cahn

Or: Who is Miranda Sharifi?

Reread. Second book in the Sleepless trilogy, following Beggars in Spain. This is the last writeup I had for 2023 (there are a lot of books I never did write up, mind you).

seekingferret once said about Beggars in Spain that it was basically examining The Fountainhead in science-fictional terms, with Roger Camden [edit: not Leisha], the main character's father, as the Howard Roark analogue, and coming to its own conclusions. On rereading Beggars and Choosers, I had to laugh. It's a book about an America where everything is slowly breaking down and not working anymore. (Including a train!) As the breakdowns become worse, it highlights the divisions in society, how people are divided into basically three sets: a set who hedonistically enjoy life but don't actually do anything; a set who actually do all the work; and a set of geniuses that hide away from the world that is breaking down, not to be seen directly until late in the book... is this sounding familiar to anyone yet? Yep, Kress is very clearly patterning this entire book after Atlas Shrugged!

(Miranda Sharifi even gets a monologue at the end! Although it's not as long as John Galt's, by far.)

Of course, since this is Kress, she both has a deep compassion for all these sets of people and an SF-writer-worldbuilding eye to how all of this came about, so the set of geniuses are not just hiding away to be ornery, they're the genetically modified Sleepless and Supersleepless from the previous book who have a lot of history with prejudice against them, their own struggles with community, and in the Supers' case, a super-high intelligence that makes them all but incomprehensible to typical human beings and vice versa.

And both Kress and the Supers come to very different conclusions than Ayn Rand does. Although I suspect that one of Kress' other points is that everything is complicated and although one can say that Rand wasn't right when she simplified it in X direction, one cannot then say that simplifying it in not-X direction is right -- the ending (which is pretty great) makes sense as a happy ending, and yet it's also clear that it's a disturbing ending as well.

I remember not liking this much the first time I read it (in college or possibly early 20's), mostly because Leisha Camden, the protagonist of Beggars in Spain, is such a vibrant protagonist, and a) all these other random people who weren't in the first book showed up whom I was not interested in, and they were often even POV characters! and b) spoilery thing. Well, the spoilery thing wasn't a surprise this time, and also I enjoyed the random people a lot more knowing they were coming. Though on this read it was interesting to note that the POV characters are mostly there to watch the events unfold. There are mini-character arcs, of course, but it's very much subsidiary to figuring out what is going on and what the SuperSleepless (and their opponents) are doing.

I'm looking forward to reading Beggars Ride, which I remember absolutely hating for spoilery reasons. I suspect I'll still hate it (honestly I will be surprised if I can get over spoilery thing, it's like a heavy-handed deus ex machina in reverse), but I also suspect that I'll find it more interesting than I did on first reading.

4/5. This book is a sequel and conclusion to She Who Became the Sun and chronicles the further adventures of Zhu Yuanzhang, who took her dead brother's fate and is now the Radiant King, and whose inexorable ambition is driving her to further heights; the despised scholar Wang Baoxiang, whose inexorable desire for revenge is driving him to play ever-more fraught court games; Madame Zhang, whose inexorable ambition to be the wife of the Emperor is fueling all kinds of wars and intrigues; the haunted (both figuratively and literally) General Ouyang, whose inexorable desire for revenge drives him onwards.

If this sounds like it could be wildly exciting and compelling, you will be pleased to know that it in fact is! Shelly Parker-Chan is a very good writer and does all of these storylines justice; her writing is very compelling. More than its predecessor, it reads very much to me like a cdrama -- I was reminded a lot of watching Nirvana in Fire, not because any of the characters are particularly similar, but just in terms of the plot twists and the plot drama and so on.

If this sounds like everyone in this book is incredibly intense, then you are also correct! Sometimes while reading it I felt almost on the edge of burnout just reading it because everyone was always working at 100% capacity because they were so intense about what they wanted! Which is in large part the point -- that when you want something that much, the world will (at least to a certain extent) warp around that -- but not being that kind of intense myself, I was sometimes like, "wow, have you ever thought about getting a hobby??" (Unsurprisingly, the once or twice that one of the characters does have a hobby, it is swiftly co-opted in service of Ambition and Drama.)

