I’m extremely tickled by this first pairing (it is actually my second pairing, but I didn’t write about Birnam Wood and The Survivalists fast enough after finishing them, and now they are fading from my mind because I am one entire stupid little goldfishy), of two books where people can pull real things out of dreams. Greywaren is the final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamers trilogy, which follows the adventures of the Lynch brothers from the Raven Boys quartet (which I loved), most notably Ronan Lynch, who can dream of specific things and then bring them back to the real world when he awakens. It all has something to do with ley lines and something to do with other worlds and something to do with the fact that his boyfriend has gone off to Harvard and left him behind. Jessica Johns’s Bad Cree tells the story of a Cree woman called Mackenzie who has begun to have unsettlingly vivid dreams of her dead sister Sabrina. And when she wakes up, she has brought pieces of the dream back with her.

Jessica Johns (Sucker Creek First Nation) wrote Bad Cree in part because a white male writing instructor had told the class never to write about their dreams, and Johns resolved to “write a story about dreams that validate them in all their beauty and wonder and knowledge” (source). This is an A+ origin story, number one. B of all, it would be hard to deny the power of Johns’s chosen opening image: Mackenzie wakes up from her dream with a severed crow’s head in her hand. It came back with her to the waking world from a horribly vivid dream about finding her sister’s body with a gaping, bloody hole where Sabrina’s heart should be. Terrified by the sudden intrusion of her dreams into the waking world — and the fact that she is being followed by crows for some reason? — Mackenzie makes the difficult decision to travel back home to be with her family, who have their own stories to tell about dreams and the so-called real world.

As the name of the Raven Boys series implies, corvids have always been a staple of the two book series that culminate in Greywaren. One of the first ways Ronan revealed his dream power to his friends was by introducing them to a dream raven called Chainsaw (great name for a corvid), and we continue to catch glimpses of Chainsaw, and other characters beloved from the Raven Cycle series, throughout the Dreamers trilogy. Greywaren concludes the latter trilogy, bringing the Lynch brothers and the many, mannnnnyyyyy other characters back together to save the world from a prophesied world-ending fire. It’s maybe the least bringing-things-back-from-dreams-y book in this entire seven-book series, in part because the prior book shut down the power for dreamers to do that, and in part because Ronan Lynch is spiritually trapped in a sort of liminal dream/otherworld space.

The trouble I’ve had with the Dreamers trilogy overall is that it contains too many characters who stray too far afield of each other. If you came here from the Raven Cycle (which the trilogy pretty heavily assumes that you did), you’ll miss those characters; whether you did or didn’t, you’ll probably spend a certain amount of time sulking about the ratio of how much we’re asking to care about Ronan’s relationship with Adam to how much screen time that relationship actually gets in the course of the series. Maggie Stiefvater remains superb at writing spiky, specific characters, but there were so many of them in this series having so many different adventures that the best I can say is that by the end of book 3 I felt genuinely fond of some of them. The moments when the series sparked to life were those when the characters were in each other’s lives and in each other’s faces, making messes up close instead of in far-flung locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

(I don’t really have a very strong grasp on what is comprehended in the term “Eastern Seaboard,” nor have I ever not once had a strong grasp on the geography of any fictional book or real-world place, ever. If I have made a mistake here, I apologize, but please know that mistakes of this type are inevitable for me.)

The core beauty of Bad Cree, a book I will heretofore be advertising to people as an indigenous readalike to Practical Magic the movie (I’ve never read the book), is that Jessica Johns fully understands the necessity of getting all her characters in the same room. When Mackenzie starts having her unsettling dreams, she immediately brings it to her friend and cousin Jory, and they advise her to repair to her family home posthaste to work through the problem with the support of her aunts, her cousin, and her surviving sister. Mackenzie soon realizes that she’s not the only family member whose dreams are imbued with particular power and foreknowledge, a fact that each of her relatives has held close throughout her life, only revealing it now that Mackenzie has opened the door to that sharing. As a family, they’re able to approach the problem of Mackenzie’s haunted dreams, and start finding ways to solve it; things chiefly go wrong when they fail to trust or confide in one another.

Some of the cousins and aunts don’t quite spring to vivid life in the same way as the central three sisters (our protagonist, her late sister Sabrina, and Sabrina’s twin, Tracey), but what’s flawless in every detail is Johns’s evocation of Mackenzie’s home and family. Bad Cree is packed with these gorgeous sensory details — the sound a can of coins makes when you shake it; the way an old couch tips everyone sitting on it toward the center; the lingering smell of cigarette smoke in a bar that hasn’t allowed smoking for years — that flawlessly evoke both the safety Mackenzie felt with her family growing up, and the ways in which her family’s lives have been informed by trauma and historical disenfranchisement.

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, the evil that haunts Mackenzie has its roots in that very disenfranchisement. That Mackenzie can only fight it by drawing on the power and wisdom of her community might have felt overly allegorical in the hands of a less talented writer. Here it just feels inevitable. Johns writes about Mackenzie’s Cree family with such obvious love and respect, but she doesn’t avoid the painful colonial legacies that have threaded trauma, addiction, and premature death through the fabric of the community. Defeating the present evil is necessary, and satisfying, but it cannot go back in time to restore Sabrina to them, or heal any of the other ills their nation has suffered through the years.

