Publication Announcement: Monologue: “The Cheesy Poofs that Broke the Camel’s Back”
I am thrilled to say that a monologue I wrote – “The Cheesy Poofs that Broke the Camel’s Back” – was produced by De Frente Productions as part of their Monologue Marathon on May 23rd with a lovely performance by Hannah Elizabeth Williams.
View the monologue here for free.
Be sure to check out my Publications Page for my other work.
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Book Review: The Stolen Sisters by Louise Jensen
Summary:
Leah’s perfect marriage isn’t what it seems but the biggest lie of all is that she’s learned to live with what happened all those years ago. Marie drinks a bit too much to help her forget. And Carly has never forgiven herself for not keeping them safe.
Twenty years ago The Sinclair Sisters were taken. But what came after their return was far worse. Can a family ever recover, especially when not everyone is telling the truth…?
Review:
I really enjoyed this twist on the abducted children thriller trope. Instead of being told linearly from the moment of abduction forward, we meet the children as adults. We know they survived, but we also see what emotional and mental health impact being abducted had on them. Chapters alternate among characters and also among timelines . We see both the past and the present, and how they converge together at the 20th anniversary of their abduction.
In a way it may seem this twist removes all suspense – we know the sisters survived the abduction and were returned. But in fact it was still quite a suspenseful read. There’s still a lot of mystery. For example, we at first don’t know who did the abduction or why. We don’t know exactly what happened to the sisters when they were abducted and why that might have led to their current behaviors. And we also don’t know if Leah especially is correct to be anxious about something nefarious happening on the 20th anniversary or if it’s her PTSD and OCD tricking her.
I like how this book goes about exploring that what makes something traumatic isn’t necessarily the exact degree of physical trauma experienced but rather each individual’s own perception of the situation. Trauma is very personal, and what traumatizes some and not others is also personal. We see this very clearly in the sisters who had varying degrees of physical harm during the abduction, and yet their long-term trauma responses differed but not in direct proportion to the traumas they experienced. This is a very trauma-informed read.
The book also explores family and sisters. What makes us call someone a sister, and what makes us call someone family? Who gets to truly be our family and who doesn’t. What impact do those relationships have on us.
In general Leah’s OCD is well represented, although her magical number is a little low at 3. I understand why Leah’s number is 3 but a higher number is more common and obviously a higher magical number is more invasive in day to day life. Leah, for example, feels a compulsion to clean the floor 3 times. Cleaning the floor 10 times for a magical number of 10 is obviously more invasive in daily life. I also personally feel that she puts too much blame on herself for her OCD, and those around her let her. I’m fine with this happening but I’d like for it to be corrected by the end of the book. Instead she continues to blame herself for causing those around her to suffer from her OCD rather than understanding it’s not her fault.
Marie’s addiction is not explored as thoroughly as I would have liked but that’s my own personal preference. What is there is well-done. Carly’s feelings as the oldest who took on a lot of responsibility even at the age of 13 I found well-done.
Overall this is a creative exploration of the abducted children thriller trope that turns it on its head, following them as adults with flashbacks to childhood that still maintains suspense throughout. Recommended to those seeking a thriller more focused on the psychological than physical risks.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 400 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Summary:
A Heian-era mansion stands abandoned, its foundations resting on the bones of a bride and its walls packed with the remains of the girls sacrificed to keep her company.
It’s the perfect wedding venue for a group of thrill-seeking friends.
But a night of food, drinks, and games quickly spirals into a nightmare. For lurking in the shadows is the ghost bride with a black smile and a hungry heart.
And she gets lonely down there in the dirt.
Review:
I thought this cover was deliciously creepy in a way that reminded me of The Ring, and I was ready for a quick spine-tingling thriller set in Japan. Unfortunately, for me, the cover was the only part of the book that elicited any real response from me.
Let’s start with the good. Representation is strong in this book. It’s a group of four racially diverse friends. The main character is bisexual, says the word, and isn’t demonized in the book. Since it’s common for thrillers and horror to demonize queer characters, this was nice. The writing is poetic, which is a bit unusual in horror. The idea of a bride being so into haunted houses that she wants to be married in a house where the haunting is a bride was also fun. So why didn’t it work for me?