I do highly recommend that if you are like me and have forgotten everything that happened in She Who Became the Sun, to reread that one first. I spent way too long being a bit lost (but still enjoying myself) because I didn't do that. Most books I feel like I don't have to reread previous ones, but this one is so intense that would really have helped.

I do feel like I would have liked it more had I read it before I read the Scholomance books or Some Desperate Glory. Both those books are very concerned with what it means to come to understand and help other people, and also with the mindset of "you know what? It's not enough to just save the two people we like." These books are not so concerned with that. (Which is fine! But admittedly less super pushing my thematic buttons.) I felt that 98% of the book was everyone going "Zhu Yuanzhang, you GO with that ambition!" and not until pretty late in the book does Zhu even start considering anything else, and it's only literally the last few pages where the book deals with these questions head-on. At the end of Sun I had thought that Zhu's overwhelming ambition was careening towards disaster in some way or another, and there's a certain extent to which that's true in Drowned, but the narrative always seems to be very much on Zhu's side. Which makes it a much much more upbeat book than, say, the Baru Cormorant books, which I did very much appreciate! But also it often seemed like Zhu was getting off too easy.

3+/5. Courtesy of selenak, this is a saga primarily concerned with the French author Pierre Beaumarchais (he of the original play version of Marriage of Figaro, which indeed is a significant plot strand in this book) and his quest to help finance the American Revolution. (My understanding from selenak is that Feuchtwanger wrote it after emigrating to the US as sort of a thank-you present to his new country.) Beaumarchais is a hero who is in many ways like Feuchtwanger's other heroes without at all being identical: a complex, not always likeable guy who has strong opinions which are not always correct, and who is interesting without always being entirely sympathetic. He also, like the other Feuchtwanger heroes I've seen, is also quite attractive to the ladies.

There are a lot of different strands and characters, as you might expect, in addition to Beaumarchais: Benjamin Franklin and his visit to France to solicit money; the various news of the American Revolution battles, etc. coming at various points; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (called Toinette in the novel) and their struggles with financing, well, both Toinette and the American Revolution; Voltaire's last visit to Paris culminating in his death; Emperor Joseph's visit to France and his taking care of Louis and his sister Toinette's problem with Louis not doing sex correctly to impregnate her ( <-- !! true fact I have learned from salon! though Feuchtwanger blames a surgery that Louis needed, which I believe was older scholarship, and apparently newer scholarship has revealed that the actual problem was that Louis just, er, didn't know how to do sexual intercourse properly, which I'm so sad wasn't known scholarship at the time because I would love to know how Feuchtwanger would have written that). There is, also, the death of a young man, though not as young as in the other Feuchtwangers I've read, and because it's telegraphed from the beginning it's not as dreadful as the other ones.

Anyway, this all sounds like it would be wildly interesting, and parts of it were, though I must admit that this is the Feuchtwanger that took the longest for me to read and that I have found least compelling so far, even though in subject matter it should be right up my alley. I think that part of this is that the disparate plot pieces and characterization arcs didn't come together for me in the same way that they did in The Oppermanns and the Josephus trilogy, which may well be a me problem (I read the bulk of this in a few planes and hotel rooms on three different trips, so that may be part of the disconnect).

I think another part of the issue may have been that -- well -- I mean -- we all know it didn't really turn out that great for the French nobility in the end, so this makes a bit hard to root for the whole endeavor when we're seeing it through the French nobility's eyes, even though of course as an American I do root for it :) And I don't think that Feuchtwanger wholly intended us to root for it (though the novel is of course at its base a story about the American victory). selenak pointed out to me that Feuchtwanger makes Louis the voice of the impending doom -- and in so doing makes him a somewhat different, both sharper and more depressed personality than I have otherwise seen ascribed to him, which unfortunately also makes him less likeable to me. (My strong headcanon is that Louis XVI was on the spectrum, though obviously no one knows.)

Anyway, although I seem not to have connected with it on the book-wide level that I'm sure Feuchtwanger intended, I both loved a lot of the disparate scenes (Voltaire's death! Putting on the Marriage of Figaro!) and learned a lot (I really hadn't known at all about Beaumarchais' role here, or really much about Beaumarchais at all). Feuchtwanger is a detailed and proficient author (to the extent of the scholarship available at the time, etc.), and I was able to put a lot of things into context I hadn't quite figured out before or had seen before but, well, it's very useful to see it all in the same place like this, and I'm glad I read this.

