Circe - Madeline Miller

After an off-month for Book of the Month in March, where they only had one title in which I was interested, they came back strong in April with a variety of books with piqued my interest.  The first and foremost of them, however, was Circe.  I haven't read Miller's other Greek mythology-inspired book, The Song of Achilles, but Circe's story interest me anyway, and much more than Achilles' did.  A goddess in her own right and the daughter of Titans, Circe is best known for her appearance in The Odyssey, where she tries to delay Odysseus on his way home from the Trojan War.  She is not Calypso, another nymph/witch who succeeds in delaying Odysseus for something like seven years.

One problem with writing a book based on mythology is that there are so many versions of different mythos that, no matter how you write it, you're bound to piss someone off because you left out their favorite part or adapted it in a way they don't like.  The only thing to do is to pick a string, stick to it, and don't waste time trying to justify every detail you changed or neglected because it doesn't fit with the thread of story that you chose to follow.  Miller does this admirably.  She leaves out pieces of Circe's mythology that aren't well known or that conflict with her strong center story line--that of a woman who defies the gods and seeks love even in her isolation--and builds connections to other, more tangential parts that work with that story.  For example, Circe only has one child with Odysseus in this telling, when she's sometimes said to have three; in contrast, Miller builds up Circe's connections with her siblings, particularly Pashiphae, mother of the Minotaur, in order to insert Circe into that story and emphasize her breaking with her Titan kin to seek her own fulfillment instead.  She overcomes so much--her vicious family, an Olympian pantheon who'd be happier with her dead, her own mistakes, rape--and while she doesn't always do it with grace, she does it with her own sort of strength.

That said, despite so many fascinating mythological elements tying in, this is not a fast-paced book.  Circe's story is, ultimately, one of exile to an island with nothing but her magic and her animals to keep her company.  While at first I found even these portions of the book fascinating--watching Circe grow into her arts, tame her animals, etc. was appealing in its own way--it became tedious after a while.  Of course, it also grows tedious for Circe herself, so maybe that was suiting, but I did find myself skimming more on these quiet portions as the book went on.  Even some of the parts of the book that should have been riveting--such as the entire story surrounding Scylla--were sometimes more slow than not, because of how much pondering Circe does as opposed to actually acting.  Ultimately, however, the book has an extremely satisfying ending--just firm enough and yet vague enough to leave possibilities and closure at the same time.

I really, really enjoyed this book.  I had completely discounted The Song of Achilles when I saw it before because I didn't think it would be something that interested me, but this book has completely changed my mind.  This is an extremely underutilized vein of fantasy--all of the Greek myth retellings or adaptations that are popular tend to be modern rather than set in their historic period, which is honestly their strength--and I would love to see more like this take the stage in popular fantasy.

4 stars out of 5.

The Girl in the Tower - Katherine Arden (The Winternight Trilogy #2)

Oh second books.  They're a bear--and just when you thought that Vasya had defeated the bear.  I was excited about this book, as I adored The Bear and the Nightingale, and this volume promised us adventure for Vasya, moving out into the world beyond her small village and a step into full adulthood, and maybe even more glimpses of the tantalizing frost demon Morozko.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel that this was quite as strong of a book as the first one.  There are some strong elements to it, certainly--we get to see more of the siblings that were rarely glimpsed in the the first book, as Olga and Sasha left fairly early on in the first volume.  Vasya does get to see the world, and learns a little bit in the process, though perhaps after her ordeals in the first book she shouldn't have been quite as naive when she went out into the wide world beyond.  And we get to watch the development of Morozko's feelings towards Vasya, feelings that he is not supposed to have, though this remains a minor element and is not nearly as played up as I would have liked to have seen.  (Please, someone, tell me there is a robust fanfiction community for this series somewhere, because this is a series that could spawn some amazing fanfics.)  However, Vasya's naivete, constant need of rescue, and headstrong ways are getting old, and they're getting old fast.  Despite literally everyone telling her that she is making a mistake kin the way she goes about things in this book, she does whatever she wants anyway, because no one understands her, clearly.  Not even when the answer is staring her right in the face.  Again, one would think she'd learned something from her first paranormal go-round, but no.  Of course not.

