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Book Review: A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
An eerily prescient book that came out in September of 2019 that looks at a future where stay at home orders in response to both bombing attacks and a deadly virus mean performing music live for a crowd is illegal.
Summary:
In the Before, when the government didn’t prohibit large public gatherings, Luce Cannon was on top of the world. One of her songs had just taken off and she was on her way to becoming a star. Now, in the After, terror attacks and deadly viruses have led the government to ban concerts, and Luce’s connection to the world—her music, her purpose—is closed off forever. She does what she has to do: she performs in illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.
Rosemary Laws barely remembers the Before times. She spends her days in Hoodspace, helping customers order all of their goods online for drone delivery—no physical contact with humans needed. By lucky chance, she finds a new job and a new calling: discover amazing musicians and bring their concerts to everyone via virtual reality. The only catch is that she’ll have to do something she’s never done before and go out in public. Find the illegal concerts and bring musicians into the limelight they deserve. But when she sees how the world could actually be, that won’t be enough.
Review:
I wouldn’t have been too surprised if this vision of a dystopian future was written during the height of the pandemic then came out recently. What intrigued me about this book was that it was published in September of 2019. It both predicted stay at home orders and density rules and imagines what would have happened if they’d never been lifted. In an interview in Marie Claire, Pinsker graciously states that this is simply a risk of writing about the near future. Indeed, she’s correct. Near future scifi is about paying attention to the current and predicting where we might end up soon – whether dystopic, hopepunk, or somewhere in-between. Pinsker certainly had her finger on the pulse of both risks and what responses to those risks might be given our technology.
She was a note that hadn’t ever known it fit into a chord.
page 213
While the book is certainly about the risk/reward balance and how to live in a satisfying way, it also is drenched in music and musical references. It was obvious to me that Pinsker is a musician, and I wasn’t surprised at all to look it up later and see she’s an indie rocker. If you’re a musician who wants to see music accurately represented in fiction, just stop reading this review now and go pick up this book. It’s the best integration of music from a musician’s perspective I’ve ever seen in a fiction book.
Another element of this book that is a wise storytelling choice is the dual perspective from Luce and Rosemary. Luce remembers the Before very well. The bombings and pandemic ripped away her success just as she was taking off. Rosemary barely remembers the Before, because she’s about 15 years younger than Luce. She remembers a baseball game at a stadium. But mostly she remembers being in the hospital with the Pox. Luce is able to remember all that was good and not actually that dangerous about Before. But Rosemary is able to see the parts of Now that are good – and there are parts that are. For example, the ability of rural people and people who can’t travel to go see Graceland (and other cultural places) in Hoodspace. There’s one scene in particular where Rosemary argues with Luce about how Hoodspace isn’t all bad that reminded me of some people speaking excitedly about being able to go back to conferences just the way they were before, while people with disabilities tried to get them to listen to the fact that joining things remotely meant they weren’t being left out any longer and how much they didn’t want to lose that. Without spoilers, an important part of the plot is Luce and Rosemary having to figure out together how to take the best from both and make a better future.
An important theme of the book is the balance of staying safe with still being able to live a fulfilling life. Who gets to decide what’s too risky? What actually is too risky? And isn’t that something that’s fluid? Are things that were once risky always risky? And aren’t things that were once safe sometimes too risky for a time? This is definitely a book that comes down on the side of part of life is taking some risks.
Now she understood how much she’d missed; how much had been taken from her in the name of safety and control.
page 268
While this isn’t a book about being queer, it is a book by a queer author full of queer characters. Luce and Rosemary both are attracted to women. Their relationships are mentioned when relevant to the plot but there’s no big coming out arc for either. Also, you can tell this was written by a queer person because Luce and Rosemary are not automatically attracted to each other just because they both happen to be women who are into women. Love to see that. A flaw I often see in books with queer characters by straight author is this idea that all women who are into women are automatically attracted to each other. That’s….not how it works. So I found the representation to be quite authentic. It’s just people living their lives who happen to be queer.
I also want to mention that Luce is Jewish, originally from an Orthodox community that she became ostracized from due to her sexuality. The author is herself Jewish, and I trust people to represent their own faiths and cultures well. I will say, much like the queer representation, there was one scene where Luce thinks about Rosh Hashanah’s in the past after seeing some people throwing paper into the river, and I found it very moving.
