A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Spring 2025 To-Read List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’ll be reading this spring! An unusually high amount of non-fiction for me up this spring, ranging from a history of the early years of Nazi rule to an oral recounting of the making of one of my favorite movies. I’ll also finally be reading the dragon book!

Woodworking: I’ve been following Emily St. James since she was writing about TV at The Onion AV Club and I am super excited to read her debut novel!

The Emperor: African history is a serious gap in my knowledge base so I’m looking forward to this recounting of the final years of Haile Selassie’s rule as emperor of Ethiopia.

The Scientist in the Crib: I don’t usually read a lot of parenting books, but watching C learn and grow has made me really curious about what we know about early learning!

Prophet Song: This is my book club’s selection for April, and though I likely won’t be able to go because of session I do like to read along.

Fourth Wing: Everyone but me has read the dragon book so it’s time.

The Coming of the Third Reich: I’ve long had this read planned but it will be especially…interesting to read right now, I think.

Things Left Unsaid: I love coming-of-age stories and this one about two young people who used to be friends coming back together in London feels very up my alley.

Ada Blackjack: This is a true story, about an Eskimo woman who accompanied several men into the Arctic as a guide but was the only survivor of their journey and it sounds fascinating.

As If: I love Clueless so much, of course I have to read a book all about it getting made.

The Accursed: I read Blonde in high school but haven’t tried Joyce Carol Oates since and this gothic novel seems like it could be fun!

Book Review: The Hours

Existing in the world as a woman has never been easy. Even today, when women are freer and more independent than ever, we’re still relentlessly policed for how our hair looks, how our bodies look, whether we smile enough. Women in the professional world know the delicate balance we must strive to achieve between being forceful enough to not be railroaded while not being aggressive enough to attract male ire. When women become mothers, they’re expected to be the primary parent even if that’s not what they or their partner want, and be involved enough to be interested but not so involved that they smother their child’s independence. Sometimes it feels like a mean-spirited game, in which there isn’t so much a way to win as just a way to lose less badly.

The ways the world traps women are highlighted by Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. It follows three women, all connected by Mrs. Dalloway. There’s Virginia Woolf herself, as she begins to be inspired to write the book. There’s Laura Brown, a pregnant 1950s housewife who can’t understand her own dissatisfaction with her loving husband and adoring young son, who’s reading the book. And then there’s Clarissa Vaughan, who shares the name of the novel’s protagonist and has been teasingly called “Mrs. Dalloway” for years by her ex-lover and dear friend Richard, who is dying of AIDS. Like in Mrs. Dalloway, each character’s story takes place over a single day.

For each woman, that one day is their life in miniature. Woolf doubts herself in the wake of a mental breakdown that has driven her husband to insist on a move to the countryside, but carefully nurses the inspiration that has come to her for her new book. Her sister and nieces/nephews come to visit and Woolf feels inferior to her, as she does not have the family that their social world celebrates as the pinnacle of female achievement. Having that perfect domestic situation, though, doesn’t make Laura Brown happy. Faced with the same demands to be a cheerful spouse and mother, she wants desperately to find her situation idyllic, but the pressure of putting together a birthday party for her husband causes her such distress that she leaves her child with a neighbor and takes a hotel room for a few hours to just have some space to read. Vaughan is also preparing for a party, a celebration for Richard having won a literary prize. As she’s getting ready, she reflects on the path her life took, the failure of her romance with Richard during a heady summer in which they and Richard’s boyfriend lived together and tried to sort out their own sexualities and romantic ties.

This is a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time, but wanted to hold off until after I’d read Mrs. Dalloway itself. Which was the correct call: reading this book without having any real background in that book would have robbed it of a lot of context and power. And whew, what power this book has! It’s a short read, about 250 pages, but it packs a punch. Cunningham’s writing is incredible: his prose is smooth, elegant, rich. Though each woman’s story is allocated only about 70 pages, he builds deeply-felt characters who feel three-dimensional and real. And the way he structures the book, with alternating chapters, works beautifully. It highlights the parallels between them, as well as making each one feel fresh when it gets its turn.

The only flaw I would say this book has is that while it’s admirable, it wasn’t something that I felt a particularly strong emotional connection to throughout. Moments, like Laura in her hotel room, really struck me and stayed with me, but there was something removed about the way Cunningham wrote about existential despair. I never got truly pulled in to and transported by the narrative, but I don’t know that it’s fair to criticize it for that as it never seemed to be the kind of book that was trying to do that. Otherwise, though, it’s incredibly well-done. Writing a book that explicitly seeks to have itself compared to Mrs. Dalloway is a big lift, but Cunningham achieves it. I highly recommend this book!

