strange and random happenstance

The Burial Witch by Cari Thomas
Published by: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: June 5th, 2025
Format: Hardcover, 150 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

It's summer and Miranda Richardson has every second of her time accounted for. She has spent her life trying to live up to the expectations of her parents who already have two perfect children. But she never thinks she's good enough. If she can't even smile right for the family photo how is she going to achieve all her goals? They're laminated and on her wall; GOALS BEFORE THIRTY. Which is why instead of going to the park with her brother she is digging through boxes in the attic for a school project on the Richardson Family Tree. She's learning all about the Smiths and Evans from Shropshire and the local steel industry. Despite her father's enthusiasm she doesn't think she could be more bored if she tried. Yet she chose to look into her father's family and not her mother's. As she shifts the boxes of the past in the attic she finds a suitcase. It obviously belonged to her maternal grandparents. They emigrated from Nigeria to Peckham. Since their deaths her mother never talks about them. They are Richardsons, they can achieve anything they set their minds to. They don't dig into their past, they are a future-facing family. Which would be why Miranda is learning about Shropshire's steel industry. Her mother has made it clear that that part of their lives, her life, is over. The past is the past. But it's about to affect Miranda's present. In the suitcase she finds a box. There is something inside the box. When she moves it there is a clunking sound. Getting it open becomes her obsession. It's like a fairy tale come to life, this is her test. And she's failing because fairy tales don't come with instructions. She starts to slip in her work and she's distracted at church and lashing out. This little coffin shaped box leads her to do the unheard of. She has never disobeyed her parents, she wants to be like her mother when she grows up, and yet she goes to a shop that is off-limits. When A Sense of Craft opened in Richmond Miranda's mother tired to have it shut down. But this store and it's owner, Maya, might be Miranda's only hope. Though Miranda can't help but feel that Maya is a threat. That she's somehow involved in what's happening. Especially when Maya's advice opens the box to reveal a wooden doll. What could this mean? Miranda has to get to the bottom of this. Her summer was written and now she's dealing with magical forces, first loves, demonic dreams. If she wasn't highly strung before the events of the last few weeks she is now. The question is, will she embrace what's to come or bury it in a shallow grave?

Since I finished Shadowstitch I have been desperately craving anything new in Cari Thomas's The Language of Magic series. So when The Burial Witch novella was announced I was overjoyed. Preordered it from England to get it two months early overjoyed. And then I learned it was about Miranda. And my joy was somewhat tempered. It's not that I dislike Miranda, she's just the least interesting member of this Scooby Gang. Miranda has just been there, doing her thing, being conflicted about her religious beliefs and equally fighting and embracing this new aspect to herself, this magical aspect. She just is. And then The Burial Witch comes out and now I have to reread the whole series because of this new insight I have into her. Her OCD nature, her wanting to please her parents, her fear of the "other," all of this I relate to. Some from when I was her age, some from now. It's like she represents the different stages of my life and she's had to have all these changes thrust on her over one short summer. But what really struck me about her book, this book, is that you have to have no foreknowledge of anything else in this series for this book to work. It is a self-contained little masterpiece of a novella. Really, think British Stephen King at the top of his game and that's The Burial Witch. This is a perfect standalone horror novella in the tradition of Carrie. A religious girl is confronted by the unknown, there's temptation in this new knowledge, then, being who she is, she must find out more and goes to a forbidden shop where it's revealed that magic is real. And that dichotomy, that struggle in Miranda that Maya tries to help her with is to show her that not all religion is Christian and not all magic is bad. Which brings in the Vodun religion. Most people just think of rather racist and stereotypical Voodoo tropes. Whereas real Vodun is nothing like the movies would have you think. Yes, it's far away from anything Miranda might have experienced, and let us not forget she's lived a very sheltered life, but it's still holy. It's still divine. And so many books only use Vodun for the tropes, here it's handled thoughtfully. And what I really appreciate is that seeing as this series is set in England there's a certain kind of view of British magic. It's very Anglocentric. Yet England, like the rest of the world, is a melting pot. Therefore it makes sense that there are different kinds of magic. And having Vodun from Nigeria just works. There's a balance here that makes it both terrifying and respectful. Because it's how Miranda handles the changes where all the fear arises. The villain isn't magic, the villain is change. The villain is a future that wasn't planned out and laminated. That's a horror we can all relate to.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anglocentric, Cari Thomas, Carrie, Horror, Miranda Richardson, Nigeria, Novella, OCD, Religion, Scooby Gang, Shadowstitch, Stephen King, Summer School, The Burial Witch, The Language of Magic, Threadneedle, Top Ten, Vodun, West Africa

The Burial Witch by Cari Thomas
Published by: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: June 5th, 2025
Format: Hardcover, 150 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

It's summer and Miranda Richardson has every second of her time accounted for. She has spent her life trying to live up to the expectations of her parents who already have two perfect children. But she never thinks she's good enough. If she can't even smile right for the family photo how is she going to achieve all her goals? They're laminated and on her wall; GOALS BEFORE THIRTY. Which is why instead of going to the park with her brother she is digging through boxes in the attic for a school project on the Richardson Family Tree. She's learning all about the Smiths and Evans from Shropshire and the local steel industry. Despite her father's enthusiasm she doesn't think she could be more bored if she tried. Yet she chose to look into her father's family and not her mother's. As she shifts the boxes of the past in the attic she finds a suitcase. It obviously belonged to her maternal grandparents. They emigrated from Nigeria to Peckham. Since their deaths her mother never talks about them. They are Richardsons, they can achieve anything they set their minds to. They don't dig into their past, they are a future-facing family. Which would be why Miranda is learning about Shropshire's steel industry. Her mother has made it clear that that part of their lives, her life, is over. The past is the past. But it's about to affect Miranda's present. In the suitcase she finds a box. There is something inside the box. When she moves it there is a clunking sound. Getting it open becomes her obsession. It's like a fairy tale come to life, this is her test. And she's failing because fairy tales don't come with instructions. She starts to slip in her work and she's distracted at church and lashing out. This little coffin shaped box leads her to do the unheard of. She has never disobeyed her parents, she wants to be like her mother when she grows up, and yet she goes to a shop that is off-limits. When A Sense of Craft opened in Richmond Miranda's mother tired to have it shut down. But this store and it's owner, Maya, might be Miranda's only hope. Though Miranda can't help but feel that Maya is a threat. That she's somehow involved in what's happening. Especially when Maya's advice opens the box to reveal a wooden doll. What could this mean? Miranda has to get to the bottom of this. Her summer was written and now she's dealing with magical forces, first loves, demonic dreams. If she wasn't highly strung before the events of the last few weeks she is now. The question is, will she embrace what's to come or bury it in a shallow grave?

Since I finished Shadowstitch I have been desperately craving anything new in Cari Thomas's The Language of Magic series. So when The Burial Witch novella was announced I was overjoyed. Preordered it from England to get it two months early overjoyed. And then I learned it was about Miranda. And my joy was somewhat tempered. It's not that I dislike Miranda, she's just the least interesting member of this Scooby Gang. Miranda has just been there, doing her thing, being conflicted about her religious beliefs and equally fighting and embracing this new aspect to herself, this magical aspect. She just is. And then The Burial Witch comes out and now I have to reread the whole series because of this new insight I have into her. Her OCD nature, her wanting to please her parents, her fear of the "other," all of this I relate to. Some from when I was her age some from now. It's like she represents the different stages of my life and she's had to have all these changes thrust on her over one short summer. But what really struck me about her book, this book, is that you have to have no foreknowledge of anything else in this series for this book to work. It is a self-contained little masterpiece of a novella. Really, think British Stephen King at the top of his game and that's The Burial Witch. This is a perfect standalone horror novella in the tradition of Carrie. A religious girl is confronted by the unknown, there's temptation in this new knowledge, then, being who she is, she must find out more and goes to a forbidden shop where it's revealed that magic is real. And that dichotomy, that struggle in Miranda that Maya tries to help her with is to show her that not all religion is Christian and not all magic is bad. Which brings in the Vodun religion. Most people just think of rather racist and stereotypical Voodoo tropes. Whereas real Vodun is nothing like the movies would have you think. Yes, it's far away from anything Miranda might have experienced, and let us not forget she's lived a very sheltered life, but it's still holy. It's still divine. And so many books only use Vodun for the tropes, here it's handled thoughtfully. And what I really appreciate is that seeing as this series is set in England there's a certain kind of view of British magic. It's very Anglocentric. Yet England, like the rest of the world, is a melting pot. Therefore it makes sense that there are different kinds of magic. And having Vodun from Nigeria just works. There's a balance here that makes it both terrifying and respectful. Because it's how Miranda handles the changes where all the fear arises. The villain isn't magic, the villain is change. The villain is a future that wasn't planned out and laminated. That's a horror we can all relate to.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Sense of Craft, Anglocentric, Cari Thomas, Carrie, Horror, Miranda Richardson, Nigeria, Novella, OCD, Religion, Shadowstitch, Stephen King, Summer School, The Burial Witch, The Language of Magic, Threadneedle, Vodun, West Africa

