The Silence of the Asonu by Ursula K. Le Guin

The strength in Le Guin’s writing has always been her worldbuilding. She seems to have an infinite capacity for creating varied cultures. In The Silence of the Asonu she creates a world in which none of the adults talk and the children gradually lose language.

Children from two to six years old chatter to each other constantly; they argue, wrangle, and bicker, and sometimes come to blows. As they come to be six or seven they begin to speak less and to quarrel less. By the time they are eight or nine most of them are very shy of words and reluctant to answer a question except by gesture. They have learned to quietly evade inquiring tourists and linguists with notebooks and recording devices. By adolescence they are as silent and as peaceable as the adults.

There is little plot in the story – there is a somewhat amusing section where the silence of the Asonu has been given a mysticism by a group of zealots who seem to want to read far more into one Asonu’s utterances than warranted.

The story turns dark when one of the zealots kidnaps a young Asonu child in hopes of getting it to speak longer so that she could teach him the secrets the Asonu hide. Unsurprisingly, this does not turn out well.

Unfortunately, the story collapses for me when Le Guin ends the story with a lame joke.

Matched by Ally Condie

Dystopias have been all the rage in the last few years (we needed something to counterbalance all the supernatural romance which is the other rage).

Latest on the best selling block is Matched by Ally Condie. It’s the sort of book that has a great elevator pitch. You’ve just been presented with your ideal match? What if you fall in love with someone else?

Matched could be the child of The Giver and Twilight – it adds a love triangle in the dystopia mix (as there was in The Hunger Games) but it is of the truly tepid sort – there’s not a second of mystery about who Cassia is going to fall in love with. It’s not going to be her perfect match Xander (aka Doormat), but her other perfect match, Ky (aka, not-so-Rebel).

My biggest problem with this book is the fact that it’s not a full story. It’s more like the first third of a book incredibly inflated in word count. By the time we reach the end, I feel like we’ve reached the first turning point plotwise and that simply is not enough to support the page length

Cassia is blandly self-centered (a la Bella) but it’s pretty impossible for me to imagine someone wanting to be on team Ky or team Xander since neither of them is terribly interesting.

The one thing I did like about this story was the restraint in the worldbuilding. They live in a world where everything has been streamlined. People all wear the same color clothes, eat the blandest of food. Even songs and poems have been stripped down to a bare 100, all for the population to better appreciate them.

It’s the sort of place where the cracks in the allegedly utopian society are apparent straight from the get go. Which makes it all the more annoying that Cassia is so complacently content at the start of the story. Really the only character I didn’t want to shake was Cassia’s grandfather.

I try to understand why a book might sell well even when it doesn’t work for me, but I have to admit I’m pretty baffled here.

It’s Christmas Time

And if you are anything like me, you probably have been scrambling for ideas on what to get people for Christmas. So this year, why not get your loved ones some books by women? Here’s a few of my favorites:

Shirley Jackson has long been on of my favorite writers and one of the things I love about her writing is that she writes to the correct damn length (modern novels are so bloated.) Which is why I want to highlight her two masterpiece short novels – The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. You’ve probably read them already, but they are definitely worth passing on to someone else.

I’ve always wished that I lived while Jackson was publishing so I could experience the discovery of her work as she was writing. And I bet you do too. So run, don’t walk and buy M. Rickert’s two short story collections. She is the writer you want to say in twenty years that you were reading now. Trust me, you won’t be sorry.

Kelly Link is one of those unique voices that comes along once in a generation. (And spawns masses of imitators – far too many imitators.) For my money, her first collection is the one you want. Her later ones are more polished, but I think this one shines for the sheer raw genius.

One of my favorite childhood memories is watching The French Chef on Channel 2. I think I started watching because my aunt liked it, but there was something mesmerizing about Julia Child, vibrant and alive like few people are. I didn’t know what a hollandaise sauce was, but watching her, I wanted some. I think it is hard to understate her influence on American cooking. (Heck, she basically invented the TV cooking show.) None of these are fiction, but I make the rules and you won’t go wrong buying any of them.

I was surprised when I learned the author of I Capture the Castle was also the author of 101 Dalmatians. I’ll admit I’m not familiar with her other writing, but even with these two books, it’s a hell of a legacy.

Ok, more later.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N K Jemisin

Quiz Time!

1. You have several gods at your beck and call. Yep, they can do most anything, except for read minds. Your beloved daughter has been murdered. What do you do?

a) Concoct a byzantine plan to see if the person you suspect is guilty a la old timey witch tests You know, that one where they throw a woman in a pond and if she drowns, congratulations she’s not a witch. If she survives, she’s clearly a witch and gets burned at the stake. Except for “burned at the stake” insert “becomes ruler of the entire world.”
b) Get the damn Gods to find out who killed your daughter and then have them make paste out of him.

