Reading Wednesday
Jul. 20th, 2016 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Hostage by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, the second in The Change series. If you haven't heard of this series before, it's post-apocalyptic YA. Several generations after civilization collapsed, humanity has recovered enough to rebuild towns and some sort of economy, but separate towns tend to go to war with one another. Genetic mutations turn up frequently but unpredictably, giving some people superpowers and killing or injuring others. The world is incredibly diverse, with main characters of multiple races, sexualities, disabilities, and neurodiversity.
So on to Hostage! The people of Las Anclas are still dealing with the repercussions of the big final battle of Stranger (book #1), particularly PTSD and grief. Jennie, Ross, and Paco have been hit especially hard, causing damage their relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners. This all takes a turn for the worse when, on a trip outside the town walls, Ross is kidnapped by Voske's soldiers. Having learned about Ross's Change power and wanting its benefits for himself, Voske is determined to Stockholm Syndrome, manipulate, or outright force Ross into working for him. A team of Las Anclas people attempt to come to Ross's rescue, but when that seems impossible, they resort to kidnapping Kerry, Voske's daughter and the Crown Princess of the Gold Point Empire.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS THIS WAS SO GOOD. I loved the setup of dueling hostages, and it provided a really interesting opportunity for the characters to deal with genuine moral questions: how to treat prisoners, how to gain power, how to deal with political differences, the responsibility of choices made during combat, the ethics of execution, freedom vs constraint, and so on. There's a lot of very tense, very well-done action scenes, and the suspense ramps up excellently over the novel as a whole.
I loved this even more than the first book, which was already pretty great. But this one was even more of a page-turner, and I read it straight through, always wanting to find out what happened next. I did miss Felicite, who appears in the story but isn't a POV character this time, but on the other hand, Kerry's a wonderful introduction, and I loved her slow growth from arrogant and coddled heir to someone with responsibility and honor, as she struggles to figure out what she wants out of life.
Anyway, everyone should read this, it's fantastic. (Also an early scene kinda made me want Ross/Indra fic? And no one's writing weird pairings unless it becomes a big fandom, so get started on that, everybody.)
Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity by Sil Lai Abrams. I should probably start off this review by saying that I'm not a huge fan of memoirs in general, and I picked up this book more because I wanted a discussion on race, and not so much for the story of someone's traumatizing childhood. Well, too bad for me, because this book is pretty much entirely the second and not the first.
Sil Lai Abrams is the daughter of a Chinese woman and a white American man, or so she believed. She discovers as a teenager that her mother actually had an affair shortly before her parents' wedding and Abrams is therefore the daughter of an unknown black man. Things are complicated further by the fact that her mother abandons the family when Abrams is only four, leaving Abrams to be raised by her (not biological) father and eventually his new wife, who is also white. There are certainly interesting things to say about mixed race families and the difficulties of white parents raising children who will experience racism, or the differences in life experience between between being mixed Chinese and white versus mixed Chinese and black. Unfortunately Abrams says none of them.
She spends significant portions of the book being furious with her father for lying to her about being her "real" dad, though honestly I can't imagine a lot of parents choosing to explain about their absentee spouse's affair to their eight-year-old child, especially back in the 1970s. Which doesn't mean it's the right choice, necessarily! Just that I have sympathy for why someone might do so, while Abrams seems to sincerely believe her father was entirely motivated by maliciousness or laziness.
And speaking of ascribing weird motives to others, there was a scene between thirteen-year-old Abrams and her step-mother that I found so indescribably bizarre that I have to share it with you all. Abrams is grounded to her room when her step-mother allows some neighborhood kids to play in their backyard pool:
The sense of betrayal was overwhelming. I felt like I was in the movie Carrie, in the scene where the pig’s blood was dumped over her head. Only I wasn’t the prom queen, but a thirteen-year-old girl stuck in her room, without any agency. And my tormentors weren’t the “cool” kids but my best friends, who were invading my territory and worse, my safe haven. Showing me through their laughing and splashing that they didn’t give a damn about our friendship or my feelings.