Vasya has reason to be frustrated and to strain against confines, of course.  Women don't exactly have the best lot in life in medieval Russia.  If Vasya is discovered to be a girl rather than the boy she travels as, she could be raped and murdered at worst, or confined to a tower for all her days at best, as her sister is.  Vasya does not want to spend her days in a tower; she wants adventure.  However, if she wants adventure, perhaps she should have listened to a number of people who told her that parading about Moscow barely disguised as a boy was not the way to go about it, and was in fact probably the best way to be caught out and open a whole kettle of fish that could mean death for, oh, her entire family.  Additionally, beyond Vasya parading around as a boy, having smug conversations with her horse, and making herself out to be the best thing before sliced bread, nothing really happens here until the last fifteen percent of the book.  The writing is lovely, but without character growth or compelling action to move the story along, it's just not enough to make this a strong book on its own.  The wonderful atmosphere and magic of the first volume were largely gone, both literally and figuratively, and they left a weaker book in their wake.

This was decidedly a second book, and it suffers from Second Book Syndrome.  I still have high hopes for the third volume, The Winter of the Witch, due out later this year--but while The Bear and the Nightingale will be listed in my favorite reads, The Girl in the Tower most certainly will not.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Bollywood Bride - Sonali Dev (Bollywood #2)

This is another one of those books that I've had for ages but, despite being intrigued by it, just never got it.  When you own a book, sometimes reading it doesn't seem as pressing as reading all of your library books that have due dates attached to them!  But the Popsugar Reading Challenge for 2018 has a category for "A book by an author of a different ethnicity than you," and since this was hovering so close to the top of my to-read list anyway, it was an easy one to slot in for that category.

Given the title of the book, with the emphasis on the word "Bride," I thought that this was going to be a romance.  While there is a romantic plot, perhaps one that is really the central driving force of the book, what this really felt like was a book about family, particularly family you choose over family you're born to.  Heroine Ria was mostly raised by her aunt and uncle following a terrible encounter with her mentally-ill mother, and while she and her father loved each other, their relationship was strained by that encounter and everything that followed it.  But Ria is now somewhat estranged from her aunt and uncle, who she kind of sees as her real parents, stemming from a secret relationship with her not-cousin (seriously, not her cousin, but around a lot, and the cousin of her cousin) that ended poorly on several fronts.  Ria has spent the last decade in India as a Bollywood star, and returns to Chicago and her family in order to attend the wedding of her actual, blood cousin who is more like a brother to her than anything.

Ria is perhaps not the ideal heroine.  She's kind of mean, and deliberately does things that hurt people.  Ostensibly she does these things to protect them, but it seems like what would really be better would be letting people make informed decisions for themselves.  Vikram is also kind of terrible.  He holds grudges and does spiteful things, and while he might be entitled to do so, he doesn't just hurt Ria, he hurts everyone else around him in the process.  However, they are surrounded by absolutely wonderful people who love and support each other and welcome misfits into their fold and make everyone around them feel wanted.  They keep each others' secrets, but to actually protect each other, rather than out of some misguided sense of righteousness.  Ria's aunt and uncle are both wonderful, her cousin is wonderful, his fiancee is wonderful, the aunties are wonderful, everyone is wonderful except our main characters.  Luckily this isn't a book that depended totally on romance between the heroine and hero to propel it; the supporting characters were so important in building the feeling in the story.

The writing itself is decent; Dev an write a good romantic scene, but I think her true strength was in those wonderful family scenes, and even more so in descriptions of food!  Oh geeze, I got so hungry reading this book.  I wanted to eat so much Indian food, it wasn't even funny.  Except Indian food is like a million dollars in the United States, and so I didn't.