Maggie Stiefvater has an equally obvious love for her characters, but not to quite such good effect. The first two books in the series sprung most vividly to life in scenes between characters I had an existing stake in (i.e., the ones who carried over from the prior series). The same is broadly true in Greywaren, although I was beginning to care about new characters enough to be invested in different sets of them being shuffled around and into each other’s lives. It’s just… this is the third book in the series! It is too late for me to begin to find it interesting for Ronan to see how Declan is with Jordan. As in Bad Cree, the evil in Greywaren can only be defeated through everyone’s combined efforts. They also have to choose to be the best version of themselves, the most capable, the most expansive, the most idealistic. It’s a lovely conclusion that would have landed with much more oomph if most of the characters hadn’t been separated from each other for most of the series. We cannot all be Tolkien!! Nobody likes that half of The Two Towers anyway!!!³

The conclusions I have drawn from this book pairing are below:

• Corvids are dream creatures.
• Together we stand, divided we fall.
• Read Bad Cree! It’s excellent and weird and creepy, and I can’t wait to read more by this author!
• Read the Raven Cycle! It is excellenter than this sequel series.

Coda: If crows were suddenly following you around, what would you do about it? I would bring them presents so that they’d want to be my friends. I have always wanted a crow friend. I would go to some lengths to avoid having a crow enemy.

The post Book Pairing: Bad Cree and Greywaren appeared first on Reading the End.

Then the third one is about the romance novel cinematic universe, specifically in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling-Trinity series, and how it resolves the Protagonist Problem by making systemic change a group project.

Enjoy!!

The post Me over at Tor appeared first on Reading the End.

(I guess I should say we don’t know she’s Death yet! It has not yet been discussed at this point in the episode. I am working from advance knowledge)

Death tries to get Dream to open up, so he tells her what’s been going on: revenge (maybe you’d feel better if you’d done more revenge, Dream), McGuffin hunting, etc. What he can’t figure out, he explains, is why he doesn’t feel better now that his quest is finished. He feels like nothing. Death says, immensely sweetly, “You could have called me.” Then she yells at him for being such a whiny baby and not calling her when he should have known she’d be worried about him. It’s Great. Then because she can’t spend her whole life watching Dream tear tiny pieces of bread off his bread loaf and petulantly chuck them at pigeons (affectionate), she invites him to come along while she does her work.

Massive shouts to the chemistry between Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Tom Sturridge. I in general think that one of the strengths of casting Tom Sturridge is that he tends to have good chemistry with the more, shall we say, lively characters, and the same has been true of Kirby Howell-Baptiste in every role I’ve seen her in. They’re fantastic together here. Death is radiantly sincere and cheerful, catching Dream up on the news and gently teasing him for being self-absorbed, and although Dream doesn’t say a lot to her, he does a lot of good being-charmed face acting as she goes about her rounds. As in the comic, Death is absolutely lovely to everyone whose time has come, a kind and personal presence at the end of each human’s life, even as she’s unrelenting in the inevitability of that end.

As they’re going around with Death taking people’s lives, she and Dream chat about The Job and Their Duty, which is very appropriate because His Duty is the primary thing Dream ever cares about. “I am far more terrible than you,” Dream tells his sister, with a hint of a smile on his face. They’re delightful together, truly. Death admits that there was a time when she was really struggling with her die, until she learned that “all they really need is a kind word and a friendly face, like they had in the beginning.” I teared up! Honestly! There has always been something very lovely about the idea that Death is someone who just… likes you.

The thing that really gets to Dream is when Death tells him that the Endless need people as much as people need them, and he thanks her for spending the day with him. He has to go, because he’s late for an appointment, which transitions us into the second half of the episode, an adaptation of a comic a little later in the run called “Men of Good Fortune.”

This one starts with a flashback: Dream and Death (in a wimpley head-dress thing that is An Lot) walk into a bar in 1389, and I screamed FLASHBACK WIGS because of all the bad wigs in all of television, FLASHBACK WIGS are the absolute worst of them all. Remember Stefan and Damon’s FLASHBACK WIGS in The Vampire Diaries? What a time. Anyway, at this bar in 1389, Dream and Death hear a guy talking about how dying is a mug’s game, there’s no good reason for it, and he, this guy, has decided he’s just not going to do it. The Endless siblings are charmed, and Death grants the guy, Hob Gadling, eternal life. The deal is that he and Hob will meet in this bar on the same day every 100 years. Dream is like “lol he is going to REGRET THIS,” and Hob is like “I will never ever ever regret this.”

A hundred years later, Hob is still alive, and Dream is interested. Hob is very excited about chimneys, handkerchiefs, and playing cards, and he’s 100% planning to keep living for another hundred years (slash, forever). You have to admit chimneys and playing cards are pretty good! Think how boring it must have been before playing cards! Anyway, Dream is delighted by this, for a Dream value of delighted (minor mouth quirk). A hundred years from then: Venison! Shakespeare! A knighthood for Hob! A wife and son! (Dream is unimpressed. He liked the chimneys a lot more than the son.) I enjoy the twitchy little weirdo they’ve hired to play Shakespeare, and so does Dream (more to come on this, if Sandman gets renewed).

