Tokyo Heist by Diana Renn

Standalone, Viking, 2012, 373 pgs.

Violet was prepared for her summer vacation to be average, if enjoyable: a visit to her artist father’s place while her mother does graduate research means getting to study his technique while she works on her own. She doesn’t expect a sudden trip to Japan, home of her favorite comics and cartoons, where her father is commissioned to paint a mural for a museum. Or for the museum to give her access to some of Japan’s most important historical art, anime, manga, or otherwise. In a lot of ways it’s a dream trip for her as an artist and a huge fan of all things Japanese. What she certainly doesn’t expect, though, is to become involved in a case of stolen Van Gogh sketches that the museum was using to demonstrate ukiyo-e’s wide-reaching influence. But with her family and friends being threatened by a mysterious third-party until the sketches are handed over, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to solve the mystery.

This book poses me with an interesting conundrum: how do you review a mystery novel that only sort of works as a mystery novel?

You’d think something that mostly fails in the genre it advertises itself as would fail as a piece in general, but that’s not really the case here. This, instead, works on other levels, and it’s more that the mystery aspects never managed to be the main draw.

Or, at least, they never manage to fully hold together, for multiple reasons. Oh, it has the structure of a classical mystery plot, with the initial crime to set the scene and enough clues to let the audience figure it out for themselves. As much as I usually like mysteries, though, this one never really worked for me.

The first, most obvious, reason for this was that I thought the whodunit was glaringly obvious, from about the first thirty pages of the book. That naturally kills a lot of the tension, but I’m also willing to forgive the novel for it a little bit. Sometimes with a mystery you get lucky and the right thing just sticks out to you right away.

No, the real, and probably more legitimate problem, comes from the second issue, which is that Violet, our lead, makes for an incredibly unconvincing detective.

See, this wants to be a sort of mystery solving teens thing, a la Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, but Violet is far from Nancy Drew. She’s not meticulous, or sneaky, or even particularly logical. Instead, she’s an overemotional teenage girl, with a giant chip on her shoulder because of her deadbeat dad, a tendency to overreact because she doesn’t really understand her own feelings, and a complete willingness to barge her way into situations she doesn’t belong in.

And while the last serves her well among a group of adults who aren’t taking her seriously, the other two cause problems. Part of the reason the whodunit was so obvious in this was because a lot of the red herrings involve Violet making Grand-Canyon-sized leaps of logic based on personal dislike. Lady who’s dating her dad (and replacing her mom) is kind of awkward around the surprise stepdaughter and frustrated with said father’s inability to commit? Obviously the culprit. Someone’s sort of a jerk to her, or even just has issues with a teenager in the middle of an international art theft case? Wait, new top suspect!

She never even suspects the actual culprit until late in the game, even though she knows the huge stakes he has in the whole ordeal, because he’s nice to her and panders to her need to be important to the case.

It’s not that she can’t be clever, but her tendency to jump to conclusions often undermines the parts where she is. She’s good at finding the pieces of clues that she needs, but really bad at actually putting them together. This makes it hard to rejoice in her cleverness in figuring things out, or in her success when she has it. It’s hard to celebrate someone tripping face-first into an accidental win.

But she’s also a lot of the fun of the book. She’s a pretty strongly written character, and a pretty authentically teenagery one at that. She’s insecure and is only barely starting to understand herself. In fact, for large chunks of the story self-awareness is something she can’t manage: even the issues with her dad’s girlfriend are mostly issues with her dad that she can’t or won’t connect to him out of love.

That’s relatable, and I appreciate it. Ditto her squealy, excitable friendships and her awkward, painful crushes.

Also relatable: the stories she creates. She’s an artist working on a manga (in the style of her favorite comics) that gets every bit of personal drama she experiences shoved into it. She, in classic self-insert style, becomes the heroine, everyone she dislikes become villains, and it’s so full of enthusiasm and lacking in polish that it’s the most true-to-life teenage creation I’ve ever seen in a fictional world. I mean, I know that’s exactly the sort of thing I was writing when I was fifteen. Tying it all together is the prose, which would be a little overly poetic for either an adult or a more logical lead, but fits perfectly for the character established here.

Suffice to say, she’s about as charming as she is frustrating, and that really works to the book’s benefit.

In fact, the only thing I was disappointed in with regards to Violet on a personal level was the romance. Given the fact that I normally don’t like romance, I usually wouldn’t say this, but it really needed more time and development than it was given, especially considering it factored so heavily into the ending. Instead, up until that ending, we get some base establishing stuff, and then barely anything at all over the course of the middle of the book.

I feel like I’d also be remiss if, as a fan, I didn’t mention my slight disappointment in the anime/manga theme here. It’s a little strange, really; you can tell the author’s not a fan herself and is getting her information from people who have been out of the fan base for a while. The story was published in 2012, and most likely set pretty close to that date. And for that, the references are pretty dated, and the timeline is pretty off.

I haven’t heard a thing about Fruits Basket since probably 2004, which Violet is supposed to be a huge fan of. Where Inuyasha was airing on Cartoon Network for years after everyone had forgotten about Furuba, Violet says Rumiko Takahashi is too old-school for her.

And that’s not even mentioning that nothing that came out after 2006 is ever talked about, which is odd for a character who’s supposed to be actively paying attention to the subculture. I haven’t really been paying attention for a good ten years, and I was still waiting for the author to name-drop something that made up the 2010’s anime landscape, like Baccano or Haruhi.

It’s not a major part of the story, nor would I really want it to be, so it doesn’t interfere too much. But, well, it’s just off enough to be bothersome, especially if you know the fandom and have been around for a while. And since it’s not a huge part of the story, and it’s clear it’s not really coming from the author’s investment, it sort of makes me wonder why it’s here. You could have replaced any purpose it had with a general interest in Japanese culture, which was given a lot more love and research anyway.

Which brings me back to the initial conundrum. I can’t recommend this for mystery fans, and I can’t recommend this for anime fans. It fails as a mystery novel and as a nerdy theme piece.

So who can I recommend it to? Well, if you want general teenage hijinks or a decent character piece, then you could do worse than giving this a look. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it’s perfectly light and fun in its own way.

Snacktime Reviews II–Paperback Boogaloo

So, once again, books have been piling up far faster than I can review them, and my personal backlog is becoming unreasonable. And you know what that means! Put out a bunch of tiny reviews to blow through the to-do list. Thankfully there are always a couple of titles on that to-do list that, for whatever reason, I find I can’t dig into too much. As always, these are just books where I don’t have that much to say about them. It doesn’t make them good, it doesn’t make them bad, it just means I didn’t find that much to talk about. Without further ado, then.

#1—The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

Standalone, Speak, 2009, 309 pgs.

Dade’s house is downright stereotypical; it has everything an upper-middle class home in the suburbs should. A huge, sprawling layout with way more space than his family needs. Ridiculous gadgets like a refrigerator that has an inset television. A collection of broken relationships formed by a group of desperate people, all struggling to find any shred of meaning in their lives. You know, the usual. Ok, so maybe Dade’s life isn’t perfect. In fact, it often kind of sucks: his boyfriend’s still incredibly closeted and throwing around slurs to compensate, his dad’s cheating on his mom, and neither of his parents are willing to get off his back about his nonexistent life plans. What’s a boy to do the summer before college, except try to find some kindred spirits and sort out his life as best he can.

