
How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi) - My Review
Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - My Review
They Called Us Enemy (George Takei) - My Review
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Zero Sum Game (S. L. Huang)
Zero Sum Game
The Cas Russell series, Book 1
S. L. Huang
Tor
Fiction, Action/Humor/Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Some people are good at math. Some are great at it. And then there's Cas Russell, a woman to whom the whole world is a series of numbers and equations in constant flow around her, enabling her to perform seemingly-superhuman feats. Rather than use her gifts to make a killing in business or at a casino, she instead takes freelance jobs finding things that have been lost... even people. Tracking down Courtney, a wayward girl who got sucked into the clutches of a Colombian drug cartel, is just another day on the job to Cas. But something isn't adding up about this job. Why would drug lords and federal agencies alike take such a particular interest in an unnoteworthy, expendable mule? Why is there an ex-cop PI on her tail almost from the moment they escape the cartel compound, babbling nonsense about secret projects and assassinations and mind control? And who has decided the Cas herself is now a sufficient threat that her contacts are getting killed? Cas may not have many (or any) real friends, and her morals may be generously described as charcoal gray, but that just makes her a very, very bad enemy...
REVIEW: With a snarky bad-ass heroine and action straight from the first page, Zero Sum Game starts on a strong note, quickly establishing Cas and her abilities (as well as her not-quite-friend Rio, a psychopath who ironically is the only person she trusts to have her back). It stayed strong through most of its length, until an ending that felt like a betrayal and letdown of most everything that came before.
In the vein of many a mercenary or bounty hunter, Cas is not a white-hat good girl; the book opens after she's already killed numerous people breaking into the drug lords' compound outside of Los Angeles, and it's not long before the body count ticks higher during the escape with Courtney. She is, however, interesting, a compelling character with a nice, quick-witted voice and an intriguing ability as she uses her beyond-prodigal grasp of mathematics to pick her way through firefights without a scratch (using formulae to calculate the location of shooters via echos and vectors, figuring out force and optimal angles of attack in a heartbeat, etc.). If it all stretches credulity a bit, well, it's basically a superhero plot, and math as a superpower is less implausible than mutation from a radioactive spider bite or other gimmicks. It isn't long before Cas realizes just how much more there is to this seemingly-routine rescue mission, but it still takes some convincing before she realizes the truth about the threat: a secret society with an apparent mind reader who can manipulate people with just a single conversation, driving them to spill secrets, betray friends and family, even murder or commit suicide, all thinking it's their own idea. For a woman who has always been self-reliant, who relies on her brain and her calculations, this is a horror beyond anything, the idea that she might not even be able to trust her own memories or thoughts. Despite her lone-wolf instincts and inherently distrustful nature, she finds herself picking up a small handful of new allies (who are familiar tropes, but decently done) even before she admits to herself that this is a threat she cannot compute down to zero without help... and even then, victory may not be a sure formula. Being around other people forces her to see herself as others see her - making her question her utter disregard for humans, her casual willingness to resort to lethal force as though lives were just more numbers to impersonally manipulate - but does not lead to an instant personality shift. She is who she is, for better or worse, but perhaps she could become a slightly more ethical version of herself, especially when confronted with an enemy whose rationale and methodology repel her, but which seem disturbingly familiar.
As mentioned, this is a fast-paced book with few lulls, punctuated by periodic snark. A few of the setbacks seemed avoidable or foreseeable, but overall I was enjoying it... until the ending. Granted, this is just the first book in an apparently trilogy, but the ending felt like it ripped away Cas's agency and invalidated most of what she and her companions sacrificed. It was enough to knock a solid star off the rating, and make me uninterested in future adventures with Cas. Why bother, when the equation just comes to zero in the end?
