book review: the break

The Break by Katherena Vermette is a multithreaded novel about a crime that takes place in Winnipeg. A young Native woman is attacked in the February night. There’s a witness who calls the police. So it’s a story about a crime, but it’s definitely not a procedural.

We get to know the family around the incident through a number of different viewpoints, including a couple of outsiders (a girl who’s escaped detention and a police officer). The story mostly takes place over less than a week, but is filled with flashbacks that give it a lot more depth than that.

It was a great book.

I often talk about how for me, the practical reason for reading fiction is to build empathy. If you get into the heads of people who are different from you, you help expand what your world can be, and it makes you better at understanding and helping people with different experiences from you. The Break is totally going to be my go-to example for that. Vermette gets us into heads really deftly and her descriptions were incisive and made me shudder. We feel for the weaknesses and we feel the strengths everyone shows.

It’s great. You should read it.

book review: reality boy

Most of the YA books I read tend towards the science fiction end of things. For me that’s a good intersection point, especially since a lot of great SF was written before YA was really a thing, so it can fall in different categories post-hoc. Anyway. The one writer whose non-SF YA books I love and will now buy sight unseen are A.S. King’s. Her newest is Reality Boy.

What I love about this book is how it takes a good hook – the protagonist is a 17-year-old who when he was little was on a reality TV show about misbehaving children where he shat on a bunch of things – and piles on the dysfunction, and makes you see the situation the way he does, but then as the tension mounts and mounts and mounts there’s this understanding that actually, this is more fucked up than a person should have to deal with. Especially a 17-year-old.

King is so good at writing teens who think they’re fucked up and then realize that actually their situation is even more fucked up than they thought, and really it’s up to them to say something. This idea that adults are full of shit and need you to tell them that things are fucked up even if they won’t believe you is, I think, an important message. Even though it’s not written as a “message” novel. There’s something subversive about this, that it is actually well within your rights not to fit in and to be angry at the way the world is, even if other people have it worse.

The story is also hella romantic, with angry teenage true love and fights and a bit of running away to join the circus. It’s an excellent book, even if it is a pretty quick read. Highly recommended.

book review: siege 13

I read Tamas Dobozy’s collection of short stories entitled Siege 13 on the recommendation of one of our library members. Dobozy writes about Hungarian immigrants to Canada and their communities, sort of. I didn’t know much about 20th century Hungarian history before reading this book, but the WW2 occupation by the Nazis and then the Communists led to a lot of traumatic life-shattering events, even for those who managed to emigrate to the west, so that forms the backdrop to most of these stories.

They were well-written enough, but I was lured in by a promise of beguiling weirdness, which there definitely wasn’t enough of for my taste. They were stories of informers, and of relationships between people who hid themselves away and who tried to falsify histories. They weren’t bad, and Dobozy is very skilled but they just weren’t my kind of thing.

book review: are you my mother?

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is Alison Bechdel’s memoir about her relationship with her mother and her therapists and about writing Fun Home. Because it’s about writing the previous book and how much her mother didn’t like that she’d written it, but also about psychoanalysis, it feels more like a meta-book.

She writes and draws a lot about feeling self-conscious, and transcribes so many bits about writing memoir that it feels more like an essay than a story. Which isn’t a bad thing. It makes me want to read her sources.

One of the things I really like about both of Bechdel’s books is how she draws the pages from the things she’s reading. She draws the typewriter font and highlights the interesting text, but leaves the surrounding bits in there for context. She also has people’s letters and her drawings of photographs. This whole layer of drawing and selecting as construction fascinates the hell out of me.

I don’t think I found this one as compelling as Fun Home because the relationship between Bechdel and her mother is ongoing. It’s harder to make it all fit into a book. In any nonfiction you’re making arbitrary endpoints but it’s always easier when you’ve got something natural like a death to crystallize around. In Are You My Mother? there isn’t that one thing, which seems to make it a harder book to create. So in some ways the book becomes about how hard it is to make itself. Which some people might not enjoy, but I did.

book review: fun home

Alison Bechdel’s book Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a memoir, a genre I don’t find myself reading a lot of. If you’ve read through my archives here you see I’m mostly into things that definitely haven’t happened or couldn’t possibly happen. Travel among the stars, or dealing with mystical artifacts or whatever. But if all memoirs were as good as this, I’d probably be devouring more of them.

Oh, I suppose I should mention it’s a comic too. And I do read a lot of those. So maybe this isn’t that far out of my usual fare.

Bechdel’s book is mostly about growing up and dealing with her father’s homosexuality (at the same time she was coming out as a lesbian) and his criminal behaviour with some of his students, and his death. Which may have been a suicide.

She doesn’t tell it straightforwardly, but circles around events and brings things back and forth through time echoing dreams the way memory does at its best. It starts with the house her father was constantly renovating. It deals with life in a funeral home. There are neglected dreams and OCD episodes. It’s painful and terrible and everything seems fraught with meaning.