Overall, a good book, and I might be interested in readings others by Dev--but not the sequel to this one, because it sounds depressing af.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Watership Down - Richard Adams

Watership Down is one of those children's books that I never read.  It's not that I disliked books about animals--in fact, I loved the Redwall books when I was younger, and the Narnia books have a good number of talking animals as well.  But for some reason, I thought this was a book about rabbits going to war.  And like in rabbit-y ways--like, basically World War II with rabbits.  I'm not entirely sure where I got this idea, but I think it might have been the title; it just sounds like some sort of distress call from a boat that's been struck by a torpedo: "SOS!  Watership down, I repeat, Watership down!  SOS!"

I finally got around to reading it because it was the Deliberate Reader book club selection for April in the Facebook group.  It also slotted nicely into my reading challenge category for a book that is a parable; while Adams did not intend the book to be a parable, saying that it was just a book about rabbits, it seems it's frequently read as a parable, and that's good enough for me.

The plot here is fairly basic.  Adams builds a society of rabbits, but keeps them in their natural habits and forms; they talk and act and think, but they're not necessarily anthropomorphized in the way that, say, Mickey Mouse is.  Within this society, some rabbits are gifted with seeing; in the warren of rabbits that starts the book, one of these seers if Fiver, the best friend of the main rabbit, Hazel.  Fiver predicts some unknown devastation for the warren, and on his warning, Hazel convinces some other rabbits to leave the warren with them.  They strike out into the countryside, seeking a place to build a new warren.  Along the way they encounter other rabbits who fled their warren, and encounter other rabbits not of their group.  And even when they establish a new home, they can't live in contentment, because without any females, they can't sustain a new colony.  And it's this struggle for survival, both immediately and in the long term, that drives the book.

Throughout the story, Hazel grows from an undersized, un-listened-to rabbit to the leader of the group, using logic instead of emotion and pushing on in the face of fear in order to take the new warren to safety.  We also get to see several different modes of warren society; the home warren, the one they encounter on the way, the one they establish on Watership Down, and Efrafa.  We also encounter other colorful characters, such as General Woundwort and the best character in the entire book, the bird Kehaar.  Human society is glimpsed through the rabbits' eyes and the story is bulked up by tales of the mythical rabbit who was the original rabbit leader, in the style of Br'er Rabbit and other trickster stories.

The writing was surprisingly engaging.  While it got off to a slow start, I soon found myself wrapped up in the story.  I didn't expect to enjoy it nearly as much as I did, but the different types of rabbit societies offered a wonderful study of contrasts, and seeing our core group of rabbits come together and learn to triumph as a cohesive group rather than a bunch of misfits was a great central propulsion.  Hazel was also definitely the proper choice for a central character.  The other two obvious choices would be Bigwig or Fiver, either of whom would have quickly become annoying as a main character--Bigwig because of his impulsivity, and Fiver because of his Timidity.  The other types of animals also held enough difference and interest to not make the book bland, which it could have easily become.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading experience.  This is another one I can cross of my classics list, and I even recommended it to a few people who'd had similar misconceptions about the book.  A worthy read.

4 stars out of 5.

Ghostland - Colin Dickey

This is not a book of ghost stories.  Let's get that out there right now.  There are some ghost stories in it, yes, of various turns and origins.  However, ghost stories are not the focus of this book.  Instead, what Dickey turns his attention to is the historical and cultural atmospheres that contributed to these stories, as most of them--as Dickey demonstrates--have absolutely zero basis in fact.

The United States has a tumultuous history, and it shows in the ghost stories that populate it.  Dickey digs into a lot of different areas, both geographically and topically, examining such things as: Why aren't there more stories of Native American ghosts, given the violence rained upon them by whites?  Why aren't there more black ghosts in areas that are fraught with dismay and death for Africans or those of African descent, such as former slave markets and places where slaves were tortured?  Why do the details of ghost stories change, sometimes dramatically, over time--things like race, age, and origin all altering on the same ghost?  He answers all of these in turn, and some others to boot.  Though the details vary somewhat, what it all boils down to is that ghost stories reflect cultural hopes and fears at the time they are told, and so the areas that are important at the time of telling are sometimes altered for emphasized in order to emphasize these tensions, whether the alteration is deliberate or not.  For example, a ghost can be a slave in a time when tensions about race and brutality by masters was of cultural importance, but the same ghost can be a white lower-class woman in a time when matters of economic tension are more predominant in the psyche.