For horror to work for me, I need to know enough about the characters to kind of care about what happens to them. This jumps so quickly into the haunted house moment with the friends that I just….never really cared about any of them. To be honest, I still kind of easily get them mixed up in my head. By the time we know any of their motivations, a lot of the thrills and gore have already happened but it’s too late for me to care about them. It wasn’t even that they were a collection of common horror tropes so I knew what was going on and could sort of care. (I’m thinking about the tropes used in Scream or The Cabin in the Woods). It seems to me that part of the goal was to subvert tropes but in order for that to work, I need to really know the characters for the tropes to be subverted and for me to still care about the characters. Tropes work because they fill in the blanks for us. The cheerleader may be ditzy but she really cares about her friends, so we know she’s really actually upset when she can’t find one of them. But if the trope has been subverted just enough that we know that the cheerleader doesn’t’ care about her friends but we also don’t know what she actually cares about then all understanding of what meaning and impact the plot has on her is lost.
Others who don’t need strong character development to get into the thrills of a horror will likely enjoy this story more than I did, particularly if the basic plot summary given above appeals to you.
2 out of 5 stars
Length: 128 pages – novella/short nonfiction
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Bear by Marian Engel
Summary:
A librarian named Lou is called to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of a secretive Colonel whose most surprising secret is a bear who keeps her company–shocking company.
Review:
I don’t recall anymore how I heard about this book, but this is what I heard about it:
There’s this book that’s considered a Canadian classic where a librarian has sex with a bear.
Ok. I was left with questions. First, this sounds like erotica – how is it a classic? Second, as a trained librarian I immediately wondered if the librarian part was essential to the story. Third, does she really have sex with a bear? Then I became even more intrigued when I discovered I couldn’t get this book digitally but only in print AND it’s out of print in the US so it’s far cheaper to purchase it abroad and have it sent here. So, now that I got this book from the UK and read it (in one weekend), let me answer these questions for you.
First, I wouldn’t call this erotica. The point, in spite of the murmurings about it, is absolutely not about sex with a bear, whereas in erotica, the point is the sex. I in all honesty would say this is a book about burnout. Lou is an archivist who is in a rut. When the nameless Institute she works for sends her to this estate that has been left to them to inventory their materials, her time in nature and her experiences with the locals (yes, including Bear), reveals her massive burnout to her.
She wondered by what right she was there, and why she did what she did for a living. And who she was.
(pg 93)
Second, I would definitely say the librarian part is essential to the story. Librarianship is a feminized profession. This book was first published in 1976. It is an exploration of what it means to be a working woman and how the world views working women, even when our work is performed outside of the public’s eye (perhaps especially when our work is performed outside of the public’s eye). I also thought this book does an excellent job of showing how even though librarianship is a feminized profession, those in the positions of greatest power within libraries and archives are men. Lou’s boss is a man, and this is relevant to her negative work experience.
Third, does she actually have sex with a bear? Ok, slight spoiler warning here. There is no penetration. She tricks the bear to go down on her. That’s it. I didn’t find it particularly shocking, but I’m a millennial from the internet generation that grew up with the internet urban legend about the woman with the dog and the peanut butter so. I viewed the transgressive act with Bear as serving two purposes. First, Lou has a tendency toward self-sabotage, self-loathing, and self-punishment. I think transgressing in this way makes her see how she’s transgressing against herself and her own soul in other ways and makes her refind her own sense of self. Second, I think it’s important to note that at the beginning of the book an Indigenous woman named Lucy kind of hands off the caretaking of Bear to Lou. At the end of the book, she hands the caretaking back to Lucy. I view this as an acknowledgement that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It doesn’t mean it’s your life calling. There are other interesting takes on this as a commentary on colonialism, which I also think are valid.
So do I see why this is a Canadian classic? Yes, absolutely. The whole story oozes Canada from the juxtaposition of the wilderness with the city to the entwining of European and local history to the acknowledgment of the realness and relevance of local Indigenous peoples. (These peoples are not of the past but are of the present, something I think Canadian literature often does a better job with than US literature).
I thought I was going to read this book and laugh at it, kind of like how folks on book-tok are laughing about the ice planet barbarians right now. Instead, I found a unique story about a woman’s time in the semi-wilderness and how it makes her confront her burnout and how her career is a poor fit for her. How her life setup is causing her to transgress and how that needs to change. A shocking way to get the point across? Perhaps. But an important point nonetheless.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 167 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Purchased
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
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Book Review: Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
Summary:
When a reaper comes to collect Wallace Price from his own funeral, Wallace suspects he really might be dead. Instead of leading him directly to the afterlife, the reaper takes him to a small village. On the outskirts, off the path through the woods, tucked between mountains, is a particular tea shop, run by a man named Hugo. Hugo is the tea shop’s owner to locals and the ferryman to souls who need to cross over.
