Growing up in a cult, Hough’s uses an examination of her past trauma as an intersectional interrogation of American values, prejudice, heteronormativity, queerness, and many other things. Some inadvertent topics too, I’d argue. Such as how internalized patriarchal concepts enable people to spot those traumatized for further abuse and manipulation. Her lived experience is pretty much the embodiment of this.

From being jailed by her abusive ex for shoving her, completely deriding the small amount of agency she’d accrued after being dispatched by the airforce for “admission of being gay”—the papers of which follow an individual more-or-less like a felony (after she’d been exonerated of a crime she couldn’t have been committed in military court)—to living in abject poverty, Hough details various life events that shape her, and further strike the themes running through her stories.

The schizophrenia of western culture parallels these events. Systemic issues in every facet of interactions with people, especially the disenfranchised, and the disturbing problem we have in constructing belief systems that are just as messed up as the cult she was indoctrinated into.

Sometimes resistance is simply survival in such a society, and we ought to celebrate that more in others, rather than internalized capitalistic ideas.

As far as craft goes, I listened on audio and that makes it so much more difficult to gauge prose. It was engaging, decently narrated, but not stand out. There are a couple quotable lines that were particularly well done, but otherwise it’s a steam or consciousness that, when exceptional, means you just don’t notice it. I’m sure it’s technically difficult to pull if, but neither is it as impactful as different stylistic choices. The pacing was good; never overstaying it’s welcome. Themes are particularly fantastic and of note, interwoven and made real with a lived experience narrative.

It’s an impressive achievement that exceeded my expectations. I do think the stylistic choice for the prose will put some people off, or else really click with others. Kind of like Virgina Woolf does.

Some parts of this felt really contrived, but there are some great moments as well and I liked how inclusive it was and how they each have inverted gender characteristics they like about each other.

4.5. I don’t know why I chose this as my first Oates book. I have others that are more popular and highly rated and shorter. Whatever drove me to pick this up first, I’m happy for it.

The events in this book are wonderfully realized. Ostensibly, this is a mystery. When a young girl in a tight knit town goes missing, everything seems to point to a veteran who once was engaged to her older sister, but are now estranged as he’s been hurt in his two tours overseas.

Hurt is the through line here. Surrounding the disappearance and the mystery, Carthage jumps around often, occupying family and community and beyond to shape the contours of its story. The format produces transcripts of conversations and letters, sometimes mixed with accompanying thoughts from the point of view character, sometimes just a document itself. The result is a vivid character study and a thorough examination of a historic event for said characters. The ripples of which are similarly traced into the future, rendering the hurt across time, rooting it in place, complex and dynamic psychology, long-term effects, and stark contradictions.

I think plot fiends are the ones that must have driven the rating for this book so far down. It would feel meandering if it wasn’t so methodical and explicit in its goals to elucidate the
systemic issues in American society (Western culture writ large). Blame isn’t so much a thing to be assigned, as it is in most genre fiction that people may conflate this with, it’s a subject to be examined along with the disappearance itself. How useful is it? How do we arrive at it? Who gets to assign it? A normal production would point to a person and say, ‘There. That’s the one responsible.’ And the book would be over. Here it’s a good start, but we can do better.

This is almost a reverse engineering of a crime. And how did we get here? And where and how and what do we do with that contemporary hurt?

Craft-wise, I was particularly struck by the foreshadowing. Oates notices and points to—correctly, I think—how much influence those around us have. There are seemingly throw away lines of dialogue that show the dynamics of the relationship. Especially initially, with the family interactions between the two daughters, father, and mother. The father throws cruel castaway comparisons between his daughters and peacocks in a way that is both charming in a men-who- are-socialized-Correctly-will-like-this-man-kind-of-way, but is actually clearly toxic and, sadly, formative for his children. Those callously dropped lines have a ring of truth to me, because all people I know similarly wield their influence like this. They drop bomb-like words that lift or crush and imagine the responsibility is on the listener; unable to empathize with those they speak with. Characters in Carthage spout truisms that, if one could snatch them from the air to examine, similarly indict the systems we’ve erected to help us, but actually beat us bloody daily.

The prose and sentence-by-sentence text is engaging and similarly methodical. It won’t be for everyone, but even when it’s annoying repetitive, it’s in service to the psychology of the character. It’s pretty singular and interesting seeing Oates’ voice fill a person up. There’s a chameleon quality to it. Intelligence matched to diction and unusual cadences wrapped up in neurosis. All of them topped to the brim with humanity. Everyone is shitty and everyone is generous and kind. In a story where you expect to presented with someone to hate, what do you do when you understand every variable and aspect of those involved?

