Read an updated review from 2018!

If I continue reading books this good, then 2010 will be a hard year for reviewing indeed. I had trouble capturing my appreciation for the scope of Anathem, and it took what seemed like forever to formulate a half-decent review of Bridge of Birds. Now Elizabeth Moon has gone and delivered what might be the most complex piece of fiction I've read in months (I'm counting Anathem here too). It's infuriating! When I read a great book, I want to write a great review. The pressure is on!

I don't doubt the veracity of Moon's portrayal of autism in the form of Lou Arrendale. However, her character sketch is far more powerful than that: she portrays someone who is inescapably different from the majority of his society. This is something with which we can all identify, even if we have very little idea of what it would it feel like to be autistic. We all have moments where we feel the uneven walls of society close in, where we question the obviously insane rituals society has inculcated on us.

Watching Lou grow and change even over the short time for which we know him is a rewarding experience. Every relationship, every interaction brings something new to the table and makes the reader look at quotidian events in a new light—sometimes with wonder, perhaps, and often with consternation, but always with an appreciation of how fragile a construction "normal" is.

As well-developed a character as Lou is, few of the other characters in the book approach his level of detail. The two major antagonists, Crenshaw and Don, were both one-dimensional. Although Moon justifies their antagonism fine, as people they didn't feel very real. In particular, Crenshaw lacked the guile to make him a believable villain. I could see him bullishly pursuing his disastrous plan for section A, but behaving that way in front of the police? In front of Aldrin? He should have been somewhat sneakier. Likewise, Don's fate is inevitable from the moment we see him set against Lou. The relationships of the people in Lou's life are interesting, but the people themselves are not.

I have similar feelings about the Lou at the end of The Speed of Dark. I cannot countenance his decision to undergo the treatment, but I recognize that Moon was making a statement about it being an individual's choice—pressuring Lou or anyone else to undergo a treatment to become "normal" is wrong, but if Lou elects to have the treatment . . . can we really justify denying it to him? Nevertheless, some part of Lou was lost—he himself admits this, but it does not bother the new Lou.

Had we more time to get to know the new Lou, maybe I would feel different. On this more abstracted level, the ending's flaw is apparent: even if one agrees with Lou's decision to undergo the treatment, the ending is too rushed to allow us a fair evaluation of his adjusted character. We get a glimpse at the new Lou and exposition of his future, but a very shallow sense of the man. This is all the more disappointing when compared to the deep and detailed exploration of Lou's mind for the first 330 pages. The Speed of Dark reaches a dazzling, virtuoso crescendo for its crisis moment, as we wonder if Lou will undergo the treatment and what it will mean for him—and for us. And then it fizzles.

The Speed of Dark is a paradigm case of science fiction that isn't science fiction. By that I mean: science fiction that lacks the overt trappings commonly associated with works of science fiction, the type of conventions that deter non-science fiction fans from reading the genre. Set slightly in the future and occasionally mentioning technology we don't have (like anti-aging treatments), The Speed of Dark's "science fiction component" seldom intrudes on the narrative and almost never intruded on my consciousness. I'm not knocking more overt works of science fiction, but I have to laud Moon for her ability to tell a story with such precision of her artifice.

I set out to write this review with every intention of giving The Speed of Dark four stars. I wanted to give it five stars, I really did, but as nearly perfect as the book may be, there are parts that I just wish were different. There were characters who didn't work, and I did not enjoy the ending as much as I enjoyed the journey toward it. And if it weren't for the fact that I did enjoy the majority of the book so much, I could let most of its flaws slide—then again, if that were the cause, it probably wouldn't be worthy of a five-star rating anyway, and I wouldn't have this problem.

The fact is, that five-star rating you see attached to this review was inevitable. I tried to fight it, I did. But the book made me! Despite its flaws, despite my ardent discomfort with the book's ending, The Speed of Dark is just that good. And I need to emphasize that in a way only four stars never could. This is not a perfect book—few books, even ones that I give five stars, are—nor does it approach perfection in any asymptotic sense. The Speed of Dark is a necessary book. It's one of the few books I would venture to say everyone should read.

Reading Family Matters after reading A Fine Balance is a little anticlimactic. A Fine Balance comes very close to my idea of a perfect novel, so I doubted that Rohinton Mistry would be able to deliver something of similar calibre a second time. There is just something about A Fine Balance that smashes that wall between reader and text, breaking down the barrier until the fiction becomes as close to truth as fiction can. It is a visceral, highly emotional experience—and it is utterly singular and impossible to replicate. While I might give another Mistry book five stars, he has set the standard high. Family Matters is an excellent book, but it doesn’t quite pack the same punch.

