May Dodd endures every modern stereotype of life in a lunatic asylum for a woman in the 1800s (to the point where I literally rolled my eyes), and she jumps at the chance to escape -- even if it means joining a secret government program that offers 1000 white women as brides for Indians to work towards peace with the half-Indian, half-white offspring of these brides. On the way Fergus adds in a varied cast colored with racist Irish accents, racist Swedish accents, offensive white men, lots of rape, caricatures of the "noble savage" type, and stirs them all into a pot that ostensibly is aiming towards peace, but makes it clear from the get go that no peace is possible. Without spoiling it for you, I have to at least warn potential readers that the ending undoes any work done in the novel itself towards the idea of peace, and is as offensive as can be possibly imagined (though Fergus at least has the grace not to make either side look like heroes). Fergus' childish writing style reads like a seventh grader being asked to write a story from the perspective of pioneers, and he fails utterly at writing female friendships and well-developed characters. I can't think of a single nice thing to say about this entire book.

I picked up this book because Deathless was perfect and because it was compared to House of Leaves (which I adore), which is a thrill ride through a house of mirrors, it is fear and magic. Radiance, however, attempts to be an alternate history scifi extravaganza romance film study horror noir, and, specializing in nothing, it fails at everything. It is an inventive tale, told without passion, and easily forgotten.

I didn't know that this was part of a series of a hit man turned father, but it didn't matter. Haas writes so beguilingly and sharply that you can't help but care for the assassin, even as he is beating a man bloody. I loved that his wife was his fence and they were in it together -- there was no bad man with a heart of gold or damsel in distress, only a man whose job happened to be hit man, a wife whose job happened to be fence, and a son who happened to have two kick ass parents. A fun, quick read.

I opened this book expecting a polemic that would disgust me, but what I found instead was an overly dramatic and somehow still boring series of misfortunes happening to a family that tried to survive in Chicago during the time of the Beef Trust and an influx of immigrants. The family themselves were so poorly drawn that I was unmoved by the terrible things that happened to them, and the writing was so absurd that I found myself rolling my eyes rather than sympathizing. Sinclair made no effort to make this book readable or infuse it with any character development (even after the main character loses himself in a rage that results in the loss of his house and the death of his wife, he literally does the exact same thing two years later for no reason), he simply slapped every bad thing he could imagine onto the lives of his fictional family, and then finished the book off with a series of yawn-inducing Socialist speeches. It has great historic value and zero literary quality.