Update May 17, 2021: So, today I learned Criado Perez is a TERF. Oops. I noticed, as remarked in the original review below, that the book doesn’t address issues of data collection for trans people. I didn’t realize at the time that Criado Perez’s omission was likely intentional. Sigh. 

So my quandary … I did think at the time I read this that Invisible Women was a very good book. It discusses very real problems that women (both cis and trans) face in a society designed for and largely by men. In that respect, I stand by my review below. 

However, I can no longer in good conscience recommend Invisible Women. And if anyone can point me in the direction of better, trans-inclusive books to recommend, please hit me up! In the meantime, here is a blog post inspired by this issue that serves as my general stance. 

Here is the original review. 

For some reason I thought this book was much older than it is—I don’t know if that’s because I’ve just been excited for it for a while, but whatever the reason, I’m glad I got around to reading it sooner rather than later. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is a valuable and cogent summary of the numerous ways in which our society’s perception of male-as-default is incredibly problematic. This is a feminist book, yes. But it’s also economics, data science, etc. Caroline Criado Perez packs a lot into these 400 pages—as evidenced by the fact that nearly 100 of those pages is endnotes citing all the various studies and sources that support her. The result is fascinating, illuminating, angering, but seldom very surprising.

As with many books like this, books awash in so many data and details, I find it at a loss to summarize or discuss it without feeling either too general or too much like I am bogged down in those details. Instead, let me describe what I hope people take away from this, as well as my reaction reading this as a trans woman.

My most important takeaway from this book is a potent reminder that ours is a designed world. As I said in my review of The Reality Bubble, I love reading books that remind me of all the hidden systems we take for granted but that have actually been created to allow our society to function. This is the bread-and-butter of Criado Perez’s book. She opens with a chapter about transportation design, making the points that women are both more likely to use public transit and more likely to trip-chain—make a bunch of stops, as opposed to a single commute in/out of town—but because the majority of transit planning is done by men, they design urban transit for men’s needs, mistakenly assuming that their perspective is universal. No one is setting out to intentionally discriminate against women in this case, but the discrimination happens. Not only is this bad for women, but the second- and third-order consequences are bad for our society in general.

Many of the examples in this book were already familiar to me. For example, I’ve previously learned about the disparity in women’s health outcomes from such books as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and also The Hormone Diaries. But what Invisible Women might lack in novelty for some it surely makes up in drawing attention to how the combinations of all these design issues and data gaps is a serious problem. The chapter focusing on the poor design of HEC stoves, designed to replace the indoor-pollution-causing three-stone stoves often used in developing countries, is a great example of this. Well-meaning organizations dive in, hoping to solve a problem, but because they don’t collect enough data disaggregated by gender, or they don’t listen to women, their efforts prove futile. The result is a massive waste of money. This is what I like about Invisible Women: this is a feminist book that nevertheless skilfully couches much of its polemic within an economic lens. Now, the book could be more anti-capitalist for my tastes, sure. But I appreciate and admire Criado Perez’s ability to speak the language, if you know what I mean.

That’s the second thing I hope you take away from this. We should care about women’s rights, women’s issues, etc., because they are human rights. But just in case there was still any doubt, Criado Perez demolishes the notion that oppressing or discriminating against women is actually somehow better for our society or our economy. She discusses (mostly from a UK point of view) how governments that don’t invest in subsidized childcare offload that cost onto women, which has negative effects on employment and other aspects of society. Childcare is costly, and when you don’t invest in it as a public good, that cost doesn’t go away—others have to pay for it, or balance their precarious employment with caring for their child themselves. In many ways, Criado Perez is demonstrating that our failure to design for women is in fact a failure of empathy, a failure to remember that the whole point of society is for us to take care of one another.

Since this book is so grounded in data, its flaws revolve around data—or lack thereof. Criado Perez spends a lot of time discussing how we often just don’t know how women are affected by certain decisions, because we don’t actually collect the data. So this book focuses predominantly on women in developed countries, and mostly middle-class white women. Where possible, Criado Perez mentions women of colour and women in developing countries—don’t get the idea that they are completely overlooked—but it’s telling, how even our understanding of data gaps has, itself, gaps along lines of race and ethnicity. Likewise, there isn’t much discussion of gender data gaps in research into disability, neurodivergence and autism, etc.

There’s also a dearth of data about transgender women like myself, which is not surprising. As someone who presented male for the first 30 years of her life, I definitely benefitted from living in a world designed for men. And now? I could make some superficial observations about how, as I transition, I’m starting to notice the gaps—certainly, very few of my dresses have pockets. But the deeper truth is that—despite seeing and interacting with so many trans people online, and a handful in my local community (at least prior to the pandemic)—I still feel very invisible, very disconnected from other trans people and very much ignored by our society. When I am seen, I still feel like I stand out as an isolated point of data rather than a member of a larger data set. And it is a little scary at times, not having significant longitudinal data on things like hormone replacement therapy, because no one felt it was important enough to study until now. If, to borrow from the title of this book, women are invisible to our society’s vast obsession with data, trans women sometimes are the most invisible of all.