Like A Fine Balance, this novel is set in Mumbai (then Bombay, and the nationalistic name change is an important plot point). Whereas the former is set during The Emergency, this novel is more contemporary, set sometime in the 1990s (I believe; I didn’t catch an exact date). The right-wing and volatile Shiv Sena party is in power throughout the region, whipping up a nationalistic fervour at the expense of tolerance for India’s diverse religions and cultures. In the midst of these times of change, we follow an extended family: Nariman, who slowly succumbing to Parkinson’s; his two step-children, Jal and Coomy; his daughter, Roxana; and Roxana’s husband, Yezad, and their two children, Jehangir, and Murad. When Nariman falls and breaks his leg while walking, he faces four weeks of immobility and bed rest. Though he has always lived with Jal and Coomy since his wife died, Coomy finds herself unwilling to shoulder this burden, so she literally shows up at Roxana and Yezad’s doorstep with Nariman and without warning. Talk about pushy!

At its best, Family Matters is the intricate interplay of three generations. Nariman continually recalls intense memories of a doomed love affair with a non-Parsi girl, and how she continued to dog him even after his ill-fated arranged marriage to Jal and Coomy’s mother. He is a victim of the conservative bigotry of his parents and their friends, but he is not a shining husband to his new bride. Nariman carries around a lot of guilt, and it is interesting to see the contrast between the young man and the ailing one in the present day.

Jal, Coomy, Roxana, and Yezad all belong to the latest batch of “adults”, though with Jal and Coomy that is a term only loosely applied. After Coomy unilaterally decides to transfer Nariman’s care to Roxana and Yezad, we see the impact of caring for an older relative on the lifestyle and budget of a middle-class Indian family. Money becomes a real issue, and at times Yezad is sorely tempted to abandon the “Parsi honesty” that has made him beloved to his boss at Bombay Sporting Goods.

Their son, Jehangir, does more than contemplate. Always honest before, Jehangir overhears how his parents are tight for money and wonders how he can help. He crosses the line and accepts a 20-rupee bribe in his official capacity as Homework Monitor. It’s one of those pivotal points in the novel: as he is about to accept the bribe, I wanted to do something and make him stop, even though I knew he was going to do it. A lot of the novel is like that: moments where suddenly the narrative tilts and becomes very predictable, but in a car-crash-like manner.

We don’t learn all that much about Murad, Jehangir’s older brother. He is sort of the silent sibling, speaking up only when there needs to be a counterpoint to Jehangir’s insistent voice. I wish we had learned more about him and about what he was going through at that age, especially since he becomes a more important character in the novel’s quixotic epilogue.

The epilogue is definitely the part of Family Matters that gives me, as a reader, the most difficulty processing. Part of me wonders why it’s there. It skips forward five years, after a semi-satisfactory resolution that doesn’t leave me quite as despairing as A Fine Balance—and Mistry wrecks everything! Yezad has embraced his newfound faith in Zoroastrianism in an extreme way, butting heads with both his wife and the rebellious teenaged Murad. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mistry includes this epilogue as a reminder that happy endings don’t stay that way: no situation remains stable forever, and what might appear a happy ending could very well lead to further trouble down the road.

I kind of feel like I am rambling on and stirring up name soup without actually saying much. I am having difficulty reviewing this novel because the whole thing works so well together, but when I try to pick out one of the parts, the entire structure collapses on me. I can’t talk just about the way Yezad interacts with the political pressures on his boss or just about Jal and Coomy’s abominable behaviour regarding Nariman’s care. The book is aptly titled, because all of these events together create a story that is worth reading. The significance of Family Matters comes not from what Mistry has to say on any one topic, but the way each of those topics affects the members of this family.

Not everyone will invest in the characters in such a way that the experience becomes meaningful. I did, although I didn’t enjoy the portrayals of these people as much as I did the characters of A Fine Balance. Both novels, however, are incredibly intimate experiences. Moreover, I love the opportunity they give me to open my eyes and see a country and cultures that truly differ from my own views in so many different ways. (Yes, this is Mistry’s interpretation of India, and I am aware that doesn’t come without its own baggage. One advantage to reading A Fine Balance before Family Matters is that I recognized all the subtle digs he includes aimed at various critics of the former novel.) I don’t just read fiction about India for the novelty value: I do it because I could read hundreds of novels set in the Western world, and they would improve my vocabulary and my literary aptitude, but they would only reinforce my biases and beliefs. There is so much more out there—and at the same time, even families on the other side of the world struggle with issues I can recognize: the ailing elder and his lost love; deceit and desperation; trepidation over the changing times. Family Matters is strange and foreign but also comforting and familiar, and so while it is not quite sublime, it is definitely successful.

Sisters Red is the best kind of fairytale retelling, in that Jackson Pearce takes the kernel of a fairytale (“Little Red Riding Hood” here, obvs) and then … just runs with it. There’s no need to hew too closely to the “original” story—because what is the original story, anyway? Instead we get this cool, thrilling urban fantasy adventure about sisters who slay werewolves … like, yeah. I’m down with that.

