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Category: 3 Stars

Dipping my toe in the mystery novel waters

By chance last month I found myself reading two mystery novels at once, although I rarely even read one mystery novel at once. The first was Parker Bilal’s The Golden Scales, set in the criminal underworld of 1990s Cairo; and the second was Deborah Crombie’s A Share in Death, in which a Scotland Yard superintendent has rather a busman’s holiday at his cousin’s time share. Golden Scales sees Sudanese investigator Makana engaged by Egyptian mogul Saad Hanafi to find the missing Adil Romario, the star player of Hanafi’s football (soccer) team. As Makana digs deeper into Romario’s dealings, he finds…

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Speak, Louisa Hall

Note: In the course of writing this blog post, I arrived at semantic satiation for the word speak, and maybe you will too. In Speak Louisa Hall plays around with concepts of speech and personhood and artificial intelligence. In alternating chapters, the reader hears from Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence; Mary Bradford, a seventeenth-century diarist on her way to a new life in the New World; Ruth and Karl Dettman, who together (but separately) created the first iteration of an AI called MARY; Stephen Chinn, who built MARY into something dangerous and is now writing his…

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Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan

Conspicuous consumption. That could actually be my full post about Crazy Rich Asians, a book I read because Roxane Gay told me to. It is a book that depicts conspicuous consumption. If you like Jackie Collins and preferred Veronica to Betty because Veronica had all the cool stuff, Crazy Rich Asians might be for you. One of the characters literally has an outfit-picking computer program like in Clueless. Nick Young, scion of a derangedly wealthy Singaporean family, is bringing his girlfriend, Rachel Chu, home to meet his family, while his cousin Astrid Yeong faces the possible collapse of her marriage.…

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Ascension, Jacqueline Koyanagi

For whatever reason, it’s shaping up to be a specfic kind of summer for me here at Reading the End. A glance at my reading spreadsheet reports that I did a sci-fi binge at the start of this year, and here I am having another one, what with Touch and Elysium and The Player of Games and some other books I didn’t tell you about because YOU DO NOT KNOW MY WHOLE LIFE. And now Ascension. Like The Player of Games, there’s a very “I am science fiction!” quality to Ascension, which I admit is not always my jam. I…

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The Night Sister, Jennifer McMahon

Note: I received The Night Sister from the publisher, Doubleday, for review consideration. HAUNTED MOTEL. I mean, let’s be cool about it, but: Haunted. Motel. Sisters Piper and Margot have done their best to forget the childhood summer they spent exploring their friend Amy’s home, the Tower Motel (now closed and in disrepair). But when Amy is accused of a horrific crime, their memories of that time come pouring back, and they must grapple with what they uncovered at the Tower Motel as teenagers. The Night Sister unfolds in three separate timelines: the present, as Piper and Margot try to…

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The Player of Games, Iain Banks

So the problem is that I don’t truly like hard science fiction. Or hard fantasy. Or I mean, I do sometimes, occasionally, but on those occasions it’s sort of despite the trappings of the genre, rather than because of them. So it may be that Iain Banks, whatever his virtues, is just not the author for me. (Which isn’t to say that I hated The Player of Games.) And Banks has created a fascinating world here: A civilization called the Culture has asked one of their finest game-players, Gurgeh, to pop over to an alien Empire and have a stab at…

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Game of Queens, India Edghill

Note: I received a review copy of Game of Queens from the publisher for review consideration. This has no bearing upon my super-intense vengeful emotions about Haman and their contribution to my enjoyment of the book; about which, see further remarks below. In my 2014 book preview, my expressed wish for Game of Queens, a retelling of the story of Esther, was that it not use the word sex as a euphemism for genitalia. And it did not. It also turned out to feature Daniel, of lions-not-eating-him fame, being gay without his close friends fretting too much about it, and it managed the neat trick of vilifying not Esther nor Vashti nor…

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There Was and There Was Not, Meline Toumani

Identity is a complex and infinitely divisible monster. (Fight me sometime over the legitimacy of my claim to Southern-girl identity.) In the fascinating first few chapters of There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, Meline Toumani explores the close bonds among diaspora Armenians, as well as the oodles of ways they have found of distinguishing themselves from each other: speakers of Western Armenian vs. speakers of Eastern Armenian, Armenians from Lebanon vs. from Brazil vs. from Turkey vs. from actual Armenia. What they share in common is a mistrust of Turks and a passionate desire to make the Turks and the…

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The Hired Man, Aminatta Forna

An English woman moves with her two children into a blue house in Croatia in the first chapter of The Hired Man. She hires a neighbor called Duro to do handyman work, helping fix up the house, to make it into a nice vacation home. Duro has two dogs and a bunch of guns, and there is something not right in the town of Gost. So here is where a background understanding of the ethnic/religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia would have been beneficial to me. The jokesters in the audience will say “What? But Jenny! You love genocide!” and that’s…

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Disgruntled, Asali Solomon

Let’s begin by double-checking that everybody knows about the MOVE bombing in the 1980s. Because I didn’t know about it until Code Switch mentioned it a while ago, and then right after that, in yet-further proof of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I encountered it in Asali Solomon’s debut novel Disgruntled. Basically there was this militant group called MOVE that lived in a Philadelphia apartment and their kids ran around naked and they composted their own stuff, which drew roaches. Also various members were under indictment for various things. So the Philly cops came to their house, and the members of MOVE…

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