Sometimes the best books are the books that are actually more than one story. Fall On Your Knees is a difficult book to summarize, or review, in a way that could do it justice. It is one of those sweeping multi-generational pieces of historical fiction, but at the same time it’s really just a story about four sisters. Against the backdrop of Cape Breton Island and New York City from the turn of the 20th century all the way to the advent of World War II, Ann-Marie MacDonald shows us how the good and bad actions we take in life ripple outward to touch the lives of everyone around us.

MacDonald’s narrative is cyclical and self-referential. We don’t find out who the narrator is until the very end (though you can probably guess after a while). Though mostly linear, there are flashbacks throughout, and a detailled accounting of Kathleen’s time in New York is deferred to the penulimate section for dramatic effect. The story’s power comes from how the setting around the main characters changes, almost like a time-lapse video. When James and Materia marry, their corner of Cape Breton Island is unremarkable and undistinguished. We get to watch a town spring up, miners’ strike, the devastation of war, and the Great Depression. While the characters grow older, go to school, take or change vocations, the story that MacDonald tells never seems to change. It’s always about the tension between the good and evil parts of the soul, that desire to do right by each other and that temptation to be mischievous.

It’s the nature of a character-driven book such as this that it’s hard to identify protagonists and antagonists. Each character takes their turn at both; much as in real life, it’s largely a matter of perspective. Even in cases where the character seems more villainous than not, like James, or more saint than sinner, like Lily, their actions bely that simplified morality.

When James marries Materia over her parents’ disapproval, it seems for about two and a half pages that Fall On Your Knees will be a love story. Rugged Canadian of Irish descent makes good with daughter of Lebanese immigrants, settles down, and becomes a respected piano tuner. MacDonald lets us cling to this vision, as I said, for a few pages, spinning out the fantasy that James and Materia might be happy together. Having manipulated us by presenting it as a love-match between a precocious young woman and a headstrong young man, she pivots, pulls off the blinders, and shows us the other perspective:

But deep down he winced at the thought of showing Materia to anyone. He was grateful they lived in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her any more, he did. It was just that, recently, it had struck him taht other people might think there was something strange. They might think he’d married a child.

So, love story, denied, or rather, aborted. Passion fizzles out to be replaced only by a kind of bewildered regret, which soon kindles resentment. James has such ambition: he orders a crate of books—a crate!—from England with the intention of becoming an educated, well-read, learned man. He wants to move in higher circles than he was born into. And he is frustrated when it becomes clear that Materia will be more hindrance than help in this regard. It’s not her fault; she was raised in a sheltered way, and she is so very young. Yet MacDonald gives her ambition as well: she discovers her love for performing, for playing the piano for vaudeville acts. What might Materia have become if James had believed in and supported her instead of shunned her?

It’s interesting to note what doesn’t happen in Materia and James’ marriage. As far as we know, James never cheats on her (with the one exception, as we learn at the end, but that is … different). He does not beat her regularly—there are moments when he hits her, yes, and MacDonald rightly portrays these as the inexcusable acts they are. He doesn’t leave her (unless you count going to war). I mention these things, because in spite of the evident dissatisfaction on both sides, these two try to muddle through. On Materia’s part, it’s likely that she sees little other choice, especially after Mercedes and Frances are born. On James’ part, it’s that he wants to be seen as a good man. And good men don’t abandon their wives and families, right? I can’t help but feel like some of this subtext is grounded inexorably in the period: in a more contemporary setting, Fall On Your Knees would involve messy affairs, fast cars, divorce, and in the inevitable movie adaptation, a car chase and a running-through-the-airport scene.

Reading this book a second time, of course, means that I have the benefit of what little I remembered about it. I don’t know if I completely comprehended the foreshadowing of James’ demon when I first read this book; this time around, of course, it feels rather heavy-handed. But it seems like that is the point:

The next day, James outsmarts the demon for the second time. He enlists.…

… Materia arrives at Mount Carmel and hurries over to Mary’s grotto. There she prostrates herself as best she can, what with her unborn cargo, and gives thanks to Our Lady for sending The War.

MacDonald keeps the specifics of what happens vague until the end of the book, but she foreshadows early on that James cannot outsmart his demon forever. With this, she declares, “This is a tragedy.” For a book so steeped in Catholic symbolism, there is a strong whiff of Calvinist determinism to this: James is destined to survive the war; Kathleen is destined to seek her fortune in New York; all are destined for tragedy.

MacDonald continues in this tenor with the trio of Mercedes, Frances, and Lily. With the first two, Materia’s influence is more pronounced: Mercedes grows up staunchly Catholic, and she and Frances share with their mother a muddled, fairy-talesque use of Arabic words to communicate and commiserate. These two fill the void of motherhood for Lily, who never gets to know either Materia or Kathleen.

It’s particularly interesting how Mercedes’ life resembles that of her parents. Like James, she ends up making many sacrifices for her family. She takes on jobs she doesn’t necessarily want, puts off her own ambitions, studies by correspondence rather than going to university in person. Mercedes tries to dress these sacrifices in humility, like a good Catholic, and I appreciate the way MacDonald draws out the irony and pride that taints her actions:

Tears fill Mercedes’ eyes. It is not fair that Frances should bask in Daddy’s affection and the approval of sundry shopkeepers for something that ought to have her hiding her face in shame. It is not fair that Sister Saint Eustace managed to make Mercedes feel like the bad one—when everyone knows that she’s the good one. It is not fair that Frances will have a baby, while Mercedes was denied a husband. None of it is fair, but that is not why Mercedes is weeping freely against her pillow…. Everyone seems to think that motherhood is the best thing that could possibly happen to [Frances]. Everyone but Mercedes. For she knows that once Frances has a child, Frances will no longer need a mother.

