Dyscalculia is finally getting the attention it deserves as the lesser-known sibling condition to dyslexia. I was intrigued by the title of Camonghne Felix’s book, its tantalizing promise to connect dyscalculia to Felix’s tribulations with romance. Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation does all of this, though with less focus on math skills than I hoped. Thank you to NetGalley and publisher One World for the eARC!

Felix experiences trauma at a young age when her cousin molests her. She recounts in stark terms how the aftermath of this trauma was also traumatic, and as a result, something in her brain changed and she started to struggle with math. Though various doctor’s visits netted pronouncements of ADHD, etc.—with one doctor venturing to suggest bipolar disorder, much to her mother’s dismay—medication regimes didn’t seem to help much, and no one, from Felix’s telling, was all that interested in actually getting to the root of the issue. So Felix grew up, drifted, got into a bad romantic relationship, and here we are. We relive the relationship with her, the break up, the depression, the self-harm and suicide attempt. The psychological evaluations. The cycle.

I really enjoyed the style in which this book is written, which surprised me. Each page is short, a paragraph or two. Felix leans on her experience as a poet to conjure up careful descriptions of scenes and action. The chapters here aren’t so much sustained stories as they are lengthy series of missives, back and forth, from different elements of her psyche. They remind me a lot of the poetry of amanda lovelace!

I went into this knowing little about the actual content of the book and expecting there to be more discussion of dyscalculia. In that respect, my hopes were dashed. But that isn’t the book’s fault, just a miscalculation on my part (see what I did there). I mention it only to help others who might have formed the same impression. Don’t get me wrong: the dyscalculia talk is definitely there, but it is a part of the larger discourse Felix engages in over these ideas about being broken and whether or not she is fixable.

Ultimately, Dyscalculia is about how pain and pleasure are too often connected. How what’s bad for you can feel good, and what’s good for can feel bad. How the people in your life who hurt you can sometimes be the only ones you want to let in, and the ones who are there to help don’t always know how. It’s a deep meditation on how external events can reshape our brain chemistry, which in turn affects how we move through life.

Did this book hit me the same I suspect it will hit others? Not really. It verges on poetry in a way that made me zoom through it. And while I can empathize with Felix’s intense episodes of pain, disappointment, and loss, my life has been extremely different from hers; I’m not sure I have ever felt the same depths that she has felt. Dyscalculia did not resonate with me, but I am sure it will resonate with many.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

One of my responsibilities as an English teacher is to help my students build their media literacy skills. In the past couple of years, I have become increasingly convinced, in fact, that media literacy is the most essential skill English classes can cover. The deluge of disinformation and morass of misinformation out there is staggering. Throw in the challenges of deepfakes, and, well, it’s starting to get depressing, how difficult it is to evaluate the quality of information that comes across my feeds. For a long time, I’ve been using the Bad News Game in my classroom to help my adult learners understand how misinformation works. When I was approved via NetGalley to read an eARC of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, I didn’t know at the time that Sander van der Linden was one of the researchers behind the game! It’s neat to hear him talk more about how the game was designed and other findings about fake news.

In the first part of the book, van der Linden discusses the current state of research into misinformation and how it affects us from a cognitive science point of view. Part 2 of the book look at the historical spread of misinformation, from ancient Rome to modern times, and introduces concepts like filter bubbles and echo chambers. Part 3 explains the concept that van der Linden and his team have been researching (building upon older research from the mid-twentieth century)—a psychological vaccine that inoculates us against misinformation. The Bad News Game is an example of such a vaccine in action.

My main takeaways from this book (some of which I already knew but which van der Linden explained in more detail): our brains are susceptible to misinformation because of cognitive biases we evolved to deal with environments far different from the ones we find ourselves in today; merely debunking or fact-checking misinformation is seldom very effective; pre-bunking or inoculating people against misinformation can be very effective, but the duration of that efficacy can be variable.

