Book Review: Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

Then at least we would be responsible for our own doom, instead of someone else deciding it for us. And really, isn't that the most any of us can hope for?

One of my most frustrating university discussions happened over a reading of Antigone. I don’t even remember now what literature class it was, who the professor was, or even what year I was in, but I still remember the other student’s face, her pale-red hair and floral dress.

 

Antigone by Felix Resureccion Hidalgo

I hadn’t read Sophocles before that class, but Antigone blew me away. We also read Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Thebes but it was Antigone that hit me the hardest. Her loyalty to her brother and her determination to do what she felt was right; I even dreamed about her burial.

(Twenty-five years later it is still my favorite classic piece of literature.)

In a classroom conversation, we were asked who the hero of the story is. I think it is obvious: Antigone, of course. She is the hero because she doesn’t allow fear to determine her choices. She remains true to her ideals.

But the other student insisted I was wrong. Ismene is the hero, in her mind, because Ismene survives. Doesn’t she, in the end, try to stand up for her sister? Even if it’s too late, she does try. And by staying alive she makes sure someone exists to carry on Oedipus’s family line.

I didn’t know enough about so many things back then to explain why I thought she was wrong. I could have an excellent discussion of it now, from many perspectives (literary, religious, women’s rights…) And I certainly couldn’t, back then, have framed the story within a concept of sisters actually betraying each other, as I can now, so I couldn’t imagine, actually, how Ismene’s lack of courage hurt her sister, and in ways that had nothing to do with her horrific death. 

At any rate, I absolutely had to read Veronica Roth’s novella, Arch Conspirator, when I found out it is a futuristic, dystopian retelling of Antigone. I was so excited to read it that I put it off for a few months, because I worried I’d be disappointed.

But I was not disappointed.

The way that Roth takes the main points of Sophocles’ tales and reimagines them on the last city on a dying earth is just—well, the only word for it is “clever.” She builds a fully-imagined world with very few words, then sets her characters to interact inside of it, playing out their parts. THe story is told from several perspectives, Antigone (who is called “Tig” by her siblings, a little tidbit that sums up exactly what I mean by “clever”), Ismene, Haemon, Eurydice. 

I loved it so much.

I couldn’t help contrasting the Amy who read Antigone all of those years ago with myself reading this retelling of it. I’m almost not the same person at all. I am no longer afraid to use my voice as I was during those days at BYU, when I intrinsically knew I did not fit in or agree with the ways many of my classmates viewed the world, but I didn’t know how to put it into words yet. But we share our strong opinions about books, still, and are both still moved by Antigone.

***SPOILER**

In Arch Conspirator, the ending is different: Ismene still goes to her sister too late, but she goes anyway, and asks Antigone if she can go with her. (Instead of being buried alive, Antigone is to be sent to space on the last functional spaceship on earth, which is kind of the same thing.) 

And Antigone says yes. 

Ismene realizes that her relationship with her sister is the thing that gives meaning to her life, and she takes action on that decision.

I honestly would likely not have read this book if I had realized that, at its core, Antigone is a story about sisters. I don’t think it hit me in that light when I read it at 27, but now? After all that has happened, I can’t see it any other way: the beating heart of the story is sisterhood.

That Antigone relents and doesn’t go into darkness alone as a defense mechanism, and that Ismene realizes her mistake before it’s too late, and then ACTS on that knowledge?

I don’t know that that is a thing that could happen in real life. But it both broke my heart and gave me…what? Not hope, actually. Not that my own Ismene would ever again act on our relationship mattering to her. But just…a little glimmer that maybe I don’t know the ending of this story yet.

Book Review: Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea

It had not taken them long after arrive in Glatton to understand that their service was not truly about the donuts and coffee. They had seen enough boys fail to return from a morning flight. The real service was that their faces, their voices, their sendoff might be the final blessing from home for some of these young pilots. The enormity of this trivial-seeming job became clearer every day.