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Middlegame (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Killing Gravity (Corey J. White) - My Review
The Cas Russell series, Book 1
S. L. Huang
Tor
Fiction, Action/Humor/Sci-Fi/Thriller
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Some people are good at math. Some are great at it. And then there's Cas Russell, a woman to whom the whole world is a series of numbers and equations in constant flow around her, enabling her to perform seemingly-superhuman feats. Rather than use her gifts to make a killing in business or at a casino, she instead takes freelance jobs finding things that have been lost... even people. Tracking down Courtney, a wayward girl who got sucked into the clutches of a Colombian drug cartel, is just another day on the job to Cas. But something isn't adding up about this job. Why would drug lords and federal agencies alike take such a particular interest in an unnoteworthy, expendable mule? Why is there an ex-cop PI on her tail almost from the moment they escape the cartel compound, babbling nonsense about secret projects and assassinations and mind control? And who has decided the Cas herself is now a sufficient threat that her contacts are getting killed? Cas may not have many (or any) real friends, and her morals may be generously described as charcoal gray, but that just makes her a very, very bad enemy...
REVIEW: With a snarky bad-ass heroine and action straight from the first page, Zero Sum Game starts on a strong note, quickly establishing Cas and her abilities (as well as her not-quite-friend Rio, a psychopath who ironically is the only person she trusts to have her back). It stayed strong through most of its length, until an ending that felt like a betrayal and letdown of most everything that came before.
In the vein of many a mercenary or bounty hunter, Cas is not a white-hat good girl; the book opens after she's already killed numerous people breaking into the drug lords' compound outside of Los Angeles, and it's not long before the body count ticks higher during the escape with Courtney. She is, however, interesting, a compelling character with a nice, quick-witted voice and an intriguing ability as she uses her beyond-prodigal grasp of mathematics to pick her way through firefights without a scratch (using formulae to calculate the location of shooters via echos and vectors, figuring out force and optimal angles of attack in a heartbeat, etc.). If it all stretches credulity a bit, well, it's basically a superhero plot, and math as a superpower is less implausible than mutation from a radioactive spider bite or other gimmicks. It isn't long before Cas realizes just how much more there is to this seemingly-routine rescue mission, but it still takes some convincing before she realizes the truth about the threat: a secret society with an apparent mind reader who can manipulate people with just a single conversation, driving them to spill secrets, betray friends and family, even murder or commit suicide, all thinking it's their own idea. For a woman who has always been self-reliant, who relies on her brain and her calculations, this is a horror beyond anything, the idea that she might not even be able to trust her own memories or thoughts. Despite her lone-wolf instincts and inherently distrustful nature, she finds herself picking up a small handful of new allies (who are familiar tropes, but decently done) even before she admits to herself that this is a threat she cannot compute down to zero without help... and even then, victory may not be a sure formula. Being around other people forces her to see herself as others see her - making her question her utter disregard for humans, her casual willingness to resort to lethal force as though lives were just more numbers to impersonally manipulate - but does not lead to an instant personality shift. She is who she is, for better or worse, but perhaps she could become a slightly more ethical version of herself, especially when confronted with an enemy whose rationale and methodology repel her, but which seem disturbingly familiar.
As mentioned, this is a fast-paced book with few lulls, punctuated by periodic snark. A few of the setbacks seemed avoidable or foreseeable, but overall I was enjoying it... until the ending. Granted, this is just the first book in an apparently trilogy, but the ending felt like it ripped away Cas's agency and invalidated most of what she and her companions sacrificed. It was enough to knock a solid star off the rating, and make me uninterested in future adventures with Cas. Why bother, when the equation just comes to zero in the end?
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind (Jackson Ford) - My Review
Middlegame (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Killing Gravity (Corey J. White) - My Review
Friday, November 8, 2024
The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders)
The City in the Middle of the Night
Charlie Jane Anders
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, aboard a battered colony ship, humans came to the tidally-locked world of January, hoping to build a new home in the narrow strip between burning daylight and lethally-cold darkness... and barely survived. Now, what civilization remains mostly exists in two cities: Xiosphant, a rigid authoritarian state obsessed with strictly-enforced timekeeping, and Argelo, a chaotic place run by quarreling crime families. But with resources dwindling and the last technology of their ancestors wearing out beyond repair in the resource-poor land, even these holdouts of humanity may be living on borrowed time...
