In 2095 we follow a cyborg named Nephilim, groomed from birth to be a hunter-killer for a mega corporation. They’ve colonized her body, indoctrinated her with company thinking and ideology, and inducted her their puritanical angelic hierarchy. Things take a turn when she goes on a mission and kills two guardians, possibly mothers, of a small community of people off-grid. When the kids look at her like she’s a monster, she starts having doubts. And in the company, doubts can, and often do, get you killed.

I had to put this aside at 16% in unfortunately. I didn’t feel like there was any work done in the setup to cause this cascade failure of her ideology. It’s alluded to that many of the missions are run. This isn’t her first time. The kids don’t confront her at all. What, specifically, is haunting her? It feels like it’s taken for granted but it was hard to follow. The commercial fiction, cinematic style prose make it clear that I think that is a perfunctory point, yet I couldn’t see my way through and it’s the crux of the story. The author was a script writer and writer for video games, I believe, and that makes sense here.

This is going for a cinematic, campy vibe similar to anime in tone and affectations and plot beats. I think it’s doing that well, it’s just not to my taste, so I didn’t feel rating it was appropriate as I don’t think I was able to actually accept it and engage with it in the spirit in which it was written. Perhaps another time.

An old, troubled man named Samuel forms an equilibrium and ecological bond with the island on which he is a lighthouse keeper. Dead immigrant bodies wash onto the shore constantly. But when he discovers a man alive and nurtures him back from the brink of death, the delicate balance he’s forged for himself is thrown askew.

Over four days we learn Samuel’s past as the breaks move backwards and forwards in his life. A political prisoner under an unspecified dictatorship for 25 years due to being at a dissenting rally, it makes some sense that he should be attracted to a solitary existence on an island.

It’s surprisingly nuanced and moving how that foundation becomes pertinent though. His past is dredges up a kind of cyclical history. Immigrants being othered. The demands a society has of its populace. The casual cruelties of being not queer, but unwilling to perform what is expected of the codified notion of a ‘man’. Tying everything together as an ecology on an island and the internal machinations a man like Samuel goes through was really well done.

Craft wise, this has excellent prose and is a notch about commercial fiction. It’s accessible and has strong themes. A conventional structure, pretty much, aside from flashbacks. And is a simple yet effective straight-forward narrative. It took maybe 2.5 hours to read the whole thing. Prose range from evocative to invisible, meaning good, not getting in the way at all, which is a success for me. I’m fairly critical of voice and style. There was a plot thread never answered and seemed to only partly function well before being completely abandoned. It feels out of place in an otherwise tight text.

Lastly, the ending I am mixed on, as it again produces subjective elements that are less interesting than being answered. It leads you to a point where it feels like it has something to say and then denies catharsis and allows you to make of it what you will. That’s fine. But it’s not telegraphed that way and plot beats are contradictory as to feel intentionally sitting on the fence on such a central theme. Still, very enjoyable and worth reading.

Sometimes you just gotta give 21%.

I understand why this would be well liked. It’s extremely palatable commercial fiction. It has two old, rough and tumble dudes attempting to make things “right” when their two gay sons are murdered for unknown reasons. They’re the ones for the job apparently, despite literally hating their sons, driving them to a life which did not include them.

It’s sort-of appealing? Parents finally giving a shit about the queer kids. But the problem for me was that they approach problems in a way that, yes, makes sense for the genre. Both hammers everything nails, and so on. But I truly did not believe the central conceit of them actually caring about their kids. And the only way I almost got there was the sense that it is very conditioned masculinity to provoke a reaction in men that they themselves were attacked by proxy because something they made or belonged to them was harmed.

But I still could not care less about them as people. And at that point it’s all just spinning wheels to me.

I did notice, however, a marked improvement in craft from Blacktop Wasteland, which deployed wildly incongruent similes and metaphors. It’s still very Hemingway-esque at a sentence level. And that’s a pejorative for me. I use it to mean repetitive and boring sentences, and therefore paragraphs. It’s a lot of commercial fiction these days. Usually can’t escape it. Sadly.

If the framing had been different for this story I do think I’d have kept up with it and enjoyed it. I like revenge stories that get the heart pumping. But homophobes trying to make things right between them and dead kids. That ain’t it, for me.

This is the story of a boy who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a museum, loses his mother, is entrusted with a secret: a priceless painting of a titular Goldfinch. We follow the boy across a wild life, always keeping this painting apart from every sort of home he moves to and from, the secret moulding his very being from boyhood to young man without his knowing.

I thought this was a 4 star, but I find myself thinking about this book every few days. Especially after finishing The Secret History. So, clearly it’s a 5.

What it feels like to me is Tartt manages to view her constructed characters from a different, elusive perspective. All I can really see is that everyone has a secret and their every movement and word orbits them, stemming from this opaque thing that becomes the Point of the novel.

It took me a while to finish this book. Similar to A Little Life, the most wonderful characters aren’t diamonds. They are fractured in the most unpredictable ways. Often defined by their trauma; willingly or unwillingly. Agency a push-pull tug-of-war with specificity that feels hyper realistic, fair, and vulnerable.

