A slice in the life of. That’s what this book is. A slice in the life of Alice. Or maybe Gideon, since the told-in-the-first-person sections are his. Over the space of a few months we see, well, what exactly do we see? That’s hard to say. For a book that has evolution in the title, not a whole lot of stuff happens. Not that having not a lot happening is a bad thing. But this novel has a very calm, flat feel to it. It’s a deep pond, with lots happening underneath, but we never really see the depths. Robinson barely even hints at the depths. A novel primarily of character, there has to be depths in the characters shown, at least in one. Instead, we have sketches or prototypes of the people we see again and again in literary novels: the struggling single mother, the friend secretly in love with her, etc. At least the kids are kids. They aren’t wunderkinds. They watch Dora and play with Barbies. I appreciated that.

Parched. That’s it. That’s the word I’m looking for to describe this book. A dry, dusty, parching of the plot, of the characters. I almost think that A De-evolution of Alice would be a better title, for how what is in the book fades away. I felt it fading. I felt the pain. If books existed in a vacuum, I likely would have appreciated (enjoyed is the wrong word because how can you enjoy a book about disintegration) The Evolution of Alice more if I hadn’t read, immediately before starting this book, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. All my emotion was already gutted out of me, scooped out like with a spoon, before I began The Evolution of Alice. The Evolution of Alice is more emotionally manageable than A Little Life, but maybe not as meaningful. I don’t think that’s the right word. I’m all wrong with words today.

The Evolution of Alice was okay. Okay and nothing more.

The Evolution of Alice by David Alexander Robinson went on sale August 6, 2014.

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

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.

A father-in-law dies. A mother dies. A husband takes ill. The Cruel Country, by Judith Ortiz Cofer is an amorphous meditation on all this. Not a particularly uplifting book with which to start 2016.

Part way through The Cruel Country, I thought to myself Is this really necessary? Not that the book isn’t necessary to the author; with each word, you can feel how cathartic this memoir is for her, the ability to place all this in a narrative, however unsatisfying. But the book in relation to the reader: my father-in-law and mother are still alive, my husband isn’t sick. Ortiz Cofer’s words are going to be nothing more than a pale simulacrum until these things happen to me, in the same way that explaining motherhood to the childfree is a somewhat futile task. What can I say to an experience I haven’t lived through? Is it a failure of the words that I feel distanced from them? A failure of my own imagination? A failure of empathy? A failure of eliciting empathy? I can’t say. I can say that a few times the jumps between paragraphs fall flat, too quick transitions. I can say that there is some repetition, because of the repetitiveness of life, but that doesn’t mean I want to read it. I can say there is some unevenness, the story pushed into two books, one far longer than the other, so the second, dealing with the illness of her husband, feels more like a P.S. at the end, with the writing style and tone changing almost completely (less poetry, less Spanish).

I’ll say I loved the Spanish words sprinkled in. I’ll say I love, now and then, with the poetry. I’ll say I love this, this quote:

Ave María. Let me learn to relinquish her physical presence. Let her be the dew in the grass, the seed in teh rich black earth, the shade of the tree; let her be in the ephemeral bloom of the hibiscus plant … with flowers that fold unto themselves each night and are renewed each day.

I’ll think of that with my grandmother, who is the closest person I’ve lost, who was Catholic, and slightly foreign to my Protestant upbringing. I’ll think of her as I watch the little kids across the way tobogganing down their hill in the snow, almost a completely perpendicular image from the de afuera who lives in Georgia, USA, and comes to Puerto Rico to bury her mother.

Let me learn to relinquish; at least that I will take away from this book that I can barely even fathom.

The Cruel Country, by Judith Ortiz Cofer went on sale March 1, 2015.

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

Start the month with a hundred year old Austrian satire, end the month with a hundred year old French satire. Why not?

Not that I was really aware this was a satire before the opening page (The Vatican Cellars: An allegorical satire) told me. I ARC’d The Vatican Cellars because I read La Symphonie pastorale in high school, which is a story pretty much perpendicular to this one. I don’t recall La Symphonie pastorale as a romp. The Vatican Cellars is a romp. The satire here is definitely more subtle than in this month’s earlier Austrian satire (i.e. no Martians sweeping in at the end and blowing up the earth). I appreciated that, having the author think me a little bit clever. But I likely missed a lot of the Catholic jokes and I know I missed pretty much all the Freemason ones.

So we have our romp. There’s a whole intermingled family (three sisters, their husbands, an illegitimate child, the childhood friend of the illegitimate child, the girlfriend of the illegitimate child and his childhood friend (generally not at the same time, but maybe?), the sister of one of the husbands, the father of same husband, a childhood friend of another husband (who is in love with the sister his childhood friend married), a bunch of the kids of various sisters and husbands); part way through I felt like I needed one of those family trees found in the front of heavy Russian novels. Then I sorted myself out and continued. The main narrative thrust, at least the one that gets most of the family from France to Italy, is a sort of 419/Nigerian-Prince scam, where you roll your eyes at the characters who can’t seem to see how ridiculous the whole thing is, en courant comme des canards sans tête. There’s the proto-nihilism and a crime that one could attribute, retroactively, to Mersault. There’s a bunch of pious characters ignoring taboos (extra-marital affairs! incest! blasphemy!). There’s a dragging of the last twenty pages or so as some of the machinations are revealed to some of the characters and then …

And then the story simply stops. Bam. Like a wall and we’re in the endnotes and afterword.

Um, okay.