There is so much historical fiction written about World War II that I have grown resistant to it. The sheer volume is overwhelming, and it can become repetitive: just another somebody’s interpretation of the impact a war can have. (Do I sound jaded? They just all can’t be full of excellent writing, strong character development, and meaningful interaction.) Sometimes it feels like WWII fiction is written simply because it will sell, but in a sense it almost starts to become a sort of…exploitation, somehow.

But I was strongly drawn to reading Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel, Good Night, Irene, when I read an early review that discussed how the book is based on his mother’s experiences during the war. The American Red Cross had a little-known program called Clubmobiles, which were large trucks outfitted with kitchens. Women managed these on bases and on the front lines of the war in the European theater, making donuts and coffee for the soldiers. As with most of women’s contributions to the wars of the twentieth century, most of the stories of the Clubmobiles haven’t been shared. I certainly had never heard of them, but the author’s mother managed one. Urrea worked for two decades, travelled many miles, and interviewed other “Donut Dollies,” as the women who ran the Clubmobiles were called, to write this novel.

I am so glad I set aside my no-WWII-fiction resistance to read this book, as it is amazing. At the center of the story are Irene and Dorothy, two women who are very different but form a strong, supportive, and honest friendship. There are romances, family relationships, experiences with soldiers and other Dollies, but this friendship is the core of the story. It felt authentic to me; the two women don’t always agree, and sometimes, during their long, slow drives through war-damaged country, they get on each other’s nerves. They don’t always understand each other’s choices, actions, or perspectives. But they always lean on and support each other.

 Since there were not women soldiers in WWII, we rarely see women in battle. But since the Clubmobiles were literally on the front lines, Irene and Dorothy are often right in the thick of it. They experience many of the crucial battles of the last year of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. They are in the middle of a small French town when it comes under the Germans’ war plan and have to fight to keep themselves alive. They help with liberating Buchenwald (a brutal chapter). The war is not something happening miles away, but only feet, and that makes it immediate both for the characters and the readers. (I had to take a break a few times, to gather my composure.) And through it all, they are there for each other.

Good Night, Irene is one of the best historical novels about World War II that I have ever read.

 

*****SPOILER WARNING*****

 

Because the novel is based on the author’s mother, I never doubted that Irene would make it through the war. I did not think Hans would (because Urrea is a Mexican-American and Hans was from Oregon), and I was iffy on Dorothy surviving.

So the way the novel ended, with Dot & Irene finding out, near the end of their lives, that the other had not, in fact, died in the crash of their Clubmobile?

At first it confused me. When I realized the chapter was talking about Dot taking a cross-country trip with her granddaughter, not Irene, I was at first the tiniest bit annoyed. I thought it might be something like Kate Atkinson did in A God in Ruins (another WWII novel I love), an alternative-universe thing, and I was a bit bugged. But when I realized that, no, they just really didn’t know the other was alive—I don’t know. It wasn’t the brutal ending I was expecting, and it was maybe a bit too coincidental (like, why would Dot want to visit Irene’s grave in New Jersey? Would she have a grave there if she was burned to death in the Clubmobile?) but I decided to let it be OK. It made me trust the author and want to read more of his work.

Book Review: The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

“That’s true for adults, too; after all we’re just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children. None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”

The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland is a story about vampires, centered on the character of Anna, a child in 1830s New York whose small village is convinced that the recent spate of illness is caused by the prince of darkness and his minions. When her father, a stoneworker who carves the gravestones of the village’s citizens, succumbs to the illness, she is rescued by her step-grandfather—who turns her into a vampire.

Anna isn’t a traditional vampire, however. Not deeply sensual or extraordinary violent, but a person who is seemingly impossible to kill and survives on blood (usually, as time passes, cat blood. Which kind of grossed me out, honestly). She is sent away from America to continue growing up—her body stops aging once she is no longer a child—to live in a small cottage in the forests of Eastern Europe. This section reads like a bit of a fairy tale, with a wise old woman woman, Piroska,  with some witch-like qualities and the two other boys she has also adopted, Vano, who is kind and filled with a different sort of wisdom, and Ehru, who is also a vampire.

