Category: Book reviews

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. 2/5
The Dreamers is a lyrical account of the everyday actions and choices that cause a fictional pandemic in which victims fall asleep and can’t be woken, while experiencing intense dream activity; the human emotions and costs of such an event; and how choices become taken from us during high-fear times. This is a well-written novel, albeit lacking a certain amount of narrative tension other that causing the reader to ask, “who will be the next victim?” With somewhat better characterization, this question might have been, “what characters do I care about, and how am I invested in their status?” I was made uncomfortable by the author’s decision to have a sleeper become pregnant, resulting in the birth of her child while she sleeps, without anyone in the story questioning the woman’s desires; and certain aspects of characterization that I felt were stereotyping.

A Borrowing of Bones by Paula Munier. 4/5
A great first novel in what I hope becomes a series. Munier creates complex and interesting characters, both human and canine, in this story, which finds ex-MP Mercy Carr and retired sniffer dog Elvis and game warden Troy Warner and Newfoundland-mix Susie Bear in a thriller involving separatist movements, poachers, and artists in small-town Vermont. The book’s pacing is perfect, the logic is solid, and I felt pleasantly immersed in an area I knew little about. The dogs are well-written and neither too cute nor too anthropomorphized. I’m recommending this widely.

Driving to Geronimo’s Grave and Other Stories by Joe R. Lansdale. 5/5
This collection of some of Joe Lansdale’s short stories demonstrates why he’s such a popular author. These are beautifully-crafted, honest, evocative works, capturing a wide variety of voices and time periods. Including a story based on the real-life US Marshal Nat Love, a Lovecraftian tale of horror and discovery, and accounts of the defining moment of young people’s lives, this book is one to savor.

The Banshee of Machrae by Sonja Condit. 4/5
A well-crafted and evocative meditation of a novel on might-have-beens, what-ifs, and the nature of people to wonder what their lives could have been like but for one moment or decision. Each what-if centers around a single family, the Machraes, and what may have led to the death of young Kalen Machrae in multiple possible timelines, as narrated by his lover, as viewed by an outsider, as experienced by his family. Condit’s language is lovely: there are “kittens of flame” and an autumnal yard is a “sheet of copper.”

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us by Edgar Cantero. 4/5
I began This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us with eager anticipation–I really enjoyed Cantero’s two other English-language books. And while I felt that this got off to an uneven start, I found myself enjoying it more and more as it progressed. Adrian and Zooey Kimrean (a near-anagram of Kimerean, as they are a chimera) are sibling private investigators constantly fighting for control of the single body they share. Asked to investigate a mob killing, both sleuths make unique contributions and develop as individuals during the case. Cantero’s unorthodox mix of traditional prose and screenwriting formats makes for a quick and fun read, providing excellent descriptions and visual cues for readers. Overall, an eye-opening and manic joy ride.

The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel by Alyssa Palombo. 2/5
The author notes that this is her stab at a feminist retelling of Washington Irving’s famous tale of Sleepy Hollow, and while there isn’t a whole lot of nuance in that attempt–Katrina van Tassel has her own political opinions, chooses Ichabod Crane as her lover, and has a knowing midwife as a friend–it is passable. The story is pretty predictable from the start, and Katrina isn’t a particularly compelling character. Katrina is haunted from childhood by dreams of the Headless Horseman, and when her suitor Brom discovers that she’s in love with Ichabod, he dresses up as the phantom and kills the schoolmaster. By scrying, Katrina discovers this after she has married Brom to cover up the fact that she’s pregnant by Ichabod, and finally the Horseman comes for Brom.

The Leaving Year by Pam McGaffin. 3/5
A high-schooler learns that adults have lives besides just being parents. The diversity of characters is a good thing, but none of the characters are particularly memorable or interesting. Appropriate for late elementary school students and middle grades; although written with high-school age characters, they are all young for their ages, perhaps an artifact of the book’s 1967 setting, or the author’s lack of desire for more complex and mature characters.

Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit by Amy Stewart. 5/5
Amy Stewart continues her smart and engaging series about Constance Kopp and her sisters with aplomb in Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit. Imagining a life for the Kopps, who really did live in New Jersey in the 1910s, Stewart recreates the atmosphere and attitudes of the time to a T, giving readers a well-researched historical novel with great characters and incorporating issues that resonate even today.

Travels with Foxfire. 5/5.
Another lovely installment in the Foxfire series, full of information and personal stories surrounding life in the Appalachians, including foodways and recipes, music, politics, farming, building, and much more. The Foxfire books are gems, appealing to general readers and useful for scholars of oral history and folkways.

