The Astonishing Color of After - Emily X. R. Pan

Book of the Month sometimes has some interesting selections.  They tend to be mostly literary fiction or suspense/thriller; I guess the judges' favored genres tend in this direction.  However, every now and then something very different slips in.  Something like Exit West or this one, The Astonishing Color of After, which has a definitive magical realism bend to it.

The story is about Leigh, whose mother commits suicide while Leigh is finally, finally kissing her best friend, Axel.  But while Leigh's mother might be dead, she is not gone, because Leigh is one thousand percent certain that instead of going away, her mother has become a red bird.  Her father thinks she's crazy, but some strange occurrences as well, and he takes Leigh to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents, whom Leigh has never seen due to a rift between them and her mother.  Leigh wants to find her mother, to figure out what she's supposed to know or remember, and finds herself on that quest with her grandmother and a strange young woman named Feng.

This is an interesting take on magical realism.  The things that Leigh experiences are definitely  happening.  They are not in her head.  Other people even sometimes acknowledge them.  But there's a whole aspect to it that only Leigh notices, that only she can see, or only she can remember, and I haven't encountered that in other magical realism books, which tend to have everyday magic more closely woven into the real world as a whole.  I spent a lot of the book flopping between "it's magical realism, no, it's just plain fantasy," but overall I think that magical realism is a more apt descriptor, just given how the magical plays into the story and characters.

Most of this book is set in Taiwan, but there are also flashbacks to parts of other people's lives and Leigh's own evolving relationship with Axel.  I really liked Leigh and Axel.  They're teenagers, and they do stupid things and have stupid fights, but their pull is undeniable.  They have a connection, and despite Leigh shutting down after her mother's suicide, that connection persists and grows even when they're separate and not talking...with a little magical help, of course.  But I think the aspect of this book that most intrigued me was Feng.  I had some idea of who she had to be, but I think Pan did a good job of concealing her true origins and revealing them in a way that wasn't designed to trick you but to make you put together all of the little pieces that had come before.

There were some things I didn't like, however.  First, Leigh's father is horrible.  Not in a typical "Leigh is a teenager and doesn't get along with her father" type of way, but in a "I knew my wife was depressed and so I pretty much abandoned her and my daughter rather than deal with it" type of way.  He hates that Leigh loves art.  He sends her off to a camp that she hates to the very depths of her soul and doesn't tell her anything regarding her mother's health, even though Leigh is the one who cares for her mother, because her father isn't present.  Pan tries to reconcile Leigh and her father at the end, but I am not at all convinced that he would suddenly become so supportive of her, or that he would become an involved father.

Second...can we talk about the pretentious color words?  Pan uses so many descriptive color words that I have never, ever encountered before, and I have a large vocabulary and am widely read.  Which means if I haven't encountered these words, I doubt her target young adult audience has.  I actually started highlighting them as I went through the book, there were so many!  The result is that there would be "[some crazy word] orange" and I would just disregard the descriptor, because "orange" was the part that mattered.  There are so many words for colors and hues and shades that the average reader knows, so I'm not sure why Pan veered away from those and to these spelling bee ones instead.

Overall, I did like this quite a bit.  Leigh's father was awful and the vocabulary was eye-roll worthy at times, but the story itself is solid.  The magical realism is done well, Leigh is a compelling main character, and the setting of Taiwan is a strong one.

4 stars out of 5.

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness (All Souls #1)

A Discovery of Witches had been on my to-read list for a while, in a sort of vague, "That sounds interesting, maybe someday" way.  It bumped its way up towards the top when I needed a book involving Halloween for my reading challenge--while books that take place entirely on Halloween seem to be few and far between, books that have a climax or conclusion involving Halloween seem to be more common, and this book is one of them.

Diana is witch in a world where there are basically four types of humaoids: humans, and then three types of "creatures," witches/wizards, vampires, and daemons.  But Diana has scorned her witchy ancestry and tries to use magic as little as possible.  This changes when, in the course of conducting research for a conference, she stumbles across an enchanted manuscript that no one else has been able to get for hundreds of years.  Diana doesn't really care for it, and sends it back to the stacks, where it vanishes again--and finds herself being stalked by all kinds of creatures who want her to get it back for them, including vampire Matthew, with whom Diana quickly develops a romantic attachment.

