I guess I am still unstuck in time because as I read the first few pages of Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due I thought to myself just in time for black history month. Except it was March. So oops. I amended my thoughts to Just in time for International Woman’s Day after I realised about half-way through Nalo Hopkinson‘s introduction that Ghost Summer: Stories, that Tananarive Due is female. I don’t know. I can’t really say I’ve been on the ball lately.

I feel like just going meh about this review and leaving it at that. I could have probably guessed I’d go meh after Hopkinson’s Introduction, because that’s how I feel about Hopkinson’s work as well. I don’t hate it. Just nothing grabs me. Going back to my complete obliviousness, I’d thought Ghost Summer: Stories would be more of horror stories, probably because of the ghost in the title. They’re kind of spooky, but nothing really terrifying, so that likely added to my assessment of meh. The stories don’t necessarily speak to my experience, which is fine; I don’t expect all books and all stories to be geared towards me. Perhaps if I were a WOC, specifically a black woman from the Southern US, I would feel some of the horror more acutely, like how certain stressors (like reactions to racist violence) can be passed down bloodlines.

But the real meh for me comes in the fact that most of these stories are less self-contained stories than starting points. Due can set up such a intriguing idea and then the story just ends. Reading Ghost Summer: Stories is like talking to that friend of yours who has so many cool ideas and then just doesn’t do anything with them. There’s a story about a disagreeable baby who gets possessed by a calming spirit and that’s it. The baby gets possessed. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy who knows the day he’s going to die. It’s in four years. That’s it. Nothing more. There’s a story about a boy in quarantine who is a Patient Zero for an epidemic. Then his doors are left unlocked, so he walks out of the ward. That’s it. Nothing more. See what I mean? All these are just the starting point. They aren’t stories. They are half-stories, a whole (in my copy) two hundred and seventy three pages of starts with not one of those pages devoted to a proper ending. Not even ambiguous thought-provoking or discussion-provoking endings. Just stops. It’s crazy-making!

The most interesting part of this collection is the, for lack of a better word, bios Due writes at the end of the each story, about why or where or how she wrote the stories. At least those are more complete than the stories themselves.

Ghost Summer: Stories is a great poster-child for the We Need Diverse Books movement. I’m glad I read it. But I can’t say I’m really happy with the stories themselves. Maybe short fiction just isn’t where Due should be since her ideas need more room to grow.

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due went on sale September 15, 2015.

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

It seems kind of redundant for me to have written The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig. Who else would they have been by? I think I need to write a story called The Collected Novellas of a name that isn’t mine by my name. Also, it won’t be collection of novellas. It’ll be a poetry book or a piece of investigative journalism or a video game. It will be full of sentences like The red house is blue and Feed the dog food to the cat.

Moving on to novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig, wikipedia tells me that “[a]t the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.” I could see why. With only a few broad strokes, the world he paints has such vivacity, the ostentatiousness of middle-Europe before and between the wars. The first class carriages and lamp lit streets and fur coats on ladies and thin little cigarettes. Silk stockings with lines up the backs. Men with mustaches, unironically.

And then, because don’t I always have my and then‘s, there’s a sort of monotony in excess. The stories are dense for very little actual goings-on and they start to drag. Plus all the women in the stories are silly, bobble-headed fools. They actually aren’t differentiated in any way, so I’ll rephrase: the woman in four of these novellas is a silly, bobble-headed fool. Her adultery, since the woman never remains faithful, is clearly on her, never on the man with whom she partakes her dalliances, or even the husband who (in story number three), and this is a big spoiler here, hires an actress to torment his wife to the point of suicide. Yes, the husband concocts a plan that destroys his wife’s mental state, but she’s the one who needs her head examined; he’s presented as quite the clever fellow for his machinations.

My book’s blurb laments how Zweig has fallen out of fashion. Yes, well, there may be a reason for that when an author treats fifty percent of the populace as flibberty-gibbets.

Moving on again from those four novellas of Zweig’s, The Collected Novellas has one more story in it: A Chess Story. Our maligned adulteress is not present; actually I don’t think any women are, which raises a whole other set of issues, but pushing that aside, why couldn’t the four other novellas be like this one? We’re on a ship, men are strolling about having metaphorical cock-fights with each other, and then it jolts into a whole, completely paranoid, Old Boy-esque backstory of a man trapped in a hotel room, losing his mind, and megalomaniac chess masters, and the whole thing races even though it’s a chess match where one of the players is purposefully going slow and it’s like all the things one dreams of in a novella, speed and plot and emotion and gravitas, but then we’re done and A Chess Story is only the second story in this collection, and there are three more to go, and if it weren’t for the brilliance of A Chess Story I’d just toss the book at the wall (not really, it’s on my kobo) and forget about it.

So I liked The Chess Story. The rest can stay behind in obscurity. For my tastes of Germany between the wars, I’ll take Christopher Isherwood, any day, instead.

The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig went on sale February 2, 2016.

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

(On Netgalley, when one posts a review, there’s always a Are you interested in connecting with this author checkbox. I only check yes for authors who are deceased because I really want to see Netgalley try to make that sort of thing happen. So maybe we’ll get a Stefan Zweig seance sometime in the future courtesy of Netgalley.)

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.