Some of what van der Linden says here might seem obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What makes Foolproof so valuable is the way that he grounds these perhaps obvious ideas in actual research stretching back decades. Reading this book reminded me of the incredible power of science: without this research, we would be in a much worse off place than we are today. This book gave me hope and made me more optimistic for our future. As grave a threat as misinformation plagues pose, there are solutions out there.

Although van der Linden briefly touches on the role of artificial intelligence (such as deepfakes) in the book, he doesn’t mention generative AI like ChatGPT. This is likely because the book went to press just before ChatGPT and its competitors launched into the limelight. How’s that for timing? While a great deal of what van der Linden says about spotting misinformation applies to these tools as well, I still have questions. ChatGPT and other large language models open up the door to the possibility of generating so much garbage online that accurate information diminishes simply by volume alone. I’m curious if this new dimension to misinformation spread affects van der Linden’s recommendations or his team’s findings at all.

Foolproof is a fascinating and edifying story of using science to push back against one of the most pressing issues in our modern society. Highly recommended for tech people, scholars, scientists, and anyone interested in how misinformation spreads and how we can fight it.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

It has been a long time since I read a graphic novel! However, the library had a display of “Girl Power” graphic novels and comic books up for Women’s History Month. This Supergirl comic caught my eye—I named myself after Kara Danvers from the CW Supergirl show! So I decided, why not? I have been mainlining the non-fiction lately. Maybe a comic will be a nice break.

Set during Kara’s high school years, Supergirl: Being Super is a coming-of-age adventure that examines the tension between wanting to be “normal” and fitting in versus, as the subtitle says, acknowledging one’s power. In Kara’s case, it’s the power she derives from the yellow sun of Earth. This graphic novel plays fast and loose with Supergirl’s canon and origin story: the way Mariko Tamaki tells it, Kara was sent away from Krypton at a much younger age (similar to her cousin, Kal-El) and therefore does not remember much about her origins. She experiences scattered, intermittent flashbacks to her parents on Krypton, but that’s about it. When an earthquake takes the life of one of Kara’s best friends, she sinks into depression and wonders how she can possibly reconcile having such abilities with no way to help those closest to her.

From my perspective this story was all a bit “meh,” but I want to acknowledge that I am not in the target audience. I think a teenager reading this would get a lot more out of the story, from Kara’s devotion to her friends to the ways in which her parents worry over her, love her, and protect her. This is a very different Supergirl from the one I saw on TV, but then again she is very different from the ones in the comics or other media. That is, of course, the strength of comic-book characters: they have a mutability that allow each writer to imagine them anew. So I will praise the interpersonal and internal dynamics of Kara’s journey here.

Where I can be more fairly critical, I think, is in the villain and basically the whole A-plot of the story. Without going too deep into spoilers, the villain basically thinks that she should just get to experiment on aliens, and if a few humans get killed in the process, that’s collateral damage. It’s a rather clichéd trope with very little originality applied to it. Tamaki tries to add some depth, granted, giving the villain a sympathetic goal so that we can understand she sees herself as helping humanity—the greater good, and all that.

I will say that I really enjoyed Joëlle Jones’s art! The style is crisp and very dynamic. My eyes lingered on the pages slightly longer than they usually do with graphic novels.

All in all, as ever, take my reviews of graphic novels with grains of salt because this is not the medium for me. There’s a reason it took a TV adaptation of Supergirl to get my attention—but I am happy that all these other versions exist to inspire younger generations of girls too.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Often people ask me what I would recommend if I am no longer recommending Invisible Women. Usually my response is the unhelpful, “Dunno, figure it out.” But really, the amount of books I read? There must be more books about technology and bias out there, especially in the four years since that one was published. So when I heard about More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, I was excited to receive an eARC from NetGalley and publisher MIT Press.

Meredith Broussard brings her decades of experience as a data scientist and a Black woman in America to discuss design and data bias in tech, not only along the axis of gender but also race and (dis)ability. As the title implies, the book’s thesis is that the bias we can detect and quantify in tech (and in the social systems, such as companies, that build and maintain our tech) is not present by accident. It’s not just a “glitch” or a bug that we can squash with some crunch and a new release. It’s baked into the system, and solving the problem of bias will require a new approach. Fortunately, in addition to pointing out the problems, Broussard points to the people (herself included) doing the work to build this new approach.