Matrix by Lauren Groff
Published by: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: September 7th, 2021
Format: Kindle, 272 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Marie's life isn't exactly blessed. A child of rape she is the half-sister of Henry II of England. When Eleanor of Aquitaine marries Henry it is made very clear that Marie will no longer be welcome in the French court. So she follows Eleanor to England with only her servant Cecile as company. Marie's attraction to Eleanor combined with having no marriage prospects set her fate in motion. Who would marry a gangly, unattractive, illegitimate seventeen year old with a liking for the ladies anyway? Torn away from Eleanor and Cecile she is once more moved along. This time to an abbey. She is young and the nuns are old and sick. Her first instinct is to escape. To get back to Eleanor any way she can. If she can just win Eleanor's favor everything will be well. She starts to write a series of lais. In these poems she pours out her heart. And yet Eleanor never responds. Disillusioned Marie gradually accepts her fate and then embraces it. She starts with nutrition. If the nuns can eat well they can live well. She takes stock of the skills her nuns have and some become farmers, some become healers, each to their own ability they start to shine. Marie enforces the sanctity of the abbey's lands and taxes squatters. While Eleanor installed Marie as prioress of the abbey it's by Marie's own skills that she rises to abbess. She creates a haven for her nuns. They are safe, content, and well cared for. They even have a very active sex life. The fact that in the beginning Marie didn't view herself as strongly religious doesn't matter as time goes on. Because fate has chosen her and she is touched by divine visions. These visions help to protect the community she has built. She builds herself a world apart. The patriarchy of the outside world doesn't like the wealth she is hoarding and plot against her. Some of the nuns even question her power. But when power is used to protect is it such a bad thing? Her people, her world, thrives. But what will happen when she is no longer protector? How will history view her? As salvation or Satan?

Matrix is one of those books that almost defies any reviewers attempts to review it. Lauren Groff is obviously a talented writer yet at the same time what exactly did she write here? What on Earth did I just read? I think I liked it didn't I? Wait are the nuns having "healing" sex again? Boiled down to it's basics we have a group of sexually active nuns who create a female utopia led by a visionary leader that pisses off the patriarchy. And then the leader dies. I'm trying to remember if she "saw" her death coming because that would have been kind of ironic. I know she "felt" it but "saw" it would have been more on point. My issue with Matrix was more in how it was written. Groff spent time with Benedictine nuns at the Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Being among the educated woman caring for each other she thought it kind of a utopia. Which carried through into the book. But as you see with her immersing herself in the Benedictine lifestyle she is very method. I mean she assumed that all readers would get that the title comes from the Latin for mother... I was not one of those readers. In fact until I started writing this review I had no idea how the title connected to the narrative so at least now I know that. So it's not a stretch to say that Groff really does her research. And yet the kind of faux Middle Ages first person patois she writes the story in is off-putting. I thought and still think that it was an attempt to be "of the time." She wanted us so in Marie's world, so in her head, that she created her own dialect. Which, when you're dropping modern vernacular like "rube" into the conversation takes your readers out of the narrative. I mean it would be over six hundred years until the word "rube" came about. Me being me, this then resulted in a discussion with my book club as to whether she really meant to write like she was in the Middle Ages or just in a way that would be unique. Given her whole background and her education and her going to hang out at an abbey for awhile, I think my argument holds together. She wanted her writing to feel "of the time" like Chaucer a few hundred years later. She just wasn't as thorough as she thought. She in fact might be a bit of a rube.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Abbess, Abbey, Court, Eleanor of Aquitaine, For the Love of Book Clubs, Henry II, Lauren Groff, Lesbians, Matrix, Middle Ages, Nuns, Patois, Prioress, Regina Laudis Abbey, Religion, Sex, Vernacular, Visions

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Published by: Library of America
Publication Date: 1968
Format: Hardcover, 900 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Earth is a radioactive wasteland. There are cities where you can eek out a life but those that can have emigrated off planet, where they've been given an android servant to help with their new life. Every once in a while an andy escapes Mars and it's indentured servitude and comes to Earth and needs to be hunted down. This is where Rick Deckard comes in. He is a bounty hunter who tracks down the androids and retires them. He gets a sizable bounty for each andy he puts down and all he wants to do with that money is replace his electric sheep. At one time he had a live one and it was everything to him, his status in society secured. But it tragically died and he secretly replaced it with a replica. With the bounties from the six escaped Nexus-6 androids he could replace his sheep or maybe even get a goat. The problem is the Nexus-6 is next to impossible to distinguish from humans, and an andy already got the drop on his senior officer. Therefore his boss thinks it's wise that he visit Rosen Associates, the creators of the Nexus-6, to make sure the test capable of determining if an android is an android short of checking their bone marrow, the Voigt-Kampff test, still works. There he meets Rachael Rosen, the heir to the company, and, surprisingly, an android. Her ability to almost pass the test and his stirring of emotions for her confuse him. Could the line between human and android be thinner than he's ever thought? At least he's able to retire his first target without a problem. The second target once again makes him question his job. Luba Luft is a famous opera singer, and an android. A clever one who turns the tables on him and gets him arrested. At the police station he starts to question everything. Who is in power? Are androids secretly among us? Is that their master plan? Could even he be an android with implanted memories? After Luba Luft is taken care of Deckard administers the Voigt-Kampff test on himself. He is human, but has empathy for the androids. But what does that matter now that he has the money to buy a goat? But will the goat satisfy Deckard and his wife? Or will he still think of Rachael. There are also three more androids to account for...

If you are not a reader of science fiction you most likely know Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as the book that became the film Blade Runner. That's why I picked it up to read over twenty years ago. I read it straight through without sleep on an overnight train to New York City and it confused the hell out of me because it was nothing like the film. And I'm including all the versions of it out there. It's best to take the book on it's own terms. Because if you read it through the lens of the film you will be disappointed and confused. They are akin to each other but feel like distant cousins. In fact this is a weird instance in which both the book and the film have amazing cultural impact on their respective fields but are two disparate stories. Yet both stories can be boiled down to the question, what is it to be human? And Dick posits that what makes us human is empathy. But how do you quantify empathy and success in Dick's world? That's through the owning of an animal. If you are poor you can only afford a cheap electric imitation animal, but if you have a real animal you are not just showing that you have money, you are showing that you are a more successful human. The fact that characters painstakingly poor over the pages of Sidney's Animal and Fowl Catalogue like gambling addicts at a horse race is both amusing and tragic. They are junkies looking for their next hit of upward mobility. To prove that they are worth something. Which is why the revenge of the android Rachael is so perfect, she emasculates Deckard by taking the one thing he truly loves, his goat. Proving that it's the androids who understand what it is to be human more than the humans. Deckard wanted the goat to prove something, whereas the androids don't want anything other than to experience what it is to live. Luba Luft is the prime example of this. She's an opera singer who goes to a museum to take in the Edvard Munch exhibit. She is part of and an enthusiast of culture. If art is the purest form of the human condition Luba Luft is just as human if not more than Deckard who only wants a goat. And as for the religion? Mercerism? I'm not sure how even Dick himself felt about that. He was drawn deeply into religion and in the book it's a way to connect to other humans. It's really the one thing that the androids can't experience. And yet it is a lie. So will people willingly believe a lie to feel connected? I think as we see with Deckard and his toad that people will believe anything if they are desperate enough.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Androids, Art, Blade Runner, Bounty Hunters, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Empathy, For the Love of Book Clubs, Goat, Luba Luft, Philip K. Dick, Rachael Rosen, Religion, Rick Deckard, Voigt-Kampff Test

