A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Eleven climbers died on K-2 in a three-day stretch the summer of 2008. Amidst the tragedy were some extraordinary feats of heroism. The two most impressive ones, in my mind, were performed by a Sherpa who rescued another Sherpa, and a Pakistani cook who rescued a Pakistani climber/expedition organizer. Neither of those heroes were recognized by the American, European, and South Korean climbers, most of whom ignored the Sherpas and one of whom publicly disparaged the Pakistanis who struggled and died on the mountain. (Seriously, fuck that guy.)

This book is partly the story of those converging and ill-fated expeditions, but mostly of those two Sherpas, Chhiring Dorje Sherpa and Pasang Lama. It also gives a lot of eye-opening background on Sherpas, their ethnic and class divisions, the social and economic forces that lead so many of them to climb mountains, and the cultural forces that affect them when they do so.

(It also explains why so many Sherpas have the same name. Traditionally, they are named after the day of the week that they were born, and don't have last names so they mostly use "Sherpa" for outsiders who demand one. This is fine in a village of 100, where there will only, statistically, be 14.28 people named Pasang so you can easily distinguish Old Grandpa Pasang from Teenage Yak Herder Pasang from Pasang With The Missing Finger. Then you get to Kathmandu, where there's 350 Pasang Sherpas who are all 25 years old and are porters on mountain climbing expeditions so if you want to identify one of them you have to resort to naming what expeditions they were on and what village they come from and then you will still probably need to use a nickname as that could easily be five different people.)

Until I read this book, I had completely forgotten that the crown prince of Nepal had massacred the entire royal family in 2001. To be fair, there was a lot going on in 2001. Still, what a bizarre incident that was. It also caused a lot of political and economic chaos which, as always, drove people to move in search of safety and better living conditions.

The Sherpas almost all started climbing because the pay was good. But some of them, like Chhiring, got a taste for the risk as well. But even they seem, overall, vastly more level-headed than the paying climbers, who mostly don't come across particularly well in this book. This may be because whatever sort of person climbs Mt. Everest, you have to be fifty times more like that to climb the notoriously bloodthirsty K-2.

Between that, a very narrow window of good weather, the inevitable breaking of vows to turn around if you're not on track to summit at 2:00 PM, the one person who could translate between the multiple language groups having to be medevaced out, and some plain bad luck, it's not surprising that so many people died. It's actually surprising that so many survived.

This book is both excellent in its own right and a great antidote to all the books that don't focus on the Sherpas. Every time you read one of those, just remember that the Sherpas are doing everything the paying climbers are doing, but carrying heavy packs, with shoddy gear, without fame or glory, and often against the wishes of their families. They're like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire does, but backwards and in high heels.

A journalist recovering from the death of her husband is sent to a small town to investigate the claim that A HORSE GAVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN BABY.

I strongly dislike reading about normal human pregnancy and birth, but I love stories about bizarre births. I also love folk horror. So a story about a small town where a horse gives birth to a human baby sounded like just my jam.

Sadly, I really disliked this book. In fact the more I think about it, the more I dislike it.

My main beef with it is that very little of interest happens until about the last ten pages. The parts about the horse-human birth are cool! Ten pages of cool. Would've been a good short story.

There are eleven or twelve POV characters, but only one is actually necessary (the journalist) and only one is at all interesting (the teenage boy who is raising and claims to be the father of the horse baby). The rest are townspeople whose POVs don't add anything to the story, plus "The Horses," which ought to be interesting but wasn't because half of it was explaining what humans thought about the horses. I don't care what humans think about horses! When I'm in supposed horse POV, I want to be immersed in HORSE POV!

The setting is incredibly vague. I couldn't figure out if it was even in America or England until it mentioned the opioid crisis.

Aggravated spoilers. ( Read more... )

The premise is better than the book and the cover is also better than the book. I was in it for the horse baby but that's only about 10% of the book.

June is the month where every time I post about my shop, brave internet warriors call me a pedophile and a groomer. Joke's on them though: every time they comment, the algorithm boosts my post and gets my shop more publicity.

I had fun creating a display for Pride. The books rotate - I have lots that fit the categories I highlighted. Which slogan is your favorite?

In a country with Wild West vibes, young girls are often sold to brothels, to become sex slaves when they come of age. They are given magical tattoos of buds when they're bought. These tattoos slowly grow and blossom into flowers that the girls are nicknamed for. They cause excruciating pain when they're covered up, preventing the girls from fleeing and blending into the populace. But this isn't the only barrier to escape. The entire wilderness area is haunted by angry ghosts that can take physical form and rip you to shreds.

On Clementine's inaugural rape night, her would-be rapist nearly suffocates her, and she brains him with a lamp. As she would be executed for that, she, her older sister Aster who's been a sex slave for years already, and three other girls manage to escape the brothel and flee in search of a rumored woman who can remove the magic tattoos. 