A hundred years on, Hob’s fortunes have turned, and he’s a starving indigent whom Dream has to prevent from being thrown out of the tavern. He’s lost his wife, been tried as a witch, and hated every second of the last quite-many decades; but as always, he still wants to live. “Death is a mug’s game. I’ve got so much to live for,” says Hob, a very very different person than me. As they’re having this little convo, someone is sketching them from above (ominous), and a hundred years later (we’re in 1789 now, for those keeping track at home), our girlfriend Johanna Constantine shows up with the drawing and an Ominous Plan. It’s of course not our Johanna Constantine, it’s an ancestor, but, whatever. In 1789, Hob is involved in the slave trade, which truly I think they should have just dumped. I can’t fuck with a guy who trades in enslaved people! Dream is all “it’s a poor thing for one man to enslave another” and tells Hob to get into another line of business. Pretty much rooting for Johanna Constantine, our girlfriend, to kill Hob at this point. Can he die if he gets stabbed right in the throat? And if I may, a follow-up: can I stab him right in the throat?

Johanna Constantine, our girlfriend, shows up with two heavies who she says will slit Dream’s and Hob’s throats if they try to do anything she doesn’t like. Having heard that Dream shows up at this tavern every 100 years and shares gifts such as immortality, Johanna Constantine wants in. Accordingly, Hob does a pretty good job of beating up both of Johanna Constantine’s heavies, and then Dream blows sand at her that forces her to see “old ghosts,” which she sounds very upsetting. This is a pretty brutal consequence? I hope it wears off quickly, because I really don’t think threatening them with knives that absolutely cannot hurt them is all that dreadful of a thing to do.

With that, we’re up to 1889, wherein Dream is wearing a top hat. I want a top hat very badly. Don’t you think I’d look good in a top hat? Now that I am a hugely wealthy publishing professional, I feel like I could spend some money on a sexy, sexy top hat? He tells Hob Gadling that Lady Johanna ended up doing a task for him (foreshadowing! it’s a very doomed task for Dream!), and Hob expresses regret for his past mistakes (slave trade! his past mistakes were working in the slave trade!). Then he makes a brand new mistake: he tells Dream that the reason they keep meeting up is that Dream just likes him and wants to be friends. Dream is So Offended. Dream throws a little tanty about it. Dream doesn’t have friends and he doesn’t want friends. What a dumb baby. He’s all, FRIENDSHIP OVER, NOT THAT WE WERE EVER FRIENDS. Hob says, “I tell you what: I’ll be here in a hundred years’ time. If you’re here too, it’ll be because we’re friends. No other reason!”

This is a pretty ill-starred century for Hob to issue an ultimatum! Considering that as of 1989, Dream is imprisoned inside a big glass bubble, which means that when Hob gets stood up, he fully believes it’s because Dream is still in a sulk. No supposition could be more reasonable. Dream is famously a big sulky baby, and after six hundred years, it’s no surprise Hob has noticed.The other shit thing is that Hob learns their special pub has been sold. He’s heartbroken! Their special place! We cut to Dream discovering the same thing, twentyish years on, that their pub has been abandoned. But then it turns out there’s a new pub and Hob owns it. Look. I still want to stab Hob in the throat about the slave trade thing, but this was a rather nice moment.

To close out the episode, we see Desire (Mason Alexander Park, looking sexy as) saying that they have a new plan for how to ruin Dream’s life. Do you think it gets tiresome to be one of the other Endless, and you’ve been around for untold millennia, and Dream and Desire are just constantly bickering with each other? At some point, wouldn’t you just stop coming to family dinners?

Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: 2. Death (fair enough, she’s an angel) and Hob Gadling (can’t get with it).

Does Dream do a sulk? The whole first half of the episode is about Dream being in a big sulk after getting done with his big quest. Then he has another big sulk about Hob thinking he’s lonely. He probably goes home and indignantly rants to Lucienne about it, and Lucienne is probably like “uh-huh” and “sure” and “wow yeah so rude” and then goes into the library and gets a pillow off a window-seat and screams into the pillow for an hour. (I miss Lucienne.)

Fuckboy energy: Oh, absolutely 10/10. Before Sandman came out, they released a clip from the first half of the episode, and Dream’s fuckboy energy simply radiated out of him. It’s great work from Tom Sturridge.

The post Sandman, Episode 6: The Sound of Her Wings appeared first on Reading the End.

An old lady named Hetty warns Constantine that Morpheus / the Oneiromancer / the Sandman is back, and he wants his sand. Constantine thinks Morpheus is a fairy tale, but wouldn’t you know it? She turns around, and there he is. Wonderfully, she does not have time for Dream, because she’s come to do a job for a lady vicar who flirts madly with her (fair) and tries to convince her to exorcise a princess who’s showed up insisting on marrying a footballer she claims she’s in love with. Constantine insists she’s done with the royal family, which I take to mean that she watched the Oprah interview with Meghan and Harry and drew the same conclusions as all the rest of us.

Eventually, she is prevailed upon to do the exorcism. Turns out it’s not the princess who’s possessed, it’s the footballer she’s trying to marry. Here we have a genuinely nasty and horrible bit of gore, with hands reaching up out of the guy’s throat to sort of tear his body apart and burst into a demon? I loved it except for this is the first nasty death we have actually witnessed, and it’s a Black character and that makes me feel weird. Just cast a white guy when someone needs to get torn apart. Then tear him apart. This is the ruthlessness that was missing from the show’s first two episodes.