When it comes to the problems outlined in this book, a lot of this was already familiar territory to me from watching Coded Bias, reading Algorithms of Oppression and Weapons of Math Destruction, etc. Broussard cites many high-profile examples, and often her explanations of how these systems work start from a basic, first-principles approach. As a result, techies might feel like this book is a little slow. Yet this is exactly the pace needed to make these issues accessible to laypeople, which Broussard is doing here. With systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT making a spectacle, it is imperative that we arm non-tech-savvy individuals with additional literacy, inoculating them against the mistaken argument that technology is or can ever be value-neutral. Broussard’s writing is clear, cogent, and careful. You don’t need any background in computing to understand the issues as she explains them here.

What was new to me in this book were the parts where Broussard goes beyond the problems to look instead at the solutions. In addition to her own work, she cites many names with which I’m familiar—Safiya Umoja Noble, Timnit Gebru, Cathy O’Neil—along with a few others whose work I have yet to read, such as Ruha Benjamin. In particular, Broussard enthusiastically endorses the practice of algorithmic auditing. This procedure essentially upends the assumption that machine learning algorithms must be black boxes whose decision-making processes we can never truly understand. Broussard, O’Neil, and others are working to create both manual and automated auditing procedures that companies and organizations can use to detect bias in algorithms. While this isn’t a panacea in and of itself, it is an important step forward into this new frontier of data science.

I say this because it’s important for us to accept that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We are living in an algorithmic age. But much as with the fight against climate change, we cannot allow acceptance of reality to turn into doom and naysaying against any action. Broussard points out that we can still say no to certain deployments of technology that can be harmful. Facial recognition software is a great example of this, with many municipalities outlawing real-time facial recognition in city surveillance. There are actions we can take.

The overarching solution is thus one of thoughtfulness and harm reduction. Broussard directly challenges the Zuckerberg adage to “move fast and break things.” I suppose this means a good clickbait title for this review might be “Capitalists hate her”! But it’s true. The choice here isn’t between algorithms or no algorithms, AI or no AI. It’s between moving fast for the sake of convenience and profit or moving more slowly and thoughtfully for the sake of being more inclusive, equitable, and just.

I like to think of myself as “tech adjacent.” I don’t work in tech, but I code on an amateur level and keep my pulse on the tech sector. I think there is a tendency among people like me—tech-adjacent people invested in social justice—to write off the tech sector as a bunch of white dudebros who are out of touch. We see the Musks and Zuckerbergs at the top, and we see the Damores in the bottom and middle ranks ranting about women, and we roll our eyes and stereotype. When we do this, however, we forget that there are so many brilliant people like Broussard, Benjamin, Noble, O’Neil, Gebru, Buolamwini, and more—people of colour, women, people of marginalized genders, disabled people, etc., who care about and are part of the tech ecosystem and are actively working to make it better. They are out there, and they have solutions. We just need to listen.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Reading memoirs by people in their twenties makes me feel old (and I am only thirty-three!). Fortunately, Clarkisha Kent makes up for that because her writing is intense, rich, and thoughtful. Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto is a memoir, yes, but I also love that framing of manifesto as well: Kent is bringing forth a type of energy that she wants to see in this world. I received a review copy from the Feminist Press.

From the beginning, Kent does not hold back. She gets into some heavy topics here—just a big content warning for mentions of child molestation and abuse, suicide attempts, mental illness, etc. Kent shares her trauma and talks about how it has shaped her. She is also quite critical of herself. At one point, as she is discussing how her religious upbringing influenced her ideas on sexuality, she describes how fervently she attempted to dissuade her peers from same-sex attraction. Kent, who would eventually realize she is bi, did not have the language as a teenager to properly analyze her experience. This resonated with me as a queer woman, and it also made me think, as a teacher, about why it’s so important to have labels and terms for things. If anyone needs convincing that banning books with queer or Black representation in them is a bad idea, reading about Kent’s experience growing up in a conservative southern state is a good place to start.