Inspired partially by sophia_sol (but I might have done this anyway), I'm incorporating a very liberal attitude towards not finishing my Hugo reading.

The Kaiju Preservation Society (Scalzi) - DNF. I'm not actually asking about this one as I've decided I'm not going to finish this. It's not bad, it's light and frothy and fun, but I think I am willing to deal with light and frothy and fun when it's tropes I'm interested in (galactic empires in The Last Emperox) and not when it's not (kaiju).

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Moreno-Garcia) - Is there a payoff here for someone who hasn't read Island of Doctor Moreau? I didn't dislike it and am willing to read more if there is a payoff, but I'm worried that it will only be a payoff if you know something about the original. Also, independently of this book, should I read Island? (That is to say, I wouldn't read it just to read Daughter, but if I read it I might read Daughter afterwards.)

A Mirror Mended (Harrow) - is this worth finishing? I read and liked the first of these but I guess I'm not super convinced there's enough more to say in this multiverse... is there? I got far enough in this one to be aware of what the gimmick is likely to be, but I also think I am near saturation on reversed fairy tales. Tanith Lee probably did it better anyway

In order of how much I had to say about them:

-When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Vo) - Second Singing Hills novella about a cleric who collects stories. Not a Hugo nominee, but I wanted to read it so I could read the actual Hugo nominee (the third novella, which is currently on hold at the library). I liked it quite a lot, though not nearly as much as the first one, I think because it just didn't tap into my particular tropes quite as much (which is of course not Vo's fault).

-Ogres (Tchaikovsky) - Slight novella about a society in which the ogres lord it over the humans. It was pretty easy to figure out the main conceit, but I wasn't sure how it was going to end (and I liked the ending twist). Tchaikovsky continues to be a writer whose writing is very easy to read, which I appreciated.

The interesting thing about this one was I came away feeling like the novella was more deeply pessimistic about human nature than perhaps the author intended: humans can fix fairly dire problems, but humans are also infinitely corruptible, and in fact all the evidence available in the book is that these fixes only take place through profoundly hierarchical and subjugative means. ( Spoilers. )

The end is, I think, supposed to be hopeful, with its statement that sometimes you have to burn it all down. But given the events of the book, and that no one in the book seems to have thought at all about how to do it differently, I'm really not confident that what rises from the ashes is going to be any less hierarchical and subjugative than what was there beforehand... just that probably different entities are going to be at the top and the bottom.

-Even Though I Knew the End (Polk) - a queer noir story, set earlier in the last century, with a noir ex-warlock investigating murders in an alt-Chicago with demons and angels.

So the conceit is awesome, and I really enjoyed the writing here which I thought did live up to that conceit -- there is some lovely word-evocation and worldbuilding detail. My quibble is that I felt like there was something deeply incoherent about the worldbuilding and plotline.
( Spoilers. )

But even though those things bothered me, the writing was still strong enough that I liked it a lot!

I had to work a bunch in the last couple of months, and then I used some time to put a bunch of books littering the house back on bookshelves, so between those two things I read and reread several very easy-to-read books.

-Honey and Me (Drazin) - rec from seekingferret who cited lannamichael's excellent post (discusses all aspects of the book, but this is not the kind of book where you really need to worry about spoilers) which got me to read it. It's a middle-grade book about Orthodox Jewish bas mitzvah girls, and is one of those books where plot is not really a thing, there is a bit of character through-line but it's deliciously like all those books I would read as a kid that just... followed kids around through what happened in their lives and what was going on with their families and friends and themselves, without there having to be an elaborate through-plot. I LOVED IT, as someone who has a religion that reasonably permeates a lot of my life (and even more for people who are more orthodox about it than I am) even if it isn't Orthodox Judaism, I felt that the book did a good job of speaking to me and offering up characters who were extremely relatable and understandable through my own lens which is of course very different but has commonalities. Content note: an important minor character dies during the book, which was apparently based on someone in Drazin's life who died under similar circumstances. (I was glad to be spoiled for this, as it does a bit come out of nowhere.) I really want my kids to read this, though it's hard to get them to read anything that isn't SF or fantasy, so we'll see.

