strange and random happenstance: Whorehouse

Fever (The Chemical Garden Book 2) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: February 21st, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Rhine is free of her husband, but there is more then one kind of prison as she is quick to learn as she and Gabriel are captured by a madame who runs a carnival inside a wickedly electrified fence. Rhine and Gabriel are trying to get to New York from Florida and have only made it as far as South Carolina before their luck starts to run out. Kept in a drugged state, the two of them perform for madame's customers, hoping that they can break free and find Rhine's brother Rowan. But once free of the carnival they face more horrors then they can imagine, all with Rhine's father-in-law quick on their heels. Stowing away on trucks, Angel Blood withdrawal, unexpected comrades, creepy men, snatchers, danger at every corner with no money and no food. Rhine is starting to realize just how naive she was in thinking that she just had to get away from her husband's house, because his reach is far. Can she ever escape the marriage she was forced into and go back to her old life?

Never in all my years of reading books has a series gone to the bad so fast and so irrevocably. I might point a figure at Mary Norton and her Borrowers, but that was more her tendency to drop plot points and start each book from scratch then writing a hot mess that is just shit. If this series had been just content to leave well enough alone ending with just the right amount of hope and ambiguity with Wither then I'd be all for DeStefano. As it stands, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with a series that started out so uniquely and so strongly and having it turn so unoriginal, disjointed, dark, and dare I say, predictable?

Was this really how the series was outlined? Because Wither clearly states it's book one in a trilogy... so, seriously, this was the plan? THIS? I am just baffled. Fever has no identity, no core of originality, it quite literally doesn't know what it wants to be so it tries to be everything and fails at it all... it just has so many random dystopian tropes thrown into it that my head wants to explode. The impossible love story, evil carnies, the dying hooker with the heart of gold, the sad little crippled girl who everyone underestimates... blurg. When the book eventually got to the "good" orphanage, I expected a medley from Annie to be sung. Just no.

Yet Rhine is the biggest shock of all. She came across as a unique and intelligent, if confused, girl in Wither. What the hell happened? Now she's all naivete and seriously stupid. It seems as if once Gabriel and Rhine left the house they lost their identities in the process and became bumbling idiots. Rhine grew up on the streets of New York. She had to have been street savvy and smart to avoid capture all these years. The only reason she got caught was because it was a fake job set-up, not because she was dumb enough to be pulled off the street our dragged out of her home. Heck, her and her brother killed the last man who invaded their house! Yet outside Linden's estate, oh gosh, let's steal this boat, oh dear, we don't have money, shucks, we've been captured by an evil madame who runs a carnival and is going to turn us into sex salves... say what!?!

Rhine had how many freakin' months planning this escape and she didn't think to, oh, I don't know, steal a whole heck of a lot of the jewelry Linden gave her and hide it under her clothes to fund their flight? And how about not stealing a boat that can only run on fuel, I thought Gabriel knew about boats, so get something with a sail as well as a motor idiots. Oh, and yes Rhine, Gabriel is in love with you and wants something more, so stop acting like it's a shock, you do know what goes on behind closed doors, or in tents... and of course Vaughn put a tracker in your leg, before the wedding he obviously examined you to see if you could bare children, it only makes sense that he would tag you as the cattle he views you are.

Fever seems to take, not just one step back from the progress it made on women's rights and personal liberties, but it seems to jump off a cliff. Wither smartly showed us a world of exploitation and horrors that was relatable and fascinating, but never stooped to sensationalism. Everything had it's reason, everything was there for a purpose, to show us how the three wives coped, to show us what captivity did to Rhine's state of mind, everything in it's perfect place giving us a compelling narrative. Yet here it seems that the book has shifted away from the exploration of these salient arguments and instead has embraced exploitation.

