An Academic Affair
I took a trip with a friend to the Florida Keys in June, to get warm after the long, cold spring of Ohio. The day we drove to the airport in Columbus to fly to Miami the high was 66F. When we got to Miami, it was in the 90s, which was what we wanted but had to get used to.
On our first day we drove to Key Largo, visited a bird sanctuary, and then found our hotel, the Atlantic Bay, which faced the gulf. It was nice but quiet and unassuming, the pool half-full of friendly people who had come down from the north to get some of the Florida heat. One of them told us about a place called Robbie’s on the next island, where people feed the tarpon, so we headed there the next day, after taking a morning tour of the Key Largo coral reef on a glass bottom boat.
At Robbie’s, on Isla Morada, we had lunch and then paid for buckets of little fish to feed the big tarpons and the aggressive pelicans, which was lots of fun and very hot, out on a dock in the sun. We went on to our next hotel, the Amara Cay, and got in the pool. We considered the ocean, this time the Atlantic, but it was full of sargasso and looked dark and uninviting.
The next day we drove on to Marathon, where we went to the dolphin research center. We spent much of the day there, watching the dolphins as they played with the trainers and the people who had paid to get in the water with them. One of our favorites was a young dolphin named Louie whose trainers put sunscreen on his back to keep him from getting sunburned, since his back was out of the water so much, people-watching from his seawater pen. When we got to the Faro Blanco hotel, which was near a white lighthouse, we got in their infinity pool and watched the sun set over the gulf.
After that, we drove to Key West, where we parked at Mallory Square and took a trolley ride around downtown, getting off at the house where Ernest Hemingway lived with his second wife, Pauline, and taking the tour, including some of the 59 polydactyl cats who live on the property. That evening we went on a sunset dinner cruise. I overheard one of the crew saying that he had watched the sunset almost every day for four years and had still never seen a green flash, so I watched the sun set with less hope than I usually have, in the tropics. Although it was pretty, there was no green flash that night.
We spent time at the pool at the Doubletree hotel and then on our last day we got up early to board the ferry to Dry Tortugas National Park. It was a 2-1/2 hour boat ride and then we got to wander around the island from 10:45 to 2:30. We decided it was too hot and I didn’t walk well enough to tour Fort Jefferson so we went right down to the south beach where we finally found some Atlantic ocean that looked good for swimming. It was lovely, green and cool. People were snorkeling and finding live conch and hermit crabs.
When we had to get back on the ferry, we went through the freshwater showers and then dried off on our way back to Key West, where we got in our rental car, bought some aloe vera for our sunburns, and started the 3-1/2 hour drive back to the Miami airport, where we turned in our rental car and stayed at an airport hotel before flying back to Ohio the next morning.
It was a great trip, made even better by one of the books I’d brought for reading by the pool, Jodi McAlister’s An Academic Affair. I laughed out loud at something every time I picked it up. The first time I laughed, it was with rue, at the prologue: “For everyone who’s ever had to navigate the academic jobs market. It’s broken, not you.”
The novel alternates Jonah’s first-person point of view with Sadie’s; they tell the story of their competitive fighting since undergrad and it’s increasingly obvious that they’re fascinated with each other. This novel is set in Australia, so some of the terms are different but the details about their jobs as what we call adjuncts in the US are exactly the same. The conflict of the novel comes when they both apply for a tenure-track job in the town where Jonah’s sister lives and Sadie gets it, only to offer a marriage of convenience to Jonah so he can move there too and continue working in academia under the terms of a spousal hire.
Of course the marriage is much more than convenience and this becomes obvious to everyone fairly quickly, but part of the fun is watching them figure it out. The other big part of the fun is the footnotes. They start small and conversational but about halfway through there’s a page that’s more than half footnotes, quoting from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. (It added to my enjoyment that Sadie and Jonah are in the English department.)
At one point, at an emotional peak, Jonah quotes Shakespeare to Sadie and she says “as far as declarations of love went, it was entirely citational—quite literally someone else’s words—but it was somehow also entirely personal.” Especially as I’ve gotten older, that’s my idea of love. It’s a long conversation you’re always having with someone who has read most of the same things and can quote the right bits at the right time.
One of the fun things about this novel is the way the author uses various characters’ doubt that life can ever be like a romance plot. At times this is done with a footnote, like when Jonah has “a few deeply uncharitable thoughts about how long it had taken and how thin Chess’s reasoning seemed to me” and a footnote comments “I thought I was smothering you, so the only other alternative was completely exiting your life—really? That would get some stern words in the margins about logical leaps and a profound lack of nuance if it were an assignment I was grading.” Jodi McAlister can have her cake and eat it too, by making her characters comment on how unbelievable some parts of the plot of her novel are.
She also gets to comment on the literary study of romance novels by having this be the subject of Sadie’s research. At one point Sadie defends the genre she studies and that she’s in by saying “sincerity, my research had taught me, was often seen as a vulnerability. To earnestly express a feeling was a weakness. It was part of the reason people…liked to hang shit on romance novels. There was something inherently earnest at their heart: a sincere love and hope and joy that readers often reacted to with the same feelings, a delicate flower that provoked some people to want to crush it.”
Reading An Academic Affair was like enjoying the sight of a delicate flower—it was a small and lovely part of the experience of my trip to the Florida Keys.