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch
Published by: DAW
Publication Date: April 12th, 2022
Format: Paperback, 304 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

In one of the most secure places in London a man loses his heart by an invisible assailant. The London Silver Vaults rarely has anyone stupid enough to attempt a robbery, and yet that's just what David Moore more tried to do, and failed, when a giant hole appeared where his heart should have been. This case has Falcon written all over it, those "special" cases that the Folly comes in to handle. The victim was looking for a ring that his ex-wife supposedly sold. A ring that he desperately wanted back. A ring that his ex-wife was still in possession of. When Peter Grant and Danni Wickford, who's on the Basic Falcon Management Course, show up at her house to say Althea Moore is channeling Gollum would be an understatement. The ring is unique, it can expand to form an armillary sphere and has writing inside from more languages than they can recognize. Soon though that ring is stolen. When they stumble on another dead body with the same cause of death as David Moore, they start to form a picture of what's going on. Years ago up in Manchester, a man named Preston Carmichael, AKA the second body, ran a prayer group that David Moore was a part of. There were seven members of the group in total, seven rings for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. And these rings were magical. They were also misfiled at a local library instead of with the Sons of Weyland, the magical blacksmiths whom Nightingale learned from. Which is how they got into the hands of the public. Obviously something magical happened at one of these meetings and since then the bearers of the rings have become overly attached to them. It is when they are questioning one of the other members of the group that Peter has to fight off what he is quite sure is the Angel of Death. Now is not the time for him to die, Bev is about to give birth to twins any day now and he's not going to leave his daughters fatherless. Plus the Folly hasn't really ever come across "angels." And anyhow what would an angel want with rings? Whatever it is there are obvious religious connotations, it's just figuring them out before another person dies, another person that hopefully isn't Peter, that is going to be tricky.

There are very few authors whose sense of humor is perfectly aligned with mine. Ben Aaronovitch happens to be one such author. I honed my humor at the feet of Monty Python. I watched the entire series and then rewatched it while bootlegging it. I know bits off completely by heart, enough to retroactively know that my friends in eighth grade really biffed up the "Dead Parrot" sketch for our talent show that year. Needless to say I, like many, especially the writers of the film Sliding Doors, have a strong reverence for "The Spanish Inquisition" sketches. So when I saw that the title of the next Rivers of London book was Amongst Our Weapons I instantly hoped beyond hope that it was in reference to said sketch. Needless to say, it was. Aaronovitch hasn't let me down yet. But what's more it's used as a structure for the book as well, creating a flow not seen since Whispers Under Ground. Plus, it's not just a a humorous veneer, though I did snort laugh when DCI Seawoll uttered a certain profanity before declaring he "wasn't expecting them," Aaronovitch has worked the Spanish Inquisition into the plot of the book making the reference so important and tying it into the ever expanding magical world. One of the reasons that "The Spanish Inquisition" sketches resonate with me is because I had eight years of Catholic school. Needless to say eight years made me pretty convinced that there isn't a God and there had to be something else that people got out of going to church. Whether it was a sense of community or safety or patronage, I felt that there was something other than God that had to be why thinking people kept going back. I am not alone in thinking this way, and one person who has spent quite a considerable about of time on it is Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil, F.R.S. As the Folly's literary liaison he is convinced that mass is actually magic. A form of magic that allows one practitioner, the preacher, to use the gathering of the congregants to work a spell. Thus giving Postmartin some tangible reason as to why the congregants would believe, because they got something out of it despite having no magical ability themselves. And I buy this theory, but the more I learn about this world Aaronovitch has created the more I need to know. The Catholic Church might have their own version of the Folly!?! And there are just so many different magical traditions all over not just Britain, but the world. This series could be hundreds of books and it would never be enough. More!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Amongst Our Weapons, Ben Aaronovitch, Beverly Brook, Catholic, London Calling, Magic, Monty Python, Peter Grant, Professor Postmartin, Religion, Rivers of London, The Spanish Inquisition, Whispers Under Ground

Last year when it was announced that an adaptation of The Essex Serpent was underway staring Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes the book which had been languishing on my to be read pile for more years than I can count, probably since it was released, went straight to the top of the pile. I devoured the book and it was one of my favorite reads of last year. So really, I was shooting myself in the foot wasn't I? Because rarely does an adaptation create the same love in me as the book. There are of course exceptions, but The Princess Bride and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell kind of prove my point more than disprove it. So the number one show I was most looking forward to really had no chance. Yet it does work, but only on the surface. The thing that is so amazing about the book is that it tackles so many subjects so sensitively. Women's rights, abuse, the treatment of the poor, religion, superstition, science, attraction, repulsion, mass delusions, and most importantly, people who are "other" from disabled to dwarfism. While they touch on aspects of poverty they really narrowed in on the the superstition/ religion/ science because they obviously decided that this was going to be about channeling the Salem Witch Trials and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying it's very narrow minded to make Cora the "other" when the book had so many big ideas. I mean, for Pete's sake Cora is dressed in red like a nice delicious apple when Will succumbs to her temptation. Could we make her any more of a scarlet woman? And don't get me started on those Amish beards. I concede that changes had to be made, so much of the story is told in an epistolary manner that that wouldn't have worked. But I should have known that something was wrong with this adaptation when they didn't hire someone with dwarfism to play Luke. I mean, that's a pretty big change to make, and not for the better. Yes, Frank Dillane does a magnificent job capturing Luke's personality, but his personality was formed by his dwarfism, so what the fuck? Why change that? But more importantly there were certain beats they HAD to hit to make it actually feel like the book and they just didn't. Hiddles doesn't destroy the pew, Luke doesn't try to kill himself, and as for that happy ending? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?! I could have accepted this as a shallow adaptation of a deep book because it does exude the Gothic and hot priest Hiddles, but the happy ending with Cora and Will coming together? NO! Bad adaptation. The whole point was lost on everyone involved in this production. Now IF they reedited the final episode and when Will puts Cora's letter in a drawer and closes it and it went straight to the credits...I think I could accept that.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: And the Emmy Goes To, Claire Danes, Dwarfism, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Religion, Salem Witch Trials, Science, The Essex Serpent, The Princess Bride, Tom Hiddleston

The Great Mogul Diamond by G.P. Taylor
Published by: Tyndale Momentum
Publication Date: May 1st, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 293 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Muzz Elliott is being blackmailed. She has been told she must be in Cannes at a specific time and at a specific place. Sadie, Saskia, and Erik know all of this because, well, they can't let someone's privacy stand in their way. Conversations can be overheard and letters can be read and secrets can be revealed. So when Muzz Elliott tells the twins that they are all immediately leaving on a vacation to the south of France, the girls know that the vacation is just a cover. They are going to confront the blackmailer. The girls think that they might need the help of Erik and Dorcas Potts, so they contact Erik from the train station and tell them to follow in the Bugatti. Aboard the train odd things start to happen. Saskia is reading one of Muzz Elliott's books, Murder Train, and she notices that events that happened in the book are happening to them. Right now! Someone is using Muzz Elliott's own writing against her! Therefore they should be able to head the villains off at the pass, but the evil doers are too quick off the mark and Muzz Elliott is blaming herself for putting the girls in danger. Meanwhile Erik and Dorcas are encountering problems of their own. They are being followed through the Alps. Dorcas is convinced it's the mafia, who would use such tactics, and she's not unknown to them. But it is clear that whomever they are their goal is to keep Erik and Dorcas from reaching Muzz and her compatriots in Cannes. Things get even more out of control when Sadie is kidnapped and the blackmailer reveals their intentions. Muzz Elliott must recreate the plot of her book Another Day, Another Diamond, and steal the Great Mogul Diamond that is about to be auctioned off in Cannes. If she doesn't Sadie dies. Given the extent of their planning and the elaborate scheme to lure Muzz Elliott to Cannes, she has no doubt that they mean what they say. Only she isn't one to go down without a fight. Perhaps she and her gang can turn the tables on their enemies. Even if it should turn out their enemies were once their friends.