Constantine tries to carry on with the exorcism, but Dream shows up to cause problems on purpose. The demon offers to tell Dream who has the helmet if he’ll stop Constantine from doing the exorcism, and Dream appears to be amenable to this dream. Constantine is not. She’s all, “Run along and fuck off back to hell,” and I’d die for her. Dream just stands there in disbelief that Constantine has ignored his commands to stop exorcising. The funniest bits of Sandman are always the moment when someone out-fuckboys Dream, which is what has just happened to him here. Dream cannot cope with not being the biggest fuckboy in the room! His eternal life has not prepared him for such an eventuality!

After a bit of farewell flirting with her vicar friend, Constantine comes out to have a chat with Dream, who is looking extra skinny and doomed. He tells her that they have to find the pouch of sand, lest dreams disappear forever. “Does this approach generally work for you?” Constantine asks. “You just turn up and order people about?” (Probably her time on Doctor Who prepared Jenna Coleman for this line read in particular.) Dream says, “Yes.” It is not unsexy (see previous posts re: Tom Sturridge having good chemistry with everyone, all the time). Constantine agrees to help him, but says that she works alone and refuses to be followed around London by Dream and his friend. This is shocking to Dream because he has no friends.

The friend in question is a raven. The raven’s name is Matthew. Dream does not need a babysitter. (As he is explaining to the raven that he does not need a babysitter, Constantine bounces. I love her, your honor.) The raven explains that he lived on earth all his life and can be really helpful to Dream, but Dream doesn’t want another raven. He recounts what happens to Jessamy as evidence for not wanting another raven. I cannot believe we are having a multi-episode arc about Dream’s grief for this extracanonical raven. That said, I spoke to my friend who is watching this show but has never read the comics, and they love the whole Jessamy thing, so maybe this is an entry point for people who did not read the comics.

While we’re discussing plot lines that aren’t as good as Jenna Coleman, I might as well run quickly through what’s going on with Ethel and John, over in Arkham Asylum. John resents many of Ethel’s parenting choices and does not believe in the Sandman. He thinks the person they’ve been running from is his father, actually, and he knows his father’s name, from reading The History of Ritual Magic in England. The moment of truth arrives! He says that if Ethel wants the ruby, she has to tell him everything, and be honest about it. Ethel comes clean, and John says he’s changed the ruby so it only works for him. He doesn’t want to give it back to Morpheus, he wants to use it to create a world without Morpheus.

Just as they are having a little bit of a moment, John asks her to bring him the ruby. She says that she can’t, because last time he had it, he killed people. Instead, she offers him the amulet of protection and tells him she’s sorry she was such a shit mum. Without the amulet, she ages swiftly and dies in his arms. I’m sure this will not end in tragedy. Jokes! It immediately ends in tragedy. John straightens up, splats the guard that comes in, and escapes the asylum, splatting two more guards in the process. Then he runs into the Corinthian, a very stable and reassuring presence! I’m sure this will not end in more tragedy!

Okay, so fine. That’s John and Ethel, setting up episode five, which we are all prepared to find very troubling. Back to Jo Constantine, my girlfriend! She dreams again, but this time we see the end of the dream/memory: Astra came running in when she was in the midst of doing her exorcism, and she was taken and killed, and Constantine couldn’t save her. (If you’re keeping track at home, the count is now at two people of color who have died gruesomely in this episode.) Constantine wakes up to find Dream in her room, and he offers to fix her bad dreams if she helps him find his pouch o’ sand. Now we’re cooking with gas, y’all. What we need, I have discovered, is someone irreverent and chatty to bounce off Tom Sturridge’s haughty sulk, and that is Constantine in spades. She gets it out of him that he was imprisoned in Roderick Burgess’s basement for decades, and he retaliates by finding a photo booth strip of pictures of her looking happy with another lady.

The woman in the picture is called Rachel. Constantine ghosted her because Rachel thought things were getting serious, and Constantine is a fuckboy, even when she’s Jenna Coleman. She and Dream agree that love never ends well. (Certainly that is very true for protagonists of comic books.) They roll up to Rachel’s flat, and Constantine insists on going in alone, probably because she doesn’t want Dream to witness firsthand the aftermath of her fuckboyitude. The flat seems suitably haunted for what I know is coming, but like… don’t other people live there? Do they mind living in this very haunted block of flats? As Constantine psychs herself up to chat with her ex, Matthew is giving Dream whatever the opposite of a pep talk is. Dream looks tremendously aesthetic in this mood lighting with the rain behind him. I don’t know if it’s altogether a sulk—I’m going to have to think about it—but it has the aesthetic of a sulk.

Constantine and Rachel have an awkward conversation that turns into kissing that turns into more awkward conversation that turns into… well, Rachel’s face sort of sloughs off into sand. Again, I am delighted that the show has started to lean a little more into the body horror that very much characterized the comic; but again, Rachel is Black and I wish that these grisly fates had not befallen three characters of color in a single episode. Dream is there in the clinch to wake Constantine up from this dream, and he explains that it’s the sand making her think she saw what she saw. In reality, Rachel is ghastly, gauntly ill in bed, her hand clasped around the pouch of sand. Dream takes it from her hand and starts to walk out, but Constantine demands that Dream do something to help Rachel. He’s bewildered that she thinks this would be necessary. “We’re all just Roderick Burgess to you,” she says with searing accuracy. “What is the point of you?”