This is a long book for its type.  The pacing is decidedly better in the first part, when Diana is in Oxford and is being increasingly stalked by creatures and little bits of her magic occasionally pop up.  Once she and Matthew decamp for France, however, things slow down.  There's meals and horseback riding and dancing in a castle he built.  Yes, there's a little bit of drama while they're there, but overall the pace is much slower, and the slow pace continues--again with one anomaly--once they move on from France to the US.  And while I normally like a strong romantic plot in my novels, no matter what their primary genre falls into, this one just didn't seem to hit the right points.  There's no sizzling chemistry or attraction between Diana and Matthew; in fact, the repeated reminders of how cold he is seems like a complete turn-off.  There aren't any good kissing scenes, or any sort of other scenes, if you know what I mean.  (Which, you know, aren't necessary, but if you're going to write a 600-page book relying heavily on romance...)

Diana herself is also a Special Snowflake Supreme.  She has All the Powers, which of course no one else has, and is the only witch--literally the only one--to be stronger than her parents were.  Now, I am not entirely against Special Snowflakes.  In some cases, I actually quite like them.  Diana was obnoxious, though.  Not as a person, but as a concept.  There's no sign of her magic her entire life, and then suddenly she views a report of her DNA and they start popping out all over the place, stronger than anyone has ever seen.  This seemed a bit odd, honestly.  Apparently the use of her magic is tied to "need," but that didn't seem to be the case in most of the instances in which her magic made its appearance.

Overall, this was an okay one.  It was one I found myself picking at rather than just reading, which is generally an indication that I'm not enjoying it very much.  There were some interesting concepts here, but the pacing and romance were off, and Diana's Special Snowflake status was annoying.  I also have absolutely no interest in where Diana and Matthew are going next, so I think I'm probably unlikely to read the second book.

2 stars out of 5.

Bleaker House - Nell Stevens

The happy, pale turquoise and penguin clutching a page  on the cover caught my eye while perusing books at a well-known local bookstore a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I'd already bought a few other books at said store (at full cover price--ouch) and didn't have it in the budget for this one.  Luckily, the library came through for me, because I'd skimmed the first few pages and was intrigued by the premise of this memoir: young woman finishes MFA and, with the opportunity of going anywhere in the world for up to three months, chooses Bleaker Island, a tiny hunk of land in the Falklands (just north of Antarctica) in the middle of the southern hemisphere's winter, in the hopes that a sense of extreme isolation will give her the discipline and concentration she needs to write a novel.  Does it work?  Well...

I found this a charming book set in a depressing AF setting.  Stevens wants to be a writer, desperately.  She picks Bleaker Island as her spot to write out of a sense of wanting to be different; and don't all writers?  But upon her arrival, she finds herself thinking, "If the island is Bleaker, it's bleaker than what?"  The answer: everything.  It is a desolate place, as the Falklands in general seem to be, at least in the winter.  It is devoid of fresh produce, and regular contact with the outside world, with a language that has evolved out of several kinds of language into its own weird sort of dialect.  Nell finds herself scrutinized by citizens who are wary of outsiders in general and writers in particular, and then eventually completely and literally isolated: the only human on Bleaker Island for six weeks.  There, she struggles to apply everything she learned in school to the creation of a novel set in the Falklands, and on Bleaker in particular.  Ultimately, the novel doesn't work, and what she produced--in her diary from her stay, in her attempts at the novel, in short stories from school, in snippets of her life leading up to the trip to the Falklands--became this book instead.

I did like Stevens' writing.  She has a dry and self-deprecating sense of humor, and while her time in the Falklands might not have turned her into a novelist (at least not a published one), it certainly seemed to let herself know herself more, though this seems to have come in an epiphany moment near the end of her stay rather than in a slow but steady stream of self-realization.  In this, she was successful, and I think the book showed that.  She realizes that not everything she has to write is amazing.  She realizes that being alone and being lonely are very different things.  And she realizes that even if she's not going to write a novel based on her time in the Falklands, she can still certainly write a book.

This was a trip taken on a whim; while Stevens has some justification for her choice, she seems aware that it's flimsy and that she's going primarily because no one else was, and that even her written proposal sounded pretty silly once it was read back.  But she definitely got something out of it, I think we can safely say.  The structure of the book feeds into this idea; while it starts with Nell's arrival on Bleaker, it jumps back with the first chapter to do a mostly-chronological account of her time in the Falklands, interspersed with snippets of her life beforehand and other writing projects she worked on, mostly a few short stories in their full form.  Because she includes pieces of her life, you can see her penchant for including life in her writing, just as she was hoping to do with basing a book on Bleaker.  It's an insight into her creative process, and the evolution of it over time.  I personally thought it was interesting--most aspiring writers probably will, if only to see someone else sharing in their struggles.  But other people might not.