But Wallace isn’t ready to abandon the life he barely lived. With Hugo’s help he finally starts to learn about all the things he missed in life.
Review:
I preordered this because of how much I loved another Klune book that I read earlier this year – The House in the Cerulean Sea (review). I just did not want to have to wait through the line at the library for a copy of this one. So maybe my expectations were a bit high for this after that. Maybe I would have liked this better if I hadn’t loved that one so much. But I do feel decidedly ho-hum about it.
Here’s what I did enjoy about it. The main character is a bisexual man. We don’t see that often in literature. And the representation of male bisexuality is well done. The setting and feel of the book is just plain cozy. I loved the tea shop, and how it’s described. I would want to go there for tea for sure. It was soothing to visit, in spite of being populated by ghosts and having a general ambiance of being in touch with the dead. The cover really beautifully represents the tea shop. It was a setting I wanted to soak into.
So what turned me off? I feel a bit awkward talking about this as the author states in the afterword that writing this book was part of his own grief process after losing someone. But I am also a person who has gone through grief for someone close to me, and I just have to say that this vision of the afterlife just didn’t work for me. I found it quite sad, actually. I got the vibe I was supposed to feel at least a little hopeful from it but I didn’t. I don’t like that there’s jobs and management. I didn’t like that the supernatural creature in management asserts there’s no god. (Kind of confusing for a setting that’s entirely about a mystical afterlife?)
My other issue with the book was with the main character Wallace’s character development. He was a jerk in his life and learns to do better in his afterlife. I didn’t find the transformation realistic or believable. It’s like one minute he’s the guy heartlessly firing someone in the first chapter and the next he’s this selfless ghost. What happened that made him change? It just didn’t track for me. And that made it quite difficult for me to care about his storyline. I read about it because I wanted to hang out in the tea shop but not because I cared about Wallace.
So if you’re ok with the depiction of an afterlife that’s managed like a department store and an extremely rapid turnaround of character, you’ll probably really like this book. The cozy setting, and the bisexual male representation are big pluses also.
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 373 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Purchased
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton
Summary:
Katherine Mortenhoe’s world looks very similar to our own, except that in this near future medical science has found the cure for death—or eliminated nearly every cause for it other than old age. So when Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal brain disease caused by an inability to process an ever-increasing volume of sensory input, she immediately becomes a celebrity to the “pain-starved public.” But Katherine will not agree to be the star of the reality TV show Human Destiny, her last days will not be recorded by any cameras. She doesn’t realize that from the moment of her diagnosis, she’s been watched, not only by television producers but by a new kind of reporter, one with no visible camera, who is always recording behind his never-blinking eye.
Review:
This book was first published in 1973 under the title The Unsleeping Eye. It was then published in the UK in 1974 under this title. It was made as a film in 1980 under the title Death Watch with the books published after that under that title. Then in 2016 it was republished as The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe along with a new introduction by Jeff Vandermeer. All of which is to say, although you may see it listed as published in 2016, this is actually a 1970s vision of the future. This makes its take on reality tv all the more impressive to me.
The story is told in two perspectives from Katherine’s and from the reporter’s. They both live in the near future UK. Katherine is in her 40s on her second husband, childfree (there is no discussion of fertility issues or a desire for children), and works for Computabook’s romance department. Computabook appears to be essentially an AI largely writing Harlequin style romance novels. The consensus seems to be that she could write a great novel and is wasting her time at Computabook. She goes to the doctor quite a bit, which is presented as odd for a time when most illnesses are cured. The gentle opinion seems to be that she has a mental problem skewing toward perhaps hypochondria. But then she gets a terminal diagnosis. The reality tv show Human Destiny is so sure that they will get her to sign on to live out her last days filmed that they secretly film her receiving the diagnosis news, figuring they will get her permission via contract later.
The reporter has just consented to have tv cameras implanted in his eyes, allowing them to film without the presence of any cameras, only him. He cannot be in full darkness for a period of time after the surgery and takes pills to stay awake. He has an ex-wife and son. The ex-wife very much dislikes his work for the producer who does Human Destiny. She does not like this producer.
There are a lot of ex-spouses in this society because they do 5 year handfastings, essentially, and at that point they decide whether or not to recommit for another 5 years. It’s supposed to not be a big deal if folks don’t recommit, but it’s clear from both the reporter’s relationships and Katherine’s that it actually is to the folks involved. While not a focus of the book, I found this interesting.