A Month in the Life: February 2025

About one month down, roughly three to go to get through the 83rd Legislative Session! It turns out session with a baby is a very different ballgame than session with a toddler, so the whole family is adjusting in real time.

In Books…

  • Last Night at the Viper Room: The subtitle on this one (“River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind”) made me expect something that was about the Hollywood of the era examined through the lens of the life, films, and death of River Phoenix. That turned out to be a mistaken apprehension. Instead, this book serves overwhelmingly as a glowing biography of River, who lived an atypical life for anyone, much less a movie star. Born to hippies John and Arlyn Bottom (who eventually changed their surname to Phoenix) and followed by four other children, River spent many of his childhood years in Venezuela with the Children of God cult, infamous for its encouragement of sexual behavior in children. Despite acknowledging that River often lied in interviews, author Gavin Edwards decides to regard as true the claim that River made to have been molested at age 4, locating this as the center of the trauma that the actor was trying to bury with drugs. River’s brother Joaquin has refuted the claim, and honestly the childhood he had would have been traumatizing either way: both before and after the family left the group, he and his siblings sang on street corners to earn enough money for five children and two adults to scrape by. The pressure he was put under to earn what he and his loved ones needed to survive continued once they returned to the United States, as River started to appear in commercials and television shows. He had a real and untutored talent: Stand By Me, of course, made him a star, and he was just 18 when he was nominated for an Oscar for Running on Empty. He never spent a single day in a classroom, either for regular school or acting lessons, and Edwards traces his addictive behavior to his instinctual Method acting technique…and a desire to bond with his increasingly distant father, an alcoholic. What seems to have started out with booze and weed as a young teenager turned into an on-and-off heroin habit, and while Phoenix was capable of delivering great performances still (as in My Own Private Idaho), he became increasingly less engaged with his film career. He was only 23 when, as many know, he died after overdosing on a speedball at The Viper Room, a club infamous for being owned and regularly frequented by Johnny Depp in his peak indie-cool Tim Burton era. There are asides, every so often, about Hollywood at large and River’s contemporaries, but they are separated by long segments devoted exclusively to River. There are so many places this could have gone to root itself more deeply. The long history of the exploitative nature of child stardom, and the ways parent-child dynamics in families even much more stable than the Phoenixes can go awry when your 14 year-old is paying your rent. There are some nods to the drug culture at the time, with references to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the rise of “heroin chic”, but the connections are only surface-level. Similarly shallow references are made to the changing ecosystem of the movie industry, with Quentin Tarantino and the Weinsteins beginning their ascent. But it’s never tied together, never critically examined. Nor, for that measure, is River himself, who is portrayed as an open-hearted, sensitive idealist, in an almost “too pure for this world” way. Apart from not being what I wanted it to be, I just don’t think it succeeds in creating a compelling narrative, so I can’t recommend it.
  • Orbital: The International Space Station orbits the Earth sixteen times every twenty four hours. Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel follows one day in the lives of six astro/cosmonauts, who are Russian, American, British, Japanese, and Italian, and whose vessel is never explicitly named as the ISS but obviously is intended to be. They float. They think about their loved ones. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, learns that her mother has died and she will not be back in time for the funeral rites. They make reports back down to earth about the progress of an enormous, destructive typhoon. As a different team of astronauts make a journey to the moon, many on the ISS reflect on their professional envy, their childhood dreams of stepping on that satellite unlikely to ever come to fruition even as it brought them to their current situation. They all watch a movie together. It’s a meditative book, focusing less on the astronauts themselves than the reflections prompted by their experiences watching the earth from orbit. It recounts moments both small (the way they all share food, despite strictures against so doing) and large (watching the typhoon tear across populated areas), emphasizing the power of human connection, despite or even because of the pure chance that creates those connections. Harvey’s writing leans heavily on the wonder of it all, the way the astronauts come to find their daily experiences becoming mundane but the sight of the pale blue dot from their windows retains the power to shock them back into awe at the perspective they get to see, one beyond the understanding of all but a very lucky few. If I’m being completely honest, I’d say I’d hoped for this book to be mind-blowing and was slightly disappointed to find it merely quite good. Despite its abbreviated length (only a little over 200 pages), by the end it managed to feel like it was getting a bit repetitive. There’s a loveliness to the prose but it taps the same well over and over. I liked it but did not love it.