You’re left with the impeccable themes to contemplate, as well as an interiority that manifests from occupying other people so fully human.

Elle, a 50 year old married mother of two, slides into an easy dalliance with a partner of tangled history that reaches back to the burgeoning ecology of the summer cottages at which the indiscretion takes place. The event spirals Elle into a confluence of memory as she struggles to make sense of her choice, and what it means for everyone going forward.

We jump back and forth in time; as far back as Elle’s childhood and coming-of-age. It’s Jonah’s history we are seeing too. Not rendered and framed quite so vividly as Elle, as we stick with her as the sole perspective, but all the same, what occurs in the present seems inevitable and irrevocable.

Craft-wise, this book is brilliant in its specificity, diction, and plot beats within scenes, other books feels like an old Polaroid still being developed, shaken impatiently, whereas this emerges seemingly fully formed, ostensibly without effort. The interactions between people, especially the body language is sometimes so detailed in its choreography that the memory becomes a truism. The dialogue is biting and meaningful, often serving as a coda to the nature of people being expressed already. The effect is staggering and unique.

It also made me think a lot about Donna Tartt’s books. Where a secret often defines a person. Maps out their life so completely, the rest feels like fate. The cruelty experienced by other people, and how it’s internalized, ultimately, and unfortunately, is most often the one true thing that changes them. Peripheral decisions are often a desperate attempt at staving off inner nature, and tend to fade. It’s the secret inside that maneuvers our thoughts and actions. But we struggle as best we can.

And so, as are all the best novels, I find, they become, in their specificity, about everyone. Imminently relatable, compelling, and beautiful, this one is shelved in my all time favourites.

DNF 29%. Dark fantasy, I feel, needs better writing than average and a more socially aware person. Because otherwise it’s just the same tired posturing to make it “dark”. More often it seems like short hand for the writer to put in content that isn’t pertinent to the plot, but signals their perception of “realism” and the crueler aspects of life. Of course this just means sexual assault and violence against women are normalized but it’s okay because it’s daaaark.

As such, dark fantasy is just trite to me. And this is sadly no different.

The setup is somewhat interesting, with the death of the emperor and the children trying to unmask assassins. But in reality it’s mostly military fiction, something I don’t get on with either, usually, and so coupled with the, you’re being trained to be a Real warrior/man stuff, I’m just not finding anything to like about this one.

The only dark fantasy I’ve been impressed with are the Second Apocalypse books, which have the “dark” outlook and tropes, but use them as an allegory to communicate that misogyny (literally) destroys the world.

Meanwhile in this book during a 2v2 training exercise, in which platoons are watching, a woman is tricked into falling and the rival thinks it’s funny to make her mad by sexually assaulting her, which nobody does anything about except her sparring partner and narrator, who is made to feel bad because he can’t get to her and save her and he failed.

Aren’t we passed this yet? I sure am.

While I’m not a fan of the style of prose, I do very much prefer it when an author writes a story that communicates something of themselves. And memory is a fascinating subject. One I return to over and over again myself, and feels like a enduring question ingrained in the life cycle of amy given human. Musings like this, when I was young, probably would have seemed ludicrous.

But the older one gets the more self evident it becomes that memory is not at all as you believe it to be when you’re growing up. So many things alter it and I have many of the same feelings about memory as are codified in this book.

In a way, that is precisely what failed to connect for me, though. If you seek out stories about memory, as I have, for a long time, it feels like these revelations have lost their lustre. So while I connected at a meta level as like-recognizes-like, at the authorial-reader level, the story itself felt like walking a far too familiar path. The ending is similarly perfunctory if you pay attention.

It’s interesting being frustrated with a protagonist, and I think it could have formed a better bond, had the prose not been preoccupied with concrete steam or consciousness with no time or place or anything active. And so, because Tony “just doesn’t get it”, and his perception of the world is so ineffectual, it was hard for me to care about him and his story. Other than as a warning about motivation thinking, but that’s the retread path.

If I had to try to describe exactly why it’s not 3 stars and not 5 stars, I’d compare it to a family member—probably an uncle or a father—telling you a story you’ve heard many times, but they continue, for whatever reason, to tell the tale (perhaps without remembering who they’ve told it to) again and again and again. It’s not that it’s a bad story. It’s well told and you have new context every time you hear it, to some degree. But you do already know it, the way it will be told, and you know that at some point you’ll be hearing this story again. Possibly soon.

There is some interesting aspects to this book: The concept is pretty interesting and intersectional from a genre standpoint. There’s a lot of knowledge about Cambridge as a place being conveyed, some of which I found fascinating (if true).