Invisible Women is a book grounded in science, but its bedrock is the emotional truths of empathy and compassion. It is a book that assumes we want to build a better society than the one we currently have, a society that is more inclusive, more thoughtful, and more deliberate. This is Criado Perez’s rallying cry. For women in particular, this book might be angering or upsetting at times—but I hope it is also illuminating and inspiring. And I hope readers of other genders listen to this book’s ideas, so you get a sense of how your blind spots and preconceptions sometimes influence not just your world, but our worlds as well.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

When I learned after finishing this book that Kimberly Unger is a video game designer, much more about this book began to make sense. Nucleation is a science-fiction novel that wants to wow you with its video game–like aesthetic—this is a novel that craves the label of cinematic for its descriptions of how its protagonist virtually manipulates robots in another star system in high-stakes, high-pressure situations. Nevertheless, even if such moments capture your attention (I’m not sure, for me, that they did), they do very little to hide this story’s paucity of plot or character development. I got this for free from NetGalley and Tachyon Publications, but that isn’t going to stop me from being brutally honest here.

Nucleation is a snooze-fest.

We open in space. Helen is virtually manipulating a robot in another star system from the comfort of her job back here on Earth. She and her partner run into a problem, and Unger unfolds what should be a nail-biting scene of intense action … except she holds it for too long before pulling us out and giving us enough exposition to understand what’s going on. This opening chapter drags on past its expiry date, establishing what becomes a theme throughout the book. Indeed, we’re a quarter of the way through the book before we’ve even moved past the inciting force, and well over halfway through before the main conflict really picks up steam. The urgency Unger wants us to feel when Helen is in her coffin, doing her virtual OP stuff, is nowhere within the scenes outside the coffin.

With that being said, this next critique might seem contradictory: this book is way too focused on its main plot. Seriously, though, the cast of characters here is slim, the sets are like something from a budget cable TV show, and the scenes are so restricted in scope I started to chafe. I think we get like … two parts of the book that take place outside of Helen’s work—a wake at a bar, and then later on in a hospital. Otherwise, all the scenes (not counting the parts in space, obvs) take place on the Far Reaches campus. Helen barely interacts with anyone outside of her team—and yes, Unger handwaves this because Helen is “sequestered” along with the rest of her team, fine. But even her interactions with other members of her team don’t work for me. Pretty much the only downtime we get are meals that actually serve as a chance for some exposition.

Meanwhile, Helen herself seems to have a single mood (“damn you all, I’m just trying to do my job while you’ve got one arm tied behind my back!”) without much range. She’s got depth but it’s like … not used. She gets stuck in that emotional feedback loop (probably because we don’t get to see her breathe, as discussed above), so focused on this single plot that takes too long to develop anyway. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t care about her beyond a base level of empathy.

This is all so unfortunate, because the science fictional premise of this story has legs! Tiny robot swarms in another system, building jump gates and possibly making first contact with alien robot swarms? Yes, sign me up for this adventure! Wait, you’re going to make me read repetitive chapter and repetitive chapter without really advancing the plot or telling me more until the very end of the book, in the hope that hey, I’ll stick around for book 2?

Eject. Eject. Eject.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Every once in a while, I stop and just think about how everyone else around me is totally engrossed in their own life. I don’t mean in an egotistical sense. I mean … just as I am wrapped up in living my life, with my own beliefs and struggles, my moments to myself and my moments given to others … everyone else goes through all this too! Except they aren’t me, or I’m not them, and therefore I don’t know what it’s like … sorry, am I getting too deep? Anyway, Girl, Woman, Other is an unconventional novel that basically seeks to remind us of theory of mind. Bernardine Evaristo tells 12 interlocking stories that expose us not just to the lives but to the minds of 12 Black people. In so doing, she reminds us that when we look at someone, when we judge them, when we wonder why they think or behave the way we do, maybe we should stop and consider where they come from—not just in place but in time and society as well.

I’m not even going to attempt to summarize each of the 12 stories, because I am lazy. Let’s just say that Evaristo’s characters are drawn from a diversity of backgrounds, yet they also share experiences by dint of how society perceives them. Almost all of them are women (one is non-binary), all of them are Black (although that is complicated and erased for one), all of them are British yet are either immigrants or have tangible connections to immigrant parents or grandparents. Evaristo’s characters span generations, classes, careers, sexualities, and attitudes. They are artists and parents, cleaners and mathematicians, teachers and farm wives.

Girl, Woman, Other’s writing is closer to poetry than prose. The paragraphs are more like verses, with capitalization and line-breaks creative rather than conventional. Description dominates over dialogue, which is conveyed at a distance. In this way, Evaristo seeks to provide a sum-over-stream-of-consciousness of histories: her characters grow from girls to women in a matter of pages, learn hard lessons, move through the world and make decisions that set their lives on certain paths. This is beautiful yet also frustrating, this style—I don’t like it, but I also understand its use here, and I don’t mean to say it’s bad. I just don’t make a habit of reading novels like this, and I won’t pretend that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book.

