I don’t much like economics. I like Cory Doctorow’s metaphor here in For the Win of the economy like a train: most people have no idea where it’s going, or whether the driver is even still alive; while economists speculate on all of this, some people pay attention to them while others just ignore them entirely and watch the scenery go by.

I don’t much like economics, but I guess I should admit that the economy is important. Similarly, I won’t accept the cop-out idea that it’s impossible to comprehend economics unless you’re some kind of genius. That’s why I love Doctorow’s didactic novels: he is so good at taking a subject he is clearly passionate about and breaking it down into easier-to-understand lessons. So, yes, For the Win has a lot of pointed lectures about economic theories, from investments and hedge funds to shortselling and market panic—but it’s all couched in examples from fictitious game economies. I love that.

The cast of this novel is also stunning. Doctorow assembles quite a diverse bunch: Chinese gold farmers and dissidents, Indonesian labour rights advocates, Indian gold farmer–busting gamers, etc. There are gamers and economists, concerned parents and bemused traditional union leaders. Most importantly, these characters don’t always get along. Mala and Yasmin’s opinions diverge in Dharavi, only for the two to be drawn back together after a dangerous confrontation. Even then, they don’t always see eye-to-eye. I like stories where the protagonists have this kind of low-level conflict—conflict not for drama’s sake, mind you, but in the service of acknowledging that it is seldom clear what the “right” thing to do is.

Most of the main characters change quite a bit. Doctorow allows some time to elapse between each major part of the novel. By skipping forward in this way, he can bring us to new and interesting impasses, whether it’s the rift between Mala and Yasmin or Wei-Dong’s crazy plan to smuggle himself into China. One notable impression this makes is how privileged I am, as a Western reader, compared to many of the characters in this book. There is a deceptive and dangerous idea that somehow technology, particularly the Internet, is somehow going to liberate people in developing nations from oppression and unjust labour and create a more equal society. That’s clearly not the case here: Mala and her army have access to the Internet, but it’s just another tool that her boss uses to keep her oppressed and dependent on him for income and protection.

On the flip side, Doctorow shows us how the Internet and related technologies can be forces for good, when used as one might use any other tool. The Webbly gold farmers take the very same economies that others use to oppress them and, by cornering the gold markets, take those economies hostage for their own ends. Doctorow distills the basic tenets of union and labour philosophy in a very simple way: one or two people standing up for themselves will end badly; nearly everyone standing up for each other makes a statement so loud the world can hear.

The resolution is somewhat unrealistic, perhaps, in its scope, although there are tinges of bittersweetness to it. It’s appropriate enough given the big, dramatic nature of the entire plot. And throughout the novel, Doctorow shows realistically enough the brutal ways in which those in power respond to people’s attempts to organize and unionize; he does not pull his punches there. He makes me feel such pitch-perfect pathos for these characters, both the ones who suffer and the ones who survive. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush of the moment and that feeling of power and triumph; he encourages you to get a piece of that elation. There’s so much more going on, though, and he captures that too.

For the Win has a great deal of nuance, then. It’s not light reading, in the sense that Doctorow does digress on many points economical. But he does this through examples in games and game economies. He takes the topical—but global—idea of games and how those make money for companies and marries it with the issue of cheap and abusive labour practices. The result is a sometimes bizarre but somewhat brilliant piece of contemporary science fiction, and I, for one, feel much improved and much entertained having read it.

It’s another Megamorphs, and more time travel! This time it’s not the Ellimist who sends them back but Crayak, of all entities, via the Drode, because a Yeerk got its hands on the Time Matrix, and ain’t nobody wants that. Of course, Crayak has a “price” to enlisting the Animorphs: one of them must die!

This book is dark in a way few of the previous Animorphs books have been. And its darkness is more meditative: this isn’t the slick and slimy evil of the Yeerks, or the awful supercilious negligence of the Andalites; it’s Applegate’s portrayal of the cold and cruel evils of humanity. As is often the case in this series, the Yeerk villain de jour merely gets the plot rolling, after which the story is more about what the Animorphs learn about themselves as they work madly to stop the Yeerk from winning.

The neverending struggle between good and evil is central to this series. At first, of course, it seems like the Animorphs represent good while the Yeerks are pure evil. As the books went on, however, Applegate reveals more complexity: there is evil within the hearts of our heroes; there are Yeerks who want to do good. Additionally, the series demonstrates why evil tends to have the upper hand: it does not have to pull its punches. Good, by definition, is more constrained in its approach. It’s almost a truism that in fighting against evil, good has to worry about losing itself to that evil by “lowering” to its level. We see that here in Elfangor’s Secret, as each of the Animorphs must act on their worst selves.

Reading this now, as an adult, there is little impressive about the plot. It’s a romp through history, like many other time travel stories, and not particularly well done at that. They go to Agincourt, Trafalgar, Princeton 1933, D-Day, etc. At each juncture, the Animorphs try to stop the former Visser Four from re-writing history to make humanity easier to conquer. Along the way they stumble into various historical figures and situations. I can imagine that for younger readers, however, this would be a pretty solid story.

As with most time travel stories (regardless of audience age), the ending relies on some paradoxical time travel trickery. I don’t think “clever” is the right word for it, but it’s appropriate, I guess? Probably the best thing about it is how Cassie is the one who takes it upon herself to find out where John Berryman’s parents met (I love how they assume he knows how/when his parents met, and that the Time Matrix can just wibbly-wobbly plop them down in the exact right spot at the right moment—it’s certainly no TARDIS!). Cassie, who is always about saving lives, working not just to end one but actually prevent one from ever being born.

And this is where I’m going to get nitpicky: would this solution even work?

I mean, so that particular host is never born. Visser Four would still be demoted. Visser Four would still be stuck on Earth in some human host. Presumably they would still find the Time Matrix and have this same idea, just in a different human body. (It’s not entirely clear whether Berryman was the Yeerk’s host when it was still Visser Four. So I suppose there is an argument that it’s Berryman’s particular disposition and memories that inspired the Yeerk in its time travelling gambit.)

I guess it’s a moot point. The time travel stuff itself is dumb, as is typical for a lot of Animorphs plots: what matters instead is the way the characters confront the moral questions in the story. And much like the previous Megamorphs outing, they don’t actually come off that great. Applegate affirms that in war, the good guys sometimes cannot avoid lowering themselves to the level of the “evil” that they fight. As usual, I appreciate the complexities that she brings to this audience and to the series itself.

Next time, Marco’s mom is in trouuuuuuuble.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #29: The Sickness | #30: The Reunion →

Not sure how I discovered Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here (I swear I’d seen it discussed before I plucked it off my library’s shelves). The fanfic motif really works for me; I was looking for something to recapture the same goodness of Fangirl. Still, I have to admit I didn’t have high expectations—I’m not sure if it was the title, or the cover art, or whatever, but little about the book jumped out at me as memorable.

Any such reservations quickly fell away, however, as I began to enjoy the hell out of this novel. Anna Breslaw creates characters who are interesting and definitely memorable, and she does it in a way that feels authentic to teens who might read this, without feeling pandering. Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here has both a story and an atmosphere that I really like.

