A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

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I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.

At a very special coffee shop in Japan, you can time-travel into the past, as long as you sit in a particular chair and don't move from it, and only for as long as it takes for your coffee to go cold. You can't change the past, you can only travel within the cafe (so anyone you want to visit in the past must have also visited the cafe), and a ghost is already in that chair so you have to wait till she gets up to go to the bathroom.

This book sounded very charming, but I got off on a bad foot with it because it took FOREVER to explain the rules before anyone traveled. When I learned that it originated as a stage play, that made more sense - the back-and-forth about the rules was probably very funny with good actors. In book form, it was interminable.

The vignettes are touching, but in a manufactured tearjerking way, like the woman who will die if she gets pregnant so of course she decides to keep her pregnancy so her baby will have a chance at life or the woman whose sister storms out angrily after a fight and immediately gets killed in a car crash. I was expecting Banana Yoshimoto and I got Jodi Picoult.

Maybe later books in the series are better, or at least don't spend so long explaining the rules.

A children's fantasy timeslip novel about a modern girl in New York and a girl in ancient Egypt, who may somehow be the same girl. This was a re-read of one of my favorite childhood novels. I've re-read it a bunch of times, though not recently, and it holds up.

Erin, living in New York City in 1975, has problems. She's bullied at school, has what are clearly panic attacks though she has no idea what they are, and is forever fighting with her glamorous mother, Belle, who is confused and annoyed by her weird daughter. Erin loves her father, Peter, a businessman fascinated by ancient Egypt, but while he's loving to her when he's there, he's often gone and avoids conflict when he's present. She loves cats, but Belle won't let her have one.

Erin's sources of comfort are the straight-talking housekeeper Flora, and her slowly budding friendship with the new boy at school, Seti, who is Egyptian. (Not, as he keeps having to explain, a descendant of the ancient Egyptians.) There's some excellent low-key comedy when the school bullies decide to make a movie set in ancient Egypt, and Seti quietly places bets with himself over exactly how cliched it will be.

This is all very sharply observed, with lightly sketched but real-feeling characters. Because Erin, her father, and Seti are interested in ancient Egypt and it's being discussed at school, there's a lot of discussion about ancient Egypt and its beliefs. It's interesting in its own right, but also works as characterization because the characters are personally invested in it for various reasons.

The bullies alternately mock Egypt and think it's cool because it's a vehicle for their own status, Belle points out (correctly!) that it had slavery and (arguably) that all they cared about was death, because she dislikes her husband having interests other than her. Peter, who wishes he'd been an Egyptologist instead of a strike-breaking businessman, argues that the slaves were relatively well-treated and that the preparations for death were because they loved life and believed that it continued after death. Seti, who has an analytical frame of mind, notices the contradictory beliefs in both a perpetual afterlife and reincarnation, with people working their way up through animal forms and back to human over a 3000-year timespan.

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An old favorite pony book of mine got a reprint!

Gail is a pony-loving girl in the 80s whose family moves to a new town. She misses her friends, but is somewhat consoled by their temporary residence, which they're living in for the summer while their new house is being built. It's outside of town in a forested area, perfect for adventurous rides on her pony Candlelight.

She finds a rusted-shut gate and, after getting it open, rides Candlelight through the woods and to a mansion she hadn't known was there, where she meets a strange girl named Hilary. Hilary is dressed strangely, is unfamiliar with Gail's clothes and slang, and only knows how to ride side-saddle. The girls bond over their mutual love of horses, while Gail slowly comes to realize/accept that the gate leads back in time to the 1880s.

Can I Get There By Candlelight? is a short, haunting, lovely book. The girls' friendship is beautifully evoked but not without edge. Hilary clearly needs Gail more than Gail needs her, because Gail has opportunities in life that Hilary doesn't, so what's a friendship for Gail is more than that for Hilary. (Re-reading it now, it also seems like Hilary might be in love with Gail, while Gail is at a pre-romance stage of life.)

The book has a shimmery, late-afternoon feeling; it's a bubble of time and space that's beautiful and real but inherently temporary. The ending is unexpectedly dark (but no animals die).