Mercedes in her hubris is a recognizable stereotype of someone we all know. Her genuine desire to do good through her sacrifices is mixed with the yearning for recognition she feels her martyrdom must bring. And when it doesn’t—or when someone spurns it deliberately, as Lily does by rejecting the Lourdes plan—she can only recover by reframing what happens in light of faith and her own ego. Well, if Lily doesn’t want her leg healed, doesn’t want to be whole, she must be possessed! In this way Mercedes justifies her past sacrifice and reassures herself that neither she nor her interpretation of her faith could be wrong; the world simply hasn’t lived up to its promise.

In both Mercedes and Frances, even more so than in their father, we see how people grow up and change in the unlikeliest of ways. Mercedes is so full of dreams of marrying and settling down with a family, even if it is with the Jewish boy next door. And Frances—wild Frances, showgirl Frances, sex worker Frances … would she ever have thought she would be the mothering type? Though Frances probably undergoes the most dramatic of changes, it is just another manifestation of MacDonald’s theme that our lives—while seemingly driven by destiny—are unpredictable, malleable, and full of surprises.

Lily is interesting in that, for the majority of her time in the story, she is not really a protagonist or antagonist at all, but rather an object on which other characters enact their designs. Mercedes mothers Lily, raises Lily, pities Lily, loves Lily, and harbours the secret hope that Lily might be a saint. Lily being a saint is far more preferable to Mercedes being a saint, of course, because being a saint is a sucky job. You have to suffer—physically, in Lily’s case—and be ever so holy. Being the sister of a saint, the person who first recognized their sainthood, is a much better gig.

Lily is an excuse for Frances to embrace her wilder side. Don’t forget that, originally, the siblings went Kathleen, Mercedes, and then Frances in order of age. Frances was the youngest child, the baby. It’s only after the epoch that Mercedes suddenly becomes the eldest and Frances the middle child. So it’s interesting to see them take up the stereotypical mantles of those titles: Mercedes becomes the responsible one, and Frances can be the wild one, because James can pin his hopes and dreams on Lily once more.

I really can’t do justice to this book in a review of any length. I haven’t even scratched the surface of the themes MacDonald weaves throughout it. I could go on to talk about racism, about the effects of war at home, about the march of history, family, and religion. As for the characters, who indisputably make the book what it is, I have only managed to give the briefest overview of what makes them so complex and well-realized.

So let’s finish off by talking about Lily at the end of the book, by which I really mean, of course, talking about Kathleen in New York.

I remembered James’ demon, but I did not remember the twist that MacDonald introduces during Kathleen’s time in New York. We learn early on that James goes to retrieve her because she has fallen in love, ostensibly with a black man. MacDonald carefully shapes our expectations in such a way that when the details come to light, it’s clever. She plays both on our heteronormative expectations of society in general as well as our expectations of that time period. This is just another facet in the way that MacDonald gently probes the layers of people’s personalities. Like so many other minor characters in this book, Rose takes on a life of her own without stealing the stage. Fall On Your Knees is one of those special novels that manage to contain more of a universe than most: a true microcosm rather than the two-dimensional set that falls apart if you view it from another angle.

Some books capitalize on a single tragedy, one moment of absolute disaster that has consequences for the rest of the characters’ lives. The plot and conflict then comes from watching them pick up the pieces, if they can, and making their peace where they cannot. Other books, though, capture how life is more properly a series of tragedies, some small, some big. Our lives routinely shatter and reassemble, seemingly on the universe’s whim or of their own accord; we don’t pick up the pieces so much as try to reinterpret the map after a geological upheaval. Fall On Your Knees is like this. It’s not just that bad things happen: lots of bad things happen, but good things happen too, and worse still, sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart. Sometimes when we think we’re doing good we are actually doing the most harm—and vice versa. In these respects, this book reminds me a lot of that other inexpressibly wonderful story, A Fine Balance. However, Fall On Your Knees feels a little more optimistic in its prognosis for its characters. There is no such thing as “moving on” or “moving past” a tragedy, because in living through it, it changes you. It is just as much a part of you as every good thing that happens. So as MacDonald closes out the book by showing us the time-lapse photographs of the rest of the Pipers’ lives, we get to see the sum over all their histories.

And then Anthony finds Lily, and the story starts over again.

This is a book that sprawls. It is beautifully written, MacDonald’s style being without parallel here. I first read her play Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) in first-year English, and that’s what led me to Fall On Your Knees. Sometime after that I think I also read The Way the Crow Flies, but it never left as much of a lasting impression on me as this book. For nearly eight years I’ve cited this as one of my favourite novels. But the truth is, I barely remembered the details. I remembered only the exhilaration I felt reading it, the sense that this is so good it’s painful.

Yet I put off re-reading it for the longest time. I was scared that if I did, I wouldn’t like it as much. I would discover that my memory is more false than normal, that it just isn’t as good as I thought it was. I didn’t want that to happen.

This is my 1000th review on Goodreads, though. I could lie and say I don’t care, but breaking into four digits does feel pretty special. I put a lot of time and effort into these reviews, so to say that I’ve written so many is something worth celebrating. To do that, I wanted to review a very special book—and what better than the book I didn’t want to re-read?

