So if I read a book that talks about super-germs and then feel sick two days later, am I sick or is my imagination overactive? Medical students’ disease or the fact that I share a house with someone who was sick last week? Not that Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson has anything in it to tell me how hypochondrial I am being. But it does have enough bits and pieces in it to make me feel nervous. And, unlike my last “scientific” book I read, there are references — almost a quarter of the book in my copy. And no holier-than-thou attitude either.

Yay science!

Except boo people, since, as Unnatural Selection points out, people are doing a lot of stuff that may have unintended long term consequences as weeds, bugs, and germs develop new resistance to our attempts to squash them out, or, in a more intriguing aspect I hadn’t know about before, re-activating genes that maybe haven’t been used for centuries. So yay evolution, except for the fact that such evolution in our tiny plant and microbe friends will likely screw us over big time in the coming years. At the end of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, when they go see the locusts and talk about how all they’ve ever tried to do, and here the locusts still are, thriving, unsquashable, unstoppable, yep. Like that. We’re screwed.

So what to do, what to do? That isn’t really Unnatural Selection‘s scope, since it isn’t a fix-it-up book, but rather a watch-out-your-house-is-caving-in book. It stays scientific; there’s no fear-mongering. But I still get sleepy reading books like this, like the problem is so overwhelming that my brain actually starts turning itself off rather than want to keep reading. At the same time, as the book points out, a huge problem is agri-business, which I can affect only a little (buying antibiotic free meat, writing letters to parliament, etc.). But I can’t really stop Monsanto from tinkering around to get more herbicide-resistant crops that end up cross-breeding with weeds until the weeds are endemic and resistant to all known herbicides. So then I start to freak out, and the book talks about influenza, and I convince myself I have influenza, and I get even sleepier. I perked up at the third and final chapter on epigenetics, but then the book ends, without even so much as a conclusion, and I was left feeling adrift in a sea of antibiotic, herbicide and pesticide resistant super plants and microbes ready to destroy me. Maybe I’ll stay in my house for awhile.

Believable science. No assholery.

Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson went on sale October 28, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Do you ever sometimes feel you totally get an author’s thought process?

What if … schizophrenia were contagious! And what if … the only one who could stop the spread was someone who had schizophrenia before all this happened! Except … he’s spiraling off his meds and is unwilling to help!

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after you (Joseph Heller — Catch-22).

A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac is a fairly typical thriller-zombie-pathogen type novel. All the standard plot points: strange disease starts to infect a small town, initial panic escalates to full blown pandemonium, military-enforced quarantine, protagonist chased.

Because I wrote pandemonium up there, I feel like thinking about pandas for a bit.

Okay. Done.

For a thriller, A Cure for Madness is well written. The characters aren’t flat puppets bouncing around on popsicle sticks and the pacing is well done; the amping up of the spread of the disease and the way the town starts to fall apart completely believable. The story takes place in a small college town in Maine, so I can imagine the whole story here, in my small university town in New Brunswick (province bordering Maine for the geographically-challenged), especially since McIsaac is also from New Brunswick. Granted, I don’t think we have a mental hospital. The last chapter is heartbreaking, when you realize what this has meant for Clare, our protagonist, who spends the later two-thirds of novel trying to protect her brother with his mental illness.

So it’s a good, solid, easy-to-read thriller novel that I have nothing to complain about, except for the fact that I generally prefer literary fiction to thrillers. But for those days when you just want to read something a little mindless and entertaining, A Cure for Madness works fine.

A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac went on sale January 19, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Well, on the plus side, the supernatural aspect is there right from the get-go. No surprise aliens or alternate personalities thrust upon me after I’ve gone a good way into the novel. Julia, our protagonist, is one of a long line of women in her family who have some sort of second sight, able to foretell future deaths and work to avoid them. Anyone remember that show from the 90, Early Edition? Sort of like that, but set during Argentina’s Dirty War and its aftermath. But right there, at the beginning, bam, supernatural. Thank you Ingrid Betancourt for not trying to trick me or surprise me, but just being honest from page one that there is some weird otherwordly stuff that’s going to be going on.

You know what else happens right around page one: two or three metaphors right after each other. Then more. Then characters that earnestly spout vapid phrases like Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Then coincidences. Then a narrative that jumps around from Julia to other people and back again. Each time I think Okay, I can deal with this, the book goes back into airport thriller style, completely illogical.