Obstetrix
Naomi Kritzer’s new novel Obstetrix is about a woman who is kidnapped by a religious cult because they need an obstetrician, and she has to survive until she can escape. It is the stuff of nightmares. When I think about why this book at this time, my guess is that women who look ahead are thinking about what would happen if the men in our current government who are chipping away at women’s rights—the right to vote, the right to get a divorce without proving “fault,” the right to have a say in what happens to her own body—were to get more control over our lives.
The obstetrician is named Liz. She is kidnapped from what she thinks is a job interview, drugged and put into a minivan. When they arrive at a gas station, she tries to get out of the van but
“I flung myself out of the car to try to run. Only, my feet weren’t quite listening to me and instead of running, I found myself falling.
The asphalt was rough against my face and I struggled to push myself to sitting, but my body didn’t seem to know up from down. My voice still worked, at least. ‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘Help! I’m being kidnapped, help!’
There were other people at the gas station; I glimpsed a concerned face, but when Sarah and the man with her laughed apologetically and said ‘Yeah, we’re on our way to rehab for her, again,’ the face smiled in relief and turned away as the man and Sarah lifted me back into the car, buckled me in again, and drove away.”
One of the worst parts is that the cult leader won’t allow any of the members to read. He keeps even the Bible locked up. Liz spends some of her time at the compound remembering her favorite book, “an obscure fantasy novel from 1985 that I’d found at my local library and checked out repeatedly, called The Onyx Dagger which features “a lost princess who narrowly escaped death when her parents were murdered by a necromancer.” Those evil necromancers.
When Liz doesn’t cooperate the way the cult members want her to, they forbid her to come to meals, threaten to beat her with a cane, and finally threaten to kill her, showing her the grave of the obstetrician before her and saying “the doctor we had before, she chose not to save Sister Ginny. Brother Ethan, Sister Ginny’s husband, he shot that doctor when she said she wouldn’t help.”
Among the things Liz witnesses is children who are beaten and denied medical care aside from what she can offer (because it would require them to be able to leave the compound) and adults who are beaten for things like having a hidden phone. There can be no contact with the outside world.
Finally Liz is rescued, just as she is about to be shot for keeping her mouth shut about an escape plan involving a mother who needed a c-section. It’s a short book, and well-written enough to be a page-turner, so you can probably get to the safety of the ending before having to spend more than one night with its nightmares.
I didn’t need more nightmares than I already have about religious nuts and men who want control over women. If you’re interested in reading this book, let me know in the comments and I will send you my copy of Obstetrix–because if you’re not already alarmed, it’s certainly time to spread the word.
The Fountain
The Fountain, by Casey Scieszka, is a novel about a mother and her two adult children who apparently found the fountain of youth in the Catskills in the nineteenth century and have now returned to find out exactly what gave them eternal youth and immortality.
The book was sent to me as a gift from a friend who has family in the area of the Catskills where it’s set and knows the local area well. She was interested in how someone who hasn’t been there would see the local color. My reaction is that the location was chosen mostly in relation to the twist at the very end—the Catskills have long been settled but parts are still remote, so there could be secret, relatively unexplored places no one but the people who live there know about, kind of like a good fishing spot.
The main character, Vera Van Valkenburg, has a few secret fishing spots. She’s become a forest ranger because her long life has taught her that she can be useful helping to preserve and protect wild areas. Her brother Eli, a sensualist, has learned how to cook and charm everyone he meets. Their mother, who left them for parts unknown a few lifetimes ago, has put her immortality to work as a nurse. As in all stories about immortals, they have to fake their aging and death and stay on the move so no one discovers their secret. They’ve been separated for a while but as the novel begins Vera and Eli have moved back home, living near the house where they grew up.
Vera finds out that Eli has discovered another immortal, a woman named Lydia who grew up with them. Lydia is a scientist and is working to find the source of their immortality, so as my friend who sent me the book said, it’s kind of necromancy adjacent. Instead of trying to find a way to live forever, Lydia is trying to reverse engineer her immortality, along with Vera’s and Eli’s. Vera tries to point out to Lydia that what she is talking about is “extremely dangerous. Eternally dangerous” and asks her “you sure you’re going to feel the same way when some psychotic despot builds an immortal army?” But in the end, Lydia and her financial backer find out that necromancy doesn’t pay.
It’s a well-written book, and I enjoyed reading it. I had a few complaints, though. One is the chapter headings, which keep giving us the month and year in which the events of the novel happen, although there’s no reason to keep track of the time month by month since there’s never a chapter that doesn’t take place in 2014. Another of my complaints is that Vera keeps trying to kill herself, and there’s no obvious reason for it except that she hasn’t yet found a way to give meaning to her abnormally long life. A final complaint is that there’s an immortal deer and it’s totally obvious, although not to the characters. And if there’s a deer who has discovered “the fountain,” it seems like there would also be immortal insects and birds.
The Fountain has observations about people that seem funny and true, like that “when people lie to you, you never think it’s because they’re secretly immortal.” And the twist is a good one. It’s obvious in retrospect, but I didn’t guess it and I bet you won’t, either.
Radiant Star
I read Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie, because she read the first chapter out loud at the ICFA conference I went to last March and then I wanted to find out what happened. The first chapter is about a child named Jonr and I did eventually find out what happened to him, but it took a while to get back to him; there are a lot of characters in the novel, all intriguing for places in the religious and political hierarchy of a planet called Ooioiaa, which is a great name for a place where everyone lives underground and eats worms. This one is related to the Radch empire novels–the Radchaai arrive on the planet during the events of the novel–but it’s a standalone, as you can read and enjoy it without having read any previous novels in the series.