Whatever you can say about Dream, he does his duty when someone makes it clear that it is a duty. After Constantine apologizes to Rachel and leaves the room, Dream mercy-kills Rachel. You can see that he is thinking, as he does this mercy killing, “idk what if I were slightly less of a fuckboy?” He puts this thought into action when he gets outside by telling Constantine that she’s not Roderick Burgess. Which is nice! Even nicer, he tells her that he’s taken away her nightmare for her.

Matthew and Dream have a little argument about whether Matthew needs to go home to the Dreaming or can be allowed to come with Dream where he’s going. Dream accedes that he might have use of Matthew where he’s going. Which is Hell. “I don’t get a sense that you’re listening,” Matthew says. “So fuck it! Let’s go to Hell!”

How I’d fix this episode: This episode is genuinely really good, and I enjoyed it a lot! Jenna Coleman is terrific as Johanna Constantine, and I love her with Dream. I would, however, rethink the casting of the three people of color who wind up gruesomely dead. I am all for creating a more diverse cast of characters, but I do want the show to think critically about how — in particular — its white characters interact with / violently murder / witness the violent deaths of its characters of color.

Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: Fucking Jessamy, still. Jesus Christ with Jessamy. I can’t believe we’re still hearing about Jessamy. He doesn’t in fact care about Rachel’s horrific plight, but he does accept her as his duty when Constantine points out that he should, which captures Dream as a character much better than him crying over the gargoyle. (Apologies to Gregory, who was a very sweet gargoyle, and none of this is Gregory’s fault.)

Does Dream do a sulk? I’m going to say no! He has a sulky energy at times, but I don’t think he properly goes into a sulk the way we’ve seen him do in the prior two episodes. When he briefly attempts to sulk, he loses track of Constantine, so I guess that teaches him that he can keep up with Constantine, or he can do a sulk, but he can’t do both.

Fuckboy energy: 9/10. If Dream had done what he intended and left the room with Rachel dying in there, I’d have awarded him the full ten points. The fact that he comes close is perfectly in character. Maybe he can learn something from Constantine’s cursed love life.

The post Sandman, Episode 3: Dream a Little Dream of Me appeared first on Reading the End.

A couple of housekeeping things: At the end of this month (April), I’ll be shutting down the Patreon page, with love and thanks to all of y’all for sticking with us this long. The podcast will stay online through the end of May, in case you want to download and save any past episodes. I’ll also be keeping copies of every episode, so you can always email me post-May if there’s an episode you want. Okay! This is sad! On to the podcast! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 155

Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around!

1:12 – What we’re reading
4:07 – ANNOUNCEMENT
4:55 – What we’re watching
10:13 – GAME
21:24 – What kind of podcast has it been?
43:47 – Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

What We Talked About

The Trees, Percival Everett
So Much Blue, Percival Everett
Telephone, Percival Everett
The Frozen Women, Jon Michelet, translated by Don Bartlett
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Nimona movie (link)
podcast books referenced: Half Blood Blues (podcast), Washington Black (podcast), Pretty as a Picture (podcast), The Goldfinch (podcast), The Color Purple (podcast), Tell the Truth Shame the Devil (podcast), The Fair Fight (podcast), Boat Squad John (podcast), The Mothers (podcast), The Vanishing Half (podcast), Insurrecto (podcast), Black Chalk (podcast), That They May Face the Rising Sun (podcast)
The Devil’s Teeth, Susan Casey (sharks)
Voices in the Ocean, Susan Casey (dolphins)
The Wave, Susan Casey (waves)
F1: Drive to Survive
My Dad Wrote a Porno
Normal Gossip
Enchanted April, Elizabeth Von Arnim

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 the Storygraph!

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by Sharon of Library Hungry

The post Episode 155 – The Last One appeared first on Reading the End.

Lena has come back to the US after some time spent happily with her aunt, a renowned herbalist, in Italy. Her father has been laid off without severance, and an inadequately treated injury has left him with an addiction to pain pills. Lena’s expected to get a job ASAP and start supporting her family, which is why she accepts a position as a medical assistant to the wealthy Verdeau family’s in-house doctor. The doctor, Prosenko, mainly tends to the Verdeau son and heir, Jonathan, who’s afflicted with an unnamed, but debilitating, medical condition and — separately? — never seems to stop drinking. The longer Lena works with the family, attending their hideously decadent rich-people parties, the angrier she becomes at their callous disregard for anyone who isn’t them. And so she concocts a plan for revenge, using her medical knowledge and, more specifically, her aunt’s research on *dramatic hand gestures* POISON.

In the many, many years since I first read and loved The Secret History, years in which I have sought unceasingly for a book that would hit me the same way, I have learned that I am best served by books with similar vibes but very different plots. Pretty much, Gothic novels. Gothic novels is what I want. I respect and thank Kit Mayquist for understanding what the people want and putting the words A GOTHIC NOVEL right there on the cover. Gothic indeed it is, from the opening few paragraphs where the narrator is all last-night-I-dreamt-I-went-to-Manderley-again about it straight through to the ending, in which the question is posed “can we ever be free?” and the answer at time of writing is a shrug emoji. In the middle are a bunch of rich-people parties in the Berkshires that are so decadent they require an on-call doctor. These happen with sufficient regularity to ensure that you’re never going to be able to go too deep down the “rich people are people too” rabbit hole of your compassionate brain, because Mayquist is always reminding you that these guys wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire and instead would probably put it on their Instagram Stories before snorting your ashes like cocaine.