  • Doctor Zhivago: Yuri Zhivago is a traumatized child when the book bearing his name begins, having found himself an orphan after the loss of his beloved mother. His father, a once-wealthy man, had left them behind long ago to spend all his money chasing pleasure. He finds himself in the charge of his uncle Nikolai, who eventually places him with a Moscow family, the Gromekos. Yuri is raised as a beloved member of that comfortable family, eventually marrying their daughter Antonina and completing his studies to become a doctor. Another unfortunate child brought to Moscow is Larissa Guichard. Her father is also dead, leaving her and her brother in the care of their mother Amalia. Amalia is the mistress of the powerful and well-connected lawyer Komarovsky, who helps the family establish themselves while also starting to groom Larissa (or Lara, for short). As she grows into a beautiful teenager, he begins to abuse her and fancies himself in love with her. She does not have feelings for him and in order get out of a situation she is increasingly unhappy in, throws herself into marriage with Pasha Antipov, the son of an imprisoned revolutionary who has long-since adored her. Both are starting to find some stability and happiness when their lives are upended by the Russian Revolution. Pasha feels trapped in his marriage to Lara despite his love for her and escapes into military service, where he goes missing. Lara trains as a nurse and searches for him, winding up working in the same camp alongside Zhivago, where they finally become acquainted as part of the same medical team after having had glancing encounters in their earlier lives in Moscow. A few years later, Zhivago and his wife and children travel to a remote town in the Ural Mountains where they once owned a large estate, which has of course been nationalized but where they hope to escape from the perils of the city to live simply on the land. Lara has also ended up there with her daughter after Pasha’s reported death, and it is then that the two begin an affair, which is broken off when Zhivago is kidnapped by a band of Red partisans to serve as their doctor in their continued warfare against the Whites. He escapes, however, and is reunited with Lara…but their happiness cannot last. This is certainly an important novel, but for me, it wasn’t an especially good one. For as much time as the narrative spends with Lara and especially Yuri, their inner lives are not well-developed. As a reader who enjoys character, I was hoping to be immersed in Yuri and Lara’s perspectives of a fascinating time, when their world shifted irrevocably under their feet. How do they find the strength to go on without succumbing to despair? What do they really think of the battles between Red and White? In this book so reknowned for their romance, why, even, do they love each other? These questions aren’t ever really answered, because what drives Yuri and Lara doesn’t seem to be what Pasternak is interested in exploring in his narrative. Instead, what I got from it was a portrait of the chaos and trials of living in the post-Revolutionary world as an adult who had come of age before it had happened. Like presumably many Russians, there was tentative hope for the world that could have emerged from the ashes, destined to be forever unrealized because the world that actually came to be took a decidedly worse turn. I’m not sure if it was my translation (I read the Peavar/Volokhonsky), but I felt like both the plot and prose were resisting my attempts to enjoy them. The narrative doesn’t have a lot of momentum, and the writing lacked a sense of sweep that would have given its epic ambitions more oomph. Like many Russian novels, this one will likely be confusing to those without context around Russian naming conventions. I’m relatively familiar with them and even I noted at least a few times when the same character was referred to by two different diminutives within just a sentence or two. I did learn much more about the time of the civil wars following the Revolution than I had before. It’s not that I don’t appreciate having read this, I do. I just wish I’d actually liked it more.
  • The Favorites: Katarina Shaw is only four years old when she watches, rapt, as American ice dancer Sheila Lin and her partner, Kirk Lockwood, win a gold medal at the Olympics. She begins skating shortly thereafter, dreaming of being just like Sheila…even more so when she makes an unexpected comeback to the next Games, snagging another gold despite having become a mother of two in between. Kat wants to be an ice dancer just like her hero, but her small rink outside of Chicago is not teeming with potential partners. At least, not until she’s nine and Heath Rocha, a foster kid at the rink for a hockey program for underprivileged youth, spots her from the stands and is entranced. The two team up, despite him having no resources at all and Kat’s family having scant few themselves, and fall in love, bonded close together by Kat’s goal of skating glory and their hardscrabble circumstances. They manage to qualify for US Nationals when they’re 16, hoping against hope they can leverage their performance skills (he, especially, has some real deficits in the actual skating) and electric chemistry to grab the attention of a sponsor. Instead, they attract the attention of Sheila Lin herself…now the coach of her twin children, Bella and Garrett. Lin offers them a place in her exclusive ice dance school in Los Angeles, training alongside the siblings. Saying yes changes their course of their lives forever as they start to rise in the ranks, climbing ever closer to the Olympics and maybe even the gold medal Kat has wanted as long as she can remember. But nothing is fair in love, war, or figure skating. A retelling of Wuthering Heights, Layne Fargo mixes in a dash of Taylor Jenkins Reid, a bit of the dynamism of Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, and some Tonya Harding vibes to freshen up the story for the modern era. I read Wuthering Heights back in high school and didn’t especially enjoy it. Its depiction of a set of characters who make each other romantically miserable felt melodramatic even as a teenager. so I enjoyed the ways Fargo changed some of the dynamics within the narrative with her book. Kat and Bella Lin are rivals, and Heath is a component of that rivalry, but ultimately they compete more over their shared ambition to win everything they can as skaters. Kat’s relationship to Heath is profoundly important to her, but achieving what she can on the ice is even more so. It’s definitely a page-turner, the oral history plot device and relatively short chapters give it a lot of momentum. But honestly, I failed to really get drawn into the story the way I was hoping, in part because of the relatively shallowness of the characters. Each has a few defining features but the only one whose head we really get into is Kat’s, where we find little but drive towards gold. As a person who does seriously watch figure skating, I was prepared to be irritated by an unrealistic depiction of the sport, but though there are some relatively minor quibbles, Fargo gets the broad strokes right. It’s an enjoyable read, perfect for the beach or an airplane!