The descriptions of Ooioiaa and its people and culture are the best part, as in this passage:
“Shtel hirself suspected that the refusal of hir dinner invitation was a calculated insult, and that an invitation to breakfast—not generally a meal Ooioiaans take in company—was a bad sign.” Shtel is the consort of Iono, who is the son of Tais, and it is Tais who invited them to breakfast in order to tell his son that he is disinheriting him in favor of his granddaughter.
There’s a complicated plot involving religion—the worship of a “radiant star” and the creation of “saints” in the star’s temple (called the “temporal location”). I should admit that I’ve never liked reading about fictional religion in SF or fantasy novels, even something everyone acknowledges as great like Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light or N.K. Jemison’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. So the religion part of this novel—a very large part—was mostly lost on me.
I did enjoy some of the narrator’s tone of voice, like when we’re told that
“a cynic might suspect that the entire matter of rushing to put St. Tais on the new Crown of Rays was about currying favor with the very wealthy heir of Serque Tais, whoever that might be. But is it even possible to imagine that these people, who had devoted so much time and money and effort to the worthy cause of religious education, could possibly be so mercenary in the midst of such a sacred occasion? Surely not.”
And I definitely enjoyed the how the reactions of the Radchaii, who are newly arrived on Ooioiaa, are described as they are finding out details about the local religion, like when one “drew breath to call the savant ignorant and superstitious and stupid, to cry out all her misgivings and disgusts, the press of pilgrims around the ghoulish saints, even the very petty concealment of the Images of Radiance.”
It’s funny how readers, new to Ooioiaa themselves, start to identify with the Radchaii. And how starting with the story of Jonr, who appeals for help to one of the priest-figures, Niranhin, at the local temple and is denied, makes seeing what happens to Niranhin more interesting, especially when “they remembered their contempt for their predecessor, Hierarch Biven, who Niranhin had felt was not as strong of a leader as they might have been, who had not, Niranhin believed, had the strength to make difficult choices.” Niranhin’s own choices turn out to have been all wrong.
We get to see other people who tormented young Jonr get their just deserts too, as the narrator observes, archly:
“We all make mistakes. Which is absolutely true. And should our subsequent lives be determined by mistakes we might have made when young and foolish? Who among us has not sold a child away for some extra money, or excluded and harassed a sibling who seemed undefended and vulnerable? Who among us has not, in a fit of high spirits, left a sib with broken ribs and a concussion?”
The Radchaii governor who has been installed on Ooioiaa tries to head off famine by ordering that skel, a basic food eaten by Radchaii, should now be cultured to feed the planet’s population. Much of the plot involves the far-reaching repercussions of this order. I found this passage interesting:
“The non-Radchaai permanent residents of Ooioiaa did not eat skel. Nor did the pilgrims—though they certainly complained about Ooioiaan cuisine when they could not find a favorite, essential dish, or when the taste and texture of local food was discovered to be unpalatable. Because food—the food you’re used to, the food you ate as a child—is so essential a part of what makes you feel safe and secure, and even confirms who you imagine yourself to be.”
So whether or not you’re all that interested in any of the particular details about Ooioiaa and its inhabitants, you’ll find things that get you interested in Radiant Star, even if they’re only observations about the fictional characters, whose minds seem to work much the same way as our own.
Cosmic Cats and Fantastic Furballs
I read Cosmic Cats and Fantastic Furballs, short stories by Mary A. Turzillo, because it was lying around at my house–Ron read it first and left it out for me. I’d met the author at ICFA in March, when she was with her husband, also an author, and I was telling him how much I’d enjoyed one of his books. Now I wish I’d been able to tell Mary that, too. But I can recommend her book to cat lovers participating in Reading the Meow.
It’s hard to pick out a favorite from these stories; they’re all good and very much of a piece. The first one, “Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station,” is about a space station full of cat lovers and the effects of taxoplasmosis on its population.
“Nefertiti’s Tenth Life” is about a cosseted indoor cat whose old soul is transplanted into a new robot body because her humans can’t stand to let her die, but then they are too disconcerted by the new robot cat to even care when she finally slinks off to live elsewhere. Nefertiti herself is the story’s first-person narrator, and that adds to the effect:
“I remember the rush of PLEASURE when the female slave held me, so when they are both good and asleep, I spring up onto the bed, as lightly as I can. I used to be able to do that, long ago, without waking them up. But then when I was sick, I couldn’t manage to get up off the floor at all, and just sat there, meowing pitifully in that tone that always gets to humans. This time, I land too hard, and they wake up.”
As I would tell you to expect, cat necromancy doesn’t pay.
Another first-person narrated story is “The Painter and the Sphynx,” which has time travel and a good twist at the end.
“Chocolate Kittens from Mars” is the most memorable and original story in this collection. It will gradually become clear to the reader what genre this story belongs in. There are hints from the very beginning—these are kitten from Mars, experimental, given to a girlfriend in “a heavy red satin box, heart-shaped” which she later describes as a “kitten coffin” and the girlfriend says “although I was afraid they’d give away their presence by sunning themselves in the front window, they seemed to enjoy basking in shadows.”
The story “Lin Jee” begins with the cat “yowling over a sock she had killed,” which turns out to help her humans solve a mystery.
There’s a Christmas story, “A Small Gift from Miw” which is, again, narrated in first person by the cat to give a new perspective on familiar events.