And, you know, it occurs to me that Scarlett Epstein might be the villain of this tale.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, not only does this review contain spoilers, but I’m going to start with a spoiler, because this was my favourite moment in the entire book. This is in the last third of the novel, after Ashley has stumbled on Scarlett’s RL-inspired fanfic. Scarlett has come upon Ashley, crying and smoking in the girls’ bathroom, and the two of them have one of the most honest exchanges in the entire book, and perhaps in their entire lives:

Her eyes are puffy and red. She looks right up at me. “Why do you think I’m so dumb? And don’t lie. I’ll know.”

“Because you’re mean to me.”

Perplexed, she wrinkles her nose, like I’ve put a rip in the space-time continuum. “You’re mean to me.”

…

“Um, yeah,” she sniffles, “because you think I’m a fucking moron.”

“I—”

“And you convinced Avery I am too. She’s my sister! When you’re not around, we’re really close. But whenever you’re there, she acts different. You have your smart, special club, and I’m just a dumb Fembot idiot. Right?” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her gold shadow.

“Even my parents like you more than me, even though I get straight As and your grades suck. They always talk about how shitty your mom is and how you deserve better, and what a smart, great kid you are. You come over for dinner, and they talk to you about books and stuff more than they ever talk to me about anything.”

Mean Girls is one of my favourite movies of all time, for so many reasons. It’s funny. It’s empathetic. But if you interpret Mean Girls merely as an indictment of the Regina Georges of the world, you’ve missed the point. There’s more going on there, a deeper conversation about school cliques, peer pressure, and the way we socialize girls into women and how it affects their relationships with men and with each other. One of the most powerful moments in the movie is when Cady finally realizes she has become the very thing she feared most; close seconds are when we realize that the Plastics, Regina included, are Plastics for a reason.

So my jaw just about hit the floor when I read this page (218–19), because Ashley kind of has a point. And I love it. I love that Breslaw takes this Mean Girl “dumb Fembot” and makes us, and Scarlett, see things from her perspective. Because, yes, Ashley is horrible to Scarlett in so many ways—but that’s not inherent to Ashley’s personality. I feel like if we champion YA novels that merely pit the “outsider” against the “popular kids,” we’re only going half way. It’s much more important to challenge the entire premise of the system and build empathy.

No, Scarlett isn’t the villain here. But she isn’t the hero either. Real life doesn’t have Mary Sues.

I also love that Breslaw totally foreshadows Ashley’s little moment earlier in the book through Scarlett's OC fanfic and her friends’ commentary:

DavidaTheDeadly: this could be such a great character arc for both of them: gideon helps ashbot realize her worth, ashbot helps gideon not take everything so effing seriously…

Scarface: Guys, she’s a robot.

MorwennaWraith: That’s not what John would do. He’d make her better than the sum of her parts, LITERALLY

Scarface: But, like … maybe she’s just a robot. You know.

DavidaTheDeadly: um … no? what do you mean? if that’s true, who’s gideon’s otp?

It’s not meta I guess, but Breslaw’s intertextual game is strong here. As with Fangirl, this book definitely uses the phenomenon of fanfiction both to drive the plot and to emphasize important themes. In particular, Breslaw uses these characters to smack Scarlett down whenever she’s getting too full of herself (i.e., the time she literally writes in a literal Mary Sue literally named Scarlett). I love me some foils.

(I wasn’t much into the fanfic itself. However, one of the hallmarks of a great writer is the ability to write badly on purpose, which Breslaw pulls off here in spades—I mean, Scarlett’s writing and sense of narrative is sophisticated for a teenager and about on par with where I was when I posted stuff to Fanfiction.net and FictionPress.com, but it’s pretty silly. But I appreciate the purpose it all serves, and Breslaw’s attention to authentically replicating the interactions Scarlett has within this community makes it even better.)

In keeping with this theme that Scarlett Must Realize Hers is Not a Privileged Point of View, the narrative keeps poking her and reminding her that other characters actually have lives and desires and drives beyond how they relate to her. Consider: Dawn, Scarlett’s dad, and Ruth. On the one hand, all three characters somewhat embody semi-stable tropes of the contemporary YA novel: the somewhat irresponsible, impoverished single mom; the semi-absent father figure who treats his daughter more like an idea than a person; the rebellious wise old woman who flouts authority. On the other hand, each of these characters belies those stereotypes and begs Scarlett, and us, to understand their actions from their perspectives. And each time Scarlett stops to consider how they think, she becomes a more complex person herself:

It’s funny. This whole time I thought I hated Dawn’s boyfriends because she seemed to spend more time dating them than she did with me, but now I realize I just hated them because I never saw them make her look like that.

Scarlett develops more empathy for her mother’s perspective. Or, for her father:

There are a lot of things I could say to him. Like: Yeah, you were devastated when you got a book deal. You were devastated when it got optioned by a major movie studio. And you were really devastated in that online magazine profile that included glossy photos of your apartment and your new wife and daughter, in which I was not mentioned once. But if I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that life is short.

“You're not a good writer,” I say and then walk away.

Oooooooooh. Ice. Cold. I guess that one isn’t so much empathy as bitterness—then again, you don’t have to agree with someone’s point of view to understand it.

On the subject of Scarlett and her father, I just want to add that I’m happy with the way Breslaw gradually fleshes out that dynamic. At first when Scarlett mentions her dad in a way that implies he’s not around, I jump wildly to various conclusions: is he dead? a deadbeat? So I was pleased when we learn that she actually has a good relationship with him: “I brush that off, insisting that I’ll send one soon, but all the while a warm, loved feeling creeps up behind my rib cage like ivy.” (That simile tho!) True, he profits off a hyperbolic autobiographical version of her in his novel, and he clearly doesn’t understand her—Scarlett’s distaste for The Corrections earned her a free pass from me for all past, present, and future indiscretions—but what father does understand his teenaged daughter?

Even thinking about it now, as I leaf through the book in search of these quotes, is bringing back memories of what I felt while reading it—I love that. As I went into it, I prepared myself for the worst, worrying that Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here would be long on buzzwords and teen culture nomenclature and short on, you know, actual substance or plot. Nothing is further from the truth: this is an enduring story, its main character funny but flawed, and her antics relatable but oh-so-cringe-worthy at times.

Let’s finish up by talking about sex!

Two of the best YA books I’ve read this year (Asking for It, by Louise O’Neill, and All the Rage, by Courtney Summers) have been fairly heavy books, and they were both heavy because of their portrayals of rape and rape culture. I think one reason I’m so happy with Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here is that it reassured me I can love a YA novel that isn’t doom and gloomy—there is plenty of room for all sorts of amazing fiction, and even if Scarlett isn’t dealing with existential threats to her body and psyche, her problems are no less real or important.

While sex doesn’t figure as heavily into this book as some of my other YA reads for the year, it is still present. Scarlett talks about it, struggles with writing it for her own fic. Discusses the “bases” and their lack of standardization with Avery. (Avery is the best. Would totally ship Scarvery ace OTP if all those raging hormones were not canon!) Almost has it with Gideon, but then doesn’t. And it’s this last one I want to highlight, because yes indeedy, we have a sex-positive portrayal of a boy understanding consent:

“Wait, stop.”