The takeaway here is pretty simple: the prose and characters were good, but this book felt outdated in a multitude of ways, beyond it not being my sort of story at all. Trying to avoid suburban ennui and people angsting about their ordinary lives is half the reason I don’t much bother with literary fiction. Beyond that, I typically have a huge amount of trouble connecting at all to characters who care too much about being cool, or worry too much about being cringey. As such, this was never going to be my book, but if that is your sort of thing, this is pretty solid. Sure there are the points where this feels like it should have been set twenty years earlier than it was: the author seems to not have noticed that malls as both shopping centers and teen hangout spots have gone into a free fall, or that hip-hop is not talking about the same things it was in the mid-90’s, or even that the boredom of a comfortable life in the suburbs is a worry that not that many people have today. But, as I said, the characters feel real and three-dimensional enough and the writing itself is a step above the typical YA standard. If this is your genre, there’s a good amount here to like.

#2—The Stars Never Rise by Rachel Vincent

The Stars Never Rise Book 1, Delacorte, 2015, 316 pgs.

Life under a totalitarian religious state would be hard for any teenage girls, let alone two whose mother has decided to commit to a very important schedule of lying in bed all day. Without anyone to support them, it’s incredibly hard for Nina and Mellie to get enough money for food, keep appearances up in their very strict school, and avoid the interfering eyes of the church. And that’s not even mentioning the demons that run rampant outside the walls of their town. Suffice to say, life is tough. So, when Mellie comes to Nina with a life-destroying secret that she can no longer hide, it leads to Nina making some rash choices. And if that leads to Nina discovering her own life-destroying secret, then? Well, then life becomes nearly impossible.

Out of the three, this was the one I probably remember the least about. It didn’t leave much of an impression on me at all, even closely after I’d finished it. What I do remember boils down, mostly, to two points. The first is that it was trying to say way too many things at once. Good dystopias work when they pick an issue and think that through in-depth, but by around page sixty we’d touched on everything from prison labor, to reproductive rights, to the sort of generically oppressive government that censors news broadcasts and forces people to become members of The Party in order to have any chance at a future. And that’s even cutting a couple of topics out. Slow down book; you are allowed to let things breathe. The other is what is possibly the stupidest love triangle to ever exist, even in YA, which is saying something. I won’t give anything away, but be prepared for some hearty laughter if you do end up reading this. That said I did like the way this book went about portraying its post-apocalypse. An equivalent to the zombie uprising may have happened, but aside from quadrupling down on the “safety” side of the safety/freedom divide, society is still basically functioning. Technology exists, social institutions are still up and running, and we even get mentions of countries that aren’t America! It’s a little refreshing to have something in the genre that’s more twisted modernity than desert wasteland.

#3—Shanghai Faithful by Jennifer Lin

Standalone, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 332 pgs.

In 1949 Chairman Mao took power and created the People’s Republic of China, splitting Jennifer Lin’s father, and his wife and children in Philadelphia, from the rest of the family in the Mainland for decades. When travel resumed between the two nations in the 1970’s, the family then jumped at the chance to reunite, and Dr. Paul Lin brought his young children with him. For all the joy of the long-delayed reunion, though, it was clear that something had broken in the family. Christian for generations, and seen as unforgivably tainted with foreignness in a nationalistic, communist China, the intervening decades had been hard on them. That trip, and all the things left unsaid, the deep cracks left unhealed, would haunt Jennifer for years. This memoir is her attempt to find out what caused those cracks, to fill in the family history left untold. It stretches from her great-great-grandfather, a fisherman in the 1800’s, when Christian missionaries were just beginning to forge their way into the country, to the present day, with her still living family.

This is mostly a short review because I have a hard time reviewing non-fiction, meaning, when I can’t talk about plot structure or character development I find myself at a loss as to what I can talk about. That said I really enjoyed reading this. Its two main topics, the history of Christianity in China and the way that interacted with China’s Cultural Revolution, are both absolutely fascinating on their own, and I probably would have enjoyed the book for that alone. Beyond that, Lin clearly took this project on as a labor of love. Her research here is as detailed and rigorous as it could possibly be, and when translating that into a coherent story she’s very good at painting beautiful, emotive pictures for the audience. The book does presume you have some background on Chinese history and culture already, and so can get a little confusing if you don’t; I found myself looking something up about every thirty or so pages. That said, if you find the topic at all interesting and either have the background or are willing to do a little legwork on your own, I highly recommend this.

Stranger Than Fanfiction by Chris Colfer

 

Standalone, Little Brown and Company, 2017, 295 pgs.

Cash’s life should be going well. He’s rich, and famous, and plays one of the most beloved characters on a TV show with a huge, dedicated following. He has thousands of fans cosplaying his iconic look, obsessing over his character’s fictional relationships, and even just milling around hoping to get a glimpse of him. Instead Cash’s life is sliding downhill. His secrets are eating him alive, to the extent that his annoying costars are staging interventions and he’s even thinking about quitting the show that made his career. Maybe that’s why, on some reckless whim, he accepts an invitation for a road trip from four fans. Because Topher, Mo, Sam, and Joey certainly didn’t expect him to accept, however much they’ve built their lives and friendships around being fans of Wiz Kids. It’s a life changing offer for them, the opportunity to spend a week hanging out with their favorite actor. Just, maybe, not exactly in the way they expect.

Hoo boy. This is gonna be a doozy.

There are many, many problems with this book. Many of these many problems I was going to excuse by way of this being the author’s first, but, having looked it up, apparently that’s not true. I don’t know how you manage to publish more than one novel and have things come out so confused and flat, but here we are.

Let’s start with the basics, though, because really, this could have been very interesting.

The story centers mostly around Cash, a former child actor who plays the lead in the eminently popular Wiz Kids, a show which, from the description, sounds like some unholy Harry Potter/Dr. Who mashup with the aesthetics and production values of something that aired on TeenNick in the late 90’s. On a whim he agrees to take a road trip cross-country with a group of four super-fans, and together they have adventures and grow and learn about themselves, and all that jazz.

Ultimately, though, it’s a tale about fandom, as seen through the eyes of an actor who’s the focus of that sort of devotion. And that could have been both fascinating and timely, especially when written by someone who’s actually experienced the weight of a fairly crazy group of fans.

Especially today: the internet connects people. One way it’s done that is by making access to fandom easier for everyone, but by the same token it’s also made access to content creators easier for everyone, for better or for worse.

How many stories of creators quitting social media altogether over fan interactions have we gotten in the past couple of years? More than I’ve ever seen before. What I’m saying is, a book exploring the ways in which you can now just link your favorite actor to your porny fantasies, or send a writer death threats over a plot twist you disliked, as well as the ways in which you really, really shouldn’t, could have been important.

Even just a book about the way that it can be a burden to constantly have fans’ simple, non-intrusive hopes and expectations put on you could have been great. It’s a side of things that those of us invested in media don’t often think about, but one that we’re going to have to start taking into account as we gain more and more access to the people who make the stuff we like.

So this is a great premise, but, well, there’s a but here.

The problem comes two-fold in the execution.