I appreciate the myriad ways Evaristo interrogates the intersections of sex, sexuality, and race. Her characters are often queer—some of them openly so, some of them only experimentally or quietly. Trigger warnings for this book abound: rape and sexual violence, racism, abuse, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. Part of Evaristo’s theme is this idea that even though these characters explain Blackness and femaleness in very different ways, they are some level united by these identities by dint of living in white supremacist Britain. Meanwhile, these characters are complex and fallible. In a way, these aren’t really even interconnecting stories. They are character sketches, like we’re getting a glimpse into Evaristo’s notebook, plans for a novel not yet writen.

I take issue with how Evaristo tells the story of Morgan, the non-binary (“gender-free” in Morgan’s own words). Evaristo begins by using Morgan’s deadname and the pronouns she/her, only switching up after Morgan chooses a new name and switches to they/them. I can understand why Evaristo does this, but as a trans person, I don’t like it. I want people to apply my name and pronouns retroactively—now that I am Kara, I’m Kara in 1989 when I was born, Kara in 2007 when I graduated high school, Kara last year before I came out as trans. It felt weird and compromising to be asked to look at Morgan in a way incongruent with their identity, even if the idea is supposed to be that this is the past. And here’s the thing: in a movie, or perhaps even a more conventional novel, there might be call for such convention—but this is not a conventional novel; this is a perfect opportunity for Evaristo to further her experimental form.

(As an aside, Morgan, Shirley, Penelope’s stories probably resonated most with me, since I’m trans and also a teacher. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black in England, but I know what it’s like to teach there!)

Indeed, as I considered Evaristo’s portrayal of Morgan, I started to understand the limitations of Girl, Woman, Other. It deserves its praise for the diversity of its sketches, for the complexity of these characters. Yet it also runs into the problem that plagues every author: you cannot possibly represent, with perfect fidelity, the experiences of people whose lives you haven’t shared. I’m pretty sure Evaristo understands this, that this is in fact part of the point of the book—but I wonder if this might go over some people’s heads. Girl, Woman, Other’s greatest strength is, out of necessity and probably by design, also its greatest weakness. In telling 12 stories, it sacrifices its ability to dive deeply into one. Each of these characters could have, do deserve, their own 450-page novel to portray them as fully and deeply as they deserve.

That’s what I thought about as I read this book. In a way, I really appreciate that I pushed through its unconventional prose—it’s always nice when a novel gets me thinking about the structures and strictures of literature, about what is possible within the boundaries of the conventions we set, or within the liminal spaces between conventions. Thus, the highest praise I can give Girl, Woman, Other is that it is the best type of experimental novel, in my opinion: it is an experiment born out of empathy, rather than the author’s ego; and it is intrinsically aware of its own limitations.

And more broadly, of course, I suspect that this book is a response to the dearth of Black female characters in so-called “mainstream” literature. It’s somewhat ironic (but certainly laudable) that this book won such accolades as the Booker Prize. Mainstream British (and Canadian) literature often ignores the voices of women and Black people, unless they embody Blackness and femaleness in specific ways, in ways that invalidate the autonomy and dignity of their bodies. Evaristo in this book pushes back against such ideas. This is a book filled with Black joy as well as Black pain. Hopefully its success paves the way for more Black women’s voices to tell the stories they want to tell rather than the ones that our literary gatekeepers deem theirs to tell.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Turns out I remembered almost nothing of Stars Uncharted, the first book in this series (duology?). As I began Stars Beyond, very little of the overall story came back to me. I contemplated re-reading Stars Unchartd, but by that point I was 50 pages in and felt committed. Fortunately, as I forged onwards, the plot of this volume cohered into something pretty easy to follow. Or should I say … plots? Because, upon re-reading my review of the first book, it turns out my criticisms apply largely to this sequel: too many characters competing for too many goals.

Stars Beyond picks up where the first book left off. Captain Roystan and his small but plucky crew are very close to unlocking the location of a treasure trove of transurides, rare elements much coveted across the galaxy. But they have enemies on their trail: corrupt agents of the Justice Department, a company executive who is unhappy his pet assassin botched the job, and people who want to talk to Nika Rik Terri, the hotshot body modder who has found herself pat of Roystan’s crew. From pretty much page one, everyone is up to something, in trouble, and moving. I will say this for S.K. Dunstall: they know how to keep the book going at a nice pace!

Epic action sequences aside, time and again I came back to this problem: Stars Uncharted has no clear protagonist. Everyone wants something a little different, and while some people could be natural allies, the book flits between various groups such that I can’t tell exactly whom I should care about most. Alistair and Cam? Nika and Snow? Josune or Roystan? (Certainly not Wickmore, of course!) This is not Game of Thrones where we aren’t supposed to be cheering for any character, really. But is it possible for me to root for them all?

