The Hatening begiiiiiiiiiiiiiins! I dearly hope that with this Hatening, I have managed to talk Whiskey Jenny out of Hatening me to read Irish literature, because this is now two Irish books in a row that haven’t really worked for either of us. Star of the Sea is set on a famine ship, and the good thing I can say about it is that it made me really want an Upstairs/Downstairs style BBC series that takes place on board a ship. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!
Things We Discussed
Sweat, Lynn Nottage
“A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department”
Kim’s Convenience
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Oscar Isaac training to play Moon Knight
Babylon 5
Black Sails
Sense8
Envy, Sandra Brown
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
Sarah McCarry
Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall
Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Alexis Hall
Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace
Mort(e), Robert Repino
Gin Jenny’s Picks
The Rib King, Ladee Hubbard
The Mirror Season, Anna-Marie McLemore
Renegade Flight, Andrea Tang (companion novel to Rebelwing)
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Sorrowland, Rivers Solomon
Black Water Sister, Zen Cho
Firebreak, Nicole Kornher-Stace
The Library of the Dead, TL Huchu
The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo
The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri
Whiskey Jenny’s Picks
Quiet in Her Bones, Nalini Singh
Accidentally Engaged, Farah Heron
Lightseekers, Femi Kayode
Dial A for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto
Malefactor, Robert Repino
Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor
You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcript
WJ: Hello, and welcome back to the Reading the End Bookcast with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GJ: And I’m Gin Jenny!
WJ: And we are thrilled to be back talking about books and literary happenings. On today’s podcast, we are going to talk about what we’re reading; we’re going to talk about what we’re watching. We will preview the first half of 2021 in books, and we will embark upon the Hatening, Part One. Did you like my boat pun, embark?
GJ: Yes. Oh my gosh. Oh, so strong. That’s fantastic; way to go.
WJ: The Hatening, Part One, for which I picked a book that I thought I would like and Gin Jenny would hate, which was Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor. And then we get to find out what Gin Jenny has Hatened for the reverse, when the shoe will be on the other table. But before we get into that, what are you reading, Gin Jenny?
GJ: So I am reading a play called Sweat by Lynn Nottage, which I believe either it or she won the Pulitzer. She might have won the Pulitzer for a different play. But it’s about a group of friends who work at a paper mill, I think, and there’s a union and there’s like union busting, I think.
WJ: Boooooo.
GJ: And at some point, the sons of some of the friends do a crime, because the play starts out eight years in the future, and the sons are both like talking to maybe a parole officer sort of a person.
WJ: So it’s modern day?
GJ: Yeah, their original timeline is in 2000, and the jump forward is to 2008. So present day ish.
WJ: So is there a Richard Armitage type character?
GJ: No, no Richard Armitage type character.
WJ: From North and South, no?
GJ: So that’s what I’m reading. What are you reading?
WJ: What I’m reading is not a book, but it’s a long journalism series. Is that a thing?
GJ: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
WJ: Multi-part investigative journalism series. So it’s by Cerise Castle, and it’s about gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
GJ: So, uplifting reading.
WJ: But I just want to clarify, it’s about gangs of sheriffs. The gang members are the sheriffs.
GJ: I’m nodding sadly.
WJ: And the whole series is called “A Tradition of Violence.” It’s available online at knock-la.com. I’ve only been able to read the first section so far, and it is a wild ride. Like it’s insane, and also horrifying. But it’s really interestingly reported, and I am looking forward– Not looking forward; I am going to read the next article to continue my education.
GJ: Oh, well. Good work!
WJ: Thanks!
GJ: What are you– Well, hopefully you’re watching something a little more cheerful.
WJ: I am! I’ve been watching Kim’s Convenience on Netflix.
GJ: Oh, how is it? It’s been on my list forever!
WJ: I really like it. It’s so sweet. It’s a little more sort of emotional and angsty than I normally would have wanted, but everything is mostly okay. Like it gets resolved.
GJ: Okay, so how emotionally angsty is it on a scale between like, New Girl and One Day at a Time?
WJ: I have not seen one day at a time.
GJ: Oh yeah, you would cry a lot so that’s fair.
WJ: I need another top end for the scale. Well, more than New Girl…
GJ: Out of every five episodes, how many do you think you cry during?
WJ: I don’t know that I’m a good bellwether for that.
GJ: So all of them?
WJ: Yeah.
GJ: Okay. You’re right. That was a foolish question.
WJ: What does cry mean, really? Oh, and also there’s a really handsome man in it. I think he’s gonna be in a Marvel something something. When I first saw him, I was like, Jesus Christ, this man is like really attractive and like really buff for this part? Like, he is in Marvel shape! And then it turns out it’s because he is going to be in a Marvel property.
GJ: Oh, great. I saw a video of Oscar Isaac training to be in a Marvel and it was a very good video.