Fat Off, Fat On reminds me in some ways of Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be. Perkins and Kent have much in common at least superficially, from their origins in Tennessee to writing on pop culture and, of course, the experience of growing up as Black women in America. If you like one of these books, you will probably like other. That being said, I don’t want to give the impression that they are extremely similar in content. Each has her own unique story, with a distinct voice.

Kent’s memoir exists at the intersections of fatphobia, biphobia, and misogynoir. In particular, she returns time and again to the theme of how being fat in a society that mandates thinness for women and dark-skinned in a society that privileges lighter skin, especially among Black women, fucked up her relationship to her own body and to others. Kent makes the point that it is impossible to analyze any one of these traits by themselves—they are all connected, all a part of her. Add in poverty and mental and physical disability and—well, that’s a lot to contend with.

Yet never does it feel like Kent falls into the trap of performing her trauma for our entertainment as is so common within memoirs, especially the memoirs of marginalized people. A lot of white women will read memoirs from Black or Indigenous women as a kind of tourism, and then we love to talk about how much we learned, how grateful we are that this person shared their story of oppression with us. Fat Off, Fat On doesn’t let you do that. This is not the plucky story of someone rising above the obstacles in front of them.

That being said, did I learn? Of course I did. Kent’s experiences, her identity, her life are all very different from mine. Was I entertained? Um, hell yes. Kent is hilarious. Her writing style is not just present tense but intensely present on the page, with numerous allusions. There’s a whole chapter where she makes connections to Janelle Monáe and Dirty Computer, and had I not already been sitting, I would have needed to sit myself down and taken a moment just to recover. Like, this is the skill of Kent as a storyteller.

But I suspect and hope that the people who get the most out of this book are not thin white women like me. I hope this book reaches young Black women, fat women, baby queers stuck in southern states who need some reassurance that yes, you too can escape—even if it won’t be easy, and even if it might never truly be “over.” Kent’s too honest to make empty promises. As the final chapters attest, Kent is nowhere near done, nowhere near arrived; she has barely got started here. The hardship she has faced from multiple intersecting axes of oppression has neither evaporated nor, in many ways, has it ever let up. We need more memoirs like this, especially from Black women—not as educational aids for white women, mind you, but as the antithesis to that. This is a book designed to be seen and in turn make others feel seen. I really hope it can accomplish that.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I’m not sure what got me interested in Missing Clarissa—whether it was the general description, the podcast element, or I just felt like taking a chance. Thrillers aren’t normally my genre of choice. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised by Ripley Jones’s debut novel. It was darker than I expected yet also has plenty of light character moments. Thanks to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the eARC.

Clarissa Campbell went missing in 1999. The cheerleading captain at Oreville High, Clarissa was in many ways a town darling. Yet even after nationwide coverage, no one turned up any trace of her—dead or alive. Now, over twenty years later, two students at Oreville High decide to make Clarissa the subject of their journalism project. Blair and Cameron start a true-crime podcast, Missing Clarissa. As you might expect, there are many in their small town that don’t want this mystery stirred up again. As Blair and Cameron dig deeper into Clarissa’s disappearance, they find that it’s one thing to talk about a mystery and another to actually solve it.

As I intimated above, I wasn’t expecting to be so engrossed with the narrative. There’s something about how Jones crafted this mystery, however, that kept me engaged. I like how, even as the book dangles an obvious culprit in front of us, it’s also clear that we’re not expected to believe this person is the true culprit—we are led to expect a twist, which is indeed forthcoming in the final act. Honestly, the way that our intrepid podcasters uncover the true identity of Clarissa’s assailant, and the action-packed climax that follows, was the least interesting part of the book for me. It’s the journey to that moment that had me hooked, especially when Blair and Cameron are investigating their various leads.