The book then ultimately explores the ethics of why Katherine might or might not sign on for the show, whether or not the reality tv show is in and of itself ethical, and what the limits of cameras in a person’s eyes are to truly telling the truth. I would also say it explores the impact of your job on your life and your sense of fulfillment. Another theme is how different people’s lives look depending on how much they have “bought in” to the way of life depicted to them as the main choice by the government. There’s also a question of what’s a good death and who gets to choose what that means.
I most enjoyed the exploration of the alternative societies outside of the mainstream. I also found the depiction of near future reality tv very well-imagined. I am happy to report that there is no rape or sexual violence in this 1970s scifi book. There is an instance where it seems a possibility, but it does not ultimately happen. There is medical trauma and some minor violence seen in robberies.
This book ultimately left me pondering if it was trying to say something larger about the male gaze or if that was coincidental. Regardless, it left me thinking about women and our lives and how others view them. A valuable issue to ponder. Plus it was fun to explore this imagined future society.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 264 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Purchased
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
Summary:
At the very end of Needless Street lies a house. In this house lives Ted with his cat Olivia. They sometimes have his daughter Lauren with them. Ted’s cat Olivia believes the LORD sent her to take care of him.
This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street.
All these things are true. And yet they are all lies.
Review:
Every review I saw of this book before I requested it on NetGalley promised an amazing twist that cannot be revealed or it will spoil the book. What I can say after reading this is….there’s definitely a great twist that cannot be revealed or it will spoil the book. I thought I had the twist figured out and was all ready to be disappointed at it being not that great. Turns out I had not figured it out, and it is that great.
So what can I really say in this review without spoiling things? This book is not what it at first seems to be (or even second or third) so if you feel yourself thinking you know exactly what type of book this is going to be and you think you won’t like it, keep reading, because it’s not that type of book.
Olivia the cat is by far my favorite character. A cat who believes she has a calling from the LORD to take care of her owner. Who reads the Bible by knocking it off a table sometimes and then lets those verses guide her actions. Who calls dogs brouhahas. There aren’t enough words for how much I love Olivia the cat.
This book explores trauma and survival. There are therefore some elements that may be disturbing to some readers, but there is never gratuitous violence or sexual violence. There is some cruelty to birds in the first chapter. This is not a repeated plot device of the book, and a character spends a sizable chunk of the book investigating who did such a thing.
If you are intrigued by the last house on Needless Street and its occupants, pick this one up. And keep reading even if you think you know what type of story it’s going to be telling. It will certainly surprise you.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 335 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: NetGalley
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, PhD
Summary:
Explores the psychological underpinnings of the “laziness lie,” including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough. Filled with practical and accessible advice for overcoming society’s pressure to do more, and featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work.
Review:
I was raised with a strict, Protestant work ethic. I mean, I grew up in New England. The epicenter of Puritanism. “Lazy” was one of the worst insults to hurl at someone else or to internally scream at myself to keep myself pulling all-nighters etc… So why did I pick up a book with such a title? I follow Devon on Instagram, and I found myself helped and relating so much to what they said about dealing with burnout in academic labor that I decided to see past the title and try out the book.
Devon starts the book by sharing their own burnout/overwork story. The thing that makes this so compelling is we know that Devon still accomplished things – just look at this book! – in spit of embracing what some might call “laziness.” So how did Devon go from burnt out and overworked to fighting back and successful? Devon intertwines their story with psycho-social explorations and stories from others encountering burnout and overwork.
A few things really stuck out to me when reading this book. The first is that there’s no science behind the length of the average workday or workweek as it stands in the US (8 hours a day, 40 hours a week). What science there is indicates it’s “still probably too long and demanding for most people” (loc 15%). A statistic to back this up that really blew my mind:
Researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours per day, on average.
loc 24%
The point being that if you’re finding it hard to concentrate or get things done it’s not that you’re lazy, it’s that you’re being asked to think and work for longer periods of time than people are actually capable of naturally. Devon then goes into how more breaks and less time working actually leads to better quality of labor and greater satisfaction in workers. They also talk about the dangers of work performed by overtired people, and these aren’t just the obvious like falling asleep at the wheel. People also, for example, get more negative and judgmental when overtired.
Devon then goes into the perils of information overload. How access to so much information so easily can and does overwhelm us. How this has changed dramatically in the last decades.
The volume of unique information the average person encounters in a day is approximately five times what the average person encountered in 1986.
loc 39%
They also speak about how it’s not always possible to just “disconnect,” giving the example of how we might need to check the news to see if there’s currently a lockdown in place.