-Small Admissions (Poeppel) -- rec from Ask a Manager. Young woman getting over an emotional experience falls into a job working in admissions for a prestigious NYC private school. ...Okay, I have a weakness for prep school books, and even more for prep school admissions books, and this one I really enjoyed. It's frothy and fun, but also does have a sense of compassion for all the characters, many of whom are a bit more complex than one might expect. (And some of whom are exactly as one might expect.) Unsurprisingly, I really liked the parts (mostly found-document-style, told via emails and admissions notes and so on) that dealt with the different students and admissions drama, and how those played out over the course of the book.
I could have done without nearly as much of the drama with the main character's friends -- I was there mostly for the admissions drama -- but I can see how it fit into the book.

-The ABC Murders (Christie) - Poirot gets sent mocking letters by an adversary who turns out to be killing based on the alphabet. I had never read this one and read it now due to rachelmanija's Christie read, and for some reason it took me a looooong time to get through. I don't know why, because I enjoyed it.

-Tara Road (Binchy) - Binchy is a great comfort read for me, and I enjoyed this. It's a bit like all her other books -- the too-handsome, untrustworthy boy, the good-hearted girl who has a group of friends who surround her, the characters who come together and understand one another better, the foreshadowing that is explained by the end. Nice and easy reading.

Rereads:

-Uncharted Territory (Willis) -- The explorer team of Finriddy and Carson, on an alien world, becomes a bit destabilized when a visitor "loaner" temporarily joins their team. A fast read (it's more of a novella, maybe even a novelette), but gosh, this one has really not aged well. I mean, I was never really that excited about it to begin with, so there was no extreme emotional response swamping out my ability to see that, mm, the whole playing the indigenous-alien stereotypes and gender stereotypes for laughs is kind of icky rather than funny.

Also, a large part of the book arc depends on a play on words at the climax that I absolutely Did Not get in high school and I did, finally, get it thirty years later, so I guess progress in my reading abilities, yay? (It's a really obvious play on words, I'm just... really slow.)

-The Pandora Principle (Clowes) - Star Trek (TOS). Saavik's childhood on Hellguard becomes relevant when a Romulan attack threatens the Federation... Now this one I have an extreme emotional response to, which means I love it so much that I have no idea if it really holds up or not. I mean, I can see that a) several of the plot McGuffins are rather nonsensical, both scientifically and politically (although the one at the end is a clever punchline and I love it anyway), and b) Spock is a bit of a Gary Stu parent, who even though he angsts about saying the right thing, generally does, in fact, say the right thing. But I don't mind either of those. Spock as a put-upon parent is still greeeeat, and Saavik is awesome. I don't know whether Saavik as a trauma survivor would be something that passes muster (I'd be super interested to know what others think), but I loved it then and I love it now, especially the small everyday triumphs she has to fight so hard for but that she does fight and win. And I also absolutely adore what I couldn't articulate when I first read it: that Spock and Saavik code for a very neurodiverse parent-child pair (huh, I guess there's also Bobby and Obo coding as a differently neurodiverse parent-child pair, that's interesting, and I would be 100% not surprised to find out that Clowes has experience with ND children) who find their own way even when it's not necessarily the neurotypical-culturally-approved way that anyone else (either Earth or Vulcan) would have prescribed for them.

I love this book so much. Every few years or so I look up Carolyn Clowes' name to see whether she's written anything else, because I would buy it in a heartbeat, but she hasn't, and I suppose she must be getting up in years now. But this is certainly a good single book to have written!

(And if you can't tell from the writeup, yeah, content notes for... well, the writing style is upbeat but a lot (a LOT) of dark things happen. Death, some on-screen; violence; extreme physical child abuse and trauma; strongly implied rape (NOT of children) but nothing spelled out.)

3/5. I must grudgingly give this book a score of 3 because I agreed broadly... mostly... with what he is saying (extrinisic rewards don't really work that well as a motivator), and this is an important concept, if you haven't read any parenting books (and I can imagine there being rather less of an overlap with readers of this book and other parenting books than the last pop psych book I read), and there were some interesting studies I hadn't seen before, but just about every page I'd be all "Yes BUT..." and "Okay BUT...," in large part because Kohn is wildly annoying.