It is here that Anya (her name changes several times throughout the novel) learns of  Czernobog, the god of endings, who pursues her throughout her many years.

As we read Anya’s story through time, we also read her contemporary story (if the 1980s counts as contemporary? Yes. Yes, of course it does.), wherein she has returned to the United States and is running a preschool for very small artistic children. One of them, Leo, begins to tug at her heart, and she becomes more and more involved in his family’s drama—but meanwhile her usually well-controlled hunger is becoming insatiable.

I really enjoyed much of this novel. I especially loved the historical sections of the book, and wished I knew more of Piroshka’s story (that could, I imagine, be its very own novel). I loved the writing style and the way the story was told.

There were some plot holes that ate at me a bit. How did she feed herself when she was living in the village near Mont Blanc during the war, or in Alexandria after? And the way the loss of one character’s baby felt medically incorrect really jumped out at me. 

The main point of the novel was Anna/Anya/Colette trying to figure out what it means to live the life that has been created for her. In a sense she lives on the margins of her own life, and it is the tug with Leo that reminds her of another child, Halla, which forces her to at last examine what she wants out of this world. She has struggled for her entire vampiric existence with the concept of living for eternity; it is a gift she wants to reject but she cannot figure out how to die. A memory of Halla reminds her that there are two types of eternity: that of nothing, and that of everything. Colette’s work to figure out this tension is the main thread of the contemporary part of the story. 

When I finished it, I really had to stop and wonder how I felt about The God of Endings. I really did love the reading experience, but the main conflict of Colette’s life felt…well, remarkably similar to the main conflict in the other vampire novel I read this year, Vampire Weekend. Eternal beings working through their conflict over being eternal. What can I, a mortal, take from that?

I pondered for a bit before writing this review, but I think what I am taking from it is that the shortness of mortal life is what makes it sweet. And that I still have things to do in whatever time I have left. (For example, now I really want to hike Mont Blanc!)

This novel was a bit The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, a bit The Bear and The Nightingale, a whole lot of good writing…but the tiniest bit empty, too. Glad I read it!

Book Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

     Whenever one does discover a moment of joy, beauty enters the world. Human beings, we can’t create energy; we can only harness it. We can’t create matter; we can only shape it. We can’t even create life; we can only nurture it.

   But we can create light. This is one of the ways. The effervescence of purpose discovered.

I’ve been excited to read Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson for quite a while. Mostly because it seems like everyone in Utah adores Brandon Sanderson (he is a local, after all) but it’s not a conversation I can really engage in as I am usually reluctant to start very long fantasy series.

But Tress is a stand-alone. It is set in a world with oceans made of spores that fall from the moons. These spores have different colors, depending on the moon, and do different, but always destructive things when water touches them. Tress lives on an island called The Rock, in the middle of The Emerald Sea where the spores are green and turn into enormous, writhing, destructive vines when they meet moisture. She is a window washer and her best friend is a boy named Charlie—who happens to be the son of the island’s ruling nobleman. The duke is not happy when he sees Charlie and Tress growing closer, so he takes Charlie off the island to find a wife, an escapade that does not end well for Charlie. Tress decides it is up to her to rescue him, and her adventures begin.

I enjoyed this one a lot. It’s compared to The Princess Bride, but if Buttercup went and did something instead of just pining for Wesley. It has a similar wry and whimsical tone, but mostly I just think it’s a fantasy with an adventuresome main character. Something fantasy novels do that annoys me is when the main character can just…do everything somehow, and this novel does not (to my relief) do that. Tress starts out as a person who is determined, creative, and inventive, but she has to figure out how to do things without any preternatural skill or strength. Her ultimate lesson is that asking for help isn’t weakness, but just a thing people sometimes do. The kick is that you have to live your life in a way that people want to help you. As this was a mildly painful thing for me to ponder (considering recent experiences of my own), I liked that idea but it wasn’t my favorite take away.