The afterward tries to suggest that the abruptness is again a manner of playing with preconceptions, i.e. where is the happy ending, or the comeuppance or the return to moral rectitude? Nowhere! Because I, André Gide, am trying to fuck with your idea of how stories like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

So the book was funny and engaging and then it started to slog and then it finished. The End.

But I will mention that The Vatican Cellars is not at all like La Symphonie pastorale, which is more what I was expecting because I never read the blurbs on Netgalley maybe as closely as I should have?

See the kind of wacky verb-tenses in that past sentence? There’s a lot of verb-tense changes The Vatican Cellars. I suppose they are from the original text and not the translation, but they pull me out of the story. Also the narrator who likes to talk to the reader now and then, I think to remind us that André Gide is somewhere watching us. Then the translation, which the introduction assures me has been modernized for today’s reader, veers between describing something as looking gross (at least it wasn’t gnarly) then using words like bumf, which is apparently British slang, no idea if that’s contemporary or not. I’m glad my kobo has a dictionary for me to look these words up in. Ending a review like this, without any real sort of conclusion may seem a bit odd, but think of it this way, I am trying to fuck with your idea of how reviews like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

The Vatican Cellars, by André Gide, a new translation by Julian Evans, went on sale August 11, 2014.

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

I am not predisposed towards magazines. They have too many advertisements and those that don’t, like Bitch and Adbusters and The Walrus, I let my subscriptions lapse with a stack of issues I never even got around to starting. I cherry pick my way through The Economist most weeks, half-finishing articles and sections. I’ve never read every article in their China section. I don’t think I’ve read their Obits in ages. So even the magazine I “read”, I don’t really read. Something about magazines and their stories just doesn’t gel with me.

But, break outside your comfort zone and all that. A Best-Of Collection means I won’t have to be wading through the trash, thought I. It’s curated, to use web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now? n.0?) lingo. Such a collection will inspire me to explore more long-form journalism. My horizons will be expanded and I will be all the richer.

Except, well, not really.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the stories in The Best American Magazine Writing 2015. They aren’t riddled with typographical errors or unsubstantiated claims. They aren’t unnecessarily fanciful or overwhelmingly dour. They are perfectly adequate technique pieces. I could imagine journalism students dissecting them in little work groups and giving powerpoint presentations afterwards.

But I can’t say that, with the exception of Brian Phillips’ The Sea of Crises, about Sumo wrestling and Yukio Mishima, that I enjoyed reading any of these articles. That I felt that feeling you get after reading something that knocks your mind into the next level, like an energized electron. Most of the time, I just felt annoyed. Or forgetful. Three times now I’ve looked at the table of contents, baffled by Love and Ruin. Three times I couldn’t remember what that piece was about, including about half an hour after I read it. I think I’ve finally got it down though. Love and Ruin is about Afghanistan.

But annoyed. For example, the initial essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. I found the argument muddled and unconvincing even though I am pretty much for reparations (or at least, as the article points out, I am completely open to studying the possibility of reparations via studies that are continually voted down by congress or the senate or whatever it is in the US that vote on these sorts of things. I’m Canadian so that whole governmental process is somewhat mysterious to me). The winning essay didn’t convince someone who already believed in the possibility. Things like this annoy me. The articles instantly stopping when, I guess, they’ve gotten to five thousand or seventy-five hundred or whatever their word limit is, rather than letting the piece be as long as it needs to be, annoyed me. Having to read three short articles on art criticism, written for other art critics, so me having really no clue what was being talked about, annoyed me. Having to read four hundred pages on my iPad rather than my kobo and getting eye strain and headaches annoyed me (although, that really isn’t the fault of the essays in this book, more the publisher. I hate reading on my iPad).

So The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 did not change my opinion of long-form magazine journalism. I’m just going to go back to flipping at random through The Economist‘s articles on the bathroom floor while waiting for Tesfa to get out of the tub. Maybe, when I stupidly request to review The Best American Magazine Writing 2016 next fall, that will be the collection that inspires me to love this type of journalism.

But probably not.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, Sid Holt editor went on sale December 15, 2015.

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

I always find it harder to write reviews for good books than for poor ones (perhaps I should really say books I enjoyed versus books I disliked since no one has, of yet, made me the supreme arbiter of what constitutes a good book. Perhaps that email mistakenly got routed to my spam folder? Feel free to send it to me again universe.) A bad book I can pick apart and be sarcastic about. A good book, what is there to say except I have read a good book?

So I have read a good book.

In A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese transplant to Angola builds a wall separating her apartment from the rest of the building during the Angolan war for independence. She stays there for thirty or forty years later until everything in the story comes together, a bit like in the most absurd of French movie farces, but more like in the tiny patterns of a pysanka, all small and perfect and fit together just so.

Okay, I went away and looked at buzzfeed for fifteen minutes. I’m back. This is what I mean, what am I supposed to say about a good book other than it’s a good book? I read it in an evening. It isn’t heavy or long. It’s like bubbles of air. It’s like reading Gabriel García Márquez — I wrote that in the margins, then saw that other reviews said that too — but other reviews also talk about magical realism and I guess I don’t know what that means because unlike in Gabriel García Márquez, there are no shrinking women or marveling at ice or ascending into the heavens. There are coincidences. There is that farce in the denouement. Like with Gabriel García Márquez, one needs to suspend disbelief, but A General Theory of Oblivion is so deftly drawn that suspending one’s disbelief is a pleasure rather than a chore, like with Gabriel García Márquez. Is that what magical realism is: an enjoyable suspension of disbelief?

I liked A General Theory of Oblivion. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t put the book down once from the first page to the last, so what I will say is what I have said: I have read a good book.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa went on sale December 15, 2015.

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