In Life…

  • My sixth session began: I honestly do enjoy my job but it’s been hard. Since C abandoned his nap several months ago, he goes to bed very early so there are days when I hardly even get to see him and I feel a lot of guilt even though I know it will be over soon.
  • C is three!: He’s sweet and silly and growing so so fast! It’s hard to believe that it has been three years already since he was born. It feels like just yesterday that he was fresh and new and had no idea what it meant to be alive in the world and now he’s a whole person with his own thoughts that he feels very free to share with us (including demands for “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga)! I can’t wait to find out who he continues to become.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set in Another Time

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re highlighting books from time periods other than our own. I’ve gone back through my read list and picked ten books I really enjoyed set in all different times and places!

Catherine, Called Birdy (the Middle Ages): This is smart and funny and surprisingly well-rooted in actual history. Teenage Catherine may be anachronistically high-spirited and rebellious, but it’s a winning middle-grade book that will actually teach readers something!

The Butcher’s Daughter (the English Reformation): I’ve read a ton of books set in the Tudor era so knew about the closing of the religious homes but had never really thought about what might have drawn young people into that sort of environment…and how they would have coped with having their lives ripped away from them. A different and interesting perspective!

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B (the French Revolution): The woman who became Empress of France as the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte saw the very dark side of the French Revolution, being imprisoned after her first husband fell out of favor with the Jacobins, who eventually executed him, and coming close to being executed herself. A compelling look at a very tumultuous time.

Persuasion (Georgian-Era England): Any of Austen’s novels would have worked here, but Persuasion is my favorite. It’s a very specific part of the English experience of that era, with little evidence of larger movements of the outside world (though Wentworth’s achievement of status is tied to his service in the navy during the Napoleonic Wars, this is not dwelt on), and tightly focused on country gentry, but it paints a rich portrait of that little world.

The Killer Angels (the American Civil War): This book depicts the Battle of Gettysburg from both sides and really goes deep into its characters, providing rich context to the social environment of the Civil War, especially that of the officers. I learned a lot more about the time than I’d known before I read it and really enjoyed it!

The Children’s Book (the Belle Epoque): I think technically this term is meant to refer to French history specifically, but this book beautifully captures England in the years leading up to WWI and the peace, prosperity, and frivolity of that era that were ripped away when the war began.

The Shining Girls (the Great Depression): While this book takes place in several timelines, one of the major ones follows a drifter during the Depression, really emphasizing the rootlessness and desperation to survive of that time through the eyes of an unusually unsympathetic character.

Life After Life (the London Blitz): The book’s central conceit, that an English woman lives her life over and over again, really shone for me in the portions that take place during the Blitz, exploring the fear and devastation from multiple perspectives.

Midnight’s Children (the Partition): One of the most significant events of the 20th century is masterfully explored in this masterpiece novel that traces 1,001 children born in the hour India becomes independent and is also torn asunder. Every time I read about Partition I want to read even more, I can’t believe how little I learned about it growing up!

Oryx and Crake (the near future): This is just one take on what might be in store for the world but felt (and still feels) frighteningly prescient.