Scarlett and Rosie March are young when a werewolf kills their grandmother, leaving them orphaned and virtually alone in the world. They grow up and start hunting wolves, partly out of revenge, partly to protect other would-be victims. However, the sisters are not as close as they want to think. Hunting is an all-consuming calling for Scarlett, who has honed her body and mind into a weapon with a single purpose: hunting wolves. Rosie, younger, less scarred (physically and emotionally) is devoted to her sister and their shared cause—yet she feels the tug of the outside world, and an attraction to the March sisters’ close friend and hunting partner, Silas the woodsman, in a way that Scarlett just doesn’t. That, of course, is the source of tension as the sisters and Silas temporarily relocate from their sleepy town to Atlanta to stop the werewolves from finding and turning a Potential new wolf.

The relationship between the March sisters reminds me so much of the relationship between Dean and Sam Winchester in Supernatural (which I adore). The parallels aren’t quite exact, but Scarlett is such a Dean and Rosie is such a Sam when it comes to their outlooks on hunting and whether or not they can have a life outside of it. And Scarlett has that same over-protectiveness of her younger sister that Dean has with Sammy, even after all these years. It’s this dynamic that is largely the reason why Supernatural has stayed so strong for 13 years, and this dynamic works just as well in Sisters Red, largely as a result of Pearce’s storytelling and narrative structure. By alternating chapters between each sister’s point of view, we understand each one’s perspective and thinking. To Scarlett, Rosie can seem young and feckless and too … alive. There’s an envy there, and a sadness as well. To Rosie, Scarlett is this heroic, driven, but also hollowed-out person. Rosie measures herself against Scarlett and always feels like she’s falling short—yet she is so reluctant to strike out on her own, for it would mean abandoning her own sister.

These are never easy issues to address, so I love how Sisters Red tackles it. I love that the drama and conflict that comes out of these issues never feels contrived. Silas is literally in the middle of it, with his and Rosie’s nascent romance. He tries to appease both sisters, and it’s so interesting, watching the three-way interactions, the way each person’s desires to help the others conflicts with their own needs. I think Pearce does an excellent job of keeping everything feeling real and balanced while still driving the characters and story forward.

The actual setting and plot are less impressive. There isn’t a great deal of worldbuilding here. That is for the best, in some ways—too much exposition can definitely ruin many a good book. And I guess it replicates the fairytale atmosphere. You never see someone explaining the socioeconomic structure of Snow White after all. However, because of the urban fantasy-esque setting in an actual city, I think I would have liked a little more attention to what’s happening in the wider world. How big a problem, exactly, are these Fenris?

Similarly, the plot is a so-so journey of fights and sleuthing and cleaning of apartments. The revelation regarding the identity of the Potential is fairly easy to see coming a long way off. The fight sequences are OK, but those are never why I come to a book in the first place.

Sisters Red is a great, interesting way to take “Little Red Riding Hood” and transpose it into the present day. With more knives and hatchets. And werewolves! I liked it, and I’d recommend it, but it also didn’t knock my socks off. Not sure yet if I’ll read more of Pearce’s retellings.

I want to conclude with: shout out to the cover artist, strawberryluna, for an amazing cover. Just marvel at all the different layers and elements, the way you see Scarlett, Rosie, and a wolf in there (did you miss the wolf? I missed the wolf at first). Bravo.

So you read So You Want to Talk About Race and now you have more questions. Specifically, you’re wondering how privilege affects your life online. Surely the Internet is the libertarian cyber-utopia we were all promised, right? It’s totally free of bias and discrimina—sorry, I can’t even write that with a straight face.

Of course the Internet is a flaming cesspool of racism and misogyny. We can’t have good things.

What Safiya Umoja Noble sets out to do in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is explore exactly what it is that Google and related companies are doing that does or does not reinforce discriminatory attitudes and perspectives in our society. Thanks to NetGalley and New York UP for the eARC (although the formatting was a bit messed up, argh). Noble eloquently lays out the argument for why technology, and in this case, the algorithms that determine what websites show up in your search results, is not a neutral force.

This is a topic that has interested me for quite some time. I took a Philosophy of the Internet course in university even—because I liked philosophy and I liked the Internet, so it seemed like a no-brainer. We are encouraged, especially those of us with white and/or male privilege, to view the Internet as this neutral, free, public space. But it’s not, really. It’s carved up by corporations. Think about how often you’re accessing the Internet mediated through a company: you read your email courtesy of Microsoft or Google or maybe Apple, and ditto for your device; your connection is controlled by an ISP, which is not a neutral player; the website you visit is perhaps owned by a corporation or serves ads from corporations trying to make money … this is a dirty, mucky pond we are playing around in, folks. The least we can do as a start is to recognize this.