What I’m saying is, the vibes are impeccable.

(Sidebar: Have y’all noticed that I’ve been saying versions of “the vibes are impeccable” about a lot of my books lately? Do we think that books are moving in a more vibey direction than in years past, or is it more that I have gotten better about finding books with vibes that suit me? I kind of like the first option, don’t you? Like, the authors all grew up on fanfiction and WB dramas and now they’re bringing that energy to their books. I respect it. Long live the vibe shift.²)

One of the allures of the gothic novel is that the fresh-faced ingenue (who comes of poorish, sometimes-honest parents) sinks deeper and deeper into complicity with whatever rich-people nonsense is happening around them. The first time Lena attends a decadent party, she gets a bonus check of several thousand dollars, for a single night’s work, which frees her up to buy her own shitty car and make a start at paying down her student loans. Even as you know she should get out, you can’t deny the allure of the minor freedom that six thousand dollars gives her. She doesn’t even have to make excuses for herself because the reader is already doing it for her: Just a few more parties like that to stabilize her and then she can work on trying to get out.

Except, of course, nobody can ever just get out. No sooner does she start to think Maybe This Is It than the beautiful, alluring Verdeau daughter, Audrey, asks for her help in figuring out what’s wrong with her brother Jonathan. Around the same time, the horrible Verdeau father ropes her into doing something very unethical but very well paid, and the thing about Lena’s circumstances is that she’s just not in a position to say no to either one of them. Reluctantly, she agrees to both proposals, which only leads her deeper into the kind of trouble rich people have to pay thousands of dollars to get themselves out of.

If I had one complaint about Tripping Arcadia, it’s that the reveals at the end were pretty confusing. A lot of people are doing a lot of nefarious things and it was like a game of three-card monte trying to keep track of who had access to which poisons and which poisoners and whom they wanted to hurt or kill and why. Apart from that, it was one of those near-perfect reading experiences where it’s the exact book you wanted at the exact moment you wanted it. Kit Mayquist’s debut is fun, dark, soapy, bloody, and a promising start to their (hopefully long and fruitful) authorial career.

The post Tripping Arcadia, Kit Mayquist appeared first on Reading the End.

I continue to derive so much comfort from reading, and to that end I’ve got some links. I also recommend the brand new television show Abbott Elementary and the quite old television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, as they are making me feel better. I just finished Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow and loved it, so that’s another rec for you if you’re in the mood for a story about a girl burning shit down. And now, on to the links!

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY. … This show is great. Here are some things about it and its greatness. (link) Plus an interview with Janelle James, who plays the principal. (link)

Lauren Michele Jackson considers appropriation, AAVE, and the artist formerly known as Awkwafina. (link)

“How can we make men care? Does a fear of being disgraced have to be part of the incentive?” This is an interesting article with the really depressing, though unsurprising, punchline that abusers will only think critically about the harm they’ve caused if they can do so while still controlling the possibility of facing consequences; and not often then. (link)

The Crisis Text Line turned out to be an extremely typical tech bro company. Compassionate care for people struggling with suicidal ideation is incompatible with its ethos. (link)

Pregnancy apps are rife with misinformation and propaganda. (link)

I loved this curated list of Black food cookbooks that focus on plant-based recipes. (link)

Norman Mailer hasn’t been canceled — but the uproar about Random House pulling a planned book of his essays says a lot about the state of cancel culture discourse. (link)

“This is not the end. It is a change.” Tiya Miles advises looking to Black history to understand and ameliorate our current fears. (link)

Toril Moi reminds writers not to write for readers who hate them. Write for the people who want to hear what you have to say. (Great reminder in the age of Twitter.) (link)

Morgan Jerkins thinks it’s long past time for Jessie Redmon Fauset to have a literary renaissance. (I am very easily swayed by people being like “everyone should know such-and-such writer from long ago!”) (link)

This piece about the artist Piranesi makes an excellent companion to Susanna Clarke’s latest novel Piranesi. (link)

You’re Going To Italy In A Novel By A Non-Italian Writer! Are You Going To Have A Good Time? (link)

This is a beautiful piece about love, queer love, platonic love, and how queer literature can help us to escape the trap of believing that love only looks one way. (link)

Caretakers are being left to fail. Any conversation about the so-called Great Resignation has to take this into account. (link)

Delighted to learn that Patricia Lockwood was influenced by Emily of New Moon, which I also love. (link)

Take care, and take care of each other, and also Happy Mardi Gras.

The post Happy Mardi Gras, I guess: A Links Round-uP appeared first on Reading the End.

Y’all may remember me screeching and carrying on about the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and how gosh-darn fun it was despite being about a dystopian future in which a few scrappy and independent-minded escapees of government torture banded together to carve out a small space for happiness and community. Well, this is the sequel, and I stand by everything I said about Deal with the Devil and it’s true in The Devil You Know as well. This is Maya and Gray’s book. Maya is the former information courier for sinister corporation TechCorps, who was given the dubious gift of an eidetic memory and a whole host of corporate secrets. Gray is the sniper from among Rafe’s unmerry band of supersoldiers, and he is very stone-faced, and the implant that makes him a supersoldier has begun to deteriorate and will soon kill him. Plus, someone’s trafficking in cloned children, and everybody is determined to put a stop to that. Fun times all around!