Overall, this was a book I really liked.  It's light, but not fluffy, and while there's nothing world- or even life-shattering about it, I found it was a book I could empathize with...though the Falklands are probably off my list of places to visit, honestly.

4 stars out of 5.

Tower of Dawn - Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass #6)

Upon reading this book, I had to immediately go back to my reviews of former Throne of Glass books.  This is a strange volume--a book that was supposed to be a novella and ended up at nearly seven hundred pages, taking place concurrently with the prior book in the series, Empire of Storms.  In this, Maas tries to fill in the Chaol-shaped hole that was left in EoS, something that I had mentioned in my review of that book, but I was looking for something else.  The sentence fragments.  Dear lord, did the other books have these sentence fragments?  I don't seem to have mentioned them in my reviews, if they did, and I know I mentioned the use of this "convention" in another book that it drove me crazy in, The Rose and the Dagger.  Either way, whether they were used so blatantly in the other books or not, it is not an excuse, this is a terrible convention and should be abandoned.  Seriously.  The sentence fragments that run amok here continuously yanked me out of the story and had me pounding my head against my Kindle.  Seriously, Maas, did sentence subjects and verbs hurt you as a child?

Now, with that out of the way...

This book dumps Chaol and his traveling companion/kind-of-girlfriend Nesryn on the southern continent of the Throne of Glass world, in Antica, the city of thirty-six gods and the capital of an empire.  If you were looking for a foil to the white, European-based Adarlan, Antica is your answer to it.  With a variety of races and cultures, it's definitely different from Adarlan, in a good way.  Chaol is hoping that the healers who live on the southern continent can fix the paralysis caused by his injuries in the fight against Adarlan's king two books ago.  The healer he is assigned apparently hails from another novella, which I have not read--Yrene Towers.  She is, of course, the most talented and most beautiful healer evah.  While we're on the topic, is Antica not allowed to have people who are the best?  Yrene, from the north, is the best healer.  Nesryn, from the north--her father is from Antica, but Nesryn herself is from the north--is the best archer.  Our absent characters, Aelin and company, are the best at assorted other things.  No one in Antica is apparently the best, and if they are, I'm sure one of those northern characters will soon become interested in that skill and master it and be the best instead.  So, yes, maybe still some subtle racist contexts here.  Hmm...

Anyway.  Chaol gets a hot healer, and Nesryn gets a hot royal who rides a giant bird and thinks she's da bomb, so there goes that relationship.  At first I was onboard with the relationship swapping in this series; after all, few people in real life spend their entire lives with their first romantic partner.  But at this point...just get on with it already.  Anyway (again) Chaol and Nesryn soon split up, Nesryn going off in search of info on the menace that might have followed them to Antica and Chaol...staying put because he's paralyzed, which is a bummer for him, though of course the gorgeous Yrene helps to ease his sorrows.

Remember how Harry Potter spent the entire book in Half Blood Prince angsting over Sirius' death?  This is that book for Chaol.  Except, whereas Harry had faced a very real loss (even if it was still a bit overblown) Chaol was angsty over all kinds of things that, really, he just needed to get over and should have been over already.  This sounds extremely callous of me, I know.  And some of the things, yes, he could feel guilty over, even if they were not directly his fault.  But when the person who is literally going to restore your ability to walk tells you, "Hey, I can do this, but you need to work through what is holding you back.  I will help you do this, but you need to make the effort," and you still refuse to make the effort, well, you lose some of the sympathy factor.  And beyond the healing, there is really not much that goes on for Chaol in this book.  Nesryn only has slightly more action.  There's not a lot of pep in these pages.

Now.  This was not necessarily a bad book.  I liked aspects of it quite a bit--I did like Antica, and the ruks, and Yrene and the Tower.  It's just that this book, and this series, is getting a bit, well, tired.  Repetitive, if I dare say so.  There are only so many times you can try to throw in the same twist before people start calling it, and I saw all of them coming from a mile away--which does not bode well for the one volume remaining.  I'm betting it's going to be pretty much a direct copy of the finale of A Court of Wings and Ruin, because Maas' bread and butter seems to be presenting the same book again and again.  They have fun aspects; they are light and fast and enjoyable to read.  And this same critique could be said of many other authors and genres (romance, anyone?).  Buuuuut you can only write the same story so many times before you lose interest, you know?  Also, there are questions raised that I'm not sure Maas can properly answer at this point, because they seem to be running contrary to what has been set up in other books--like the whole spiders thing?  Why are they not allied in all kinds of different ways with the bad forces running about?  And Maeve?  Really?  That's the route you're taking?

