Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

 Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

by Jason Pargin

Pub Date: 31 Oct 2023

The creative gore here is perfect for Halloween reading. And it’s kind of a killer crime novel too.

You might not think from the opening pages that Zoey is going to become one of your favourite characters. But soon you will be rooting for her, and snickering at the snarky observations and quirky turns of phrase. You don’t have to read far before you realize that the author, being the former executive editor of cracked.com, has a wry and slightly demented sense of humor.

This futuristic supermall-slash-Vegas version of Utah has hypercharged crooked capitalism at its core, and thanks to her dead father, Zoey owns a large chunk of it. Anytime there’s wealth derived from shady/crooked origins, there are enemies. And Zoey's are a special breed of determined/crazy.

This book is a sequel to Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick (2020), which followed Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. Those two were written by the same author under the name David Wong.

Apart from a tendency of the various characters to digress into brief polemics about the inevitability of corruption and predictably existentialist views of modern society, the book is entertaining for anyone who loves wordplay and unexpected situational comedy. It will appeal to mystery lovers who like their humour zany, and to many people who loved Mad Magazine and Cracked in their youth. And possibly to anyone who enjoys The Murderbot Diaries.

 

You don’t need to have read the previous two books in order to enjoy this one, but you will probably want to go back after you’ve lived in Zoe‘s world for this extremely eccentric adventure. 

 

#NetGalley #Zoey #gangsters #politics #futuristic #zany #election #stunts #socialmedia

Shark Teeth: she's not really a biter

Shark Teeth

by Sherri Winston 

Pub Date: 16 Jan 2024 

Bloomsbury Children's Books

 

Kita is a really identifiable character, a girl going into grade 7 whose mission is to look after her younger siblings, keep their home life on track amid her mother's partying and absenteeism and cruelty, and most of all keep the family from being split up into different foster homes AGAIN.

She’s also got hyperdontia, two rows of teeth. The kids at school call her Sharkita or Shark Teeth. She's heard all the hurtful phrases that everyone who is physically different faces, and by now expects them. Which new person would ask her what’s wrong with her teeth? Which would say no offense before saying something that could only seen as offensive? Or, what hurt the most: which would pretend she wasn’t there at all?

Kita wants to join after school activities like her friends do. She wants to be a kid. And that seems to be what the new assistant principal is encouraging. Even when she’s trying out for the dance and twirl team at school, with her mother's blessing, Kita’s stressed about whether Mama is actually looking after the younger siblings or has gone off again. She has episodes of severe muscle spasms, but her mother just tells her they’re a sign of being crazy. If she tells anyone about them, she could get locked up. Mama's really an expert at cutting off Kita from anyone who might help her. 

 

This is a touching story of Kita's struggle to become a kid again: to learn to trust others to look after her siblings better than she can, to accept help and support and even love from people who truly have her best interests at heart. Foster kids will see their own struggles here, and other kids will relate to Kita's insecurities as well as learning empathy for classmates who too often are mocked for their poverty, their enforced maturity, their visible differences.  

Five Stars.

#NetGalley #FosterCare #FosterHome #Family #FoundFamily #Family Dysfunction #MiddleGrade #Twirl #DanceTeam #School #Friendship #Bloomsbury

Imprisoned Like a Lady

 Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Lord

 by Celeste Connally 

This novel has all that most readers expect from a Regency: carriages, horses, a ball scene, sparks and snarks between the heroine and her love interest. There are few clues in the opening chapter to this novel’s Regency-Gothic plot, but get past that and it’s a socially relevant, intriguing tale of women successfully challenging of one of England’s longstanding, deeply inhumane ways of exercising patriarchal power and greed.

Several feisty female secondary characters band together with Our Heroine to rescue their downtrodden compatriots from controlling spouses and fathers, at similar risk to their own limited freedoms. It’s inspiring and refreshing, part of the new wave of Regencies that tackle wider societal problems rather than strictly a het romance.