So despite all the supposed praise this "illustra-novella" series had larded on it The Great Mogul Diamond was the end of the line. Whether through lack of a cohesive style in the illustrations or lack of interest in readers to be converted to God this series ended on what I feel is the most disjointed of the chronicles. Because I loved half the story and hated the other half. Let me break it down. So we're finally done with the orphanage and all the ancillary characters. We're focusing on Sadie and Saskia living with Muzz Elliott and Erik living with Lord Gervaz and working with Gervaz's niece Dorcas Potts. We are stripping off the excess and moving on, even if due to lack of artistic ability I totally thought two of the bad guys were Potemkin and his henchman, this turned out to be an erroneous conclusion. So a smaller cast of characters involved in a story that is literally Agatha Christie meets Alfred Hitchcock. I loved this. I loved them being on a train that Muzz Elliott happened to set one of her novels on and then the events from the book started to come true as they headed towards the French Riviera, were the events of another one of her plots was being set in motion. I adored this gaslighting of an author with her own canon. It was perfection. So right now you're like, but wouldn't that make you love this book? Yes, I loved that part of the book, the problem is that wasn't all the book was. We have gone off the deep end with religiosity in this volume. I'm all for religious freedom as long as you're not trying to convert me. G.P. Taylor seemed to be doing a really hard sell with Erik and The Man of Good-Bye Friday. I'm sorry, but Jesus showing up in a pinstripe suit and going by that LUDICROUS name as some reference to his death on Good Friday, hell no. Then signalling that one of the villains wasn't bad because he was on a first name basis with Jesus and the angels!?! Ugh. And I'm not even going to touch the whole Erik's father is dead and The Man of Good-Bye Friday brought Erik peace. This just didn't work with the story being told. It was intrusive and manipulative. In other words, I'm very glad the series ended because The Man of Good-Bye Friday and Madame Raphael had overstayed their welcome.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Agatha Christie, Cannes, G.P. Taylor, Gaslighting, God, Going Gothic, Graphic Novel, Hitchcock, Jewel Heist, Mafia, Religion, The Dopple Ganger Chronicles, The Great Mogul Diamond, The Man of Good-Bye Friday

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Published by: Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: July 22nd, 1997
Format: Paperback, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Lyra followed her father across the bridge in the sky and lost him. There was a fog. A dense, impenetrable fog and she has found herself in a world with no one. The town she is in is deserted until one day Will shows up. Will is from an Oxford different than her own. His father was a great explorer and his mother is mentally ill. Will has been caring for his mother all his life since the disappearance of his father. Only now he and his mother are in danger. Men have broken into their house and are searching for something that his father left behind. He secrets his mother away and when he goes home to retrieve that which is sought he accidentally kills one of the intruders. On the run he sees a window into another world and climbs through and meets Lyra. They decide to join forces as the only outsiders in this weird little world they've found themselves in, which isn't empty after all. The town is run by gangs of children because the adults fled due to Spectres, dangerous beings that are invisible to children but destroy adults. The two kids go back and forth between Will's Oxford and Cittàgazze. Lyra is trying to learn about Dust and Will is trying to find his father. Lyra soon learns, thanks to nudges from the alethiometer, that perhaps her questions will be answered by helping Will find his father. Because as it turns out, his father might have played an important role in Lyra's life so far, as he one day found a window into another world like his son did and walked through, never looking back. But how are these windows even formed? Will will learn the hard way about the Subtle Knife, but it also means that in spite of the danger to him he can always go home.

If you're expecting The Subtle Knife to be a straightforward sequel to The Golden Compass you're in for a bit of a surprise. Yes, it is a continuation of Lyra's story, but perhaps not as anyone growing up reading the Harry Potter books would foresee. Harry Potter is always front and center, but here, Lyra takes a backseat. The spitfire we've grown to love has been drastically changed because of her father's betrayal and therefore it is up to the new character of Will to fill the void. While you could say that it's all about the balancing of these two characters, of male and female, I think the shifting of focus off Lyra might be more in the vein of another famous writer who dealt with church indoctrination, C.S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia pick up and drop the various Penvensies like they're going out of fashion, and while Pullman never deserts any of our beloved characters, they all have their specific heft depending on the book. And The Subtle Knife belongs to Will, and to a lesser but more emotionally charged way to Lee Scorsby the Texas aeronaut. This kind of results with the reader feeling a little alienated. We've fallen in love with this world and now we're back at square one. Even weirder, we're back in our own world. We have to rebuild our love of this expanding universe while our heroine is in shock. Because Lyra's absenting herself from steering the book makes sense when you think of the very real situation she is in. She's in shock from the death of her best friend Roger. She doesn't know what to do, she's just pinballing around looking for something, someone to rally around and she finds Will and makes him her new cause. Lyra is actively promoting Will while stifling her and Pan's voice.

This change up just adds to the fact that this book is suffering from typical "middle book" problems. Everyone has heard of middle child syndrome, but I think more people need to be aware of the problems inherent in middle books. Ah, the issues facing the bridging book of a trilogy... you need to make it interesting enough that people will wait with baited breath for the final volume, yet you must give them a story that holds up on it's own, while also having a satisfying ending. If you want a master class in a successful middle book look to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers or Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight or Galen Beckett's The House on Durrow Street. I could go on because when a middle book gets it right it just stays in your mind as being the exception to the rule. While The Subtle Knife does "technically" hold up on it's own, it's not due to any overarching story, it's due to little moments that take your breath away. Imagery that is unforgettable, while Pullman struggles with setting up all the pieces that will be needed for the epic conclusion. Lee Scorsby's last stand in that rocky gulch will just rip your heart out and put it back in all gritty and pained. The witches swirling through the sky, like the unforgettable illustrations of Adrienne Adams's A Woggle of Witches. The dangerous yet somehow ingenious heist of the alethiometer from the odious Sir Charles Latrom. These moments stick with you. I remembered these moments in all the years since I first read The Subtle Knife, but as for anything else like plot? It had slipped out of my head because of all those middle book issues... and worst of all Pullman decided to end the book on a major cliffhanger... sigh. You know, minor cliffhangers can be just if not more satisfying. They also don't alienate your readers.

While there are those who grow to love Will as much as Lyra, I have to say that I've always been on the fence about him. Yes, he has struggled, yes he has survived against the odds, and yes, he has a soft spot for cats, yet there was always something that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Until now. Will's mother is mentally ill. This isn't the problem, the problem is the way in which Philip Pullman describes Will's thoughts in regards to his mother. I don't know if Pullman is trying to show that Will is young and naive or if Pullman himself just doesn't get mental illness. And yes, there are people out there that try as they might just aren't able to comprehend what mental illness is in any form, from having it to dealing with someone who has it. Will is very straightforward about knowing that his mother's problems come from within, that there's something wrong. She obviously has OCD as well as other more serious problems yet when Will hears about the Spectres he starts to fantasize that somehow in his world, this world, that perhaps they are what cause mental illness. While yes, a child does dream of there being some external force that can be removed and their parent returned to normal, the actual belief wouldn't be there. Having spent a childhood growing up seeing those with problems and having OCD myself Will would never be this naive. What's more he describes what his mother does as just things she does, he never once focuses on the underlying compulsion. It's like a flip got switched in her and she does these things without any logic. But the truth is for the person suffering there is a logic, a drive. They might not want to do it, they might be fighting against it every step of the way, but Pullman just doesn't get this across. Mental illness becomes just another problem Will deals with instead of the horror it really is. Pullman trivializes it for his character's backstory.