Noble points out that the truly insidious perspective, however, is how we’ve normalized Google as this public search tool. It is a generic search term—just google it—and, yes, Google is my default search engine. I use it in Firefox, in Chrome, on my Android phone … I am really hooked into Google’s ecosystem—or should I say, it’s hooked into me. But Google’s search algorithms did not spring forth fully coded from the head of Zeus. They were designed (mostly by men), moderated (again by men), tweaked, on occasion, for the interests of the companies and shareholders who pay Google’s way. They can have biases. And that is the problem.

Noble, as a Black feminist and scholar, writes with a particular interest in how this affects Black women and girls. Her paradigm case is the search results she turned up, in 2010 and 2011, for “black girls”—mostly pornography or other sex-related hits, on the first page, for what should have been an innocuous term. Noble’s point is that the algorithms were influenced by society’s perceptions of black girls, but that in turn, our perceptions will be influenced by the results we see in search engines. It is a vicious cycle of racism, and it is no one person’s fault—there is no Chief Racist Officer at Google, cackling with glee as they rig the search results (James Damore got fired, remember). It’s a systemic problem and must therefore be addressed systemically, first by acknowledging it (see above) and now by acting on it.

It’s this last part that really makes Algorithms of Oppression a good read. I found parts of this book dry and somewhat repetitive. For example, Noble keeps returning to the “black girls” search example—returning to it is not a problem, mind you, but she keeps re-explaining it, as if we hadn’t already read the first chapter of the book. Aside from these stylistic quibbles, though, I love the message that she lays out here. She is not just trying to educating us about the perils of algorithms of oppression: she is advocating that we actively design algorithms with restorative and social justice frameworks in mind.

Let me say it louder for those in the back: there is no such thing as a neutral algorithm. If you read this book and walk away from it persuaded that we need to do better at designing so-called “objective” search algorithms, then you’ve read it wrong. Algorithms are products of human engineering, as much as science or medicine, and therefore they will always be biased. Hence, the question is not if the algorithm will be biased, but how can we bias it for the better? How can we put pressure on companies like Google to take responsibility for what their algorithms produce and ensure that they reflect the society we want, not the society we currently have? That’s what I took away from this book.

I’m having trouble critiquing or discussing more specific, salient parts of this book, simply because a lot of what Noble says is stuff I’ve already read, in slightly different ways, elsewhere—just because I’ve been reading and learning about this for a while. For a newcomer to this topic, I think this book is going to be an eye-opening boon. In particular, Noble just writes about it so well, and so clearly, and she has grounded her work in research and work of other feminists (and in particular, Black feminists). This book is so clearly a labour of academic love and research, built upon the work of other Black women, and that is something worth pointing out and celebrating. We shouldn’t point to books by Black women as if they are these rare unicorns, because Black women have always been here, writing science fiction and non-fiction, science and culture and prose and poetry, and it’s worthwhile considering why we aren’t constantly aware of this fact.

Algorithms of Oppression is a smart book about how colonialism and racism are not over. They aren’t even sleeping. They’ve just transformed, rebranded for the 21st century. They are no longer monsters under the bed or slave-owners on the plantation or schoolteachers; they are the assumptions we build into the algorithms and services and products that power every part of our digital lives. Just as we have for centuries before this, we continue to encode racism into the very structures of our society. Online is no different from offline in this respect. Noble demonstrates this emphatically, beyond the shadow of a doubt, and I encourage you to check out her work to understand how deep this goes and what we need to do to change it.

So here I am, working my way through my honestly impressive backlog of ebooks from Angry Robot and Strange Chemistry. I have zero memory of Poltergeeks, the first book in this series from Sean Cummings, except maybe a vague impression that I liked it. Fortunately, Student Bodies makes it easy enough to dive into Julie Richardson’s life as a Shadowcull that I didn’t feel lost at all. Also, disclaimer: I read the first third of this book in a loud bar at around 1 am because the dancefloor was too crowded for me to actually dance and that’s what you do when you’re DD while all your friends are busy drinking and trying to talk to boys even though it’s very loud in there.

Julie Richardson is sixteen (?) and a Shadowcull, which means she’s the witch in charge of stopping badder witches from doing bad stuff. She’s also in high school (obvs) and now she has a boyfriend, and her dad is dead (he used to be the local Shadowcull) but he’s still around in ghost form, so hey, totally normal family dynamic, amirite? Just when Julie thinks things are calming down on the magic front, she and her boyfriend, Marcus, discover that someone is inflicting popular kids at school with Soul Worms, little magical buggies that suck out your soul and force you to do stuff you don’t like, up to and including suicide. As Julie and Marcus try to get to the bottom of this dark plot, they realize that this isn’t someone targeting just popular kids—an old and malevolent force is hoping to take out a whole lot more of the high school population, and she doesn’t really care who she has to kill to do it.