Natural Causes by Barbara Ehrenreich. 5/5.
Ehrenreich, as always, turns in a prescient and finely-crafted book that marries recent scientific knowledge to accessible and elegant writing in exploring the medicalization of aging and those who seek to reject the prolongation of life at the cost of living well.

Prairie Fairies by Valerie J. Korinek. 4/5.
A well-written, empathetic, and fascinating account of lesbian and gay citizens of Canada’s prairie provinces. While there is some bi erasure in this book, it is otherwise strong in documentation of queer history in both the large cities and smaller rural towns of these provinces, taking into account First Nations, Metis, and colonizer politics and relationships; the problems of identity that persist in dividing LGBTTQIAA+ communities; and the difficulty of finding individuals willing to share their memories and histories with the public. Prairie Fairies is an important addition not only to the body of work on queer history, but to Canadian history as a whole, and offers new avenues of research for scholars to pursue further.

Rise Up! by Chris Jones. 1/5
I hope that the ARC I just read gets a very, very heavy copyedit before it goes to press. What it really needs is a developmental edit, top to bottom.

Ostensibly a work about “Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton,” Rise Up! is a collection of anecdotes and trivia with a poor narrative structure. The author has tried to put together a chronological presentation of musicals and politics, but is too often interested in asides and jumps forwards and backwards in time: the result is a book in need of a strong outline and re-writing.

The tone is casual, aimed at a general readership, and apparently the author is a professional critic. The author’s bona fides come into question, however, with a number of examples in which he appears not to actually know much about music, the study of music and ethnography, or other extant studies about the arts, society, and politics. Even for a broad audience, the book’s sources display a superficiality that is also obvious in the text. Jones provides a lot of facts, but little linking them together, and even less interpretation or insight. In regard to the musical literacy issue, here’s a sample: “Their [Green Day’s] music may have been dominated by thrashing downward guitar strokes but is also far more melodic than their inherently atonal British ancestors [referring to the Sex Pistols] […] Green Day did not run a-feared of major keys. They made more ample use of arpeggios–and keyboards in general–than either their predecessors or their peers.” Does Jones know what atonality is? Does he know what an arpeggio is? Does he think it’s an instrument? Or that an arpeggio can only be played on a keyboard?

Other issues:
–The frequent use of “a person called X” as in: “an intern named Monica Lewinsky;” a [….] taxi-driver named Rodney G. King;” A man named George Holliday;” “an […] actress named Anna Deavere Smith;” “a solo artist named Lily Tomlin,” and countless more.
–Grammar errors. Here’s my favorite: “…a fantastical adventure by an unknown writer called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” The WRITER is called Harry Potter?
–Numerous typos. “Taylor” for “Taymor;” and others.
–Too much passive voice. “In 2017, an 18-year-old man named Michael Brown (there’s that”named” thing again) was short 12 times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri….” No. “A police officer shot 18-year old Michael Brown….”
–Poor organization even on the paragraph/section level. Jones writes about American Idiot for four pages before mentioning the album/show’s creators (…”an American punk band called Green Day…”)

I’d hoped this would be a smart book appropriate for music history and music and politics courses, but alas, it is most definitely not. In fact, I’d be loath to recommend it even to the most die-hard fan of American musicals: they can find all of the info in this book elsewhere (and easily) and make their own observations and analyses.

Bringing Down the Colonel by Patricia Miller. 4/5
I really enjoyed this journalistic account of how Madeline Pollard, the mistress of a Kentucky bigshot, successfully sued him for breach of contract when he refused to marry her–having repeatedly promised to do so–after the death of his wife. Miller gets into the social and sexual politics and mores of the time, the roles and activities of women, and how Pollard’s suit exposed and challenged the double standard women face. Appropriate reading for this particular point in history, and an engaging read to boot.

Playing to the Gods by Peter Rader. 1/5
A light and gossipy account of the careers and rivalry of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, the late 19th century actors. While Rader relies on previously published sources and some primary source materials, I nevertheless found his frequent fictionalizing of events troublesome for a book marketed as non-fiction. His descriptions of women are also problematic, as are his attributions of motive and emotion, and his repeated use of “Jewess” to describe Bernhardt which, lacking a note in the introduction or elsewhere as to why he chose to use it, has a strong whiff of antisemitism about it.

The Writer’s Map by Hue Lewis-Jones. 2/5
A collection of writers’, cartographers’, artists’ and scholars’ accounts of maps of fictional places and how maps influence and guide fiction writing. While many of the essays included here are beautifully written and thought-provoking, every contributor is white, and although a few mention historical maps of non-Western places or non-Western influences, almost all of the maps and writers and places they cite are also predominantly white. So although I enjoyed reading about how ancient maps sparked writers’ imaginations, how some authors begin by making maps of their new worlds, and so on, I was enormously disappointed in the lack of diversity represented in the collection. Where was N.J. Jemison to discuss the geography of the Broken Earth or the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms? Where was Nnedi Okorafor to write about the worlds of Binti or Sunny’s Nigeria? Why weren’t Amy Tan or Haruki Murakami or other Asian writers included?