I was a fool; I should have had more faith. Fall On Your Knees is every bit as good as it was the first time I read it—maybe more. It cannot offer answers or reassurance, but instead only the certainty that life is complex and difficult. This is a book that sprawls, not just because it covers multiple generations and a dynamic network of characters, but because their stories have no clear starting or stopping points. Unlike a classical tragedy, which ends in the clarity of the protagonist’s death, these characters have to go on living.

This is the truth of Fall On Your Knees and the inadequacy of the novel form that it exposes: stories don’t end after the tragedy is dealt with. As much as we might like, we cannot boil down our judgement of a person to “did they do good?” or “were they a good person?” Life is a series of events, good or bad or a mixture as determined by how we react—but every event shatters us, changes us. Life is the act of continuously rebuilding ourselves. The story does not stop, never stops, as long as we are there to shatter and rebuild, over and over.

And so I’m not going to stop.

Here’s to the next thousand.

When I first started reading this book after borrowing it from the library, I did a double-take. I had this book down as being recommended by one of my favourite science fiction blogs, yet the book's description mentioned nothing that made it sound like science fiction! So I had to go back and read the article that mentions this book before I realized what was going on (the Library of Congress cataloguing information also gives it away). Immediately I was impressed by Kazuo Ishiguro. He doesn't keep the SF component of the book (cloning) secret for long, but the way it opens, you wouldn't think it's science fiction. Even better, the premise--that the main character and her friends are clones grown for organ donation--is the only science fiction component of the entire book. Beyond that, it's just another human interest story--and a fairly beautiful one at that.

I've filed this book under alternate-history because, although Ishiguro never gives us a date, the technology is conspicuously late-twentieth-century (cassette tapes and walkmans). Since, as far as I know, our late twentieth century society never started growing clones for organ donations, I'm assuming this is alternate history. It doesn't matter all that much, however. Ishiguro doesn't bother too much with anything outside the scope of the characters' lives, nor does he go into any detail about the nature of the cloning process itself. That's because, as I'm going to argue, the book isn't really about cloning at all.

There's a fair amount of suspense in the book, especially because I didn't know where Ishiguro was trying to take his story about cloning. At first all we learn about is the narrator's childhood at Hailsham, a boarding school where the clones were educated and brought up for the first sixteen years of their lives. We experience the growing pains familiar to natural-born children: the cliques, the fights, the awkward budding romances, the discovery of sex.

In these respects, Never Let Me Go is like any coming-of-age story. Kath H. talks about growing up among the boys and girls at Hailsham, living in the shadow of clique-leader Ruth and slowly becoming friends with hot-headed Tommy. I enjoyed the episodes at Hailsham in their own right, for they make many good points about growing up in general, not just about cloning. Of course, that's all part of Ishiguro's intended theme: the clones are us, just with a different career path.

The story really takes off once the main characters leave Hailsham and reside temporarily at "the Cottages." Kathy H. becomes sexually active, but aside from physical relationships, she finds it hard to become close to anyone. Her relationship with Ruth is always tumultuous at best--whereas Kathy is self-assured, Ruth is insecure and constantly trying to fit herself into social strata. Likewise, she can never quite get as close to Tommy as we know she should be.

Part of the problem is a sense of sinister ephemerality to their time at the Cottages. They all know that eventually they'll have to leave, train to become carers, and one day become donors themselves. Yet the main characters, who are latently aware of that as children and eventually come to terms with this as adults, never do escape their gilded cages. They don't get a "deferral," as it's called in the book; they all donate until they "complete."

This may seem nihilistic. Shouldn't clones go free?! It isn't though, because if one accepts that reasoning, then it means our lives are nihilistic too. After all, we all die eventually. How are our lives any different from the slightly more restricted lives of the clones? We just have a greater illusion of freedom, of self-control--and suddenly that makes us think we're different.

Although Ishiguro raises the big moral questions, he never seems to try to solve them in any way; the clones just go on accepting life as it is. Some may view this as a moral cop-out--what's the point of writing about cloning if one isn't going to take a stand on the issue? But it's much deeper than that. The clones are just a setting for a tale about all humanity, cloned and "natural." When Ishiguro asks, "Do the clones have souls?" he's really asking, "Do we have souls?"

The only thing that really disappointed me about Never Let Me Go was the narrator's style. It was too conversational, too rambling for my tastes. Her tone made it hard for me to connect with the story at times. Narrator aside, Never Let Me Go is a wonderful book with richly emotional moments interspersed with the occasional dull one. It's the perfect sort of book for a rainy day, to read beside the fireplace or by candlelight. And yeah, it's got clones in it, but it's not about clones, not really. So I'd recommend to my friends, even if they aren't science fiction fanatics like me. Because it's good.

The titles of Animorphs novels might seem mundane, but they are always appropriate. The Change begins as another supposedly simple Animorphs versus Yeerks plot. It turns out to be so much more. Still, an alternative and equally appropriate title might have been The Hope.

Following the revelations from The Andalite Chronicles, Applegate finally returns to the perspective of the most marginalized Animorph, Tobias. Trapped in hawk morph, a nothlit, Tobias can’t exactly contribute to missions in the same way that the others do. The rest of the Animorphs have been good sports about pretending he’s an integral member of the team—and there are moments when he does save their bacon. But Applegate has bigger plans for him, so much so that for the second time in two books, the Ellimist intervenes and makes things get all timey-wimey.