It’s very much a personal story. It’s the kind of story that makes you ask “how do the people she wrote about feel about this?” It’s courageous and self-absorbed in a way I can’t help but admire. Really great work.

book review: everybody sees the ants

Everybody Sees The Ants is a YA book about a kid named Lucky Linderman who gets bullied and goes to Arizona with his mom to recuperate. Put like that it doesn’t sound too exciting. But because this is A.S. King writing the story things aren’t that straight-forward. She uses a fragmented storytelling technique to show us scenes from the present, from Lucky’s freshman year at school, from his childhood, and most importantly from his dreams where he tries to rescue his grandfather from a Vietnamese POW camp.

The story features adults being idiots and perfect lives being not so perfect. The relationship between Lucky and his dad is really interesting and a big part of the story. It’s interesting because his dad is kind of an absentee father, spending all his time at his fancy restaurant and caring more about cooking than anything else. By the end of the book, his dad hasn’t changed, but everyone has a bit more perspective and tolerance for why people act the way they do. The same goes for Lucky and his mom. King is really good at setting up situations where characters seem unreasonable and then showing us a key to understanding them (even if we don’t have to like them).

It’s a really good book. Probably the best I’ve read that’s expressly about bullying since it never ends up in a clichéd place. Kudos to King on another great read.

book review: how to live safely in a science fictional universe

I loved How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu so much. It’s a story about a time machine repair guy named Charles Yu who’s been living safely off in a null-zone where time doesn’t really pass, thinking about his father who disappeared, the inability to change the past, the trajectory of a life and closed time-like loops. But really it’s about loneliness and memory.

It’s a quiet book, introspective. I think I’d thought it would be funnier, but instead it was just beautiful. Also a good crossover book for people who like literature and aren’t necessarily interested in “science fiction.” There’s lots of stuff tossed in there in technical language, that’s cryptic but decipherable. It encourages study and reading slowly, really settling into the book (which is not long at all).

Definitely one of my new favourites. Yu’s new short story collection, Sorry Please Thank You, is now on my must read list.

book review: rocket girls

I did not like Housuke Nojiri’s Rocket Girls. It’s a science fiction story about a teenager who goes to the Solomon Islands looking for her father and gets co-opted into a space program because she’s small enough to need less thrust on the rockets they’re trying to launch into space in the next 6 months or the plug will be pulled on the project. It is so fucking stupid.

It seems that Nojiri wanted to write a cool vaguely realistic story about low earth orbit. He probably did a bunch of research on rockets and Mir. But the situation is so stupid. Yukari finds her father on the island and he’s been made chief of an islander band that cheers for explosions of the rockets as fireworks. He has another daughter almost the same size as Yukari. Who can then be her backup on the mission! And if she goes through with the training he’ll come back to Japan with Yukari and get back with her mother and they’ll all live a normal life!

There’s also sketchy bullshit about the islanders cursing the rockets, and a plan Yukari has to get Chinese food delivered so she’ll be too heavy to go on the rocket, media people bursting into her room in the middle of the night for interviews, and gay Russian cosmonauts who accidentally destroy Mir (that was a spoiler).

It’s ridiculous enough that if it was written with a sense of humour, it could be pretty fun. But it’s trying so hard to make us take this seriously, it’s just aggravating. I wonder if it’s a translation issue.

Anyway, I cannot suggest this book unless it’s to someone really into orbital dynamics. Even then the unrealistic mad scientists and complete motiveless changes of character will probably get in the way of any enjoyment.

book review: the big kahn

Neil Kleid and Nicholas Cinquegrani’s The Big Kahn was an excellent comic about religion lies and trust. It opens with the funeral of a rabbi. Within a few pages we discover that the rabbi was actually a conman who’d settled into his fake life. The effects this has on the dead rabbi’s family is big and profound. One of his sons was set to take over from his father, but now he’s let go and wracked with guilt over all the lies (that he had no idea about).

The art is very clean and light and doesn’t get in the way of the story, but the writing is what makes this book great. It’s all about grief and trauma and coping and what you can do about the bad things your family did, something I’ve got a little history with myself (although who doesn’t?). Very worth reading.

book review: ship breaker

Photo Credit: Sect by Kris Krug

Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA novel Ship Breaker is all sorts of awesome. Nailer is a kid who works on a light crew stripping salvage from the long-abandoned oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. He and everyone he knows lives out on the beach at the whims of the corporations who’ll buy salvage and the many layers of power between them. Nailer and his best friend make an extremely lucky find but instead of just collecting on it, Nailer does something stupid and saves a rich girl’s life.

The world of Ship Breaker is rusty and painful. Nailer’s dad is terribly abusive, and in that off-balancing way I recognize from real people’s stories, not just fiction. But Nailer saves him from a city-wrecking storm, because he’s family. It’s a post-oil world seen from the point of view of people who have no real say in the forces that shape their lives, except for how they can adapt themselves. The book is filled with cool ideas, culturally mashed-up names and diamond-hulled sailing ships. It’s great, and it doesn’t end on a terrible cliffhanger for a trilogy. Highly recommended.