By far the most interesting character in the book is Violet, the brothel bully, spoiled brat, and magical opium addict who is the only one who knows where to find the woman who will be their salvation, if she actually exists. As they flee across the haunted wilderness, they're pursued by magical slavecatchers, are joined by a boy, and meet some rebels. Clementine has a romance with the boy, two of the girls have a romance together, and Violet and Aster have intense feelings which hopefully go somewhere in the sequel.

This novel has an extremely cool setting and unusual worldbuilding. I love ensemble casts and wilderness traveling. I expected to adore this, but while I did enjoy reading it, I didn't love it. I had been under the impression that the girls all had different magical powers, which is my own fault for misreading the blurb, but I was disappointed that they don't have any, except that Clementine can talk to ghosts a bit. More importantly, only Aster and Violet, plus Clementine to some degree, get any real characterization. I was interested in them enough that I'll read the sequel, but the book overall felt like it should have been fantastic but ended up merely good.

Content notes: There is a very violent, graphic rape attempt in chapter one. That's it for that but the repercussions of years of sexual abuse are felt throughout the novel.

To come!

After 40 years together, Don and Rodney face the end of the world from a black hole that will swallow the Earth in exactly one month. So they embark on a road trip to keep a promise they made to their son.

Klune sells very well at my shop. He is good at doing what he does, and what he does is gay, twee, and glurgy. I did not enjoy The House on the Cerulean Sea and I did not enjoy this either. Both of them made my eyes glaze over. I started both of them, disliked them both, started skimming, still was bored and irritated, then skipped to the end to see how it all came out. Then I learned some information that made me revise my opinion of the book even lower. In the case of The House in the Cerulean Sea, it was an interview where he mentioned that his sappy, trivializing book was inspired by the Sixties Scoop. In the case of We Burned So Bright, it was his afterword.

Spoilery. ( Read more... )

Klune's books are very deeply meaningful for a lot of my customers, but UGH. The best thing I can say about it is that I quite like the covers.

A very loose take on "Little Red Riding Hood," set in modern times post-apocalypse!

Cordelia, nicknamed Red because she hates her given name and always wears a red hoodie, is the sole survivor of her family. She's traveling the post-pandemic wilderness to get to her grandmother's house in the woods, armed only with an axe. She's used a prosthetic leg since losing one in a car crash when she was a child, so people underestimate her. They shouldn't.

The story alternates between her post-pandemic journey and the events leading up to it, when Red lived with her mom (a Black college professor), her dad (white, I forget his job) and her older brother Adam. Red is about 20, Adam is about 22; they're both college students. Red is extremely into horror movies and preparing for danger, so she sees the urgency of the pandemic well before most people. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save her parents and brother.

I was absolutely glued to this book, staying up past midnight to finish it, despite its many flaws. If you, like me, enjoy a small scale apocalypse story with a focus on the logistics of survival, this is a must-read. The logistics of survival bits are GREAT.

It's repetitive (HOW many times do we need to be told that Red can't run fast because she has a prosthetic leg?), everything is over-explained, Red is somehow able to use a small axe to kill multiple men armed with guns (all at once in addition to sequentially!) despite having no training, and the ending is incredibly abrupt and has more loose ends than a half-finished sweater. I cannot believe the author's chutzpah in setting up all sorts of fascinating mysteries only to have Red conclude that she's not the main character (what?) and so no longer cares that she'll never know the answer to any of them. Okay, but I care!

And yet, I enjoyed the hell out of it, right up to the non-ending. I am just a sucker for people searching for beef jerky in looted supermarkets and rescuing kids.

Spoilery details.

( Read more... )

Halfway through this book, I was looking up all of Henry's other books, which are horror or thrillers, many dark fairytale retellings, so I could read them all. When I got the end, I looked up their reviews. Many mention "abrupt" endings and none of the rest are post-apocalyptic, which was by far the best part of the book, so I will probably leave my reading of her books right here.

Erica Skyberg is a 35-year-old teacher in a small town in South Dakota who’s just realized that she’s a trans woman. Or rather, the knowledge that she’s a trans woman has finally become impossible to suppress. Unfortunately, she’s deep in the closet and the only other trans person she knows is Abigail, who is 17 and the only openly trans student at her high school. Erica is in the stage of identity where she can’t think about anything else; Abigail is fine with carrying the banner of being out but would really like her life to not be just about Being Trans.

Erica comes out to Abigail, who is equal parts annoyed and fascinated by the chance to take on the role of being a mentor to an adult. Their relationship is definitionally inappropriate, but not predatory or harmful. Abigail can be a lot and Erica has enormous issues with self-esteem and boundaries, but they’re both essentially kind and well-meaning people trying to just live their lives in a world that has cast them as Public Enemy # 1.