“Yoshi and the Dragon’s Pearl” is a Japanese-style story about the heroism of a man who turned into a cat.
Some of the stories are very short, just one or two pages, and the best of these, I think is a fictional lab report entitled “Notes Toward a New Trait As Revealed by Correlation Among Items of the Mmmpi.”
“Purple” is a long story about a kitten “which angels had dyed purple,” who comes back to earth to earn its wings and meets one of those inexplicable humans who hate cats. Worry not, however, because before the end of the story the human realizes that “maybe God had not appointed her the Chief Agent of Feline Birth Control for Northeast Ohio.”
In “Pride,” an animal rights protestor, Kevin, saves a cute kitten from an experimental facility and takes care of it as it grows up into a saber-toothed tiger, a smilodon, and eventually it wreaks the kind of havoc that you might expect, at which time Kevin realizes that the big cat is “not a pet. No more than an astronaut would call the moon a pet. No more than a composer would call his greatest symphony a pet. No more than a mountain climber would call Everest a pet.”
Anyone who loves cats will love these stories. Do you know the word for cat lover? It’s ailurophile, a word that combines the Greek word for cat, ailouros, with the suffix -phile, meaning a lover or enthusiast. Are you an ailurophile? I am. Mary Turzillo certainly is.
Yesteryear
I read Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, because I thought it was speculative fiction, but I was wrong. There will be spoilers in this review—but I’ll warn you that I don’t think it’s worth it to read the novel without knowing what is going to happen. Here’s the thing: there is no time travel in Yesteryear; her own just deserts are carefully chosen by its first-person narrator.
I don’t know why it would surprise anyone, in this era of people voting for leopards eating their faces, that a woman would be so perverse as to choose to live as if she were in the 19th century on purpose. But it surprised me. So that was the first hurdle I had to get over in order to say what I thought of the novel—it wasn’t what I expected or wanted.
The second hurdle—and this one is higher—is that what could have been an interesting story, offering ideas for discussion about the role of women in today’s American society, is spoiled by an emphasis on sex and domestic violence. A woman who chooses to stay home and raise children is not necessarily fervently religious, sexually repressed, and an idiot but the first-person narrator of Yesteryear, whose name is Natalie, definitely is.
One of the things that makes this novel interesting and the ideas potentially flammable is that Natalie is an unreliable narrator. You might not see that at first, as with any good novel with an unreliable narrator (think of Lolita, by Nabakov). In Yesteryear, signals about the narrator’s unreliability are available from the very beginning, certainly by page 8, when she says “If the Angry Women found out about any of my children’s failings, they’d go crazy with bloodthirst. They’d also be devastated. None of them realized it, of course, but they needed me as much as I needed them. It was a symbiotic relationship.” The narrator calls her Instagram followers “angry women” because they’re critical of her life and she thinks it must be because they’re less hardworking and jealous of what she’s achieved. What she’s “achieved,” in fact, is a loveless marriage, six children being raised by nannies, and a renovated farmhouse in the middle of Idaho in which modern conveniences, like microwave and dishwasher, are hidden.
Natalie is largely based on Hannah of Ballerina Farm. Natalie’s father-in-law, who has political aspirations, is a MAGA conservative; a man who criticizes his hired help for being “lazy” and for not having enough time to raise their own children. Natalie’s mother is a fundamentalist Christian who does things like push her daughter to go jogging just days after giving birth rather than addressing her obvious postpartum depression. The more we learn about Natalie’s mother, the worse she gets. At one point, on the phone, she tells Natalie
“there comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be—meaning: if you are lucky, you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children’s train sets, and you will not find out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.”
So did I “like” this book? I mostly enjoyed the process of reading it and think it’s well-written. The part where Natalie finds herself in what seems to be the past–getting what some might say is her just deserts for pretending to live in the past—actually begins on page 31 of the novel and is identified as “the present.” Natalie’s influencer period, her childhood and college days, and her courtship with her husband Caleb are all spooled out against the backdrop of this puzzling present day, which is a good narrative move, since in the end we discover that Natalie has orchestrated everything that happens to her.
The big moments in Natalie’s life are designed to show how she got to where she is in the fictional “present.” When she goes off to college, she is afraid, because she thinks of the rest of the world as the biblical “Gomorrah” and believes that if she associates with anyone she meets at college she will be defiled, quoting a Bible verse warning against necromancers: “do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them…”
What Natalie thinks about college seems designed to stoke the anger of conservative readers who want more women to be “tradwives.” It’s the same kind of lies and innuendo we’ve been hearing from the current administration; Natalie says that, in college,
“I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out.”
Natalie is scandalized by her college classmates, who “when they talked about stay-at-home mothers—specifically about their stay-at-home mothers—their eyes didn’t go misty with gratitude. Instead, they argued bravely that old-school femininity was a scourge. Any woman who chose to stay in the home instead of working in the world was complicit.” My question is: have you ever adopted or volunteered with a child who is grateful? It’s a pitiful thing, a grateful child. I think that children who feel secure usually don’t feel much gratitude for anything their parents did for them until they reach their twenties or they have children of their own.
Throughout the novel Natalie preaches about the evils of education:
“’They teach little white children to feel guilty about the fact that our country used to have slaves.’ My public school hadn’t taught this, but I’d heard of other schools that had. Or rather my mother had heard about it from another woman at a church bake sale, who had heard about it from her sister’s best friend, who was a principal at an afflicted middle school in California or Maryland or Canada. My mother (or the woman or her sister” could never quite remember where.”