My indignation erupted with an emotional frenzy that bordered on pathological. Trapped in my room, I was unable to defend myself from this blatant encroachment on my personal space by my frenemies.
So I did the only thing I could at the time, which was to stew and plot my revenge. After a half hour or so, I saw Mom open the kitchen door that led to the patio. Leaning partially out the doorway, she called out, “Are you girls okay?”
“Yes, Mrs. Baber,” they happily replied in unison.
“Okay, just checking on you! Have fun!” she said.
As Mom began to close the door our eyes met, and that’s when I saw it. Emanating from her blue gray orbs like radio waves, I saw a smile crinkling the corners of her eyes that spread to her mouth as it slowly curved into the slightest grin.
In that instant, I realized that Mom had intentionally let my friends swim in our pool knowing that we were in an argument. She wasn’t naïve; she knew exactly what she was doing. Mom had let my friends play in our pool while I was on restriction to punish me for my insolence. To further drive home the fact that she was the boss, not me.
As the awareness of her power play slowly began to sink in, a new, larger thought began to drown out the gleeful sounds of my “friends” splashing in my pool. Mom could also be motivated by malice, or at the very least, the need to win. When our eyes connected I saw her smugness and triumph.
Realizing that Mom was capable of willfully inflicting emotional harm on me irreversibly changed our relationship. And the fact that she would use my friends to do it was unforgivable. On that hot summer day in 1983, Mom became my enemy. Someone to be destroyed, lest I be destroyed.
I mean, it's certainly realistic that a thirteen year old would find this an act of irredeemable betrayal! I just find an adult retelling it without any greater perspective to be unsympathetic. A great deal of the book was like this to me. Which makes me feel guilty, because I don't want to be some gatekeeper of whether or not anyone's childhood was traumatic "enough". If it hurt you, then it hurt you, regardless of what the effect might have been on someone else. And yet so many of the incidents that Abrams recounts are so minor, so unremarkable, that I couldn't help rolling my eyes. And she herself is prone, from her own account, to intense personal relationships that burn out as quickly as they start, which leads to her dumping people for tiny slights. She seems to have no awareness of this aspect to her behavior, which makes me take the rest of her account with a grain of salt.
Also the book randomly became a celebrity tell-all for several chapters. I definitely picked up a A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity because I wanted to know what it was like to go on a date with Eddie Murphy.
Abram's writing is shallow and self-pitying, with no insight beyond "and everyone was mean to me and it sucked". Here's a sample of it at its most faux-deep and glurge-y:
The unanswered prayers of a child never go away. They recede into hidden compartments in the child’s heart. Calcifying, layer by layer, with each failed intervention from a kinder, forgiving life force. Slowly the innocence begins to drain out of the child’s soul. Smiling eyes become distrustful. Warmth is replaced with coolness. Faith is transformed into fear as the optimistic child becomes a wary skeptic.
It's like a Chicken Soup for the Soul story extended to three hundred pages!
I don't know. I made a dozen bookmarks while I was reading this, because there were so many places she contradicted herself, made unbelievable claims, or treated others badly with no regard for her own actions. But I don't think I need to add them all, if only because this review would be enormous. It's a self-centered, willfully oblivious book, with nothing of interest to say.
(There are also a tremendous amount of typos in this book. I read an ARC, of course, but NetGalley's copies have almost always previously been indistinguishable from publication quality. I really hope this went through another editing pass before it was printed.)
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly. I happened to have come across two references to there being an abundance of weird cults in upstate New York in the early 1800s, from two different pieces of historical fiction I was reading. So when I saw a nonfiction book on the topic, of course I had to grab it!
Hostage by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, the second in The Change series. If you haven't heard of this series before, it's post-apocalyptic YA. Several generations after civilization collapsed, humanity has recovered enough to rebuild towns and some sort of economy, but separate towns tend to go to war with one another. Genetic mutations turn up frequently but unpredictably, giving some people superpowers and killing or injuring others. The world is incredibly diverse, with main characters of multiple races, sexualities, disabilities, and neurodiversity.
