A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This novel alternates "Now" and "Then" sections. In "Then," teenage Cass bicycles across America with her best friend's ashes. In "Now," she has returned from her trip and is facing everything she tried to flee via road trip: high school, her friend's death, and the bully who called her a dyke in front of the entire school and now has inexplicably been given the starring role in Cass's he dead best friend's musical, Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.

A sweet, poignant high school lesbian romance and coming-of-age story which also partakes of one of my least-favorite YA genres (my dead best friend) and one of my most-favorite (backstage drama). The former is well-done and non-moralistic; the latter is totally sweet. (Especially the excerpted song lyrics.) The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the climax to the "Then" section, in particular, was beautifully orchestrated and moving.

One of my favorite things about the whole book is that Cass, the heroine, is a Quaker, which affects her worldview in interesting, believable ways. I also liked that her parents are supportive and she doesn't rebel against them and her culture just because she's a teenager in a YA novel.

The main flaw was that many of the supporting characters were thin. While I believed in her theatre pals as a group, as individuals, there was not much to them. For instance, all we ever learn about Lissa is her ethnicity, that she's quiet, and that she's a vegetarian. Also, some of the dialogue would have been unusually self-aware and emotionally sophisticated coming from twenty-somethings, let alone supposedly socially awkward teenagers.

Overall, however, I liked this a lot. I leave you with these main selling points: 1. Teen lesbians. 2. Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad: The Musical.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (Only $6.80 on Amazon.)

I will write a flashfic, original or fanfic, to a prompt of the choice of the person or people who get the most correct and fewest incorrect guesses. People who actually sent me one or more of these items are disqualified, but should fill out the poll anyway!

[Poll #1389415]

Cheryl Aylward Whitesel, Blue Fingers: a ninja's tale (Clarion Books, 2004)

It’s a common flaw in certain genres for the background to be more interesting than the foreground. Science fiction is notorious for this: the author created a dazzling future world, overflowing with cool gadgets and mind-blowing concepts and vast panoramas of time and space, but neglected to create characters that wouldn’t be upstaged by the setting, or a plot that was more than a device to show off the landscape.

Historical fiction can also fall into this trap. In that case, the author is bedazzled by research rather than by invention, but the result is similar: a fascinating history lesson which functions less effectively as a story.

Cheryl Aylward Whitesel’s middle-grade novel Blue Fingers: a ninja’s tale is great fun when it focuses on ninjas doing sneaky-cool ninja stuff, but less successful when it comes to characterization, plot, pacing, or anything else that isn’t directly related to ninjas.

Koji and Taro are identical twin farm boys in 1545 Japan. At twelve, the emotionally and physically immature Koji has always envied his brother, who seems extraverted, brave, skillful, and is generally everything Koji thinks he isn’t. When Taro saves a dye-maker’s life, the grateful man offers him an apprenticeship— a huge step up in social status.

For reasons which are not explained until later in the book, the twins’ parents make Koji impersonate his brother and take the apprenticeship. In the first of a series of peculiar actions which are never satisfactorily explained, the dye-maker refuses to wait more than about three minutes between making his offer and taking Koji back with him, without even giving the kid a chance to pack his clothes. (None of the other characters seem to think this is odd.)

But he’s too homesick and undisciplined to succeed at his apprenticeship. So the dye-maker sends him back home with a gift for his father— a piece of cloth with a crane design which can only legally be owned by Lord Udo, the local daimyo. Why a sympathetic character would stick someone he barely knows with a gift that would have to be hidden lest it get him killed, when any other piece of cloth would have shown the same respect without the danger, is never explained.

Needless to say, Koji’s possession of the crane cloth sets into motion a sequence of events which end with him drafted into a clan of ninjas. Most of the rest of the book focuses on Koji learning the tricks of the ninja trade, and excellent tricks they are. Whitesel did a fair amount of research, judging from the bibliography at the end of the book, and she did an excellent job of culling all the best bits of ninja lore and putting them in the book.

But a novel cannot be nothing but ninjas throwing shuriken, hiding in the rafters, and making ingenious use of frogs and snakes and exploding eggshells. A novel must also have characters and a plot, and those are so average as to be thoroughly overshadowed by the details about ninja life.