Sophie clawed her way to a place in the Gymnasium college of Xiosphant from a rough background on the city outskirts, hoping to make a better life for herself, only to be pulled into the orbit of her privileged roommate Bianca. They spend many a "night" - the period when windows are shuttered across the city, a strict curfew designed to encourage "natural" circadian rhythms on a world with no night and day cycle - whispering rebellious dreams of a future where Xiosphant may be freed from its rigid rules and tyrannical leaders, meeting up with fellow progressive students. Sophie just knows that Bianca will someday change their world, and would do anything to protect the girl she can't admit she loves (a forbidden notion in this city, girls loving girls) - so she takes the blame when the city guards raid a meeting. As punishment, Sophie is sent to her certain death, beyond the mountain on the night side of Xiosphant, where she runs into a deadly native "crocodile"... but, instead of killing her, it forges a telepathic connection, upending everything Sophie was taught about January.
As a child, Mouth was raised by the nomadic people known as the Citizens, who traveled endlessly between the world's two cities and outlying settlements, back when travel was even possible. But the others were slaughtered, leaving her the sole survivor to remember their ways. She joined up with a smuggler group, the Resourceful Couriers, the closest thing left to traders between Argelo and Xiosphant in these dangerous times, but it's not the same, and there's still a huge hole in her heart. Then, in Xiosphant, she learns that the city ruler holds a sacred Citizen artifact known as the Invention in the palace vaults: a compendium of the lost people's knowledge and myths, things even Mouth never learned in her time among them. Her obsession to rescue this last vestige of her lost people leads her into the orbit of a group of student radicals plotting an attack against the palace - a group led by a young woman named Bianca.
REVIEW: Set in an inhospitable world of extremes - social, physical, and biological - at a time of disruption, The City in the Middle of the Night offers a decently realized setting and flawed characters, most of whom learn the hard way that even the best intentions and ideas rarely survive contact with the battleground of the real world, and even love may not be enough to stop everything from falling apart.
Sophie starts out a naive student, dazzled by new ideas and new opportunities at the Gymnasium, but mostly by the wealthy party girl Bianca. In a culture that considers same-sex attraction taboo, she does not even recognize her own infatuation with her roommate, falling into orbit around the stronger personality and getting caught up in other people's ideas and goals. When an act of petty theft threatens to derail Bianca's plans and "destiny" (in Sophie's eyes) to change their rigid society for the better, Sophie takes the blame... not knowing the guards intend to not just jail her, but make an example of her as a warning to other young radicals. Still, she's perfectly willing to die knowing that Bianca will be spared - and then she meets "Rose", the "crocodile" (many animals and plants on January carry names from Earth, for all that the descriptions make it clear how unlike their Earth namesakes they are) who turns out to be not a mindless killer animal, but an intelligent species with a civilization far older than humanity itself. For the first time, Sophie has a purpose that is not Bianca-shaped, hiding at a tea house on the fringes of the city (terrified of being spotted and identified as someone who should technically be dead; her post-traumatic stress over the near-execution haunts her for most of the novel) while sneaking out to the dark to meet up with "Rose" and exchange memories and a few smuggled trade goods... but the alien may have an ulterior motive, one that will eventually put her at odds with her own people.
Mouth, meanwhile, starts out rather unlikable, jaded and prone to self-isolating even with her closest smuggler companion Alyssa. Witnessing the gruesome deaths of the Citizens left a seeping wound in her soul that nobody else can understand, the loss of a culture no city-dweller would ever comprehend; she is haunted as much by what she never had a chance to know - she never completed the rites of passage that would have given her an adult name - as what she remembers. Only when she hears of the Invention in the Xiosphant palace - a blasphemy, seeing a sacred item of a traveling people kept in the vault of a city-dweller - does she come alive, determined to rescue it from the clutches of outsiders and reclaim some small token of the heritage that was torn from her. That plan involves cozying up to a group of local radical students and their leader Bianca, feigning sympathy and support but all the while just hoping to use them and their ill-conceived plans as a means to get into the palace. When things inevitably go south, the Resourceful Couriers wind up escorting fugitives Bianca and Sophie to the distant city of Argelo, a journey with fateful consequences for all involved, as relationships are realigned and true colors are revealed.
