meghan rose allen

I requested this book from Netgalley in part because the author’s name reminded me of my Calculus textbook. Where is my Calculus textbook? In Geoff’s office maybe? I’m sure there are worse reasons for requesting a book.

So Unspeakable Things, a book which has a Nazi transvestite pedophile mad-scientist masturbating to a picture of Adolf Hitler. I’d put that as the byline if I were the publisher: Read a description of a Nazi transvestite pedophile mad-scientist masturbating to a picture of Adolf Hitler! Limited time only!

There are musicians in this book and, as I read, I thought of the word fantaisie, as a musical term rather than a description of something unreal with dwarves and hobbits and lines and lines of italicized poetry. A fantaisie eschews the rules of strict musical form, like Marc Chagall as a symphony. I think Unspeakable Things was written to be like a word fantasie, a novel by a painting by Marc Chagall. Time, physics, consequences, logic be damned. The Gypsy King meets with one who may be the Grand Vizier of the Freemasons in the New York Public library to plea the case for his people. This is the sort of nonsense (not derogatory, just literally outside the realm of sense) Unspeakable Things engages in.

Did I like it? I don’t know.

Is it well written? I don’t know.

When one exists in a fantastical space, what rules of criticism apply?

I don’t know.

Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack went on sale January 26, 2016.

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

When an ostracized and mocked teen starts a blog revealing her classmate’s secrets, what is our every-person narrator supposed to do?

I asked my seven year old, after reading the book to her. Her response I don’t know. That probably makes sense, as this book is targeted at, I’d say, the middle-school crowd (complete with vocab and questions at the end for study in the classroom! Which is probably great for a teacher, but I’d have a hard time believing that an eleven year old is going to be enthused about picking up a book only to find homework at the end). I did try to get some of my seven year old’s thoughts as we read through. She said the other kids were mean to Agnes. That even so Agnes shouldn’t have stolen their secrets. That she didn’t understand why Agnes just didn’t act normal to make the kids like her (I’m kind of worried about that response, but she’s seven so maybe she hasn’t developed as much abstract-empathy-thinking-brain-a-doodle stuff as an eleven year old. In any case, I’m going to re-read Franny K. Stein to her to reiterate the importance of not just being what other people want you to be).

The tone of the book is a bit moralistic, which is the point, but not too preachy. The ethical dilemmas presented are all basically simplistic with set answers (don’t be mean to odd kids, don’t steal things, speak up for what is right, don’t judge people without getting to know them first, two wrongs don’t make a right, etc.), which is expected given the target audience. I found it hackneyed, the nameless, genderless, every-person narrator, but I understand that it’s so that the YA reader can put herself as the narrator. It’s a decision that Cheng made, probably because most of us are bystanders rather than the bullied or bully, so the story could appeal to the broadest group of readers. But having the narrator a step back from some of the action means there’s a lot of telling what’s going on with other characters. If it were a trial, most everything would be thrown out as hearsay; and I’d rather hear from Agnes (the bullied) and Leah (the bully) more than nameless. Or to have some of the conflicts a bit less cut-and-dry. But it’s YA. The whole point of YA is that nuance is only as developed as the teen/pre-teen audience.

Edge the Bare Garden is pure YA, doesn’t claim otherwise, or pretend to be more than that. It’s meant for a classroom setting, full of middle schoolers rolling their eyes and acting tough as the teacher reads it aloud and gives journal prompts, but it’ll likely get through to some. Hopefully.

Edge the Bare Garden by Roseanne Cheng went on sale September 15, 2015.

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

A silly, but engaging spy romp in 1970’s Prague. With magic added, literally. Most of the spies here are also magicians, fighting another, older war between Fire and Ice underneath their capitalist/communist one. Of course, most of the tension comes from the fact that Fire and Ice don’t match up with East and West. So we have *gasp* CIA and MI6 agents having to consort with KGB in the magic war, while trying to hide their liaisons from their respective economic ideological sides.

So yeah, pretty silly.