WJ: His name is Simu Liu. He’s gonna be Shang-Chi.
GJ: Okay, in what?
WJ: Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings.
GJ: Oh, he is very good looking!
WJ: So good looking! I don’t know what the Marvel workout thing is, but I would never want to do it.
GJ: Oh my God, me neither. To be clear, he wasn’t like doing like exercises. He was like practicing fight scenes.
WJ: Oh, that’s fun!
GJ: Yeah, it was very fun!
WJ: What are you watching?
GJ: What am I watching? I’m watching Babylon Five, which is an older sci fi series. My friends told me it was her Black Sails. She really wanted me to watch it, and she was like, It is to me as Black Sails is to you. And I was like, well, you know, in the interests of friendship. It’s by the same writer who wrote Sense8. So it has a similar like, slow start, but I think I’m getting into the meat of it now. It’s pretty dark. And there’s like religion stuff in it, which is kind of like fun and interesting and dark. And yeah, I’m enjoying it. It’s very like thinky SF, and the production values are what you would expect from 1990s science fiction TV, but I think they make it work pretty well. And they have interesting like, not monster of the week, but like problem of the week episodes, and I’ve been given to understand that the ongoing story arcs are also very strong. So I’m excited to get further into it. I’m like, middle of season one, I think.
WJ: Before we move into spring preview, I would like to introduce a new segment, which is an update on the mailbox books.
GJ: Oh, fantastic! That’s such a good segment! Go!
WJ: Mostly because I wanted to complain about this one thing.
GJ: This is great. This is like when a friend texts soon is like, Can I be really petty for a second?
WJ: This is me being really petty. My mom got from the mailbox library a book called Envy by Sandra Brown, like one of those thriller romance sort of a genre. She returned it because it had an unreliable narrator, which I did not know she was also not a fan of but she was like, No. Get that out of the house.
GJ: Runs in families.
WJ: I came by it honest. But near it on the bookshelf was a book by Stephen Covey. Do you remember this guy? The like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?
GJ: Oh, sure. Sure.
WJ: This man had the gall to come up with a book called The Eighth Habit.
GJ: [gasp]
WJ: Right?
GJ: Oh my God! He has enough gall to be divided into three parts. I’m outraged.
WJ: The eighth habit? You held this back from the first book? The whole premise was that there were seven habits!
GJ: Well, and the other thing is, once you start with this, once you say Oh, actually there’s eight habits, like there could be an infinite number of habits now!
WJ: Where does it end?
GJ: We’ve lost faith in you now!
WJ: I was appalled. I couldn’t believe it.
GJ: I’m horrified.
WJ: So that’s the update from the mailroom. Also, I liked your gall joke.
GJ: I actually have a mailbox update as well. It’s a little free library update. Okay, so as I was looking for a Hatening book to Haten you with–
WJ: I’m so excited.
GJ: I was looking at like some books on my shelves, some books that I have on my like various lists, books in the library, etc. I had Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff on my shelves, which I had picked up from a little free library. And I was like, doesn’t that have an unreliable narrator? Because I remember people talking about it in the same breath as Gone Girl, and I don’t think it had quite the same type of twist as Gone Girl. But I thought I remembered it being something like that. So I picked it up, and I was kind of looking through it. And I was like, this seems like it has like some suburbia-is-soul-killing content that Whiskey Jenny would really hate, but I was nervous because I didn’t know what the twist was going to be, and I didn’t want to accidentally haten, you for something really horrible. So I went online and looked up spoilers and it sounds awful. I’m just gonna give it back. It looks like both of us would hate it a lot.
WJ: Oh, no! What is the plot?
GJ: Well, so I don’t know the whole thing. But it’s this couple that gets married and blah, blah, blah, they have whatever suburban life they have, and then they go to like a party or something, and the husband finds out that the wife did not come to him a virgin and he’s very upset. It’s like set in, like, now times!
WJ: What the hey?
GJ: Anyway, he’s a real jerk to her, and he finds out she was once a kept woman by this guy that they meet at the art gallery or whatever.
WJ: And it’s definitely modern times? Boy!
GJ: Anyway, so then it’s like all about her horrible life and the like humiliating life she had when she was this guy’s kept woman and how she like schemed to get this second guy to fall in love with her and get married. It just seemed really like grim and sordid, and like it would just depress me no end. And I thought you would hate it, but I also now feel like I would hate it.
WJ: Yeah, not quite the point.
GJ: Yeah, so I’m returning that son of a gun to the little free library. And I wish others joy of it.
WJ: Godspeed. I think many people loved it.
GJ: I’m excited to be able to just get it off my shelves because as you know, I love culling books.
WJ: Yeah! You can let it go.
GJ: Yeah, as the bard says. So we want to talk about books we’re excited for in the first half ish of 2021. And I picked a lot, so I’m going to do two to every Whiskey Jenny’s one. I plead that you bear with me.