Whatever.  I'm over it.

I'm in this for the long haul, I guess, since there's only one book left.  But it had better be a doozy, because I'm getting kind of tired of this.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilych isn't my first Tolstoy.  That would be War and Peace (the foreword to Ivan Ilych talks about how Tolstoy used W&P as a vehicle to discuss theories of history!!!) and I followed it up a year or two later with Anna Karenina.  But Ivan Ilych wouldn't have made it onto my reading list if not for it being a book club selection at The Deliberate Reader, because it is a novella, clocking in at around 75 pages depending on your edition and format.  Starting with the funeral of the eponymous Ivan Ilych, the story then jumps back to the beginning of his fall, first slow and then fast, in a series of short chapters.

I don't really like short stories because I typically don't find them to have enough substance for me.  There are some exceptions, of course; Neil Gaiman can write an amazing fantasy short story when the mood strikes him, and I've read some absolutely wonderful literary ones, as well.  Unfortunately for me, Ivan Ilych didn't fall into this wonderful character.  It is exactly what it purports to be: an account of Ilych's death.  Always wanting more and better, his greed drives him to spend beyond his means to no success, and it's in the process of this spending and remodeling of a new home that he quite literally falls, injuring himself in the process.  The injury initially seems minor, but drags him down towards a slow and painful death that's not only torturous to him, but to everyone around him, none of whom seem to particularly like him to begin with.  In the process of dying, Ilych reflects on his life--he feels that he has been wronged by dying, because he lived as he should have, though questions of things like love and meaning come to him as he lies in excruciating pain for weeks before passing away.

This is a contemplative story, and one that's probably not suited for everyone at every point in life.  Several of Ilych's acquaintances reflect on how he might die, but they couldn't possibly, and that's something that I think a lot of readers can empathize with.  After all, most of us don't spend a lot of time dwelling on our own mortality, and I suppose getting us to do so was part of Tolstoy's goal in writing this tale.  Ilych is not an interesting person; he's a mid-level bureaucrat in the justice system and his life is not exactly filled with adventure.  He wants to better himself and sees money as a way to do that.  He has family issues.  Most of us share these qualities, to some degree, as well as some rather unlikable ones that those close to us come to know.  In this way, though we might not like Ilych, I think we can probably understand where he's coming from, why he finds his demise so unfair, etc.  In this, I think Tolstoy did a very good job.

The problem?  This story isn't very interesting.  It's not really supposed to be, I guess--contemplative if definitely more its vein.  While this has its purpose, it doesn't make for a very riveting read.  This was a story I found myself wandering away from again and again, and it took me a surprising amount of time to get through less than a hundred pages.  It has its time and place, and I think it's actually quite good in that regard; it just didn't strike me at this time.

Based on the story's clear merit, I'm going to write it higher than I would on pure enjoyment.  I can see myself "enjoying" this more in a more melancholy or contemplative mood, and it's one I could potentially return to at some point, which isn't something I'd say about most tales of this length.

4 stars out of 5.

Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

Last September, I was at the National Book Festival hoping to get a signed copy of Outlander for my boyfriend's mother (because Diana Gabaldon is her favorite and I'm thoughtful like that).  A few queues over from the Gabaldon line was one for Margot Lee Shetterly.  There was practically no one in it.  How odd, I thought.  Hidden Figures was a pretty big movie, after all, getting a lot of press, acclaim, the whole shebang.  I found it very odd that there wouldn't be more people in that line.  Well, now I know why the line was so short: this book is boring.

And let me say this.  A book about a story that is this fascinating should not be this boring.  And yet boring it is.