You might have noticed, if you’re still reading these, I’m not flagging them for spoilers. That’s precisely because if you’re still reading these, thirteen books in, then either you’ve read the series at some point in your life, or you really don’t care about things being spoiled.

So Applegate offers us that rarest of all tonics, hope, in two forms.

Tobias totally gets his morphing powers back!!!!

Also: free Hork-Bajir! “Free or die!”

The Change has something else in common with the previous very-special-book: like The Andalite Chronicles, it highlights and humanizes an alien species. The previous book showed us the Andalites (and even the Taxxons) in a way we hadn’t experienced. Now we learn more about the Hork-Bajir. Despite their fierce appearance, they are herbivores. They have tight-knit family structures. They are peaceful creatures, for the most part.

They have names.

Until now, the Hork-Bajir have just been interchangeable foot soldiers for the Yeerks—the Stormtroopers of the Animorphs universe, if you will. They exist for the Animorphs to dispatch—without thought, because they aren’t human—and as imposing, physical barriers to plot advancement. With Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak, Applegate makes the Hork-Bajir—or at least, these Hork-Bajir—into characters. Into people.

We can take a couple of things from this. Firstly, this is yet another example of what the Yeerks do to you. They have enslaved an entire species, transformed a peaceful species into a warrior species, simply to serve them. If you weren’t already frightened of what the Yeerks have done and could do, then you should be frightened now.

More broadly, though, this is another facet of the war motif Applegate examines in these books. Civilians and soldiers alike are encouraged to view the enemy soldiers as Others. Some of the best moments in war stories—and I’m talking about non-fiction as well as fiction here—are the moments that remind us how the people on the other side are humans. They have families and hopes and dreams as well. In this case, the Hork-Bajir obviously aren’t humans. Nevertheless, they have all those other qualities. They are not the machines that kill without question that we have seen so far.

So Applegate introduces another layer of moral complexity. The Animorphs don’t just have to worry about saving the Earth. Now they’re responsible for the only free Hork-Bajir in the galaxy.

No pressure.

Meanwhile, Tobias can morph again. I don’t think anyone, with the possible exception of the Animorphs, was surprised when the Ellimist gave him his morphing powers back instead of just making him human. Perhaps the coda where he acquires himself in the past was a surprise, though. (Having read this book when I was younger, I remembered this vividly—I thought it was a great twist.) I still think it’s a great twist. Ordinarily, timey-wimey deus ex machinae are annoying. Indeed, the flashes of information Tobias receives would, in another context, rob the story of tension. Instead, they heighten the urgency: Tobias is now aware that he’s acting as the agent of this higher power, so something big must be on the line.

Next time, Animorphs go full horse.

You never go full horse.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← The Andalite Chronicles | #14: The Unknown →

I’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about how the Animorphs series is amazing. It deals with complex topics and themes in a way that remains entertaining and accessible for adolescents. It’s a great gateway drug to full-blown science-fiction fandom. Although most of the books tend to feel light and fun, there is a very serious undertone to the entire series, one that finally comes to the fore as Applegate (and her legion of ghostwriters) draws the series to a close.

So it’s easy to forget that this is, ultimately, a kids’ series, and so there are times when the books are … shall we say, lighter? That’s not an excuse for The Unknown, but it’s a reason.

The Animorphs, narrated by Cassie this time, investigate Zone 91. They do this as horses, because it turns out that the Yeerks are also interested in the alien tech the government is hiding in Zone 91, so much so that some poor low-level Yeerk grunts have to become horse-controllers.

Visser Three could literally morph an army officer, waltz onto the base, and take a peek—but no. He makes his underlings be horses. He is a horrible boss. He makes that Kevin Spacey character from Horrible Bosses look like nice-guy Boss of the Year.

Even the Visser eventually realizes this plan is beyond bonkers and falls back on the tried-and-true method of taking over humans. So shenanigans go down at the Gardens between the Yeerks and the “Andalite bandits” over the army officers having a field trip there. And the commander of the base, who caught Marco and Cassie and Rachel when they were trying to sneak onto it the first time, is a fairly incompetent loonie right out of … well, a kids’ book.

P.S., the alien device? An Andalite toilet. A defunct model of Andalite toilet. Hilarious, no?

Very little about the plot of The Unknown makes sense, even within the Animorphs universe. But this gives me an opportunity to nitpick elements of that universe.

Zone 91 is Area 51 in all but name. That’s because if Applegate set the action at Area 51, then we would be able to conclude that the Animorphs live within flying distance of Groom Lake. It’s a big deal that the Animorphs’ location is undisclosed—not only does it make the story seem more secretive, but it creates a “this could be happening in your town!” atmosphere that surely thrills young readers.

Still, it’s awfully nice of Visser Three to confine so many of his operations to this small area of the United States. It seems like the invasion would proceed more quickly if the Yeerks set up their base somewhere like Washington, D.C., or even a metropolis like New York.

For that matter, this whole secret invasion strategy doesn’t seem to be paying dividends. The Visser’s Blade ship took out an Andalite Dome ship—so why, exactly, hasn’t the Visser just landed a full-scale military force? I mean, yeah, there would be rebellions to deal with, and I guess dealing with the then—five billion unruly population might be difficult. So maybe an all-out invasion would be untenable—but this torturously slow process of taking over middle school principals is absurd.

I guess that’s why he’s Visser Three, not Visser Two, eh?