Those flaws in this opening: dialogue and inner monologues are slightly over-flowery (as is common with neo-Regency novels), setting is generically ‘carriages and balls’ rather than definably Regency-era, and far too many paragraphs are lost interspersing Our Heroine changing her clothes with clumsily introducing (through inane dialogue with her faithful ladies’ maid) characters we’ll meet later. There’s no way to guess from this opening that you’re entering a tale of human frailty, madhouses, and morals that would not be out of place in a Bronte novel. 

Available for pre-order to Nov 14, 2023

#Netgalley #Regency #Women

 

The Observer: grim foreboding in a small town

The Observer, quasi-fictional recounting of a small rural town's seasonal doings through the eyes of a Mountie's young wife, proceeds with all the inexorable fatality of a comet as seen by those innocent of the scientific explanations. 

In this pre-cellphone, pre-internet proto-memoir our narrator is, by her own admission, a out-of-her-depth outsider in Medway (a fictional standin for Meyerthorpe, Alberta). She struggles to grasp the local rhythms of life, the inexplicable codes governing what dish to bring to which potluck. A recurring temporary job at the local paper, The Observer, gives her more insight into the denizens of town and surrounding farms, and hands her secret after secret that can't be spoken of directly, let alone printed in the paper. Mysteries come and go, adding menace but rarely resolved.

Mostly alone with her young child while her spouse Hardy is on patrol (sometimes for days on end) or at home sleeping between shifts, Julia fears her own emotions almost as much as she worries about Hardy's growing bleakness. She's a composite of thousands of law enforcement spouses: pitched without information or recourse into being the main emotional prop and outlet for a man under tremendous work strain, himself with no external support beyond that provided by equally stressed-out co-workers.

The characters are mostly sympathetic, the prose often beautiful, the moments of joy in nature sublime... and yet the darker undercurrents multiply, expanding like the comet's tail in the night sky. The sense of impending doom thickens page by page, chapter by chapter, recreating the nigh-breathless tension of life in an RCMP household, of an RCMP career, and in a town where too many assholes have been tolerated, too many secrets swept under for far too long. 

Something has to snap. You're just not sure what, or who, or how bad it's going to go.

At the novel's end, something does. By then Julia and Hardy are long gone, their reactions both sharpened by familiarity and muted by time & distance. Their subsequent life briefly touches on several changes forced onto the RCMP in the past twenty years, including Critical Incident Debriefing and other psychological supports. Spouses, though, remain outside the precinct, responsible for their own mental health and supporting each other without quite admitting just how much strain they're all under.

There's no emotional catharsis here for the reader, just as there was not for the very real townspeople who lived through, and still live with, not only the Mayerthorpe tragedy but the myriad dark currents that swirl beneath the idyllic surface of small rural towns.

The Observer

View Marina Endicott's book launch of The Observer

#NetGalley #Mayerthorpe #RCMP #MarinaEndicott #novel #prairies #smalltown #ruralliving #tragedy #policing #trauma #CriticalIncidentDebrief #journalism #dramaturge #horses #hate

Golden Gate is more than a place

The Golden Gate
by Amy Chua

The Golden Gate of the title is a hotel catering to the rich and infamous in San Francisco, and it's also a not-subtle delineation of the barriers that wealth and fame create to keep truth and justice at bay. A boffo prologue tells us there’s been a murder. In the first few pages, there are actually two deaths. And three golden girls--wealthy and beautiful cousins--who are all suspects. We don’t know all the players yet but we can be pretty sure things are going to keep on happening.

There’s a strong flavour of San Francisco noir, the cynical cop getting the runaround from wealthy businessman and politicians. Except this cop is half-Latino and thus very conscious of his race-based risk if he calls them out on their lies. He's worked hard to pass as white on the force, even using his mother's maiden name instead of his father's Mexican surname. Indirectly  at first, later more directly, the Japanese Internment of WW2 plays a role. Distinct overtones of Lavender House by Lev A. C. Rosen.