Instead, what I really loved is that Tress learns to wrestle with fear, and just how often a fear-based decision (instead of one made with facts and knowledge) is the wrong one. Circumstances for her to face her fear of the spores (a fear that every person on the planet holds) and in doing so she discovers qualities the spores possess that others don’t know.

So my little piece of wisdom I’ll take from Tress of the Emerald Sea is that reminder. I have been making decisions for the past 18 months based on the fear that there is something wrong with me that I can’t identify. That I haven’t lived my life in the way that would encourage people to want to help me (rather than the rejection I’ve been trying to overcome), the fear that I am a horrible person. But honestly, I don’t have all of the facts or knowledge to make assumptions about what happened, and so am deciding that out of fear instead of wisdom. Real life isn’t a novel, but I’m grateful for the reminder to examine my fears instead of letting them control me, and maybe when I face them I will find something I don’t already know.

Tress of the Emerald Sea is not high literature but it is full of wisdom, humor, courage, and fun. (Yes! I did have fun reading this, which is not something I can always say about the books I read.) There are images that will stick with me (the stone spires that grow in the Crimson Sea during rain; Tress’s walk across the ocean of spores; Tress’s butterfly cup.

I’m glad I read it.  

Book Review: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

I thought how strange it was that I ever feared the end. That I had ever tried to escape it. And like that, it was done. My hand releasing from its fist. The battle fought. The life slipped from this old tether.

I have been telling everyone I know who loves books about Simon Jimenez’s book The Spear Cuts Through Water.

(Well, everyone I know who won’t object to a few erotic queer love scenes.)

It’s kind of a hard book to explain. It has a framing device called the “inverted theatre,” which is an otherworldly theatre, a reflection on water, where many people are arriving to watch a play. One of the people is carrying a spear, a family relic given to her by her grandmother who used to tell her stories of the inverted theatre.

When the play begins, it is a story about the Moon Goddess, who was in love with the sea and so fell to earth to be with him—but then was trapped by the emperor. For many generations she has born the latest emperor one son, until this generation, when she has triplets. The performed play is the story of how she escapes and the battle that follows as the Triple Terrors try to put her back and regain control. Keema and Jun are the two main characters, bound in different ways to both the Moon Goddess and their pasts.

It’s hard for me to explain how much I loved this book. It’s partly that framing device, and it’s partly the adventure that Keema and Jun have. But it’s mostly the connections that are made between different generations of family. Who are we in the larger scope of the world and how do the stories of our ancestors affect us without us ever knowing? More, are the people who have died still with us in some way? What do we owe the dead, and what might they still owe us? And how are we brave, and what does bravery even look like? How are we ever absolved of our mistakes? What is death, anyway, and so what is life—the performance on the inverted theatre stage, or the theatre itself?

I don’t think everyone would love this novel. I can see the way the framing device might make it complicated to follow, and some of the story is told in second person which not everyone loves.

But for me? For me this novel is marvelous and healing and enthralling. It made me fear death less.

It’s my favorite book I’ve read so far this year.

(Keeping it short because really, it should just unfold for the reader with her knowing much other than to expect brilliance and occasional bouts of weeping.)

Book Review: The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

Kieta is just like all the rest, giving us impossibilities and calling them choices. 

I was feeling kind of blah about my 2023 reading choices as winter finally turned into spring. I had loved Demon Copperhead but also been traumatized by it. I’d been craving a really good fantasy but hadn’t found it. I’d started a dozen or so audio books that just hadn’t grabbed me. I hadn’t hated anything I’d read, and I’d had some good experiences, but I hadn’t unequivocally loved anything.