I guess the reason the way Pullman handles mental illness annoys me is because he's dealing with such weighty issues, reconciling religion and science and yet he got something so wrong that can I trust his analysis of anything? This weird give and take between religion and science is one we have fought of centuries and which is sadly still being fought as Creationism is being taught again in many schools. Yet in Lyra's world experimental theology is what physics is in our world, indicating that there science and religion are more entwined and accepting of each other. As the series continues you see that yes, it is the battle between free thought and that of indoctrination but it's not so clear cut as The Magisterium would want you to think. And yes, this book is taking many ideas and bringing them together for you to think about, especially the fall of man as Milton depicted it in Paradise Lost, but to me, at this point in the series, it almost feels as if Pullman isn't sure what his side is. Both sides have committed atrocities in his narrative, yet we have yet to learn what is the truth. Because this is fiction, while we might speculate day and night and a book that leads to a good discussion is the friend of all book lovers and book clubs everywhere, we still need to know where Pullman's opinion lies. Did God create the universe or did science? This needs to be stated. Clearly. And it wasn't here. Here we suffer once again from middle book issues and have to wait. Sometimes I just want to find authors and shake them. As I write this I'm about a third of the way through The Amber Spyglass and the truth has been revealed and with that revelation I wonder why he waited. Yes, he's created a big set piece with it, so it would have made this book a little longer. But some of the building blocks were in place and a touch more foreshadowing might have made this book a more satisfying read.

But life isn't about satisfaction most of the time. Life is about just living day to day wondering about the mysteries of the universe that if we think too long on we'll be right there with Will's mom. Yet in the end I keep coming back to the more supernatural elements of this story, the fantastical, the prophetic. The witches. The witches have a prophecy that Lyra will be the end of fate by initiating the second fall of man. Here's the thing though, how is there really fate in this "world" that Pullman has built. Prophecies are all nice and good but he's clearly shown us that the multiple worlds theory is at play here and that each and every decision creates a different universe that has splintered off. Therefore everything is possible and everything IS happening at the same time. In a multiverse where everything is possible how exactly does prophecy come into play? Is it just for this ONE Lyra and this ONE Will? If something happened to them could Lord Asriel or Mrs. Coulter or the church go to another universe and nudge that other Lyra or Will into line with what they want? I get that this is a multiverse changing war that's on the horizon, but if everything is possible at all times yet you need a certain chain of events to happen how do you do this? It's almost too hard to reconcile these opposing ideas. So Lyra will end fate. What does that mean? I mean, really, how is fate possible in these books? It could be possible if the worlds were self contained. But travel between them is possible, so then what? Again, middle book issues! It's like he just threw everything at this book and figured he'd work it all out in the end. The problem I have is can he actually work it all out?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Different Kind of P and P, C.S. Lewis, His Dark Materials, Lee Scoresby, Lyra Belacqua, Mental Illness, Philip Pullman, Religion, Science, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, Will Parry, Witches, Worldbuilding

The Circle by Dave Eggers
Published by: Vintage Books
Publication Date: October 8th, 2013
Format: Paperback, 497 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Mae Holland had dreams that took her east of the Rockies to an elite liberal arts college yet here she is, back in her home town, working nine to five at a utility company of all places. Whereas her college roommate Annie Allerton doesn't just work for the most important tech company on the planet, she's one of the Group of 40, one of the forty most influential people in the most influential company in the world. Thanks to Annie pulling some strings she gets Mae in the door for an interview at The Circle. As Mae walks through the campus she realizes that she is in heaven and she doesn't care if the job she's interviewing for is only in Customer Experience, answering questions and obsessively keeping track of her satisfaction rating, it's where everyone started, even Annie. Yet her transition into The Circle isn't that smooth, she makes more than a few mistakes in not fully engaging in the culture that the company wants its employees to embrace. She also upsets a few of her coworkers by her lack of participation.

But leeway is given as she's a friend of Annie and there are extenuating circumstances with her family. Her father is suffering from MS and her mother is struggling to cope. With Mae now further away they are relying heavily on Mae's ex, Mercer. The pressure to help, to be better, makes Mae reckless and one night she breaks into a kayak rental store she frequents after-hours and what happens next changes everything. It's not just that Mae is caught by technology that The Circle created, it's her blind ignorance that she was cheating others of a once in a lifetime experience that now only exists in her memories. Because sharing is caring. This experience is the beginning of her full integration into The Circle. Through a talk with The Circle's co-founders, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton, Mae becomes "transparent," broadcasting her life 24/7 to the world. Soon she has eclipsed Annie and becomes the face of The Circle. Mae has everything she could possibly dream of, what could possibly go wrong?

The Circle is an interesting book to read because I think I can say that it's easily the most uneven book I've ever read with an ill-defined endgame. Because of my blog and how many books I review in a year I kind of get a sense while reading about what star rating a book will end up with but here I was flummoxed. The narrative is continually waffling between searing satire and heavy-handed often clumsy world commentary. If The Circle hadn't ended on just the right note that it did, with that perfect level of cynicism pushing it towards darkness, it would have been a fail. With literally one witch-hunt worthy of the Wicked Witch of the West and a two and a half page conclusion everything comes together and all the faults can be overlooked when you finally see the bigger picture. That ill defined bigger picture is so badly articulated until those final moments when you learn what the end goal of "closing the circle" is that The Circle is almost a book without a plot relying on vaguely interconnecting scenes and too much kayaking. While a book can be redeemed by it's ending, it's far more satisfying to have enough clues that give you a hint of what's to come without actually being able to put all the pieces together. Structure is important to all things in life, not just architecture!

What struck me most forcibly reading The Circle is how it resonates at the moment. This transparency of life is exactly the opposite to how we are currently living. The trolls of the Internet are everywhere, even in the highest office of the land, and they hide behind fake news and fake identities. Truth isn't actually something you hear very often anymore. Yet The Circle created TruYou, where your identity isn't just synced across all platforms, but that it's verified as actually being you, like Twitter verification to the umpteenth degree that has access to your credit cards. Everyone can be held accountable for everything they do. This is just such a weird polarity to living in a world where the president doesn't even want to be on camera for plausible deniability. And all this got me thinking, could what is happening now spawn a future like Dave Eggers has created? Will all these lies lead the coming younger generation, who are the early adapters of all tech, to force a TruYou situation? Which I personally think would be the other extreme. Just because it looks perfect doesn't mean it is, that's the whole point of dystopian literature, it's someones utopia.

And as we all know, utopia is heaven, and heaven is found through religion and the church, and oh yes, there are religious metaphors aplenty here. While the most obvious would be to see this as very much of the school of Scientology, I think it's more the school of Apple, or Google, or even, to go a little homegrown, Epic. All secretive organizations, all have vast sprawling campuses that encourage a community formed of your work colleagues, and all kind of indoctrinate you. Years ago a study was done on true Apple acolytes and under scientific observation they had the same reaction to seeing the Apple logo as true believers when show the cross. Eggers is on fire when he leans towards the dark humor. The book soars when comparing the three founders to the father, the son, and the holy ghost, or, as the case is here, an octopus, a shark, and a seahorse. Their inability to see who is the most dangerous of the three founders. The dark intents that "the son" has for the future. I just want to yell it from the rooftops that this is what works, this is what makes the book such an amazing read. But then Eggers comes along every once in awhile and goes all earnest and I want to smack him. Being earnest has no place in a dark satire, and those scenes when Mae is smiling or frowning at 50 million different "tweets" or posts while using so many screens it's almost incomprehensible I want to highlight them and ask Eggers to make the rest of the book like this.