The first issue is that the novel seems to be fairly unsure of what it actually wants to be. You could easily go the send-up route with this, and parts of the book do trend that way. Unfortunately, other parts of the novel want to be a deep, heart wrenching story of five people’s lives changing irrevocably, and while these two things could work together, here they have a tendency to undercut each other instead.

Case in point: Colfer has to establish early on that Cash’s life is a little screwed up, so he opens with him tossing back some unnamed pills, some pot-infused candy, and washing it down with some alcohol before going out to face his fans at a convention. This is standard, but it’s standard for a reason; it’s effective at conveying what needs to be conveyed. But then he ends this very depressing section with “His preconvention cocktail had done the trick!,” exclamation point included. Whee! Isn’t numbing your emotional pain so fun!

I would like to read that bit as nihilistically sarcastic, but honestly, so much of this is so earnest that it’s hard to. It’s actually hard to read the tone in general. In fact, because of the novel’s pretensions at being deep and meaningful even its obvious jokes fall flat. Half the time they feel less like jokes and more like barely veneered finger-wagging. Now kids, did you know transphobia is wrong?

The constant back and forth makes the narrative non-functional, as either a send-up or a drama. It’s too serious for the former, and too silly for the later.

The other problem also relates to the novel’s need to be deep and meaningful, and it’s, put bluntly, that Colfer can’t quite pull it off. Most of the big emotional moments here feel more like soap-opera level melodrama. There’s a very heavy, melancholy car ride at the very end that I just couldn’t help but roll my eyes at because nothing in the story had earned it.

Some of this has to do with the tone-deaf prose style, yes. There are so many exclamation points in this thing that I spent half the novel with that Pratchett quote about underpants on heads floating through my mind. But most of it is the symptom of a much larger problem, which is the author’s unwillingness to give actual depth to anything.

Gay people are all perfect angels, who never have any nasty personality quirks and are just “so accepting of every race, culture, and nationality” that they’re nearly god’s chosen (p. 85). I, uh, guess “no femmes, no fats, no asians” isn’t a thing in this world? There’s a scene where our characters balk at the idea of partying because they’re nerds, and lord knows nerds never do anything like go out with their friends. Groups are hivemind stereotypes here.

Even Cash’s issues eventually get boiled down into some Live For the Moment, I Hope You Dance blah, because dealing with character flaws and resolving internal personality contradictions is hard.

It’s not that I think the novel really needs to go into the intragroup conflicts of the queer community or show its teenage protagonists talking about how they’ve totally gotten drunk hundreds of times before; those would all be unnecessary tangents. But I do need it to give me something more than one-note flatness to dig into. Those examples up there are up there not because I want to see those things actually addressed, but because they’re indicative of the general demeanor of the book, which is all very surface level.

Which is the real issue here; everything is just surface level. Its understanding of fandom: surface level. Colfer’s clearly aware that cosplay and fanfiction exist, but knows very little about the dynamics underlying those communities. Its understanding of how to create drama: surface level. Have someone be dying, that’ll do the trick, right? And worst of all, his characters: surface level.

Look, I just really need your characters to be more than Gay Dude, Trans Dude, Child Actor, and Nerds #1 and #2. To illustrate just how bad this gets, consider: I read this book a couple of months ago and had forgotten entirely that Nerd #2 (the girl one) existed at all. That is, until I started going through my notes to write this and had a moment of “wait, crap, there were four of them!?”

That? Should not happen. Characters are incredibly important, and having them be that forgettable is a major problem. For the leads all I can tell you is what boxes they tick. I know nothing about their actual personalities. Cash probably gets the best of it because he’s allowed to be a little snarky and something other than a wide-eyed ingénue, but even he falls into some blatant stereotypes.

Which, deep and meaningful? Not being willing to do more than scratch the surface fundamentally undercuts that. You want me to buy your take on a subculture, then you have to do the research. You want me to weep at your drama, then you need to be willing to let it grow by digging into the details. And you want me to care about your characters, you need to be able to give them more than a school-cafeteria table designation. And if you can’t, for god’s sake, at least try to make it funny.

Eon by Alison Goodman

Eon Series Book #1, Firebird Fantasy, 2008, 531 pgs.

Four years ago Eona cut her hair, donned a pair of trousers, and ran, as fast as she could, away from the salt mines, to become the boy Eon in the house of her grouchy, exacting master. He pulled her away from that life of poverty and abuse because she has the rare ability to see the energy dragons that protect their kingdom, and the even rarer ability to see all of them. She’s valuable, even as a girl, when women are forbidden from becoming one of the Dragoneyes who wield the dragons’ energy. Talented enough to be worth the risk of hiding her gender to get her into the test. It’s a gamble for everyone involved: Eona desperate to avoid being sent back to the mines, the servants she’s grown up with pinning their hopes on her to keep from becoming destitute outcasts, and her master urgently trying to return to a position of influence in the court. Because the balance of power is shifting there; has been for years, with the Emperor growing older and more feeble. And with her connections to the former Tiger Dragoneye, Eona is about to find herself right in the middle of the growing war.

Minor Spoilers Ahead

I always say that good characters can make up for a lot of sins with me, and conversely, that it’s hard to have a novel I really love without them. Your book may have the most beautifully thought out world, the most intricate magic system, the most artfully structured plot, but for a lot of people (including myself) that’s going to generate, at most, academic interest.

Stories build their flesh and blood on the characters that populate them, and most live and die by whether or not they can make their audience care about those characters.

And I think this book is the best example of that principle that I’ve come across in a good, long while. I’ll be honest: there’s a lot about it that’s frustrating. Not anything particularly heinous, given, but I do admit that in the early parts of the story I was rolling my eyes and thinking this was going to be a slog.

First, there’s the setup, which is incredibly generic, at least for YA and Midgrade fantasy. It’s Ancient China instead of Medieval Europe, but that still comes with a society that’s very hierarchical and patriarchal, leading to a beginning that has everything that usually comes with that territory. Princes, politics, brewing revolution, and most notably, women being forbidden from performing Dragoneye magic. Naturally, our lead is a girl pretending to be a boy in order to use her talents.

She’s also an underdog in pretty much every way, from having been essentially a slave before her master discovered her power, to said master being poor and out of favor at court, to having a bad leg that makes it impossible for her to perform some of the more physical aspects of the magic.

Oh, but then she’s secretly more powerful than all of the other Dragoneyes and destined to reawaken the lost Mirror Dragon, because she’s Special.

Put simply, the opening lays it on thick with, simultaneously, the general misery of her situation and with how much she is the chosen one. And it does it in a way that somehow feels both like everything that’s coming out today and also exactly like a Tamora Pierce novel that I might have picked up in 1998.

And while that setup is the worst of the problems, there are still plenty of little annoyances scattered throughout the novel. The love interest is kind of a jerk, and not in a fun, bickering couples sort of way. Eona, our lead, spends a solid two thirds of the book bullheadedly ignoring the obvious trick to making her powers work, which is incredibly frustrating, if true to the character’s worldview. And, silly and petty as it is, Goodman names one of her characters “Swordman Jian” which basically translates to “Swordman Sword.” So, there’s that.