Which brings me to my second issue: the ending feels very contrived. I’m not going to spoil it. I just want to say that everything comes together in such a nice, fitted way. Each of the candidates for protagonists mentioned above gets, if not exactly what they want, some kind of satisfaction. This is … boring. Dunstall throw numerous obstacles in the way of the main characters throughout the book—oh, we took Roystan out of the machine too early; oh, we don’t have the right genemod machine; oh, I can’t track down Nika Rik Teri—and so on. Yet these obstacles are small potatoes compared to the larger plot, which decides to resolve itself without much strenuous participation from any of the potential protagonists, it seems.

At least with the first book, I had my criticisms but I could genuinely say I liked it. This book bored me more than I want to admit, given how much I know I enjoyed Dunstall’s first science fiction series. I wish I could praise this series equally as much. But the confoundingly boring cast of characters combined with the lack of support for the supposed high stakes of the plot just leaves me shaking my head.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

You ever read a book and have an epiphany, only for that epiphany to evaporate before you get around to writing it down or telling others? I think that happened here—I think one of Alicia Elliott’s essays in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground inspired an epiphany regarding my relationship with poetry … yet I have totally forgotten the thought now! I even paged through the book again to see if I could recover it. Nope. Maybe one day it will return.

I was drawn to this book by Elliott’s social media presence and some of her other writing online, such as this superb article for Chatelaine about 1492 Land Back Lane and Canada’s ongoing colonialism. Elliott’s writing balances past and present tense in a way that helps us connect how the colonial actions of the past reverberate into the colonial present Indigenous people are experiencing today. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a very personal collection of essays. Its title comes from a translation of a Mohawk word that roughly means depression, and a great deal of this book is concerned with the effects of colonialism on Elliott and her family. Yet the essays transcend colonialism, and as Elliott mentions in “Not Your Noble Savage,” she does not want to be pigeonholed as “just” an Indigenous writer.

I really appreciate the nuance on display in these essays. For example, Elliott’s parents often appear in her writing. She makes it very clear that she thinks of them fondly—yet at the same time, her childhood and teenage years are full of moments of tension, abuse, even violence. We are so prone to simplifying people in our lives into single stories—a parent is either loving or abusive, rather than loving and abusive. Elliott rejects the dichotomy and displays both the loving moments and the darker ones. Moreover, her intention here isn’t to excuse these contrasts or to show that she has worked through and somehow processed and come to understand all of this. Rather, she admits to us that it can be difficult to fully puzzle out the way we react to, understand, and respond to the people closest to us.

Within these pages you’re going to find what you expect: the violence Canada does to Indigenous people (especially Indigenous women), the nasty fallout of racism both systemic and targeted, the pain that comes with uprooting and re-rooting oneself and one’s family and—for Elliott is light-skinned enough to “pass” as non-Indigenous—feeling like one never quite belongs anywhere. However, you will also find the moments that are often erased from Indigenous experiences that make it to the mainstream: the moments of joy—particularly when Elliott is talking about her husband and child; the moments of triumph; the moments of honesty. As she mentions herself in several essays, we place Indigenous writers in boxes. We elevate those who conform to what we expect an Indigenous writer to write, and we find reasons to ignore and erase those whose writing breaks out of those boxes.

So as a settler, what I take away from this collection is that reminder that I have to be careful about how I approach the Indigenous storytelling that makes it into mainstream CanLit. (Joseph Boyden’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall from grace is perhaps the textbook case for this issue.) I must do my best to check my preconceptions at the door, not to laud something merely because it meets some subconscious checklist for Indigeneity, nor to reject something from an Indigenous author merely because of its departure from that unspoken norm.

And then more generally, I just valued Elliott’s candidness. The way she spoke about her traumas, about her difficulty navigating both the racism and the misogyny of modern Canada. Hers is a life so very distinctive from mine, by dint of so many axes of experience and identity. I appreciate being able to hear her stories and briefly glimpse my country through her eyes, so I can better understand how it is failing other women less privileged than me, how it is failing Indigenous people, how it is silent about survivors of abuse and assault, and how the very structures—such as public education and childwelfare—we supposedly put in place to protect our most vulnerable turn into the most oppressive, most inequitable parts of our society for some.

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is many moments of intensity punctuated by poetical prose and thoughtful ways of weaving facts and education about this country’s colonial attitudes into very personal stories. My mind is not spread out on the ground after reading this, but you can bet that it is buzzing with ideas and interest sparked by Elliott’s essays.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

From women writing subversive TV now to women inventing time travel! The Pyschology of Time Travel is a quirky part mystery, part love story. As the title suggests, Kate Mascarenhas focuses more so on what it would be like to be a time traveller rather than on the social, historical, or future repercussions of mucking about with a timeline. Along with bringing up the usual questions of free will versus determinism, etc., this book seeks to address such burning queries as: what would you call it if you had sex with your future or past self, and is that cheating? I’m being tongue-in-cheek—there is a lot of serious, weird stuff in this book. But my overall impression is that there were better stories that could be told here.