So maybe I can’t be blamed for not putting a ton of effort into finding a book to take to San Antonio at the end of March, when I flew to Texas with my life-long best friend so we could see Depeche Mode. Usually I spend at least four or five hours reading reviews and picking several possibilities for my travel reading. For this trip (which was just so…so good in ways I am still thinking about) I realized I didn’t have a book picked out just the day before we flew out, with no time at all to order anything (I’ve learned the hard way: never take a library book on a trip, as it will inevitably get damaged and you’ll have to pay for it anyway). So I went with The Gilded Ones, a book I’d purchased in February because A—it looked good and B—I always buy at least one book by an African-American writer in February, to mark Black History Month, even if I don’t get around to actually reading said book in February.

The Gilded Ones is a young adult fantasy that builds out of West African mythology and the culture of Sierra Leon. Girls in Deka’s culture must undergo the blood ceremony, which proves (or doesn’t) their purity. Girls whose blood is gold become outcasts, tortured and killed if they can be—but many with gold in their veins can only be killed in one specific way, unique to her. Deka, whose mother (who recently died) came from a different part of the country, has always been on the fringes of her community anyway, and so is determined to prove her purity, but her blood is gold. Her father abandons her to the village elders, who torture her with many different attempted deaths she always survives. She escapes this torture when a woman arrives in her village to take her to be trained as a soldier.

In a sense, this book is a take on the traditional hero’s journey: Young person who doesn’t know her importance leaves her small community on a quest to find something. But it is much more than that. The blurb calls it a “darkly feminist tale” and as you continue reading you understand why. The alaki (the girls with gold blood) are detested in their community, only allowed to become soldiers to fight the ever-growing threat of the deathshrieks, terrifying monsters whose shriek can kill. They have all been taught that girls are only worth anything if they are pure---modest, quiet, unobtrusive. (Sound familiar?) Yet Deka finds a way to make friends and find her strength, and as she does so she begins to realize that the things she doesn’t know about herself might be the key to freeing the alaki.

This isn’t a gentle book. There is a lot of violence and a horrific, disturbing twist. I sort-of thought of the twist, or some version of it, at the beginning of the book, then doubted myself, then watched for clues, then was sure I was right, then sure I was wrong because surely that couldn’t happen if the twist was true. I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion the novel comes to about violence in the first place.

But. I was absolutely enthralled with the story, and conveniently enough it was a perfect travel novel for me. The plot was not so complicated that I had to struggle to get back into the flow of it with all the interruptions that happen while you’re travelling. It has many of my favorite bookish traits: a strong female character who grapples to figure out what she believes about the world in contrast with what religion has told her to believe; strong friendships between women; a fully-imagined fantasy world with intriguing goddesses; the lingering impact of a lost mother; divine statues. A mysterious catlike creature. And running---running is important in this story.

I enjoyed this book immensely. I think it will prove a turning point: I’ve found my groove and will love more of what I read from now on.

Book Review: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

“It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.”

Reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver was a complicated experience for me.

This novel, a sort of modernized reimagining of David Copperfield (which I have never read because Dickens and I do not get along) tells the story of Demon, who’s born to a mom with a drug problem. They live in a single-wide trailer, helped out by their neighbor the Peggots, but it is not a happy existence. It gets worse when Demon’s mom gets involved with another man. He has few bits of brightness in his life—Maggot (his best friend and neighbor) and his family, a young, determined caseworker—but is mostly a struggling little kid. Then things get worse when Demon’s mom gets married to an abusive man named Stoner. From there his life is a series of more and more difficult struggles, interspersed with some upsides (like becoming a local football star). But the positive experiences and situations are always touched with a hint of menace; you never can believe he’ll get to keep anything good.

It was a complicated reading experience because on one hand, it is just so good. The writing brings the characters to life, and they are complex, many-sided individuals. Angus (“all I could think of was little Angus bearing those Hellboy eyes on her, all her life. Growing her skin of Leather”) and Ms. Annie will stay with me for a good, long while. I loved that Demon finds a sort of way out (if at least a mental escape) with art. I loved his experience with his grandmother, especially Mr. Dick and his book kites. I appreciated the way Demon’s father, who has died before the story begins, is nevertheless a character with influence. Appalachia came to life in my imagination, and I have had actual dreams about the Devil’s bathtub.