Book Review: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Middle school, as a whole, remains one of the worst experiences of my life. I was socially awkward, chubby, awash with hormones and feelings I struggled to control but that more often controlled me. I was angry and lashed out frequently. I’ve never done so poorly in school in my life. The best thing that happened was that it ended. And I got over it! I’m something resembling a reasonably well-adjusted adult now…but hoo boy, middle school me did not seem like she was going to get there.

A lot of people struggle with those years between proper childhood and being a real teenager. Even in the best of circumstances, your body is changing, your friendships start to change, and the outside world starts to intrude. Unfortunately, the unnamed 12 year-old protagonist of Dave Patterson’s Soon The Light Will Be Perfect is not living in the best of circumstances. His family, living in rural Vermont, is trying desperately to claw out of poverty, having just moved into a house from the nearby trailer park, but his father’s shaky hold on his job in a munitions factory is causing a lot of stress. Causing even more stress is his mother’s diagnosis of cancer. The family leans heavily on their deep, conservative Catholic religion for strength, but despite the fiery pro-life rhetoric the church espouses, even the priest seems to be questioning his faith.

While his mother gets sicker and sicker over the course of the summer, the boy and his older brother are often left more or less to their own devices. The brother, about to start high school, begins to rebel, buying NWA albums and spending hours talking to his girlfriend on the phone. The boy acts out in his own way, including being drawn into the orbit of a pretty, troubled girl his own age named Taylor who’s just moved into his old trailer park with her mother. The family is teetering on the edge of a break, and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.

This sounds epic, right? There is a LOT going on here: religion, parents and children, siblings, first infatuations, child abuse, poverty, social class, cancer. But the book is only about 250 pages long. Which is really where it fails: it’s overambitious and unfortunately, under-executed. A book of this length should be tight, focused. Instead, Patterson hops from heavy theme to heavy theme, never giving any of them room to breathe or develop. It feels more than anything like an early draft, where he’s got the major plot points he wants to hit on the page and will come back and fill in all the rest of it later…and then never did.

Which is a pity, because while he’s not a masterful prose stylist and some of the symbolism is pretty clunky, there are some good elements here. While I did not think the technique of leaving the narrator unnamed was effective in this case, Patterson does solid work in building the character, and everyone in the book is rendered with sympathy. The dynamic between the family members feels real and is often moving. As a whole, though, this book just didn’t come together. I can’t in good faith recommend it to anyone.

A Month In The Life: January 2025

One month of 2025 down, 11 to go! And in just a few days, the Nevada State Legislature will begin the 83rd regular session and my life will go all topsy turvy! It was a bit of a chaotic month in its own way, though, and it’s only getting more bonkers from here.