WJ: I’m very excited to hear what they are.
GJ: Yeah, I mean, there’s some really good books coming out. Okay, so my first one is called The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard, which came out in January from Amistad Press. And it’s about a well to do white family with a large staff of like maids, cooks, etc, who are all Black, and the family falls on hard times, so to get money going, the patriarch sells his Black cook’s recipe for rib sauce, which is really legendary, like using a lot of racist caricatures on the packaging and in the marketing. So that’s the first half of the book and then the second half skips ahead 10 years later, and it’s dealing with a Black woman named Jenny, who used to be a maid for this family and she’s trying to get her own business off the ground selling beauty products, but she kind of can’t get out from under the shadow of this white family. So it sounds really weird and interesting. And I’m excited to read it. I heard a lot of good things about this author’s first book, which might have been short stories.
WJ: Yeah, I like that concept. I feel like food justice and colonialism getting reckoned with in food writing as well is on the rise, which I love. And I’m excited to see that in fiction as well.
GJ: Yeah, it’s always so fascinating when I read like journalism about it. So yeah, I’m also excited to see it in fiction. Then my next one is The Mirror Season by Anna Marie McLemore. coming out in March from– Well, so, is out now from Feiwel & Friends. Anna-Marie McLemore writes, these extremely beautiful, like magic realism-y queer YA novels that are based on fairy tales. So if you liked Sarah McCarry, which I feel like people who liked Sarah McCarry are like feral for Sarah McCarry, but she wasn’t that well known. And I feel like she didn’t hit it quite the right time. But Anna-Marie McLemore’s books are a lot like that. This one’s based on the Snow Queen. And I think the subject matter is pretty tough. I think it’s about two kids who two teenagers who get sexually assaulted at a party and kind of form a relationship after that. So content warnings, for sure. But this author’s books have been so consistently amazing. And every time they come out with a new one, I’m just like, really thrilled. Their writing is gorgeous. What is your first book for 2021?
WJ: My first book came out in February from Berkeley. It’s called Quiet in her Bones, which I think is an amazing title.
GJ: Such a good title!
WJ: By Nalini Singh. It’s a mystery set in New Zealand. So I believe it’s a rich cul de sac. Those cul-de-sacs are just rife with murder.
GJ: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. I love a rich cul de sac murder.
WJ: So rich cul de sac near a forest, and I really like the hopefully juxtaposition of the wild and the developed. I believe our narrator’s mother disappeared 10 years ago, and then they just now found her body in those forests. So she didn’t just run away. She got murdered.
GJ: Oh, damn!
WJ: I know! And then also in that description, and everyone thought she just like ran away and stole a bunch of money from rich people or something, but nope, she got murdered. And then also it’s like, her son, who heard a bloodcurdling scream on the night she disappeared, like, won’t rest until the truth. And it’s like, now you’re like, oh, maybe that scream was– Like, wouldn’t you have been like, oh, I wonder what that scream was that I heard that night my mother disappeared forever. Oh, well, probably fine!
GJ: How old was he at the time, though?
WJ: I don’t know. Yeah, I’m sure it all will become explained. He is now old enough to do an investigation. So he was minus 10 from that. I don’t know.
GJ: Have you read anything by Nalini Singh before? Because she writes romance novels that people really love that I haven’t read yet.
WJ: I didn’t know that. Have you?
GJ: No, I haven’t. But I hear really good things. They’re paranormal romance.
WJ: So what’s your next two?
GJ: The first one is Renegade Flight by Andrea Tang which came out in March from Razorbill. I really enjoyed her first YA novel,Rebelwing, and this is a companion novel. So it takes place like 15 years after the first one, I think, which I think is a fun time jump. I love a companion novel. And it’s about a girl who goes to like an elite pilot school for piloting dragon mechs. And she’s supposed to find out why peacekeepers keep going missing. I don’t know what that means, but I love an elite school book, and the first one was really fun. It’s like pilot shenanigans, making friends with people. It just sounds like a extremely fun adventure story.
WJ: Did you say dragon mechs? They’re piloting like, built dragons?
GJ: Yeah, like dragon machines? Yeah.
WJ: Boy. That’s cool.
GJ: Yeah!
WJ: Was that in the first one?
GJ: Yes.
WJ: Boy, that sounds great.
GJ: Yeah, I know. And then my next one, which I think is my only nonfiction one is the disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescott Weinstein, which came out in March from Bold Type Books. It’s about particle physics, which I don’t understand. But it also takes a look at how the science profession fails to include marginalized people, because the author is a Black queer woman in science. And I’m very daunted by the science side of things, and I may end up skimming some of that. But I’m really going to give it a try and I think even if I can’t understand the particle physics, which seems pretty likely, I’m still interested in kind of the like, sociology of science stuff.