Jones’s writing reminds me of another Wednesday Books author, Courtney Summers. Missing Clarissa feels a little bit like Sadie, one of my favourite Summers novels. Both involve podcasts about missing girls whose fates are unknown. Both ruminate on how our society treats lost girls, how we romanticize them, how we give them more attention if they are white and pretty. Sadie is much darker than this book. However, Missing Clarissa still has its moments of asking hard questions about misogyny and patriarchy.

This is apparent in how Blair and Cameron interact with the many male characters. Blair and Cameron are well aware of how their age and gender might lead most adults, particularly men, to underestimate them. At times they exploit this to their benefit; sometimes it is more of an impediment than anything else. Jones also explores how the power and privilege that many men accumulate—especially in a small town like Oreville—mean that they can avoid the consequences of their past actions, even if those actions might have landed someone else in jail.

I also love the respective characterizations of Blair and Cameron, the way they play off each other as best friends and then also the romantic subplots each of them has. Blair’s delusions about her relationship are classic. Cameron’s obliviousness to Sophie’s interest in her is adorable. The way that the two of them support each other, even when they fight, makes for such a compelling duo—I would read more stories featuring these two. Jones writes with humour and empathy. Blair and Cameron are two very distinct personalities with sharply different voices, and it comes through. As a podcaster myself, I greatly enjoyed the running gag wherein other characters criticize the sound quality of their podcast!

While it has many rough edges—especially in regards to how rushed the ending seems to be—Missing Clarissa is that rare thriller that held my attention. I literally didn’t want to stop reading it. This is high praise from me. I recommend it for fans of mysteries set in small towns, as well as people who want to read about intrepid girls setting out to investigate the disappearance of another girl. It’s not true crime—which, fortunately for us, means we get the closure inherent in the ending.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Four years ago, after a particularly brutal winter and some damage from ice dams, pigeons took up residence in a section of my house’s eavestroughs. It was unpleasant, to say the least. My bed abutted the exterior wall where they were roosting, and my house is small enough that I generally heard their cooing throughout a quiet Sunday indoors. Eventually, at great expense, I had my eavestroughs redone and the pigeons were summarily evicted. Pests, I thought to myself. That opinion hasn’t changed—however, as Bethany Brookshire makes clear in Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, it is important for us to understand how our relationship with animals has evolved over the centuries, and how we come to designate certain animals as pests and others as pets, exotic attractions, or whatnot. That includes my avian nemesis.

Brookshire takes us through, one chapter at a time, different animals that are considered pests at some point and in some place in human history. From rats to elephants to our very own house cats, these animals don’t have much in common except for one thing: they live alongside humans, and they frustrate us just by being themselves. Our reactions are varied but usually along the lines of vilifying and then seeking to extirpate the problem. Alas, as Brookshire points out multiple times, it usually isn’t so simple. Most pests are not easily eradicated—we would need to change how we live to achieve that—and even when they are, maybe eradication isn’t the best option. In her interviews with various experts, many of whom often assume contradictory positions, Brookshire explores the nuanced ethics around pest control.

It’s difficult for me to pick a favourite chapter. All of them are, in their own way, fascinating and edifying. The pigeon one stood out to me for my own personal experience with them as a pest. That chapter, in particular, really shows us how quickly society’s perception of an animal can shift: Brookshire explains how, up until the early twentieth century, pigeons were viewed in a very positive light. This historical lesson is valuable because it belies our perception, created by our short lifetimes, that our relationship with animals and nature as it is today is how it has always been.

For similar reasons, I really liked the chapter about elephants. Brookshire takes aim at white conservationists who are essentially reinforcing a colonial attitude when they seek to preserve elephant populations at all costs. If you talk to the villagers who live alongside elephants every day, the situation quickly becomes more complicated. It’s hard for us white Westerners to view elephants as pests because our perception of them is so influenced by their portrayal in media. For me, as a Canadian, the closest I could liken them to would be moose—majestic creatures worth protecting, yet also incredibly dangerous in the wrong circumstances.

