2024/016: The Final Girl Support Group — Grady Hendrix

Teenagers talk like this, right? Even if it’s ugly in retrospect. I didn’t know there was a bloody engine inside his head just waiting for someone to turn it on. [loc. 2505]

Lynnette is the sole survivor of an infamous massacre. She's in group therapy with a number of other 'final girls', each of whom has survived contact with (and most of whom have then killed) a monster. Hendrix bases Lynnette and her fellow survivors on 'final girls' in various Eighties horror movies, but in the world he portrays, the 'final girls' own the rights to their stories, which have become successfu franchises. Each of the women in the group has handled the aftermath of horror differently. Julia, left partially paralysed by her experience, is an activist; Adrienne advocates for other survivors; Heather has turned to drink and drugs; Lynnette ... well, the therapist who leads the group, Doctor Carol, describes her as 'hypervigilant'. All Lynnette does is go to therapy and then (using a different route every time and memorising the footwear -- hardest thing to change -- of everyone she meets) home again. She does have a friend. He is a pepper plant named Fine, short for Final Plant.

The novel, after a session of bickering at group therapy, kicks off with one of the Final Girls being murdered. There are rumours that someone in the group is writing a book about her fellow patients, revealing everyone's secrets. Lynnette quickly discovers that her safe fortress of an apartment isn't safe. It seems that someone is out to get them all. Who can she trust? And is she being paranoid, or is she the only person who understands the danger?

Lots here about PTSD, about the dark side of therapy, and especially about gender-based violence. 'Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.' [loc. 359] The characters sometimes feel stereotyped (the jock, the nerd, the cheerleader etc), but I think that's partly because each of them was trapped by, and still focusses on, what happened to her, unable to move past it. Happily (at least for me), the descriptions of the things that did happen to the Final Girls are generally sparse and matter-of-fact, being recounted by the women themselves. On the other hand, there's quite a lot of violence during the events of the novel. And at least one point where Lynnette is very badly injured but still, somehow, manages to run up a hill?

Note to publishers, and indeed authors: if your book includes images that contain text, please provide the ebook equivalent of alt text. The text on the images following each chapter -- therapist notes, police reports, forum discussions -- was not readable on my Kindle, and I had to switch to my phone to read, which is not always an option.

Fulfils the ‘a cover without people on it’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/015: Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise — Katherine Rundell

...children’s fiction necessitates distillation: at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear. Think of children’s books as literary vodka. [loc. 127]

Rundell's essay on the experience of reading children's books as an adult, and rediscovering the hope, the subversion, the miracles that overcome chaos. Rundell is immensely eloquent, and uses her own experience as a popular writer for children to describe the crafting of stories that contain 'the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember'. She writes about how the best children's books describe the world as a huge and mysterious place, full of things yet to be learnt or encountered or overcome: and she reminds us that children, politically and economically powerless, have a different perspective on the world. The big emotions in children's books -- the victories over darkness, the importance of bravery and loyalty and love -- are a counterbalance to the great unknowns: they're layered with the darker knowledge of the adult writing, and often with a weight of myth and legend that won't necessarily be known (or even perceived) by a child reading, but will add depth to their experience of the book.

I do read quite a few children's books, even though I am so old. (Still, forever, working on wisdom.) And I love the sense of recognition when I'm rereading an old favourite, and the envy I feel for children reading today with so many more marvellous, diverse, questioning and fantastical books to read.

Fulfils the ‘about books’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

Fulfils the ‘Non-fiction recommended by a friend ’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 reading challenge. Thanks, Claire!

2024/014: Him — Geoff Ryman

"...there is a world in which God does not kill me.”
“What’s different in that world?” Maryam wanted to make this world like that one.
“I can only glimpse it and it’s like a fan opening over and over with the same faces only slightly different. Sometimes different stars. Sometimes… sometimes I was born a man.” [loc. 4552]

What if Jesus was born female?

This is the story of Maryam, who was told by 'fire in the shape of something like a person' that she would give birth to a child made only of herself, and that this child would be special to God. Maryam is a clever woman: she arranges to marry Yosef, who is being exiled for his outspoken views on theology. They make a life in Nazareth, a stony and desolate place where Maryam gives birth to a girl she names Avigayil. She's identical to Maryam, precocious, and loves to listen to Yosef reading scripture. And, when she is five and a village boy dies of a fever, she declares that her name is now Yehushua -- her dead friend's name. "That's a boy's name," says Maryam. "I'm a boy," insists the child.