None of these complaints are serious jabs, mind you. The bar is totally lower for a series of Scholastic novels. For that same reason, The Unknown is not bad. It just lacks the gravity that I, as an adult fan, have come to appreciate about most of the books up until now. And even the humour doesn’t work well for me here. I liked Rachel and Cassie’s exchange about the latter’s (lack of) fashion, as well as Cassie’s eavesdropping on her parents’ conversation about discipline. Yes, Cassie, parents totally lie to you for your own good! But the whole throwaway gag of the Andalite toilet and the bumbling base commander and whatnot is just too juvenile (and it was probably too juvenile for teenage me reading this for the first time, because teenage me was just as much of an old, crochety man as I am now, although I had already ditched the corduroys by that time).

I just glanced quickly at my ratings so far, and it seems like my lowest-rated book has been #9: The Secret. It’s also a Cassie book—I should make it clear that my issue here is not Cassie. She’s a great narrator; she brings a kind of dry sense of humour to the table that is quite distinct from Marco’s buddy-buddy comedy. That is, I love her observations.

Still, The Secret had more meaty motifs than The Unknown, for the most part. So I guess that means this is my least-favourite Animorphs novel so far. It had to happen eventually. And keep in mind that this is not a bad novel, so think about what that means for the rest. It just lacks the punchiness of many of the previous instalments, and that tends to be what I’m looking for these days.

Next time, Marco’s mom is back in town. And she brought some mind-reading friends.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #13: The Change | #15: The Escape →

Meehhhhhhhhhh?

I’m not sure what prompted me to grab a book so obviously in the dystopian YA camp. I guess it’s that bad habit of reading widely—I mean, it’s great in the sense that I discover books I love I might not have read otherwise. But it means I tend to read a lot of books that I find mediocre even when I know others are going to love them. It’s one thing to rip into a book that is legitimately terrible and another to lob half-hearted critiques at a book I don’t actually feel passion for, one way or the other.

Perfect Ruin is perfect in that regard: Lauren DeStefano shows us the intriguing floating city of Internment, whose citizens are beloved of the sky god but can never jump off the Edge. If you do, you get ricocheted back up by the winds that surround the city, and if you survive, you are broken, mentally and physically.

Morgan’s brother jumped, and now his family lives with the consequences. Morgan just wants to get through school and marry her government-arranged betrothed and, you know, get on with life. But all these pesky murders get in the way. As public order unravels in Internment, Morgan starts to question the very basis on which her society operates.

In other words, your standard “teenager starts to reflect on the organization of her society, discovers it’s a dystopia, and decides Something Must Be Done.” Points for making that Something a jailbreak rather than a revolution. Unfortunately, Morgan spends most of the book out of the loop of most of the interesting stuff. Right around the climax—which kind of came out of left field—we get a huge infodump once Morgan has the curtain pulled back for her. Just once I’d love for the main character to know about all this terrible stuff at the beginning.

The stakes, too, are extremely low, then they’re suddenly life-or-death high. For most of the book, the question seems to be, “How will this affect Morgan’s utterly normal life?” before it suddenly becomes “the powerful people want Morgan dead!” Don’t get me wrong: I love the twist and subsequent high-stakes plotting. I just wish I had the opportunity to read more of that.

I’m also calling shenanigans on the cliffhanger ending. Although it’s an appropriate place to leave off in the narrative, I suppose, I’m just disappointed because I would love to find out what happense next … but not so much I’m actually going to read the sequel. Just not that invested.

The characters offer little for me to care about. Morgan is a nice enough girl, and I like her friend Pen, and I guess Thomas and Judas are all right. But Morgan just never shines for me. And while Basil’s unwavering support for her is a refreshing change from jealous and manipulative fiancés, I just wish he had more depth to him. Pretty much the only secondary characters with more than one dimension are Pen (who proves she has a mind of her own when she isn’t immediately on the whole “let’s escape” bandwagon) and Morgan’s brother and sister-in-law.

Similarly, Internment is pretty “meh” as far as dystopian worlds go. I’m not going to bother critiquing the way DeStefano explains how it gets power or controls its population size or whatever. I’ll even pretend that DeStefano doesn’t carry the baggage of Lois Lowry’s over-simplified approach to naming things (“decision-makers” anyone?). Let’s assume the logistics of Internment make sense in this world. Aside from its different-from-us policies about social conformity, let’s examine its dystopian nature, and specifically, it’s name.

Internment implies imprisonment, albeit on a grander scale—Britain used to “intern” people in Australia, because its empire was so far-flung it literally gave zero fucks about colonizing a continent with criminals. So were the original inhabitants of Internment prisoners, or exiles from Earth? If so … why?

I don’t care how your prison floats in the sky, but it must be expensive. Unless the universal constant of gravitation has altered, you can’t just suspend a chunk of rock and dirt and people in mid-air without spending some serious juice, not to mention using some serious technology. That is a lot of work to go to if you’re going to store prisoners there. Internment should be a resort spa.

And maybe it was. Maybe Internment was actually some kind of refuge for the privileged during the apocalyptic global war. Then, somehow, they forgot all that and called it Internment and made up their sky-god religion. I guess stranger things could happen.

If the second book explains any of this, then I’d welcome anyone who has read it to spoil it for me in the comments. (Please use spoiler tags, though, for the benefit of people who do want to continue with this series!)

DeStefano is a capable writer on the micro-level (i.e., sentences and paragraphs). On the macro-level, Perfect Ruin could have used another editing pass to condense some scenes and fix what I see as a weird transition between two plot states. None of my complaints about the pacing, plotting, or even the dystopian nature of Internment actually ruin the experience of the book.