For all that’s wrong with it, though, the problems never seem to overwhelm the book’s strengths. If the magic system doesn’t have much going for it in the way of actual structure, then the political background to the plot is meticulously thought out and fascinating. If the patriarchal society is a little cliché and overplayed, then the way Goodman uses it to inform Eona’s interactions with the world around her is poignant and striking. The plot of this is still fun, engaging, and adventurous, for all the clichés that make up the trappings of it.

And if Eona is a little frustratingly dense at points, you still feel for her because of the situation she’s been caught up in.

Like I said, the book’s saving grace really is its characters. With few exceptions they’re all wonderfully well developed, and as good as parts of the plot are, the people are really what kept me reading. I do honestly care what happens to them, and that’s the thing that’s probably going to lead me to buy the sequel.

They are also, for the most part the one wholly un-cliché aspect of the novel. Sure, Eona’s entire setup I’ve seen before, but the way her story plays out breaks type; having the girl-dressed-as-a-boy need to embrace her femininity isn’t groundbreaking, but having her need to do so to fight is a twist I can’t say I’ve seen. And the rest of the characters, pretty similarly, diverge drastically from where I would have guessed they’d go, based on their archetypes.

Given, a lot of what I’m trying to get at, especially with Eona, is in the development of the characters and the way they’re played, which is hard to describe, even with specific examples. Suffice to say that, aside from the beginning, almost none of what happens to them feels like it happens just because that’s how stories are supposed to go.

There are two standouts here. The first is Dillon, Eona’s friend from training who ends up being apprenticed to her main antagonist. Where he could have easily just been portrayed as a simple traitor, a minor villain for Eona to deal with, his slow slide into desperation and insanity after abuse at the hands of his master physically hurts to watch. He manages to be genuinely tragic in his own right, even without the broken relationship with the protagonist to back it up.

The second is Lady Jila, the favored courtesan of the emperor. Her type would usually be played as manipulative and scheming, and while I can’t say that’s completely absent here, she’s also genteel, kind, and loving. She plays the court’s games mostly to keep her people safe and her child alive.

But while those are the most genre-bending, my two favorites were probably Lady Dela and Ryko, both of whom have awesome, heart-wrenching backstories, both of whom serve as our main “in” to the revolution brewing in the background of the court, and both of whom are not the sort of characters who usually get love subplots. The two have a very sweet, almost Sam and Frodo-like relationship, except that this is likely to turn canonically romantic, and I find myself needing to see how it plays out.

And that’s really the best you can do as an author, isn’t it? To write characters so human and engaging to your audience that they’re willing to overlook any multitude of sins to get more of them? Plot details fade in a reader’s mind, but the way you feel about the people in the story rarely does.

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Standalone, Perigree, 1957, 175 pgs.
Translated from the Japanese Yukiguni by Edward Seidensticker

Along the western coast of Japan, in the mountains, the snow falls oppressively every winter. It’s a bleak and remote area, a somewhat barren countryside, not at all the place for an often-bored urbanite from Tokyo. Something there keeps drawing Shimamura back to it though, something revitalizing about the mountains and the forest, something charming about the tiny hot springs where he stays. Something intriguing about Komako, the geisha who he visits every year and who he’s been having an affair with. She’s a nice girl, sweet and bright, and strangely loyal to a man who she sees for maybe one week out of fifty-two. Shimamura can never quite bring himself to actually love her.

So, uh, funny story. I initially picked this up at a secondhand store, knowing absolutely nothing about it. I read the back, thought “Oh, a cheesy geisha story! I love cheesy geisha stories,” and bought it.

And then I started reading. This book began with an introduction from the translator, talking about the novel’s “haiku-like” prose and the author’s place in the new lyrical movement that was happening in Japan around the beginning of World War Two. Which is emphatically not the sort of introduction they put in front of cheesy geisha stories.

Confused, I looked it up. Yeah, this author won a Nobel Prize for literature. This novel was one of the three named specifically as reasons for that win.

I am officially out of my depth here: I know next to nothing about Japanese literature. I’ve watched a decent amount of anime and know what a haiku is, but that’s the equivalent of trying to really dig into Shakespeare on the basis of Doctor Who and the vague idea of iambic pentameter. I’m not sure I’m qualified to review this; I’m possibly qualified to review a modern light novel, but that’s about it.

So this is going to be more exploration than review, I guess. I don’t want to make a lot of hardline statements, because I know that I’m missing a lot of context, both culturally and in a literary sense.

I also don’t want to go too academic, partially because that could get really dry, really quickly and partially because several days of frantic googling do not an expert make. This did require some research on my part, though, and a short introduction to what the movement Kawabata was a part of was about, where it came from, and what it was reacting to isn’t a bad way to begin to work into this novel.

So, very shortly, Kawabata was part of a literary movement called the Shinkankaku-ha, or New Sensationalist School, which came up in Japan around the 1920’s and 1930’s as capitalism and urbanization became more prevalent forces in the country. Like a lot of literary movements, it was concentrated around a core group of authors who all had a roughly similar artistic ideology.

This specific group seems like they were trying to do something similar to the western Romantics, in that they were looking to inspire a more honest and spontaneous emotional reaction in their audience, and to get closer to the heart of a matter through that. The ideal here was to create “new sensations” or “new impressions” for the people reading their stories, in opposition to the, to their minds, stagnant and entrenched Japanese Naturalist movement, and to work under an ethos of “art for art’s sake,” unlike the political, proletariat literature that was also common at the time.

Their main influences, though, were the Modernists, specifically Paul Morand. Which makes sense, I suppose; they were reacting to a lot of the same societal forces that the Modernists were.

And, from a fairly ignorant perspective, Modernist is my overall impression of this piece. In everything from the style of the prose, to the way the characters are written, to the overall feeling of melancholy and loss that permeates the book, I kept coming back to the idea that this feels like a book written in the 1920’s while reading.

Let me pick out some of the major points here, though this is a pretty non-exhaustive list. I guess I’ll start with the prose, which is not quite disjointed, but definitely has elements of that. The mood or focus will switch quickly, characters speak in half-thoughts or things they want to say but can’t, and dialogue tags are almost non-existent. It’s the sort of book where you’ll have to reread a page because it’s sometimes a challenge to figure out who’s saying what, let alone what they’re actually trying to say to each other.

The emotions that a woman’s eye reflected in a train window inspire in Shimamura, our lead, are described in detail, but what each of these people are actually thinking about each other is never clearly spelled out.

The characters don’t feel like people I might have known, but they also don’t feel flat to me. They have that thing where they seem almost like walking reminders of what a culture has lost: disaffected from society, dissociated from their own feelings, but with sporadic bursts of intense emotion or connection that belie their underlying humanity. They trend toward the outcast, the unwanted, those that society has left behind.

I don’t know that I can say they feel real, but there’s still depth there. Even if human connection is hard to come by; one of the points the author keeps coming back to with Shimamura is the idea that if he understands something too much, if he can’t keep it idealized, then he can’t love it and has to throw it away. And this applies to everything, including his lovers.

It seems less experimental in form, to me, but there’s every chance that’s a combination of my lack of knowledge in the Japanese literature that preceded it and my reading it in translation.