The world Anders crafts is interesting, with numerous odd native lifeforms and various human innovations and adaptations to life on a tidally-locked world (that almost seems a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor for individuals and societies struggling to find a survivable balance between light and dark). There are allusions to a deep, generations-long history on the planet January and even further back, through the generational mother ship to Earth, and all the cultural and historical entanglements that implies. While Xiosphant enforces cultural conformity, insisting that forgetting the past is the only way to heal the future, Argelo emphasizes exploring and expressing one's heritage. The ways in which people honor, distort, or attempt to erase the yesterdays that became today form one of the book's themes, along with explorations of cultural exploitation and appropriation (intentional and otherwise), societal upheaval and change, climate collapse colliding with tribalism, toxic relationships, trauma responses, and more. These themes can sometimes feel a little heavy-handed, for all that they acknowledge the complexities involved, offering no clear-cut answers or preachy Lessons. Characters could also be complex, though I admit getting frustrated by Sophie's persistent inability to see the truth about Bianca long past the point where that truth was readily visible (and she herself acknowledged it, before falling right back into her old schoolgirl-with-a-crush habit to inevitably disastrous consequences). It ultimately lost a half-star for an abrupt and ambiguous ending that made me check the audiobook file twice to make sure it hadn't somehow skipped a chapter or three of wrap-up, plus the aforementioned frustration and some meandering of the story now and again.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Strange Dogs (James S. A. Corey) - My Review
A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) - My Review
A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge) - My Review
Charlie Jane Anders
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, aboard a battered colony ship, humans came to the tidally-locked world of January, hoping to build a new home in the narrow strip between burning daylight and lethally-cold darkness... and barely survived. Now, what civilization remains mostly exists in two cities: Xiosphant, a rigid authoritarian state obsessed with strictly-enforced timekeeping, and Argelo, a chaotic place run by quarreling crime families. But with resources dwindling and the last technology of their ancestors wearing out beyond repair in the resource-poor land, even these holdouts of humanity may be living on borrowed time...
Sophie clawed her way to a place in the Gymnasium college of Xiosphant from a rough background on the city outskirts, hoping to make a better life for herself, only to be pulled into the orbit of her privileged roommate Bianca. They spend many a "night" - the period when windows are shuttered across the city, a strict curfew designed to encourage "natural" circadian rhythms on a world with no night and day cycle - whispering rebellious dreams of a future where Xiosphant may be freed from its rigid rules and tyrannical leaders, meeting up with fellow progressive students. Sophie just knows that Bianca will someday change their world, and would do anything to protect the girl she can't admit she loves (a forbidden notion in this city, girls loving girls) - so she takes the blame when the city guards raid a meeting. As punishment, Sophie is sent to her certain death, beyond the mountain on the night side of Xiosphant, where she runs into a deadly native "crocodile"... but, instead of killing her, it forges a telepathic connection, upending everything Sophie was taught about January.
As a child, Mouth was raised by the nomadic people known as the Citizens, who traveled endlessly between the world's two cities and outlying settlements, back when travel was even possible. But the others were slaughtered, leaving her the sole survivor to remember their ways. She joined up with a smuggler group, the Resourceful Couriers, the closest thing left to traders between Argelo and Xiosphant in these dangerous times, but it's not the same, and there's still a huge hole in her heart. Then, in Xiosphant, she learns that the city ruler holds a sacred Citizen artifact known as the Invention in the palace vaults: a compendium of the lost people's knowledge and myths, things even Mouth never learned in her time among them. Her obsession to rescue this last vestige of her lost people leads her into the orbit of a group of student radicals plotting an attack against the palace - a group led by a young woman named Bianca.
