A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Lottie, a child ballet dancer, has to find a way to balance dancing with a full life that includes other pleasures and relationships.

This begins with an amazing accidental puppy acquisition - she witnesses a boy steal a King Charles Spaniel from a pet shop, chases him, hurls her carrying case at him and knocks him down, is mistaken for the puppy's owner by bystanders, and goes with it. She falls in love with the puppy, finds that it's incredibly hard to care for a puppy when you need to do other things too, and then comes to a crisis when she's accepted at a famous ballet boarding school that doesn't allow dogs. (It's Doone's ballet school, but he and Crystal do not appear in this story, which seems to be set well after their time at the school.)

The puppy issue is resolved (the puppy is fine) halfway through the book, but Lottie continues to deal with balancing her dancing with other issues: friend troubles, enemy troubles, discovering her own inner emotional life, and changes in her family. It's a very interesting topic - how to have a life when you have a single thing that your entire life revolves around - but one which is more commonly dealt with in adult literature for obvious reasons.

I didn't love this as much as Thursday Children, probably because it's aimed at a slightly younger audience and is less complex, and because I love Doone so much, but it's very good.

It also has an amazingly iddy sequence which I have seen in many fanfics but no published novels before. ( Read more... )

Twenty years ago, Kris Pulaski was the lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a metal band teetering on the brink of breakout. Today she's a beaten-down clerk at Best Western whose guitar is stashed in her closet like a hidden corpse. After a night none of the band members can fully remember, all of their lives went to hell - except for that of Terry Hunt, the lead singer who is now the superstar front man for a sell-out band called Koffin.

After a series of bad-to-worse events during the lead-up to Koffin's farewell tour, Kris realizes that something very strange and bad happened on that night. What exactly was in the contract that broke up the band? Why did Terry bury Troglodyte, the album Kris wrote, and why is he so determined that it stay buried? So she picks up her guitar, puts on her bones (a black leather jacket painted with a spinal column and ribs), and sets out to find out exactly what's going on...

Kris is a fantastic character, a middle-aged woman who loves heavy metal, loved to play the guitar, and is one of the most determined characters I've ever encountered in fiction. The more she gets knocked down, the more she gets back up again. This, she says, is the spirit of heavy metal. I don't like metal, but Kris makes it come alive and feel like something worth fighting for - random umlauts and all.

Troglodyte and its associated mythology, in which Black Iron Mountain is the hole in the center of the world with its soul-crushing machinery and Troglodyte is the chained hero who glimpses something better, is central to the book and crucial to Kris. We get enough of its lyrics and descriptions of the music that it's very convincing as a real album and one which believably would make an impression on people who are into metal. (There's a hilarious running thread in which radio hosts argue over whether the album is actually any good or not.)

There are some weird plotholes and dangling threads, and the climax of the middle is better than the climax at the end. But it's a deeply satisfying, gripping book with a great ending, and Kris Pulaski is an absolutely fantastic character. Carol Monda reads the book with the exact right voice for a middle-aged woman who's seen some shit and is sick of taking it.

Warning for sexual assault, forced institutionalization, suicide, bugs, bats, and gore. And probably other things I've forgotten.

In the Before, rock singer Luce Cannon is just starting to hit the big time when the world is hit by the one-two punch of massive terrorist attacks and (apparently unrelatedly) a pandemic. In the After, gatherings have been banned to prevent violence and viruses, life is lived mostly online and under the eye of huge corporations. Rosemary, a young woman who loves music but experiences it only in virtual reality, is hired by one of those huge corporations to scout musicians at illegal underground concerts.

This novel starts with a bang and had me completely engrossed for the first third. The second two-thirds were well-written, but for me lacked the propulsive power of the first part of the book. I say “for me” because I’m not sure if that was the book or me. Given that my favorite part was Luce’s first-person narration of her pre-pandemic tour, I’d happily read a contemporary novel about musicians by Pinsker, no sf content required. Luce is Jewish and her relationship with her family and community, which she's mostly estranged from, is a small part of the novel but very well-done. I'd also have happily read a novel focusing on that.

Luce and Rosemary are both queer, and have romantic relationships with women (not with each other). Their own relationship felt like it should have been the center of the book, but wasn’t; they had a few powerful scenes early on, but later their interactions felt more like a clash of worldviews than like a clash of two people.