It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.

Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.

So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.

That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.

( There were a lot of things that annoyed me. )

( Kohn's chapter on praise gets its own cut: )

(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."

I am SO behind on book posts; these are from... a month or two ago?

Tales from Hollywood (Hampton) - From selenak. This is the script of a play, deeply researched, about European emigres to California in the wake of WWII. It's an AU, in the sense that the main POV character is Ödön von Horváth, who actually died in a freak accident in 1938 in Paris; in the play, the freak accident happens to another bystander, and Horvath survives to come to the US and work at Hollywood and hang out with other displaced writers, like Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger (who gets to be in scenes but I think does not actually get any lines), and Bertolt Brecht. (I must admit that before hanging out with selenak, I did not know who Heinrich Mann was, though I had heard of his brother Thomas Mann. Which is... a thing.) The parts about Heinrich Mann, especially the suicide of his wife Nelly, are just heartbreaking -- and side by side with hilarious parts where I was laughing really hard; it's a very funny play as well. It never loses sight of life's absurdity, and it also never loses sight of life's tragedy, and that double lens is really interesting.

selenak convinced me to read this by linking me to scenes available on YouTube of this play made into a TV movie version, with Jeremy Irons as Horváth and Alec Guinness as Heinrich Mann: clip 1 and clip 2 and now I am low-key involved in trying to find a copy of this because I want to see the whole thing :P
(Content note: one character is (historically) anti-Semitic; the first clip does include Heinrich finding Nelly and trying to get her to a hospital; nothing super explicit, but it's all rather horrible and wrenching.)

The Eagle's Daughter (Tarr) - This must have come out around the time that I stopped reading every single Tarr that came out, because, well, I never read it until now. It's set in the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the first century, and is about Theophano, a Byzantium woman who is given to Emperor Otto II as a Byzantium wife. (In the book and in older scholarship, Theophanu is a Byzantium princess "born in the purple"; I am given to understand that modern scholarship does not think she was "born in the purple" and is not a princess that grew up in a palace, etc.) The book goes on to relate the regency of Theophano and Otto II's young child Otto III when Otto II dies young and unexpectedly: his mother Theophanu, and Otto II's mother Adelheid join forces, and it's great and I can see why Tarr wanted to write about it :D I can also see why this book wasn't as popular as, say, her Cleopatra book. Of course far fewer people know about Theophano than do about Cleopatra, but also in addition to that I felt like there was a lot of telling-not-showing about the relationships between the characters: I never was fully convinced of Theophano's relationship with the POV character Aspasia, for instance; we're told that Aspasia basically raised Theophano, but we don't really see much of that relationship going on. The non-romantic part of the ending is great especially if you know the historical fate of Otto III (which I was dubious about how that was going to work), though Aspasia's romance ends in a way I did not foresee (and which, though not wholly unhappy, isn't very happy either).

Notes on what things are and aren't backed up by modern scholarship here, though this thread contains spoilers for the whole thing.

The Oppermanns (Feuchtwanger) - Also from selenak! This is a book that was written in 1933 about a well-to-do Jewish family in Germany (and various people around their family), and how things change for them, almost overnight, as a not-explicitly-named-until-very-late-in-the-book "Leader" and his party comes to power. Yeah. It took me forever to read it, not because it's not a compelling and interesting book (which it is), but because -- well -- one rather knows what's going to happen, and it's not... good. But anyway once I got through that block it really was compelling and I finished it quite quickly, actually. It's... kind of horrifyingly impressive, how accurate it is, when you remember that he wrote it in 1933! (And even though he didn't see how bad it would get -- he saw enough to be horrifying.)

Of note given my recent fandom, Voltaire and Frederick the Great get a cameo as busts in a head of school's office, where (and I wouldn't have realized this before) they are symbolic of the Enlightenment, as well as a more overt talisman of how Frederick the Great got co-opted by what selenak and mildred_of_midgard like to refer to as the Worst Fanboys Ever.