I appreciate how much Brookshire, herself a white woman, deferred to Indigenous experts when learning about these creatures and our historical connections to them. Along the same lines, she seems to have gone out of her way to seek out and then faithfully present differing points of view. This was especially notable to me in the chapter on feral cats, where she interviews both proponents and opponents of the trap-neuter-return (TNR) approach to feral cat population control. At times, the back and forth way that she alternates between these people can get a bit confusing (so many names!). However, I respect the work that went into showing us so many sides of these issues instead of being simplistic or reductive. As a result, rather than emerging from that chapter feeling biased in favour of or against TNR, now I understand that it’s a complex issue—one that I would have to do more reading and thinking about before I fully made up my mind. But I certainly see now how different people in different parts of the world come to view the issue of indoor versus outdoor house cats so distinctly and often passionately!

Pests is a story of animals, yet it is also a story about ourselves, humanity. How we have made ourselves a kind of pest in so many biomes, moving in and setting up shop and pushing out indigenous species, then bringing in our own invasive species, only to often turn around and yell at them for being too successful. Humanity is a host of contradictions. Brookshire’s compassionate, thoughtful, and informative look at how we relate to the species with which we coexist is a potent reminder that there are seldom simple answers when it comes to conservation, preservation, and urban development. If we are to be successful in managing the pests in our lives, we must come to terms with the fact that pest-management solutions will be different in different contexts. Sometimes that means population control, or changing how we store our garbage. Sometimes that means accepting that we don’t have complete control over our environment, no matter what we might desire.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The idea of free speech sounds great on paper, and it’s one of those nebulous concepts that most people, if you asked them if it sounded like a good idea, would generally affirm. But that hasn’t always been the case until very recently—more recently, in fact, than one might think. Dennis Baron explores this in You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech along with a robust look at free-speech debates, legal precedents, and issues in the context of American history and civil rights. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Cambridge University Press, and I was excited to dive into this because the topic feels so timely and important given the current political climate.

Baron’s perspective is an interesting one: he is not a lawyer or law professor but rather a linguistics professor. Still, he knows his stuff. He has researched and written about free speech, and he has weighed in on court cases. You Can’t Always Say What You Want takes a historical but not quite chronological look at how the legal and social idea of freedom of speech has evolved in the United States. From the First versus Second Amendments to obscenity to what makes speech a threat, Baron guides us through the many quagmires that await anyone attempting to pin down what free speech actually means.

Prior to reading this book I was not, and am still not, a free-speech absolutist. Probably the best way to summarize my position is to say that I believe speech should have commensurate consequence. I think most free-speech absolutists are earnest but mistaken—that is, I don’t think there is a position of free-speech absolutism that is consistent with a stable, functioning liberal democracy. Beyond that, many who claim to believe in absolute free speech do so from a position of rhetorical dishonesty—invoking freedom of speech when, in actuality, they want to suppress the speech of their political and ideological opponents. In this way, free-speech absolutism becomes a form of camouflage.

Baron takes aim at both aspects of free-speech absolutism in this book. I spent a good deal of time reading it trying to infer his personal politics—when I first saw this title offered on NetGalley, I briefly worried it would be about cancel culture, etc., before I read the description and realized it was far more interesting than that. I get the sense that Baron and I agree on a lot of points, and where we might be in disagreement, it’s largely because (a) he knows more about this than I do and (b) he’s being a lot more diplomatic than I might. Baron is no fan of current interpretation of the Second Amendment, yet he also has criticism for liberal attempts to curtail free speech in the name of preventing, say, hate speech. Nevertheless, I suspect that conservative readers will see Baron as a woke ideologue, which says a lot more about how far right most American conservatives have been pulled in the past decade than it does about Baron’s alignment.