The chapters trip around in time between the first Golden Gate death, of a child, and the second, of a well known and much despised politician early in WW2. It's a slow unveiling of that ever-popular plot: rich Americans behaving badly. It's the author's first foray into crime fiction and that shows in the technique of revealing most of the useful backstory (and the solution) not through the detective's own efforts but through intermittent pieces of a long statement by the golden girls' grandmother, produced on the thinnest of legal pretexts.

There’s lots of evidence here that Amy Chua is better known for her nonfiction, as page after page elides away from the ongoing story into neutral-voice narration of San Francisco’s, and America’s, history. The history and culture are interesting as sidelights on the setting. Several characters are either real people, or fictional ones whose life events are lifted from then-living people. But those digressions, like the grandmother's statement, tend to distance us from caring about the characters or becoming fully immersed in exploring the plot.

 

As Chua is a talented writer and cares deeply about producing textured backgrounds rich in historical detail, her next mystery novel will almost surely be better, with the background serving as, well, background and the characters allowed to fully explore their own unfolding story. 

#Netgalley #TheGoldenGate #novel #reviewing #fiction #AmericanFiction #WW2 #JapaneseInternment #California #politics #politicians #philandering #adultery #cousins #lesbians #gays #LGBTQ #murder #AmericanHistory

The Rachel Incident gets five stars from me

This is both a small story of one woman's decade--from seedy university digs and hangovers with her gay roommate through professional development to the birth of her first child--and the story of Ireland's financial and social turmoil of the early 21st century. It tackles abuse of power and academic privilege, the difficulties and exultations of coming out queer in a college town filled with football hooligans and conservative religious parents, couple dynamics viewed through the lenses of several different Rachels in the course of her evolution toward maturity. And especially it speaks of lies, their endurance and their evolution. 

Amid the memorable images of drunken sprees and devastating breakups are some deeply resonant lines, such as

He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.

I suspect most authors, editors, and booksellers would agree. Even some agents...

 

The book launch scene in chapter 7 is--apart from one notable backroom moment--both entertaining and cringingly familiar to authors and bookstore owners.

At one point Rachel talks about bands whose names she wouldn’t remember a decade later but that occupied "a magical sweet space between celebrity and accessibility.” 

 

For me this book is a magical sweet space between Ireland as it is, Ireland of the bleak financial-crash years before the Celtic Tiger roared anew, and the Ireland that was and remains shaped indelibly by the starvation times under Queen Victoria. Ireland has a long and complex memory, and that is infused in every page of this engaging tale of a young woman growing up, navigating her world not always wisely. Her happy ending isn't one I'd have envisioned, and yet it was perfect for her. I dare you not to tear up.

 

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

the New York Times best-selling author of All Our Hidden Gifts

#Ireland #abortion #university #comingout #goinghome #financialcrash #womensfiction #Netgalley

DIVA by Daisy Goodwin

A competent fictionalization that breaks no new ground

In Goodwin's competent hands, this fictionalized life of operatic sensation Maria Callas is framed, and punctuated, by her relationship with the richest man on the planet, Ari Onassis. It drops us into her public space and private thoughts on the day she learns Ari has abandoned her and their long-standing affair to marry a woman of better pedigree, namely Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

After that emotionally tense opening, we skip back-and-forth through her early desperate years in New York City, the ignored younger sister, until she demonstrates her singing talent to her grasping mother. Sent back to Italy when her parents separate, she supports her mother by singing in the streets and bars through some troubled times before finally making her way to a teacher and opera company. When she returns to New York City, it is as a world renowned diva, and the rest of the book is pretty much headlines with some yearning over forbidden food and arrogant comments about her own brilliance.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. But although it gives possible plausible insights into fictionalized Maria, it fails to make her engaging or sympathetic, and does not elevate the rather humdrum elements of her celebrated life either on or off stage. If there was a search for meaning in her life it seems to have gone no further than a quest to be allowed to eat pasta again as opposed to eating only salad to preserve her figure for the stage. With so much rich opera to draw on, there were many parallels that could have been made, some tragedies underpinned by the operas in which she performed, but the book stays in the lighter and easier fare, resulting in an operetta of middling competence rather than an opera-quality life and death.