This novel is also essentially kind. It’s a very warm and often pretty funny look at two people who have one somewhat random thing in common and create a relationship based on that one thing, which becomes a relationship based on more than that, and how the repercussions of that relationship spiral outward and affect others: Erica’s ex-wife, Abigail’s boyfriend, Abigail’s boyfriend’s mother, a lonely student who wants to be friends with Abigail, the woman running against an anti-trans political candidate who is guaranteed to win, and many more.

Content note: Obviously transphobia and internalized self-hatred are central to the overall story, but it’s not the kind of book where people are constantly getting slurs screamed at them.

I will mention, since it’s a mistake that I made, that Emily St. James is not Emily St. John Mandel who wrote Station Eleven.

Recommended by Naomi Kritzer. Thanks!

This novel has one of the most off-the-wall premises I've come across. In a near-future world much like our own, women who get pregnant also conceive a "fetal mother." When they give birth to their baby, they also deliver the fetal mother, then fall into a coma-like sleep. The fetal mother rapidly grows into an identical clone of the original mother, then EATS HER. This process is called rebirth. The new mother has the original mother's memories and personality, but is also endowed with superpowers for the first five years of her child's life: she needs almost no sleep, has super strength and fast reflexes, is filled with energy, and finds all child care and domestic tasks endlessly fascinating and enjoyable. In short, the new mother is the woman that mothers are supposed to be.

The main character, Vivi, is terrified of rebirth, and sees it as death. This view is very stigmatized, but might be more widespread than society lets on. She's reluctant to get pregnant because of it. When she finally does, something goes wrong with her rebirth. She didn't get new mother powers. Instead she slogs along, depressed and alienated, trying to care for her infant while she's still physically impaired from the pregnancy and actually needs sleep. She and her husband end up breaking up over this, and Vivi moves to Australia to live with her uncle, who runs a hobbling business.

Remember I mentioned this is near-future? The world has actually decided to do something about climate change, and so drastically regulated energy consumption. Hobbling is altering old machines to make them low emitters. The low-emissions world is less lavish: planes are rarely used, long-distance calls are brief, and only the very rich have unlimited internet. It's an interesting take on a world whose future seems much brighter than ours, but whose present is more similar to our recent past.

Vivi and her family are Indonesian-Chinese, and their cultures (including Australian) play into the book much as the near-future setting does: it's pervasive and interesting and very specific, which makes a nice grounded base for the incredibly weird rebirth stuff.

But Won't I Miss Me is a weird, fascinating, ambitious book with a weird, fascinating, ambitious premise. Great social commentary and issues of identity. I didn't quite love the ending - it felt like it needed either more setup or more payoff - but the book is still excellent and very original.

One day everyone in the world woke up with these words in front of their eyes, somehow inscribed in their inner eye: YOU ARE LIVING IN A SIMULATION. Simultaneously, a number of impossible things appeared on Earth, apparently to prove it: a frozen tornado, windows between continents, etc.

It's now seven years later. Those words still appear before everyone's eyes periodically. And tours have sprung up to take people to see the Impossibles, or at least as many as can be seen on a seven-day bus trip.

This extremely high-concept premise resembles that of The Measure in some ways: a world-spanning event, clearly real and equally clearly done by a more-than-human power, with immense existential implications, and with no one having any idea why it happened or why it happened now. But this is Daryl Gregory and he's very good with bizarre high-concept premises, and this book is excellent.

The other genre of When We Were Real is "set of random people thrown together" story. A number of the characters are, at least on the surface, straight out of a 1930s train story or a 1970s airplane story: two nuns, a rabbi, a pregnant woman, an elderly woman in a wheelchair and her devoted daughter, a set of elderly tourists, a person who's secretly dying, a person with a secret identity, a fugitive from the law. The only stock character it's missing is the cute child.

The many characters are very human and likable, with even the most frustrating of them having reasons for being the way they are; the annoying pregnant influencer's reason for being an annoying influencer turns out to be both sympathetic and heartbreaking. (Yes, it's partly to provide for her upcoming baby, but the real question is "Why an influencer rather than some other job?")

( Read more... )

The Impossibles themselves are excellent. My favorite was the time tunnel, where you can stay an infinite amount of subjective time (you get a home pulled out of your own history or desires, plus fresh-baked bread every morning) and emerge several hundred miles away, only a second having passed outside. But the flock of non-real sheep was pretty great too.

There's serious themes - existentialism, mortality, meaning, God, ethics, love - but delivered with a light touch. It's more plotty than I expected, given the quest/picaresque structure, and the story is very satisfying. You don't get answers to all the questions, but you do get a general outline as to what's going on and why. It's a very human and humane novel, of the moment but in a good way.

Content notes: Cancer. Plans for suicide due to terminal illness. Pregnancy and birthing issues. Violence.