The characters keep saying things like, had not someone recently calculated that Goethe's works alone circulated in German-speaking territories to the extent of more than a hundred million copies? Such a people did not listen long to the shouting of barbarians. (And the US doesn't even read Goethe. :( )

One thing that is sort of weird is that due to Reasons, I have both a print copy and a kindle e-book; the print copy is an older translation, and the e-book is a new translation that came out this year. I don't know why they didn't bother to hard-copy print the new translation! Or, maybe amazon has a backlog of the old copies and is getting rid of them?? Who knows. Anyway, mostly the two translations are pretty similar, though the e-book also has an alternate ending (which ending is more prevalent in Germany? The translator said that Marta Feuchtwanger and others thought the original ending was too sentimental. I liked the original ending better, though!), and also there are some little things where maybe usage has changed over time. (For example, I have never heard Mein Kampf referred to as My Battle as it is in the older translation, and only very rarely even seen the title in translation at all; the new translation refers to it simply as Mein Kampf, which is how I usually have seen it.)

Anyway, I highly recommend it, although you might want to try to get the e-book rather than the print book. Also, content note for -- okay, look, it's a Feuchtwanger, and it has a personable young person in it, and this book makes it now 3 of 4 of his that I've read where the personable young person does not make it all the way through the book, and the fourth book Josephus (as far as I remember) didn't have a personable young person. (I was spoiled for this, and I'm rather glad of it.)

[Edited 4-23-23 to point out that Tales is also really funny!]

mildred_of_midgard and rachelmanija both told me to read The Explosive Child, so I reread it. I'd read it when E. was much younger (4? 6? something like that) and we had the most problems with her getting really upset about things -- and I had not found it very useful. I got the e-book from the library.

This turned out to be a VERY WEIRD experience for me because I read it and thought, wow, this book seems totally unfamiliar! I know it's been at least six years... and my memory is completely shot these days... but I had distinct memories of the book spending a lot of time on "pick your battles" which I found extremely not useful with E. (E's problem, especially at that age, was not battles of will between me and her! E's problem was battles of will between herself and herself -- she would get upset when she was not able to do things the way she felt she should, which spanned basically all activities, including quite a few that were things she loved to do, not things I was asking her to do at all, while my memories were that the book spent a lot of time on conflicts between what the parents were asking the kid to do and what the kid wanted to do, and how the parent should try just not to ask a whole lot of the former.)

The book I read was not primarily about picking one's battles. If anything I thought Explosive Child was a poor title for it; maybe Defiant Child, but really the title should have been How to Collaboratively Solve Problems with Your Child, because that's what almost all the book was about, and it was rather good at that! (The first few chapters were boring; they were all things like "why being Super Strict with your child isn't productive," which... okay, but yes, I have actually read parenting books before, thanks!) There were lots of examples, lots of discussions on the order of "if your child does X, here's a strategy to use that still keeps the focus on collaborative problem-solving and not going in an unproductive or Unilateral Telling Your Kid What to Do direction." Really it almost does a disservice to call it Explosive Child, because these strategies (as mildred_of_midgard remarked when she recced it) could be used with really anyone -- all children, not just explosive ones, and even adults. (Though many of the examples and details were child-centric; for example, he goes into things like what to do if a child answers "I don't know," to everything, which in my experience is a very common kid mode but not so common in adults.)

It was good and I am trying to use the techniques with both kids! (We do try to foster a family atmosphere where they feel like they have a say and can always bring up when they disagree, but I definitely do have a tendency to barrel through and say "this is what we're gonna do!" as a first pass.) I had one major nitpick: I was majorly side-eyeing Greene's claim that children would magically learn skills they were deficient in (like "difficulty managing emotional response to frustration so as to think rationally") by doing this collaborative problem-solving, because once you work on the problems the skills will naturally be exercised. Uhhhhhh you know what this reminds me of? it's like, if the kid is not able to read, collaborative problem solving and creating an atmosphere where reading is fun and snuggly is great and I absolutely am on board with it making an atmosphere conducive to reading, and some kids will pick it up automatically in the right atmosphere, but it's NOT actually teaching the kid to read, and NOT ALL KIDS WILL LEARN without explicit instruction! This is sort of how I feel about some of these skills. Sometimes you might need other tools! Some kids need more explicit instruction than others! Greene seems to think that you would never need any other tools except his, which is a common failure mode of books like these, but it annoys me :)