Koji, who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, makes for a frustratingly dim protagonist, and the supporting characters are less than vivid. And like the dye-maker, all the characters are prone to behaving in peculiar and unexplained ways. Does Koji withhold significant knowledge from the ninja chief because he doesn’t trust him yet, or because he doesn’t have the sense to realize that a completely new weapon being discussed at high levels of government might be something the ninjas would want to know about? It’s not explained.

The plot allows for many excellent scenes of derring-do, but suffers from the same opacity that afflicts the characters. The ninja keep calling the daimyo evil and foil one of his evil plans, but they never even consider killing him, even though at one point they sneak into his bedroom and drip sleeping potion into his snoring mouth. I can think of reasons why they’d rather not, but I’d like to have had it raised and dismissed as a possibility rather than never mentioned.

There are also several moments where the language and philosophy of the characters is jarringly twenty-first century, such as when a ninja betrays the clan, but is forgiven with the comment, “He will work on this issue.” That sentence and sentiment belong in a psychiatrist’s office, not a ninja camp. At another point, Koji’s sensei tells him that a ninja must be “morally upright.” I don’t demand that Whitesel portray the ninja as the amoral hitmen that they probably were, but it’s a bit much to have them quote the boy scout manual.

But quibbles aside, if you have a craving for ninjas, you could do much worse than Blue Fingers. And when you’re done with it, if that craving is still there, I recommend the ninja-centered manga series Flame of Recca and Naruto.


Oswald Rivera, The Pharaoh's Feast: from pit-boiled roots to pickled herring, cooking through the ages with 110 simple recipes (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)

A meal can be a sensual joy that becomes a treasured memory, or a horrifying disaster followed by days of vomiting. Similarly, food writing that is good is very very good, but when it’s bad, it’s horrid.

I regret to write that The Pharaoh’s Feast is horrid. It may be that its 110 recipes are delicious. I’m not much of a cook, and none of them sounded appealing enough to try. I hope they are, because anyone who buys this book hoping for an accurate, well-researched, and well-written history of cooking will be woefully disappointed.

Rivera’s prose style is not merely uninspired, but embarassingly bad. It’s so casual as to verge on contemptuous, relies heavily on stale and unfunny humor, and is peppered with blatant grammatical errors, historical errors, typos, and misused words.

You know you’re in trouble when the first paragraph begins like this:

“When did it all begin? To which some would reply, “Who the hell cares?” Well, I, for one, care. And so do a lot of others, I’d like to think.”

This is not the voice of authority. Nor does it suggest wit, erudition, or an instinct for the well-chosen detail—all attributes essential to a history of cooking. Rather, it’s the voice of the windy old bore.

The rest of the book is even worse:

“It was at P.S. 25, in East Harlem, where dear old Miss Robinette first introduced us to the heroes of classical Greece. We were forced to read portions of Homer’s Iliad—a long, turgid poem for adults let alone unctuous sixth-graders. Thank God in those days we had Classic comic books. Remember those? If a kid was assigned a book report on some notable work of fiction, all he had to do was get a Classic comic book, which gave you the gist of the story. I may be wrong, but I don’t think those comic books are around any more.”

From the cloying familiarity of “dear old Miss Robinette” and “Remember those?” to the misuse of the word unctuous (which means oily or insincere, when the context suggests that Rivera thought it meant young or impatient), to the last sentence pointing out that he’s too lazy to check his facts, there is nothing good about that paragraph. And that paragraph is representative of the book.

Rivera includes a bibliography, but does not footnote or include many cites within the text. This makes it impossible to judge the accuracy of his facts. And though I don’t know much about most of his subject matter, in the few places where I had outside knowledge, I noticed two misspellings (“udom” instead of “udon,” a Japanese noodle, and “Jians” instead of “Jains,” followers of an Indian religion) and one major factual inaccuracy. Rivera states that India’s ancient Harappa civilization left “no ringing archaelogical record.” Only if you don’t count an entire buried city.

The recipes are sometimes accompanied by the original one with notes on variations, but are sometimes modern recipes with no explanation of where they came from. Some were even borrowed from the author’s friends.

In Rivera’s own words, “Now comes the denouement (I love them twenty-dollar words).”

This I-can’t-be-bothered approach to a book which purports to be a history of cookery accompanied by historic recipes adapted for the modern kitchen makes it read like it was written by a middle-aged Beavis or Butthead.