The sex carnival seems to be not there for a discussion on the personal liberties of brides versus whores, but to my mind, there just for sensation, to make us shocked. Therefore all the good the first book has done is ripped down with shock for shocks sake with no insight, no deeper meaning. The sex and drugs that Rhine was previously exposed to were a creepy background threat lurking in the shadows, here the sex and drugs come forefront and are exploitative, and not in any way that is good or open for discussion. Seriously, a prostitution carnival? Just, no.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Angel Blood, Annie, Carnival, Chemical Garden Trilogy, Fever, Lauren DeStefano, Linden, Mary Norton, Rhine, Summer Series, The Borrowers, Whorehouse, Wither

The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin
Published by: Harper
Publication Date: January 21st, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Anna Madrigal senses her time is coming. She has lived a long and blessed life and has surrounded herself with her logical family, but it might be time to leave them soon. Though there is something in her past, out there in the shadows of the whorehouse where she grew up a he, out in Winnemucca that must be laid to rest before she is. The mass exodus of San Francisco to Nevada takes the disparate souls in different directions. Michael, Ben, Shawna, Jake, and a few surprising others are head to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, while Brian, his new wife Wren, and Anna are headed to Winnemucca. Will their journeys be transformative? Anything might happen in a world where we just follow the road laid out before us to the life we're meant to lead.

Even though Barbary Lane is long gone, sold off by Anna Madrigal, returning to the Tales of the City books is like checking in with long lost friends. They might have moved, they might have aged, but they are still your family. While I didn't really discover these books till recent years, I feel like I have known the characters all my life... so it was hard to say goodbye. The truth is, I really don't want to let them go, but I will always admire an author who decides when to end a series properly versus having the decision forced on him by time or circumstances. That being said, I didn't really like the ending because it wasn't really an ending at all. I get that Maupin is trying to mirror life and life doesn't have neat little endings tied up with a bow. But despite the roman à clef nature of these books, they are books. I personally like a little bit of bow tying in my books. Just a little...

Anna Madrigal, that mysterious anagram, has always been the locus of this rag tag group. With her getting ready to go it makes sense that now is the time to let go gracefully, and thankfully for us she gets ready to go in style, unlike the medical crises that marred the endings of the previous two books. We learn more about Anna's past then we ever could have hoped for. She has always been an enigma, little bits and pieces of her life hinted at here and there. While the picture is not complete, there is a feeling that we know all the secrets that she is willing to part with. Also, I love how Maupin handled the infamous anagram. In a strange twist of fate "Anna Madrigal" can be rearranged to form "a man and a girl." This was unintentional on Maupin's part, and while I liked this little take on happenstance giving us an answer, I never thought that this was the real reason for Anna choosing this name. While it might have been felicitous, it never felt like the truth, just another half truth from Mrs. Madrigal's lips. Finding the truth out after all this time... it was satisfying. Perhaps that was my bow...

But what has always made these books appealing to me is that the characters feel like family that are giving you a glimpse of a different life to your own, a chance to connect with different people and experiences, and vicariously live through them, and yes, they do satisfy a deep seeded need of mine to go back to San Francisco. In particular regard to this newest book I'm actually not talking about San Francisco, I'm talking about Burning Man. Sometime when I was in college I first heard about Burning Man, mainly because my friend Orelia was going one year and I vaguely remembered a TA of mine talking about it as well. Seemed like an interesting concept, didn't really leave much impact on me other then I knew a few people who went and loved it. Years have gone by and even more people I know have gone, so, I'm a little more interested, but that's about all, I have a vague idea of what goes on, but other then that, it's peripheral to my life, I'm interested in blog posts about outfits people are making, but, whatever.

Enter The Days of Anna Madrigal. For the first time in my life I get it, I understand Burning Man. Maupin placed me there on the playa with the alkali flats and the dust swirling around me so that I can't even see. I can see why it would appeal to him and how the world created there has the same twists of fate and bizarre coincidences that his world in Tales of the City has always embodied. I also love that it is an event that celebrates creation and makers. Art that is made just to be made, it's the act that is important, not the finished product. This experience I was vicariously living showed me just how opposite this world is to my own. I try to live in a very organized, clean, structured world that relies more on the end result of my labors then the labor itself. I have tried to open myself up to other experiences, art forms, like letterpress, wherein the act of creating is just as important as what you create. But at the end of the day, I liked having this experience from a distance. This is an experience I realized I can do without in my life, much like Michael learned. But am I different from learning about it? Yes I am. But you can call me Couch Lady.