He takes his hands off me and lies on the floor, facing up and breathing shallowly. I stay on my back, also staring up at the ceiling.

“I, um, I can’t.”

I’m trying to sound nonplussed, like I have almost-sex with guys all the time and coolly stop short because I am playing hard to get.

“No worries! Like, not at all,” Gideon says, now sounding vaguely panicked. “I—I mean, did I go too fast? Or did I do something you didn’t want me to do?”

As amazing as Asking for It and All the Rage and all these other books about rape and rape culture are, it’s just as important that YA depicts what we want our society to be. And here we have an amazing example: consent must be enthusiastic and must be ongoing. It’s not enough that Scarlett just goes along with the making out: she revokes consent, tells Gideon to stop. And—this is the key—he does. He stops, and he doesn’t try to shame her or blame he or make her feel bad.

That, alone, would be wonderful. All teenage boys should be reading scenes like this so they see examples of how they should behave. I don’t know how many boys will read Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, gendered assumptions of audience in our marketing and all that (but that is another conversation). At the very least, however, girls reading this book get to see how boys should behave, get some antidote to the noxious messages our media send telling them they should just “accept” whatever boys are doing to their bodies.

Yet look at that last line: “did I do something you didn’t want me to do?” Not only does Gideon stop when asked, but he initiates a dialogue about them having sex. So much of the portrayal of sex in our fiction focuses on the act, on the hot-and-heavy hormones and lusts. Breslaw includes that, sure, but this scene also reminds us that sex should be about consent and communication among the people involved. Gideon stops, and they talk about how to proceed—eventually they decide, nope, no sex today. No harm, no foul. It’s an extremely positive way of modelling how teenagers can go about exploring sex in a safe way.

It would have been so easy for me to pass on Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here; you have no idea how close I came. I’m really glad I didn’t, and you shouldn’t either. It’s a debut novel, and it’s by no means perfect—there are shoals and shallows in the plot, minor momentary quirks of character. But the mistakes it makes are its own, and meanwhile, it is incredibly successful in all of the ways I’ve described above.

Now, if you excuse me, this book has reminded me it has been entirely too long since I watched Mean Girls….

I never wrote much fanfic. Or read much of it. I tried. I consider myself a “fan” of many things. But I don’t like playing in others’ universes that much. And when I do (such as when I do my chatroom-based Star Trek roleplaying every week), I make up my own characters. Nevertheless, I understand why people like Cath Avery of Fangirl are so fascinated with writing in worlds others created. Rainbow Rowell takes this idea and spins it into a YA novel that’s on the more “adult” end of the age spectrum. Cath and her twin sister are off to college, and while Wren is ready and willing to jump into the deep end of classes, dating, and parties, Cath just wants to sit in her dorm room and write Simon Snow fic. Like you do.

Fangirl fully won me over with a simple line: "I have a right to get upset about upsetting things."

Cath says this when Wren tells her to calm down, and it pulled me out of the narrative—but in a good way. It’s just so true. When people are upset, very often our first reaction is to tell them to “calm down,” and we mean it in the nicest, most helpful way. Yet some subvert this phrase and twist it to mean, “just accept this.” It’s easy to fall into the trap of not becoming upset—at least, not visibly upset—simply because one doesn’t want to inconvenience others.

Watching Cath’s development as a person is the main pleasure of the novel. She starts out as an extreme case—and, to be honest, a little annoying for all that. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t identify a little with Cath—we both love writing and staying home, for one thing—but I think it’s more that Cath and I share an enjoyment of an internal life. Reagan, Levi, and Wren all look for external stimuli to validate and energize their existence; Cath is fine by herself, exploring worlds of her own (or, more accurately, worlds of Gemma T. Leslie’s). For Cath and me both, the outside world is often more an inconvenience to be borne, an obstacle to what’s happening in our mind.

I’m not saying that’s better, mind you. But it is different. And that’s the key to getting along with introverts: don’t tell us we’re broken or abnormal. Just smile when we tell you we’re too tired to hang out, and go have fun with your more extroverted friends. We’ll be around another time.

This book is about Cath struggling to find her voice. At the beginning she is nervous to the point of illness, practically neurotic in her desire to avoid strangers and agoraphobic in her behaviour. I can’t go into the psychology and how this is all a result of her and Wren getting messed up because her mother left—I’m not a psychologist. But I like how Rowell starts with Cath clearly in a place of great fragility, and gradually, Cath changes. She gets to know new people. She experiments with having a proper boyfriend for the first time. She starts voicing her own desires, her own needs, and actually gets properly angry.

I like that there are few trite resolutions here. Cath and Levi’s relationship doesn’t speak to me that much. But I like that Cath and Wren end up simply “OK” and that Cath and her mother don’t really resolve things. The end of this book reliably coincides with the end of Cath’s first year at college, and Rowell doesn’t mince her words or promise that a few scenes could make everything better.

I’m a little sad we don’t get to hear how Cath ends Carry On, though. I’ll read Rowell’s version (which apparently is not exactly Cath’s version), but the ending is probably one of my less favourite parts of Fangirl.

While this isn’t a book that I’ll be re-reading often or recommending at the top of my lungs like I do with some YA, it’s a steady-paced and thoughtful story. It’s a nice break from science-fiction and fantasy YA that I often read, and I thoroughly enjoyed ripping through this more hefty novel in a weekend. Rowell has talents both for characterization and dialogue. Her characters feel real, and talk like people with real pet peeves and problems might. Fangirl, despite its title, is not about Cath’s obsession with Simon Snow. That’s just one facet of a much more complicated but intriguing story.

Stories are fascinating because they are co-constructed experiences between teller and audience. Unless you are eating your own tale, your story takes shape not just from your words but also from its form in the minds of your audience. Each audience member contributes their own flavours to the stories. Sometimes, their visions correspond eerily similar to yours. Other times those visions diverge. I’m always fascinated when I read a story and find myself enjoying it despite its plot diverging from what I expected. (And I’m not talking about twists or surprises here, but rather how my mental map of what I interpret the story as being differs from what the story actually is on paper.)

Zeroes is the latest example of this phenomenon. Chuck Wendig is an author whose writing I greatly respect even though his stories aren’t always to my tastes. I hadn’t heard about this, so I was surprised to see a more “conventional” story from him—my library hasn’t labelled this as science fiction, although after reading I’m pretty sure I’d die on the hill that maintains it is. Anyway, there is a lot of creepy, twisty stuff happening in this book. Some of it is predictable, and some of it is not. The story doesn’t always go where I was hoping, but the places it goes are really interesting. This isn’t a “slam dunk” but it is a thriller that could have some broad appeal.

First, we have an ensemble cast. This is a risky proposition. Too many characters can make the story hard to follow. Wendig follows a very traditional “round up” method of introducing the cast, but he does it very well. In addition to allowing us to see each of these hackers in their “natural habitat”, this method lets Wendig scatter clues as to the overall plot. He sets up Hollis Copper as a formidable opponent, then subverts that by revealing that Hollis is jaded, out of favour with the agency, and largely a middleman for the more sinister Golathan. After we have met our hacking crew and they get sent to the Lodge, the real story begins.