Natalie’s conclusion about the other women at her college is “I missed being around women who were nice.” (This makes me think of the witch in Into the Woods singing “you’re so nice…you’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice.”) She tells us she spends her nights at college looking at “a series of low-fi internet forums” searching for answers to dumb questions like “why do modern women hate men so much?” and “why do modern women hate kids so much?”
As a mother and influencer, Natalie fixates on words as “dog whistles,” like when she’s getting an ultrasound and the technician asks “do you want to know the gender?” Natalie corrects the technician, saying “sex….you mean the sex of the baby.”
Burke might be trying to work up sympathy for Natalie by giving her some kind of amnesia and a few injuries when she finds herself with no modern conveniences, so we have to suffer through hearing about how her daughter gives her stitches after she’s put her ankle in a steel trap in the woods and through a long passage about how difficult it is to wash clothes with lye soap in all kinds of weather.
There is a little bit of what I think readers expect from this novel, the karma of the “tradwife” getting what she said she wanted:
“It really is funny to think of how I all but begged Caleb, in our early years of marriage, to become the kind of man who is standing before me now. The opposite of a kindergarten teacher. A farmer. A cowboy. A patriarch. A man without a single soft edge. I craved it, I prayed for it, and what did the Lord do? He listened. He gave me what I wanted.”
But I found it impossible to sympathize with Natalie, self-obsessed and ignorantly critical as she is. She likes to imagine that the women she knew in high school and college—in particular, her college roommate, Reena—envy her. She builds up entire castles-in-the-air about it:
“I knew exactly what would come next. As long as Reena didn’t screw up royally over the next few summers, she’d get a job offer from the firm after graduation, six figures right out of the gate. Living the dream! She would start working seventy or eighty hours a week, subsisting mostly on a diet of cocaine and Red Bull. Her coworkers would comprise a bullpen of male colleagues, men who screwed the small handful of women in the office non-stop, personally and professionally. From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary—smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter. No biggie! Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for. She would spend her twenties feeling disappointment and labeling it gratitude, and then she would convince herself that this was a form of Buddhist enlightenment: be happy with what you have. This is what she would tell herself each time she was faced with the fact that she had once again received less money, less praise, and even a smaller portion of blow than her male coworkers….During this time period of professional growth, Reena would also do her best to fall in love and get married, and if she managed that, then years later, when she finally go around to having kids, she would act utterly shocked when her doctor informed her she was a geriatric candidate, and it would be an uphill battle to get pregnant. If she was lucky…she’d have to do only one or two rounds of IVF, and there would be only a small handful of months where she found herself joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband jabbed at the fat of her ass with a needle (his mind starting to wander past his miserable aging wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to become pregnant), and when the time came, when Reena finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and realized she’d made it—she was at the top of the mountain, she had it all!—the landscape would look like this: her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her, and her friends with children no longer had time to see her, and Reena…would complain about none of it, not the disappearing husband or the flailing career or the crushing loneliness, not a word of it to anyone, because she would technically be one of the lucky ones—a flush retirement account and four months’ maternity leave.”
Perhaps it’s inevitable with this kind of unreliable narrator, but the effect of the novel is polarizing, as if there are only two choices for women—to be like Reena, or to be like Natalie.
At one point Natalie describes a scene that reminds me of one from the first season of the tv show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when she wakes up early to make herself pretty and then slips back into bed so her husband will think she woke up that way. Natalie describes waking up before dawn to
“Shower. Wash and condition hair. Exfoliate. Shave. Blow-dry hair. Curl hair. Layer creams and pigments onto skin. Foundation, blush, eyelash curler, mascara, brow liner. As your mother-in-law would say: the bare minimum. While the sun rises outside, stare at reflection in the bathroom mirror, inspecting for flaws. Practice saying It’s nothing. Practice saying I just like starting my day with a little bit of me time. Swallow the rising misery in throat. Swallow the fury. Swallow the anxiety. Swallow the desire to light the house on fire and walk out the front door while husband, baby, and in-laws burn to death. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Kill yourself. No—conjure the audience. Conjure Jesus. Conjure mother. Conjure Reena.”
This is the remedy Natalie finds for her misery—imagining an audience for everything she does. And then, once she becomes Instagram famous, framing every moment of her life for the camera. Always performing. And her mother, who has brought Natalie up to believe a number of twisted things about life, keeps encouraging her to perform every minute by saying “who is our Lord and Savior, if not the original audience member for our lives?”
Natalie is a poisonous character and you will, at some point, be repelled by having to see the world through her eyes. She doesn’t get the last word, though—that comes from her daughter, which is another good move for this narrative, framing the real evil that Natalie has caused with the perspective of one of her innocent victims, a girl who is escaping the false opposition of “tradwife” vs “angry woman.”
All Gremlins Great & Small
A comment on my review of Violet Thistlewait is Not a Villain Anymore made me look for another cozy fantasy, T.M. Baumgartner’s All Gremlins Great & Small. I love the titular homage to the popular veterinarian series by James Herriott, whose title comes, of course, from the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful.
And I love Baumgartner’s Gremlins—and all the rest of the alien creatures that accidentally come through a portal into our world and end up needing vet care from Nessa, the series’ indefatigable veterinarian.