In addition, it’s pretty clear that this book needs to be read in hard copy to be enjoyed. The Kindle edition I read was a terrible mess in terms of layout and design.

Anne of Cleves by Sarah-Beth Watkins. 2/5
In this biography of Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Sarah-Beth Watkins offers a casual overview of the short-reigning queen’s life. Watkins quotes from contemporary documents at length, presenting anecdotes and important events in Anne’s life in equal measure. While this could have been a good introduction for readers new to the Tudor period, the book is unfortunately rife with grammar and punctuation errors, Watkins is also in the habit of making assumptions about various figures’ feelings, opinions, and desires without any kind of evidence to back these up. This sloppy writing and scholarship may not bother some readers, but I can’t condone it.

Paris on the Brink by Mary McAuliffe. 2/5
In Paris on the Brink, Mary McAuliffe offers anecdotes about the Famous People of Paris in the 1930s, stringing them together with loose connections while at the same time providing some context about the French, American, and international political climates of the period. This would have been a fun and entertaining book–albeit not one that has anything new to say about this period or its people–if it weren’t for some curiously old-fashioned and problematic writing choices. McAuliffe often refers to women by their first names but men by their last, a misogynist practice that most editors would have insisted be changed, and her use of ableist terms like “crazy” and “a nutcase” are inappropriate and offensive.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. 2/5.
Barker tells the story of the Trojan War from the view of Briseis, the Trojan woman claimed by Achilles whose later claiming by Agamemnon results in Achilles’ famous sulking in his tent and refusing to fight. Using both first person and omniscient POVs, Barker seeks to tell of the silent women taken in the war. While the conceit is a great one, the characters mainly feel tired and shallowly created. The women are quite stock: the sex worker, the healer, the Stockholm Syndrome victim. Briseis herself is bland: we learn little of her actual character, her likes, her dislikes. She reports her sections in a flat, pragmatic manner. Perhaps this is intended to illustrate the numbing effects of war, but it didn’t work for me as such. Where the novel is most compelling is in the descriptions of the ghastly and gruesome aspects of the war; I ended up feeling pity and horror for Hector and Priam than the women.

White Stag by Kara Barbieri. 1/5.
A young woman with both goblin and human traits is captured, raped, and mutilated by goblins. Given to a nicer goblin, she develops Stockholm Syndrome and falls in love with her “master,” who exploits the power inequality of their relationship by taking her as his lover and forcing her to help him fight to become the supreme ruler of the goblins. Psychologically very disturbing, this novel also reinforces the problematic tropes of light=good and dark=bad, that gender identity is chosen, and that adult women are always rivals with one another.

How to Fracture a Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen. 1/5.
Jane Yolen is, as many know, an award-winning and oft-hailed writer of fantasy. However, her work has never stuck with me much, and I wanted to read this collection, which includes work from throughout her career and author’s notes on each story, as well as a poem for each story, to try to figure out why. Having read the book, I find her work rather dated and stuck in a 1970s ethos of second-wave feminism, and where she tries for inclusivity–borrowing Appalachian speech patterns and the like–her work comes off as being appropriative. I think it’s also aimed for readers we don’t really have anymore: young readers who have never heard a fairy tale from the “villain’s” POV; readers to whom the hint of sex is titillating, and who only know the cliches of heternormativity; readers who have grown up with characters and plots more sophisticated than what Yolen delivers. I wanted to find stories here that really stood out, that I could recommend to young readers and even older or more experienced readers who like subversions of the norm, but Yolen’s writing is prosaic and dull, the issues she deals with are old and tired, and there’s unfortunately little magic to be found here.

Edinburgh Dusk by Carole Lawrence. 2/5.
A decent enough procedural mystery, with added drama (and length) in the form of a theater group performing Hamlet, the protagonist’s alcoholic brother, their formidable aunt, and other side stories. Plenty of readers will enjoy it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea–too many stock characters, motives, and scenes.

The Thieftaker’s Trek by Joan S. Sumner. 2/5.
An interesting concept marred by clunky writing. There’s too much exposition in the dialogue, which sounds artificial and anachronistic; the characters are mostly cardboard and none are charismatic enough to garner the reader’s interest or sympathy; and several scenes do nothing to move the plot along but seem to hint that the author is writing more of a screen treatment than a novel.