Second, this is a story that feels familiar but isn’t. This sense of déjà vu might be why I kept expecting things to happen that didn’t. There is some serious Deus Ex stuff happening here (Leslie reminds me of Madame Zhao and Typhon the Hyron Project). On a low level, Wendig is challenging a lot of our assumptions about embodiment and the ways in which we will be interacting with technology in the near future. Similarly, he highlights some of the most topical issues around state surveillance strategies and the use of data mining to create ever-more-advanced predictive algorithms.

Third, this is a damn good thriller. I say that as someone who, generally, doesn’t appreciate thrillers and tends not to give them very good reviews when I do try them. Zeroes feels eerily close to a novelization of a movie. I could almost see this translating to screen very directly: the chapters feel like scenes, and that short time-jump towards the end is a nice kind of “wrap-up” scene that shows the characters’ continuing story. The diversity in the ages, genders, and races of the main characters would make for a nice, rich casting call. I would go to see this in the theatres.

That being said, for all that Zeroes does well within those parameters of techno-thriller, it doesn’t feel all that transgressive. If the nature of Typhon is supposed to shock me, then see above—Deus Ex: Human Revolution got to this first. Wendig’s portrayal of hacking is quite good—it and Mr. Robot do hacking right, in that they realize that the hacking part is not the actual story, and that showing hacks should be done sparingly because they really aren’t as magical as Hollywood seems to think. He tries to sample from a breadth of hacker sub-types (hence the ensemble), and he respectfully references hacking’s history and the hackers of yore; I can’t fault him for his research. Nevertheless, his engagement with hacker culture is shallow at best. The very premise of the government coercing hackers to white hat for them might be entertaining, but it’s not all that novel, nor does it even scratch the surface of what hackers (of any hat colour) are doing these days.

Don’t get me wrong: Zeroes kept me going through a Sunday afternoon, and it was good times. I meant what I said above about it feeling cinematic. The plot and story chug along, and the characters are turn-key in that respect; everything just falls into place like intricately laid out dominoes. This is a pleasant enough sensation—the kind of reliable drug hit all of us readers like. But it doesn’t tickle the ganglia that respond to fresh, new ideas (it might if this is your first time stumbling on some of these ideas, I guess). Zeroes is one of the better thrillers I’ve read, and if you are in the mood for this, you’ll enjoy it. But it didn’t rock my world.

P.S. This is the second book named Zeroes from 2015 that I’ve read (I technically read the other one at the very end of last year). If you want to find out which one I liked better, you’ll need to check out that review for yourself.

Am I doing this clickbait stuff right, guys?

“I am healing. I have scars that show and scars that don’t.”

The tagline for Rose Under Fire is “I will tell the world”, and it is so appropriate. This book is about many things. It’s about women in World War II; it’s about the beauty and freedom of flying planes; it’s about the lengths to which people go to survive, or to help others survive, and the paradox of our immense capacities for both empathy and cruelty. Above all else, though, I think this book is about the importance of hearing, believing, and remembering.

I suppose comparing this book to Code Name Verity is inevitable and expected. In both books, Elizabeth Wein tells the story of women who end up behind enemy lines in World War II. They are “companion” novels in the sense that they take place in the same continuity; this is a loose sequel to Code Name Verity that references some of the events from the previous book and includes Maddie. You don’t need to read Code Name Verity to appreciate Rose Under Fire, but you should read it for its own merits, and there are spoilers for it in this book.

Getting into the game of “which is the better book” feels kind of cheap, because they are both amazing. I want people to read both! Arguably, Code Name Verity is superior from a narrative perspective; Wein just does some very interesting things with frame stories and unreliable narration that she doesn’t replicate in this book. While both feature women captured by the Nazis, their individual experiences and the stories that Wein tells are quite distinct. Julie’s story is about the terror of what is going to happen to her, the knowledge that no matter what story she tells them, there will be no Arabian Nights–esque reprieve. Rose’s story is about trying to put the horrors of the past behind her; after her capture, her diary picks back up and lets us know she made it out alive before she begins to tell us everything that happened. We have that security—and we need it, considering the horrors that Rose describes.

Wein acknowledges in the afterword that Rose’s experience is limited to a very narrow slice of life in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. That’s understandable. And what an interesting, important slice of experiences these are anyway: so much of our fiction around World War II focuses on the battles (hence the men); fiction about concentration camps often focuses on Jewish people. Don’t get me wrong: these perspectives are so, so important and we should read and learn about them. But we also need to hear about the women’s concentration camps. And before reading these two books, I had no idea that there were women pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary responsible for ferrying planes around! Once again it turns out that systemic bias in history and our education system has worked to erase the fact that women have always been there, making vital contributions in every field of human endeavour imaginable.

So Rose ends up in Ravensbrück (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s in the cover copy). She herself experiences all the “typical” forms of abuse and torture—malnutrition, forced labour, whipping, insufficient attire, etc. She also ends up in the same barracks as the surviving Rabbits, Polish women on whom Nazi doctors performed incredibly unethical and painful experimental surgeries in the guise of “learning how to treat battle wounds”. Rose talks to them, becomes friends and comrades with them, particularly with her namesake, Róża. And so begins her mantra: I will tell the world.

Because in this book, Wein reminds me of something that was different back then compared to how we view Nazi atrocities today. Nowadays, deniers aside, we take the atrocities of the Holocaust for granted. We don’t always know the details (i.e., the Rabbits) but we believe these things happened. Hindsight makes us forget that this wasn’t always the case. Before Rose ends up in Ravensbrück, she herself is skeptical:

It was compelling stuff—you couldn’t stop listening—but it was so absolutely awful that I couldn’t believe it, and I said so.

“That’s got to be propaganda!” I burst out. “You English are as bad as the Germans!”

“You should read the Guardian,” Maddie said. “It’s not all propaganda. The reports from the concentration camps are pure evil.”

“Poisoning girls with gangrene?” I objected. “It’s like trying to get us to believe the Germans eat babies!”

Later, of course, Rose finds out how accurate this “propaganda” is firsthand—and she experiences the other side of the coin when her mother talks about not believing “those Jewish women who said they’d been—”. One can understand why these reports are hard to believe; as Rose herself says above, it’s just so awful one doesn’t want to think anyone is capable of such acts. And here we are, 70 years on, so secure in our knowledge of what happened it’s easy to forget anyone ever doubted. But in a time when film was still rare and radio and telegraph were the go-to communication methods, it was harder to communicate the true scope of what was happening.

It’s tempting to say that things are different now, in this age when everyone has cameras on their person and can livestream something happening all around the world at the push of a button. But it isn’t different, really. Being more connected has not made people any more interested in hearing about kidnapped Nigerian school girls or Syrian refugee camps—we tune into the 24-hour news cycle and then tune right back out. We “heard something about that” on Twitter or Facebook but don’t hear the whole story. And there are plenty of people denying the true extent of conditions in Syria or even here in Canada, on First Nations reserves—one wonders how history is going to look back on that. (Even now so many people are ignorant of or deny the experience of survivors of residential schools. I can’t begin to tell you how many times someone has insisted to me that “the British” were responsible for colonialist policies towards Indigenous peoples, and that “Canada” put a stop to all that.)