This is a dark book. Like, it’s YA, but there’s profanity and a fair amount of highly serious situations in here. And by “it’s YA, but…” I’m not trying to say this stuff doesn’t belong in YA. It’s just not necessarily something I’m used to encountering. Julie and Marcus are dealing with some very adult situations and are responding pretty much the way I would expect mature teenagers to respond—as do the adults around them. If there’s one thing I can say about Cummings, it’s the way he doesn’t try to create contrived drama. Is Julie’s mom happy that Julie is dating a non-witch? No. And she expresses that. Yet she also recognizes that forbidding Julie from seeing Marcus would be a non-starter, so there’s that. The drama in this book comes from the good, ol’ fashioned application of dark magic. Good times were had by all!

In my review of Poltergeeks, I critiqued the way that Julie seems almost too self-aware. Not sure if Cummings is better here or if I was just being overly-critical there; I didn’t pick up on that this time around. Cummings includes treatments of some serious issues, like high school bullying (and not to mention dealing with the deaths of peers) in a fairly sensitive way. The stuff Julie and (to some extent) Marcus go through is incredibly traumatizing, right up to and including the unfortunate but incredibly poignant and understandable outcome at the end of the book (more on that in a bit).

Probably the best thing about this book, though, is just the excellent pacing. Cummings keeps the plot going, each event leading into the next, with just enough pauses to catch our characters’ breaths but never enough that the reader starts getting bored. There’s a good balance between intense, explosive action sequences and exposition, conversations, etc. Student Bodies definitely isn’t a boring book. Even though the plot is somewhat too straightforward at times (I mean, seriously—did anyone not suspect it was Willard and the creepy psychologist all along?), just the precision of its execution alone is enough to make up for that.

As with Poltergeeks, I appreciate the Canadian setting of Calgary and all the references to Canadian winter, up to and including having to warm up a car long enough so the windows don’t frost up too badly. More notably, Student Bodies features Twyla Standingready, an Indigenous witch and member of the (real life) Tsuu T’ina Nation. It’s not my lane to comment on Cummings’ portrayal of magic mixed with Indigenous spiritual practices. All I can really say is that I’m glad he made the attempt and that it’s definitely better than some other stuff I’ve seen (but that doesn’t mean it’s not problematic).

I’m more conflicted about the ending. I’m just not sure how to read Marcus breaking up with Julie. On the one hand, it feels a bit like the kind of contrived plot development you get in a series: these two people love each other, so of course they can’t be together, because then there would be no drama! That kind of decision always bothers me, because there is so much potential for conflict within a relationship. On the other hand, Marcus’ decision really does make sense given what he has been through. Maybe it’s just the abruptness? Like, he’s so constant and understanding throughout the whole novel. His tribulations during the climax are definitely traumatic enough to provoke this kind of reaction. It’s just very shocking—which I guess makes it all that easier to sympathize with Julie.

Student Bodies is a far more layered, emotionally satisfying book than its description and the first chapter or so might imply. It’s a light read, in the sense that it is easy to read, but it is not a light read, in the sense that it has a lot of dark events to it. The plot is simple but the characters complex enough to keep me coming back for more, if a third book in this series ever emerges.

Although I’ve been familiar with the concept for a while, I think I first came across the term Female Chauvinist Pig in Holly Bourne’s excellent How Hard Can Love Be?. In her novel, Bourne presents us with Melody, a stereotypical busty blonde who struts her stuff and embraces her sexuality and “hotness” because she believes that this is what makes her empowered in today’s society. It’s such an intriguing concept, something that interests me on multiple levels. My experiences growing up male mean I don’t really understand the pressures women find themselves under to behave in certain ways, or to exhibit empowerment in certain ways. Moreover, being asexual, I find a lot of the processes behind these behaviours, in people of any gender, slightly baffling. So I’m always interested in reading and learning more about how feminism intersects with portrayals of sexuality. I’m not sure, though, that this book really told me anything I didn’t already know.

In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy examines whether women are truly “free” in a sexually liberated sense. She posits that this freedom is in fact an illusion, that the anti-feminist goalposts have just shifted so that the pressure on women now is not so much to be the perfect wife or homemaker but instead to be the “sexiest”, the “most empowered”—where the definition of “empowered” is “most willing to exhibit oneself for the male gaze”. To substantiate this thesis, Levy presents a number of anecdotes, case studies, interviews, and editorialized glimpses into this world of raunch culture. She takes us behind the scenes of the Playboy corporation, gives us a little history lesson in second wave feminism, and analyzes how Sex & the City revolutionized certain segments of society’s relationships to sex and shopping.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t like this book, but I don’t actually disagree with a lot of it. I think Levy is, for the most part, spot on in her critiques of what our society is doing wrong. I agree with many of her points about how, in response to women fighting for more rights in the workplace and an equal spot at the sex table (so to speak), the capitalist elements of the patriarchy decided to regroup and simply absorb these changes instead of pushing back against them. But I don’t think this book does a very good job of tackling these issues in a meaningful way, and that’s what I want to focus on in this review.