Because whenever Mae has to deal with anything outside The Circle it's like a damp towel has been thrown over the book. Her off-campus life is painful to read. It's not just that there's no spark, no subversive humor, it's that it's too earnest. Mae dealing with her family and Mercer is painful. Yes, I know that this kind of needs to be the case. There needs to be a disconnect between her old world and her new world, but that doesn't mean it has to be so bleak. Her parents dealing with MS was almost too painful for me to read, and not just because I've spent this year suffering from caregivers syndrome, but because it didn't read true. It read as plot contrivances. We need Mae's parents to push her further into The Circle and Mercer to be the sacrifice that is the nail in Mae's coffin. But could they at least have been written better? This needed the polish that the rapid fire dialogues Mae has with her co-workers received. It just needed to be a piece with the rest of the book. THIS is what makes the book uneven. This disconnect between her two worlds, like trying to shove a FireWire cable into a USB port, and it needed to be addressed. As did Mae's love life, because Eggers sure doesn't know how to handle sex in a way that isn't clunky and unbelievable. But I'm willing to tackle one subject at a time.

For my final subject I will tackle tech. Technology is rapidly changing and each year that passes it speeds up more and more. By the time you buy a new phone or computer it's already obsolete. Just think about this, in my lifetime computers have gone from the size of large rooms to being able to be held in the palm of your hand and I'm not yet forty. And that computer in your hand is FAR more powerful than the one that took up a large room or perhaps even several buildings. Phones are now in our pockets instead of only in houses and on street corners. Therefore in the five years that have passed since The Circle was first released the leaps and bounds in tech have lead the amazing and revolutionary tech that Eamon Bailey introduces in his big presentation that Mae goes to laughably out of date. SeeChange, the streaming camera service that causes Mae so much grief but then makes her a celebrity is common now. When Bailey is talking about how crystal clear images can be I was thinking, yeah, just look at Netflix, or Hulu, or even Skype. This "revolutionary" tech is no longer so. Which makes me wonder about the longevity of The Circle. Will it somehow become a dystopian classic that looks back on a certain time with it's quaint tech or will it be forgotten? Personally, I think it will be forgotten. If you look at the classics of this genre there's a timelessness to them. While they may have been written in the 70s or the 80s they don't quite feel of that time but of all times. The Circle feels very much of one time and I fear it's time has already passed.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:01 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Annie Allerton, Apple, Dave Eggers, Dystopian, Dystopian Drama, Google, Holy Trinity, Kayaking, Mae Holland, Religion, Scientology, SeeChange, Technology, The Circle, The Wicked Witch, Timeless, Transparent, TruYou

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Published by: Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date: July 22nd, 1997
Format: Hardcover, 326 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Lyra followed her father across the bridge in the sky and lost him. There was a fog. A dense, impenetrable fog and she has found herself in a world with no one. The town she is in is deserted until one day Will shows up. Will is from an Oxford different than her own. His father was a great explorer and his mother is mentally ill. Will has been caring for his mother all his life since the disappearance of his father. Only now he and his mother are in danger. Men have broken into their house and are searching for something that his father left behind. He secrets his mother away and when he goes home to retrieve that which is sought he accidentally kills one of the intruders. On the run he sees a window into another world and climbs through and meets Lyra. They decide to join forces as the only outsiders in this weird little world they've found themselves in, which isn't empty after all. The town is run by gangs of children because the adults fled due to Spectres, dangerous beings that are invisible to children but destroy adults. The two kids go back and forth between Will's Oxford and Cittàgazze. Lyra is trying to learn about Dust and Will is trying to find his father. Lyra soon learns, thanks to nudges from the alethiometer, that perhaps her questions will be answered by helping Will find his father. Because as it turns out, his father might have played an important role in Lyra's life so far, as he one day found a window into another world like his son did and walked through, never looking back. But how are these windows even formed? Will will learn the hard way about the Subtle Knife, but it also means that in spite of the danger to him he can always go home.

If you're expecting The Subtle Knife to be a straightforward sequel to The Golden Compass you're in for a bit of a surprise. Yes, it is a continuation of Lyra's story, but perhaps not as anyone growing up reading the Harry Potter books would foresee. Harry Potter is always front and center, but here, Lyra takes a backseat. The spitfire we've grown to love has been drastically changed because of her father's betrayal and therefore it is up to the new character of Will to fill the void. While you could say that it's all about the balancing of these two characters, of male and female, I think the shifting of focus off Lyra might be more in the vein of another famous writer who dealt with church indoctrination, C.S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia pick up and drop the various Penvensies like they're going out of fashion, and while Pullman never deserts any of our beloved characters, they all have their specific heft depending on the book. And The Subtle Knife belongs to Will, and to a lesser but more emotionally charged way to Lee Scorsby the Texas aeronaut. This kind of results with the reader feeling a little alienated. We've fallen in love with this world and now we're back at square one. Even weirder, we're back in our own world. We have to rebuild our love of this expanding universe while our heroine is in shock. Because Lyra's absenting herself from steering the book makes sense when you think of the very real situation she is in. She's in shock from the death of her best friend Roger. She doesn't know what to do, she's just pinballing around looking for something, someone to rally around and she finds Will and makes him her new cause. Lyra is actively promoting Will while stifling her and Pan's voice.

This change up just adds to the fact that this book is suffering from typical "middle book" problems. Everyone has heard of middle child syndrome, but I think more people need to be aware of the problems inherent in middle books. Ah, the issues facing the bridging book of a trilogy... you need to make it interesting enough that people will wait with baited breath for the final volume, yet you must give them a story that holds up on it's own, while also having a satisfying ending. If you want a master class in a successful middle book look to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers or Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight or Galen Beckett's The House on Durrow Street. I could go on because when a middle book gets it right it just stays in your mind as being the exception to the rule. While The Subtle Knife does "technically" hold up on it's own, it's not due to any overarching story, it's due to little moments that take your breath away. Imagery that is unforgettable, while Pullman struggles with setting up all the pieces that will be needed for the epic conclusion. Lee Scorsby's last stand in that rocky gulch will just rip your heart out and put it back in all gritty and pained. The witches swirling through the sky, like the unforgettable illustrations of Adrienne Adams's A Woggle of Witches. The dangerous yet somehow ingenious heist of the alethiometer from the odious Sir Charles Latrom. These moments stick with you. I remembered these moments in all the years since I first read The Subtle Knife, but as for anything else like plot? It had slipped out of my head because of all those middle book issues... and worst of all Pullman decided to end the book on a major cliffhanger... sigh. You know, minor cliffhangers can be just if not more satisfying. They also don't alienate your readers.

While there are those who grow to love Will as much as Lyra, I have to say that I've always been on the fence about him. Yes, he has struggled, yes he has survived against the odds, and yes, he has a soft spot for cats, yet there was always something that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Until now. Will's mother is mentally ill. This isn't the problem, the problem is the way in which Philip Pullman describes Will's thoughts in regards to his mother. I don't know if Pullman is trying to show that Will is young and naive or if Pullman himself just doesn't get mental illness. And yes, there are people out there that try as they might just aren't able to comprehend what mental illness is in any form, from having it to dealing with someone who has it. Will is very straightforward about knowing that his mother's problems come from within, that there's something wrong. She obviously has OCD as well as other more serious problems yet when Will hears about the Spectres he starts to fantasize that somehow in his world, this world, that perhaps they are what cause mental illness. While yes, a child does dream of there being some external force that can be removed and their parent returned to normal, the actual belief wouldn't be there. Having spent a childhood growing up seeing those with problems and having OCD myself Will would never be this naive. What's more he describes what his mother does as just things she does, he never once focuses on the underlying compulsion. It's like a flip got switched in her and she does these things without any logic. But the truth is for the person suffering there is a logic, a drive. They might not want to do it, they might be fighting against it every step of the way, but Pullman just doesn't get this across. Mental illness becomes just another problem Will deals with instead of the horror it really is. Pullman trivializes it for his character's backstory.