This is the point Wein tries to make: stories are everything. Listening to the stories of survivors, whether they are of the Holocaust or concentration camps or residential schools or refugees of war, is so essential, and believing them, even more so.

I also love how Wein doesn’t make Rose overly strong or stoic. The moments where Rose is confiding in her diary about her experience after the camp, about her recovery in the room at the Ritz, are some of the most powerful, even though she is at her safest. Her inability, at first, to leave the room; her reluctance to engage with the crowds of Paris, underscore the lasting trauma of her imprisonment. Even afterwards, when she is living in Scotland, she talks to us about how she isn’t strong enough to testify at some of the war crimes trials. When we tell stories about survivors, we often like to sprinkle in adjectives like “brave”, without really wanting to engage with what those descriptors mean. In doing so, we ignore and erase the feelings of the survivors themselves. Rose does some incredible things, especially during that escape sequence. Regardless of whether we think she is brave, however, she doesn’t think that. And her feelings are more important; it is more important we understand how this experience has, as she puts it, influenced her.

All in all, Wein’s portrayal is just so incredibly nuanced:

It is true that Ravensbrück shaped me—whatever I would have been without it interfering, I am someone else now. On the simplest level, I don’t think I would be in Scotland or in medicine. But Ravensbrück doesn’t define me.

Rose here is contrasting her experience with Róża’s, for the younger Polish girl lost her entire family in the war and adopted the camp prisoners are her new family. Hence, her identity is so inextricably bound to the Ravensbrück experience that she is struggling much more to reconstruct herself now that she is free.

Moreover, Wein underscores just how much World War II altered the trajectory of an entire generation—and not just an entire generation in a single country, but in almost all of the world. I am lucky enough to have grown up in an era where I would not be expected to go fight in a war. For the people Rose’s age, that simply wasn’t an option. Even those who weren’t fighting were involved in the war effort in one way or another, and even when the war was over, your life was different from what it was before. From the hasty marriages to Rose’s ruminations on the contrast between her life in Pennsylvania and her life in England and Ravensbrück, this book illustrates how different it was to come of age during World War II.

So Rose Under Fire is not an easy book, nor should it be. But its beautiful in that haunting sort of way. Wein refuses to sugarcoat or elide details despite this being a young adult novel (nor should she). This is a tonic to the myths we encounter, about the war or about the fragility of adolescents or about the one-dimensionality of survivors and their stories. There is so much happening here.

It’s been too long since I read Code Name Verity; I should probably pick it up again. I’m very happy I finally got around to reading Rose Under Fire, and I really recommend both books, not just to young adults but to readers of any age. This is one of those stories that is too important to let pass by: we need to tell the world.

I had to add a new shelf for this book: "deliciously quotable." That admirably summarizes Fool, a bawdy comedic interpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear. Not for the faint of heart, Fool puts the reader through a whirlwind tour of Shakespearean clichés mixed with a healthy dose of anachronisms and sexual innuendo.

I love any sort of irreverent Shakespearean fun. It's all well and good to call the Bard one of the greatest writers of the English language, but I've never agreed with scholars who treat Shakespeare's writing as sacred. After all, I'm sure good ol' Will wasn't looking to become the most lauded British playwright--he just wanted to make some money and have a good time. And we all know that Shakespeare, although a master wordsmith, was far from original--almost all of his plays are based on earlier works anyway. So it's more homage than heresy to reinterpret the Bard's own work.

King Lear is my favourite of Shakespeare's plays; however, even if it isn't your favourite, or even if you've never read it, you'll still enjoy Fool (just maybe not as much as I did). Christopher Moore draws on inspiration and quotations from several of Shakespeare's plays "largely to throw off reviewers, who will be reluctant to cite and criticize passages of my writing, lest they were penned by the Bard hisownself." It's King Lear sprinkled with Macbeth and Hamlet and a happy ending. I'm not suggesting that a happy ending is better for King Lear—I'm looking at you, Nathan Tate—but it's better for the King Lear reimagining that is Fool.

Take Fool with a grain of salt and suspend your disbelief and you'll be rewarded with a funny and entertaining story. I laughed out loud at several parts of the book, something I very rarely do, and was ready to grant the book five stars when I was less than halfway through (contingent on the book remaining awesome, which it did). Not only is Fool fun and easy to read, but it makes Shakespeare accessible to people who might otherwise never find time for the Bard—I'm looking at you, vapid Twilight-enslaved teenage populace. Fool isn't a replacement for King Lear, and maybe I'm just being too idealistic here, but I hope it'll stir up more interest in Shakespeare, who could be every bit as bawdy as Christopher Moore.

Yes, I loved hearing Regan described as "sadistic (but erotic-fantasy-grade-hot)" and several independent discussions of her "shaggacity." My taste in comedy runs more toward the cerebral, so I hope my enjoyment of Moore's wordplay is all the more convincing a testimonial. It's simply brilliant: "We've been rehearsing a classic from antiquity, Green Eggs and Hamlet, the story of a young prince of Denmark who goes mad, drowns his girlfriend, and in his remorse, forces spoiled breakfast on all whom he meets." As that quotation indicates, Moore peppers Fool with anachronisms. He doesn't go out of his way to describe the mythical medieval Britain he's conjured into existence; Fool is very light on description and heavy on dialogue. Moore sets the stage prior to the beginning of the book: "generally, if not otherwise explained, conditions may be considered damp" and then rarely goes on to describe the environment except when required by the plot. And I don't mind the scant description; it fits the quick-paced, witty tone of Pocket's narration and his banter with enemies and allies alike.

In keeping with the wit and dialogue, another reason Fool appealed so much to me is that it's very meta. The characters occasionally break the fourth wall—usually when Pocket criticizes their behaviour as a stock character:

"So," said Oswald, "you lived through the night?"

"Of course, why wouldn't I?" I asked.

"Well, because I told Cornwall of your rendezvous with Regan and I expected him to slay you."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Oswald, show a little guile, would you? The state of villainy in this castle is rubbish, what with Edmund being pleasant and you being straightforward. What's next, Cornwall starts feeding orphans while bloody bluebirds fly out of his bum? Now, let's try it again, see if you can at least keep up the pretense of evil. Go."

"So, you lived through the night?" said Oswald.

"Of course, why wouldn't I?" I asked.

This sort of meta-repartee can only work in a certain type of book—it would be out of place in a deeply serious piece of literature, for instance, but is fine for something like Fool or [b:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy|11|The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Book 1)|Douglas Adams|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156039839s/11.jpg|3078186]. Moore goes further and interposes a page-length "intermission" scene consisting of fourth-wall-breaking dialogue between Pocket and Edmund at the end of Act IV:

"Bloody ghost is foreshadowing, innit?"

"But all the gratuitous shagging and tossing?"

"Brilliant misdirection."

"You're having me on."

"Sorry, no, it's pikeman's surprise for you in the next scene."

"I'm slain then?"

"To the great satisfaction of the audience."

"Oh bugger!"