But here’s the thing: I read more than a hundred books a year. It’s not just that I can handle a dud every now and then; statistically, I expect several duds at the very least. I know most people just don’t devote the time to reading that I do—they manage, what, 10 books? 20? If you’re reading 10 or 20 books a year, even if most of them are dystopian YA, you probably want to prioritize and read the best 20 books you possibly can. I just don’t see Perfect Ruin making that list. It’s OK, I guess, but there are better ways to spend your precious reading time.

Shame. It has such a pretty cover.

I would be lying if I said I read this book for reasons other than a) it's by Elizabeth Bear and b) it's received some good attention, particularly in a few of my Goodreads groups. I know this because I struggle to find something compelling to talk about in this review. There's not really one thing that hooks me about this book. It's not a time period I'm interested in. The whole "wild West" motif is something I usually don't go for. But I gave it a try, and while I didn't love Karen Memory, I didn't hate it either.

The setting is remarkable in its understatement. There's a somewhat steampunky alternative-universe happening here. Bear's Rapid City is a merger of a lot of real or imagined places in nineteenth-century America, just as several of her characters are drawn from real or imaginary people. But this isn't straight-up historical fiction, because there are also airships and Mad Scientists and advanced submarines. For the most part, these larger-than-life science-fictional elements are background for the story--Karen talks about Mad Science, but Mad Scientists don't figure so prominently in the plot. I respect it when an author can create a world and resist the urge to play with all her toys.

Of course, a little Mad Science leaks in there--I would be disappointed if it didn't. We get to see an awesome submarine commanded by a Russian version of Captain Nemo. And Karen, though no Mad Scientist herself, manages to co-opt a steampunk sewing machine into a weapon of war. So there's that.

The depth of the story has to come from the characters, of course, and specifically the narrator. Karen is utterly frank about her life as a sex worker. At the same time, however, this work doesn't figure as prominently in the story as it might have. Bear stresses that prostitution is something Karen does, not something she is--it's a practical profession and part of a practical choice, one that allows her to save more money than she would in a domestic position. This isn't the only reason someone might be a prostitute, of course, and Bear shows any number of different experiences women have in the sex trade. This is what happens when you have multiple women characters: instead of having one or two women stand in for all women, you can depict a more diverse and nuanced version of women. In contrast to Karen's fierce independence, we have Priya and her devotion ot her sister, or Madame Damnable's hints of weariness. And of course, there's Miss Francina, whom we learn early on is trans--but no one sees this as a big deal.

So kudos to Bear for creating a story that is historical fiction yet still managing to have main characters who are just as, if not more, progressive as some people in our present society. I think "historical accuracy" is a terrible justification for a lack of diversity in a story, and Bear proves diversity is not detrimental to telling an action-packed thriller. There is prejudice and hatred here, of course: plenty of racism and misogyny, some based in history and some just plain evil. But these sources of conflict are even more meaningful because of the progressiveness of the characters.

I was a little worried from the description inside the cover that Karen was going to play amateur sleuth alongside Marshal Reeves. Not that I have anything against prostitutes moonlighting (daylighting?) as detectives. But amateur detective hour isn't my favourite. Fortunately, Bear puts a slightly different spin on things. Karen is more of an ally to Reeves: they share some mutual interests and manage to pool their resources. In doing so, they discover that their mutual enemies are embroiled in a far larger plot than murdered and missing women.

This escalation fuels a carousel of increasingly intense action scenes. From confrontations in the bordello to infiltrating the enemy's house to fighting off a Russian submarine with a sewing machine, Karen Memory certainly doesn't lack in bombastic moments of awesomeness. These are contrasted by quieter moments, though. All in all, perhaps that's what is most impressive about this book: it is remarkably balanced. Keep in mind that I haven't always had awesome experiences with Bear--in fact, I'd characterize her as more miss than hit with me.

Karen Memory is a hit. It isn't a home run, again, more because the whole wild West aesthetic doesn't appeal to me. But it's one of the better Bear books I've read so far, and in general, if steampunk or wild West speculative fiction is your thing, you're going to be happy about this book.

Hercule Poirot returns to once again solve a murder, this time of a wealthy Frenchman who seems to have foreseen his death. It’s not about Poirot being smarter than other detectives or about him noticing more details—it’s about his method, his organized way of approaching those details and fitting the theory to the facts rather than the other way around.

Contrary to what the title might imply, there is no golf in this book. (Thank God.) Rather, the body turns up in an open grave on the golf course undergoing renovation. This is the first oddity in a series of oddities that the police overlook, much to their sorrow. But Hercule Poirot, no, he does not overlook such things! That and the lead pipe.

Much like The Mysterious Affair at Styles, this novel has Captain Hastings as the narrator. Hastings is even more of a buffoon here: he falls in love with a girl he meets on the channel ferry. In what is a most magnificent coincidence, she turns up again near the crime scene, and happens to be embroiled in the mystery. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

Though Hastings’ characterization isn’t great here, the mystery itself is much more engaging. We’ve got two bodies, a neighbour who turns out to have a checkered past, unsanctioned love—all the good stuff. Christie even arranges for a tense climax where Poirot has a woman act as bait to reveal the murderer—but because she neglected to tell him that she changed rooms, she almost dies. Oops.