There are two main characters: Ruby and Odette. Ruby is the granddaughter of Barbara, one of the four women who invented time travel in the 1960s. Barbara fell out with her fellow inventors after she had a breakdown on national television, so Ruby and her mother have always lived at a distance from the world of time travel. This changes in big ways, for a mysterious note from the future prompts Ruby to look into the Time Travel Conclave. Odette, on the other hand, thinks the Conclave holds the answer to what killed a dead woman she discovered in the basement of a museum. She joins up to look for those answers, but of course, the reality is much more wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey!

Mascarenhas follows a block time, self-consistent approach to time travel: if you know the future, you are doomed to complete it, no paradoxes allowed. She delves a little into what this does to time travellers’ attitudes towards deaths of loved ones—how do you grieve someone who is accessible to you by travelling to the past? Similarly, how do you live a life when you know the outcome—your date of death, how you die, who your friends and partners are at that time? We humans are so accustomed to the linearity of our time, and to the arrow of time being such that we know our past absolutely yet our future in no true sense—what would time travel, really, do to us? (It seems strange to me that Ruby is a therapist, yet she spends little enough time ruminating on this herself.) I, for one, do not want to know how or when I die. I like that uncertainty.

Time travel affects more than just romantic relationships. The relationships people have with Margaret Norton, the Conclave’s inaugural director, are an interesting example. Apparently she gets nastier as she gets older, and many characters remark that they prefer dealing with her younger selves. What would a job be like if you could talk to your boss across different time periods?

Mascarenhas never actually takes us on a time travel adventure. She offers up interesting tidbits on how our society has evolved after a few centuries of time travel. Perhaps the most tantalizing is that it’s impossible to travel beyond 2267, as if the time travel machines just disappear after that. Oooh, what a cool mystery! But that’s never brought up again—and in a weird continuity error any editor should have caught, they keep mentioning how time travel justice is inspired by “twenty-fourth century British law,” even though the 2267 cap is in the twenty-third century. Oops.

Speaking of errors, I’m not sure if this is a stylistic faux pas or a typesetting issue, but the dialogue habitually runs together—the speaker changing mid-paragraph. This kind of thing annoys the hell out of me, and honestly there were moments I wanted to put down this book simply because of that habit.

So, in short, this book could have used another editing pass, I think.

The main plots are all well and good, but in the end I guess I was just hoping for more after that set-up. I feel like there are more stories, better stories, more interesting stories happening here, yet we are on the periphery looking inwards with Ruby and Odette. Furthermore, while I give Mascarenhas due credit for attempting to use her time travel framework to tell the story in a non-linear yet comprehensive way, I wish she had taken more risks. I wonder if this is because this book attempts to be a more “literary” approach to time travel? In any case, The Pyschology of Time Travel has a great premise, but the story itself and the characters within fall flat for me.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Two years ago I picked up, on a whim, Sarah-Jane Stratford’s Radio Girls, and I fell in love. The book was the perfect blend of history, politics, and feminism. I’m pleased to say that with Red Letter Days, Stratford has done it again. While the protagonists share some superficial qualities—both move from North America to Britain, both work in communications industries in some capacity, both become somewhat embroiled in espionage and skullduggery—Stratford has chosen a different era and a different set of problems for her heroines this time around. Although slow to start, Red Letter Days did win me over.

Their stories told in parallel, the two protagonists are Phoebe Adler and Hannah Wolfson. Both Americans, Phoebe is a TV writer while Hannah is a TV producer. When Phoebe is blacklisted (for being accused of communist sympathies), she moves to London, where Hannah has been building her own production company—and hiring blacklisted Americans like Phoebe. The two must navigate the treacherous waters of the entertainment industry, sexism, sexual politics, and espionage. It’s quite the story.

I just love Stratford choices of time periods! Just as I didn’t know much about the founding of the BBC, I know very little about McCarthy-era America—my history class in Canada tended to stop around World War II, and everything after that was, I guess, too modern. So while I was aware in general of McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States, Stratford brings it to life in an empathetic, dramatic way. Phoebe’s sudden and unexpected blacklisting is hard to swallow, and the merciless and cruel treatment she receives as a result might seem melodramatic and unrealistic to those of us who have grown up with more privileges and apparent freedoms. Yet is it really so unbelievable? Looking at the way people treat each other here and now, I don’t see all that much difference. As Phoebe observe in the book, people don’t change that much across history—certainly not within a century. These days we condemn people scurrilously over social media, and our governments continue to practise surveillance techniques that would make the HUAC drool in envy.