So on to Hostage! The people of Las Anclas are still dealing with the repercussions of the big final battle of Stranger (book #1), particularly PTSD and grief. Jennie, Ross, and Paco have been hit especially hard, causing damage their relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners. This all takes a turn for the worse when, on a trip outside the town walls, Ross is kidnapped by Voske's soldiers. Having learned about Ross's Change power and wanting its benefits for himself, Voske is determined to Stockholm Syndrome, manipulate, or outright force Ross into working for him. A team of Las Anclas people attempt to come to Ross's rescue, but when that seems impossible, they resort to kidnapping Kerry, Voske's daughter and the Crown Princess of the Gold Point Empire.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS THIS WAS SO GOOD. I loved the setup of dueling hostages, and it provided a really interesting opportunity for the characters to deal with genuine moral questions: how to treat prisoners, how to gain power, how to deal with political differences, the responsibility of choices made during combat, the ethics of execution, freedom vs constraint, and so on. There's a lot of very tense, very well-done action scenes, and the suspense ramps up excellently over the novel as a whole.
I loved this even more than the first book, which was already pretty great. But this one was even more of a page-turner, and I read it straight through, always wanting to find out what happened next. I did miss Felicite, who appears in the story but isn't a POV character this time, but on the other hand, Kerry's a wonderful introduction, and I loved her slow growth from arrogant and coddled heir to someone with responsibility and honor, as she struggles to figure out what she wants out of life.
Anyway, everyone should read this, it's fantastic. (Also an early scene kinda made me want Ross/Indra fic? And no one's writing weird pairings unless it becomes a big fandom, so get started on that, everybody.)
Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity by Sil Lai Abrams. I should probably start off this review by saying that I'm not a huge fan of memoirs in general, and I picked up this book more because I wanted a discussion on race, and not so much for the story of someone's traumatizing childhood. Well, too bad for me, because this book is pretty much entirely the second and not the first.
Sil Lai Abrams is the daughter of a Chinese woman and a white American man, or so she believed. She discovers as a teenager that her mother actually had an affair shortly before her parents' wedding and Abrams is therefore the daughter of an unknown black man. Things are complicated further by the fact that her mother abandons the family when Abrams is only four, leaving Abrams to be raised by her (not biological) father and eventually his new wife, who is also white. There are certainly interesting things to say about mixed race families and the difficulties of white parents raising children who will experience racism, or the differences in life experience between between being mixed Chinese and white versus mixed Chinese and black. Unfortunately Abrams says none of them.
She spends significant portions of the book being furious with her father for lying to her about being her "real" dad, though honestly I can't imagine a lot of parents choosing to explain about their absentee spouse's affair to their eight-year-old child, especially back in the 1970s. Which doesn't mean it's the right choice, necessarily! Just that I have sympathy for why someone might do so, while Abrams seems to sincerely believe her father was entirely motivated by maliciousness or laziness.
And speaking of ascribing weird motives to others, there was a scene between thirteen-year-old Abrams and her step-mother that I found so indescribably bizarre that I have to share it with you all. Abrams is grounded to her room when her step-mother allows some neighborhood kids to play in their backyard pool:
The sense of betrayal was overwhelming. I felt like I was in the movie Carrie, in the scene where the pig’s blood was dumped over her head. Only I wasn’t the prom queen, but a thirteen-year-old girl stuck in her room, without any agency. And my tormentors weren’t the “cool” kids but my best friends, who were invading my territory and worse, my safe haven. Showing me through their laughing and splashing that they didn’t give a damn about our friendship or my feelings.
My indignation erupted with an emotional frenzy that bordered on pathological. Trapped in my room, I was unable to defend myself from this blatant encroachment on my personal space by my frenemies.
So I did the only thing I could at the time, which was to stew and plot my revenge. After a half hour or so, I saw Mom open the kitchen door that led to the patio. Leaning partially out the doorway, she called out, “Are you girls okay?”
“Yes, Mrs. Baber,” they happily replied in unison.
“Okay, just checking on you! Have fun!” she said.