WJ: Yeah, sounds cool.
GJ: Yeah. What’s your next one?
WJ: So my next one came out in March. It is called Accidentally Engaged. Aren’t you excited already?
GJ: Yes. So excited.
WJ: It’s by Farah Heron. It came out from Forever Press. Here are just some keywords that I will throw at you. Fake engagement. Sourdough starter. Baking competition. And the description of the romantic hero is “the body of Captain America, a delicious British accent, and lives right across the hall.
GJ: Oh, fantastic. Neighbors. Great.
WJ: I feel like that’s, that’s everything that I needed to know to want to read this book. When I got to sourdough starter… Bread! Yay!
GJ: There’s another baking competition romance novel coming out this year, so I should read them as like companion novels.
WJ: Ooh, which one is that?
GJ: Did you read Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall?
WJ: Not yet. My Libby app keeps saying that my hold will come in soon. So I’m excited but not yet.
GJ: Well, anyway, Alexis Hall has another book coming out this year called Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, and I believe it’s set at a baking competition.
WJ: Yeah, we should do a pairing.
GJ: Oh, man, that sounds wonderful.
WJ: What’s your next one?
GJ: Okay, my next one is gonna be a bit of a change in tone. It’s called Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, coming out in May from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. I don’t know too much about this book, but I know it’s about a young Black girl who flees from an abusive cult when she’s pregnant with twins. So perhaps not your thing, Whiskey Jenny. Genre wise, I think it’s kind of magic realismy, kind of SF-y, kind of horror-y, but I think the world of this author, I’ve read some of their past work, and I’m excited that they have a new novel out. But definitely all the trigger warnings for pretty much everything that’s scary and terrible about cults. And then in a cheerier mode, Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, which is out in May from Ace. A girl called Jess moves back to Malaysia, where she hasn’t lived since she was very small, and when she’s there, she starts hearing like the voice of her dead grandmother, and her dead grandmother is like, All right, I need you to get revenge on this gang boss. And she’s like, What? No!
WJ: Oh, that sounds great. I love ghosts.
GJ: Yeah, exactly. So the grandmother’s like, Yeah, he’s offended a god and I’m dead, so you’re gonna have to do it. She’s like, but I don’t want to!
WJ: That’s amazing. Nothing for it! You’re gonna have to to do it! I am immaterial.
GJ: As you know, this podcast is a big fan of Zen Cho. So I mean, this is a book from her that’s set I think in like our world, but with ghosts, which is a new fun thing for Zen Cho, for her novels, so yeah, I’m really excited about it.
WJ: So my next one is coming out in March from Mulholland. It’s called Lightseekers. It’s by Femi Kayode. At least I think that’s how you pronounce it. I couldn’t confirm online, so apologies if it’s wrong. It is set in Nigeria. I believe the author used to be a professor of psychology, and our detective is a professor of psychology. So I’m excited for that conceit. I love when it’s not– I mean, I love a private eye. I guess I like when it’s not a police detective.
GJ: People with jobs!
WJ: Yeah, people with jobs investigating a civilian investigator, I think is really interesting. He is called down to a, I think, small town in the south of Nigeria, I believe, where there was in the past a murder of three university students. But the case is not quite as cold as they thought, I think was one of the words in the brief.
GJ: Fantastic.
WJ: Yeah, one of those “the past and secrets haunt us” books. Those cold cases. They never, ever stop reverberating in the present, do they?
GJ: That sounds wonderful. I have really enjoyed reading like mystery novels set in non-Western countries, and it is part of my mystery novel exploring remit to find more books like that. So that sounds great for me as well.
WJ: And let me know when you find them, because I’m exploring as well.
GJ: I will, I definitely will!
WJ: We’ll explore together. What are your next two?
GJ: Okay, so my next two! My first one is Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace, coming out in May from Saga Press. So she wrote Archivist Wasp, which I loved, and she writes stories that are very friendship-forward. She writes a lot of stories with relationships that are not romances, which is like a nice change of pace, though I love romances, too, as we all know. So Firebreak is set in a very like dystopian corporation-controlled future, and this girl Mallory discovers that the company has created like super soldiers, and she wants to save them. But that means setting herself in opposition to this like world-owning corporation. I think this book sounds like Ready Player One, except it doesn’t suck and actually has things to say about capitalism.
WJ: Ooh, burn!
GJ: So, Ready Player One, but good.
Unknown Speaker
Sounds great.
GJ: And then my next one is sort of a mystery, but with magic. It’s called The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu, coming out in June 2021 from Tor. It’s about a girl named Ropa, who’s a ghost talker, so her job is she talks to the ghosts of Edinburgh and like carries their messages back to the living. She uses a combination of Scottish and Zimbabwean magic, which sounds really fun, and then she finds out that kids are going missing on her turf, so she has to investigate.