This all leads nicely into a part of the book that talks about the importance of downtime – not just from physical labor but from brain work and accessing information. This essentially boils down to a need for quiet contemplation that is often demonized as laziness. But this is essential for us to be able to engage with our world in a meaningful way.
In the interest of not going into information overload here, I will say the final thing that stuck out to me in this book. Devon calls on us to be kinder to both ourselves and others. To not jump to the accusation of lazy but rather to ask are we in service to the system asking too much of ourselves? Of others? How can we be kinder and ask less? Keeping in mind that with less the quality often improves as well. So instead of, for example, berating yourself for feeling tired mid-afternoon and struggling to finish your to do list, look at what you have done. How many hours have you worked? Is your to do list reasonable? Can you reduce it at all? Do you still have time for downtime? Maybe your body just needs rest. Maybe your mind does too. We’re all only human, and we’re asking an inhuman amount from people.
Recommended if you’re interested in a deeper dive into these concepts with more real world examples.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 256 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (Series, #1)
Summary:
Dex is a tea monk on a planet that lives an eco-friendly lifestyle on a minimal share of the planet with a large portion left wild. The robots found sentience years ago and left for the wild themselves. When Dex diverges suddenly from their usual traveling path, a robot makes contact for the first time in generations.
Review:
This book just oozes coziness and relaxation. Things happen but reading it feels sort of like visiting a 1990s era fantasy/scifi tv show where nothing truly dangerous happens and everything gets wrapped up nicely within 60 minutes. If that tv show was progressive enough to have a non-binary main character that is.
Sibling Dex’s planet is a lot like Earth but definitely is not Earth. The most notable clear indicator that this is not Earth is the universal religion, which Dex is a monk in service of. That said, this religion seems like kind of a mash-up of Buddhism and Hinduism to me. It’s got a lot of Buddhist traditions but tied to a set of 6 gods/goddesses. Dex is in particular service to Allalae, who is tied to bears somehow. I enjoyed the tie to bears. It means there are cute carvings and things of bears everywhere.
The book follows Dex’s journey from an urban monk to a traveling tea monk who roams around the countryside on a bicycle/tiny house extravaganza. Tea monks basically show up, listen to people’s feelings, and then make the perfect cup of tea for whatever their current needs are. They eventually feel what struck me as a bit of a quarter-life (or mid-life?) crisis and veers off-course to visit an old monastery. It’s at this point that Mosscap the wild-build robot reaches out to make contact.
When the robots gained sentience, it was agreed that humans would not contact robots but robots could contact humans. Mosscap is on a mission to see how humans are doing, and of course Dex and Mosscap pair up and help each other on their quests. This is when the fun conversations take place between Dex, who is clearly a bit overly tied to his emotions, and Mosscap, an externally observant logical being. I enjoyed these conversations, even though I found them to be rather expected.
Here’s the thing. I would have loved this book if it had gone on longer. I felt like we were just really starting to get into the meat of things when the book ended. I get it this is the start to a series. But it’s quite short (almost novella length), and I was enjoying the world. I also, from a story structure perspective, feel that essentially things just got set up. I supposed one could chose to write a trilogy that splits the basic story structure out across three books but that will inevitably feel to some people like a bit of a let-down because we expect a complete story. I wish someone had said, “Hey! Just finish telling Dex and Mosscap’s story! No need to stop yet.” I’d probably be less annoyed by this if the next book was out already.
I didn’t find anything in this to be incredibly deep, although I suspect I may have if I had read it before I had studied a lot of philosophical and religious literature. I did however find it to be cozy and relaxing, and I loved the juxtaposition of a cottage core tiny house monk with a 1950s style robot with sentience. Yes. I was also pleased to see Dex as non-binary, and how smoothly their culture just clearly had it set up to say Sibling Dex instead of Brother or Sister. The representation worked and never felt forced.
Recommended to anyone looking for a short, cozy, scifi read and/or to those looking for non-binary representation in scifi.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 160 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
Book Review: The Rest of the Robots by Isaac Asimov
Summary:
A collection of 8 of Isaac Asimov’s classic robot short stories, divided into three sections: The Coming of the Robots, The Laws of Robotics, and Susan Calvin.
Review:
I often struggle to read short stories. For me, they often are just a bit too short for me to get fully invested into the world they’re set in, so they oddly drag in spite of being short. But this collection really worked for me, and I think that’s because the world was already fully established in my mind. It was just then a matter of what would happen with this particular iteration of a robot and the humans around it.