And while the characterization might not be great, the way Christie portrays the friendship between Poirot and Hastings is excellent. When it briefly appears as if Hastings’ sudden lady love might have done it, he sets himself against Poirot. Christie plays it as all very comical and English: Hastings is the utmost gentleman to Poirot, and Poirot mocks him for it in that needling Belgian way of his. Of course, it turns out in the end that Hastings was being a big galoot and Papa Poirot had it right all along—not that he bothered to tell Hastings.

Still, it’s a wonderful little diversion from the slavish loyalty one might expect in the detective/sidekick duo that now seems to pervade the mystery genre.

As with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and the more recently read Death on the Nile, Poirot doesn’t just solve the mystery: he plays matchmaker and generally raises the happiness of all involved, aside from those who deserve justice. Indeed, I’m not sure if this is something Christie sets out to do as a way of balancing the scales—her way of showing that even after tragedy, there is hope.

The Murder on the Links doesn’t stand out as one of Christie’s most salutary efforts, but it is by every measure competent and enjoyable. Hastings’ gentlemanly sexism and contrived romantic notions might be annoying, but if you read it with a sense of humour, you’ll have a grand afternoon ahead of you.

Does every science-fiction writer have to write a Big Dumb Object novel? (TVTropes) Is it some kind of rite of passage? That’s basically what Spindrift is, or at least what it starts out as. Later it becomes a novel about first contact and an attempt to evoke that kind of humble, “we are not alone” sensation other such stories play with. Perhaps what sets it apart from similar novels is Steele’s smart decision to set it within the Coyote universe, which automatically lends the novel a rich backstory full of political and social issues.

The first part of Spindrift is fun but almost nauseatingly par-for-the-course with BDO/first-contact stories. A SETI telescope (this time on the moon) finds an object it concludes must be of extraterrestrial origin, and it sends back a response to our signal! Of course there is only one man (man, mind you) who can possibly make sense of this, and so what if he’s in prison? Rules are made to be broken in situations like these! Genocide? What genocide?

And then we fast-forward several chapters to actually get to the thing we’re investigating. We stomp around on it for a while until we attract the attention of an alien species, first contact goes horribly wrong, and it looks like everyone will die.

And then … it’s exposition time.

Seriously, Spindrift builds up to a dramatic point where you would expect some kind of turn. Stranded on this BDO, the survivors of the starship’s destruction have no choice but to forge valiantly on! Except, no, they wake up and get to listen to an alien give them some kind of orientation lecture.

For thirty pages.

It’s as if Steele was writing the first two thirds of this book while watching some of his favourite first-contact movies and mashing them up into a Coyote-fuelled version of the same. Then someone interrupted him (I’m looking at you, robocall!), and when he sat down again, he forgot what he was doing, shrugged, and started writing about how humanity meets the hjadd.

Trouble is, the hjadd are really nice people. Like, unfailingly polite. And so all the conflict gets sucked out of the story. The characters sit and listen to the first hjadd any human has ever met tell them all about the wonderful alien species in the galaxy and nasty black holes and how one day humanity too might travel the stars. It’s a great sales pitch. But there is no existential threat, either to humanity at large or just these three people. There are no consequences for anyone for the mistake of firing a nuclear warhead at an alien ship—the aliens are just all, “It’s cool, brah; sorry we blew up your ship in response. Buds?”

On one level, I applaud Steele for showing us an optimistic vision of first contact where the aliens are more advanced than us and treat us like the primitive species we are.

On another level, it’s just … well, boring.

Spindrift starts with a kind of borrowed promise—if you don’t expect it to feel original but instead treat it as another variation on the theme of first contact, then you’ll be happy for a while. Alas, it never seizes any opportunity to grow and become more than that. In fact, it actively seeks out such opportunities and throttles them off-stage before they become an issue.

I don’t know if it’s worth reading. It’s not bad, just more unoriginal shading into dull. A Coyote completist would, obviously, find it essential. And it fills in some of the gaps in that sense, as a kind of plot primer for the Coyote series. But as far as characters and story goes? Nah. This is not so much a novel as it is a half-baked concept wrapped up in a tortilla shell of tropes.

Marco books might be the best books if you’re looking to jump into Animorphs. After fifteen books that might very well be the case. Applegate, cognizant of course that random books from this series would end up on library shelves the world over, with unconscionable gaps as a result of poor funding and attrition, tries her best to summarize the key points at the beginning of every book. But Marco does it best: succinct, but with that typical Marco humour. Like Jake, Marco knows what it’s like to have a family member who is a Controller. But Marco’s mother isn’t just some random Yeerk … she’s Visser One, one of the most powerful members of the Yeerk Empire.

And now she’s back on Earth, doing nasty things with sharks.

That sounded wrong, sorry. She’s back on Earth, planning to invade a planet with a sentient aquatic species by modifying hammerhead sharks. Which frankly sounds terrifying, and I’m very glad that the Yeerks are only using Hork-Bajir on Earth. Can you imagine if Sharknado was a thing back in the 1990s? Visser One would be all over that.

Random Yeerk: Visser, my host’s family was watching a program on their primitive video transmission devices—

Visser One: You can just say “television.” It’s fine, really.

Random Yeerk: —ah, yes, Visser. Anyway, we were watching the primitive television devices. One of their longer-form fictional documentaries—

Visser One: They’re called “movies.”

Random Yeerk: —ah, yes, Visser. One of their longer-form fictional movies was on. Something about these creatures we’re experimenting on being carried by tornados and deposited on the land.