But anyway, I was still confused as to why it was so different than my memory; my memory isn't particularly good, but my failure mode with books is usually just to forget things wholesale, not have contradictory memories! So I did an experiment: the library also had a paper copy (first edition from 1998, I believe), and I checked that out. (This would have been the identical copy I would have read in the first place.) And lo, this book is almost COMPLETELY different from the e-book I read! Like literally, there are maybe a few pages that are in common with the e-book (two of the "sample cases," a couple of pages each, are the same). The rest of it is not just entirely different words, but also an almost entirely different focus! The collaborative problem-solving is relegated to one chapter of the book. MOST of the book talks about picking one's battles... sorting one's problems into "baskets" as to whether one wants to deal with them now or later. This is a very simple concept but gets a looooot of padding. Anyway... good choice by Greene, in subsquent editions, to greatly expand the collaborative problem-solving sections and diminish the "basket" section, because the former is way more interesting than the latter.

So my verdict is: if you are interested in the concept of collaborative problem-solving with your child, this book is worth checking out (maybe skip the first few chapters if you've ever read a parenting book before), but make sure it's the current version, not the original! (I also suspect there is a lot of overlap with How to Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk, which I also read at about that age and which perhaps I should also revisit.)

(In this post I do discuss the endings of the books, because, come on. They're fluffy romances, you know what's going to happen.)

The Love Hypothesis (Hazelwood) - 3+/5 - A RL friend (who is undiagnosed but pretty definitely on the spectrum, as is her daughter) read The Rosie Project on my recommendation, and the library (because she'd read that) then recommended to her The Love Hypothesis, which she then recommended back to me with the caveat that it was not as charming as Rosie. She was right about that, but it's still a fluffy cute romance. Olive, a grad student at Stanford, because she has watched too many romance movies and decides she needs to convince her best friend Anh that she's not hung up on the boy Anh likes, ends up fake-kissing and fake-dating Adam Carlsen, the young hotshot professor in her department. (Adam is, natch, wildly attractive, though widely regarded as a lab tyrant.)

I'm sure you can take it from there. Aside from the inevitable, there's also misunderstandings and poor communication (okay, maybe that's inevitable too), impostor syndrome, and over-the-top sexual harassment (not from Adam, who of course is awesome about it all). Also hot sex and a happy ending!

I ended the book thinking I wanted to say to Olive, idk, I'm not sure if it's good for your impostor syndrome for you, a grad student who are unsure of your abilities, to date the world-class hotshot professor in your same field, even if your department is OK with it if you're not his student (she's not). I really think you could have a hard time of this in the long run! Buuuuut I guess that's beyond the scope of this book.

A Civil Contract (Heyer) - 4/5 - Another Adam, Viscount Adam Lynton, finds after his father's untimely death that his father has many debts and that he might have to sell the ancestral home. He reluctantly finds it's his duty to marry a plain, common, and very rich girl, Jenny, instead of the beautiful high society girl Julia whom he is in love with.

Okay, so, there are things I didn't love. I kind of disliked that part of Jenny's appeal is that she practically waits hand and foot on Adam, though I did like that being a good housewife was something she enjoyed, and I certainly liked that Adam was always very courteous to her. And I loved Adam's sister Lydia and found his long-suffering mother, who will tell you All About how long-suffering she is, hilarious. All told, I really loved this book, and people who enjoyed Perilous Gard for its discussions of drainage and water-meadows (*cough*calling melannen and sophia_sol!) will love Adam's excitement over agriculture and estate management -- in fact, this book has a lot more discussion of drainage and other estate management matters than Gard does :)

And then I got to the ending and while Adam, as you would expect, eventually realizes that Julia is not All That, I really, REALLY wanted Jenny's dream ending where he falls in love with her and I Did Not Get It. (Or at least in lust! Canonically they have sex -- she has his baby during the book.) I am Put Out that Heyer did not oblige me. Had she only obliged me, I would love this book as much as Cotillion. Since she did not, this is only my second favorite Heyer of those I've read.

(Why isn't A Civil Campaign about Miles having to make an arranged marriage? That would be really quite interesting! Also, I would totally read that fic. Okay, I guess Aral would never. But still!)