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I'm very glad the book is back in print, but I am DYING at its new blurb. It's not only insanely spoilery, states an ambiguous incident as a certainty, and does not make the book sound appealing, but it fails to mention a rather crucial aspect of the premise. If you want to read the book unspoiled, order it without reading the blurb.

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A classic time-travel book from 1975, back in print via Lizzie Skurnick Books. I love the title. It's strangely haunting.

Fourteen-year-old Zan (short for Alexandra) doesn't fit in and worries that she hasn't yet gotten her period. She's fascinated when her history teacher brings up the concept of time as a river, but when she tries to talk to him more about it, he blows her off. She gets mugged and assaulted, and her aunt blows her off. Her brother finds her diary and reads her entries thinking about her body and sex aloud to his friends, humiliating her, and her mother blows her off.

The sheer force of her misery sends her back in time to the Stone Age, where she falls in with a tribe preparing for the Susuru, a month-long ritual celebrating all the girls who have begun menstruating since last year's Susuru. Zan has an extremely rocky adjustment and goes catatonic for a while, but is brought out of it by the tribe's wise woman. She learns the language, makes friends, and becomes an accepted member of the tribe even though, like in her previous life, she was also an outsider.

Zan's life with the cave people makes up the meat of the book, and it's very good. Mazer depicts them and their lives as idyllic in some ways (they spend a lot of time playing and resting, they gather eggs and bugs but don't hunt and there's food all around them, and there's no sexism or war), and the opposite of idyllic in others (no modern medicine, one of the boys was rescued by his mother from being killed because he has a craniofacial malformation, the food is gross as they don't wash anything and the only thing they cook is worms), but above all, as believable individuals in a plausible cultural setting.

As far as I could tell the culture was mostly imagined rather than researched, but it does have a bit of a Clan of the Cave Bear feel minus the rape and food you'd actually want to eat. Zan does develop a taste for raw eggs though.

But all good or even semi-good things must come to an end... ( Read more... )

Excellent anthropological cave people narrative enclosed in an awesomely depressing frame story with an ending that isn't just sad in the usual nature of time travel stories, but piles on extra misery from an unanticipated direction. Well, it was the 70s.

Content notes: Child death, cultural practice of killing babies with birth defects, violence, humiliation, ambiguously sexual assault during a mugging, bad parenting, bad therapy, bad teaching, graphic bug eating.

Saturday, The Twelfth Of October

First link goes to the Kindle edition, second to the original paper book. I like the second cover better.

Veronica McAllister lived a long but largely unfulfilled life. Her marriage was unhappy, and though she loved her two daughters, her awful husband got custody in the divorce and she ended up estranged. She dies at age eighty wondering if that was all there is...

...and wakes up in the 1950s, in her senior year in high school. Veronica has a chance to do everything differently. But if she changes things too much, will her daughters never exist? If she marries a different man, will that make her happy? Would riches? Would a career? Can she fix her relationship with her mother? Will she ever get tired of eating burgers at Artie's diner?

Veronica is a great character to spend time with. She's a very loving person who's conventional in some ways and not in others, not particularly curious about the whys of her time travel but mentally flexible and creative enough to try a number of different ways to get things right, and primarily interested in good relationships and personal fulfillment. She loves the 1950s in a lot of ways (though not the restricted rules for women) and is refreshingly non-neurotic.

Veronica's story actually made me cry at certain points - not because it's sad, because it's very moving. It's all about love and relationships - some romantic, some familial, some friendships.

I didn't get to this book for a while because we meet her briefly in Joe Hart, and she's completely uninterested in helping him out and is about to commit suicide! This turns out to be caused by extremely specific circumstances and isn't what she's like normally. And for anyone who's read others of these books, this one contains zero Universal Life Center.

I've hit a good streak with these books - this one promptly rocketed to one of my top favorites in the series. Shawn Inmon should write more from female POVs. He's very good at it.

Shawn Inmon's Middle Falls Time Travel series is a set of interconnected but basically standalone Peggy Sue Got Married/Groundhog Day type of time travel books: a person dies, then is reset into their younger self. If they die before they've done what they need to do (some kind of self-improvement/self-knowledge) they reset to the same time.