Visser One: That sounds like it would end badly for the sharks.

Random Yeerk: Oddly enough, Visser, no. More so the humans.

Visser One: Hmm … I suppose if we created vortices using our Blade ships … yes. Yes, that could work. In fact, that’s brilliant. Keep this up and I might have a replacement for Visser Three in the near future.

Random Yeerk: *salutes*

And so the Yeerks develop actual sharknado technology and win the war. Thanks, Hollywood.

Anyway, so The Escape is obviously most notable for the return of Marco’s mother and the feelings that result. Marco has to make the whole “save your mother or save the world” choice, with Applegate once again foreshadowing how bad it’s going to get by the end of this whole war. And now the rest of the Animorphs know that his mother is Visser One, so that’s cool.

Also, Tobias has his morphing powers back. He used them a little in the last book, but now we get to see him acquire a couple of new animals. I love his hesitance because he can’t fly in something like a dolphin or shark morph. It’s hard, sometimes, to get a read on Tobias’ character; we forget he’s just this goofy, shy kid who really doesn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. So no wonder he’s reluctant to leave behind his hawk form—which he is used to now—for another strange animal experience.

The entire underwater setting is a welcome change of pace. Marco does a great job describing the nature of the shark mind and what it’s like to be able to sense electromagnetic fields and just be a stone-cold killing machine.

It’s also important to note that, for once, the Animorphs’ plan actually works fairly well. They infiltrate the base, sabotage it, and escape without too much hullabaloo. Maybe they’re finally not sucking at this whole saving-the-world thing.

All in all, definitely an enjoyable instalment in the series. It has some series moments, but they don’t eclipse the rest of the book. This is mostly about the plot, the Yeerks’ machinations, and Marco’s feels for his mom. It’s good stuff.

Next time, the Animorphs venture onto the strange and glorious information superhighway! And it is glorious.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #14: The Unknown | #16: The Warning →

Remember when David Mitchell came out with Cloud Atlas and everyone freaked out? Was it a novel? Inter-related short stories? What was with the weird nesting? I don’t get the movie! All our neat little categories are coming tumbling down and now it’s the end of the world! Well, Milan Kundera does much the same in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (but since it hasn’t become a Major Motion Picture, only literary snobs care to comment on it). The cover proudly proclaims that this is “a novel,” which is a stretch by any definition of the word. It’s more like a 300-page meditation of getting old under Communist rule. I’m not so bothered by what this book is, however, or how to label it. Let’s talk about more interesting things, like sex!

There’s a lot of sex in this book, or talk of sex. Most of the characters are middle-aged, and Kundera conveys the way this turning point in life heralds a subtle shift in our perspectives. (Or, you know, so I gather, not having quite reached it myself.) The title is a good hint at the lines of inquiry Kundera lays down: there are relationships that make us happy, and there are ones we would rather not dwell on; there are relationships that make us rueful, and there are ones that never happened, so we wonder what never will be. And in this pursuit of memories real and unattainable, Kundera tries to sort through some of the psychic baggage the Russian invasion has left behind on Czech culture.

Mostly my experience with this book was one of treading water. Almost everything in here concerns things I don’t know much about. I can’t pretend to talk intelligibly about Kundera’s response to Communism in this, because I know little enough about that period. This is not a novel about being under Communist rule in the sense that Kundera isn’t about to give us exposition; it very much expects a certain familiarity.

Similarly, the emphasis on sex just reminds me how much this activity baffles me at the best of times. I get the basic idea, understand its evolutionary origins and its utility as motivation in so many tragedies. I can empathize with the characters here—but I can’t sympathize, and I’m not sure I reacted to the events in these stories in the way most readers would. It’s not just the presence of sex, because of course that happens in a lot of stories! It’s more Kundera’s emphasis on the way emotion is mixed up in the embodied sensuality of the act. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting places a lot of importance on the awareness of bodies and embodiment. Much of the sparse physical description in the book is devoted to appearances and shapes and movements of limbs. We are our bodies, or at least, the way we interact with the world is informed by them—and while I agree with that thesis to an extent, mostly I’m just reminded of my own discomfort with it.

Nevertheless, there are definitely moments that spoke to me here. I very much enjoyed “Mama,” in which Karel and Eva play host to Karel’s elderly mother the same weekend they’re having a threesome with another woman. Oops. And as hilarious as the situation is, Kundera manages to turn it into so much more than a farce. He illustrates how each of our actions can have a litany of unforeseen effects. And he manages to create three-dimensional characters in a short span of pages. Karel’s mother isn’t just a stereotypical disapproving matriarch growing ever more infirm: she is as much of a person as her son or her daughter-in-law, and thanks to the limited omniscience of our narrator, we get to see the perspectives of both generations. Kundera reminds us that the people who sit across from us are … well, people, who have thoughts and feelings and failing memories as much as we do.

Kundera reminds me of a few writers. Vonnegut is one, because there is an almost weary acceptance of the absurdity that comes with authoritarianism. Orwell, another, for the commentary on the futility of fighting that absurdity. He reminds me of Murakami too, not just because of the foreignness of the experience of the stories, but for the way his characters reflect on their bodies as four-dimensional objects—existing in time as well as space.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is fun, but in a subtle rather than exciting way. It made me think—a little about life under an occupation, a lot about how we change over the decades. I’m not sure “enjoyed” is the word for this book. I don’t know if I “got” it. It’s not really my cup of tea, but I can appreciate how it might be for others.