I can’t say I’ve ever read any of Morand’s work, but I do know that if Joyce of Woolf don’t do much for you, even at their less crazy, not stream-of-consciousness points, this is also probably not something you’ll like. It has a similar feeling to those things; everything is loss, and jilted hope, and the characters’ lives not being what they want, all told in strange, small moments.

Which is not to say this feels entirely like a western Modernist piece. The beauty in transience, a particularly Japanese ideal, weighs heavily here: the setting is a country bath house, a place people pass through but never stay at. As is, I have a sneaking suspicion, the lead’s being drawn to Komako because she’s rough, natural, and unpretentious.

That said, I’m fairly certain I’m missing a lot of what this book is trying to do. It’s the sort of novel that cries for essay-length analyses of single paragraphs, done with far more knowledge of where this author is coming from than I have. I can’t say it wasn’t an interesting read, though, and I may have to do some more research and come back to it.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

Wayward Children Book 1, Tom Doherty Associates, 2016, 169 pgs.

Nancy was once an attendant to the Lord of the Dead himself; after she went through her door, into that other world, she learned quickly to stand still as a corpse, to let the quiet of those colorless halls overtake her. Then the Lord of the Dead sent her back to her own world, so she could be sure she wanted to stay, as though she wasn’t already. Back to her parents and their movement and color and noise. And then, because she refused to denounce her “kidnappers,” from her parents to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Everyone at the school is like her, once the chosen hero of a fairyland or the favorite daughter of some mixed-up, candy colored world. And like her, all of them are trying to heal, trying to cope with the idea that they may never get home again, and trying to keep up hope that they will.

You know, I really thought this book was going that hit me where I live. This was sold to me, basically, as a story for the people who never got to go through the looking glass but always really wanted to, and yes, well, I guess I have to raise my hand there. I was generally expecting to imprint on this book.

I didn’t quite.

Which is not to say that this wasn’t good, or that I wasn’t emotionally invested at all. Just that I was sort of thinking this was going to be another Fangirl, and it wasn’t for me.

That sort of thing is pretty subjective, though, and I can see where and why others could imprint on this in the way that I didn’t. This is only the second book of hers that I’ve read, but in both of my experiences, McGuire’s been a wonderfully solid and inventive writer. Not only does she seem to be consistently good with story structure and character building, she also seems to be consistently interesting.

I’ll get back to that last bit later, but the takeaway here is that, while I didn’t feel some soul-deep connection to the novel, I did really enjoy this book. I was just expecting a little less murder mystery and a little more soul-searching. This is more a question of scale than of content, and even emotionally it definitely had its moments.

I liked pretty much all of the leads, and their struggles and tragedies were relatable. From Kade’s knowledge that he was kicked out of his world, essentially solely, for being trans, to the unfair suspicion leveled against Jack and Jill because of the darkness their world involved, to Nancy’s desperate longing for her world’s stillness and quiet, they all scan pretty well to issues that people might actually have to deal with.

And there are some beautiful, heart-wrenching passages here that detail exactly what it feels like to finally be seen as yourself, to finally find the place where you belong, and then to lose that. McGuire’s prose is beautiful throughout; I started pulling out quotables around page one and never really stopped. It didn’t strike straight to my heart, but this is clearly a story where the author has something to say. I may not have had that soul-deep connection to it that I was looking for, but, again, I can see where others would.

I want to be clear on this: my saying I wasn’t as emotionally invested in this as I was expecting to be in no way does justice to how much I actually enjoyed this book. I was expecting a lot, going in.

And it’s also that my enjoyment of it had more to do with something else. Like I said, McGuire’s always interesting, and in a different way than I usually mean that. Usually I’m praising a unique environment or a plot element that I’ve never seen before, or maybe a different take on a stock character, when I say something is “interesting.”

Given, a lot of that is here. McGuire, though, seems to have an almost academic interest in dissecting and classifying stories. Indexing may have been using the pre-existing Aarne-Thompson-Uther index to do that, but here she’s created her own scale to classify the relatively modern genre of portal fantasy, a sliding X and Y axis between Virtue and Wickedness, and Logic and Nonsense, respectively. And the characters spend so much of the novel discussing their own worlds and where they fit in to that rubric that you almost find yourself doing it too, with your own favorite fantasy worlds.

The entire plot is, also, notably, the part of this story that no one ever tells. What happens when you come back from Oz and know it’s not a dream, but everyone is telling you it is? What happens when you step into the wardrobe again and find that now it’s just some musty old coats and a wooden back-board?

How do you deal when the place where you were hero and ruler and chosen one spits you out and you return home to be a powerless child? Only with all your memories and scars and trauma intact?

It takes the sort of person who thinks deeply about genre and genre conventions to write a story like this, the sort of person who takes joy in picking at what-ifs and loose threads. And McGuire certainly seems to have thought about this particular problem for years; my introduction to her was this song, which I first found almost a decade ago.

While I can’t say I’ve read her entire catalogue or anything, I think that unapologetically meta element may be a feature in a lot of McGuire’s books. It’s definitely part of what’s drawn me to the two I’ve read.

That ability to think of your narrative as a story first and foremost, to use all the variations on a type that you can think of to explore all the ways that a given genre could go, and to pick out the problems caused by the typical tropes is something I really appreciate. It speaks to me of expertise and broad understanding; McGuire knows the genres she’s writing in, loves the genres she’s writing in, and is willing to take them apart like Tinker Toys and reassemble them. It’s less uniqueness and more critical thinking, that makes McGuire’s books really interesting.

I liked this book so much because you could so easily take the structures it provides and apply them out to everything else. It’s the sort of novel that makes you think about genre as a whole. That was one of the things I appreciated about Indexing, too, and whoops, we’re back to “stories about stories.”

Basically, this book fed the part of me that likes that sort of classification, that likes to take apart the mechanics of a story. And even if I had been completely uninvested in any of these characters, I think that still might have made it worth it for me. When you add in about the amount of investment I would have for a novel I generally liked, well, you get the idea. Indexing made me want to pick up more of this author’s work, and I can only say Every Heart a Doorway has continued that trend.

Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge

Standalone, Balzer+Bray, 2015, 436 pgs.

In the days of old, the Devourer ruled the world, hunting humans in the darkness before Tyr and Zisa stole the sun and moon from him and bound him in his own realm. Not that things are perfectly safe now; The Forest, the dark world that lurks just behind our reality is still there. And the Devourer may be bound, but his servants, the forestborn, still hide in the shadows, waiting to tempt those who would stray off the path and mark them as bloodbound, cursed creatures who must kill to survive and who will eventually lose their human hearts to become forestborn themselves. Rachelle should know, she was trained to protect against them before she became one of them. Now, instead of weaving charms to ward them off, she fights for the king as a bloodbound herself, using her preternatural strength and speed to atone for her crimes in any way she can. Because the Forest is becoming stronger, the forestborn becoming more active, and signs are saying that the Devourer is about to reawaken. And, however much she has given herself to the darkness, Rachelle has still never lost the idealistic girl who deliberately stepped off the path, looking for the information needed to destroy him completely.

I love a good fairytale retelling; I know I’ve said that before when talking about “stories about stories,” but really, there are multiple ways a story about stories can go. A well-done fairytale retelling has a charm all its own, and seeing what an author chooses to keep or change from a particular tale can lead to endless analysis on endless variations.