Originally published as a serial, it’s an interesting idea: basically high-end television, but in reading form (if you were to read it as a serial, as opposed to me who got a copy from Netgalley and read it all at once). As such, there are times where it feels more like teleplay than fiction, but not often. The main issue is that it’s just so much. I guess I’ve never really binge-watched television. Binge-reading The Witch Who Came in From the Cold was a bit of a task, especially, in doing so, it tends to magnify some of the plotting issues. Each chapter is a different day, and while they are chronological, the jumps aren’t smooth and, while the story sets them at days, the character and plot development that happens off-page often makes it seem like the jumps are weeks long. What happens in these gaps often seems more interesting than the mundaneness of espionage (like what exactly is Gabe doing to himself with the mercury?) Having, it seems, every character leading a double-life as spy/magician starts to feel very, very unlikely. The magical villains are all fairly predictable villains of the Snidely-Whiplash-twirling-mustaches-variety; for a story that goes out of its way to humanize both capitalists pigs and commies, there is no attempt to humanize the “bad” side of magical war.

But it’s a romp. A big, blockbuster series/summer movie sort of romp. Try not to take it too seriously and maybe it won’t matter. It killed a few days of reading time.

The Witch Who Came in From the Cold by Lindsay Smith, Max Gladstone, Ian Tregillis, Cassandra Rose Clarke, and Michael Swanwick went on sale June 1, 2016.

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

Adding the the string of depressing and demoralizing books I’ve been reading, let’s read one about Soviet Ukraine and the murder of Anna Politkovskaya / The Second Chechen War. Because why be happy when you can read about how horrible humanity can be to each other?

In one sense, the stories are light. Most are people telling about their lives, without poetics, without justifications. This is how it was. This is the, to modify Kundera, the incredible lightness of being. But this is also where the weightiness comes in, from what it was/is. There was no need to put the weight of writing into the narrative, because the weight is the reality. The reader isn’t meant to be emotionally-exploited into caring, because trying to add that on top of the weight of what happened/is happening would drag us all down. The stories are stark enough as it is, difficult enough to chew through without an addition of faux-literary pretension and posturing. They float like a helium balloon. They drag you down like a concrete block.

But then there are gaps, or misprints, or entire sections seemingly misplaced. Ukraine in the first half, pages cut off mid-sentence. Then later, in the 2000s, in Chechnya, Ukrainian sections reappear. A misprint? A throw-back? Proof that Russia as a concept has often been a fascist one, with concept-mother-Russia first, the humans in the edges of her empire second? Or just questions? Questions questions questions. How can we be so cruel? How can we be so empty?

Add more and the book sinks under the weight of all the wrongs it wants to document. But as it is, it’s transience can feel like an insult. Can you fix this? Can anyone? How do you write about the worst of humanity without sickening us to the point of not wanting to read?

So what to do? More questions. All I have is questions. I can play as Stalin in Civ IV, the man who starved my distant relatives in the Holodomor, which the first half of this book talks about (and which, contrary to the blurbs, I did know about beforehand since I am Canadian, of part Ukrainian descent, and it’s a teeny-tiny deal here). But to play as Stalin, how is that appropriate? How is any of this fair? I feel sick with not knowing the way out of this maze.

The front says like Joe Sacco. I scoffed. Then I read it. It is like Joe Sacco though. I shouldn’t have scoffed. Read at your own risk.

The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks by Igort went on sale March 15, 2016.

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

A short decade of essays and fiction pieces about what it means to be other or an outsider or identity or — I’m not really sure what the prompt was for these essays precisely. I think it’s identity, maybe. That seems like a big enough umbrella to fit all these essays underneath.

And they aren’t all essays either. Both Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s and Hanna Krall’s submissions are fiction (or at least, intentionally read like fiction), and of course, with my love of narrative and difficulty following non-narrative arguments, those are the two that’ll probably stick with me (and not just because Gundar-Goshen’s story is very similar to a story idea I had a few years ago so it’s time to put on my tin-foil hat so she doesn’t steal any more of my ideas). But the white space in the snippets by Hanna Krall — I have put the only Hanna Krall book in the library on hold so I can read more from her. I suppose that’s the point of collections like these, hit or miss, it’s unlikely that all is a miss. So you find someone new you wouldn’t have found otherwise. The rest just sort of fades.

Life From Elsewhere by various authors went on sale June 21, 2016.

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