All Gremlins Great & Small takes place on a hike to resupply aid stations in the wilderness for people who might come back through a portal after being accidentally transported to another world. This happened to Nessa’s husband Mark four years previously, and she has continued to hope he will come back, although she’s starting to have a different perspective on some of the little things that bothered her about him during their marriage. When Nessa gets to the parking lot of her vet practice there’s only one other person there to meet her, Christopher, the other volunteers having lost enthusiasm for the resupply hikes over the years since the portals began appearing.
Christopher is a friend of one of the volunteers and tells Nessa that he works for DPAS, Department of Portal Analysis and Security. Nessa asks what he does there, thinking that “depending on the division, it might have been anything from mapping the transient portals to figuring out how to communicate with the verdirans, the only other clearly sentient species we’d encountered.” Christopher says he had been leading expeditions into the portals before he moved to Nessa’s area, the Pacific Northwest, but now he’ll be doing “more data collection from this side.”
As they walk, Christopher and Nessa laugh about their mutual friend’s random use of emojis in texts and share what they know about the creatures they meet on the trail, like when Nessa
“narrowly avoided stepping on a legless lizard pretending to be a twig. It might have been better camouflage if it didn’t have a band of red running up its back. ‘That’s not native, is it?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He shrugged. ‘Mostly, I just assume everything might be dangerous and it’s better not to touch it if you aren’t sure.’
‘The time-honored ‘Australia is everywhere’ approach.”
They rescue an injured gremlin who Nessa believes must have been someone’s pet, because of how tame she is. The gremlins are small, have fur, blue or green wings, purple eyes, and Nessa says she thinks “they probably split off from some ancestor of a bat.”
Nessa is the only vet in her area who is willing to work with xenotic species, the odd creatures that come through the portals. She takes a call from the emergency clinic, at one point, and gives them advice on what to do with a “mandadragon” that might already be dead. Her advice is to “get as much of a liter of saline as you can under the skin, then put it in some sort of contained space with a heat lamp. Tell the owner you’re trying to resuscitate it and send them off to get coffee. When it heats up, it will either spring to life and try to kill everyone—which is why you should give it fluids now instead of waiting—or it will start to smell.”
They have adventures with portals and dangerous animals, including one called a “goliath,” and Christopher starts to make Nessa more aware of how she’s been living, at one point asking her what she would do if he adopted a dog and “you find out I take her for a run every weekend and keep going until she collapses.” Nessa takes his point, although she is also “seeing through his ham-handed metaphor.”
All Gremlins Great & Small was such a delightful novella that I searched for a copy of the second book in the series (confusingly, “Book One of The Portal Storms”) entitled All Rocs Wise & Wonderful. I enjoyed it as much or even more than the first.
In All Rocs Wise & Wonderful, many more xenotic species are brought in for Nessa’s care, including an injured Verdiran, who she tries not to accept, saying he should go to the human hospital, but then relenting enough to try to get him stabilized. Then it turns out she can’t send him to the hospital because the animal control officer who brought him to her tells Nessa that “the EMTs told me the ER doctor on duty right now is one of those ‘humans first’ whack jobs.” She names him Fred in order to have something to identify him besides “animal control stray.” And then she calls Christopher, figuring that DPAS might know what to do.
Christopher starts trying to communicate with Fred, who draws a picture and then goes over to some unidentified babies Nessa has been unsuccessfully trying to feed and gives them a piece of dried meat, which they immediately latch onto, “digging at it with their front claws, and nosing out and swallowing the tiny pieces that came off.” Christopher informs Nessa that Fred is laughing, saying “that thing he’s doing with his forehead, the way it wrinkles? That’s what they do when they see something they find funny.”
Soon Nessa, Christopher, and Fred figure out that an evil corporation is opening portals so they can sell houses in a settlement they’ve named “Pure Paradise. Half a million gets you and your family a spot in some pristine world, where you can hunt and fish and live the perfect life. Perfect weather. No pollution. No government to interfere because there is no government.” Nessa comments that it “sounds like a scam. Ten to one they don’t build a sewer system properly and end up with cholera.”
Eventually one of the ideas for creating portal paradise spells its doom—hunting exotic animals they bring in through the portals. When the corporate lackeys try to send those interfering kids Nessa and Christopher to their doom, through a portal with dangerous carnivores, they manage to turn the tables and send the carnivores through to the erstwhile paradise, spoiling the scheme for the Scooby-Doo-type villains.
When I’d finished reading All Rocs Wild & Wonderful I wanted to read the next one, All Basilisks Wild & Sparking, but found that it was only available on kindle. So I sent an email to the author by way of her newsletter and she answered and made the book available in paperback. I enjoyed it as much as the first two.
One of the new developments in All Basilisks Wild & Sparking is that an ailing six-month-old relative of Fred’s is dropped at Nessa’s doorstep and she has to find a way to get the baby healthy. Her mother-in-law Antonia helps her figure out what to feed the baby, what to call her (Fiona) and who will help take care of her. Fred helps her figure out what’s wrong with Fiona’s health and how to guard her against other Verdirans who start showing up trying to take her.
Fred and Nessa have devolved into a strange kind of sibling relationship in which they tease and needle each other, using sign language. When Antonia is showing them through the garden
“that set off a round of what I liked to call ‘act like a toddler,’ in which we moved from place to place, pointing at things and saying What? Since we’d only covered three new words and they didn’t apply to vegetables, I tried to keep us away from the vegetable bed—Antonia had memorized all the names earlier, but I couldn’t identify half the herbs in English.