Of course, a literal explosion would fracture anyone. But the story is tracing every line until you finally run its center. The secret heart. Sometimes the dark room, or the locked room, or the room you never go into; a secret psychology of a character, somehow feels like an entire house and a puzzle and the inevitable, surprising ending set apart from the plot. If life is the plot, then Tartt manages to show you that, when compared to the intricacies and doomed brilliance of those struck by the hammer (which is everyone, to varying degrees), there’s not so much there as you think. So you may as well spend your time driving at the heart of the people around you.

Because shit, invariably, happens. On that you can absolutely count.

This was concerned with a very high degree of verisimilitude, only some of which was interesting. Similar to many short story collections, there are highs and lows. The later of which, even with great narration, basically became white noise, to me.

2.5 rounded up

This has been talked about to death already. Some interesting themes, fantastic voice and narration, but leans more vapid than profound to me. I suspect I will remember nothing of this in one months time. It was fine, forgettable.

3.5 rounded up

Had to check out a previous work of the author after reading Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club. These were interesting and had a heart to them but lacking the refinement and punch the novel has. You can see the DNA of it here though, interconnected shorts with distinct characters, problems that aren’t shied away from.

A mothers happiness and identity are shattered when her youngest is killed in an accident that may or may not have involved her daughter. As the mother tells us her story, as if trying to make sense of it all after-the-fact, years later, we see the daughter painted in a fairly cruel light. The psychological component shifts back and forth between the mother having misremembered the fateful moment, and by proxy, who her daughter is and has been her whole life—or is she right.

For me, this felt very predictable but the well-crafted voice and the pacing, chapters being only 3-4 minutes long in the audiobook, made it a quick read. What was truly stand out to me was the way the death changed the mother and her relationship to her husband. That felt really well realized and believable. I also like that his short comings feel organic and less trite; he’s not a gaslighting villain, for instance, the psychological component is all in our narrators mind. The husband is culpable in sadly mundane ways that are only exacerbated with the death of their child.

Because it’s first person there is some latitude here but it annoyed me a lot that the conversations you’d expect them to have never occurred. Even before the death of the child. This is a novel of almost limitless interiority and very little dialogue. It feels very solipsistic in the end. No character has a character arc or is seen clearly, save for the narrator. And that makes a lot of the components of this more uninteresting to me. Especially in the case of the daughter, who may or may not have done this thing, yet we can’t really gauge for ourselves based on recounting of things that would make the mother think this, it’s just a gut feeling she has about her.

The past is interesting in developing the psychological of the narrator, as it cuts in and out of her past to the present day—breaking the assumed semi epistolary narrative perspective—but ultimately doesn’t feel like it comes together to play a part in the plot.

It’s at its best in the first half of the book and when eloquently showing the kind of lasting devastation the loss of a child has on a person. Those moments when she’s alone make the structure feel more vindicated and well chosen. And that’s why I ultimately ended up liking it, in the end. It does have something to say beyond the did-the-daughter-or-didn’t-she, which is more than you get with most commercial fiction.

Picture a person putting nails to a chalk board in front of an audience of self identifying genre police, watching them all cringe, and then saying, ‘There was a point to that.’ That’s roughly what it felt like reading this, at times.

Some of this works some of it doesn’t. The writing is overall quite good and eclectic in its ability to go from one genre convention to the next, slipping in and out of voices convincingly. The stories do not care to telegraph what they are genre-wise. Some remain in the tone and genre established, others morph. There seems to be no rhyme or reason or hint of consistency. A realistic portrayal of a late 30s woman partnered with a self-centered, obsessive writer of a science fiction graphic novel, suddenly has him becoming a character in his own story, disappearing into its pages completely. Gone from the world. An old woman sets up a dating profile and dies under ostensibly suspicious circumstances. Just as we get to the heart of the
‘mystery’, the story is over. No catharsis. No resolution.

On one hand, it’s easy to admire the boldness of statements made in these pages. But they come to feel like they’re being made about conventions rather than actually serving the reader, or even in service to the best possible outcome for the story, even.

With all short story collections there are highs and lows but this was too much for me. There isn’t a hint of cohesiveness, despite the marketing material trumpeting. There are some definite good stories that I enjoyed and got on with the voice well. The next story, though, is a completely different voice, maybe genre. Structures vary widely. Flash fiction type stories become chapters in a multi-part overall story.

It’d be interesting if it wasn’t incredibly jarring so often and had it remotely telegraphed to the reader that this was _going somewhere_. Perhaps some stories are circled back to later on in the book? I put it aside with 100 pages left to go. Far more than I typically would have given a book, and only pushed through that far because it’s a Giller Prize shortlisted book and I wanted to finish them all. I suspect that while the structure may have held a meta kind of satisfaction for me in the end, if it does come back to previous stories or character, I began encountering stories at the mid mark that were simply uninteresting and continued in a voice that I didn’t enjoy or resonate with me, made further frustrating because I’d just read several stories that were good and were well constructed and enjoyable.

Honestly, one of the rare books that left me actually annoyed rather than just saying it wasn’t for me and putting it down, knowing it was for a different kind of reader. No idea who I could recommend this too. People who hate conventions and somehow delight in the idea of encountering authorial voice at the opposite ends of the spectrum from one another, so you are almost certain to dislike one or the other. And why why 2 stars, then? It’s trying something new and some stories did work. There is some interesting structure too, possibly, I just never found out if it pays off or not. Clearly it did work for some people, the judges are authors and clearly liked it.