In Books…

  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: In an alternate history version of Britain, the Napoleonic Wars rage across Europe, Mad King George sits on the throne, and England has no magicians to help. It used to have them, a long time ago. One, the legendary John Uskglass, even established a separate kingdom in Northern England. There are still people who call themselves magicians, but they only study history and theory. They cannot perform magic. Until one day when an obscure country gentleman, Gilbert Norrell, makes the stone statutes of his local church come alive as an announcement that magic has returned to the land. He goes to London, eager to be useful in the war effort (and just as eager to receive the plaudits for so doing). He makes his name in the city by bringing back to life the fiancee of a government minister with the help of a fairy that he summons, the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. He makes a bargain with the fairy for half the woman’s life, but as in many fairy tales, he is deceived. Emma Pole enjoys only a brief period of her revived life before the fairy comes to collect what is his, requiring her to attend balls in Faerie every night that leave her exhausted and dazed during the day, unable to fully function. Norrell is a cautious, proud, and miserly man, who jealously guards the secrets of his art. But even his hoarding of nearly every book of magic in England cannot prevent the rise of another magician, Jonathan Strange. Strange is about as different from Norrell as it is possible to be: younger, much more impulsive, intuitive, personable. When Jonathan and his wife Arabella come to London as well, one would think there would be a clash…but for a time, the magicians get on well together, with Norrell carefully doling out knowledge to the younger man. But when Strange is deployed to war under the command of Lord Wellington, developing his skills in the field, he no longer finds that he needs Norrell’s tutelage and the two quarrel. Magic, though, does not limit itself to what Norrell and Strange want, and the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair takes an active interest in the people of England that has devastating consequences. This novel is epic, sprawling, and ambitious. In its setting and scope, it evokes the great classics of the Napoleonic Wars: War & Peace, Vanity Fair, and The Count of Monte Cristo came to my mind as I read it. It’s a bold move to place your book among those, but Clarke brings her own take on events to the table. That said, it does not always achieve what it seems to be going for. Pacing is a real issue, with a very slow start and significant drag in the back half (which feels like it might be intended to set up the sequel Clarke was originally planning). For a book of this length, the character development is surprisingly thin. Strange is the most well-rounded one but the novel is not interior at all. That being said, there are quite a lot of characters, and several of the less prominent ones are vivid and interesting, so Clarke mostly is able to distract from the lack of depth with a well-populated world. I’m not sure how much I thought Clarke’s nods to Georgian/Regency-era writing (using “shew” instead of “show”, “suprize” instead of “surprise”, etc) are successful. I think the style she deploys calls to mind that era of writing well enough without those sort of things and I found it distracting as much as anything else. But I loved the footnotes, and the overall tone of her prose. It’s overall a good book, sometimes even very good, but a big time commitment.
  • Nightbitch: I was dismayed when my book club selected this one. It had been buzzy there for a bit when it first came out but everything I read about it made me feel sure I wouldn’t like it. Still, I’m in a book club in part to read books I might not have picked up if left to my own devices, so I went in with as open a mind as I could. The book tells the story of an unnamed mother, an artist in a unnamed small midwestern town married to an engineer. When she had her son, she wanted to keep working but she was both not making enough money to meaningfully offset daycare costs and felt tremendous guilt about missing time with her child, so she became a full-time parent. Her husband’s job requires constant travel, leaving her alone with her son for the entire workweek. He’s two now, but the parenting load is not getting easier on her, only heavier and heavier. One night while their son is sleeping with them, he awakes in the middle of the night and begins to cry. The mother is exhausted from an entire week of interrupted sleep and lets it continue in the hope that her husband will attend to him, but no dice. She snaps, scaring both her child and her husband, and jokes the next morning that she is the Night Bitch. This becomes the name she is referred by as she starts noticing some…changes. A patch of hair on her neck that feels like fur. Her teeth feel longer, sharper. Her senses, particularly smell, feel sharper. She tells her husband she feels like she might be turning into a dog. He laughs it off, from yet another hotel room, but it feels more and more real to Nightbitch. Things escalate from there, but where can this possibly end up? Let’s start with the positive here: Rachel Yoder’s writing is the standout, vividly expressing the terror and anger of early motherhood, the way dealing with a toddler is both drudgery and chaos, the way it feels like every mother is doing it better than you. Now for the rest: I absolutely hated this book. This would have been a compelling short story as a riff on the ways that motherhood can make you feel like not just someone else but something else other than yourself entirely. But there’s not nearly enough there to justify a novel’s length, even though this one is under 250 pages. So there are side plots with a group of local moms that work to lure Nightbitch into their MLM and a book that recounts folklore about women who experience mystical transformations, neither of which really go anywhere. The central metaphor collapses under the weight of sustaining a prolonged narrative. Just write about how much it can suck being the mother of a small child! There doesn’t need to be this whole dog angle! Also there is a truly upsetting amount of violence to animals, including violence against a pet cat. I wish I had the time I spent reading it back.
  • The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: The real-life story of two “expert” witnesses who made their living in Mississippi, focusing on two men who found themselves in prison at least in part because of the testimony those doctors offered in their cases, this book is an expose of the way the criminal justice system can fail. Dr. Steven Hayne held himself out as a forensic pathologist despite a lack of accreditation from the most reputable organization regulating these types of doctors, performing over four times more autopsies than they recommend as the absolute upper maximum to be able to do the job with reasonable proficiency. Dr. Michael West was a dentist who claimed to be a bite mark expert…among many other kinds of expertise he was able to provide to prosecutors, almost always managing to find that law enforcement’s preferred suspect was in fact guilty of the crime at hand. Two toddler girls were sexually assaulted and killed in the early 90s, and Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were imprisoned for the crimes, with Brewer even living for years on Death Row. The real perpetrator wasn’t connected to what happened until DNA testing in the 2000s from the Innocence Project, freeing both men but with no real ability to compensate for the wrongs that were done unto them. This is an important story, and co-authors Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington present a deeply-researched analysis of how it came to be. They go into the history of racism/Jim Crow in Mississippi and how the county coroner system enabled it to continue with impunity for as long as it did. They speak to the halfhearted efforts to create a state medical examiner position, defeated at every turn by the interests of the coroners and the law enforcement officials with whom they worked hand in hand. They review expert testimony, how it is qualified and admitted in court, and the inherent tension between science and the law. And, of course, they talk about Hayne and West themselves, and the cases that landed Brooks and Brewer behind bars. And partly, it’s the breadth of the perspective here that keeps it from really coming together to be more than the sum of its parts. The stories of Brooks and Brewer frame the narrative, but they aren’t really centered. The authors are more interested in showing the reader a system with rot at its core, and they do so with impressively thorough fact-finding, but there’s no real narrative hook. Any time any particular angle starts to pick up steam and get interesting, it’s interrupted by a switch to another subject. There’s a compelling book to be crafted with these elements, but it’s unfortunately not the one on offer here. It’s not terrible, it just never really grabs and holds attention.