Lest you think Fool is only vapid innuendo, I'd argue that there is a more profound level to this novel. Although it transforms King Lear from tragedy to black comedy, in the course of doing so it makes some very touching observations (this was particularly the case with Pocket's recount of his relationship with the anchoress). My favourite, hands down, is this dialogue between the banished Kent and Pocket:

"I'm beginning to wonder," said Kent, sitting down now on an overturned wooden tub. "Who do I serve? Why am I here?"

"You are here, because, in the expanding ethical ambiguity of our situation, you are steadfast in your righteousness. It is to you, our banished friend, that we all turn—a light amid the dark dealings of family and politics. You are the moral backbone on which the rest of us hang our bloody bits. Without you we are merely wiggly masses of desire writhing in our own devious bile."

"Really?" asked the old knight.

"Aye," said I.

"I'm not sure I want to keep company with you lot, then."

Not only is this funny, but it actually provides a great look at the character of Kent from the original King Lear. The most anomalous aspect of the original play is the fact that Lear's kind of a jerk, so it's curious that Kent stays loyal to him even after banishment. Here Pocket attempts to give an answer to that question, with his usual graphically disturbing diction. The characters in Fool are slightly thinner than cardboard, with very little development. Yet it's easy to forget that most of Shakespeare's characters are like that too. Fool is, at some level, an allegory with a paper-thin cast.

Fool is my first, but definitely not my last, Christopher Moore book. Friends of mine who like Moore, and many of the reviewers on this site, seem to concur that Fool is not one of his best novels. If that's the case, then I'm in for a treat; since I loved Fool, I can't wait to get my hands on Moore novels that don't suck!

There's a certain subset of people who will pan this book because their sense of humour isn't compatible with it—they'll find it childish, or perhaps even repugnant. I respect their differing opinion, but if you don't share that opinion, then you must read this book. It is awesome.

Shall we have a discussion about how, at this point, no one, not even Atwood herself, is pretending she is not writing science fiction, yet libraries and bookstores are still going to shelve these books in the “literary” or “general” sections because genres are bullshit marketing labels?

What, you just want me to skip all that noise and go to the review? Fine, fine. Don’t say I never listen to you, reader.

Also, you’re looking nice today. Hats suit you.

I don’t know how to summarize The Heart Goes Last in a way that sounds original, because it isn’t. It’s dystopian, obviously, from the description. The United States sinks ever deeper into economic recession, with some areas becoming ghost-towns of anarchy where people like Stan and Charmaine live in their cars and avoid gangs or individuals who would steal their vehicle and rape them. Fun times, eh? Atwood does a good job illustrating the extent of their hopeless existence before throwing them into the Positron Project, Consilience, where they spend alternating months living lives out of the 1950s (but with 1950s with robots, not the 1950s with mounting McCarthyism) and living in a prison while another couple lives in their house and benefits from the fruit of their labour. Billed as a new model for sustainable, viable communities, all but the most brain-dead readers will recognize the sinister capitalism-in-overdrive tones of the Positron Project as soon as flabby moustache-twirling Ed shows up on the page. Stan and Charmaine’s marriage is not in the best of states—over a year of living in a vehicle together does that to people, probably. They continue to drift apart within Consilience, and for reasons that are never fully justified, become drawn into a conspiracy or kind-of-coup against Ed by his former partner.

Majorly, my problem with The Heart Goes Last is the tone Atwood strikes in depicting the evils hidden behind the Positron Project’s brochure-glazed exterior. It’s just so obviously a bad proposition from the start; there is no attempt at subtlety, ever. From the creepy surveillance tactics to the restrictions on freedom of expression and consumption of media, the Project has “Big Brother” written all over it. Oh, and Charmaine blithely acts as benign executioner for the Project, injecting anyone who shows up in the little chamber with a lethal cocktail. I am not really sure to make of that, except possibly that Charmaine must have skipped the Civics lesson where you learn that private companies can’t go around killing people for minor infractions; there are these things called trials first. And of course, we later learn that the fates of these people are much Worse Than Death, because there are creepy things happening Behind the Scenes of the Project with sexbots and neuro-reprogramming and oh-my-god-we-didn’t-just-cross-the-line-we-obliterated-it. But then, when the “good guys” (?) win, suddenly all these things that were objectively bad become OK or justifiable, at least in certain circumstances.

“Moral clarity” is not really in evidence here. That alone is not a bad thing, per se. I don’t think this book would have won me over it if it just went around preaching that “killing is wrong” and “turning ordinary citizens into prisoners is wrong,” because, of course, that’s not all that interesting. I’m just confused, though, about what I’m supposed to take away from this.

Am I supposed to see this as a farce, a kind of mockery both of dystopian literature (oooh, how post-post-modernist!) and of the late stage capitalism that seems to be rocketing us towards such a future? The characters are certainly flat enough for this—but if this is the case, what’s with the attempts at pathos for Stan and Charmaine?

Am I supposed to see this as a serious indictment of the way governments are abdicating their responsibilities towards the welfare of their citizens to private corporations? On the surface, this is a very plausible reading: the Positron Project itself might seem a little incredible, but one could see elements of it easily becoming reality; and, in general, the way that corporations continue to wrest more rights and privileges from government—at the expense of our personhood and dignity—is troubling. None of what Atwood is suggesting, in terms of the economic climate of this book, seems far-fetched.

However, I have some issues with the whole “body harvesting” aspect of the Positron Project, because I’m not really sure why you’d go to the lengths one would go to here just to get some meat-suits for your mad scientist projects. It seems like it would be more cost-effective and a lot less risky, media-wise, just to kidnap people off the streets instead of shepherding them into fake cities first. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some companies aren’t doing that already—the poor and marginalized parts of our society lack so many basic protections that someone like me takes for granted. The Heart Goes Last’s whole “what if we made prison good but it’s secretly still bad” strikes me as such a white, middle class horror fantasy. Stan and Charmaine are the most whitebread couple. While Atwood lampshades this in Stan’s observations of his helplessness compared to his criminal brother, that doesn’t really change the fact that the Positron Project is a bogeyman of the formerly middle class. And there have been so many more interesting, more realistic, more passionate books written about people who are struggling with these problems from a position of much less privilege.

There is also a certain level of dismissiveness and cynicism to so much of the narration. As the evils of the Positron Project are exposed to the wider world, Atwood almost casually remarks about “the bloggers” having field days, taking up their torches and pitchforks to scream about civil liberties, etc. This is very good shorthand for the frenzied nature of our distributed media landscape—but it also felt really lazy, as if Atwood was unwilling or uninterested in interrogating the substantive ways in which digital media has altered the tenor of our discussions. It’s true that might have been outside the scope of the book. Nevertheless, the offhanded way Atwood talks about these things further contributes to the shallow feeling of the book.

I’ve previously remarked that I tend to like Atwood’s ideas but that her style doesn’t always work for me. This seems to be the case once again, although arguably there are more fundamental problems with this book that could restrict its appeal. The Heart Goes Last has sparks of Atwood’s brilliance, but as a work of dystopian fiction, it strikes me as very tired, very tapped out. There is nothing here that feels transgressive or like it is adding something new to the intertextual conversation: even the things that are supposed to be shocking, like the purpose of the knit blue teddy-bears, just seem banal. Atwood has covered a lot of this ground before in much better ways. I’d be disappointed in this book coming from any author, I think; coming from Atwood, this is that much more bitter a pill.