As Mom began to close the door our eyes met, and that’s when I saw it. Emanating from her blue gray orbs like radio waves, I saw a smile crinkling the corners of her eyes that spread to her mouth as it slowly curved into the slightest grin.
In that instant, I realized that Mom had intentionally let my friends swim in our pool knowing that we were in an argument. She wasn’t naïve; she knew exactly what she was doing. Mom had let my friends play in our pool while I was on restriction to punish me for my insolence. To further drive home the fact that she was the boss, not me.
As the awareness of her power play slowly began to sink in, a new, larger thought began to drown out the gleeful sounds of my “friends” splashing in my pool. Mom could also be motivated by malice, or at the very least, the need to win. When our eyes connected I saw her smugness and triumph.
Realizing that Mom was capable of willfully inflicting emotional harm on me irreversibly changed our relationship. And the fact that she would use my friends to do it was unforgivable. On that hot summer day in 1983, Mom became my enemy. Someone to be destroyed, lest I be destroyed.
I mean, it's certainly realistic that a thirteen year old would find this an act of irredeemable betrayal! I just find an adult retelling it without any greater perspective to be unsympathetic. A great deal of the book was like this to me. Which makes me feel guilty, because I don't want to be some gatekeeper of whether or not anyone's childhood was traumatic "enough". If it hurt you, then it hurt you, regardless of what the effect might have been on someone else. And yet so many of the incidents that Abrams recounts are so minor, so unremarkable, that I couldn't help rolling my eyes. And she herself is prone, from her own account, to intense personal relationships that burn out as quickly as they start, which leads to her dumping people for tiny slights. She seems to have no awareness of this aspect to her behavior, which makes me take the rest of her account with a grain of salt.
Also the book randomly became a celebrity tell-all for several chapters. I definitely picked up a A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity because I wanted to know what it was like to go on a date with Eddie Murphy.
Abram's writing is shallow and self-pitying, with no insight beyond "and everyone was mean to me and it sucked". Here's a sample of it at its most faux-deep and glurge-y:
The unanswered prayers of a child never go away. They recede into hidden compartments in the child’s heart. Calcifying, layer by layer, with each failed intervention from a kinder, forgiving life force. Slowly the innocence begins to drain out of the child’s soul. Smiling eyes become distrustful. Warmth is replaced with coolness. Faith is transformed into fear as the optimistic child becomes a wary skeptic.
It's like a Chicken Soup for the Soul story extended to three hundred pages!
I don't know. I made a dozen bookmarks while I was reading this, because there were so many places she contradicted herself, made unbelievable claims, or treated others badly with no regard for her own actions. But I don't think I need to add them all, if only because this review would be enormous. It's a self-centered, willfully oblivious book, with nothing of interest to say.
(There are also a tremendous amount of typos in this book. I read an ARC, of course, but NetGalley's copies have almost always previously been indistinguishable from publication quality. I really hope this went through another editing pass before it was printed.)
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
What are you currently reading?
Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold, and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly. I happened to have come across two references to there being an abundance of weird cults in upstate New York in the early 1800s, from two different pieces of historical fiction I was reading. So when I saw a nonfiction book on the topic, of course I had to grab it!
no subject
Date: 2016-07-21 01:09 am (UTC)(Also an early scene kinda made me want Ross/Indra fic? And no one's writing weird pairings unless it becomes a big fandom, so get started on that, everybody.)
Haha, I like Indra well out of proportion to his actual screentime, and have a feeling I'd be more on board with Indra/Jennie/Ross than the canonical Jennie/Ross/Mya; or, you know, Indra/Ross would be fine, too.
The memoir does sound really weird from the quotes you presented; like you, I could see an actual thirteen year old feeling that way (mine was certainly all about drama and seeing Malice and Betrayal in very common things dictated by pragmatism or caused by her own actions), but reading that from an adult looking back makes me kind of side-eye the author. Which is too bad, as that does sound like a very interesting background.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-21 02:47 am (UTC)I had such high hopes for the memoir! And then... alas, it turned out to be this.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-27 07:07 pm (UTC)