kyatic's reviews
934 reviews

I am not a book reviewer, so bear that in mind. I never know how to structure a book review. So, this is a list. How organised.

- Plot - bit of a hard one to summarise, this. A bus driven by an immortal cannibal? A demoted god named after my favourite Oscar Wilde character who's a bit squeamish about the whole cannibal thing, but wants to make friends? A journalist with an odd genetic quirk and her dedication to following a story through to its bitter end? It's probably best to say that there are several plot strands in this one, and they all tied up nicely. I didn't finish the book wondering what happened next. I did finish it thinking that there should be a film adaptation in which all of the characters were played by Martin Freeman (ooh, look, I'm referencing the book... you'll have to read it to get the reference!!)

- Structure - unlike this review, one of the things that stood out to me with this book was its structure. It's not told in any particularly revolutionary way; there aren't chapters where the plot is conveyed through interpretive dance, or paragraphs that alternate between the second and third person, or sentences which repeat over and over again and only change one word until it's a new sentence. This book sticks to the tried and tested structure of alternating perspectives, with chapters told from the points of view of Gwen, the witches, the inhabitants of the bus, and occasionally others. What it does do is know exactly when to switch perspectives. Each chapter ended at just the right point to make me say 'aw, dang, I guess I have time for another chapter!' because I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to follow all the storylines through to where they met.

- Character - look, I'm a simple woman. Give me a god who can put the essence of humanity into an acorn and I'm happy. All the characters in this book were interesting and sympathetic - even the cannibal, which was no mean feat - and that helped to drive the plot. There were some elements of character which made me a little squirmy; without any spoilers, there's a character who attempts to rape a woman and this wasn't addressed in as comprehensive a way as I would have liked - it might have been interesting to see why he did it, as 'he was drunk' isn't generally an explanation for that - but I think that was the only moment in the book where I felt as though there wasn't enough depth, and is also probably a very personal grind.

- Things that were top notch - the depiction of the afterlife was pretty rad. I'm one of those sad saps who has a Master's degree in this sort of thing, because I never want to be employed, and it was a genuine surprise to see an afterlife that I hadn't seen before. We get depictions of limbo in a lot of media, but never quite like this one.

- The resolution - again, no spoilers, but this book does have the kind of ending that's actually satisfying. There's one character with whose ending I was a little confused - I would have liked to have seen more of her - but this paved the way for the actual ending of the book, which I was super keen on. So, swings and roundabouts.

- Fun facts: I read this book in one sitting on an aeroplane. At one point, I laughed and jostled the arm of the man next to me. We did not become friends. I think he got fed up of me laughing. This book destroyed my chance of making a new friend. It was worth it.

- Best lines:

Algernon had fought in the last great war - it was where he'd lost his right sock.

David drank the rest of his pint and waited for something to happen. It didn't.

Overall - because all reviews should end with a conclusion, right? - this was a good book with a few lines that made me laugh out loud on an aeroplane, which is a compliment as I'm a nervous flier. There were a few times where character development was sacrificed in favour of plot, but it was a good plot, and honestly I don't think it impacted the book at all, so it's not factored into my rating. Algernon was nice. I think this is the end of the review.

This is one of those books which I really, really wish I'd read without any context. The first literary hoax I ever read was the Holocaust memoir, [b:Fragments|444804|Fragments|Binjamin Wilkomirski|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|433532], by Binjamin Wilkomirski. I read that as part of my English degree, and was told by the tutor that it was imperative not to research the book before I read it. So, I read it under the assumption that I was reading a real memoir, and only after I'd turned the last page did I discover the truth. It was odd; it meant that I'd initially read the book and appreciated it as one thing, only to be told afterwards that I had to appreciate it as something else, something more bizarre and of questionable morality, and it was hard to separate my first reading from my second; I couldn't help but read it as a memoir, even when I knew it wasn't, because that's how I'd encountered it.

I would imagine that there are many people who feel the same way about Sarah. For those not aware of the Sarah and JT Leroy mess, here's a quick synopsis: gay teen boy with HIV writes a semi-autobiographical novel about his childhood as a truckstop prostitute in the '90s, becomes a literary sensation, makes best friends with a host of celebrities including Winona Ryder and Lou Reed, then turns out to be the creation of a middle aged woman with a vivid imagination and her sister in law in a wig. Which is fine.

And here's the thing: people had been taken in, hook, line and sinker by this ruse. The far-fetched tales of a child prostitute (to use the popular, although inaccurate and whitewashed terminology) with a drug addicted absent mother had captured the attention of an entire market. They didn't read Sarah because they thought it was a great novel; they read Sarah because they thought it was a great autobiography. A great memoir by a young boy who had survived the unsurvivable and triumphed, become best friends with Courtney Love (possibly the greatest achievement of all), all against almost insurmountable odds. Living with HIV. Overcoming a drug addiction. Coming to terms with a transgender identity. These people did not read Sarah for the escapism of a wildly creative and unlikely narrative. They read it for the reality of it. They read it because they wanted to play their own part in the truth.