I’ve loved Barbara Kingsolver’s work since I read The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible is one of my top-ten favorite novels. Her writing skill is just so apparent in Demon Copperhead. I know some have complained that this one is too long, but for me the pacing was perfect. It told the story fully.

But on the other hand—this is a painful read. It explores the impact of the opioid epidemic in Appalachia, and that is an unrelenting nightmare itself. Toss in the poverty caused by the ending of the coal mines and the vacuum that created in the economy, and yes: It seems impossible for anyone to escape that community without scars. The people who hurt or damage Demon have themselves been hurt or damaged, and he turns that around both on others and himself. I often grew frustrated with Demon and his decisions, even while I understood why he made them. You make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive. Community and drugs and economy and family and social systems all seemed set against him, and then all of his choices made the impact even worse.

(Maybe because I sometimes did that myself as a teenager made it even harder for me to read.)

So every time I picked the book up, I did it with a sort of greedy reluctance. What would happen to Demon and the characters I’d started loving? And it was often awful, but his voice just rang out so true that the reading itself was delicious.

I was—I don’t think I’ve ever thought this about a novel before—I was so grateful when I finished it. Because at last I was finished. When I was done, I set it down on the floor by my chair, turned off my lamp, and said, out loud to no one at 2:00 a.m. in February darkness, “Thank God that is over.”

And so this book review went unwritten for months. I don’t know how to put into words what Demon Copperhead made me feel. It’s always hard to quantify a book—what does “good” even mean, what does “bad” mean?—but this was one of the hardest to verbalize. I was horrified and sorrowful for all of Demon’s difficult experiences but I loved reading about them, which makes absolutely no sense, but there you go.

That’s likely exactly what makes a memorable book.

Book Review: Robot and Monk Series by Becky Chambers

They still loved performing tea service—or at least, they loved what it had been. But as they tried to connect to what had once been so captivating, they felt nothing but yawning absence. A void where they’d once been filled.

I received a copy of A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers for my birthday, and decided I needed to revisit A Psalm for The Wild Built, which is the first book in the series.

I read it when it was fairly new but never wrote about it!

This fantasy series is set on a populated moon called Panga. At some point in the past, there was a human-caused environmental disaster that the ecosystems are healing from; around that time there was also the Awakening, when the robots that did the menial work of keeping humanity working gained consciousness and decided to leave society. Since then, robots have lived in the wilderness and kept to themselves; humanity has remodeled civilization, using what went wrong (it is never fully explained) to create better solutions. There isn’t the sharp difference between wealthy and poor, as there is no money but a system based on trade and doing good things for others. They’ve recycled the garbage of the old world into new buildings. Everyone does work that they love, and if you don’t love your work you can seek out something else to do. The rivers are finally clean again.

In this happy world lives Dex, who leaves his work as a monk doing work with plants in the monastery’s garden to become a tea monk. Tea monks perform tea services in towns across the moon. They bike a wagon from town to town, and people who are tired, lonely, frustrated, or stressed in some way arrive. They listen to them and prepares a cup of tea in a combination of flavors he thinks will help them. And then they just listen.

Dex might be the best tea monk on Panga, but after a few years of doing it, the same feelings that caused them to leave the garden start to rise. One day they decide to leave the civilized part of the world and head off into the wild—where they bump into Mosscap, a robot who has been tasked to check up on humanity. Mosscap is supposed to go into the civilized part of Panga and ask people “what do you need,” but before it does, it continues into the wild with Dex, in search of a monastery ruin and the song of crickets.

In the second book, Mosscap and Dex return to civilization together, where they begin Mosscap’s quest.