What can I say? I like thinking about story evolution, and that urge is especially satisfied in a novel where the author is pulling from about five different tales, using and reworking some fairytale ideas that I’ve never even seen brought up in current novels, and mixing in some modern genre tropes to create something that has some of the most nicely layered lore that I’ve ever seen.

And while all that sounds spectacular, I’m going to be frank here and say outright that this only gave me about half of what I was looking for from it. I picked the novel up initially because I’d read a short story by the author and was hoping something long-form could capture the same amount of poetry and drive that did.

Which Crimson Bound does, to a certain extent. The book is split between the main story of our heroine, Rachelle, and little snippets of the world’s backstory with Tyr and Zisa. Those backstory pieces are everything I wanted here: dreamy and fable-like and timeless. The ending of each one felt like a punch to the gut, as each bit of information revealed forced you to reevaluate what was happening and who this world’s heroes really were.

The writing on the bulk of the main plot is a little more prosaic, unfortunately. It’s not bad at all, but in a novel that I picked up for the writing style, the back and forth between the two was a little galling.

The plot, too, plays into some YA tropes that I’m not that fond of. I could have done without the love triangle, even if this one was far less annoying than they usually are, and after the first couple of chapters Rachelle changes from a reckless girl who wants to be a hero, which is exactly the sort of character I like, to a more standard jaded, angry protagonist.

That’s not to say any of this is badly done. It’s all fine, and I don’t know if I would have even noticed it in a novel where the first fifteen pages weren’t so absolutely tailored to me. Once that sort of perfection was established though, the fact that I didn’t get more of it was a little disappointing.

Just a little, though. Minor problems aside, this is generally strong and put together beautifully.

The plot is fun and interesting, and Hodge is, at least in this book, incredibly talented at ending a segment of the story at exactly the right place to make a reader want more. She manages, in this, to give a plot that actually has fairly little action more than enough page-turning tension. Even where there is some padding in the main plotline, the tantalizing little pieces of Tyr and Zisa’s backstory keep things moving.

The mystery and treasure hunt aspects of this are well done, too. I was actually surprised by the ultimate hiding place of the magic sword Rachelle spends most of the book looking for, and being caught off guard that much in a novel is something that’s becoming rarer and rarer in my old age.

And the opening may have skewed my expectations for the characters, but I can’t say they were badly done at all. A large portion of her arc is about Rachelle learning that she doesn’t have to be perfectly pure and innocent to be that reckless girl who wants to save the world, that sometimes understanding darkness can help in defeating it.

So, while I may have wanted a novel about who she was at the beginning, rather than the bitter, almost hopeless person she became after a couple of chapters, I can’t say I came away completely disappointed on that front. The tension between the two states actually adds some nice layers to the character; I can appreciate a lead that sometimes wants to slap people for being blindly happy, even as she wants to protect them.

The rest of the characters follow suit with the same depth. Armand, who plays the stupid dandy at court ends up being the moral center of the novel, and la Fontaine, who comes off as the mean-girl bully at first has a similar arc. Even Erec, who from the get-go is portrayed as despicable is fun in his horribleness; he’s written with the sort of life that means the author didn’t just create him to be a moralistic plot device, and actually enjoyed writing the character.

His awfulness is never used to undercut how personally important he is to Rachelle, either, which is a complexity I like to see a novel balance. That sort of complexity in the relationships carries through, too; Rachelle has realistically mixed feelings about everyone she interacts with, and the romance plot never takes over all of her thoughts, the way it does in so many novels.

The thing that really makes me love the book, though, the thing that almost completely makes up for its only giving me half of what I wanted, was the lore. The little bits and pieces of other stories that are blended together here make for a book just so full of ideas, and I can’t help but love trying to pick them all out.

This starts out reading like it’s going to be a straight “Little Red Riding Hood” retelling, but then Hodge starts pulling from other fairytales, and British myths, and actual fairy lore (which I consider sort of a different category than the other two). There’s even a splash of modern superheroes and urban vampire fantasy, with Rachelle brooding on the rooftops at points.

The fairytales referenced aren’t the ones that you normally see picked up, either. The two major ones are “The Girl Without Hands,” which I’d never heard of before, and “Little Red Riding Hood.” And while I have seen adaptations of the latter, I’ve never seen anything working with its “The Grandmother’s Tale” variation; Hodge’s take on the idea of the “path of needles and the path of pins,” is particularly interesting, and not only because I’ve never seen that concept brought up in a modern retelling.

I also love the idea of the woodwives, country women who are the main force working against the forestborn, using charms made of string and cloth and flowers. It’s a lovely little homage to the people who originally told these tales and the setting in which they were originally told.

Mix in some “Hansel and Gretel,” some “The Juniper Tree,” some Bran the Blessed, and some Unseelie Court, and you have a wonderful, layered mishmash. And that’s not even getting into the things that seem unique to this story. The two swords of bone are perfect for this tone, but I can’t place them and google’s turning up nothing. Ditto the idea of hunger being at the center of fairyland; it fits perfectly into fairy myths, but it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before. Hodge seems to have some innate understanding of classic fables, and it means that this cherry picking from so many sources, which could have seemed random and disjointed, holds together perfectly and works beautifully with the themes and character arcs she wants to create.

Basically, while there are some slip ups, most of this works together so wonderfully that I can forgive all its faults. The themes, plot, and characters all work together here in a way that’s rare for a novel: everything just clicks. And when you add that to the sort of fable-like storytelling I love and toss in a whole lot of mythology nerdery, you have something I can’t resist.

Codex Born by Jim Hines

Magic ex Libris Book 2, DAW Books, 2013, 379 pgs.

Having managed to stop an impending war between his group of book-wielding magicians, the Porters, and Michigan’s entire vampire population earlier this year, Isaac’s finally clawed his way out of drudge work and into the research position he’s always wanted. Unfortunately, it’s a research position that involves some rather arduous tasks. Like “working out what the vengeful demons lurking just inside the boundary to magic are.” Or “figuring out how to destroy them when the best minds of several generations have only been able to keep them at bay.” All with an unknown, but crucial, time limit hanging over his head. And even things that should be a break from the stress of that, like solving the mystery of who’s been killing werewolves and wendigoes near his hometown, are having an odd tendency to explode into larger problems. Because that investigation is going to bring Isaac face to face with a long-buried rival organization who hate the Porters, who have magic like he’s never seen, and who are, for some reason, targeting his old partner and new girlfriend, Lena.

I’m going to start by saying that most of this review is predicated on the idea that my thoughts on the first Magic ex Libris book were relatively objective and that the beginning novel in the series was actually as meh as my feelings on it were.

And, well, if you go back to that first review, you’ll see that I don’t think either of those statements are particularly fair, but I also have no other basis for comparison. In spite of the fact that I’m pretty sure my feelings on that book were more to do with my mental state than the novel itself, they were what they were and, outside of a reread, I have no way to pull up anything else.