There's some debate over whether or not the whole thing was a marketing stunt or the attempt of a traumatised woman to fictionalise her own life, which then got out of hand. The real author, Laura Albert, has come out in her own defense in a documentary, in which she makes it clear that she had been abused herself and wrote Sarah with JT Leroy as an 'avatar', or a fictional character through which she felt able to convey fictionalised versions of her own real experiences. Some people point out that she could easily have done this without befriending Winona Ryder. I'm probably between the two camps, assuming that Laura Albert wrote the book as therapy and then exploited its success to meet her favourite filmstars and feel important. And no matter what the truth behind the ruse was, I think that's the crux of it. No matter why this hoax was written, it ultimately capitalised on people's desires - both Albert's and her readers' - to be a part of that narrative of overcoming terrible odds. It played on the '90s zeitgeist, in which stories about young queer people (yes, often with HIV) were starting to emerge from the fringes of literature and become money-makers for the first time. Celebrities like Madonna, Elton John and Bono had lent their names to the cause of HIV awareness. Stories about teenagers and drugs and mental illness were some of the most popular films and books of the day; Girl Interrupted, Junk, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. JT Leroy was a product not only of Albert's imagination, but of the era. There was no better decade to invent JT Leroy. People ate it up because it epitomised what was popular at the time, and what's more, it was real. Except it wasn't.

Back to Sarah itself, then. This is not a book I'd ever read based on its synopsis or subject matter alone, so I find it hard to approach it as anything other than a hoax. It's not a novel I would have picked up, even though the version I read was marketed as a novel rather than a memoir as it was reissued after the hoax became public, because I'm just not interested in this type of book ordinarily. It's not a book I would have read as a memoir, because I don't much care for 'I survived 400 near-death incidents' stories; they make me feel inadequate and sad. So, unlike my first foray into literary hoaxes, I would only ever have read this one because of its hoax status. Trying to look at it as anything else is difficult. As a work of literature, it's well-written and incredibly disturbing (especially when you consider that someone had to imagine it all) and it's undeniable that Albert is a very talented writer. I'm not sure that it's worthy of the cult status it enjoyed when it posed as a memoir, though. It tries very hard to take itself seriously, even when it's ridiculous, and honestly, it is frequently exactly that. I mean, the climactic event is a car chase over a magic bridge between two transvestite prostitutes, one dressed as a geisha, with a short-lived shoot-em-up between the geisha and an overweight man in pursuit whom we're told sweats so much that bats live in his truck and feed off his sweat. Seems likely.

All in all, it's a bizarre and blessedly short book which is undoubtedly well crafted, but really hard to appreciate as anything other than a hoax, because so much of its modern appeal rests on the fact that it is a hoax. The issues it covers aren't particularly relevant to a lot of modern readers today; it's still a good story, but not one that quite as many people are seeking to read. It lives on now not as a great book, but as a great scam. It makes me wonder about the life it would have in an alternate 2017, in which the hoax was never exposed, or another 2017 in which it was never a hoax at all, but always marketed as a novel. Riding the wave of the '90s - '00s zeitgeist as closely as it does, complete with drug addicted teenagers and sexuality issues, I'm not sure it would have had such a lengthy shelf life in those scenarios. I honestly think that this one would have been a hit either way in the '90s, but I don't think we'd still be reading it now. That said, the weirdest thing to me about Sarah is that I really don't think it needed to pose as memoir to do well at the time. I think that Albert would have ended up meeting Winona Ryder and Lou Reed and Courtney Love even if she'd been upfront about who she was from the very beginning. Sure, they might not have started wearing raccoon penis bones in honour of someone they knew was fictional, but I can fully imagine that Sarah would have captured that niche just as well as a novel as it did as a memoir.

Really, I think that when the story of how a book came to be is more interesting than the story that the book tells, that book isn't standing on its own merits. Sarah isn't so much a book as a relic, or a fun fact you tell at parties about that weird story you heard last year about the woman who wrote a fake memoir, or a piece of evidence in an infamous case about the author who wasn't. It isn't a novel and it isn't a memoir. It's a curiosity, and I'm not sure that that's a compliment.

Honestly, I just appreciate an author who completely ignores the 'bury your gays' trope and releases a bunch of short fiction after the end of her book trilogy with the sole intention of giving the queer characters a happy ending, and then embellishing it over and over again to really hammer the point home that it's totally possible (and satisfying in a narrative context) for LGBT+ characters to live happily ever after. More of this sort of thing, please, and less of the 'oh no, our queer characters need to suffer as, like, a metaphor, so we killed one of them'.

Also, super glad that the whole slavery thing was ironed out here as being a Bad Thing, because I did find the first two books to be a little fetishising of non-con in an uncritical way, which skeeved me out. Still think the first book in particular needed to address some of those elements more to keep the 'slavery is bad' message canon, but it's a relieving disclaimer.