Firstly, Levy approaches this very much from a journalistic perspective. That is not inherently a bad thing. However, it means that most of this book reads like a series of loosely-connected chapters, of interviews woven together to try to help Levy make a point. Levy jumps from example to example, essentially arguing her case at a very fine, specific level—so when she pulls back and tries to justify larger conclusions, I’m not sure they follow. I don’t think Female Chauvinist Pigs necessarily needed to be strictly polemical, but Levy’s tone and the way she includes other people’s points of view makes for a less-than-unified read.

Secondly, it matters whom Levy interviews. Obviously the author ultimately has the prerogative of which voices to include in her work. Yet I can’t help but notice that these voices inevitably skew towards certain stereotypes or perceptions of these industries. Levy interviews Christie Hefner and quotes at length from people like Jenna Jameson, but she never seems to bother to find someone like Erika Lust, who seems very dedicated to a positive portrayal of sex work, to talk to. (This book, incidentally, is now hella old by modern cultural standards, seeing as it references LiveJournal and Friendster as things that are not defunct, but I assume that there were Erika Lusts around even back in the ancient days of 2005.) Levy doesn’t quite come down on the anti-porn, anti–sex work side, but she heavily implies that sex workers are just victims with incredibly troubled pasts and are all being taken advantage of by …

… and that leads me to my biggest issue with Female Chauvinist Pigs. It’s really interesting how Levy goes about examining the causes or key figures of this raunch culture. She interviews a gay man who makes Girls Gone Wild! videos and Christie Hefner. She spends an entire chapter talking about how lesbian women, genderqueer or genderfluid people, and trans men are involved in shifting sexual mores and folkways in our hookup scenes. She points out that Sex & the City was created by gay men and this CAKE movement is run by women. So are queer people, and women of various sexualities, the problem here? I don’t know, because Levy only ever really gives us these various examples without connecting the dots into a bigger picture.

One thing that Levy does that I really like is how she talks a lot about the history of various parts of feminist movements in the United States. She points out how many of the more fractured elements of the movement emerged as disagreements over how to respond to an increasingly sexualized culture. As a fairly young person, I find these history lessons very valuable in helping me understand why feminism looks the way it does today.

But that’s why Female Chauvinist Pigs misses the mark, in my opinion. Unlike many of the seminal works that Levy cites in this book—works that may or may not have stood the test of time but are important nonetheless—Female Chauvinist Pigs does not present a clear, coherent feminist approach to dealing with the problem Levy identifies. I’m not saying Levy should be able to offer up a simple solution, but I’m looking for something a little more specific than the conclusion’s kind of self-evident conclusion that women should be free to create their own ideas of what sex and sexual power looks like. In her rush to point to all these specific examples of things that she sees as wrong or problematic in culture, Levy never really engages with the power dynamics that have created these problems.

So I’m left with a sense of … so what. Like, yes, I agree with a lot of what Levy has said. (Content warning, though, for that chapter “From Womyn to Bois”, which is filled with cherry-picked interviews and perspectives and language that is problematic and transmisic.) Nevertheless, there just isn’t enough analysis in here, not enough actual thought about the structural nature of the problem, for this to be a transformative feminist work.

So you invent a time machine, and what’s the first thing you do? You go back in time and kill Hitler, of course! Except you can’t (TVTropes), because either it doesn’t work or it screws up the timeline even more. Thus resolving one of the burning questions surrounding time travel: if it’s possible, why do we still have Hitler? Stephen Fry tackles this in a best-of-all-possible worlds way in Making History, where his protagonist succeeds in averting Hitler’s birth only for someone more charismatic and cunning to rise to power in his place.

I didn’t like this novel at first. I’m a fan of Fry as a TV personality, but the opening pages of Making History didn’t endear themselves to me. Michael Young is such an unsympathetic character. But he kind of needs to be a jerk. One requires a certain level of hubris to think that one should be responsible for changing history, and Michael certainly has that. Of course, a story where one kills Hitler with no unintended consequences would be boring. So things go wrong, and that’s where it gets really interesting.

When reality adjusts to Hitler’s absence, Michael finds himself not in Cambridge but Princeton, where he is supposed have an American accent. But with Hitler out of the picture, a more charismatic German rose to power. He reins in the anti-semitism, and as a result, Germany develops the atomic bomb first. World War II doesn’t happen, and America exists in a tenuous state of non-aggression with a Fascist/Communist Europe. In many respects this world seems more advanced—it’s 1996 and everyone has mobile phones and tablets—but culturally, civil liberties didn’t happen. Racism and homophobia are normal; a climate of McCarthyism is the country’s response to Germany’s power. And the Jews? Well, in Europe, they got shuffled into a supposed “free state” but haven’t been heard from since.