Fred knew what I was doing and countered by leading us back toward the rosemary. I’d looked up insults a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t remember any of them, so I pointed at him. Flower.
The laugh lines on his forehead were so deep I wondered if verdirans had additional muscles there. He stood up taller, pointed to his chest, and signed tree.
Antonia shook her head and sighed. ‘The two of you are like little kids.’”
Later Fred includes Christopher in his practical jokes. As they are investigating a mystery connected to a portal, walking through an olive grove at night,
“Christopher’s head hit something and he reeled back. I caught his shoulder to keep him from moving forward. ‘You okay?’
Christopher rubbed his forehead. ‘I’m fine. Won’t even leave a bump. How did Fred not hit that? We’re the same height.
Fred emerged from the side of the trail right next to us.
‘Fred was holding it down so you’d run into it.’ I clamped my phone under my arm and signed You plant. He found that even funnier than the middle finger.”
The three of them solve the mystery and manage to keep Fiona safe. It’s an entirely satisfying adventure, and I’ll be looking for the next in the series, called The Portal Storms, by checking the author’s free newsletter, advertised at the end of the book.
If you enjoy reading about animals, you’ll like these books, which are crammed with details about imaginary creatures, most of which I haven’t even mentioned but are essential to the feel of the world. One of my favorites is the “zap lizards,” who build nests in all kinds of precarious places.
Speaking of nests, I bought a blooming begonia a few weeks ago and hung it right beside a door to the deck, one we use frequently. As they often have in previous summers, a couple of wrens moved right in, tossing the foliage and flowers aside to make a nest, where I can now see eggs. The fledglings sometimes have trouble there, above the hard deck, but I don’t know of any way to discourage the wrens from moving in, so we’re trying to take care with the door and put up with the truncated plant while they do their bird thing. We’ve previously had a squirrel nest in a gutter downspout, and a fawn born under a tree in our front yard. We don’t want the mess and the parasites and the baby animals so close, but since we’re not Scooby-Doo-type villains we don’t run them off. Have you ever dealt with nests and baby animals around your house?
The Shippers
Katherine Center is an author I’ll read anything by, and her newest novel, The Shippers, is about as good as the rest. I enjoyed it especially because it was delivered to my house (pre-ordered) when I had a cold that turned into a sinus infection, so I had very little energy to read anything more taxing.
I really enjoyed the author’s preface, about why she likes happy endings. It reminded me of my friend Jenny, who once wrote a blog with the title Reading the End when Center said “I, myself, hate not knowing what’s going to happen at the end. I hate it so much, in fact, that if I don’t know how a story ends, I will google it beforehand.”
I loved the metaphors, like “being with Pearce was the emotional equivalent of being ravenously hungry and then eating one Pringle.” I enjoyed the local Galveston flavor, like when the main character, Jojo, went to “Murdochs—a hundred-year-old souvenir shop that sold everything and sat up on stilts over the waves.” (When I went to Murdochs I bought a postcard of the souvenir shop, which I thought was pretty funny.)
Jojo and her sister Ashley, who is getting married on a cruise ship, decide that the cruise will be the right time to match up Jojo with her childhood crush, Finn. They think he’s the first person who ever kissed her during a neighborhood game of truth or dare, even though it’s fairly obvious from the first time you hear the story (p. 52) that it was actually Jojo’s best friend Cooper who kissed her when she was blindfolded and Finn didn’t show up for his dare.
There’s some depth to the romance plot because Jojo thinks she has trouble with relationships on account of her father’s example. He seems to have been something of an absentee husband and father for her whole life, always working.
Cooper has always been there for Jojo, except for four years when he mysteriously disappeared from her life– a mystery to no one except Jojo herself. It’s obvious throughout the novel that Cooper is in love with Jojo and she doesn’t even consider this possibility. He helps her with everything, including singing for her sister’s wedding; the two of them liked to sing together in Jojo’s bedroom when they were younger, and when Cooper offers to help with the wedding song she says yes, adding “if you’re going to do something terrifying, it should be something you already know by heart.”
Jojo keeps saying yes to Cooper and no to Finn, who has grown up into a man who bores her silly. Cooper even tells her that “Finn is absolutely one hundred percent wrong for you,” but it takes her a while to figure that out for herself. Of course, that’s the fun of a slow burn friends to lovers romance plot.
I enjoyed the depths (ha) of the title reverberations all the way through, especially when the young people explain how they’re using the word “shipping” to Jojo’s grandmother:
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Not yet,” Grandma Dodie said, looking mischievous.
“You’ve got this, Grandma Dodie,” Bridesmaid Two said, making a hand heart. “I’m shipping you.”
Grandma Dodie frowned. “Shipping me?”
“Both of you,” Bridesmaid Two explained, like that should clear things up.
Grandma Dodie looked around the table like that didn’t compute.
“She’s rooting for your relationship,” Cooper explained. “Ship comes from relationship.”
….”Are you sure that’s a real word?” Grandma Dodie asked, pulling a tiny pencil and pad of paper from her purse to write down this newfangled term.
“Don’t worry about it, Grandma Dodie,” I said.
But Grandma Dodie kept writing, forming the word ship in her careful, slanted cursive, and then writing verb in parentheses before writing the definition. As she wrote, she said, “If people are doing it to me, I want to know what it is.”