So it was interesting to immerse myself in this time period, but probably even better was just living with Phoebe and Hannah for a while. Stratford gives us two strong yet very distinct women. Phoebe is headstrong but young, and she feels an immense sense of responsibility towards her sister, who is immuno-compromised and lives in a sanitarium at Phoebe’s expense. Hannah is older, more experienced, has a husband and two children—her struggle is with her sense of responsibility over the people she has chosen to bring in to write for her and her company in general. Whereas Phoebe debates whether or not she wants a relationship, Hannah debates whether or not her relationship can survive her being a working mother.

Of those two stories, I found Hannah’s more interesting. My aro/ace self was less interested in Phoebe’s romance arc. It would have been nice if the story were to confirm her choice to be a single, working woman—but I do like the decision she makes at the end, regarding her marital status—I thought that was very mature. Hannah’s story, on the other hand, is extremely predictable: 1950s husband is jealous of his wife’s success, feels emasculated, etc. Nevertheless, Stratford writes this with such feeling that you can’t help but be drawn into the messiness of Hannah’s emotions as she processes this upheaval in her life.

My only complaint is probably about the writing style in general. I don’t remember if this was an issue with Radio Girls, but in this book, there is an awful lot of telling rather than showing. This creates a kind of distance from the main characters, which can undermine my observation above regarding the amount of feeling on the page. In the same way, some of the more antagonistic characters are far too flat and one-dimensional—I’m including Charlie Morrison here, along with the Hound guy.

Red Letter Days would, like Stratford’s earlier novel, make an excellent film adaptation. It has the story, the characters, the setting—everything you need. It also has the heart. All these elements mean that I am more than willing to overlook those little stylistic issues that occasionally jarred me. When you get right down to it, this is a story of adventure and betrayal at a time in history that I needed to know more about. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is a marked improvement over the first book in this trilogy, but that isn’t saying much. Pilgrim is very much Drago’s redemption story, and Sara Douglass is determined that we care for him as a person and a hero. And you know what? I think she might actually succeed. Not because Drago is all that great, but because our choice of other heroes is … not great. Axis and Azhure (well, to be fair, mostly just Axis in this book) continue to be the literal worst. WolfStar is awful. Caelum is, for reasons I won’t spoiler, not really in the picture on this one. StarDrifter and Zenith kind of get relegated to supporting roles, and the human princes are basically non-entities.

Nope, folx, it is definitely the Drago and Faraday Show.

The Timekeeper Demons are loose in Tencendor. Their plan? Gotta collect ’em all. Except instead of Pokémon, they need to travel to each of the 4 magical lakes and retrieve a part of their evil uber-colleague, Queteb. Once they’ve reassembled and reanimated him, they’ll be unstoppable! Until then, they are limited to each having sway over a specific span of hours in the day—during which time anyone not in shade can be mind-controlled and turned into a raving lunatic/zombie thing.

I don’t think I’ve discussed how ridiculous the Timekeeper Demons are, so let’s pause and reflect on that. They are Metaphor Demons, in the sense that each represents a certain negative trait—despair, hunger, etc. Their personalities, however, leave much to be desired, and any time we spend with them makes me think of them as petty, squabbling children. This is the problem with personifying your nigh-unstoppable mystical forces: they feel small.

Meanwhile, everyone is engaged in a race against time. The Demons are racing to the lakes. WolfStar is trailing them because he wants to reanimate Niah the same way the Demons plan to reanimate Queteb. What happens with WolfStar and Niah both … well … let’s just say, Douglass’ fascination with strange sex/sexual violenc stuff reaches new levels in Pilgrim. And that’s in addition to Zenith quite literally complaining that she is too disgusted by the idea of sleeping with her grandfather, StarDrifter, and how much that sucks because she really wants to sleep with him. And everyone is all, “Ooooh, Zenith, don’t worry, you’ll get over and it then the two of you can boink like proper SunSoars” and I just … I can’t. I can’t. This book goes beyond kink into a very uncomfortable place.

I mentioned in my intro that Axis continues to Axis it up all over the place. Without spoiling things, suffice it to say that he is the oldest person I have ever seen to throw a temper tantrum. He would rather kill Drago on sight than admit that Drago might have a role to play in saving the entire world. Axis is the epitome of fragile, toxic masculinity—he always has been, right from Book 1, but whereas the original trilogy was about his growth into a hero, this trilogy seems determined to cast him as a crabby, closed-minded old man.

And then we have Faraday. I fucking loved Faraday in this book, because Faraday is tired of your bullshit. Faraday is not having it anymore. She has spent 4 books being put through the wringer, being killed and transformed and assaulted and married off and basically told what to do for every major decision in her life, and she is done. She majestically and quite rightfully rejects all notions of destiny in Pilgrim, and it is the best part of this book.