Maryam does not deal well with a daughter who claims to be a son. Yosef is sory that the child, being a girl, cannot preach: but he sees that 'The body says girl but the spirit says different'. And Yehushua -- later Yehush -- lives as a boy, argues with priests, works with his hands, and occasionally says things that Maryam finds profoundly unnerving. For years she refers to him as the Cub, or 'it': a large part of the novel deals with Maryam coming to terms with the nature of this child she bore, who is also the embodiment of God.

The God here is thoroughly alien, trying to learn about life and death and pain through Yehush; trying to understand the world; needing to know 'what it was like to be created by someone else'. Yehush's miracle-working is uncomfortable and unnerving, and his humanity is leavened with something quite other -- something that can see aspects of the future, something that doesn't always understand the way that humans move through time. ("We can’t see the future, you know. For us to see things, they have to happen first.") While many of the events of the novel are familiar from the Bible, the non-anglicisation of names and the perspective of Maryam (and, briefly, Yehush's envious sister Babatha, who strongly rejects Yehush's male identity) makes those tales new and strange. I was captivated: by Maryam, by miracles, by God, by Yehush's foreknowledge of his fate. I loved the historical and social detail -- this feels a well-researched book, though the research is in a hundred little details rather than an authorial lecture -- and the harshness of the desert, and the sheer strangeness of Yehush's life and death.

Fulfils the ‘Historical fiction set in West Asia’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/013: Strong Female Character — Fern Brady

My mum and teen brother came through to Edinburgh and took me out for Japanese food as there was no other way in our culture of saying, ‘Sorry you’ve gone mad again.’ [loc. 2601]

Comedian Fern Brady's account of growing up in a working-class environment with undiagnosed autism: being treated as 'bad' or 'difficult' as a child, a spell in the local psychiatric unit, feeling -- and being -- excluded at school and university... Brady (whose comedy work I wasn't familiar with) is scathingly and refreshingly honest. She illustrates facts and misconceptions about autism with anecdata from her own experience, and leavens the grimness with humour. I'm (probably) not autistic but can relate to quite a few of her experiences. It did strike me that the combination of Brady's autism and her working-class background was a toxic synergy: her struggle to function at university, and her ongoing difficulties with social subtext and white lies, felt like class issues as much as autism issues. ("Why did everyone go around speaking in code then getting angry at me because I didn’t have the glossary for their secret language?" [loc. 876])

This book has given me more insight into the ways in which autistic people can struggle to make sense of allistic society. At some points it made me weepy: I definitely laughed out loud more than once. Frank and feminist and funny and angry.

Fulfils the ‘honest’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. "Our autistic honesty is described as blunt or brutal or too much..."

2024/012: Saint Death's Daughter — C S E Cooney

He said that your violent reaction to violence was the core of your necromancy—that one day your body would revolt so magnificently against death that you would raise the very dead themselves... [loc. 308]

Miscellaneous Stones -- known as Lanie -- is in her teens when both her parents (Natty, the Chief Executioner, and Aba, the Royal Assassin) die. Her skills as necromancer are not yet mature enough to bring them back for more than a few moments, and when an unexpected creditor shows up demanding the family house and all its contents -- including the undead housekeeper Goody Graves, and the Sarcophagus of Souls which is locked by a padlock containing the ghost of Lanie's Grandpa Rad -- Lanie is forced to write to her elder sister Nita (short for Amanita) and ask her to come back from school.

Nita is gorgeous, fearsome and cruel, and Lanie (who's literally allergic to violence, and will suffer sympathetic pain if exposed to other people's physical damage) is, with good reason, afraid of her. And now Nita's brought back a lover: a falcon shapechanger, Mak, who she effectively stole from his bonded handler.

This is a long novel. A great deal happens in it, and a vast and complex world is revealed. There is necromancy (I loved Lanie's adoring group of reanimated mouse skeletons); concealed identity; footnotes; polyamory, genderqueerness, romance, found family and cross-dressing; a society where women are often in positions of relative power; a pantheon of twelve gods who all seem to be female, though not necessarily humanoid; a language which is rendered on-page as iambic pentameter; magical tides and solstitial celebrations; and some graphic violence, which viewpoint character Lanie mercifully shies from. I enjoyed it massively, as befits a book with so much to it. The dark humour and the emotional rollercoaster delighted me, and the author's joy in language made me joyful too.

