DW Runners

I am surprised to find myself surprised by the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It reveals that I had subconsciously assumed that obviously he would get away with whatever it was he had been doing.

The War that Saved My Life was my favourite this month - I liked bits of the others but nothing that was entirely successful for me.

The war that saved my life, Kimberley Brubaker Bradley (re-read).
Havoc, Rebecca Wait.
Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie.
Heels over head, Elyse Springer.
The death of us, Abigail Dean.
Cinder house, Freya Maske.
Billy Summers, Stephen King
Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun.

The war that saved my life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Locked away and abused by her evil mother for having a club foot, Ada’s chance for an actual life comes when her brother and his friends are evacuated to the countryside in the early days of WWII and she manages to go with them. They’re placed (reluctantly) with Susan, who is grieving the death of her female lover, and basically this remains an intensely satisfying recovery/family-building/humanising story, with horses.

Havoc, Rebecca Wait. Teenage Ida flees her and her mother’s disgrace (I think they’re in the Shetlands or the Hebrides, so lots of small-town social ostracism) by organising her own scholarship to an eccentric, failing, English girls’ boarding school (in the 1980s, which I feel I should specify given my fondness for elderly boarding school stories); but her new room mate is an arsonist, a new teacher is lying about his past, and there’s a strange epidemic of compulsive twitching and seizures slowly spreading through the school… This is black comedy, readable and well-written, and I like the girls’ plot lines. I wasn’t that thrilled about the bits from the staff povs and I did feel the denouement was lacking in punch, but I liked it.

Tragedy at Pike River Mine, Rebecca Macfie. I took my mother to see the Pike River movie, about the disaster that killed 29 miners, and got curious about some of the background; this book goes through the many, many terrible decisions made by the people who built the mine in the first place (“We’re going to be cheaper and more efficient because we’ve never built a mine before so we’re not hampered by pre-conceived ideas” was basically their approach, with a lot of doubling-down when anything went wrong - the coal-cutting machines, for example, couldn’t handle the slope and broke down multiple times per shift, but although more reliable replacements were available management were convinced that it was just the miners complaining) and the cover-up in the immediate aftermath of the disaster (I hadn’t really followed this as the original explosion was between the September and February Chch earthquakes). The movie focuses on the friendship between two women who lost men in the mine (one her husband, one her son - her other son was one of the two survivors who were able to get out after the first explosion), played by Robyn Malcom and Melanie Lynskey, both excellent as always; it does end on a surprisingly upbeat note and yet the whole thing is still dragging on legally even now (the book keeps getting updated). Thorough, but not overwhelming.

Heels Over Head, Elyse Springer. Jeremy is on track to compete in diving at the Olympics and has no time for anything or anyone else, not least the new raw talent tattooed and publicly out diver Brandon, whom Jeremy’s coach has just offered to train. They fall in love, Jeremy’s homophobic redneck family say horrible things, Jeremy & Brandon are stunning at pairs diving, Brandon quietly makes himself homeless when he doesn’t want to bother anyone about why funding hasn’t come through, Jeremy works himself up over the Olympics and feels he has to break up with Brandon etc etc. I did like quite a bit of this but Jeremy is hard work and Brandon is two-dimensional. The diving is fun? But the book ends a day or so before the Olympics themselves, which does leave one hanging.

The Death of Us, Abigail Dean. I read and didn’t much like Dean’s Girl A, in which Girl A escapes a House of Horrors (quasi religious abusive large family) only to end up having to confront her past when her jailed mother dies and leaves her the house. I liked this a bit more but I don’t think I’d read another of hers. Isabelle and Edward meet, fall in love, and make a life together - a life which is torn apart violently when they become the victims of a serial rapist (and murderer), the South London Invader. Years afterwards, the Invader is caught - Isabelle and Edward, now long separated, meet up again at court and start to work through what went wrong.