2. You have obsessively been trying to find out who killed your mother. You are now about to die, but you still have a chance to denounce the one you believe is guilty. You:
A) Denounce the bastard!
B) Decide “What’s the point?” I’ll just hold my tongue.

So these first two questions felt like Jemisin knew what she wanted to happen but couldn’t think of a good reason why, so she went with really, really bad ones.

3. Darre is a country straight out of creepy pornos. This is best exemplified by which rite of passage?

a) Amazon women capture a male enemy warrior and then boink him into exhaustion.
b) One amazon warrior fights against one of the male citizens of their country. If she wins, they “make love.” If he wins, he gets to rape her.

Yeah, really I have no words for this.

4 A teenager elected leader of her/his country?

a. Totally plausible.
b. George Lucas has a lot to answer for.

Nope, don’t buy it. Especially given the chance to do something for her people, Yeine spends most of her time investigating a personal tragedy. Oh, and getting laid.

And for good measure I will complain about how it’s a matriarchal society, except for Yeine’s dad who got to be the leader bean too, because you know, special snowflake syndrome.

5 Is today opposite day?

c) No (by which I mean yes because it totally is)
d) No (by which I mean no.)

Yep, when in plotting doubt, turn to Calvin and Hobbes for assistance.

Anyway, apparently it was opposite day the day Yeine died because instead of getting killed by the magic widget of doom, it turned her into a goddess. For pretty much no reason at all. So yeah, we got the ending that was telegraphed way in the beginning of the book and it was even less satisfying that I had expected.

6. So did you too have the feeling when Yeine was talking about Naha that it was like a woman talking about how awesome her boyfriend was and you totally wanted to hand her a pamphlet on “top signs your boyfriend is abusive”?

a. Yeah.
b. Hells yeah, and double creepy because the book felt like a Mary Sue.

There were things I liked about the book, like the super creepifying way some people died (turned to diamond! Getting a jillion extra limbs!) or the war where not a single person died.

And I think the bones of the plot could have been quite good, but it didn’t cohere all the way and Jemisin forced it.

Maybe next time.

“The Night We All Had the Grippe” by Shirley Jackson

This is a short story that was published in Harpers back in 1952 (Subscribers can read it online) and this is not the side of Shirley Jackson that I think most modern readers are familiar with, and that’s a bit of a shame.

It’s a simple enough story – everyone in the family has the flu (and why don’t we call it the grippe any more? That sounds much more ominous than plain old flu) and they are all having a restless night which involves much swapping of beds as the kids migrate to their parents bed and people move on as it gets crowded.

It’s a funny piece, one that has the sharpness that’s shown in her horror writing, with a wry amusement that makes me think she was thinking “Yep, this is life” when she wrote it.

Interim report on the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

I picked this up at a Christmas dinner over the weekend and started reading on the train home. I’m a bit surprised at how much praise this book has been receiving. (I forget who suggested she was getting paid by the asterisk, but I see what they mean.)

Anyway, I’m mostly posting because I’m pretty sure Jemisin just telegraphed the ending when has Yeine refer to people as “mortals” and of course shortly after we find out she shares a soul with a god. Which pretty much means that I can expect the climax of the book to involve her becoming the dead goddess Enefa.

Which doesn’t sound all that interesting to me. (I shall hold out hope Yeine will become the goddess sooner rather than later and the do some goddess ass-kicking. Probably won’t happen because I’ve heard the second half of the book Yeine getting a lot of nookie.)

The Replacement by Brenda Yovanoff

Why do I like this book? Simple, three reasons:

1. Tate. I like a girl who can kick ass, a girl who is the one who saves the hero from the big bad but at the same time isn’t a girl with superpowers. She’s not Buffy. She’s just a regular girl who’s angry and ready to kick some ass. And smart enough to bring some cold iron (a crowbar) when she goes to kick some Fairy ass.

2. You know how in Twilight Edward was all mopey because he was so very very lonely (so lonely!) and there was no one special enough for him to love? And he’s rich and gorgeous and young forever and that’s totally not good enough for him? I bet you wanted to kick him in the nuts too.

Anyway, Mackie might be a Fairy changeling and he might be good looking, but he’s also got real problems like he’s dying from all the iron in our world. And even then? He doesn’t make with the emo moments. He’s also a big dork who is dorky enough that he really can’t tell when a pretty girl likes him, and enough of a real kid to do stupid things (like kiss a girl with a steel tongue stud) that almost kill him.

3. But really most of all it’s the interaction of Mackie’s family. Maybe their original son was stolen and killed, but that wasn’t Mackie’s fault and they love him just the same. That doesn’t mean that their isn’t baggage or guilt because of all that, but they seem like a genuine family.

For me, that was enough. I’ll tell you now that the plot isn’t any great shakes. (Remember the subplot from American Gods about the small Midwestern town? Yeah, that’s pretty much our plot here.) But it’s handled well enough and I found the characters interesting enough that they carried the day.