The books I've read so far are all interestingly different despite the same basic premise, the same setting, and all being clearly written by a very earnest middle-aged straight white guy with more kindness than sophistication. The kindness is a big draw. His characters do things like volunteer at animal shelters and go on the road to give talks on safe sex and work on their relationship with their brothers, and this is all just as important as stopping a serial killer or saving John Lennon.

Characters doing clever things with time travel is rather hilariously not Inmon's strong suit. They vary in terms of how good they are at making use of future knowledge, but I have so far read three of these and in terms of them doing things that are entertainingly clever to the reader, there is very little of that. Even when they use their knowledge smartly, they use it in obvious ways: investing in Microsoft, driving a boy home so he won't die in a drunk driving accident, using their future knowledge to convince people that they know the future so they'll believe a warning. At one point, a character reveals that she has been plotting for ages to put away a criminal. When her cunning plan is finally revealed, it's to... report him to the police.

But the series isn't about doing neat things with time travel. It's about the choices people make, and how hard it can be to do better, and that there's many paths to becoming better and leading a better life.

(The frame is a generally terrible but thankfully minimal cliche bureaucratic afterlife. One book has an angel named Semolina.)

I've been reading the series out of order, which was a good idea for me as I finally got around to the first book and found that he improved a lot as a writer as he went along. I don't think I'd have continued if I'd started there.

His first book actually is a more conventional time travel story, and it's the worst one I've read so far. At age fifteen, Thomas Weaver tries to drive his drunk older brother home from a party; since he doesn't really know how to drive, they get in a crash and his brother is killed. (Note how Inmon doesn't go for the more usual "brother drove himself home" - his characters tend to try to help out, even if they do it badly.)

Everything goes wrong from there, until he's a fifty-year-old unemployed alcoholic living with his mother and commits suicide, only to wake up fifteen again...

This book has a lot of problems, including a rushed ending (Inmon later does very long endings that are slow but satisfying), a way-too-graphic serial killer plot, and Weaver making a million inexplicable, unmotivated choices because Inmon doesn't know how to plot yet.

He already knows that one of his classmates grows up to be a serial killer, so he follows him into the woods and finds his lair of animal torture. Thomas's older brother spots him and says that he always thought that guy was creepy, why was Thomas following him? For literally no stated reason, Thomas lies about everything rather than telling his brother. He could have thought that maybe his brother is fated to die and is afraid that getting him involved in a serial killer plot might cause that, but he doesn't. Later, he sees the serial killer kidnap his dog, but covers up the whole thing plus the dog rescue, even lying about it to his mother who definitely would have believed him, again for literally no stated reason. (Actual reason: once the cops get involved, the serial killer is arrested and that plot line ends.)

Spoiler for how he saves his brother. ( Read more... )

Rebecca Wright is much much better, with a satisfying messiness about the odd turns people's lives take and not everything wrapped up neatly. Rebecca is an emotionally isolated, status and money-driven real estate agent in a loveless marriage, with a nanny actually mothering her kid. Her one genuine and loving emotional relationship is with her younger brother Duncan, and even that doesn't really blossom into intimacy until she finds out that he's gay when he gets AIDS and comes home to die.

She dies of old age, loveless and in poverty. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

Rebecca proceeds to fix up her life, focusing on making tons of money in real estate. Inmon used to be a real estate agent, and you can tell: everything about her job is very plausible and fun. But she still lets the nanny mother her kid, and her attempt to save Duncan fails because he doesn't believe in her warning. She dies again, rich but unhappy. And opens her eyes with her husband screaming that he's leaving her...

This book took a number of turns I didn't expect. While her child is important, the really crucial relationship turns out to be with her brother. A lot of the book is the Rebecca-and-Duncan story, a lot of it a road trip including a lengthy and successful commercial for the Florida Keys, and when it finally does get back the "letting the nanny raise your kid" issue, it goes in an unexpected and delightful direction.

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If you're curious about these books, The Changing Life of Joe Hart or The Empathetic Life of Rebecca Wright are good places to start.

A paleontologist sits in his office, studying ancient dinosaur tracks and extrapolating the scene in the ancient past that created them. And then a man walks in with a job offer and a cooler containing the head of a freshly-dead stegosaurus.