Overall, this is a scifi book about a dystopian future written by a queer, Jewish musician. It thus brings authentic representation to all three of these and tells a universal story about balancing safety with risk and using technology to accentuate our lives.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 384 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
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Book Review: Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
A sapphic (wlw) cozy fantasy where a woman commits treason by running away from her lifelong job as the Queen’s private guard to start a remote tea shop with her girlfriend.
Summary:
After an assassin takes Reyna hostage, she decides she’s thoroughly done risking her life for a self-centered queen. Her girlfriend Kianthe, the most important mage in all of the land, seizes the chance to flee responsibility. Together, they settle in Tawney, a town nestled in the icy tundra of dragon country, and open the shop of their dreams.
What follows is a cozy tale of mishaps, mysteries, and a murderous queen throwing the realm’s biggest temper tantrum. In a story brimming with hurt/comfort and quiet fireside conversations, these two women will discover just what they mean to each other… and the world.
Review:
This might be the first time I’ve ever impulse read a book on my kindle’s “recommended for you” list. I was precisely in the mood for something lighthearted and escapist, and none of my library books or currently owned ebooks fit that bill. When I saw this title, I laughed. Then I read the description and, delighted to see it was a cozy fantasy, decided to give it a whirl. (What exactly is cozy fantasy? It’s a newly defined genre, but I like the devoted Reddit subgroup’s definition. The Kenosha Public Library is a little more specific in their definition.)
I mostly expected a plot about opening a tea shop in a fantastical land with dragons. That was really one of three plots. The other two involve Reyna’s treason and Kianthe’s role as the most powerful mage. It was a little more high stakes than I was expecting. People’s lives are at stake at quite a few points. It didn’t particularly stress me out, but I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of – oh no we’re out of honey and can’t get anymore for a month because the dragons are blocking supply chains – sort of thing. That said, even though it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it was still a relaxing, escapist read to me.
I like the main couple. They have a sweet dynamic with things to overcome. Mainly that Reyna was raised to a role of servitude to those born to power, and Kianthe was born to power. Reyna has to come to understand her worth, and Kianthe does amazingly supporting her through that. I also loved the dragons and griffons. There are two nonbinary secondary characters, both of whom use they/them pronouns. Although the word isn’t used, it’s strongly hinted at that a secondary character who is a woman married to a man is bisexual.
Kianthe is a woman of color, although I personally was left confused by what exactly her skin tone is. It is described as “the color of drying clay” (page 42). I checked on Writing With Color’s skin tone guide, and they do suggest clay as a reference. From the picture on their page, I think it’s supposed to denote reddish-brown. For me, though, when I was reading, I thought of gray clay. Writing With Color does state that creative descriptions can be confusing to the reader and suggests using additional descriptives to help. I don’t think drying brings much clarity to the sentence. Who’s really stood around watching clay dry? They also suggest to consider the associations that come up with a word. Clay is malleable, and I think Kianthe is anything but. Similarly, while Reyna’s hair is described many times as the typical shimmery blonde, I’m still not sure what Kianthe’s looked like due to a lack of description.
The tea shop itself ends up being a giant room full of plants that Kianthe keeps magically alive in the cold climate. I loved that aspect of it. The tea itself is largely inspired by our own world’s tea, and the goodies are essentially the same as here as well. The only exception being bagels with “creamed cheese.” The bagels are treated as kind of exotic and that confused me. Why are bagels exotic and not the scones? Why is cream cheese spelled differently and not bagels? One other thing that bugged me so much I ran an Instagram poll about it is that the tea shop owners make tea incorrectly. They add tea bags to cups of hot water. While this is totally fine in one’s own home when using a microwave and in a hurry, the proper way to make tea is by pouring the hot water over the leaves. Only one respondent in my entire poll said they do it the other way around, and they messaged me to tell me they do it that way because they have to microwave their water. This is a nice tea shop, and Reyna and Kianthe don’t make tea correctly! It hurt my escapism a bit. I wanted scenes of making various types of tea in the various different ways required. I wanted a matcha whisk and special timers for different steep times and different pots for black tea and green tea and herbal tisanes. I wanted Kianthe and Reyna to offer to make special mixes for customers based on something about them like this one tea shop in Portland, Maine did for me once. Essentially, I wanted less book time spent on the stakes and more on the tea. Bonus points if there was a fantastical tea with some wild steep requirements like, I don’t know, you have to add a molted scale from a dragon.