This was a difficult book to read, and not just because of its subject matter. Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing is highly stylized in Wintergirls; I mistook the cover copy’s description of her writing as “lyrical” as being metaphorical, but it’s more accurate than not. Normally I dislike gimmicky or unconventional experiments in narrative style, even when they attempt to bring verisimilitude to a narrator’s stream of consciousness. For some reason, though, it seized me here and didn’t let me go. I guess it effectively communicates the state of Lia’s mind, and while such tricks haven’t worked for me in the past, it works here in tandem with Anderson’s careful characterization and the duplicity that Lia presents to the outside world.

Trigger warning (both book and review) for discussions of eating disorders, suicide/death.

By way of disclaimer, I know next to nothing about anorexia or other eating disorders. I haven’t even read much about them. The most I can remember reading about eating disorders was probably in Unspeakable Things, wherein Laurie Penny talks about the way medical professionals “treating” her eating disorder also coerced her into performing their vision of a feminine gender role. There are salient points there. While people who perform gender as male also suffer from eating disorders, disproportionately women in our society receive the messages telling them to be skinny. Anderson takes aim at this idea, but instead of confronting it head-on, she presents it from within. Lia acknowledges the paradox of her thinking, admits that if she hits her goal of 90 lbs she’s only going to press on to 85, then to 80, then to 75—the “danger zone”—and that nothing except “0” will ever ultimately satisfy her. This is irrational. How can this possibly end in anything except her death? I find myself thinking. How is this anything but the slowest form of suicide? But it’s so much more complex than that. This is a complicated subject, because like anything dealing with human behaviour, biology, and neurology, there are a host of physical, mental, and social factors at play here. Wintergirls takes a look at almost all of them. And I think Anderson does an amazing job of helping someone like me, who has no real frame of reference, understand even slightly better what people like Lia experience on a day-to-day basis.

When we meet Lia, she is in crisis. She has been in crisis for years now. But her crisis has recently deepened with the death of her former best friend, Cassie. Lia’s family knows all about her anorexia; she has previously been hospitalized and is presently seeing a therapist. And she is playing the game, pretending to eat and cheating at her weekly weigh-ins with her stepmom, all to keep them off her back while she monitors her calories and continues to lose weight. Her self-control, though certainly not laudable in this context, is indubitably impressive. Herein lies one of the edifying tidbits of Wintergirls: it’s not that Lia doesn’t crave the food; she is so, so hungry. But if she eats, she gains weight, and it is her embodiment that she cannot tolerate. I can empathize with this to some extent: I too occasionally find embodiment problematic. We are disgusting bags of fat and water and calcified minerals. We’re gross. So I can imagine taking my occasional distaste for the human body and turning that up to eleven and not being able to turn that off, and maybe that approximates what Lia feels when she looks at herself in the mirror. When she describes her objectively skinny body as being bloated and gruesomely blubbery.

The depths to which Lia goes to dissemble about her disorder are fascinating. It’s an inverted look at what’s happening behind the “there were no warning signs” attitude some people profess upon discovering that a loved one was depressed, had an eating disorder, etc. The warning signs are manifest and plain to see, but the human capacity for self-deception makes it easy for Lia’s family to ignore them. It’s not that they don’t care. Anderson gives us a wonderful, likeable-but-flawed stepmother character in the form of Jennifer, who seems to want what’s best for Lia. She genuinely tries to engage with Lia. Yet the ease with which Lia deflects Jennifer’s attempts, and the attempts of the other family members and adults in her life, demonstrates just how little we penetrate the interior lives of those around us.

It’s also important that Lia here is eighteen, legally an adult, theoretically capable and allowed to make her own choices. In this way, Wintergirls can explore questions of autonomy and individuality that stories focusing on pre-teens and early teens with eating disorders cannot. To what extent should we allow an individual to self-harm before we abrogate their self-determination? This is such a thorny question. It’s one that has weighed heavily in our Canadian conversation lately, because just this past week the government finally passed into law rules governing assisted dying. Western society prides itself on a strong tradition of individualism to the point, perhaps, of irrationality: people should be able to do whatever they want to themselves as long as it doesn’t hurt others, per Mills. Yet we also prescribe many anti-individualist and hegemonic practices and are willing to use any number of positive and negative coercive methods to ensure these practices are followed. In the book, Lia’s autonomy is legally valid but precarious: as long as she lives under her parents’ roofs (either one) she must submit, in some form, to their rules; her mother also makes ominous threats about having Lia declared unfit by a judge.

We cannot ignore the fact that these are conversations about the autonomy women have over their bodies and the historical context thereof. It is so weird and unforgivable that we live in an era that prides itself on individual freedoms yet simultaneously seeks to legislate what women can and cannot do with their bodies. Wintergirls engages with the social pressures inherent in Lia’s anorexia in subtle ways. Mostly, Anderson does this through Cassie and her juxtaposition with Lia—both as a spectre of what her future might hold, as well as a literal spectre goading Lia towards that future.

The subplot concerning Cassie is exceptionally well done and one of the best parts this book has to offer. It reminds me of the way Courtney Summers juxtaposes Romy’s situation with Penny’s in All the Rage: tragically, in our society, dead girls are often easier to deal with than living ones. We can memorialize dead girls, mythologize them, smooth over their checkered pasts and turn them into the impossible angels they could never have been when they were alive. Cassie is so similar to Lia in terms of the issues that plague her, yet now that she is dead, her parents seek only to remember her as a “good girl” taken from them too soon.

Lia remarks on the twisted irony of this behaviour, and rightly so. I get why parents want to do this. But this kind of narrative is so harmful to the living. It erases Cassie, turns her into something she never was, because no one is perfect and everyone has problems, perhaps teenagers more so than most. Denying this simply to remember “the best of” a person dishonours that person’s memory by refusing to remember them as a person. This is doubly perfidious for women whose personhoods are so often challenged not just in death but in life as well. In particular, the idea that girls, dead or alive, are either “good” or “bad” is reductive, insulting, and dangerous. There is so much pressure to be a “good girl”, and so why are we surprised when girls take extreme steps to attempt to carve themselves into the images of good girls thrust upon them? Lia and Cassie’s pact to be the skinniest, best, most glittering wintergirls their school has ever seen is not some idle decision; it’s an oath they take because they think it will help them survive the gauntlet of judgement, double standard, and impossible expectations that teenage girls must run from puberty through adulthood.