REVIEW: Set in an inhospitable world of extremes - social, physical, and biological - at a time of disruption, The City in the Middle of the Night offers a decently realized setting and flawed characters, most of whom learn the hard way that even the best intentions and ideas rarely survive contact with the battleground of the real world, and even love may not be enough to stop everything from falling apart.
Sophie starts out a naive student, dazzled by new ideas and new opportunities at the Gymnasium, but mostly by the wealthy party girl Bianca. In a culture that considers same-sex attraction taboo, she does not even recognize her own infatuation with her roommate, falling into orbit around the stronger personality and getting caught up in other people's ideas and goals. When an act of petty theft threatens to derail Bianca's plans and "destiny" (in Sophie's eyes) to change their rigid society for the better, Sophie takes the blame... not knowing the guards intend to not just jail her, but make an example of her as a warning to other young radicals. Still, she's perfectly willing to die knowing that Bianca will be spared - and then she meets "Rose", the "crocodile" (many animals and plants on January carry names from Earth, for all that the descriptions make it clear how unlike their Earth namesakes they are) who turns out to be not a mindless killer animal, but an intelligent species with a civilization far older than humanity itself. For the first time, Sophie has a purpose that is not Bianca-shaped, hiding at a tea house on the fringes of the city (terrified of being spotted and identified as someone who should technically be dead; her post-traumatic stress over the near-execution haunts her for most of the novel) while sneaking out to the dark to meet up with "Rose" and exchange memories and a few smuggled trade goods... but the alien may have an ulterior motive, one that will eventually put her at odds with her own people.
Mouth, meanwhile, starts out rather unlikable, jaded and prone to self-isolating even with her closest smuggler companion Alyssa. Witnessing the gruesome deaths of the Citizens left a seeping wound in her soul that nobody else can understand, the loss of a culture no city-dweller would ever comprehend; she is haunted as much by what she never had a chance to know - she never completed the rites of passage that would have given her an adult name - as what she remembers. Only when she hears of the Invention in the Xiosphant palace - a blasphemy, seeing a sacred item of a traveling people kept in the vault of a city-dweller - does she come alive, determined to rescue it from the clutches of outsiders and reclaim some small token of the heritage that was torn from her. That plan involves cozying up to a group of local radical students and their leader Bianca, feigning sympathy and support but all the while just hoping to use them and their ill-conceived plans as a means to get into the palace. When things inevitably go south, the Resourceful Couriers wind up escorting fugitives Bianca and Sophie to the distant city of Argelo, a journey with fateful consequences for all involved, as relationships are realigned and true colors are revealed.
The world Anders crafts is interesting, with numerous odd native lifeforms and various human innovations and adaptations to life on a tidally-locked world (that almost seems a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor for individuals and societies struggling to find a survivable balance between light and dark). There are allusions to a deep, generations-long history on the planet January and even further back, through the generational mother ship to Earth, and all the cultural and historical entanglements that implies. While Xiosphant enforces cultural conformity, insisting that forgetting the past is the only way to heal the future, Argelo emphasizes exploring and expressing one's heritage. The ways in which people honor, distort, or attempt to erase the yesterdays that became today form one of the book's themes, along with explorations of cultural exploitation and appropriation (intentional and otherwise), societal upheaval and change, climate collapse colliding with tribalism, toxic relationships, trauma responses, and more. These themes can sometimes feel a little heavy-handed, for all that they acknowledge the complexities involved, offering no clear-cut answers or preachy Lessons. Characters could also be complex, though I admit getting frustrated by Sophie's persistent inability to see the truth about Bianca long past the point where that truth was readily visible (and she herself acknowledged it, before falling right back into her old schoolgirl-with-a-crush habit to inevitably disastrous consequences). It ultimately lost a half-star for an abrupt and ambiguous ending that made me check the audiobook file twice to make sure it hadn't somehow skipped a chapter or three of wrap-up, plus the aforementioned frustration and some meandering of the story now and again.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Strange Dogs (James S. A. Corey) - My Review
A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) - My Review
A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge) - My Review
Friday, November 1, 2024
Finna (Nino Cipri)
Finna
The LitenVerse series, Book 1
Nino Cipri
Tordotcom
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: If retail work is Hell, then the Swedish-based home furnishing store LitenVärld is its own circle of that Hell. It's bad enough dealing with the disorienting, mazelike floor plan composed of a series of bizarre themed rooms, but now Ava has to cope with a bad breakup involving another employee, Jules. She even shuffled her schedule to avoid being there at the same time as them, even though the odds of the two crossing paths in the cavernous place were minimal. Then Derek calls out sick one dismal February day, so Ava has to slog in to work - and, of course, who does she run into almost first thing in the door but Jules. Just one day, she tells herself. She can get through just this one day in the same building as her ex. What could go wrong?