WJ: Holy smokes, that sounds cool.
GJ: Doesn’t that sound great? There’s like a magic library. She like makes a best friend. It sounds like so much fun and so up my alley.
WJ: Yay, friends.
GJ: Yay, friendship! Yay, magic library too. There’s so much about this that I’m excited for. What’s your next one?
WJ: My penultimate pick is going out in April from Berkeley. It is called Dial A for Aunties. It’s by Jessie Q. Sutento, and friend of the pod Ashley was the one who turned me on to this book? It’s described as both a romcom and a murder mystery, and I think our protagonist accidentally killed her date or something. You know how that happens! And then her aunties have to be called in to help her clean up. And it just sounds great.
GJ: It sounds so fun. Yeah, I’m excited for this one, too. It sounds like a delight.
WJ: So thank you, Ashley, for telling us about it.
GJ: Oh, and as always, Ashley has great book recommendations.
WJ: As always, indeed. What is your penultimate two?
GJ: No, my ultimate two!
WJ: Oh, no, you’re already on ultimate?
GJ: Yeah, because…
WJ: Oh, yeah, you went first. Oh, boy. I’m sad it’s over.
GJ: Okay, so my second to last one is kind of cheating, because I have in fact, already read it. But it’s The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, out in June from Tor. I am cheating by including this because I have already read it, but I’m so excited for this book to come out. I’m so excited for it. It is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the point of view of a queer Vietnamese American Jordan Baker. And there’s like a soupcon of magic involved. And it’s so good. It’s so good. I read it, and I was like, well, so much for The Great Gatsby, it’s been superseded, we don’t have to care about it anymore. The writing was beautiful. The magic was like just creepy enough. It felt very good for the end of a pandemic because it’s like roaring 20s, and everyone’s at parties drinking champagne, and it just made me feel very yearny for parties. And I don’t even like parties that much. So really a true feat by the author. It’s just so good. Everyone should preorder it. It is fantastic. It’s going to be one of my top probably three books of the year. I’m prepared to say that already.
WJ: Wow, that sounds really fun. So it’s still set in the 1920s? Interesting.
GJ: Yeah, it’s a pretty close retelling of The Great Gatsby. But the point of view is different, obviously, which makes a big difference, and then there is magic, so I liked it a lot. A lot. A lot. A lot.
WJ: That sounds really fun.
GJ: Yeah. Okay, and then my last one is The Jasmine Throne, by Tasha Suri, coming out in June from Orbit. Tasha Suri writes these secondary world fantasy novels, which is not my favorite subgenre, but she makes them so good and like so easy to get into. And they’re also very romance inflected, so like they are fantasy novels, but the romance is typically very important to the books. And this one is the first in a new series by her, and it’s about a princess who has been imprisoned by her horrible dictator brother. Yeah, and the princess’s maidservant, who I think uses illegal magic. And I think what happens is they go on a mission to topple the empire whilst pining for each other. Sounds wonderful! Yeah, so that’s, that’s my last one. And I’m, I’m just unbelievably excited for it.
WJ: I’m so sorry. I think you’ve done this a million times before. But can you remind me what secondary world means again?
GJ: Yes, it means it takes place in a fictional fantasy world that’s not our world.
WJ: Okay. Just a totally different world.
GJ: Just a totally different, made-up world, yeah.
WJ: Like Mars.
GJ: Nope. Mars is real.
WJ: Are you sure? Have you ever been there?
GJ: As my little nephew would say, There’s a rover there named Curiosity. He liked Mars so much, he flew up there to take pictures for us.
WJ: That is so cute. Oh my God, you just killed me. Yep, that’s what happened. Accurate!
GJ: What is your last book?
WJ: My last book comes out in August. But that’s still summer, so I’m counting it, and I will not be taking any further questions. It comes out from Soho Press. It is by friend of the pod Robert Repino. It’s called Malefactor. It’s the final in the War with No Name trilogy, which started with Mort(e). It’s the sci fi he wrote about animals getting sentient, larger and sentience and going to war with the humans. This is the conclusion of the trilogy. I believe it takes place after the war and their rebuilding efforts, but then wolves. I don’t know much else, but I am very excited for, you know, the return of our beloved characters.
GJ: Yeah, just see how it all wraps up.
WJ: Yeah. Third one, Return of the King. I mean!
GJ: Yeah, a lot riding on it.
WJ: And also beavers. I’m really excited for the beavers to return.
GJ: So excited for the return of the beavers. We love the beavers.
WJ: So yeah. Malefactor! And I’m also really excited, his covers have all had really– They’ve just been like, one really bold color and black and white, sort of like silhouettes of an animal. So I’m really excited to see the cover of Malefactor.
GJ: Definitely. I love the cover designs for these books.
WJ: They’re really gorgeous. Yeah.