Finally, let’s talk about Drago. In the original trilogy he was a minor villain, an instigator of a plot to kill the baby Caelum so he could be the StarSon. His face turn is perhaps the most surprising aspect of this second trilogy, and Pilgrim works hard to explore that. Despite all my other criticisms of Douglass’ writing and storytelling, I will hand it to her: she does a good job here. Drago doesn’t suddenly embrace his new role, doesn’t immediately step up and say, “Yes, now I am the hero! Hahaha.” He struggles with it, much like Axis struggles with the idea, because Drago too has spent 40 years being told he is the worst person alive. So it makes sense that he needs to adjust to the new reality.

Oh, and there is a lot of magic happening. Those races against time? They involve discovering magical secrets, magical sanctuaries, etc. This might seem like a weird remark for a fantasy series, but … sometimes I feel like The Wayfarer Redemption has too much magic. Like, everything and everyone in this book is mysterious and magical, and it’s likely one reason that this book is over 700 pages long. More importantly, when everything is magical, nothing is magical; if magic becomes the norm, if ordinary physics and logistics cease to matter to your storytelling, then you fall down a very deep rabbithole of handwavery. Douglass in particular seems fixated on closure and the idea that every character, every loose end, must be accounted for, wrapped up, tied off, and connected (Urbeth’s secret identity, revealed in this story, is a prime example). Yet I would argue that one of the most powerful actions a writer can take is to leave some mystery, leave some questions unanswered—not in a way that creates inconsistencies or continuity errors, and hopefully not in a way that leaves readers unsatisfied. Rather, leave enough room for interpretation and speculation and doubt, because that’s what keeps our brains hooked on your world.

Pilgrim actually has some worthwhile moments in it. But it is buried beneath a torrent of weird violence, sex, and substandard storytelling. I have one more book in this series to go, and then I will be happy to draw a line beneath these books forevermore.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I picked this up several years ago and am finally diving into it. It’s not what I expected—I was looking for something with essays, including personal essays, but this includes a lot more poems and other, shorter and more artistic pieces. IMPACT: Colonialism in Canada is an anthology that makes quite a statement. If it’s what you’re looking for, it’s going to satisfy. In my case, it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but don’t interpret that as a bad thing.

Let’s talk about storytelling and colonialism.

When my ancestors came to this land that has become Canada, we set out to take away the stories. English and French became the lingua franca. Residential schools and other strategies separated Elders from youth and broke the line of oral storytelling that had been unbroken from time immemorial. Don’t practise your arts. Don’t dance your dances or sing your songs. Don’t tell your stories.

I think a lot about the fact that so many stories by or about Indigenous people are told in English or French rather than their original languages. IMPACT is a book that meditates on this by telling us stories, personal and political and old and new, in an attempt to help demonstrate the wide-ranging effect of colonialism.

Yes, you will get stories in here about residential schools and other more “obvious” signifiers of colonization.

But you also get stories about fitting in. About being an Indigenous woman. About food and family and love and hatred and the difficulty of navigating growing old in a country that doesn’t often treat you like you are human.

This is not an academic book, and that’s probably a good thing. If you don’t want academic discussions of colonialism; if you want personal and emotional connections through poetry and song and careful reflection, you’ll get it here. I think the average Canadian wouldn’t do much wrong picking up this book.

That generality, that lack of focus in its attempt to include so many voices and conceptions of the effects of colonialism, ultimately is why I didn’t enjoy this as much as I could. That is not a problem with this book, just an incompatibility with what I want: I want to read more focused books about colonialism, books that discuss the impact of colonialism within specific spheres. So if you are looking for depth rather than breadth, you should keep looking.

IMPACT is a nice little anthology, but its appeal is for the general, not the specific.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

You should read my review of Peace Talks before you read this review. Also, I don’t know how to talk about this book without spoilers. So if you want a spoiler-free review: Battle Ground is a flawed attempt to give fans of the Dresden Files the climax Butcher thinks they want, but it falls short. There are definitely crowning moments of awesome, low moments, and the thoughtful moments we have come to expect.

Spoilers from hereon out. Seriously, you have been warned.

Battle Ground picks up quite literally where Peace Talks ended. This is kind of what happens when you split a book in twain because it has grown too large. Harry Dresden and his reluctant allies are facing off against Ethniu, the Last Titan, and an army of Fomor intent on destroying and conquering Chicago. We are told over and over that this is it, this is the biggest, baddest apocalypse to come since Storm Front. And, to be fair, it definitely is.

People are comparing this to Avengers: Endgame because of its huge battle against a single, uber-powerful opponent and the assembly of so many characters from previous books. I get it. There is definitely a Marvel vibe here—but I haven’t seen Endgame, so instead let’s talk about Deadpool. Because Harry definitely has that kind of sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking attitude that Ryan Reynolds brought so well to the screen. I’ve always enjoyed Harry’s snark, of course, along with his introspection into whether or not he has become a monster. But here’s the problem with trying to keep it going in the midst of a novel that is 100% battle.

It gets old.