The world that pre-existed in my mind already was Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (this explains them, if you’re not already familiar with them). Well, that combined with a world that had managed to make robots and engages in space exploration.
The book starts with an early generation robot who goes missing in a rural area and ends up at the behest of a rural man. This one made me laugh out loud, and not in a way that I think takes advantage of anyone. The second short story in this section looks at what happens when robots are sent in advance to a hostile alien planet. What I enjoyed about both of these is how the robots are so pure and so honest and how that throws everyone around them.
I thought the second section was the least engaging, but keep in mind I loved the collection so that’s barely a criticism. There’s a short story that’s very Cold War inspired about spies and robots. Then there’s also one that’s a human telling a tall tale about a robot breaking one of the laws. It’s left up to the reader to decide if it’s true.
The third section all feature the robopsychologist Susan Calvin. To me, it’s clear Susan is somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and I loved her. It did bother me a bit how everyone else in the stories describes Susan as cold and seems to question her femininity because they perceive her as lacking warmth and mothering qualities. But I also think this is a bit of a commentary – is Susan really like this or do others just perceive of her that way? I also really like how well she relates to the robots. She’s not a main character in each of the stories, but she does play a pivotal role in all of them. My favorite was “Galley Slave,” which is about a robot being brought into academia to do some ho-hum labor. Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, and the realness of the problems with academia are clear in the hilarious scifi and robot flavored commentary on that institution.
Overall, I really enjoyed these short stories. They’re a great example of how strong clear, rapid worldbuilding combined with characters formed quickly in broad strokes can make short stories work very well.
5 out of 5 stars
Length: 224 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Gift
Buy It (Amazon, not available on Bookshop.org)
Book Review: You’re As Good As Dead by E.A. Aymar (Series, #2)
Summary:
Three years have passed since Tom Starks, a Baltimore community college professor and single father, tried to avenge his wife’s death by hiring a hit man. Tom is now hopeful that he has left the world of violence and murder behind. But he is drawn back into Baltimore’s criminal underground after he witnesses the assassination of an influential crime boss. To make matters worse, it appears the FBI has discovered Tom’s involvement, and they force him to work with them as an informer. Now Tom must navigate a deadly path between warring crime families and ruthless federal agents, even as he desperately tries to keep his involvement a secret from those closest to him.
Review:
Tom Starks is definitely an example of what happens when you make one grave error in a moment of passion. This man just can’t seem to learn from his mistakes. The book opens with him dropping off money to the crime boss to keep quiet, and he witnesses the crime boss being taken out. The FBI then approaches him to infiltrate the battle between two different crime families. It’s help them or go to prison. Tom chooses helping of course.
The most interesting part of the story to me was when one crime family sends twin Black woman assassins to live with Tom. It’s a bit unclear even to Tom if they’re there to keep him quiet or keep him safe. I liked the characterization of the sisters. Yes, they’re involved in crime, but we find out the crime family’s boss essentially found them as teenagers and saved them from the streets. So they feel obligated to the crime family. They can be violent but also kind. I was particularly fond of how the sisters interact with the family’s pet bunny.
Tom clearly thinks of himself as the good guy but to the reader he’s really not one. He did, after all, hire a hit man. It seems easy to push his boundaries and to get him to do ever increasingly ethically wrong things. He also, in his spare time, sleeps with his dead wife’s sister – who is still married. He tries to protect his adopted daughter by pushing her away out of the house and never telling her anything about what’s really going on or doing a particularly great job of listening to her. This book is a story of a man’s continual descent.
It’s been a long time since I accepted this review copy, and I feel my reading tastes changed in the meantime. I used to be more interested in violent books than I am now. Now I need the violence to be making a statement about something, and I don’t think this one is making a statement. Plus, there is definitely a lot of violence – beatings, murders, and tortures. (No sexual assault though).
This is a book about violence and an ethically questionable man falling further and further into a descent of the loss of light. There is no hope at the end of the book. There seems to be no way out. Does this count as a cautionary tale about the ever-reaching effects of choosing retaliation over transformative justice? I think maybe. For someone like myself who already believes in choosing transformative justice over retaliation, it wasn’t illuminating, though, simply a tale with an expected sad trajectory.
3 out of 5 stars
Length: 290 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Kindle copy from author in exchange for my honest review
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Previous Book in Series:
I‘ll Sleep When You’re Dead, review
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This work by Amanda McNeil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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