GJ: And it must have been a very tricky book to do the initial cover design for. It seems like it’d be very hard to represent graphically, and I just think they nailed it.
WJ: Absolutely. Yeah. The themes and the concepts and stuff are very wide ranging and to represent all that in like nine by twelve.
GJ: Crushed it. Is nine by twelve the size that you think books are?
WJ: Could be! No. I’m just bad at numbers.
GJ: I thought you might have just like converted to centimeters, and you’re like, down with the imperial system! I’m onto metric now!
WJ: I still do have trouble estimating distances and measurements.
GJ: Oh, God, me too.
WJ: Normally I use eight and a half by eleven as just like my– You know, like, I know how big that piece of paper is. So I measure everything by how big it is in relation to that piece of paper. But you’re right, I went wrong on this. Books are not bigger than that piece of paper. They are smaller.
GJ: This is a books podcast!
WJ: Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
GJ: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pick on you. I apologize.
WJ: No, you did it correctly. Well, can I just say, it’s nice to have things to look forward to in 2020. 2021. It’s 2021.
GJ: It is, and I think there’s so many good books coming out later this year. And I don’t know if it’s just that there’s a lot of books, or if it’s because stuff got pushed back, or what, but there’s like so much stuff I’m looking forward to.
WJ: Yay! Hope!
GJ: Woo! Books!
WJ: I hatened this year Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor. I picked it because it was, a, by an Irish author, and we know Gin Jenny hates just the Irish people in general.
GJ: I don’t. I love the Irish people. Like, I just don’t love your literature. I do love the TV show Derry Girls more than anything.
Did you watch their Bake Off?
No, I haven’t yet. I want to watch it with my sister at sister night.
Well, I recommend it. It was great.
Did you see that–I’m so sorry to stan Derry Girls–but did you see that tweet that was like, Derry Girls accurately represents the five types of teenage girls: horny, pretentious, lesbian, feral and wee English lad.
WJ: Boy, that’s a good tweet.
GJ: Anyway, despite my love of Derry Girls, it’s true that I do not love Irish books at all.
WJ: So that was one of the reasons I picked it. It also, I thought from the description that it was going to be like an ensemble story, you know, not multigenerational family, but multiple perspectives and narratives all tied together. On the opposite side, since it is 2021, I didn’t want to go full sadist. So it was set on a ship, which I thought would be interesting for both of us. And there was a murder, so there was interesting plot stuff happening. So it’s set in the 1840s on a ship called Star of the Sea that is going from Ireland to New York, and it takes place over the course of the 25 days of the voyage, and there’s a murder. I did not realize this before starting it, but it’s also sort of– not epistolary, but–
GJ: It’s set up as if it’s a book that one of the characters is writing.
WJ: Yes, thank you. Some, like, found documents thrown in. So what did you think of it?
GJ: I would say overall, it could have been worse. I feel like my response to it was exactly where you were aiming, Whiskey Jenny, like, the precision of a master darts player. In that, like, it wasn’t the most brutal chore. I didn’t hate it the way I really hated that last Irish book. And I didn’t resent it the way I resented Island at the Edge of Night or whatever that one was called. But it was not fun to read, and I didn’t like anyone in it, and yet I was really mad that things went badly for all the characters. iI think I would have actually preferred the book I thought I was getting, which was about all the different people on the famine ship?
WJ: Oh, absolutely.
GJ: So I thought it would be about a bunch of different characters, and it was really only about like a very small group of characters. A lot of it takes place not on the famine ship, which is kind of disappointing. But the magic of ships worked though! I think we learned that setting the story onboard a ship is a big offset to the book elements I hate, because all the stuff that happened on the ship, I was like, really into.
WJ: Completely agree with everything, except for the compliment about me being like a good darts player, because when I did not nail with me loving it. I feel like I had the same reaction. In particular. I also thought we were getting a different book. I thought it was gonna be a lot more stories. And as you said, it’s like three people.
GJ: Right. And a lot of it’s just about their past. It’s like not about the ship.
WJ: Yeah, exactly. I needed more about the daily life on the ship, and I needed more points of view. In particular, more points of view in steerage!
GJ: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I thought it was gonna be like an Upstairs/Downstairs kind of book.
WJ: But on a boat! Why can’t we have that book! That book sounds great! Let’s do that!
GJ: Actually, we should have that as a like a show.
WJ: What do you mean?
GJ: That should be like a miniseries!
WJ: Oh, a TV show? Okay. Yeah. I thought you meant like, WE should have that as a show!
GJ: No, like a, like an ITV series.
WJ: That would be great. I would love that.
GJ: It’s like a month-long sea voyage. And we get to know everyone and all their lives and stuff. That’d be so fun.
WJ: Yes. So I completely agree: All this stuff on the ship was the most interesting. Just like the small details of that life, I think, when they’re first introducing one of the main characters, Pyatt?