I guess the reason the way Pullman handles mental illness annoys me is because he's dealing with such weighty issues, reconciling religion and science and yet he got something so wrong that can I trust his analysis of anything? This weird give and take between religion and science is one we have fought of centuries and which is sadly still being fought as Creationism is being taught again in many schools. Yet in Lyra's world experimental theology is what physics is in our world, indicating that there science and religion are more entwined and accepting of each other. As the series continues you see that yes, it is the battle between free thought and that of indoctrination but it's not so clear cut as The Magisterium would want you to think. And yes, this book is taking many ideas and bringing them together for you to think about, especially the fall of man as Milton depicted it in Paradise Lost, but to me, at this point in the series, it almost feels as if Pullman isn't sure what his side is. Both sides have committed atrocities in his narrative, yet we have yet to learn what is the truth. Because this is fiction, while we might speculate day and night and a book that leads to a good discussion is the friend of all book lovers and book clubs everywhere, we still need to know where Pullman's opinion lies. Did God create the universe or did science? This needs to be stated. Clearly. And it wasn't here. Here we suffer once again from middle book issues and have to wait. Sometimes I just want to find authors and shake them. As I write this I'm about a third of the way through The Amber Spyglass and the truth has been revealed and with that revelation I wonder why he waited. Yes, he's created a big set piece with it, so it would have made this book a little longer. But some of the building blocks were in place and a touch more foreshadowing might have made this book a more satisfying read.

But life isn't about satisfaction most of the time. Life is about just living day to day wondering about the mysteries of the universe that if we think too long on we'll be right there with Will's mom. Yet in the end I keep coming back to the more supernatural elements of this story, the fantastical, the prophetic. The witches. The witches have a prophecy that Lyra will be the end of fate by initiating the second fall of man. Here's the thing though, how is there really fate in this "world" that Pullman has built. Prophecies are all nice and good but he's clearly shown us that the multiple worlds theory is at play here and that each and every decision creates a different universe that has splintered off. Therefore everything is possible and everything IS happening at the same time. In a multiverse where everything is possible how exactly does prophecy come into play? Is it just for this ONE Lyra and this ONE Will? If something happened to them could Lord Asriel or Mrs. Coulter or the church go to another universe and nudge that other Lyra or Will into line with what they want? I get that this is a multiverse changing war that's on the horizon, but if everything is possible at all times yet you need a certain chain of events to happen how do you do this? It's almost too hard to reconcile these opposing ideas. So Lyra will end fate. What does that mean? I mean, really, how is fate possible in these books? It could be possible if the worlds were self contained. But travel between them is possible, so then what? Again, middle book issues! It's like he just threw everything at this book and figured he'd work it all out in the end. The problem I have is can he actually work it all out? I seriously don't remember from when I first read this series!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Different Kind of P and P, C.S. Lewis, His Dark Materials, Lee Scoresby, Lyra Belacqua, Mental Illness, Philip Pullman, Religion, Science, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, Will Parry, Witches, Worldbuilding

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Published by: Vintage
Publication Date: March 19th, 1999
Format: Paperback, 448 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

On New Year's Eve 1974 Archie Jones sets out to kill himself but ends up being unsuccessful, yet like a butterfly leaving the cocoon, he leaves that gas filled car a new man. A new life and a new wife await him! His old army buddy Samad Iqbal has been saying to him for awhile that what he needs is a new young wife, like his own Alsana. That night Archie meets Clara Bowden and by Valentine's Day they are man and wife. Archie is escaping the life left in that car and Clara is escaping her mother, Hortense, whose religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness have stifled Clara's life. It isn't long before the middle aged men are fathers. Archie has a lovely daughter, Irie, and Samad has twins boys, Magid and Millat, who couldn't be more different.

It is 1984 and now Samad's life is about to change forever. He falls hard for his son's music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. The lust stirred in Samad has him questioning everything. But the attraction is mutual, and soon he has a new outlet for his lust. Yet his religious beliefs and the sin he is committing because, as he claims, the lure of the Western world has seduced him, leads him to do something that his wife will never forgive him for. He feels that if he could be degraded in this way, his sons are in even worse danger. He wants to send them back to Bangladesh, but only has the financial resources to send one of them. Magid and Millat are separated and Alsana can never forgive him until Magid is returned to her.

The 90s have come and Irie is grown up and in love with Millat. Millat has indeed fallen prey to the lure of the West as his father feared. He sleeps around, does drugs, gets into fights, and is still somehow the object of Irie's affection, which he doesn't return. One day at school Irie is confronting Millat near resident nerd Josh Chalfen when there is a drugs bust. The three of them get brought before the principal for Millat's marijuana. In the hope that Josh and his illustrious family, his mother Joyce is an author while his father Marcus is a genetic engineer, will be a good influence on Irie and Millat they are to go to the Chalfens once a week and have Josh tutor them. Soon it's everyday. Joyce takes an extreme interest in Millat while Irie starts to work for Marcus as an assistant. Even Magid, back in Bangladesh, befriends Marcus and decides to return to England. But the life of Chalfenism is divisive, and soon Josh has joined an animal rights group, FATE, to protest his father's genetic engineering of FutureMouse, while Millat has joined a fundamentalist Islamic group, KEVIN, to turn his back on his old life and the fact that Marcus prefers Magid. On the eve of the new millennium, everyone gathers to herald the arrival of FutureMouse... most with differing ideas as to how the evening will go.

From the little blurb I have assembled above you might be drawn to the false conclusion that this book actually has a plot. It doesn't. Well... it kind of does at the very end where Zadie Smith apparently realized she needed one and just threw in a handful of new characters and a whole bunch of organizations with stupid acronyms and built words into an unsatisfying conclusion with guns and Nazis and genetically engineered mice. That is right, she brought in Nazis. And I think that's the problem, she brought in whatever she wanted randomly and then just threw it aside when she got bored. Though she never seemed to get bored of slightly tweaking the reader with little asides in some random post modern moments of incomprehensibility. So the book actually feels like a bunch of interconnected short stories, some of which might have been good if they hadn't been thrown in with the morass of crap and depravity that makes up the majority of this book.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend and she asked me if I had read Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I replied that I had, mainly because it was a loosely, if failed, reimagining of Howards End, and was mentioned on The Vicar of Dibley. She was wondering if I was put off by the very detailed descriptions of one of the character's nipples. I honestly said that I had no recollection of this, most likely I had blocked it from my memory. I can honestly say though, after reading White Teeth, I will never forget Zadie Smith's obsession with nipples ever again. In fact, this book can be summed up as very boring with a veneer of eww. If I wasn't bored senseless I was quite literally wanting to throw up. Thirty pages of a 57 year old man masturbating (a different friend claims it might have been more, perhaps I'm preemptively blocking this out). Domestic abuse, where the children are placing bets on their parents. Teenagers marrying men in their 40s (proving Smith has daddy issues). A father of Irie's classmate calling her a big black goddess and ruminating about her breasts, when she's only what, fourteen! The aforementioned nipples, except for multiple characters, not just one. I wanted to wash my brain after reading this book.