When I said “fun times all around!” before, I was being flippant, and in fact flippanter than I would have been being¹ if I’d used the same phrasing about Deal with the Devil. Deal with the Devil is more of a caper, setting up the world and the characters in a road-trippy setting that’s hard not to find fun.² The Devil You Know, by contrast, addresses the aftermath of trauma and the effort it takes to find value in a self that has been so significantly fractured by the selfishness and greed of the people who hurt you.

In a world controlled by variously malicious corporations and governments, just about everyone we meet is recovering from trauma of some kind. Maya and Gray share the experience of having been molded into the perfect tools for their evil overlords, then pressed into service of a cause they didn’t believe in, for which the skill sets they were forced to possess have made them particularly suited. Though their suitability as weapons was purpose-built by bad guys, Maya and Gray still have to grapple with the ways they’ve been wielded to do harm in the past. Gray views his own impending death as a kind of amends, while Maya lives with the fear that she’ll be taken and used again in the same way she was before.

Because this is a Kit Rocha book, both those impulses translate as action taken to protect those around them who are more vulnerable. Most obviously, the trafficked, cloned children. Maya and her friends take a personal interest, given that Nina herself is the product of a prior child cloning experiment. Remembering their many losses of agency, Maya and her friends are determined to put an end to the traffic in children — of course — but also to find a safe and comfortable life for the child survivors they rescue. Rocha makes a point of the children’s agency: at one point, the little girl Rainbow is offered a new home, but she chooses to stay in the librarians’ enclave, and that choice is respected. Love to see it! Children are people too!

On the other side of the innocence/experience spectrum is the newly returned, somewhat brainwashed supersoldier Rafe’s team thought was dead. Once their medic and sworn brother, Mace now tries to kill people sometimes. Not all the time, though! Gray and Rafe and the rest of them are pretty confident they can keep Mace and his potential murder targets (who are mostly them, anyway!) safe until he’s all the way unbrainwashed; this is not an opinion warmly shared by Nina’s feral murder twin, Ava. She keeps coming around with extravagant gifts delivered with a scowl and threats to Rafe’s crew delivered with — okay, not with a smile, but certainly you imagine with a lot of teeth.

Unusually for a Kit Rocha book, The Devil You Know is low on sex, given Maya’s and Rafe’s mutual extreme cautiousness, Rafe’s impending very much death,³ and Maya’s sensory issues. (Sensory issues: You know more people who have them than you might realize!) It’s another reminder that sex scenes are a tool for telling story and building character and can be deployed, or withheld, very effectively in those two capacities. When Maya and Rafe finally do have sex, it’s not just hooray-boning, although Hooray boning!, it’s also a sign to the reader of how much their relationship has grown and how much Maya has learned to trust Rafe and even more so to trust herself with understanding and enforcing her own limits. The third book is about Dani and will undoubtedly be just wall-to-wall boning. Sex as character development! Who knew!

(The romance genre knew. For quite a while now.)

All in all, a fast-paced, emotional, deeply satisfying second outing for the series. I am already making yearning-cat noises about Dani’s book, which is probably either called Devil in the Details or Dance with the Devil, and I am choosing to live in the uncertainty of not knowing which.

(Oh shit, or Devil May Care. Or also Devil’s Advocate. Or Speak of the Devil. Help, I can’t stop thinking of titles! Kit Rocha will just have to keep writing romances in this series until they run out of idioms!)

Note: I received an egalley of The Devil You Know, whose title I forgot as I was writing this sentence because I have thought of too many devil idioms and it’s rotted my brain, for review consideration from Netgalley.

The post Review: The Devil You Know, Kit Rocha appeared first on Reading the End.

When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author in I don’t know how long. BRACE YOURSELF; and know in advance that I am not even slightly sorry.)

Now there is The Chosen and the Beautiful. As I launch into what isn’t so much a review as it is a praise hymn, I feel that I should first specify that I quite like The Great Gatsby. I liked it when I read it in high school, despite having little to no interest in any of the other writers from this era that we had to read in school. (I liked some of Ezra Pound’s poetry, but it turns out that he is, unfortunately, a fascist.) More recently when I was doing my project of rereading books I owned by white men to see if they still worked for me (three did not; two did, ish), I still liked The Great Gatsby. It’s true that my interest in rich whites dicking each other around is limited, but what can I say? Fitzgerald is a good writer! So that’s my background vis-a-vis The Great Gatsby, of which The Chosen and the Beautiful is a queer, immigrant, fantasy retelling.

Having read The Chosen and the Beautiful, I do not see any reason that I would ever need to read The Great Gatsby again.

Honestly? I don’t see a reason that anyone will ever need to read The Great Gatsby again, except as a companion piece if you are trying to understand and analyze The Chosen and the Beautiful more fully. The Chosen and the Beautiful so monumentally captures the spirit of Gatsby (not surprising, given that we too are survivors of forever-war and worldwide plague) while attending to its failings that it truly feels not like an homage, but like a successor. If original-flavor The Great Gatsby was the book the world needed then, The Chosen and the Beautiful is the version we need now.