The rest feels a bit too commercial fiction to me, though. The pacing feels really slow, especially when coupled with serviceable but uninteresting prose. The characters are fine, but there’s no development that feels substantive or substantial. Overall, I’d describe it as just kind of bland, with large Show Don’t Tell problems, despite some compelling elements to the story.

I think that had the craft been more refined it could have been a story with a lot more vibrancy.

Incredibly cohesive as a collection, far better than most, I’d argue. Interesting characters and themes, deeply rooted in family and community and nourishment and hypocrisy. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, always in a humanizing, though. It does feel unique and interesting when looked at from the outside, with the full context of each story.

But while those components really worked for me, the prose and voice itself didn’t grab me. It’s hard to codify because I listened to the audiobook. Maybe the cadence of the writing was meant to be read, or maybe I just didn’t get on with the narrator; I’m not entirely sure. But whatever the reason, I found it hard to keep my attention. Might just be the diction; without active language my mind tends to wander.

Small town dynamics, prejudice, misconceptions, and yearnings are slowly revealed when a girl goes missing. A thread, it turns out, then when tugged begins to unravel unexpected knots in the small community.

Interestingly, this was heavily character driven, but mostly unconcerned with character arcs. That doesn’t mean there’s no development though. As the narrative skips around from a man who moves into a now committed spinsters home, said old lady herself, and the younger sister of the girl who disappears, we begin to get a larger picture of the town and its sordid past.

I really liked the juxtaposition between the old woman’s thoughts and the child; especially the child, I think. Kids see and connect far more than we give them credit for. In a household where they have to take care of themselves, even more so. I liked that this view was depicted as valid as it was. Three different generations; three different POVs; all uniquely living with invisible splinters that cause them constant emotional pain.

Slow paced, almost meditative. Not particularly concerned with plot, despite a fairly Big Bang of an inciting incident. I really liked that this subverted my expectations constantly. And the divergence doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, either. It’s short and thoughtful, highlighting the odd and savagery of society, without somehow not being mired in the darkness whatsoever. It’s a book that I think would benefit from a reread, where expectations are more aligned with what it actually is.

This was almost a 4 star book for me. The nice thing is that everything has to be explained this time, and in a very real way it works as a counterbalance to the very first Dune book.

The through line, Those That Do Not Know History Are Doomed To Repeat It, is predominate (finally) and you can really see in hindsight the overall structural accomplishment of the meta plot, which is really, really satisfying for me. When you aren’t stuck in each books A plot, which I felt were all fairly simplistic and widely varying in quality, you do see the accomplishment and overarching principles Herbert was actually to communicate. Things like Preserving actual history; the larger, sort of movements of humanity interrogates as an entity; the terror of living a life from a singular viewpoint because we simply can’t know what we don’t know, and how what we now call Motivated Thinking can be applied to every faction and component that comprise these overall movements of mankind are also divorced from moral absolutism.

Yet, these larger concepts are also really frustrating because in order to get these things you still have to experience plots that are by necessity myopic. And within these smaller frameworks there are antiquated notions like genre and sexuality and things we know about socialization and various other aspects of identity that clash against the various human civilizations. Even when the narrative tries to celebrate women it does so in a sexist way. That’s probably a product of the time it was written in. It’s nice to think that Herbert would have written it differently had all the science of today been available; had even the Internet been a thing to utilize for such a sprawling epic.

But it wasn’t. And as a result, within this plot and all the others, there’s a hobbling of suspension of the necessary suspension of disbelief for sci-fi stories to work. It’s their buttressing. And it isn’t present here; sometimes bordering on the comical. People bonding forever to each other because they fuck, for instance, feels antiquated as hell, engineered for each other or not. Terminology and names and the actual array of time and space similarly feels like it’s devoid of technological progress and birth rates; essentially anything that isn’t in service to the larger concepts is more-or-less handwaved. The only buttressing here is those things Herbert was expressing and believed to be true regarding people, as a whole.

If you can get past that then each individual story has some merit and I was able to appreciate each. The culmination of the previous book especially was what brought me to the meeting of my expectations threshold here. It’s an open ended send off, sure. But it does finish the larger context and humanization of each necessary viewpoint. And for once, a lot actually happens and it is maybe the only book that doesn’t feel devoid of context from the empire or surrounding worlds. The dialogue is still a bit melodramatic for my taste, but it felt more tight to me. Pacing felt better than the previous; miles better than God Emperor.

Overall, I liked it for what it said about the philosophical underpinnings and larger mechanizations, which is how I’ve felt every single book. And thinking back on the entire series, to be honest, the moment that had stuck with me the most is one from the very first book, despite the fact that I actually might like Messiah the most out of all of them.

“I knew Jamis. He taught me that when you kill, you pay for it…”