Harry spends the book literally racing from one confrontation to the next. Each confrontation is supposedly bigger or badder than the last. Yet you can only say, “This was like nothing I had ever seen before!” so many times before it starts to wear thin. Butcher attempts to keep raising the stakes, but it feels like a sliding scale: suddenly the baddies from the first confrontation are easily being slaughtered by volunteers with shotguns, because the next set of baddies is even more powerful and more invulnerable. All the while, there is no sense of momentum to the plot, because we know what the climax has to be: Harry squaring off with Ethniu, trying to bind her. The rest of the book is literally filler until Butcher can bring us to that moment.

I’m not saying nothing important happens. But I’m not happy about the important happenings.

First, can we talk about

how an entire book passes without nary a mention of Thomas? He was such a big part of Peace Talks! And sure, Harry has a lot on his mind tonight as he tries to save Chicago. But Butcher could at least have thrown us a bone—there is a coda called “Christmas Eve” that is supposed to be charming and heartwarming, but all I can think is, “It’s already Christmas and you haven’t saved Thomas yet???” He doesn’t even rate a mention then.

Huge spoiler coming up soon, by the way. If you thought I was exaggerating earlier about spoilers, you are wrong and should stop reading now.

Second,

Harry’s excommunication from the White Council makes sense, and I am on board for that. However, I don’t understand the hostility from people like Ebenezar. Here’s what I mean: Ebenezar presumably knows Harry’s secret path, the whole starborn chosen one bullshit that I really wish weren’t in the background of this series. He and others, including Harry’s faerie godmother, have manipulated and shaped Harry’s life from birth onwards. Now he has the gall to turn around and chastise Harry for seeking power, chastise Harry for getting into bed with the fae, chastise Harry for his choices? You set Harry up for this, my dude. I mean, I guess Butcher is trying to support Harry’s contention that most wizards are hypocritical asshats who wouldn’t know an apology if one dropped on them from the sky. But it’s one thing for Ebenezar to support a political censure of Harry and quite another for him to be so incredibly rude to his grandson like that.

Third, of course, is

the unfair, unjust, terrible death of Karrin Murphy.

(I warned you about spoilers.)

One could argue, based on that point, that Murphy must die, that it’s thematically necessary in order to deepen Harry’s separation from mortality. After all, they just almost hooked up in Peace Talks; we can’t have Harry ever being happy, can we? Gotta kill the woman then! Look, others have written extensively at the misogyny within this series, so I won’t rehash all that. But the women of this series do not get treated well, Murphy no exception, and insisting her death is a necessary plot device is an extension of that misogynistic dehumanization.

(Let’s not even mention that, after spending most of Peace Talks disabled as a result of the events of Skin Game, Murphy magically gets a boost that lets her fight tonight thanks to some handwavery from Butcher so she doesn’t have to sit this out and, you know, survive.)

It would be hyperbolic to say that Murphy was the only good thing left in his series—Mouse and Maggie are pretty sweet. Nevertheless, whatever my qualms or reservations about certain developments in this series, Murphy was always there as a touchstone. Solid Murphy. Mortal Murphy. Love interest Murphy.

Now she is gone and Butcher better fucking not cheapen that by bringing her back but you know he’s going to and oh my god am I hate-reading this series now?

I think I might be hate-reading this series now.

For a long time, I have praised the Dresden Files for the way it has gradually built out its mythos over these 17 books and some short stories. That is an achievement for which I am happy to praise Butcher. Where did it go wrong? I don’t think I can point to a specific book. Almost certainly things were going awry by Proven Guilty, what with Harry’s creepy relationship to Molly. But rather than lay the blame at any particular book’s doorstep, I’d rather critique the general storytelling decisions Butcher has made throughout the series. After 20 years, he has matured and improved as a writer, but he has also wrapped himself up in an incredibly complex continuity and demonstrated a devotion to the idea of “epicness.” This has always been at odds with the urban fantasy genre, particularly those books wherein the majority of the mortal world is unaware of the supernatural. Perhaps that tension, then, between the series’ epicness and its urban fantasy roots, has been one of the reasons it is so successful. On the other hand, this obsession with epicness is unhealthy. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to tell epic stories, there is also nothing wrong with searching for small stories that matter as well.

I think that’s why Skin Game worked so well for me. Although the scale of its setting was epic, at its core it was a return to the original Dresden Files format of small plot, big ideas: Harry was pulling off a heist. That’s cool. Harry defending Chicago from a Titan alongside most of the supernatural world? That’s epic, but it isn’t as interesting, because we’ve lost the intimacy of the plot along the way.

Battle Ground did what Peace Talks couldn’t, I guess … it has quashed what love I had for this series. Don’t get me wrong … I still appreciate and adore this series. I’m going to keep its books on my shelves, and if someone asks, I will recommend it (with caveats). But we have outgrown Dresden Files. There are newer series, newer authors, that strive for far more creative, original, breathtaking acts of storytelling. I don’t fault this series for being what it is, but like many book series I started reading as a child or a teen, I have grown and changed while it has largely remained the same. When that happens, you know it’s time to move on.