These books are amazing. They are kind without being gentle, in the sense that while the characters (and the setting itself) is one with noble ideals, it doesn’t look away from the remaining unhappiness that might just be an inevitable part of being human. The society humanity has managed to create is one without poverty, hunger, or want. People’s needs are met and the gods are benevolent. There is kindness here that I cannot imagine living inside of. And yet, Dex still has that same human question: What is my purpose? What do I mean? Why am I even alive?

I think this is a story that is best to just experience (maybe why I didn’t write about the first book when I read it?). Because it is built on the concept that the universe is entropic at its core, the story sparks many thoughts in the reader. For me, where I am right now in my life: fifty-something, a bit unhappy with my work, questioning if I have done good things with my life—it did not give me any answers (Dex and Mosscap would know what I mean I think) but it did make me feel less alone.

Book Review: Roses in The Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

     I hoped I hadn’t put the idea in the Aunty’s head that I was the kind of girl she was looking for. Was I a religious girl? I still read all my namaazes, even if Fagr was always late. I still read Qurab even though it was mostly on the weekends.
     But I knew “religious girl” was code for something that had nothing to do with Allah. It had to do with how a girl did whatever her husband and the community said, how a girl wouldn’t question the way things were set up.
     I knew the Aunty’s nephew was like the young uncles from my childhood. For them, us first-gen Pakistani girls were a forest of green cards. We were groomed like Christmas trees, thinking we were in the beautiful woods, thinking we were growing, but we were just being readied to be cut down.

Last fall, we had a little plumbing leak in the basement that led to several ah-ha moments for me.

In the damp closet were my boxes of stuff from before I got married. All the way from little art projects I made in kindergarten to my gymnastics medals and trophies and pins to the letters my friend sent me the year she was nannying and I was trying to finish high school. I went through all three of those boxes, discovering many things I’d forgotten about myself.

I consolidated from three boxes to one large and one small box, but I definitely kept all of my journals. Some of the notebooks I found were from my eighth-grade English class, where we had the assignment to write every day. The Amy I found in those notebooks! I was so young and innocent and yet I was still perceptive; I wrote a lot about discrepancies I saw but I also missed other contradictions. (Like how, on a Thursday I wrote about how much my sister annoyed me and then, on the following Monday, I wrote about how much I admired something she’d done.) They were both delightful and difficult to read; the difficulty was the innocence and naivete in my voice.

I thought about those journals a lot while reading Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman. If I had to explain the book in one sentence, it would be: A 1980s-infused Pakistani-American queer revision of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

It tells the story of Razia Mirza, who is growing up in Corona, a neighborhood in Queens, in the early 80s. She is a first-generation American born to parents who immigrated from Pakistan and who raise her with many Pakistani traditions---food, dress, relationships, and perspectives. The story starts when she is in elementary school and ends near the last days of high school, so we get to experience how her friendships and relationships change as time passes.

I loved so many things about this book. I often struggle with reading about Muslim-based cultures because the demands placed on women are so jarring to me. But as Razia pushes against her parents’ and society’s expectations for her, what I discovered is that religion seems to be religion; to a large extent it exists to restrict women and keep men in power, and in that sense Razia’s culture is not much different than my own. I cheered for her as she began to figure out how what she wanted to do with her life would be different than what her parents wanted. There is one scene that made me literally weep, when her mother throws away the clothes she has been carefully gathering and curating, so she can go to school dressed in clothes she loves (rather than the acceptable but unfashionable ones her mother wants her to wear). The balance she tries to maintain between keeping her parents happy (or at least in the dark) and being true to who she is becoming---likely all adolescents have to strive for that, but I think in strict religions it is even more complicated.

I’m glad that the book discusses Razia reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; it felt like a nod from the author that yes, she was inspired by Betty Smith’s work. There are several connections but it is a story whose arc grows out of that material without copying it.

