cahn

This book is about a nostalgic kid's TV show that... somehow... everyone remembers watching as a kid... but no one can actually find any information about it online or anywhere. (One of my favorite parts of the book are the found documents that sometimes arise after chapter breaks: a blog post or a wikipedia post or even once the notes of a fanfic!) The six kids who were featured on the show, now grown-ups, are having a "cast reunion."

The POV character, Val, finds out that she was one of the six kids, but she doesn't remember anything about it. Doesn't remember being on the show, doesn't remember what it was like, barely remembers the other kids -- only remembers a vast sense of guilt and shame, and knows that her dad hid both of them away for decades, but she doesn't remember why.

About midway through the book, the clue dropped for me. The clue was one of the grown-up kids, Jenny, saying, "This is the way to live, you know? In the world, not of the world." ( Thematic meanderings, no explicit spoilers. )

Spoilers for the end

Something I really liked about the ending is that it's been a long-standing complaint of mine that while it's a reasonably common trope of a main character ascending to become the wise mentor figure, that character is almost always male, ugh. Not this time, yeah!
(I also thought the fakeout, where Isaac becomes Mister Magic, was well done -- I was all "okay..." which quickly became "wait, what?" and "but...!")

It's a very fast and almost breezy read in style (if not not in content) -- it reads like YA, though the concerns of the characters, who are all grown-ups now, are adult.

So people keep giving me books to read and I have been so way behind on posting about them, so uh I'm just going to post something quick about a few, even though they deserve much longer posts.

-The Girl from Rawblood (Catriona Ward) - 4/5 - this one part of the Catriona Ward kick which is all the fault of rachelmanija. I really liked this one! I felt that Sundial, while compelling, also didn't invest me overmuch in the characters, except for Callie, and that took a while -- but this book I felt both had compelling characters and a deep compassion for all of them. I read this in conjunction with rachelmanija over chat (we'd make sure we were synched for each chapter) which was super fun, although it did mean that occasionally we'd figure out plot twists ahead of time that I'd never have figured out on my own (since we were having twice the amount of epiphanies/making twice the number of connections that we would have by ourselves, as well as discussing after every chapter instead of my barrelling straight through). But also ALL THE WARNINGS (most flagrantly, content note for early-20th-century insane asylums and also there is a very graphic bit with rabbit dissection that both of us skipped -- lots of other terrible stuff too, but those were the ones that were so bad that I, who have basically no triggers or squicks, flinched). This was also a good book to read with someone else because we could stop ourselves from reading chapters late at night. (...There are definitely chapters you don't want to have read late at night and be trying to sleep after reading. It doesn't have a terrible awful no-good ending -- in fact, there's a lot of grace to the ending -- but the book itself is a Gothic horror book.) rachelmanija's much better review is here.

-Josephus, The Jew of Rome, Josephus and the Emperor (Lion Feuchtwanger) - 4/5 - selenak mentioned these as part of her never-ending quest to feed me books and history I am ignorant of, and I was like, wait, the Josephus of Antiquities of the Jews? Sign me up! (We read bits of Josephus in my college Bible class, and I'd always meant to read more of his work.) I found these quite interesting -- Josephus, the titular and main character of the saga, had a much more interesting life than I had realized (I knew basically nothing about him except that he'd written that one book), and Feuchtwanger makes him a complicated character who can sometimes be frankly unlikeable at times, but whom I found always fascinating. Feuchtwanger was Jewish, and these books were written in the 1930's and 1940's... much of the books is concerned with the Jews of that time and their relationship with the Roman Empire, both as a whole (e.g., the wars, as well as various Roman policy) and in individual cases (Josephus himself being the prime example of someone whose life, as Feuchtwanger portrayed it, was continually clashing between his Jewish identity and his Roman identity).

It also brings up nascent Christianity and Josephus' investigation into Christianity's roots (which selenak told me is the only reason why Josephus' work was saved in the first place, as opposed to his rival Justus, who is a minor but important character in the book (I hilariously was convinced that if there was a fandom for this book, Justus/Josephus would be the juggernaut ship -- there are a lot of very shippy tropes and language surrounding their relationship) whom we only know about because Josephus mentioned him in his books). And at one point it raises the question, what's the role of deceit in religion? In the sense of, is it okay if a religion (Christianity, in this case) is founded on a lie? Or on stories that may have some truth but other parts of it are not truthful? (Uh, doubly relevant for me, which is why it struck me so profoundly even though it's a quite small part of the book.) Anyway -- there's a lot going on in these books, more than the... margin of this post will contain. I haven't even gotten to the great plot thread with my fave Lucia in the third book! :P Anyway, very interestingly chewy books, I thought! Perhaps more interesting to someone who is already interested in the subject material (I was interested in both Josephus and the meta questions Feuchtwanger brings up).

(His book The Oppermanns is supposed to be re-released this week in English. (The link goes to a 2001 print version but I believe the print is being rereleased this week with the e-book.) This is a contemporary novel about a German Jewish family during Hitler's rise to power. I'm going to check it out, when I surface from Yuletide-related reading...)