GJ: Pius!
WJ: Anyway, sorry, yeah, Pius! One of the things that they say is weird about him is you like really, really, really had to press him to give an opinion on the fiddle players on board, which is just such a sweet detail of like, that’s what everyone’s talking about. But otherwise, it picks the wrong stories to tell, to me, and it told those stories from the wrong point of view as well. Not wrong! Not the one that I would have picked. I also had no idea that it had this conceit built around it that it’s written by one of the passengers. And I don’t think I liked that concept.
GJ: Oh, I like that concept a lot. That’s the type of thing I tend to like.
WJ: I normally do really enjoy epistolary stuff. But I had a hard time getting on board with this, because the whole time I was just sort of like, Who the fuck is this guy telling me this? And why do I care about him? And how do you know any of it? Because most of it isn’t found documents! Most of it is you writing about points of view that you wouldn’t have known, and I just got really mad at him.
GJ: I think that the reason that I was feeling more charitably towards it is that some of the chapters were quite short. And as you recall, one of my issues with the goddamn last book is there were no chapter breaks. I think just from a reading perspective, I was like, Oh, good a break! Because the chapters are pretty short, and not to be really shallow, but it’s 2021. I’m very, very old. And like, that was a blessing unto me.
WJ: I like that that’s what you liked about it. I just think it’s so weird that on this ship, if you are– I mean, like separating the horrific classism and conditions down in steerage, if you are in first class, there’s only 15 of you, and you’re just like expected to hang out and eat dinner together. That’s weird! Like if you had to hang out with your passengers on a plane, these randos, for like a month! It’s just so weird! And I think that’s such a more interesting story about like, how do you get along with these people for a month? You don’t know them! You have to eat dinner with them every night!
GJ: I so agree. Whenever I read about the British in India, in colonial India, I feel like this comes up a lot, because they had to eat dinner with the same like 10 people constantly. And if you didn’t like them, it was like, too bad.
WJ: Too bad! You got to keep hanging out with them!
GJ: Not only did you have to keep hanging out with the same small group of people, but because they were like, well, we don’t want to like let India influence us in any way, so they were really really rigid about like class distinctions. So you basically had to sit next to the same people at dinner every time, because your rank never changed. So you were just stuck with your, like, neighbor to the left and your neighbor to the right at every dinner. Sounds awful.
WJ: It sounds awful. Yeah, I mean, not any more awful than being in steerage, but yeah, awful!
GJ: No, a very different kind of awful. And I think that when they did have scenes with them all having dinner together, it was like comically terrible, and I enjoyed that.
WJ: It was a lot more like soap opera-y than I was expecting. There were so many — where it was like — oh, well, this is a spoiler, but: Actually, they’re siblings! Or actually, the person she married was your half brother who was estranged! I think part of the reason that I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would is because I did read it in this the year of our Lord 2021. And so I was kind of putting a lot of stuff on it. Like two years ago, I probably would been like, sure that was a fine romp. This year. I was like, I don’t have time for this. I’m not into this, like this, classism, no. It has a bunch of racist stuff in it. You know, the characters are racist in the way that characters from that time period were racist. I just don’t want to read that. And then I just feel like Mary was the actual main character, and she got so few actual point of view chapters. One of the ones from her point of view was a letter from her husband, so it wasn’t even her voice. So then I just got myself into this feminist rage. And then I was so pissed at it, which is a weird position I was pissed that it was so soapy, because if a woman had written this book, it would been like, Oh, it’s so overdramatic, and look at women with their feelings again, but no, no, a man wrote it, so it’s literary. So I recognize that a lot of that is coming from me, but also not.
GJ: Yeah, I was gonna say, you’re actually touching on a lot of things that I genuinely had a problem with. I think that, in response to what you’re saying about Mary Duane, there was a lot of this sort of like, good women having things done to them by wicked, irresponsible men, which got really old.
WJ: Yeah, like constantly!
GJ: Constantly. Yeah. And then the voices that are heard are mainly the voices of men. So the women are backburnered in a way that I found exhausting. Also, hilariously, they described a woman as coltish at one point, and I was so excited and angry for you.
WJ: Oh, my God. I didn’t– I totally missed that! Maybe I was like already in a rage blindness. It’s the kind of book that describes women as coltish.
GJ: Yeah, and it did. So.
WJ: To your point, that it’s mostly told from the point of view of men who are doing these things to women, it’s rich men, also, who are doing these things to women, for the most part.
GJ: Yeah, I didn’t like the main poor man either.
WJ: I mean, no, he’s awful too!