Cinder House, Freya Marske. Cinderella retelling that starts with Ella’s death, as she tumbles down the stairs of her house and becomes its ghost, bound to its physical form. Her stepmother and stepsisters learn that they can force Ella to do household chores by threatening the house, but then Ella makes a bargain with a fairy charm-seller that earns her three nights, no more, where she can leave the house, and be part of the living world again… The ghost/house bits are great and I also liked Ella, but this is pitched as queer and while Ella is bi, the grand central romance is still Ella/male prince, so I can understand the annoyance on GoodReads.

Billy Summers, Stephen King. Billy was a (US) sniper in Iraq. Now he kills for money - only bad guys - and he’s just taken one last job, which involves going under cover in a small town where he will live in a quiet suburban house and spend each day sitting in an office (with a convenient view of a key building), writing his memoir. Billy takes pains to ensure people think he’s a lot stupider than he actually is, to fly under the radar, but the process of writing his memoir is forcing him confront his real identity; and then he endangers his cover by rescuing a young woman who’s been drugged, gang-raped and dumped on the roadside. This is solid King as crime-writer (although every so often there’s a mention of the Shining, as the characters take to the relevant mountains), and I always enjoy his pacing. Billy’s relationship with Alice doesn’t always work for me (and surely she has some other friends, even if she’s estranged from her family?).

Every step she takes, Alison Cochrun. Overly responsible Sadie gets the chance to escape her family business responsibilities when her sister, a travel blogger, is unable to walk the Camino de Santiago due to injury. Turbulence on the flight over leads to Sadie coming out to the hot queer woman sitting next to her, convinced that she is about to die without ever really grappling with her own sexual identity, but then they don’t crash, her sister has failed to tell Sadie the tour is explicitly queer, and the hot queer woman, Mal, is also on it. Mal offers to be Sadie’s hot gay mentor EVEN though she’s secretly attracted to Sadie and I’m sure you can see exactly where this is going (the “I’ve never kissed a woman, show me” is okay but by the time Sadie was ordering Mal to have sex with her because otherwise she never would I was having significant boundary issues). I don’t know why Cochrun consistently writes characters with the emotional maturity of teenagers (Sadie is supposed to be 35) but in many ways this would have worked much better for me if they’d been early 20s at most and also if Mal wasn’t secretly the incredibly rich heir to a Portuguese winery empire. I did like bits of it and I did have to have a pastel de nata (okay, two) from the local Portuguese tart makers after reading, but I do wonder whether I should keep trying with Cochrun.

I'm finally feeling mostly human after being down with a cold for about a week; serves me right for being a judge at the regional science fair and exposing myself to all those middle school germ factories. Well, I read a lot, anyway.

Shroud by Adrien Tchaikovsky - first-contact with a very alien alien species on the tidally-locked moon of a gas giant. Earth is (FRTDNEATJ*) uninhabitable, humans have diaspora'ed in spaceships under the iron rule of corporations who cynically consider only a person's value to the bottom line, and the Special Projects team of the Garveneer is evaluating what resources can be extracted from the moon nicknamed "Shroud" when disaster (of course) strikes. The middle 3/5 of the book is a bizarre roadtrip through a strange frozen hell, as an engineer and an administrator (both women) must navigate their escape pod to a place where they might be able to call for rescue.

When I'd just started this book I said that it reminded me of Alien Clay, and it really does have a lot in common with that book, especially since they are both expressions of Tchaikovsky's One Weird Theme, i.e. "How can we see Other as Person?" He hits the same beats as he does in that and other books that are expressions of that theme (for example, the exploratory overture that is interpreted as hostility, the completely different methods of accomplishing the same task) but if it's the sort of thing you like, you will like this sort of thing. It also reminded me a bit of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward, in the sense that it starts with an environment which is the opposite of anything humans would expect to find life on, and reasons out from physics and chemistry what life might be like in that environment. Finally, it (weirdly) reminded me of Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher, because the narrator, Juna Ceelander, feels that she's the worst possible person for the job (of survival, in this case); the engineer has a perfect skill-set for repairing the pod and interpreting the data they receive, but she's an administrator, she can do everyone's job a little, even if she can't do anybody's job as well as they can. But it turns out that it's important that she can do everyone's job a little; and it's also important that she can talk to the engineer, and stroke her ego when she's despairing, and not mind taking the blame for something she didn't do if it helps the engineer stay on task, and that's very Summer.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot!

