Stephen Fry is masterful in his reading but I did have to routinely pause and read something else because most of the stories, having originally been serialized, adhere to a structure that becomes a little annoying when it is as repetitive as in this edition. Other than the couple novels, you’ll know what’s coming, structurally, every time; which becomes annoying. So I decided to read other things so the repetition didn’t bother me as much.

4.5 rounded up.

I forgot to write a review for this but I did do a video review on my channel that is timestamped here: https://youtu.be/N6jLmRTN0p4

Seeing the show first really make this difficult. This feels really under developed and every major plot beat that’s interesting is superior in the show. Lots of things are hand waved in this, or else introduced and dropped. Thins grew to be more nonsensical even within the world. The ending was… a Deus ex machina that had no craft behind it. The art was uneven.

Should have read it before the show. Completely different formats, but even within the confines of this one, this was extremely rushed, nonsensical, bad soft world building being deployed, and appears to not be interested in the aspects of the story I was.

Wildly contrived and absolutely squarely in commercial fiction, something like a popcorn thriller with some romance… it has its own kind of weird charm after you acclimate to the conceits.

What a roller coaster lol again, no way for someone reading to ever figure out the plot. Maybe… any element of the plot? It’s wild and convoluted when it ties into stuff that happened in the last book. But again, you should know what you signed up for: twists and death and killers and fantastical creatures.

It is genuinely unusual, in a good way (to me)—neither conforming to normal pacing or plot trajectory, subject matter, and most especially, the ending, which is what bumped this up for me. As usual… I did not see that coming.

I struggle sometimes, to describe to someone why queer memoirs and biographies are so important and different than the typical. A queer person is, in their own way, their own monument of history. Gay Bars are generally transitory and not immutable pieces of historical context. All of that memory is in the gray matter and bones of the people whose queer journey and trajectory were there. There very presence in a space is, in a way, pioneering. The shape of gay and queer history is always the shape of the person who chooses to go to a space that is other.

In contrast, I think cis straight white culture, the mono culture can only co-opt and integrate in its effort to puncture and deflate anything different. The quintessential monument there must be the somewhat interchangeable brothers-in-arms raising of a flag. The culture can only raise a symbol of the country; of nationalism or the penetration and impingement of the norm into every space on the horizon. It is a mass indistinct. Unknowingly or knowingly in service to the status quo.

How different and important it is to have queer history in print versus those monuments history loves so much. Tying a memoir of Lin’s personal history—constructing history itself with his participation and presence—to the spaces that are often subsumed and forgotten, for many never experienced, is both apt and genius. Lin himself remarks on how important it is to have other queer people in life to pass down this kind of memory. Codifying it in this way, for some many more people, must be important, then. Vital, really.

On top of this, Lin has a knack for switching between the voice of his historical context and his personal experience. Combined with the predilection to discuss only those things I found to be interesting, there is really nothing I have to complain about. Some people, no doubt, will find the explicit sections sometimes Too Much. Even voiced by Lin, these meeting of bodies felt as important as the space they went to in order to enable the various acts. It’s sharp, matter-of-fact, and what happened. Sometimes it’s what Lin describes as a desirable reason for going there: Risky.

This is probably at this point somewhat expectedly unconventional. Tartt doesn’t really seem interested in picking a lane and staying in it. I’m not sad about it.

Harriet, the daughter of a grief stricken mother in the south, has grown up to be a self-sufficient, determined kid that is beyond her years in maturity and brains. But, just like her mother and people who directly knew her murdered 9-year old brother—culprit unfound—she’s somewhat stuck in time in other ways.

From the focal point of this unresolved trauma, Tartt launches an unusual coming-of-age story that mirrors Harriet’s ever changing interests and feelings toward life. When she is obsessed with solving the crime, which ranges in her mind, mostly in dreams, the story adopts mystery, crime aspects. When Harriett views the adults around her in insightful ways that she internalizes, there’s shades of To Kill A Mockingbird’s Scout (I think that’s the kid’s name?) qualities being annunciated. She’s scrappy, plays with boys, reads a lot, shaping her worldview from the stories she consumes.

Because Atticus is not there. Her mother is physically present, but otherwise, a pale version of herself. There is a push-pull of tradition and entropy versus the inevitability of change in those that live. All else withers and ends in a kind of cage or prison of their own making in town. Harriett has to try and discern, essentially alone, who she wants to be - while understanding, simply by virtue of being “new” in her being a child, how not to end up like the adults around her. Their racist and prejudiced and stuck in their ways. rather than deal with everything hindering them, especially the grief of the community and those closest to her brother when he died, they continue to ineffectually harm everyone they know and love in often selfish and boorish ways; exemplifying and manifesting the absolute opposite of the values and virtues southerners give mouth service, but undermine with their own actions.

Add to that Tartt’s exceptional specificity and deftness at painting a scene and making a text so rich you fall into it, and you have a strange book that is more complex and in some ways better written than The Secret History. Especially love that the structure and form, as well as multiple genre bending that occurs, as Harriett sort of tries on these aspects of herself as the story progresses. It makes a lot of sense for a story about a child, especially one so concerned with fiction to construct her reality in the formative years of her life. Every character and location is vivid and often raw.

It’s quite dark, but not so much always gothic in a southern way. More so in its treatment of the coming-of-age, loss of innocence, by way of every character we come upon and the ability to treat Harriett as someone who, come what may, will see the greyer shades within her black-and-white world despite her also wishing to return to a time when her mother was a mother and her brother was alive. Even as a child she is precariously close to being another adult trapped in a cycle that feeds their most horrible traits, constantly chasing their own tales and rutting in the mud.

Ambitious, and I think does pull it off. But, as with all story collections, I find it mixed, overall. The themes around hope for the future and heritage/legacy are compelling. There is one story in particular I just did not connect with at all however (the hockey one).