All that out of the way, I’m happy to say this played out exactly as I had predicted there. Regardless of whether it’s Hines finding his footing with the series or me finding mine with life, I had a hell of a time with this second novel. Everything that I thought was missing in Libriomancer is here in spades: this had the sort of creative, engaging, genre-bending joy that I expect out of a Hines book. The dialogue and action are snappy, the characters’ big personalities shine through, and their crazy schemes in the face of impossible odds have all of the zany vigor you could want.

This if Fun, with a capital F and enough underlying meaning to make the novel more than silly fluff, which has always been this author’s strength.

Again, it’s a little hard to compare with my thoughts on the first novel so uncertain, but even if the problems were with the book itself, it’s all fixed here. This was the sort of light, fast-paced read that I had been looking for.

Working off the assumption that my problems there were on Hines’ head, though, I think I can distill exactly what Codex Born does better than its predecessor down to one word: integration. The mystery, the characters, the action, the themes, all coexist here far more harmoniously than they did in the first, meaning that the fun and the philosophy can work together, rather than being sectioned off into chunks.

If the first book had a plot that was mostly mystery, with bursts of action at key scenes, this has both woven throughout, setting the heavier problem-solving alongside constant little showcases where our magical characters can quip and learn new tricks and show off their powers. This keeps things snappy while allowing more build, making the mystery plot both tenser and far easier to swallow.

The characters, too, feel far more consistent, not in characterization, but in presence. This is probably just down to structure. Libriomancer had Isaac hopping from place to place, trying to figure out what was going on, which meant that, by the nature of the plot, very few characters could be in the entire book. Codex Born has The Porters as an institution preparing for war, which means that everyone is present and together from pretty early on in the book, making it easier to not only build quirks and personalities for characters we barely saw in the first, but to build rapport between all of those different personalities.

And while my harping on how much more fun I’m having in this book might make it sound like this is a sillier, less intelligent novel than its predecessor, that’s really not the case. This keeps all of the things that were strong about Libriomancer, and Hines’ ambitions for the series are still very obvious.

There’s still a crazy amount of things going on here, in the plotting, in the meta, in the morality, in the genre deconstruction. All those heavy ideas about collective media experience, love of narrative, and personal agency? Still here. All the surreal, metaphorical language that seemed like such a departure for this author? Check. All the shades of gray, down to the head of the Porters being the shadiest of the shady? Uh-huh. All the questioning of the tropes of urban fantasy, from simple things like giving our heroes magical therapists so they don’t have to tough it out until they’re broken to something as big as asking whether magic is even a desirable thing to have? Yep.

You’d think those weighty ideas would be the sticking point, too; they certainly were in the first book, for me. Most people don’t find philosophy fun or easy to set alongside action one-liners, but if anything we get more depth on those themes and somehow it works. Hines is a clever enough author to integrate by shading in his world rather than by flattening it, which might have something to do with how well he always thinks his worldbuilding through.

I’m trying to figure out why this flows so much better for me. Maybe it is just the structure; hopping from place to place creates a far more episodic plot by its nature. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re starting to get into the meat of the story, which means that Hines, as an author, is free to exposit less and reveal more.

Or maybe it’s just that I read this is a relatively sensible time period, rather than over two months with weeks-long gaps in between sittings, as I did with the first: that sort of thing can make any novel seem disjointed.

Either way, I’m smiling and laughing at all the neat little genre touches and references again, which is most of what I want from Jim Hines. I can honestly say I’m looking forward to the third in this series on its own merits, rather than as a litmus test for my mental state. And, while I can’t say I doubted that much, that really was what I was hoping for here.

Snack-time Reviews: For When I Don’t Have Enough Ingredients for Dinner

Hello all! So, I’ve been trying to work through my giant back-catalogue of books, some of which are still left over from last year, and, to be frank, there are a couple that I don’t really have that much to say about. So, in the interests of paring down the ever-growing list and not trying to wrack my brain for more commentary than I have, I’m just going to write up three quick reviews to fill out the post. These are in order of least-liked to best-liked, but I do have to say that none of these were particularly terrible. Which, come to think of it, is probably part of the reason I don’t have much to say about any of them.

#1—No Passengers Beyond This Point by Gennifer Choldenko

Standalone, Dial Books, 2011, 244 pgs.

Life is falling apart for Finn Tompkins and his siblings: his family is losing their house, meaning he and his sisters are being forced to move away from everything they’ve ever known. Worse yet, their mother can’t come with them on the flight to their crazy Uncle Red’s place, leaving them to deal with the change on their own. So when they land in Falling Bird, a town that appears to give them everything they’ve ever wanted, instead of at Uncle Red’s, it seems like a dream come true. Can they trust this new place, though?

This is by far my least favorite of the three, as well as the hardest for me to talk about. That’s probably because there was nothing actually wrong here, so I’m not sure what turned me so strongly against it. Most of what I remember as my problem was that everything just seemed far too generic. The characters are archetypes that develop a little, but not enough, the plot goes about where you expect it to at the beginning, and even the prose feels like the author just pulled the stereotypical voice for a teenager, tween, and young child. Even the world it creates, while interesting, feels like it needed another draft to add some depth and meaning to it. And while it has its moments of honest emotion and has its ambitions with regards to commenting on family and poverty and the effects of the housing crisis, all those little elements that never move beyond the easy and generic really do get in the way of anything it was trying to do. Like the last on this list, it’s a book meant for pre-teen children, so I doubt most of the intended audience is going to notice, but this just failed at what it was going for, for me.

#2—One Night That Changes Everything by Lauren Barnholdt

Standalone, Simon Pulse, 2010, 242 pgs.

Ever since she was little, Eliza has kept a notebook listing all the things she’s scared to do: all the things she’d wear, all the places she’d go, all the boys she’d talk to if she were a braver person than she is. And now that notebook’s disappeared, from out of her locker and into the hands of her lying ex and his ratfink cronies. To get it back, without it being posted for the whole school to see, she’ll have to do everything she wrote down, everything she’s ever been terrified to do. She’ll absolutely have to find the strength, too, because her own secrets aren’t the only ones in that book.

If I had to choose one word to describe this novel, it would be capslocky, both literally and figuratively. This book is set almost entirely in a state of panic, and that colors everything about it, from the stupid decisions the characters make to the almost spastic thought process our lead and narrator has. Even when the text is perfectly normal, you can just see the capslock lurking under it, waiting to be brought out again. I don’t normally want a character that manages to handle all her emotions gracefully, but even I thought Eliza here needed to stop, chill, and think things through. I get why the book does this: it is, in part, supposed to be an over-the-top high school comedy where people act crazy because it’s funny, but that aspect of it is also the book’s main problem. If you, like me, have fond nostalgia over She’s All That and movies like it, you probably won’t hate this, but the execution definitely could have been better. This plot felt like it should have been over before it began because, by the time it had started, I’d already thought of three ways out of the major problem, the characters’ antics were often more annoying than funny, and my main reaction to the lead was wanting to hand her a Xanax, because most of the secrets she was freaking out about were nothing that anyone would bat an eye at. A teenager, nervous about asking a boy out or wearing revealing clothes? No one can ever know! That said, nothing happens here that I wouldn’t have easily accepted in some silly teen movie. If physical comedy and facial expressions had been available to back some of this stuff up, it could have been very funny. Basically, this probably should have been a script instead of a novel. Make of that what you will.