Making History is a fantastic example of alternate history. I particularly enjoyed how Fry shows the same scene, set during World War I, twice, once from the original timeline and once from the timeline after Michael erases Hitler. It’s an “oh shit” moment as the reader realizes the magnitude of what Michael has done. It’s a foregone conclusion that the new world is going to be somehow less preferable to the old one, but it’s not immediately obvious how that’s the case. Fry reveals more about the new timeline gradually, giving the reader time to acclimatize alongside Michael, who must pretend like everything is cool to throw off some suspicious G-men even while he secretly freaks out and wants to find a way to restore the original timeline.

This is a subject understandably close to Fry’s heart, because he has family who died at Auschwitz. And the Holocaust in any light is a serious subject. So it seems like it would be difficult to poke fun at it … and Fry doesn’t try. The humour in Making History is entirely at Michael’s expense (another reason he is an unlikable protagonist). On one level, the narrative just seems to take umbrage at Michael’s ego and conviction that he can make history better. It mocks him for believing that merely removing Hitler from the picture will somehow defuse the anti-semitism and fascist ideologies throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. Fry makes a serious point here, in that often the vilification of Hitler seems to eclipse the more important underlying issues. But he does it with a lighthearted, humorous tone with regards to Michael’s actions and feelings.

The way that Fry balances the serious nature of the subject with his trademark wit is the most stunning aspect of Making History, and the most rewarding. This is far more than just another what-if story of counterfactual fiction: it moves both through pathos and humour. I wanted to strangle Michael sometimes, but by the end I was starting to sympathize with him. And while he’s still a jerk at the end of the story, he has definitely changed and learned from his rather major mistakes. In this way Fry reaffirms what is most important: the close, personal relationship between two human beings, and the reminder that we are responsible for making a better world.

This is somewhat outside my usual reading remit. I actually kind of bought it accidentally. I gave it a try, but honestly this weekend is just kicking my ass, so it’s not the best time to be reading something that doesn’t immediately appeal to me.

DNFing this because if I finish it I’m not going to like it, and that isn’t really the book’s fault. It’s not a bad book, but I’m not in the right mood, either to appreciate its charming points or critique its flaws. Sometimes the best decision is to just set something aside and reach for something I know I’ll enjoy.

This could be the poster-child for a book that needs more editing. Spellwright is equal parts complex yet confounding, intriguing yet boring. It simultaneously stokes that fire for fantasy that first launched me into writing my own stories waaay back when I was a wee pre-teen, reminding me of those halcyon days of lying crosswise in an armchair, reading the Belgariad or chunky 600-page Recluce hardbacks, not a care in the world because there was no school and I didn’t have a job. Ahhhh, youth. For that alone I’m indebted to Blake Charlton. But he really does create a cool world here; it’s just that the characters and the story, for the most part, fail to really live up to that potential.

Spells are literally spelled, using runes of various magical languages, composed by wizards within their bodies and sent forth. Spellwright’s protagonist, Nicodemus Weal, shares with Charlton dyslexia. This trait is particularly problematic for wizards, as you might imagine. Not only does Nicodemus struggle with composing more complex spells, but every complex spell that he touches has the potential of being misspelled by his cacography. As a result, Nicodemus is a marginalized, ostracized figure—oh, and if it weren’t for his condition, he was in the running to be this world’s version of the Chosen One. Them’s the breaks. Then a mysterious murder coincides with a political summit, and it seems like all hell is going to break loose. A monster pursues Nicodemus, though it is unaware of Nicodemus’ exact identity. Nicodemus doesn’t know whom he can trust, and it’s all he can do to keep one step ahead of things.

Normally magic systems aren’t going to do it for me. Don’t get me wrong; I like a good magic system as much as the next person. But I’m here for the story. Still, Spellwright’s use of spelling as magic is really good. Charlton takes the standard trope of using magical runes and turns it into something much more creative and fun, and something that links into the story he wants to tell about navigating the world with dyslexia. I appreciate the little details, like how there is a magical language for affecting the physical world (Magnus) and one for thought and ideas (Numinous). Moreover, Charlton has clearly taken the time to figure out how the magical academy should function. Very little about the rest of this world’s political structure is ever explored (it’s implied that wizardry is a heritable trait, though wizards can’t reproduce with one another, and that Nicodemus is minor nobility, but we don’t hear much about society outside of Starhaven). Within Starhaven, however, we get a clear picture of how a magic school would function. Whereas Hogwarts was very focused, of course, on the intricacies of the teaching side, Starhaven showcases how wizardry research would function. I liked seeing the dynamic between Nicodemus and Shannon, Nico and Smallwood, etc.

We spend a lot of time throwing around the term worldbuilding when discussing fantasy. Worldbuilding is not really what I want to praise here. I don’t think Charlton has done a great job building a “world”, because we see or learn about a very small part of it. Yet Charlton has done a good job of building a tiny sliver of a world, and of making me want to see more of this world. He has that skill some writers have of implying a much bigger world without spending too much time talking about it, like if I could just dive into the pages of the book and walk out of the scene I could go off and follow characters who don’t even show up here, find different stories—visit, in other words, an entirely new place. That’s a great thing for a book to do.