  • The Muralist: Before artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were people whose work commanded millions of dollars, they were among thousands of artists employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. B.A. Shapiro creates to join them the character of Alizee Benoit, an artist born in the United States to French Jewish parents but mostly raised in France with her brother Henri by her aunt and uncle after they were orphaned. Alizee returns to America to live and work in New York, channeling her shifting moods into her personal abstract impressionist art while she toils away at blandly patriotic murals for the government. She is close friends with Rothko, Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. She makes the most of a chance meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt, advocating for non-representational art to receive some modicum of support. As she starts to get increasingly upsetting news about what’s going on in Europe from her brother and extended family, she frantically searches for a way to get visas for them and becomes involved in political agitation to allow more refugees into the country. Her already fragile mental health suffers and she pours her heartache into her canvases, drawing her to-be-famous friends into a major project that she hopes will inspire action in the broader public. In a second storyline, in the present day, Alizee’s grand-niece Dani has always wondered about her long-lost artist great-aunt that vanished mysteriously in the 1940s, leaving behind only a few paintings. Dani was once an artist herself but traded in the uncertainty of that life for one at an auction house, where she discovers a panel of canvas tucked behind what looks like it might be an early Rothko or Pollock. Convinced that it might be the work of her aunt, she embarks on a mission to discover what became of Alizee. This follows a very familiar historical fiction formula: create a plucky lady and give her famous friends as well as the chance to interact with major historical events. It is aggressively fine. The characters are mostly pretty flat: Alizee could have been pretty interesting with proper development but is mostly an “artists need to be a little bit crazy to create” cliche, her friends are paper-thin, Dani is more plot device than person. The structure, mostly following Alizee as she works for the WPA with Dani’s timeline occasionally breaking in to fill in bits and pieces about what her descendants do and don’t know about what might have happened to her, is pretty effective at creating momentum, as are the short chapters. The prose is workmanlike, the exposition and dialogue often clunky. I knew very little about the Art Project or the artists involved, though, so I appreciated the opportunity to learn more. It’s neither especially bad nor especially good, but rather a perfectly fine exemplar of a particular sub-type of its genre.
  • Harrow the Ninth: This picks up immediately after its predecessor Gideon the Ninth, plunging the reader straight back in with nothing in the way of reorientation. Harrowhark, necromancer of the Ninth House, has ascended to become a Lyctor to the Emperor along with Ianthe of the Third House, a status achieved by the deaths of their respective cavaliers. The story is told along two lines: one in the present, told in second person, with Harrow struggling to orient herself to her new reality and the war she is intended to fight against the Emperor’s enemies. In the other, told in third person, she experiences Canaan House from the first book all over again…but this time, instead of Gideon Nav serving as her cavalier, it is instead Ortus Nigenad. Naturally, things unfold differently than they did in the first iteration of the story. While I was able to keep my head around the plot in Gideon, for the most part, I will confess that I got completely lost in Harrow, despite pulling open the Wikipedia plot summaries for both books while I was reading in a desperate attempt to figure out what was supposed to be going on. It helped a little, but not a lot. I do not think I am alone there, I think this is a book where you either have to decide to let go of really understanding everything that’s going on and just roll with it or you’ll get frustrated quickly. Once I decided to go with it, I found it a very entertaining experience. I had a hard time putting it down and always wanted to pick it back up. Character remains a very strong suit for Muir, I had been very bummed to be losing out on the snarky perspective of Gideon that was so delightful in the first book but but prickly, proud Harrow won me over. And the new characters, the Emperor and his Lyctors, were just as enjoyably rendered. Muir’s prose and dialogue also shine, full of clever references to both classical stories and pop culture. I can’t wait to get to the third book and am eagerly awaiting the fourth (and final planned one) as well. A treat of a reading experience despite a convoluted plot.
  • Stella Dallas: When working-class striver Stella meets and charms the educated, sophisticated Stephen Dallas, she’s sure she’s found her way into a higher echelon. Stephen fled from his hometown in shame after his lawyer father committed suicide when his embezzlement was discovered, breaking up what seemed like a marriage-bound relationship to Helen, the lovely daughter of a local judge. Stephen and Stella are smitten and wed quickly, with their daughter Laurel being born shortly thereafter. It would seem like a recipe for happiness in 1923, but the underlying tension between the couple over Stella’s unwillingness, or inability, to fit into Stephen’s expectations for a wife (plus a set of rumors about Stella’s flirty-but-chaste connection with a riding instructor) drive them apart. By the time Laurel is a teenager, the two have long lived away from each other. Stephen supports his wife and daughter and sees the latter for a month every year, but divorce in this era was complicated and scandalous. Even being merely separated doesn’t shield Laurel from social opprobrium…she’s left out among her private-school classmates and even the other kids at the hotel where she and her mother live. Stella is determined to give Laurel every advantage she can, making her beautiful clothing by hand because she’s spending all their money putting her daughter through private school and into lessons for horseback riding and golf to ensure she’ll fit in with the in-crowd. When Stephen reconnects with the now-widowed Helen and starts to be interested in a divorce, though, Stella is faced with agonizing decisions about how to really give her daughter the best chance for a happy life. If this sounds like melodrama, that’s what it absolutely is. It’s working hard to pull heartstrings with its stock characters, especially with the bond between the rough-around-the-edges but fiercely loving Stella and the innately good and loyal Laurel. It’s not hard to see where the plot is going to go or how it will go there, nor is the prose all that spectacular. Where I found it interesting, to the extent that I did at all, was in how it reflected what would have been the widely-held views and prejudices of its intended readers, especially in the contrast it sets up between Stella and Helen. Stella is “the tacky one”, who uses makeup (just some as a young woman and increasingly more as she ages), who has gained weight and become thick around the middle, who employed artifice to ensnare Stephen. Helen, portrayed as virtuous, is bare-faced and slim, refusing to dye her hair even as she starts to develop greys. Though she wed a significantly older, wealthy man who she cared for but did not love, this choice is tacitly approved of in the narrative. The social prejudices of Stephen’s class, which would damn both the ultimately-harmless Stella and even her daughter by association, are not challenged or criticized. In a pre-Depression world, the book reflects a perspective that social climbing is the real villain here. But it’s honestly just not very good as a piece of writing, so I can’t recommend it.