GJ: Well, and this went to something that I find tiring about Irish literature in general, like Pius Mulvey does shitty things to be shitty. And I didn’t begin liking him more when he started being kinder because then he was pitiful, and I felt like the book was very much in that mode of like the “nasty, brutish, and short” thing of human life, which is fine. It’s not my personal cup of tea, and it does tend to be what I don’t like about Irish literature. Sorry, Ireland. So yeah, I mean, you nailed it with that.
WJ: Yeah. But that’s not what I like about Irish literature. So I did not nail it for me. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think the entire thing is joyless. Nothing good can come from humanity, seems to be the premise of this book.
GJ: Yes. Agreed. Also, I want to go back to something you were saying earlier. This is not a hatening thing; I think this is just bad craft. I was mad that the author chose to use racist slurs in what felt to me like very unnecessary ways. Like, I was glad that it didn’t gloss over the fact that a lot of English money at this time came from slavery in the Americas. But there are several occasions where racist slurs are used, like including the N word several times–
WJ: Uncensored. Like, printed out.
GJ: Yeah, not starred out. Right. And I don’t think the author really was bothering to grapple with the weight and violence of that word, and I think he was using it more as stage setting. Like: these are the times and you know it because they’re using this word, which I really don’t like, and I think happens a lot in white writers writing historical fiction, especially white non-American writers writing historical fiction. And although it is period-typical, he’s curating what goes in and what stays out. Like he mentions in his author’s note that he’s made up some US adoption law to make it more racist. But then there’s another place where a character is gay, and the narrator’s like, that’s fine, though. So like choices are being made. And I think the choice to put the N word in at least three times without having any characters of color is uncool. And I really thought he shouldn’t have done it, and I thought it was bad craft.
WJ: Yeah, no, completely agreed. I glossed over that in my rant, and I shouldn’t have.
GJ: No, No, you didn’t!
WJ: Yeah, I think this is emblematic, two of my notes back to back: So we got a scene set in Whitechapel. So my note says, “Well, I do appreciate that this is not just portraying London as full of white people, I guess.” Which was me trying to find the silver lining in the way that characters of other nationalities were being referred to in that section. And then right after that, I have a sarcastic note, which says, “Oh, good. Now there’s blackface.” So I think you’re completely right. It’s just stage setting, and it’s not at all grappled with. You nailed it. I also think that the violence of the famine and that suffering was sensationalized? I think that that was another type of horror and trauma that got not grappled with, but just treated as set dressing.
GJ: Especially with, very early on, there’s a part where it’s clear that a father has killed his child, and then himself. And I think that is meant as, again, stage setting, to say like, this is how horrible the famine is. And I don’t want to make it sound like the famine wasn’t that horrible because it clearly was! It was manmade, and it was really, really horrible.
WJ: Yeah, exactly. I’m not saying that the descriptions were inaccurate. I’m saying that they seemed to revel in the horror of it a bit too much for my liking.
GJ: Yeah, totally. That said, I mean, I don’t want to be like completely negative. At times I thought the writing was quite lovely, and at other times, I thought it was very funny. Like there’s a part where it’s saying that a character doesn’t fight fair, and it says, “The Marquess of Queensberry, he was not. But as admirers of another flamboyant Irishman will know, neither was the Marquess of Queensberry.” That’s a good Oscar Wilde joke. I appreciated it.
WJ: I totally missed that. Can I go back? You said that there was a gay character, and I think I missed that as well. Who was that?
GJ: It just comes up barely, barely, barely again, at the end, one of the sons of David and his wife, Laura. At the end, the narrator, who’s the kids’ stepfather, mentions he thinks that one of the boys, now an adult, prefers the company of men.
WJ: Oh, I missed that too. As you say, choices being made. I want to go back to your point, though, about sometimes the writing being good. Because, yeah, I think I was mostly just sort of faintly annoyed the whole time reading this, followed by periods of being extremely annoyed, and then I’d go back to just being faintly annoyed. But then every once in a while, there was a sentence that would just like, knock me on my ass. I did really appreciate that. So he’s talking about his brother’s faith, basically. And Pius is saying, is denouncing like, all faith as a lie, basically. But just the way he phrased it, I thought was beautiful, because he says that his brother “is translating that fact,” meaning the fact of like, existence, “translating that fact into a sententious fiction because he lacked the courage to read it in the original.” I just really liked that like, lies are translated versions of the original was just such an interesting concept. So yeah, so every once in a while, there would be this phrase or this concept that I would like sit there with for a while.
GJ: Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, the writing was really good. I mean, I think, overall, this book is probably as close to being something I might enjoy as any book of this type could be.
WJ: Can I… I have some plot questions.
GJ: Okay. I mean, I’ll really give it my all. I finished reading this quite shortly before podcast recording. So like… I think I maybe could do it. So: Spoilers from now.
WJ: Who killed David? The writer?
GJ: The writer. Yes.
WJ: The writer.
[ack I ran out of time! Please stand by! I am going to finish this ASAP!]Transcribed by https://otter.ai