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!