My main takeaway from this book is that very few of us really have a coherent concept of what we mean by free speech. The value of You Can’t Always Say What You Want is its grounding in primary source material. For the most part, this is not a polemic by Baron but a very well-researched tour through the United States Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, and other evidence. Baron explains how popular ideas of free speech depart from the actual text of the First Amendment. He helps us understand that amendment (and the Second Amendment) in historical context, as well as how the courts’ interpretations of the Constitution have changed over the years in things like obscenity trials and charges of sedition. Additionally, Baron emphasizes the ultimate futility of trying to codify free speech in something so brief as the First Amendment: language is imprecise, and the Founding Fathers themselves debated exactly how to phrase the amendment.

My main criticism of this book is that Baron’s writing is not always engaging. He repeats himself, both within and across chapters. In particular he really harps on the idea that freedom to bear arms suppresses freedom of speech for some groups—and hey, I don’t disagree, but the way this theme recurs throughout the book felt redundant rather than emphatic. He quotes at length from the primary sources I just extolled. Though still reasonably accessible for an academic work, I think the layperson will need to take their time walking through this one.

It’s worth it though. Our society’s idea of freedom of speech has always and will always evolve as our society evolves. At the moment, it feels like we are moving somewhat backwards, and that scares me. But this book didn’t scare me. It reassured me in the way that any knowledge reassures me—I went into this book with a certain idea of free speech, trusting Baron to challenge me. He did that, and while my position hasn’t changed dramatically, I feel much more informed about the topic, and I can recognize now where my thinking previously lacked depth or foundation. The debate about free speech is far from over, but I personally feel like I understand it better as a result of reading this book.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

It’s no secret that I love stories about storytelling. Similarly, as much as I love a good action-packed epic, slow stories have their own unique virtues. Close Your Eyes: A Fairy Tale is such a slow story about stories—and in particular, how the stories we tell about ourselves and one another shape our choices in life. Chris Tomasini uses the backdrop of fifteenth-century Europe and crafts a small, memorable cast of characters. I enjoyed the time I spent in this world and mostly enjoyed the story even though its coda confers sour notes, for me, to its themes. Disclosure: The author provided me with a review copy.

More a frame story for a series of vignettes, Close Your Eyes bounces around the first decades of the fifteenth century. Europe is at war. (OK, when isn’t Europe at war?) After decades of papal schism, there’s a new ecclesiastical sheriff in town. And in a small, fictional kingdom named Gora, its heartbroken widower monarch wanders the halls of his castle. Our narrator, Samuel, is a little person and a court jester. He writes to us about his former companions at the castle, including a storyteller named Tycho and a cook named Agnieszka. Samuel laments his own lack of literary ability, but he is determined to muddle through to do justice to the events he wants to share. As Samuel bounces from story to story, he seems to be searching for meaning, trying to understand not only why Tycho left Gora but how he himself can move on in the face of all the change he has endured in recent years.

Don’t expect a ton of action or even dialogue here—the book is strictly epistolary, mostly description, yet this works well with the story structure and conceits. Tomasini’s primary challenge is conveying as much of the wider world of Gora/Europe in the 1430s as he can given the limitations of Samuel’s own knowledge. Samuel’s ignorance is useful at times, for it helps Tomasini restrict the reader’s field of vision in interesting and narratively significant ways; at other times, it can be a hindrance. That’s no doubt why Samuel includes excerpts from Tycho’s journals, along with letters from the disgraced bishop dispatched to Gora by Pope Martin V. Through these different perspectives, mediated by Samuel’s curatorial presence always lingering over our shoulder, we start to see what’s going on.

This is predominantly a story about the way that love and grief are intertwined. As one loses one’s loves, grief solidifies from an abstraction to a constant companion. King Pawel is, of course, the most overt example in this book, but we see it reflected in other characters as well. Each of the chapters of Close Your Eyes meditates, in some way, on how we love, why we love, or what we might do for love.

For the most part, I enjoyed Samuel’s stories. The foolishness of Beauvais. The rambunctious flirtatiousness of Tycho. The confident faithfulness of Agnieszka. Tomasini’s characters are just a tiny bit larger than life in a way that makes them leap off the page, keeping things interesting in spite of the constraints of the epistolary form. Close Your Eyes is an easy book to read.