 

In Life…

  • Preparing for session: There’s no way to ever really be ready for session, at least not that I’ve found over the past five I’ve been a part of. But I’ve been reading bills and working with legislators and clients and it’s going to happen no matter what!

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2024

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the authors we read for the first time last year, and as usual my list includes several writers I am embarrassed to be so new to but better late than never?

Ursula K. LeGuin: One of the masters of science fiction! I found her work thought-provoking and enjoyed the way she created relationships between her characters so I’m really curious to keep reading her back catalog.

Octavia Butler: Another queen of sci-fi and I enjoyed her thoughtful, realistic world-building just as much as LeGuin so another one I’ll be reading extensively!

Sally Rooney: She’s like THE millennial lady author. I have to admit I wasn’t especially impressed with the one of her four books I’ve read thus far but people are rapturous enough about her stuff that I’ll be trying the others.

V.E. Schwab: She’s written a bunch of fantasy novels that I have on my to-read list and I quite liked the one I read this year so I’ll be reading more in this series and more of hers overall for sure.

Aminatta Forna: I’d seen a couple of her books on monthly Kindle sales when I was browsing those regularly and they seemed interesting enough so I bought a few but just got around to reading one this year and it was really good so I’m eager to read more!

Jean Hanff Korlitz: Her book The Plot was recommended to me by my boss, but I read a different one first that I already owned. It was not my favorite, it did that thing where it’s pretty engaging but then falls apart as soon as you finish and actively think about it, but it wasn’t so bad I won’t read more.

Ali Smith: An author I’d been meaning to try for a long time and I’m so glad I finally did, I loved her work and am excited to read more!

Juhea Kim: She’s only written two books, but I liked the second one enough to be very excited to go back to read the first and anything else she puts out!

Jasmine Guillory: I’d heard her described as a person who writes romance novels with broad appeal, and while I found her book enjoyable enough to give her another try, it was more insubstantial than I’d been hoping for.

Colleen Hoover: The darling of BookTok, I figured I might as well give her work a try. Well, now I have tried, and I know to never return to that well.

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