Overall, this is a different fantasy read featuring a w/w couple at the lead. It’s a fun universe to visit and was escapist for me. Recommended to readers looking for a quick, light read who don’t mind some stakes in their cozy.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 339 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Kindle Unlimited
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Book Review: Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Revisit the land of Sliding Doors in this exploration of two different paths one life can take due to one decision.
Summary:
At the age of twenty-nine, Hannah Martin still has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She has lived in six different cities and held countless meaningless jobs since graduating college. On the heels of leaving yet another city, Hannah moves back to her hometown of Los Angeles and takes up residence in her best friend Gabby’s guestroom. Shortly after getting back to town, Hannah goes out to a bar one night with Gabby and meets up with her high school boyfriend, Ethan.
Just after midnight, Gabby asks Hannah if she’s ready to go. A moment later, Ethan offers to give her a ride later if she wants to stay. Hannah hesitates. What happens if she leaves with Gabby? What happens if she leaves with Ethan?
In concurrent storylines, Hannah lives out the effects of each decision.
Review:
I consider the 1998 movie Sliding Doors to be a cult classic. Whether or not you agree, the term “a sliding doors moment” has entered the lexicon, meaning a moment in a character’s life where their seemingly innocuous decision has far-reaching impact on how their life plays out. I had been curious to read a Taylor Jenkins Reid book. The mention of her name stirs up controversy. Some folks love her work. Others find it problematic. I wanted to read one for myself to see. I thought it would be the most fair to read the one that appealed to me the most, and that was this one.
I found it to be an enjoyable piece of contemporary chick lit. To be fair, it’s hard for a book with a sliding doors moment to turn me off. I just love the idea so much. Evidence of this fact is how much time this book spends in a location I dislike, the fact that I didn’t like either of the potential love interests, and that health sciences careers are featured prominently…which is something I prefer not to visit in my leisure reading. But I still gave it four stars. Because I just love the sliding doors moment so much. So for me it was an enjoyable read. But after the fact, I did get to thinking about the things I didn’t like, and it left me kind of scratching my head as to why I enjoyed it so much. Beyond the fact it was simply just really lighthearted, which I needed at the moment.
A non-controversial issue I had with it is that I don’t think the sliding doors moment is really in the spirit of a sliding doors moment. In the movie that gave us the phrase, it’s literally simply whether or not Gwyneth Paltrow’s character catches a subway train or has to wait for the next one. Whether the doors slide closed in her face or not. In this one, it’s whether or not the main character stays at a bar with her high school ex-boyfriend after not seeing him for years and moving back to town. That just simply feels like a life-defining moment in a way that catching or missing a subway train (that usually come a few minutes apart) does not.
To address some of the criticism about how Taylor Jenkins Reid, a white woman writer, handles race. I want to be crystal clear – I’m a white woman author too. So this is not a critique from a BIPOC voice. I can see what the author is trying to do. She’s trying to be inclusive and accurately reflect the diverse world of LA. But I can also see why how she depicts race rubs some people the wrong way – and this isn’t one of the books where the main character is a woman of color. Hannah is white. So I can see how it would be more of an issue in one of those books. The biggest issue in this book to me is that characters are default white unless Taylor Jenkins Reid describes them as not white. (Andrea J. Johnson discusses this in point 3 of her very insightful post from the perspective of a Black woman author on writing race.) She does mention Hannah is white, but every other character defaults to white unless described otherwise. Hannah’s best friend is Black, and there is a cringe moment where Hannah asks her in a flashback if her new college friend is a closer friend because she’s Black too. On the one hand, I appreciate flawed characters. On the other hand, I’m not sure why that scene was even included. It was part of introducing how Hannah and Gabby are best friends but Hannah is white and Gabby is Black and it’s no big deal. Interracial friendships are great and belong in literature! But how it was handled in this book definitely made me cringe.