When a distraught customer tells the manager that her grandmother has vanished, Ava doesn't find it too alarming. Hell, she's an employee and even she gets turned around in this place. But when she goes to look where the woman was last spotted, she finds two things: Jules, and a weird room that definitely was not on the floor plan this morning... a room just beyond a weird glowing purple ring.
According to the manager and a poorly-dubbed training video, this is "just" a wormhole; the poor old woman must've wandered through into one of countless parallel dimensions with their own parallel LitenVärlds, some less hospitable than others. There used to be an entire team dedicated to wormhole retrieval, but cost cutting measures left the store with just a handheld "finna" device to track the wayward traveler, to be carried through the portal by whichever employees draw the short straw - inevitably, Ava and Jules.
REVIEW: I have been inside an IKEA (which "LitenVärld" is quite clearly inspired by) only once in my life, but that was more than enough: a strange, cramped maze of stuff, funneling customers from points A to Z without deviation or delay, disgorging the masses at the food court/checkout like spitting products off the end of an entirely impersonal assembly line. As dehumanizing and disorienting as that shopping experience was, I can only imagine how it feels to employees... and if an extra dimension or a thousand were tacked on, that would be a punishment worthy of anything Dante dreamed up.
Cipri takes the hellscape that is modern retail employment and crosses it with the multiverse, which adds a whole new chapter of canned responses to the managerial handbook and a whole new tier of instructional videos to be shown to hapless employees. In LitenVärld, the opening of a wormhole in the middle of the store is just an unfortunate side-effect of their innovative layouts, and one more onerous duty for management to drop onto underpaid and undertrained employees - incentivized not by bonuses or overtime (perish the thought), but with gift cards to a cheap restaurant... because, by management's logic, what low-wage worker wouldn't risk their lives for a discounted bowl of pasta? Ava already didn't want to be at work to begin with, still nursing a days-old breakup. Jules loathes every minute of every day they have to spend in the horrid place; the chance to explore the multiverse appeals strongly to the wanderlust they've nursed since childhood but have so rarely been able to afford to indulge. The two are forced to cooperate as they step through the purple ring and into their first other dimension, guided by the fickle "finna" that points the way but utterly fails to warn them of the many dangers they encounter in the worlds they're compelled to cross (because of course it can't be as simple as finding the old woman in the first place they go... or, rather, it both is and isn't, in the way of multiverses, and I can't get into more detail without some spoilers). Along the way, Ava and Jules must both re-evaluate their relationship, which was not so much a matter of one of them being right and the other wrong but of two flawed people whose broken edges wound up cutting each other rather than aligning. Even if they were ill-fated as lovers, could they possibly still be friends? Sometimes it takes fleeing from the dangers of a monster-filled dimension to rediscover what truly matters in life, and who matters in it.