Bones of the Earth is a celebration of dinosaurs and the pursuit of knowledge, wrapped around a lot of twisty time travel and the adventures of time-traveling paleontologists, some of whom get trapped in time and keep getting distracted from their observations by the subjects of their study trying to eat them.

I’ve re-read this book and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter every couple years since they came out, though I’ve never fallen in love with any of Swanwick’s other novels. (I haven’t yet read The Iron Dragon’s Mother.)

But what I really want to talk about is the ending, which I recall was extremely polarizing. In fact I recall that most people hated it. I loved it. For me the ending took the book from being an exceptionally good sf adventure to being something that would stay with me ever since I read it.

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Bones of the Earth

This is a sequel to The Summer Birds, in which a group of children learn to fly, among them the sisters Charlotte and Emma Makepeace.

It’s now winter, and none of them can fly anymore. Charlotte is away at boarding school, and Emma is rattling around Aviary Hall, lonely and unhappy. Meanwhile, fat and clumsy Bobby Fumpkins, who once flew but was always the straggler vainly trying to be a welcomed member of the group, is also lonely, eating to soothe his unhappiness without recognizing that’s what he’s doing. Emma, like the other kids, is casually mean to him, lashing out at others (not just him) to soothe her unhappiness without recognizing that that’s what she’s doing.

Bobby and Emma begin to share a strange dream, in which they fly every night over a mysterious and shifting landscape. Their shared efforts to understand what’s happening and why lead a prickly but very real friendship, which in turn leads to emotional growth and the beginnings of maturity.

I was waiting with some dread for Bobby to learn not to eat to soothe himself and so slim down as a symbol of his maturing. Neither happens, though he does develop a better relationship with food in other ways – rather than just eating compulsively and alone, he discovers that food can also be used to emotionally bond with others. This comes to a lovely understated climax when he’s unhappy, automatically grabs some peppermints, and gives one to Emma before popping the other in his mouth.

The beginning of the book is rough going due to the realistic depiction of being twelve and miserable and doing things that only make it worse for yourself and others. Once Emma and Bobby make friends, it’s much more enjoyable reading, though its pleasures are the homey ones of friends and self-discovery rather than the transcendence of flight. Their dream-flights are strange and a bit abstract; they're atmospheric but the payoff didn’t 100% work for me as the emotional weight felt like it should be on something else.

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Not as transcendent as The Summer Birds but still interesting and worthwhile.

Emma in Winter

In 1960, thirteen-year-old bookworm Sophie isn't happy about being sent off to stay with elderly relatives on their decrepit old house, which was once a plantation. When she meets a spirit, she makes a wish to time-travel back to the glamorous old days of Southern belles. She gets her wish. But Sophie, who isn't quite as white as she had thought, is assumed to be a runaway slave and put to work.

This sounds like a book in which a white person experiences how black people are oppressed, and learns that racism is bad. To my amusement, about a fourth of the way in, Sophie earnestly assures the spirit that she has learned that racism is bad, and he can send her back now. Not so fast. Sophie is nowhere near done, and the book is much more complicated than that.

The plot is similar to Octavia Butler's Kindred: unsurprisingly, given the basic similarity of all "modern person travels to the past; it sucks" plots. The pleasure and value of these books is not in originality, but in immersion in another time and its culture and values, in its differences and similarities to our own. The time and place are beautifully portrayed, and its horrors are portrayed at an age-appropriate level without being downplayed. For instance, it's made clear that slaves are raped by white men and the resulting children are kept as slaves or sold, and there is a scene of attempted rape. But there's no graphic details.

Surprisingly, Sophie never quite digs into the question of her own racial identity, beyond registering how others perceive her and learning that she does have black ancestry. But it was such a relevant question that I wanted to see her wrestle with it, both on the plantation and when she returns to her own time.

The Freedom Maze has gotten great advance press, including blurbs from Jane Yolen, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Nisi Shawl. It has a slightly old-fashioned style, leisurely and descriptive, like a less ornate Rosemary Sutcliff. Most of the book is about Sophie's daily life and the relationships she makes and observes on the plantation. There's a bit of conventional action at the climax, but it's primarily coming of age story and a well-evoked portrait of a time and place. A thoughtful, well-characterized, immersive novel.

The Freedom Maze