(And how ugly is the UK cover on the right? I think the US publisher played it right by going for the creepy.)

Zoo City by Lauren Buekes

Zinzi December is a former junkie, Nigerian 419 scammer, and generally not a terribly pleasant person – oh, and she also may or may not have killed her brother.

Because of her brother’s death she became one of the “animalled” – a physical manifestation of her guilt and a source of magical powers. In Zinzi’s case she can find lost objects.

She’s not quite the PI of old fashioned detective fiction, but she’s close enough for this novel, which has a definite noir feel.

She’s sucked into a missing persons case she really doesn’t want to take, and honestly I didn’t want her to take either because it wasn’t very interesting. The ending feels rushed and at the end it feels like she’s turning over a new leaf in a way that feels incredibly forced and not very believable.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit for about the first 50 pages – shortly after she gets dragged into the central missing person case I mostly stopped caring what happened. And then when you get to the big reveal/climax, I was pretty much “Really?” and not in the good way.

So yeah, that’s pretty much my thought on this book: “Really?”

One thing Angry Robot does right is the pricing of their ebooks. Zoo City was a real bargain in the Kindle store – only $3.99 and definitely worth the money. If only they published more women.

(Sorry for the paucity of posts – I have been reading, but life has been lifelike and so I am far behind on writing up thoughts.)

Day 53: The Bolted Door by Edith Wharton

Sometimes when I read a story, I wonder what it would be like if I had read it when it was first published. Or at the very least, much earlier in my reading career before I became aware of the patterns of fiction.

So it is with The Bolted Door by Edith Wharton. It’s a bit tell-tale heart and reminds me a bit of Agatha Christie. (In the fascination with useless upper class people unable to conceive of working for a living way)

Hubert Granice is that useless upper class person who has spent the last ten years of his life as a failed playwright and now his despair drives him to do something curious – confess to the decade-old unsolved murder of his cousin in hopes of getting the death penalty.

Unfortunately for his plan, the man he confessed to (his lawyer) doesn’t believe him. How ever Granice tries to convince him, his lawyer doesn’t budge in his belief that Granice is innocent.

Much of the story is taken up with Granice confessing this crime over to various people who all refuse to believe him. He has an iron tight alibi that was investigated years earlier, and all the people that Granice suggest could corroborate his story cannot be found. Eventually he becomes unhinged that he’s locked up in an asylum.

The twist at the end is (of course) that he’s actually guilty of the murder. Maybe when the story was first published this twist was surprising.

The trouble for me is that there isn’t much development in the story beyond the initial confession – sure his agitation heightens with each confession until he’s completely unhinged but for me it was obvious that this tension was just building for the reveal that he’d had in fact committed the murder.

I can’t say that I’ve read a story with this exact plot before, but I feel like I have. If I hadn’t, I imagine I would have appreciated this story quite a lot more.

Day 52: 50 Fatwas for Virtuous Vampire by Pamela K. Taylor

Kameron mentioned this story on twitter the other day and I’m glad she did. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with it.

First the love: I rarely like faux non-fiction, but I really enjoyed the excerpts from the books that advise vampires on how to live a virtuous life and one keeping with the Koran.

In Chapter Three of Ethical Eating: Seven Steps to a Godly Diet’ Sheikha al-Binawi explains, “Selecting the appropriate individual for dining upon can seem quite a daunting prospect. However, the Muslim vampire can take heart, for God does not leave us without guidance. The Qur’an, in a most appropriately titled chapter–The Table Spread–tells us that ‘whoever slays a human being, except for murder or spreading corruption on the earth, it is as though he had killed all of humankind, and whoever saves a life, it is as though they had saved all of mankind.’ Keeping these words firmly in mind, a righteous vampire can not only have his cake but eat it, too! His heart can rest at ease as he dines upon murderers, arsonists, rapists, philanderers and other nasty criminals, knowing that he is not only ridding the Earth of those who would corrupt it, but also saving innocent lives in the process! Truly, we must be deeply grateful for the double blessing the Lord has showered upon the Everliving!”

The actual narrative part of the story, well that’s something else. First, having your main character stand around and think a lot? This very rarely a good idea and definitely not one here.

The bigger problem is that I didn’t feel like the author had any awareness of how repulsive Ibrahim was. I feel like she meant him to be a hero who is saving Lina from the horror of a brutal marriage. Of course, he’s the man who attacked her and now she makes Bambi eyes at him? The whole last scene makes me want to stab the author with a fork.

Imagine to yourself what you would do if a stranger approached you on the street and said:

“I want to help. I can protect you from Sidi Ahmed.”
“You know about him? What he wants?”
“I overheard.”
[...]
“What can you do? We depend on him for everything. We’re completely under his thumb.”
“I can marry you,” he said, surprising himself.

Are you going to look at him like a) a dream come true or b) another predator who is going to do you wrong as much as the guy who was trying to blackmail you into marriage.

I choose B. The author chose A