#3—The Disappeared by Gloria Whelan

 

Standalone, Dial Books, 2008, 136 pgs.

The place is Buenos Aires, and the date is 1977, a time of political upheaval and widespread government oppression. The military junta currently in power tolerates no dissent, leading to Argentine citizens vanishing in the middle of the night, whisked away by the police for their beliefs. These people are known as The Disappeared, most of whom will never be seen again, and Silvia’s brother, Eduardo, has just become one of them.

I was, actually, very impressed with this one, especially because I picked it up for the topic, in spite of knowing that it was geared at a far younger audience. It’s a children’s book, no doubt, but for all the simplifying of complex concepts that entails, it does perfectly right by its heavy subject matter. If it weren’t so simple, plot and character-wise, or so short, in fact, this would probably be getting a proper review. In some ways, that simplicity actually helps the novel, too; the prose, for example, consists of short, plain-spoken sentences and easily understood imagery, but instead of detracting from the emotional appeal of the book, it gives the whole thing a feeling of understated tragedy and despair hidden by a brave face. This also never, surprisingly, pulls its punches on anything it’s talking about. As a children’s novel it never gets graphic, but it doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of a government imprisoning its political dissidents. There are torture scenes, and people being killed secretly by the police, and people’s families being threatened because they were protesting. A lot of the topics Whelan covers, and a lot of the emotional responses the characters have seem almost like they were pulled directly from some of the nonfiction books I’ve read on Argentina’s Disappeared; it’s obvious the author did her research here. It’s not perfect, by any means. The characters don’t really develop over the course of the book, and the prose seems more like it fell out of 1940-something than the late seventies. But in spite of those things, I was pleasantly surprised with this.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne

Harry Potter side story, Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016, 327 pgs.

Nineteen years later, Harry Potter stands again on Platform 9 ¾ watching two of his children board the train to Hogwarts, to the best years of their lives, and to their own adventures. To, presumably, safer adventures than he and his friends had; his scar has never acted up since the Battle of Hogwarts, and life has been peaceful since the war, minus some rumors about time-turners and crazy Death Eater plans. In fact, his biggest worry anymore seems to be his strained relationship with his middle child, Al. Unfortunately for Harry, that’s all about to change, with both of his minor worries coming together in the worst way possible. Children will go missing, timelines will change, and the threatened return of an enemy long defeated will once again throw Harry’s world into chaos.

Well, this was a long time coming. I read this ages ago and have been wanting to talk about it since I finished it.

I’ve been putting it off for two reasons, really. The first is that I wanted to finish my reread notes first, but, well, those are pretty firmly on the back-burner indefinitely, which I’ve known for a while now. Then there’s the other reason, which is that I’m not really sure how novel what I have to say about Cursed Child is. I really do agree with the consensus here: there’s just something about this that’s a little off for a Harry Potter story.

I also agree with the consensus that a lot of that has to do with the way the characters were written. Funnily enough, for that, the couple of big things that I’ve seen most people complaining about didn’t bother me all that much. I didn’t have much problem with the way Hermione was written, and the parts I did take issue with, like the complete lack of protection for a very important artifact in her office, I haven’t seen much discussion about.

But I had no problem with her being a complete jerk in the first alternate future, where she’s just very uptight and kind of mean. Do you remember eleven-year-old Hermione? Who was very uptight and kind of mean? She only chills out when she becomes friends with Harry and Ron, and, while this decision would have made more sense in an alternate timeline where that never happened instead of in one where she and Ron never got together, it’s not out of keeping for the character. I had no problem either with the dystopian future, where her personal life gets put on hold to fight the rebellion. That just makes sense, right? Apparently I can deal with cruel, emotionally-constipated Hermione, but stupid Hermione breaks me.

Ditto Harry telling Al that he wished he weren’t his son. I mean, it was an awful thing to do, but by the point it happened it was implied that Harry had been trying to be patient with an increasingly distant and angry kid for years. And it happened after Al had a) spit on a gift that was one of the last things Harry had of his parents and b) started in with that sentiment in the first place. Everyone has their breaking point in those situations, and Harry’s always had a temper. Snapping and then immediately regretting it seems exactly like what he’d do, to me.

On the other hand, I can’t ever see him trying to get his child to do something by saying “I need you to obey.” That’s never how he was won over by authority, and in turn that was never his method to try to win other people over. The demand to obey without question seems farther away from the spirit of the character and, really, of the series, than any awful comment made in anger ever could.

Mostly, though, my issue with the characterization comes from other people. I can’t see Cedric ever becoming a Death Eater; people that decent just don’t go that way because of a single, humiliating event. I can’t see spitfire fighter Ginny Weasley in the role of kind, forgiving saint who is trying to get everyone to accept Draco Malfoy as a friend. And at some point during the writing process, someone seems to have confused Ron with either Fred or George.

Again, it’s all just a little bit off.

That feeling has roots in everything, too. It’s in the framing: if this is supposed to be the second generation’s story, then why is it left to Harry and company to save the day again? It’s in the plotting: bringing Voldemort back seems too much like an attempt to return to a story that’s already firmly ended. It’s in the small mistakes of the world details. Hell, it’s in the overall feel of the piece: the seemingly too-fast pace is probably down to medium, but even considering that it’s still missing some sort of essential cleverness or intrigue necessary for a Harry Potter story.

And this may be a small detail and a non sequitur, but it really does bother me that, after all these years, nobody’s learned to go on high alert whenever boomslang skin goes missing from Hogwarts potion’s cupboard.

I’ve seen people talk about Cursed Child as fan-ficcy, and yeah, from the weird characterization to the recycled story elements.

For all the faults that causes, though, that’s also a lot of what I loved about it. The analytical side of my brain might have spent most of its reading time raising its eyebrows, but the lizard brain was definitely jumping for joy at a lot of this.

I don’t think it was just being able to return to this world, either. For all the weirdness and rehash, there were parts of this that made me genuinely happy to see, and those parts were also elements that could be considered fan-ficcy.

Some of that comes from its looking into the untold stories of the world, the alternate universes, the ways things could have gone, the things the second generation gets up to. Some of that is in the parts that are straight wish fulfillment. Getting to see Snape be openly funny and helpful, or to see Malfoy getting to go on an adventure with the leads are dreams long deferred for certain parts of the fandom; parts which generally include me.

And the best of these aspects comes from what is possibly the most fan-ficcy: the fact that the characters actually sit down and talk about their various traumas rather than just silently dealing on their own, and use them to relate to each other. This is a far more human happily ever after than the perfect, golden vision of the epilogue.

Arguably, part of the problem with this script was that they didn’t push the fanfic aspects far enough, or pulled too much from what fandom does wrong instead of what fandom does right. Instead of creating a new villain and storyline, they stuck too close to what had already been done. Instead of meticulously working out character traits, they inserted a bland original character. Instead of picking through every detail of how this world works, they just did what they wanted to make their plot easy. Where every fan writer worth their salt would have done the former every time.

As much as I can’t hate this, and even really loved some of it, those former examples were what I wanted. I wanted that attention to detail. I wanted a new story. I wanted to see the second generation come into their own.

And that’s really the problem here. They needed to move to the future, they needed to do it by paying close attention to the past, and they only halfway accomplished either.