Dickey's book works its way from the small to the large, from haunted houses to civic buildings to entire towns and cities and to an idea that our entire country is haunted.  While he touches on some of the places that are particularly renowned for hauntings, such as Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he mostly focuses on places that aren't quite as well known.  He doesn't really explain why he does this, but it seems likely that it's because the less-known places are actually easier to track, as stories might go through fewer permutations if there are fewer people telling the tales.  He also touches on some other areas of ghost stories that might not occur to everyone every day.  For example, by case law in New York State, if a building is said to be haunted it is, by law, haunted--because whether hauntings are a matter of fact or fiction, the belief that a building is haunted affects its value. 

This book had a lot of interesting aspects.  However, because Dickey has a lot of points he wants to make--and many of those points have overlapping and repetitive aspects--none of them are really delved into too deeply, and each point has one or possibly two examples at the most.  I think it would have been interesting to see how some of his theories played out in the context of places said to be more haunted--like the Eastern State Penitentiary, or the White House.  Seeing some of the stories completely debunked was interesting, but then there was no real context for how some of the stories came to be in the first place.  For the Winchester House, there were some rumors started by a paper, but even that can't really indicate the absolute plethora of stories that surround it, and the details are, as Dickey pointed out earlier in the book, what is so very important.  But none of those are touched on.

Overall, a fascinating book, but one that probably could have been a bit stronger in constructing its central argument.  Great for fans of history or fans of ghosts, or skeptics of ghosts!  Or someone who is all of the above.

4 stars out of 5.

The Darkest Part of the Forest - Holly Black

Holly Black never fails to please.  After reading Cruel Prince earlier this year, I realized that I was missing a chunk of her faerie stories--I had the Tithe background, as well as its sequels, but there were characters in CP whom I was clearly supposed to recognize, and did not.  Obviously, I had missed The Darkest Part of the Forest.  Or, not missed it, exactly--I knew it existed.  However, I thought it was completely unconnected to the other books and had a story significantly different from what it actually is (I have no idea where I got that sense) and so I hadn't sought it out.  Which is kind of a good thing, because I got to enjoy it now!

The story takes place in the strange Pennsylvania town of Fairfold, where humans live not with the Folk, but alongside them.  Every now and then, a tourist will go missing--tourists who come to the town to get a thrill from interacting with faeries and make mistakes that "locals" would never make, except when they do.  Changeling Jack lives alongside his human "brother," whom he was supposed to replace; a jump-rope line stops one line short of drawing a monster out of the woods; and a boy sleeping in a glass coffin is the centerpiece of many a high school party.

Heroine Hazel grew up in Fairfold, with a short stint in Philadelphia while her older brother, Ben, was in music school.  Ben has music magic, a gift (or curse) from a faerie when he was a baby.  Hazel has no such gifts, but she wishes she did; she supports Ben in his magic and takes on the role of his loyal knight, the two of them hunting bad faeries as pre-teenagers in the woods.  But all that ends with the time in Philadelphia, and upon returning to Fairfold, Hazel makes a stupid mistake that puts her off hunting even longer.  But when the glass coffin is broken and Hazel has reason to suspect that she did it--even if she doesn't know why or even remember doing it--and the boy inside it is gone, a world of trouble is unleashed from the darkest part of the forest.  Hazel has to fight for her family, friends, and Fairfold itself, even though she is woefully unprepared to do so.

This was slow to get going, I will admit, and there's not a lot of real tension or action until fairly late in the book.  I also wasn't a huge fan of Ben as a main character--perhaps because he seemed to enter the role of main character fairly late in the book, where Hazel had occupied that role by herself for much of the early parts.  Ben himself was okay, but I liked him more in a supporting role; while his motivations were clear, I never felt he got the character development that a main character really needs to shine in a starring role.  Hazel, on the other hand, had much more page time; we were in her head much more, saw more of what she did and why she did it.  It just worked better for Hazel.  (Though I liked how things ended up for Ben!)