The Shippers is a fun book, and if you’re like me you’ll read it fast and then sigh with regret that there is no more. Now I need something more taxing. Any suggestions?
Dragons of Wendal
I read Dragons of Wendal because it was written by faithful reader and commenter Maria Schneider, whose advice I did not seek before choosing one of her novels at random. I usually like a book with dragons. The ones from the fictional land of Wendal are both human and dragon, but unlike the dragons in Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw, they are not much concerned with propriety.
The book reads like a particularly good game of dungeons and dragons. The main character, Zoe, does complicated magic with crystals, which have to recharge, and glyphs. She has a cousin, Lonnie, who tries to do magic but keeps fumbling it, and largely as a result of Lonnie’s efforts, Zoe keeps ending up having to rescue a dragon/human named Lindis. The companions who join her include a wolf shifter, Derrick, and a seer named Hewitt, who is only four years old.
The details about Zoe’s crystals and how depleted her energy can get when she uses them reminded me a little of Jim Butcher’s wizard Harry Dresden, who goes like an energizer battery until he is way past the point any mortal could keep going. After one of her rescues of Lindis, Zoe thinks
“the only problem was that the orange was spent. I’d have to use the refueled yellow and that depressed me. I had not intended to give up two crystals. The small blue and a large white would be my only remaining sources of defense. I wasn’t up to my normal speed either. In fact, sitting down made me realize just how hard it was going to be to get started again. I was tapped out and short two crystals because no way did I have the energy to reset the orange one that had powered the ward.”
When Zoe has figured out how to trick whoever is binding Lindis’s dragon power, she has to go to a dragon ball in order to carry out her plan. She dances with Derrick:
“Derrick danced so expertly, most people were little more than a swirl of colors. There was some sense of who was what by their attire. Most of the female dragons wore gowns of sheer silk with huge hoops that mimicked the shape of a dragon. The men didn’t hesitate to allow wisps of smoke to float about their heads as though they were indulging in cigars rather than partaking in male dragon showmanship.”
Zoe finds that she’s caught up in political intrigue and neatly sidesteps most of it by pointing out that she is not a noble. As she eventually discovers, however, it isn’t possible to escape the political ramifications of what is happening, especially since they involve the founder of her own magic school and the secret of Hewitt’s parentage.
Dragons of Wendal is a fun little adventure, and at only 158 pages, it’s possible to read it all in one sitting.
What’s your favorite book about dragons? Have you read Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw, or JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit? Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede? Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros? His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik? To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose?
Cherry Baby
I’ll read anything by Rainbow Rowell, and her new novel, Cherry Baby, is a romance novel with a fat heroine, so it’s a bit different from the average romance novel. It’s also different because although the heroine is looking for new love, she ends up finding herself in an old place.
Many readers will identify with Cherry, as I did. She is a fat woman who “came from a long line of fat women….She’d been a fat kid, then a fat teenager, and now she was a fat lady. She knew how she looked, how people saw her—she thought about it constantly….Cherry was so used to thinking about being fat, she hardly even noticed that she was doing it.”
The descriptions of the food Cherry’s sisters make when they get together for holidays are marvelous, all of these fat women enjoying good food. And her idea of the pleasures of travel includes food: “stay in nice hotels. Try regional takes on eggs Benedict.”
The novel even addresses the new GLP-1 medications by having one of Cherry’s sisters lose weight with one of them. When the sister, Hope, asks Cherry if she has thought about taking it, they have this conversation:
“Would you ever take the meds?”
“Oh…” Cherry grimaced. “I don’t know. It feels like…Well, no offense, honestly, but that would feel like giving up.”
“On losing weight naturally?”
God, no—I’ll never lose weight naturally. I meant…giving up on the fight, you know? The good fight to be…accepted, I guess. Or to accept myself.”
“Geez, Cherry, you really are noble.”
Cherry was still thinking. “Also, I worry about what the drugs would do to my brain. Like, every time someone says that Ozempic quiets their ‘food noise’? I shudder. It’s not food noise to me—it’s food music.”
Hope laughed.
“I’m serious,” Cherry said. “I like liking food. I like being hungry. I like wanting things—and yearning. Do you still yearn?”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever noticed my yearning,” Hope said. “Maybe I’m not a natural yearner.”
“Oh, I am.” Cherry folded her arms and leaned her shoulder into the seat, getting more comfortable. “I could yearn professionally. I think I kind of do—all my success comes from wanting something more or something better.”
“I still like food…” Hope said thoughtfully.
“That’s good,” Cherry said.
“…but I don’t think about it very much.”
“That sounds terrible.”
As a person who spent two and a half years injecting myself weekly with a GLP-1 medication before stopping because it had little effect on me, I found this interesting. I did yearn less, and I wanted to drink wine less. I chewed on my fingernails a lot less. I was able to get just hungry enough to look forward to a meal in a way I hadn’t before, when I was always horribly hungry. The drug did make me less, in a psychological way, and that was nice for a while because before I had always been way too much.
Now I have a new perspective on what it means to get enough. I don’t identify with Hope, who doesn’t think about food very much, but I also don’t fully identify with Cherry, who says she likes being hungry. I hate being hungry! And I’m not excited about the fight for acceptance. I’d still love to be significantly lighter on my feet so I could walk farther, but I don’t see how that’s going to happen.
Luckily I still have the capacity to enjoy food and to enjoy reading books about people enjoying food. This is a good one.
Necromancy Never Pays 