Generally, the longer the book went on, the more didactic and abstract it felt, with the vibrant and very human Luce of the beginning giving way to an iconic figure. The more the book is about its actual premise (a young woman scouts for talent in a world where live concerts are banned), the less interested I became. I don't think it was because of anything inherent about the premise, but because of how it was treated.

The early parts about Luce's band were really funny, among other things. Afterward, music and music-making was treated much more seriously, with no goofing around and playing pranks. I'm not sure it's true that people doing illegal things with huge consequences if they slip up actually do stop being silly-- they probably just channel it into areas that won't attract attention outside of their own group. At least, the second part of the book would have been more interesting if they had. The second part also was primarily Rosemary's narration, and she was very very very serious. The book ended up feeling solemn and weighty in a way that didn't play to Pinsker's strengths as a writer.

I still recommend it but not as strongly as I thought I would when I started it.

There’s a big and still-ongoing discussion here which delves a lot into the worldbuilding.

A Song for a New Day

A high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a school election set off a tangle of plots worthy of the Bard himself. Charlie Wilder has stage fright, but gets cast as Lysander as a result of machinations by another student (Greg, currently running for class president) in revenge for a prank Charlie played on him. Charlie’s efforts to escape the role lead to an increasingly complicated web of misunderstandings, romantic entanglements, plots, counter-plots, and counter-counter-plots.

I read this book as a kid and remembered it being really funny and well-structured. Upon re-reading… it is! In fact I’m even more impressed now with the handling of a very large cast in a short middle-grade novel.

My favorite bits were Charlie’s clever plots to get himself fired from the cast, first by being as bad as possible and later by breaking the school rule against negative campaigning by putting up posters after hours with slogans like WHY WAIT? IMPEACH GREG NOW! and Priscilla “Pages” Lodge, who loves melodramatic YA novels and becomes convinced that Charlie is dying after spotting him entering a doctor's office (to try to get a medical excuse to not do the play), and keeps hopefully trailing around him and offering her shoulder to cry on, to his bewilderment.

Pages was reading Don’t Blow This Life, You Can’t Go Back For Seconds, about a wealthy and spoiled New York teenager whose parents are trying to save their marriage by adopting a refugee child every two years. The central character, Alexis, had just dyed her hair purple, so naturally the story had Pages’s full attention.

The Wilder Plot

Twenty years after apocalypse by flu, a Shakespeare troupe and symphony tours a depopulated America, living by the words painted on their caravan, “because survival is insufficient.” This story is intercut with flashback to before and during the epidemic, centered around a web of characters and events which coalesce around an actor, Arthur, who drops dead of a heart attack while playing King Lear.

This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.

I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.

I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.

I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.

I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.

In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.

I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.

Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.

In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.

This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.

In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.

This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.

This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) ( Read more... ) And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.

Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.

That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.

Station Eleven

This is a book review; I haven’t seen the TV series, but I gather it’s quite different.

Bunheads is a YA novel about Hannah, a 19-year-old dancer in a huge New York ballet company. She went off to study at the Manhattan Ballet Academy when she was very young, and so ballet has been her entire life.

It begins when she’s getting frustrated with not having a life, partly due to meeting a quirky musician whose name I have already forgotten. Will she quit ballet, get a life, and stay with Quirky McWhatsisface? Or will she continue her obsessive routine and maybe become a star at the cost of misery and probable anorexia, with her shallow rich boyfriend who loves ballet and never makes any demands on her that would interfere with her career?

I could spoiler-cut and tell you, but duh. Is it not totally obvious?

Flack was also a professional ballet dancer, and I wanted to read this book because I was interested in what I assumed would be realistic, vivid detail. It may be realistic, but it’s not very vivid. The characters are one-dimensional. You never get a sense of why Hannah loved ballet in the first place.

It was also frustrating to read a book in which, even though it’s textually justified as due to individual circumstances, the right decision for the heroine is to dump the man who actually supports her career, go with the man who doesn’t, and quit her career. It would have had fewer unintended implications if Hannah had any idea what she wanted to do with her life, so it read more as a career change than a career drop. But she doesn’t. This is part of having no personality. Which, again, is explicit in the text – she has no life but ballet, so she thinks of nothing but ballet – but the way she thinks of ballet is unrevealing of both herself and ballet.

Rumer Godden’s Thursday's Children is a way better take on a ballet-obsessed character. So is Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (The Shoe Books).

Bunheads

Girl in Motion looks like it might be good, or at least better – has anyone read it?