Yet Spellwright didn’t quite keep me hooked. This is only a 350-page book, but it took me several days to read it. I could only read a chapter or two at a time, because the prose is just very dense. Whereas in other books a simple conversation would be short, sweet, and then we would move on, Charlton has this habit of wanting to spell out (no pun intended) every little thing. There is a lot of discussion and dithering and exposition in here. And despite both my summary, above, and the summary on the jacket, there is a significant amount of time between the murder at the start of the book and Nicodemus’ direct involvement in the plot. There is a lot of set-up here, for very little payoff, and it’s disappointing.

When we finally do start to get somewhere, the book ends with the typical set-up for a sequel, our protagonist initiated into the mysteries but the final boss battle delayed in favour of existential angst and dread. I guess I should have been careful what I wished for when I started likening Spellwright to my favourite fantasy of days gone by!

I’m also not sure how I feel about Nicodemus as a protagonist. He is an interesting and complex character, I’ll give him that. Charlton does a good job exploring the toll that it must take to go through life with a disability like dyslexia. Not having experienced it myself, I won’t comment on the specifics of the portrayal. But I like that Nicodemus is flawed, quick to judge, and very intrigued by the idea that he can just “fix” himself, even while the support characters constantly point out that he’s fine the way he is and doesn’t need fixing. I’m less enamoured with the fact that we basically have to wait until the next book to see Nicodemus actually grow and change and maybe learn his lesson about that.

Spellwright is one of those books that I find are more fun to think about than actually read, if you know what I mean. I love pondering the magic here, the politics, the world and even the plot. Actually reading the story, though, and experiencing the events at the ponderous and overly-detailed pace set by Charlton, leaves more to be desired. I kind of want to read the sequel—it seems like there’s a new protagonist, or a second protagonist at least, so that could make things interesting—but I’m not sure I’ll make it a priority.

I’m wrekt.

The Revelation reminds me of the beginning of that final seven-episode story arc of Deep Space Nine. And I was not ready.

I was not ready for so much to change.

In a very Marco-centric book, Marco’s dad find himself inadvertently working on a Yeerk-controlled project to build a better zero-space communicator. The Animorphs narrowly manage to extract Marco’s dad before the Yeerks make him into a controller. Meanwhile, Visser One—the slug living inside Marco’s mom—is about to be executed. It’s time for Visser Three to step up, take control, and turn up this invasion of Earth to eleven. So the Animorphs mount a daring rescue mission, and it all goes to hell.

This series has taken us to some dark places, but The Revelation has no chill. It’s Megamorphs-level action.

First, the scene where Marco confronts his dad with the truth. So much role reversal here: the kid having to be the mature one, giving his dad the Speech, telling his dad what to do and how to react so they can just survive. And then that moment where we see Marco’s vulnerability and remember that, deep down beneath these war scars, he is still just a kid. He didn’t ask for or deserve this role:

“But that doesn’t make it right.”

“Dad, nothing is right anymore.”

Ugggggggh just kill me now I can’t take it.

And then Marco has to fake his own death!

My eye caught a photo tacked to the cork board over my father's worktable. It was a snapshot of me and Dad, taken by Mom on a sun-drenched day several years ago.

Suddenly, reality hit.

I was dead. And this was the end … of school, of dates, of video games. Of everything normal.

The kid in that photo had prepared his last frozen pizza dinner. Had gone to his last math class. Had seen his last movie at the Cineplex. That kid would never even hang out in his own backyard again. Because this wasn't his home anymore. He had no home.

He'd made the necessary sacrifice.

I could take the photo with me. It was small enough to fit in the beak of the osprey I would
morph to fly away.

I took two steps toward the cork board, then stopped.

No.
I had my memories.

They would have to be enough.

Bawling over here now.

And then that moment near the end, when Marco essentially lies to his father to make him feel better about not going after Nora….

This is a harsh book. It’s so harsh, especially on Marco. Maybe not physically, the way Tobias was tortured recently. But this book is as emotionally traumatic as it gets … and I know that we’re only just entering the final arc!

My one criticism of The Revelation is simply that, for what feels like the second or third book in a row, we’ve had a book where the other Animorphs don’t get much page-time. The action very closely follows the narrator, who is often solo. It reminds me of when TV series save money by shooting a bunch of episodes in a block, with each one featuring a single main character doing their own thing. These books have their purpose, and it doesn’t necessarily detract from the story, but it is nice to see the Animorphs working together on problems instead of at a distance.

The Revelation ends on a hell of a cliffhanger: the Animorphs place a very long-distance call. The Andalties pick up … but will this be Earth’s salvation? Or its doom? Tune in … next time.

My reviews of Animorphs:
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