This is a different setting and a different faerie Court from Black's other books, and that aspect of this wasn't felt out as well.  However, I liked Fairfold itself.  The way that Folk and humans twined together, but with humans walking the razor's edge of danger all the time, really appealed to me.  The humans of Fairfold felt safe, until they weren't, justifying that "only tourists" were in danger, but doing some "tourist"-like things themselves.  And the way they seemed so okay with things, but quickly turned on Jack--the only faerie among them--as soon as things went wrong seemed exactly like what would happen in real life to me.

These faerie tales are Black's definite strength.  I'm so glad that she's returned to them with Cruel Prince, and I can't wait to read the next installment in that series--and luckily, I think reading this in the meantime will help bulk out my understanding of that series, too.

4 stars out of 5.

Shrill - Lindy West

My pick for a feminist book for my 2018 Popsugar reading challenge, Shrill is an angry book.  And why shouldn't it be?  Women get the short end of the stick in pretty much every area of life.  West isn't at the very bottom of the social structure--she is straight and white, which are two points in her favor--but she is overweight and loud, which are two things that society does not take kindly to.  Take, for example, the recent internet kerfluffle that was "Describe yourself as if a male author was describing you," in which many older (read: not twenty-three-year-old) and/or overweight women had to point out that either they would automatically be relegated to the role of villain, or they wouldn't be in a book written by a man at all.  West has a career built in comedy, but it's one she fought for tooth and nail against pretty much every odd, and in this book she takes on that, as well as the struggle to just be seen as a person while fat and female.

West is loud.  She is opinionated.  This book has probably made a lot of people angry, because how dare a woman--and a fat one at that--have opinions like that?  How dare a woman not find rape jokes funny?  How dare she not find it flattering that men threaten to rape and kill her for protesting against the very un-funniness of rape jokes?  How dare she put it out that hey, it's hard to be a fat person, so please stop piling on the emotional abuse on top of an already challenged existence?  How dare she suggest that we don't go out of the way to shame and humiliate each other?

Nothing is off limits here, and that's probably one of the things that will make people mad.  West is a modern woman.  She has had an abortion, one she does not regret, though the emotions surrounding it were hard for her.  She is in a relationship with someone of another race.  She has struck out alone, written scathing articles directed at her own editor and climbed a professional ladder.  She has dealt with death and grieving and rejection and basically every sort of humiliation that she could possibly face.  In Shrill, she tears into all of it.  She mourns the loss of her "funny" card, from when the comedy community turned on her for speaking out about rape jokes.  She talks about online harassment, about being absolutely terrified at some of the things anonymous commenters threaten and the personal details they reveal they know, the fear that stalks her at the things they say--Are they watching me?  How do they know that?  She swears, she mocks herself and others, and she is angry, and justified in being so.  The title of the book, cooked up during the 2016 presidential campaigns, is deliberate, because West's anger, like so many other women's, comes to the surface in a time when a populace--including a majority of white women--would elect a sexual predator rather than a woman.

Her writing is good.  It is raw in some instances, but it reads like it seems West would speak, and that makes the book seem like a conversation, and a deeply personal one at that.  Is it the most polished thing in the entire world?  Probably not, because it's hard to be completely polished while being so forthright.  However, West has an extensive journalistic background, and that expertise shows here.  Among her new writing are excerpts of some of her former works, and in reviewing them she adds a few points of polish and remarks on things that she wished she had done, reflecting that not only is she not writing a 260-page rant--this is much more than that, more structured, more thought-out, more everything--but that it's largely her professional growth that has attributed to this.  That said, there are points where her writing is shocking, particularly at the beginning, and I found myself reeling back somewhat.  Maybe a bit more of easing in would have been good for the reader who wasn't quite prepared, but wanted to know--but then again, maybe that would defeat the point.

Overall, a harsh read, but a good and important one nonetheless.

4.5 stars out of 5.