[*] for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown is what took me through most of the worst of my cold, as it's an easy-to-read micro-history-slash-memoir, which is one of my favorite nonfiction genres. Brown is the astronomer who discovered a number of objects in the Kuiper Belt, planetoids roughly the size of Pluto, which led to the inevitable question: are these all planets, too? If so, the solar system would have twelve or fifteen or more planets. If not - Pluto, as one of these objects, should not be considered a planet.

I really enjoyed the tour through the history of human discovery and conception of the solar system, and the development of astronomy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He manages to outline the important aspects of esoteric technical issues without getting bogged down in detail, so it's very accessible to non-scientists. Interwoven in this was his own story, the story of his career in astronomy but also his marriage and the birth of his daughter. It's an engaging, chatty book, and one must forgive him for side-stepping the central question of "so what the heck is a planet, anyway?"

Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk, which B had read a while back when he was on a Herman Wouk kick. I'd read Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and Marjorie Morningstar, but that was it, and I remembered he had said it reminded him a lot of our time in the Bahamas and Caribbean when we were living on our boat.

The best thing about this book is Wouk's sharp, funny writing - his paragraphs are things of beauty, his characters drawn crisply with description that always seems novel. The story itself is one disaster after another, as Norman Paperman, Broadway publicist, discovers that running a resort in paradise is, actually, hell. It's funny, but the kind of funny that you want to read peeking through your fingers, because you just feel so bad for the poor characters.

On the other hand, this book was published in 1965, and it shows. I don't think the racist, sexist, antisemitic, pro-colonization attitudes expressed by the various characters are Wouk's - he's Jewish, for one thing, and he's mostly making a point about these characters, and these attitudes. The homophobia, I'm not sure. But the book's steeped in -ism and -phobia, and I cringed a lot.

I enjoyed this book (for some value of "enjoy") right up until near the end, where a sudden shift in tone ruined everything.

Don't Stop the Spoilers

Two characters die unexpectedly; a minor character, and then a more major character, and everything goes from zany slapstick disasters ameliorated at the last minute to a somber reckoning in the ashes of last night's party. In this light, the ending feels jarring: the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman realizes he is not cut out for life in Paradise and, selling the resort to another sucker, returns to the icy New York winter.

Reflecting on it, I think this ending is a better ending than the glib alternative of the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman raises a glass and looks forward to dealing with whatever Paradise throws at him in the future. But because everything has gone somber, it feels not like he's learned a lesson and acknowledged reality, but that he's had his face rubbed in horror and decided he can't cope. If he'd celebrated his success and then ruefully stepped away, it would be an act of strength, but he runs back home, defeated, and all his experience along the way seems pointless.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand - I got this book in a fantasy book Humble Bundle, so I was expecting fantasy, which this is very much not. It's a psychological thriller, following the first-person narrator Cass Neary, a fucked-up, drugged-out, briefly brilliant photographer who has been sent by an old acquaintance to interview a reclusive photographer - one of Cass's heroes - on a Maine island.

I kept reading because the narrative voice is fabulous and incredibly seductive, even though the character is a terrible person who does terrible things in between slugs of Jack Daniels and gulps of stolen uppers. It feels very immersive, both in the sense of being immersed in the world of the novel's events and in the sense of being immersed in the perspective of a messed-up photographer. But overall it's not really the sort of book I typically read, and it's not something I'd recommend unless you're into this type of book.