I love how Anderson shows us the seeds of such moments in Emma. Lia observes with distaste the way Jennifer regulates Emma’s life: “Jennifer is determined to carve her into the perfect-little-girl who will turn into the perfect-young-lady whose shining accomplishments will prove to the world that Jennifer is the absolutely perfect mother” and how this includes attempting to watch Emma’s “plumpness”. Now, it’s worth pointing out that Lia is obviously an unreliable narrator. Her relationship with her own mother is so very different from Emma’s relationship with Jennifer; Dr. Marrigan is much colder and more distant, and it’s possible Lia is projecting some of her own longing for a maternal connection onto what’s happening between Jennifer and Emma. Nevertheless, I think this is an interesting dynamic. As I mentioned earlier, Jennifer is a likeable, if somewhat high-strung, character: she has the best of intentions in mind and wants the best for her daughter, yet she is complicit in a system of socialization designed to make women self-conscious about their bodies.

The scenes between Lia and Emma are also moments of endearing tenderness. Lia intentionally distances herself from everyone, because if she allows herself to get close, her careful facade will crack. Yet she is so sweet and caring with Emma; she actually does act like a healthy big sister (even if it is sometimes only an act). The moments in the story when Lia is at her most genuine, most helpful, most raw, tend to be when Emma is involved. And then, of course, Anderson capitalizes on my fear: that Emma will be the one to find Lia when she finally takes herself to the brink.

I began worrying about how this novel might end long before that scene. How could Anderson give us a satisfactory conclusion to such a complicated conflict? On one hand, a logical consequence of Lia’s worsening condition is suicide/death along similar lines as Cassie. While possible, I felt like this would be such a grim ending; I couldn’t help but dream that Anderson would give us something more hopeful. On the other hand, it would be dishonest and disappointing if Wintergirls ended with Lia suddenly “getting better”, as if there is an easy or quick fix to something like anorexia. So neither did I hold out for a sanguine and sunny ending.

For those reasons, the actual ending of Wintergirls feels right, like it’s one of the only possible endings that could work. It is hopeful but in a realistic and unpretentious way: Lia has finally realized she needs help, finally realized she wants to get better. There is an empathy for those who haven’t made that leap yet:

I avoid the drama of the girls still neck-deep in the snow, running away from the pain as fast as they can. I hope they figure it out.

Similarly, in what is clearly Anderson speaking through Lia, the last three sentences of this novel are unadulterated and pure truth: “There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever….”

Wintergirls does not dress up anorexia. It doesn’t make it sexy or glamorous. Lia never dwells on how she becomes popular because she is skinny and beautiful. Rather, Anderson presents Lia’s suffering in its rawest form. She explores the medicalization of girlhood and the social pressures that pushed Lia and Cassie into this situation. She shows how families with even the best of intentions can fail to recognize signs and offer inadequate support simply because they don’t understand what their child is going through, and instead of stopping to listen and learn, they move forward convinced they know “what’s best” for their loved one. Lastly, the novel deals with the darkest and most painful existential moments we can have: those moments when we (or the voices we conjure up) tell ourselves lies that make us question why we are still here. Anderson does all this with unbridled compassion and sensitivity, and the result is a wonderful, unvarnished work of storytelling.

As I reflected in my review of The Sleeper and the Spindle, fairytale retellings are all the rage. With The Wrath & the Dawn, we have a new take on One Thousand and One Nights. Unlike the original, the stories within the frame story fall by the wayside, for the most part, as Shahrzad’s relationship with Khalid intensifies. Renée Ahdieh’s reimagining, then, is less about retelling the stories from One Thousand and One Nights and more about exploring that dynamic between a supposedly-cruel or vindictive king and a clever, virtuous volunteer bride. Even so, deep down, as so many stories are, this is also a story about stories and the power that stories hold over our hearts.

I know precisely when this story got me: when we learn that there is something deeper to Khalid’s executions of his wives. Though hinted at very obliquely in the beginning, this becomes more apparent later in the story, following Shahrzad’s first stays of execution. After escaping her appointments with death twice in a row, there is a tense scene where guards arrive and haul her away and very nearly garrote her … only for Khalid to rescue her at the last moment, for he had not sanctioned this execution. The exchanges that follow between Khalid and General al-Khoury, the ongoing tension whenever Shahrzad attempts to uncover the truth of things—it’s all very powerful, very suspenseful. A guy killing his bride every night and then marrying a new one is pretty terrible, so you need to have a persuasive justification if you’re going to suggest he isn’t a completely horrible person.

Indeed, The Wrath & the Dawn really casts doubt on this idea that we can assign moral signifiers to people (as opposed to actions). Khalid’s killing of his wives is an evil act, yet there is a purpose behind this act that some might view as noble. Similarly, Shahrzad marries Khalid with every intention of finding a way to kill him to avenge her best friend’s death—and while we view generally view killing as repugnant (see previous sentence), we often accept justifications such as vengeance over villains. As Shahrzad survives and she and Khalid get to know each other (or not, as Shahrzad points out much later in the novel in an incredibly touching scene), the reader is left wondering exactly where the moral high ground lies. Or was there ever any high ground to begin with?

Ahdieh leaves us with mounting certainty that somehow this is all going to end in tears. Shahrzad and Tariq seem so very much in love, to the point that Tariq is willing to stage a total rebellion against Khalid just to get her back! Yet as Shahrzad develops feelings for Khalid, and as we find out more about the mystery behind his penchant for wife-murdering, the answer to the question of “which people belong together” seems more distant rather than less.

I’m actually rather surprised I’m so into this love triangle. I think it helps that Shahrzad’s fall for Khalid is so gradual. She’s still intent on revenge halfway through the book, even as she is acknowledging her attraction to him. Also, the attraction between them is consistent with her character; she is not drawn to him just because of plot but because she is inherently drawn to risk, danger, and the prospect of the unknown. The Shahrzad who climbed trees even when she fell out of them is now the Shahrzad who will get to the bottom of the mysterious Caliph of Khorasan and his curse. Even if it kills her.

Speaking of which: what a cliffhanger! I have read some great books this year, including several that have made me want to run out and get the sequel right away. Now I have to add The Wrath & the Dawn to that list. How can you not want to jump into book 2 to find out what happens? Characters going Dark Side on us, unrest at the borders, and now a botched rescue that will doubtlessly lead to misinterpretation and tension between people who care for each other … oh man.

So this is a book with a very potent, fast-paced, suspenseful story. And it really is about stories as well. In addition to the stories that Shahrzad initially uses to beguile Khalid, there are the stories that these characters tell about themselves and others. To Tariq, Rezia, et al, Khalid is a literal monster out of myth—a boss that must be fought and defeated if the caliphate and its people are to be freed. Shahrzad begins with this opinion but then sees a new narrative: Khalid as the tortured, cursed figure, doomed to hurt the people he loves in order to save them. Ahdieh even weaves stories within the relationships between minor characters: Despina the handmaiden and Jalal the guard; Jahandar’s attempt at heroics and the immense price they extract from him. These are all old, old stories, but Ahdieh repurposes them and uses them in fresh, interesting ways. I wish Khorasan itself had been more fleshed out—other than a brief visit to the market, we don’t get much of a sense of how this country actually functions, or what its culture is like beyond “fairytale Arabic”. Then again, this is entirely consistent with the legendary tone of the book, where broad strokes setting is fine as long as the characters themselves are richer and more thought-provoking.

Not all retellings are retold equally. The Wrath & the Dawn wisely avoids hewing too closely to its roots. In so doing, it takes on a life of its own, one that definitely grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.