With a certain dark humor and a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the multiverse, as well as some horror overtones now and again, Finna manages to be short enough to not overplay its premise or its characters, though even then I could find Ava trying as a main character now and again. I'm not sure I feel any need to read onward in the series, as this is a likely a gimmick with a limited shelf life.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Warehouse (Rob Hart) - My Review
Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Time Travel Dinosaur (Matt Youngmark) - My Review
The LitenVerse series, Book 1
Nino Cipri
Tordotcom
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: If retail work is Hell, then the Swedish-based home furnishing store LitenVärld is its own circle of that Hell. It's bad enough dealing with the disorienting, mazelike floor plan composed of a series of bizarre themed rooms, but now Ava has to cope with a bad breakup involving another employee, Jules. She even shuffled her schedule to avoid being there at the same time as them, even though the odds of the two crossing paths in the cavernous place were minimal. Then Derek calls out sick one dismal February day, so Ava has to slog in to work - and, of course, who does she run into almost first thing in the door but Jules. Just one day, she tells herself. She can get through just this one day in the same building as her ex. What could go wrong?
When a distraught customer tells the manager that her grandmother has vanished, Ava doesn't find it too alarming. Hell, she's an employee and even she gets turned around in this place. But when she goes to look where the woman was last spotted, she finds two things: Jules, and a weird room that definitely was not on the floor plan this morning... a room just beyond a weird glowing purple ring.
According to the manager and a poorly-dubbed training video, this is "just" a wormhole; the poor old woman must've wandered through into one of countless parallel dimensions with their own parallel LitenVärlds, some less hospitable than others. There used to be an entire team dedicated to wormhole retrieval, but cost cutting measures left the store with just a handheld "finna" device to track the wayward traveler, to be carried through the portal by whichever employees draw the short straw - inevitably, Ava and Jules.
REVIEW: I have been inside an IKEA (which "LitenVärld" is quite clearly inspired by) only once in my life, but that was more than enough: a strange, cramped maze of stuff, funneling customers from points A to Z without deviation or delay, disgorging the masses at the food court/checkout like spitting products off the end of an entirely impersonal assembly line. As dehumanizing and disorienting as that shopping experience was, I can only imagine how it feels to employees... and if an extra dimension or a thousand were tacked on, that would be a punishment worthy of anything Dante dreamed up.
Cipri takes the hellscape that is modern retail employment and crosses it with the multiverse, which adds a whole new chapter of canned responses to the managerial handbook and a whole new tier of instructional videos to be shown to hapless employees. In LitenVärld, the opening of a wormhole in the middle of the store is just an unfortunate side-effect of their innovative layouts, and one more onerous duty for management to drop onto underpaid and undertrained employees - incentivized not by bonuses or overtime (perish the thought), but with gift cards to a cheap restaurant... because, by management's logic, what low-wage worker wouldn't risk their lives for a discounted bowl of pasta? Ava already didn't want to be at work to begin with, still nursing a days-old breakup. Jules loathes every minute of every day they have to spend in the horrid place; the chance to explore the multiverse appeals strongly to the wanderlust they've nursed since childhood but have so rarely been able to afford to indulge. The two are forced to cooperate as they step through the purple ring and into their first other dimension, guided by the fickle "finna" that points the way but utterly fails to warn them of the many dangers they encounter in the worlds they're compelled to cross (because of course it can't be as simple as finding the old woman in the first place they go... or, rather, it both is and isn't, in the way of multiverses, and I can't get into more detail without some spoilers). Along the way, Ava and Jules must both re-evaluate their relationship, which was not so much a matter of one of them being right and the other wrong but of two flawed people whose broken edges wound up cutting each other rather than aligning. Even if they were ill-fated as lovers, could they possibly still be friends? Sometimes it takes fleeing from the dangers of a monster-filled dimension to rediscover what truly matters in life, and who matters in it.
With a certain dark humor and a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the multiverse, as well as some horror overtones now and again, Finna manages to be short enough to not overplay its premise or its characters, though even then I could find Ava trying as a main character now and again. I'm not sure I feel any need to read onward in the series, as this is a likely a gimmick with a limited shelf life.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Warehouse (Rob Hart) - My Review
Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Time Travel Dinosaur (Matt Youngmark) - My Review
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