[Saint Death's] cloak’s infinite but invisible train spilled down the sides of the tower in a cascade of interlocking bone and shell and chiton, in a hundred million fossilized leaves from trees that the planet Athe knew only in its youngest days, in chains of long-extinct insects trapped in amber, in festoons of fangs that once had studded the jaws of leviathans, in a lacework of the claws of dragons—or things out of which dragons were dreamed; in the beads of embryos that had died when they were yet too tiny to be detected by the naked eye. [loc. 8495]

Cooney's prose is alight with unexpected metaphors and obscure words (labefaction, hamartia, guisarmes) and the rhythms of her sentences are hypnotic: I'd love to hear her read aloud.

This is, apparently, the first in a trilogy: a fact I only discovered after finishing the novel, so I can confirm that it's a complete story in itself, without a cliffhanger ending or a sense of something lacking. I am very much looking forward to rereading Saint Death's Daughter in advance of the second volume.

My first challenge to myself, for the first draft, was to try to write a fantasy novel where the protagonist could not, absolutely could not, solve problems by a.) punching people in the face, b.) skewering people with a sword, c.) shooting them, burning them, pwning them, or otherwise eviscerating them. If I took away all violent choices--OUT OF A FANTASY NOVEL!!!--what's left? [source: Cooney's AMA on Reddit]

Fulfils the ‘more than 40 chapters’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/011: Burntcoat — Sarah Hall

Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly draw in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this -- savant dust? [p. 166]

My desire to read this short novel was sparked by my discovery that it was, in part, about the narrator Edith's relationship with her mother, who suffered a brain haemorrhage when Edith was eight years old, and effectively became a different person whom Edith knew as Naomi. (I was ten when I experienced something very similar, though I did not bestow a new name on my mother.) Edith becomes an sculptor of some renown, and the eponymous Burntcoat is her home, a converted warehouse that's spacious enough to accommodate her works.

But this is a pandemic novel, though not quite our pandemic. Burntcoat features a hantavirus called Nova, which she caught from her Turkish lover -- who in turn caught it when set upon by looters while trying to retrieve food from his closed restaurant. The frame of the novel is Edith looking back from the vantage point of her late fifties, aware that the long-dormant virus is reactivating in her body, and that she will soon die.

Burntcoat felt like a set of unfinished stories: Edith's relationship with her mother (who dies while Edith is studying art in Japan); Edith's father, who leaves the wife who's no long the woman he loved and remarries; the pandemic itself, its social effects recognisable, if magnified, from our own experience; the ways the world has changed. In the end I think it's a story about bodies. There's a lot of graphic sex between Edith and her lover, and the whole novel is replete with human physicality, from pissing as a sign of dominance, to the scars of Edith's mother's surgery, to the gradual putrescence of a corpse.

I wasn't exactly disappointed -- Hall's writing is never a disappointment -- but this was not the book I'd hoped it would be.

Fulfils the ‘one word title’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/010: The Game of Courts — Victoria Goddard

That the Emperor was their sun was metaphorical, a statement of political fiction or theology: that he would burn or blind those who got too close simple fact. [loc. 299]

Another Goddard novella, focussing on Cavalier Conju enazo Argellian an Vilius and his life before he became the Emperor's Groom of the Chamber. The story begins with Conju having survived the catastrophic Fall of Astandalas, and spending the year, or century, afterwards -- the period during which the Emperor was in a magical sleep -- drinking his way through the supplies in the palace, and hanging out with a bunch of disreputable and debauched fellow survivors. (All his actual friends are dead.) Then the Emperor wakes, and Conju sobers up and discovers an ambition: to become one of the inner circle who tend to His Radiancy, a man notoriously particular -- like Conju himself -- about his attire and appearance. And does not care for mindless obedience, or for the prison of etiquette.

Woven through that story is Conju's grief for his lost love Terec; his occasional dalliances; his skills as a perfumier and arbiter of fashion, and and his growing friendship with a quiet fellow at court, who is only later revealed to be the Emperor's new secretary. And it becomes obvious that Conju has quietly manipulated circumstances -- a rumour here, a choice there, a morsel of gossip -- to the benefit of his lord.

This was a delight to read: I love the way that Goddard brings secondary characters to life, and her depiction of the beginnings of friendship between Conju and Kip (and the beginnings of something more rareified between Conju and His Radiancy) is understated. Especially good to see Conju discovering that in fact he does have a sense of humour.

After reading this I dipped into The Hands of the Emperor to see how Conju had matured. But one does not just 'dip into'...