It centers Jordan Baker (remember her? Nick’s louche tennis-playing love interest?), who in this telling is a queer Vietnamese American adoptee conditionally accepted into the ranks of the rich and gorgeous. She’s friends with Daisy, makes friends with Nick, and is recruited by Gatsby to help forward his cause with Daisy — a thing Jordan is not particularly inclined to do. Like Nick in the original Gatsby, but perhaps even more so because she’s more of an outsider, Jordan observes everything around her, making her own judgments and trying to preserve her own sense that she can easily extricate herself from this world she loves and despises. As Daisy and Gatsby stagger through their doomed summer love affair, Jordan is making discoveries of her own, about her magic, her heritage, and the path that brought her to America in the first place.

If I started quoting every piece of beautiful writing in The Chosen and the Beautiful, we’d be here all day, so I will just kick it to this tweet instead:

trying to articulate my feelings but I feel like I just got beat up by the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, so

— Jared Pechacek (@vandroidhelsing) June 10, 2021

In addition to being a near-perfect prose stylist, no offense to other writers, Nghi Vo has also included an amount of magic that is exactly correct. I am qualified to determine this because I:

1. have read a number of books with magic in;
2. am judgmental about all sorts of things, not just amounts of magic in books; and
3. absolutely definitely don’t have any kind of hidden agenda about making Nghi Vo the most powerful and respected writer in all the land

Demons exist in this world, and Gatsby has very probably sold his soul to one in exchange for the chance to win back Daisy Fay. At his parties, they sip demoniac (made from demon’s blood) as well as champagne. Perhaps more viscerally, Jordan has a talent that seems to come from her Vietnamese family, though her adoption into a white family has ensured that she was never taught its parameters or how best to use it. No part of this book isn’t perfect, but the perfectest part is the magic-related revelation at the very end of the book. Like everything else, it’s wry and understated; but the implications of what it means for [Redacted] are devastating, and the implications for Jordan herself will slam into you like a freight train.

The Chosen and the Beautiful shines in every possible way. It doesn’t just excel as a retelling in its own right; it also illuminated for me what I want out of all retellings. I want them to tell me something new about the old story — something magical and special and important, something I hadn’t thought about before. Nghi Vo is telling us something new about The Great Gatsby on every page. tldr: Wow.

Note: I received an electronic ARC of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. If publishers could cause me to love books this much simply by providing me with an ARC, I would presume that like Gatsby they had done a deal with a nefarious power. So I am pretty sure the book’s just very fucking good.

The post Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo appeared first on Reading the End.

The China seeds mystery, solved. (link)

IDK maybe we shouldn’t have poured so much money into mercenaries who are now wandering around doing coups, just a thought. (link)

Roxane Gay offers some theories for why people are so awful online. (link)

The Dear America books taught (mostly white!) girls that they had a place in history. (link)

Jenée Desmond-Harris, AKA New Dear Prudence, has a new column called Race Manners at the Times, and the first column is excellent. (link)

Star of Rutherford Falls Jana Schmieding discusses her passion for food and its place in indigenous culture. (link)

Soraya McDonald considers Recy Taylor and the history of interracial rapes of Black women. (link)

How did colonialism get to be such a popular premise for board games? (link)

One of my favorite genres of online writing is parents who have developed a white-hot passionate hatred for some piece of media their child consumes. Here is a ranking of all the trains in the Thomas and Friends Storytime podcast, based on how much the writer hates them. (link)

“I have the feeling that I am supposed to root for it, somehow, because LeBron is firmly established in the culture as A Good Dude, and because it can’t be very harmful to have a little fun with nostalgia, and what kind of asshole evaluates Space Jam: A New Legacy on its merits as a movie? Have some fun!” (link)

“But it never occurs to them that Whitehead and Gay come from a very different class to begin with, and are not necessarily standing in real solidarity with me.” On Black pop culture and who gets to shape it. (link)

Let’s celebrate LeVar Burton Jeopardy! week with this Esquire profile of LeVar Burton, a true American icon. (link)

CONFEDERATE VAMPIRES LITERALLY WHY (link)

“But, like, did Driver become the horse, or was he always the horse, deep down?” Ashley Reese, asking the important questions. (link)

“Aragorn occupies a unique position in the canon of formative crushes in blockbuster cinema in that he’s absolutely a sex symbol, while the actor who portrays him is absolutely not.” The analysis of Aragorn that my heart desired. (link)

“Uncle Sam first needs to get a grip on the problem. It needs to begin collecting hard data on the application and enrollment processes facing citizens, putting numbers to the time tax and analyzing it through the lens of race, gender, income, state of residence, and health and disability status.” This is such a good idea I almost cried when I read it. (link)

I am also so happy to report that the ?first? annual? TRANSreadathon is happening tonight! It’s a 24-hour readathon in which we’re celebrating trans and nonbinary authors by reading for 24 hours in a row, starting this evening at 8:00 PM EST. Amazing, no? You can read whatever you’d like! And meanwhile our social media accounts will be highlighting trans and nonbinary authors, so you can get plenty of recs for amazing books. I have a certain number of books to read by trans and nonbinary authors. Never you mind how many! It’s a normal, sane number of books! SHUT UP.

The post Mystery Seeds: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.