But I can’t say I loved it without reservation, because while in many places the writing was beautiful, in others it felt like the voice in my eighth-grade notebook: painfully naïve and innocent. This was most noticeable when Razia was also in middle school, so maybe it was an intentional choice by the writer and I’m just too jaded to stay happily inside that perspective.

But there were a few plot holes, such as the “spider” in her friend Saima’s bed, which is hinted at as being perhaps sexual abuse but never actually explained and Razia’s friendship with Saima. It falls apart in unexpected ways, which is OK, but I absolutely expected a confrontation of sorts. Instead, there were hints that Saima would just really turn out to be a “religious girl” but Razia never pursues any sort of closure with her former closest friend.

I could be OK with those issues, though, if the ending hadn’t completely fallen apart.

SPOILERS

 

The book ends with Razia running away. She is still a high school student and a minor. She is headed for Boston to live with her girlfriend’s aunt, to escape her parents who want to send her to Pakistan to an arranged marriage (to hide the fact that she is a lesbian).

That’s it. That’s the solution. She runs away. Gets on the bus headed out of Grand Central Station.

How is that the end?

It felt very much like an ending I would have imagined when I was the girl writing in my notebook in eighth grade. No resolutions or answers. How will she survive? What life will she have without even a high school diploma? What will happen when her parents figure out where she is?

I never need a happy ending to a book. My problem wasn’t that the ending wasn’t happy. It was that it was completely unrealistic and wildly pointless. It was a resolution without a resolution, really.

But I also enjoyed the reading experience.

So! Roses in the Mouth of a Lion is continuing with the streak I’ve had all year: books I like OK but don’t absolutely adore without reservation.

Hoping to end this streak soon by reading something I can love without qualifications.

Book Review: Vampire Weekend by Mike Chen

Was I just living a depressing vampire life with a really excellent soundtrack?

Vampire Weekend by Mike Chen tells a different kind of vampire tale than I’ve ever read. In the book's world, vampires definitely exist, but not living that sexy, sucking-on-necks kind of lifestyle. Instead they keep their existence secret.

Louise Chao is such a vampire. She lives in San Francisco and works the night shift at a hospital; her role as a janitor gives her easy access to expired blood, which keeps her living. She’s recently started trying to find a new punk rock band she can play guitar in, but it’s not going well. And then a distant relative, Ian, kind of shows up on her doorstep, changing her quiet world. 

This book made me think about why I love the books I love, the reading prejudices I have, and why I stick with a book and finish it rather than just returning it. One of the literary tropes I avoid is what I think of as the romance-novel finish: a complication is set up and then the point of the plot is to turn the complication into a happy ending. The story doesn’t necessarily have to have romance for the trope. It’s just the sense you get as the story moves along: there’s definitely going to be a happy ending.

I avoid those books.

What does it say about me that I don’t want a happy ending? That I am a miserable person who steeps in sorrow, relishes tragedy, savors darkness? Maybe. Or maybe it’s my need to keep my shell up. If you go around hoping for happy endings for your literary characters, the next step is hoping for happy endings for yourself, and. Well. That’s just setting yourself up for disappointment.

(Which is ridiculous because my life has plenty of happiness. I just don’t trust that it will stick around.)

Anyway, at first this novel felt like it was a romance-novel-finish vampire tale with some really cool punk rock musical references thrown in. I almost didn’t stick with it. But it ended up being the only book in the car with me one day when I had to wait for an hour with nothing to do. So I bought myself a Crumbl cookie and started reading.

And I kind of fell in love with the story.

To be honest: it kind of really IS a romance-novel-finish vampire tale with some really cool punk rock musical references. But I also just really enjoyed Louise’s journey as she lets herself be more open to happiness, and to exploring the way she really wants to live, and to figure out where she fits in her community.

Plus it made me dig out my Blondie albums, so yes: I had fun reading this book. “Fun” is not something I seek out in my books, but this one hit the right balance between fun and meaningful.

I’m glad I read it.