Alas, I didn’t like the ending—or to be specific, the epilogue. Let’s see if I can talk about it without getting into spoiler territory.

Samuel’s final part of his epilogue is a meditation on his own loneliness and lack of romantic or sexual connection, contrasted by Tycho’s almost farcical prowess in the bedroom and Agnieszka’s successful, apparently happy marriage. He declares, “I can still write that I have never known love in my own life, only its absence.” I think he’s wrong.

In the same section, Samuel recoils from the idea that Princess Alexandra might be doomed to a similar fate, that her unrequited love for another might result in her unwittingly following in Samuel’s footsteps. He says, “surely the pains of unrequited love are preferable to the hollow ache of a chest void of any emotion at all.”

I think it’s very apparent from the pages that precede this epilogue that Samuel’s life has been steeped in love, and from what he utters after those words, he will continue to be surrounded by love into the old age he imagines for himself. That his love isn’t the romantic, all-consuming fire of the tales he has been raised on is irrelevant—it’s still love. For the book to end on such a trite and arophobic idea that a life without romantic love is lesser is very disappointing. It’s also so avoidable—seriously, had I stopped reading prior to this very last section, I would have finished the book thinking, “Well, that’s a tidy and sensible ending.”

So in that sense, the book in its final moments let me down. Nevertheless, Close Your Eyes is lovingly crafted, clever, cozy. I enjoyed the afternoons I spent with it and would read more from Tomasini.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Well ain’t this just the purdiest little novella you ever did see? I came across Tread of Angels at my library and was excited to see a new title from Rebecca Roanhorse. I love the premise and love that it is a mystery and, in some ways, a tragedy. In other words, this was a perfect distraction for a day.

Celeste is half Fallen, meaning she is descended from those who rebelled against Heaven back in the day. Thanks to her Elect father’s blood, however, she can pass as Elect. Her sister, Mariel, is not so lucky. Both of them live in Goetia, a town booming because of its proximity to the corpse of the fallen Abaddon, who decays into a resource called Divinity. When Mariel is accused of murder, Celeste takes it upon herself to defend her sister from the discriminatory prosecution of the Virtues. However, as she begins a hasty investigation into what went down, she finds her entire worldview upended. At the same time, she is forced to accept help from an old flame who tempts her beyond redemption.

I get some serious Lucifer vibes from this book. I do love me a reimagining of Christian mythology, and this one is more imaginative than most. This doesn’t surprise me, given what Roanhorse has done with Diné as well as Mexica mythologies. She is supremely skilled at adapting entire cosmogonies into new creation myths, and that’s what we are seeing here. Since this is a novella, of course, the actual worldbuilding is slimmer than you would get in a full novel (yet still deliciously richer than a mere short story would provide). Roanhorse wisely sticks closely to the narrative at hand, though I suspect many readers, like myself, will lament that this raises more questions about this world than it answers.

The actual mystery, and in particular its resolution, reminds me a little bit of The Peacekeeper, written by another Indigenous author. In both cases, the protagonist must be confronted with the prospect that their axioms are flawed, that people are far more complicated—and treacherous—than they initially wanted to believe. Roanhorse, much like B.L. Blanchard, is unflinching in her ability to put her protagonist through the wringer in this way.

I adored the simplicity of this narrative. I would love to see it as a miniseries, for example, because it is so self-contained yet supremely saturated. As Celeste plays detective, we meet any number of colourful characters who reflect her back at herself, forcing her to examine her passing privilege, to question what she really knows, and pushing herself past her own limits. The way that even Abraxas—a literal soul-taking demon—eventually throws up his hands at her and says, “I think you are going too far” is a clever and moving way to emphasize when Celeste hits her nadir.

Tread of Angels is a fast-paced, noir, tragic meditation on how far we will go for our blood, the price that might exact on us and the people who love us, and what it means to win at all costs. It was lovely to see Roanhorse flex her muscles in yet another fantastical world, and I am excited to see what she comes up with next.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.