-Luckenbooth (Jenni Fagan) - 3+/5. This was an odd and interesting book, courtesy of a rec by cenozoicsynapsid. I am not quite sure I liked it so much as I admired it -- it's a story of, well, various events that take place in a single building in Edinburgh during the 20th century, in a sort of dystopian-magic AU of our world, and it's doing some interesting things structurally, with each of three sections being the weaving together of stories of three different sets of people in slightly different but overlapping eras (each section is in a distinct time era and has its own arc): so, nine different sets of people. This sometimes worked well and sometimes not as well -- some sets were interesting stories, both for the way they intersected with the through-line and in their own right (the medium! the miner who is afraid of daylight!), though there was at least one set (perhaps not surprisingly, the one with William Burroughs -- if any of the others were people I should have heard of, I don't know it) where I just didn't care about the set of people in those chapters. This was definitely one of those books where I had no idea what was going on for a while (I'm still not sure I figured out everything), and I do enjoy that. I also feel like it was odd enough that I'm not sure I recommend it! But I'll probably put it on my Hugo ballot, because it needs more challenging material and less The Same Five Authors Over And Over Again, not that I am bitter. This one also has all the warnings! graphic murder, rape, etc.

3+/5. I don't usually read horror; this is all rachelmanija's fault because she said it was well-written and compelling and the plot was well-put-together and twisty and bonkers, and I am a sucker for well-written compelling books with twisty plots. And yes! It was all those things. (I also tried to read Dark Things I Adore recently, and I gave up a quarter in and just skimmed the rest; it wasn't as compelling and all the narrators sounded the same, which also isn't a problem in this book.)

The funny thing is that Sundial starts out as your typical middle-aged suburbia with a dystopian marriage -- the suburban wife Rob, one of the principal narrators (her older daughter Callie is also a principal narrator) has two daughters, a lovely house (some of the descriptions in the first chapter are like suburbia house porn in the way they so lovingly describe the kitchen and so on) and an abusive cheating husband.

In the chick-lit-ish book it seemed like this was for most of the first chapter, this would be the springboard for Rob to embark on a journey of self-discovery and separating from her husband. Well, I'm not saying that's not what happens in this book, but, uh, that the route to get there will be more circuitous than in a chick-lit book is signposted when Rob finds animal bones and skeletons in her older daughter Callie's room, as well as evidence that Callie may have been trying to kill Rob's younger daughter Annie. (Callie's POV also involves her seeing ghosts and having a ghost best friend.) So Rob takes Callie to her childhood home (the eponymous Sundial) in the desert, which she thinks will help, though it's not very clear how.

We then get flashbacks back to Rob's childhood (as a story she is telling Callie), and this also seems incongruous at first, because the flashbacks are of this little family in the desert -- Rob, Rob's twin sister Jack, with their father, father's girlfriend/wife (it isn't quite clear in the beginning), and another guy, sort of an uncle type, who lives with them, and it comes across as this kind of hippie, love-will-conquer-all kind of environment.

Me: Well, rachelmanija told me that this was terrible awful horror with ALL THE WARNINGS but besides the animal bones and ghosts and Rob basically kidnapping her child to take her to the desert, which okay that's all a bit strange, so far it seems not so bad --
Book: Also, the parents do brain surgery experiments on abused dogs.
Callie: This is all getting Really Weird. My ghost best friend also thinks it's really weird!!
Me: ...okay. I can see this getting more horrific.

Spoiler: it gets more horrific. (Love does not conquer all.) This book does, indeed, come with ALL THE WARNINGS. Child abuse, child harm, dog death, dog abuse, spousal abuse, miscarriage, death, violent death, umm... yeah, the list goes on and on. (In rachelmanija's post, linked below, she has a more complete list. There is so much!) It's really very dark. Also, warning for Magic Science. I am not in the bio-sciences but I am really pretty darn sure genetic manipulation Does Not Work Like That. Just roll with it.

I also feel compelled to warn you also that this is the kind of book where it's all set to end on a note of hope and then the author cannot resist putting in another twist at the end to imply that everything actually is hopeless after all. Because my brain actively resists that kind of thing, my brain therefore came up with all kinds of ideas and headcanons as to why the ending wasn't actually hopeless after all. That is to say, I demand fix-it futurefic for this book :P

(My brain really does resist hopeless endings, especially when they haven't been signposted or I think it's going to end hopefully -- my brain's other move, if it can't at least vaguely justify an ending that isn't hopeless, is to get angry about why the entire worldbuilding is Wrong and Bad and Stupid and no one would think it was realistic for a second!! but I didn't have to resort to that with this book.)

With all that, this book has so many plot twists, many of which are well done and TOTALLY BONKERS, that I did like it (besides Last Hopeless Twist), because I am all about Well Done And Bonkers Plot Twists, and I will check out more Ward... just not anytime soon, because it was extremely intense.

rachelmanija's post, which made me want to read it, is here, with spoiler cuts -- but if you decide you don't want to read it (which makes total sense given the Many Many Warnings) it is worth reading the spoilers because: bonkers plot twists!