Do I need to put Spoiler Alert for a novel-in-verse originally published two hundred years ago? Because likely Spoiler Alert.

Me: So I finished Yevgeny Onegin.

Geoff: And?

Me: They still don’t end up together in this translation.

Geoff: So what, you’re holding out for a translation where they do?

Me: (shifty gaze) Maybe.

I’ve read Yevgeny Onegin before, and seen the opera (actually in the opposite order in that I saw the opera first then read the book), so I knew what was coming reading this translation. I can’t really recall any issues with the translation I read fifteen years ago, not that I could tell you who was the translator of that version. This translation also seems fine (not being a student of comparative literary translations I doubt I could say much of anything intelligent contrasting such translations in any case). The stanzas rhyme (unlike Nabokov’s version, not that I’ve read that version), so of course I’ve spent the last few days bouncy-bouncy-talking in iambic tetrameter as the rhythm has invaded my brain.

What may be lacking are explanatory notes. It’s been a long time since my Russian literature course. I could remember some things, but others, a footnote or two would have been nice. But maybe the audience for another translation of Yevgeny Onegin are people who already know a whole lot about nineteenth century Russia and mayn’t need such help. But I did. Not enough to ruin my overall enjoyment of the book/poem, but every now and then I had to stop and try to remember what something meant or put it out of my mind that I didn’t know.

But Onegin — he seemed less dickish to Tatyana in this version than I remembered, but far more dickish to Lensky. I guess that’s the point, him being a superfluous cad and all. Still doesn’t change the fact that I secretly hope him and Tatyana will get together at the end of the poem. Or, at least in the book/poem, Onegin throws himself to the ground wailing as he does in the operatic version I saw, at the realization of all he could have had, all that he threw away so carelessly, tearing his shirt open and crying. Instead, Onegin gets rebuffed, Tatyana stalks out, Onegin is like “Oh, okay, I guess” and then Tatyana’s husband walks by The End. But that’s more Pushkin’s fault than Briggs’, so I guess I’ll let that slide.

Onegin, fall to your knees in overwrought operatic emotion. Aah, be still my heart.

Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, a new translation by A.D.P. Briggs went on sale July 12, 2016.

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

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.

Not sure who decided the cover, but:

I had a hard time seeing that as a fish at first. Even now, I have to really tell myself it is one.

And it’s not the little black fish protagonist either. Why wouldn’t we have the little black fish on the cover instead of a picture of his mother, who is only in the comic for the first five or six pages?

I don’t get it.

Actually, I don’t really get a lot of this comic. I almost do — a beloved Persian children’s story, interesting art, a story that’s supposed to be a lesson (although I’m not one hundred percent sure what the lesson is supposed to be if we don’t go for the literal, and yet universal, don’t-get-eaten-by-a-heron-lesson). It seems like a great idea for a comic book. But I just feel that there’s something I’m missing, something off a little bit. Even how I would describe this book seems off. I’d say cute but that’s only because there isn’t really a word that means what I want to say otherwise. It’s kind of bloody and without a happy ending, but nevertheless, cute. See — that’s off.

Tesfa looked over my shoulder when I was reading it and was really interested in the art work. Maybe what’s off is that I’m not a kid. I’ve lost that by now. Maybe as a kid I’d appreciate this comic more.

Still, why isn’t the little black fish himself on the cover?

The Little Black Fish by Bizhan Khodabandeh went on sale May 15, 2016.

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

First things first: I know nothing about contemporary poetry, especially contemporary poetry geared towards adults. Sure I can recite Disobedience by A.A. Milne and most of Alligator Pie, but grown-up poems — I think the last grown-up book I read with poetry in it was A Poet and bin-Laden, which seemed to have been written under the illusion that there simply wasn’t enough poetry in novels about Central Asian politics (it was kind of like reading Tolkien except the inclusion of poetry was even more baffling).

So I know nothing about poetry.

And I read a book of poetry.

And said I’d review it.

Even though I don’t know what I’m doing.

Can I end the review here?

I’m going to say I liked it. I’m going to say the poems were interesting. Divided into three (really four, but one section has one poem only) sections, one about Iraqi Kurdistan, one about the Northwest Territories, one about Azerbaijan, within the sections, the poems inter-relate, if only due to geography. I’m going to say I got a sense of each of the locales, even though there was no plot to weave together. This is big for me — I love plot. I love stories. The stories here were more ephemeral. Maybe they didn’t exist. Maybe it was negative space I put stories into. Or maybe the stories were deep and I only skimmed the surface, not realizing their depths.

As I said, I don’t know much about poetry.

Some of the poem rhymed though. I do have a great appreciation for rhyming poems.

Also, Patrick Woodcock seems to know a lot of kids to dedicate poems to. Not that the poems he dedicated to these kids would be of much interest, necessarily to kids. A kid would probably rather Alligator Pie. Maybe they’ll appreciate them when they’re older.

I think I’ll end the review now here.

You can’t bury them all by Patrick Woodcock went on sale April 12, 2016.

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

In one of my many cookbooks, I have a recipe for freezer-cookies. Basically, the recipe is this: find a bunch of sweet things you like to eat, mix them into little balls stuck together with peanut butter, put balls in freezer. Done. I make them sometimes when I have a variety of baking supplies (chocolate chips, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, etc.) and just want something quick. Do they do the trick? Yes. Are they really that satisfying? Well …

And therein is my issue with Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer. It does the trick of being a quick-to-make-out story; it has everything in it, and I do mean everything (residential schools, rape, forced adoptions, sexism, racism, discrimination, the thoughts of a taxidermied bison, First Nations rights, LGBTQ issues, murder); but, ultimately the peanut butter to stick the balls together (to return to my already weak metaphor) just isn’t there. In three hundred pages, so much is thrown at us, one thing after another, that by the final page, it’s a bit like getting to the end of a marathon. The book wears me out. Plus, much like my last review, there’s a bit of wish fulfillment it seems going on here. Everything ties up in a nice tidy bow. Uplifting sure. Realistic, well … (a missing Cree senior in Saskatchewan is on the news in Ontario? I don’t buy it.)

Plus I’m more interested in the side stories: What was it like for Louise to go to law school in the 1930s as a Cree woman? Are Alice and Wanda going to continue seeing each other? Why didn’t Elinor search for her baby earlier? Does John have any personality at all? Why is the whole novel set in the sixties when it could just as easily be set now?

Overall, an okay book. Would likely be improved with less internal thoughts of a stuffed bison and more plot and character development.

Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer went on sale March 19, 2016.

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