Now, you're thinking that I missed the point, that the book wasn't about these accumulated repugnant and repulsive moments. I totally get that the book is about heritage and ancestry and genetics and what limitations we are burdened with, nature, nurture, fate. The second generation versus the first generation. You would have to be blind to miss this, especially once we get to FutureMouse. But the truth is, I can't, I couldn't, give a tinker's damn. It doesn't matter if you set out to write the most amazing, most profound story, if your characters are not only unlikeable, but reprehensible, then there is no way I will care. With all this ick as I will pejoratively call everything in this book, there wasn't a redeemable character or any reason to even finish reading this book except for the fact that I am incapable of leaving a book unfinished. So I finished. I read ever last work Smith wrote and I hated it. Mine is an educated hate, you can't say fairer than that!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Acronyms, Ancestral, E.M. Forster, Eww, FutureMouse, Genetic Engineering, Howards End, Jehovah's Witness, Masturbation, Nazis, On Beauty, Pedophile, Religion, Vicar of Dibley, White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Daughter of Mystery (Alpennia Book 1) by Heather Rose Jones
Published by: Bella Books
Publication Date: February 18th, 2014
Format: Paperback, 264 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Margerit Sovitre is in her first season. Though she'd rather be spending her time on scholarly pursuits in Rotenek than dancing in the summer playground of the rich in Chalanz. But she's never even been to Rotenek. Never walked the fabled streets of the University there. She's spent her life in Chalanz with her Uncle's family, always feeling out of place except for those rare moments talking to her cousin Nikule about the University and forming unrealistic dreams. But all that might be about to change. Her enigmatic godfather has arrived in Chalanz early. There are rumors about a duel that made it desirable that he leave Rotenek early; but more pressingly it is obvious he is dying. Margerit knows that she has a small inheritance coming her way that might get her out from under her Uncle's power, but during his last days on earth she forges a connection to Baron Saveze and he leaves her everything that he can; which is quite a lot. No one knows why he did this. Was it a whim to anger his nephew Estefen who inherited the title and has spent his life borrowing on his expectations? Was it to give Margerit the life she always wanted? Whatever the reason it upends the lives all those connected to the Baron, in particular Barbara.

Barbara is also an enigma, even to herself. But then again the Baron loves his games of secrets and shadows. She was raised by the Baron to be an Armin, a bodyguard with special skills and rights. Though female Armins are rare the Baron got away with this breach in tradition by his eccentric lifestyle. But they had an arrangement, when he died Barbara would learn her name and gain her freedom. Instead he has given her to Margerit and insisted that she remain with his goddaughter until they are both of age. What at first seems like an unholy punishment soon becomes a new way of life as Barbara becomes close to the scholarly Margerit. Margerit's fortune means that she will be able to have the life she dreamt of, with Barbara's help. While maintaining the appearance of a respectable heiress for her family's sake she can studying to her heart's desire. Though the money is a temptation to desperate men, and there is none more desperate than Estefen. Moving her household to Rotenek, Margerit starts studying the mysteries all while playing the game of disaffected debutante. Though as time goes by her scholarly side keeps asserting itself. Will her studies put her in even greater danger? It's lucky she has Barbara to protect her, even from herself.

Ruritanian Romances are tricky. They have to strike just the right balance of realism and suspension of disbelief. Couple this with worldbuilding that has an alternate history that is not clearly defined and you're stuck with a book that you're struggling to connect to. The main problem I had was this disconnect between Alpennia and the rest of Europe. With the religious practices and the magic that takes the forms of mysteries appealing to the saints Alpennia has a very distinct and unique culture. Yet there are constant references to mysteries written elsewhere, like Lyon in France. So how exactly is the world outside Alpennia different from the world of our history books? Alpennia being at one and the same time a part of our world yet outside of it how are we to grasp onto what has actually changed in our world for the alternate history angle? There seems to be a distinct lack of creating a framework for the worldbuilding in which we'd be given the information when we need it most. While this could be done to have us form a bond with the characters first and the world second, you can't understand what the characters are going through unless you know the world they live in.

I almost feel like Daughter of Mystery was at a disadvantage by being a Ruritanian Romance. I have too many questions that are left unanswered, whereas if Alpennia had been in an entirely alternate world that mirrored our own, then I would certainly have less questions. But it's not just the Ruritanian aspect I have problems with. Heather Rose Jones has an odd way of writing that adversely affects the worldbuilding. Her writing is very elliptical and what she is omitting isn't for clarity's sake! It's like she just didn't want to write about something and decides to skip it. And what she skips seems like some rather important stuff. For example we spend all this build-up to Margerit's ball she's throwing in Chalanz only to not see a single moment of the ball. And this example is just a throw-away example, it's not necessary to the world like many of the omissions are. When she arrives in Rotenek I felt at sea. As for the academics? I kind of just let it flow over me and took in what I could. Because to balance her sparsity she occasionally goes for the massive info dump. This is almost worse than nothing, because then you know there's all this stuff you should remember but it was presented in such a way that you have no chance in hell of remembering a tenth of it.

For all the worldbuilding issues I did come to like the world, despite it's imperfections. The truth is, if you're looking for the "Regency" of it all, you're not really going to find it here. Instead, in true Ruritanian style, we have intrigue and high romance and royalty worthy of the House of Medici or The Musketeers. There is this old fashioned feel to it that harks back to the Renaissance, when learning was a vocation, and I really found this fascinating, in the same way a Patrick Rothfuss book is. The truth is Daughter of Mystery doesn't really coalesce as a book until we reach Rotenek and we're in this medieval town with duplicitous scholars and scheming courtiers. Though again, what is almost the most perfect section of the book is brought down, not this time by the structure, but by how the court intrigues ensnare Barbara. For the first time in the book I was furious at Barbara. Yes, you can see why she's doing what she's doing, but her motives aren't explained properly to Margerit and it looks as if the court has turned Barbara's head. I mean, yes, you could say, as if anything could turn Barbara's stubborn head? But it seems to be done just to make us doubt the connection and love our two heroines share. It feels like a cheap shot. Yes, Barbara can navigate this world expertly, but that doesn't mean she should.

This being "Regency Magic" though the magic of it all matters. I can definitively say that not another book I've read has handled magic in this manner. Not only does that make Daughter of Mystery unique, but fascinating as you delve into the magic system. Because the magic system isn't magic, per se, it's faith manifested as miracles. But it's also not as reliable a system, as shown through Margerit's studies. Not every prayer is heard. Mysteries are complex and a word replaced could change the intent and instead of protecting an entire town only the relics of a long dead saint are protected. It's a capricious system that is itself mysterious. Learning with Margerit we see what works and what doesn't, we are with her on her journey as she systematically learns how to work mysteries. I also just like the idea that magic is referred to as mysteries, because they are both about deception and illusion. But as seems to be the case with this book, now I have more question I need answered. For example, religious persecution. Witch hunts were often done in the name of faith, so in this Alpennian world are witches outcasts? Because usually people who see visions aren't treated that well... so what's the stance? Also, is it because of the mysteries that religion is still such a strong force? Because I'd expect the church's hold to eroded a bit by now. Perhaps The Mystic Marriage will answer some of these questions for me...

But the "mysteries" ie, magic, aren't the only mysteries in this book. And these other mysteries are much more problematical. While yes, I could have liked a better understanding of the mysteries of the church, they at least weren't pedestrian and predictable. They actually had some mystery about them. As for Barbara's mysterious past... well, Poirot would have been laughing to think that anyone would have found it not patently obvious. Barbara isn't a dumb woman. She is in fact very smart and has a lot of cunning to go along with her other more physical skills. To think that she has spent years and years with the answer under her nose makes no sense. Yes, she worked for a secretive man, but would she really rely on his word that one day she would know as good enough? No, she wouldn't. It just doesn't make sense. It's literally a mystery to me! It doesn't make sense that the only reason she looks into her own mystery is because of the threat it poses to Margerit. I don't think she needed love to have her face her past, her own natural curiosity should have done that. As for the mystery as to whether they love each other, I will answer with duh. While yes, I could say that these contradictions make Barbara more human, instead I'll say it makes her fickle and Margerit did have every reason to worry about being left behind. So yes Barbara, you inadvertently knocked this book down, and for someone so graceful I find that quite shocking. Also you're not mysterious, you're just eccentric.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alpennia, Armin, Daughter of Mystery, France, Heather Rose Jones, Inheritance, Lyon, Magic, Medici's, Musketeers, Mysteries, Poirot, Regency Magic, Religion, Ruritanian Romance, The Mystic Marriage, Worldbuilding