So I don’t believe any of the characters. Or the plot. But I do believe Betancourt really really really really really really tried. She can do some things well; she writes the violence amazingly. But then she has a wife hide in the trunk of her husband’s car to see if he’s cheating on her and people oh so randomly running into each other on buses or seeing enemies countries away in photographs hung on the wall of a lover’s house and I think Sure to myself. Whatever.

Maybe go read The Dancer Upstairs if interested in a South American dirty war-esque struggle. Or read The Blue Line, but for the violence, not the book itself.

The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt went on sale January 12, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

We’ll start with my seven year old’s assessment (after some prompting from me. Well, not actually some. More like a lot.): It was like Spirited Away. I liked it. My favourite part was the object spirit town.

And that was all I got from her.

In any case, The Night Parade by Kathryn Tanquary is a middle-grade novel taking place in Japan during the Obon Festival. It’s a somewhat cute, predictable story that didn’t really hold my attention. I kept drifting off in my head while reading it aloud to Tesfa and missing plot points. Tesfa was right though: The Night Parade is similar to Spirited Away with a girl, Saki in this case instead of Chichiro, being drawn into the spirit world. But The Night Parade lacks what made Spirited Away so magical, which comes down to, I’m pretty sure, the pictures. The Night Parade needs pictures, intricately drawn, beautiful, colourful, amazing pictures to really make the story come to life. The writing, on its own, just isn’t enough to elevate the story. It’s one of these stories that’s too long and not long enough at the same time. I want more of the spirit world. I want explanations for why those specific animals were the spirit guides. I want less of the real world, less of Saki’s brother. I want the grandmother to have known something. Basically, I want all the first-novel jitters to vanish, less background, more in the moment stuff.

Still, it’s a perfectly passable middle-grade novel. Just not transcendent. Probably the most damning of all, Tesfa didn’t ask if there was a sequel, the way she does with books she truly loves.

A decent book if you like Japanese folklore. Maybe think of it as a gateway to further explorations in Japanese culture.

The Night Parade by Kathryn Tanquary went on sale January 1, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I always like to read spooky stories. The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert, is sort of a spooky book. It definitely starts out spooky — children showing up at a manor house somewhere vaguely British, a manor house owned by Morgan, a disfigured recluse and attended to by a housekeeper who also simply showed up one day. There are secret corridors and hidey holes and disappearances, all aping a nineteenth century ghost story. Even the structure, which each chapter starting with a small-font, italicized blurb: In which …

In which Engel chooses a room;

In which medical help is required;

In which Morgan’s library is described;

In which the novel suddenly veers off strangely into some bizarre Soylent Green revenge fantasy plus the Holocaust I think.

Oh my goodness, it’s the aliens all over again. How is it that my super-hero skill is the ability to pick books where random shit is thrust upon the reader? If I could monetize this, I would be wealthy enough that I could buy all the books I want, rather than request them from the public library or Netgalley.

I don’t know. I think the last third of the book is supposed to Mean Something, with bolds and capital letters. I have no idea what that something is. At least I can write in my review that I was flummoxed, because flummoxed is a fun word to say. I thought I was just going to be reading a spooky book, which turned out not even to be that spooky. What does that say about me that I’d rather be scared witless than confused?

As for the comprehensible aspects of the book, it’s decent. Shoulder shrug meh. None of the characters are particularly deeply drawn. There end up being a lot of kids, none of whom have any real characteristics other than David, and Moira, who we are told is Morgan’s favourite, at which point she more-or-less isn’t mentioned again for a good third of the book. We never really know what happens with the disappearances and reappearances. We never really know what happens with a mask. We never really know much. Are they in an alternate dimension? This dimension but dystopic? This dimension, present day? Questions abound. Obviously I have no idea how Lambert wrote this book, but it feels like a book that was cranked out, lovingly cranked out, but cranked out nonetheless, in a weekend. Stretch it out, lose some characters (the doctor? What does he even do? I don’t know one single fact about him other than he is a doctor and he knows how to drive a car), reduce the number of children, up the creepiness, the gothic, the fear, the wolfhounds, the factory, the sister, then maybe we’d have a real spooky story for me to enjoy. Else, it’s just a light novella that can be read in an evening.

The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert went on sale January 5, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.