This is, undeniably, an important story.  In a time when segregation was still the norm, female working women were still referred to as "girls," and women were pretty much banned from STEM fields, women were essentially storming NASA's predecessor, NACA, working as human computers and clawing their way upwards to the ranks of mathematicians and engineers, marking various "Firsts" and shattering glass ceilings as they went.  While white women were involved, Shetterly focuses on a much-ignored group, the West Computers and the women who came out of that pool to work in other areas, who were black.  While she talks about a few people here, only two names ultimately stuck in my head: Dorothy Vaughn and Katherine Gobels/Katherine Johnson.  Vaughn eventually ran the West Computers, and Johnson ran the calculations for the first American orbital flight and the reunion of the Apollo 11 moon landing crew and flight crew after departing from the moon.  There was a third main person, but Shetterly does such a poor job of actually distinguishing between these women that I honestly couldn't tell you anything about her.  And actually, there was a fourth woman, too--but she was in college for the events of the book, and I'm not entirely sure why she was included at all.

But my biggest dig against this book is that it's not predominantly about these women.  They are simply a lens through which Shetterly examines the Civil Rights movement, the press for desegregation, and all kinds of other social movements that surrounded these issues in the forties, fifties, and sixties.  While all of this is vitally important, it's not what I picked up the book to read about.  Additionally, the writing is extremely purple at times, not at all suitable for a nonfiction book.  It's entirely possible to do a book of literary nonfiction and do it well, but Shetterly does not.  It's always dangerous to project details of emotions, actions, etc. onto conversations and situations at which you were not present, and are collecting details from second- and sometimes third-hand, and yet that is exactly what Shetterly does.  Between wariness at this practice and sometimes eye-drooping boredom when Shetterly spent ages away from the main narrative to instead talk about the March on Washington, or something else entirely, I found that I didn't enjoy this book much at all.

Overall?  Important, fascinating story, but obscured by poor telling.  The movie might be better on this one.

2 stars out of 5.

Earls Just Want to Have Fun - Shana Galen (Covent Garden Cubs #1)

I'm not entirely sure how this book ended up on my radar; I think I actually saw the third book, I Kissed a Rogue, and went in search of the first one.  Anyway, after a bit of library finangling (because they didn't have it in Kindle format) I finally managed to dig in.

When Elizabeth was five, she was kidnapped from her life as a young lady of the ton and brought into a ring of thieves known as the Covent Garden Cubs.  After fifteen years of lies and stealing and being told she's the daughter of a prostitute, Elizabeth (now known as Marlowe) believes it--but still wonders at the few hazy memories she retains from her early life.  And she's yanked back into that life, and that world, when she's kidnapped again, this time by Sir Brook Derring, a Bow Street Runner Marlowe's parents hired to find her.  But as said parents are out of town and Brook has other things to do, he dumps her with his brother Maxwell, Earl of Dane, and heads off on other business.  Dane is none too pleased to be saddled with a girl who he's convinced is nothing better than thief, but sparks begin to fly between the two as he tries to get her in some sort of shape to meet her potential long-last parents.  Meanwhile, Marlowe's biggest concern is Satin, the head of the Cubs who will undoubtedly come after her, with repercussions for everyone involved.

Most of the time when an author tries to put a thieving/roguery plot into a historical romance novel, it doesn't go particularly well.  Luckily, this book was the exception to that.  This is probably because Marlowe's thief status and her position in the Cubs is an intrinsic part of her character, rather than something Galen just tacked onto her in order to make her seem more interesting.  Her escape from this situation is also vital to her future and Dane's as well, since anyone involved with keeping her from the Cubs is going to come under Satin's line of fire.  Because this was a primary plot point, rather than one just shoved in for kicks, it worked out very well.

Now, let's talk about Dane.  Dane at the beginning of the book is completely insufferable.  Why?  Because he's extremely prejudiced and hates poor people, thinking that they deserve their situations.  Basically, he's the embodiment of the thought that if they didn't want to be poor, then they shouldn't have been born poor to begin with.  He is a prick.  It's bad enough that I almost quit the book when he showed up, because I knew I would never be able to root for a hero so small-minded and just--ugh.  Thankfully, he changes his tune pretty quickly.  It's not unbelievably so--as much as any timeline in a book that takes place over the course of a few days can be believably stretched out, at least--and it takes a lot of arguing in order to get him to that point, but he gets there eventually and it is a change for the better.  And you can see the change slowly occurring, which is good because it doesn't make his change of position at the end of the book seem like it came out of nowhere.  If only people in real life could be reasoned with like Dane...

The writing here is good.  Galen writes a good relationship, good kissing, good sex scenes.  It's a great historical romance novel.  I don't think I've read any other ones by Galen, and while I'm not fawning and drooling over this one and going back to read it immediately after finishing it, it's definitely a good intro to Galen, and I look forward to reading other books by her.

4 stars out of 5.