A related moment that made me cringe, is when Hannah and Gabby lay in a bed together and just wish they weren’t straight so they could just simplify their lives and remove all men and just be together tee-hee! As a bisexual, queer woman this makes me see red. It’s not an endearing moment. It’s not cute. I absolutely loathe it when straight women do things like this. Because, as someone who is capable of being attracted to many genders, what keeps a friendship from progressing to a romantic relationship isn’t at all simply what body parts someone has. With my really good friends whose sexual orientations line up with mine, what kept us from becoming romantic partners was far more nuanced than that. At its simplest, it’s that romantic love and friend love are not the same thing, and I’m not in romantic love with them. (I am in romantic love with my spouse.) I have to admit, I didn’t read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo because it has a bisexual main character, and I knew Taylor Jenkins Reid is straight, and I just was not in the mood for dealing with questionable representation. Having read this book and this moment, I think I made the right choice for me.
I was also left confused about what the book’s message is about fate. Without spoilers, there are three hugely impactful aspects of a person’s life – whether or not they partner, if they do with whom, and what their career is. Some of these are the same in both lives and some of them are not. What is this saying about fate, then? I found the mixed message puzzling, especially when Gabby’s life seemed nearly identical in both storylines.
Overall, while I found this to be a fluffy and very readable book, in retrospect I’m left wondering how I managed to enjoy it so much. There are cringey moments in it, and even the sliding doors moment itself is a bit too big to really count. From what I’ve seen in this book, I can see why there’s controversy. I think I’ll be getting my fluffy reads from other sources in the future. Recommended if you’re a sliding doors moment enthusiast who really wants to have consumed all the media out there with such a moment.
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3 out of 5 stars
Length: 342 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
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Book Review: The Foundling by Ann Leary
It’s 1927, and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle thinks she’s found her way to independence and success when she starts working as a secretary for a woman doctor at a remote institute for mentally disabled women. But not everything is as it appears to be at Nettleton State.
Summary:
It’s 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer—brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel.
Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age forty, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care.
Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all.
Review:
I read Ann Leary’s contemporary fiction The Good House last winter (review) and was excited to read her new one and further intrigued to see it was a piece of historic fiction. In spite of being very different from that piece of contemporary fiction, this book lived up to it quite well with richly imagined settings, complex and flawed characters, and an honest depiction of alcohol.
The author discovered this aspect of history – the forced institutionalization of women deemed “feebleminded” in the 1920s for the express eugenics purpose of preventing them from having children – while researching her own family genealogy. (Please be aware that “feebleminded” is a pejorative in modern times. In the 1920s, it was a term used clinically to classify patients.) Her grandmother worked briefly as a secretary at such an institution. The author was made curious by the name of the institution and thus the research that led to this novel was borne. Read more about her perspective on the research process, connection to her family, and the history of this treatment of women.
One of my favorite aspects of Leary’s writing is the characters. She’s not afraid to let them be flawed. In this case, the flaws are partially a reflection of the flaws of the times and partially innate to the characters themselves. No one in this book is perfect, and yet you find yourself rooting for them anyway. It can be difficult from a modern perspective to understand why Mary’s initial reaction to the asylum is positive. Or why she doesn’t trust or believe Lillian right away. But this book does an eloquent job of showing why that is, for personal and societal reasons, and letting Mary grow and change on her own.
Another strength is in making the horrific problems clear without dwelling on them in a gratuitous way. By the end of the book, the reader knows exactly what’s wrong as the asylum, but it remained straight-forward and succinct about it. I dislike it when historical books about difficult issues have scenes that feel like they could have come from a Saw movie. This book avoids that well.
The book also highlights the very serious issues for interracial couples. But there is an interfaith couple for whom the same attention isn’t paid. It felt a bit pie in the sky to not directly address the issues facing a Jewish/Catholic couple in the 1920s. Especially when the Catholic half of the couple is serious enough about her faith that she attends weekly Mass and worries about when she can have Confession. This is a level of seriousness about her faith that made me question how she seemed to not worry at all about the issues facing her in an interfaith relationship. Given the attentive detail given to the interracial couple, it felt even more like a weakness.
I was interested as to how the author would handle alcohol in this 1920s historic piece given The Good House is largely about a woman struggling with alcoholism. Alcohol is not the focus of the book, but it is featured in ways that are realistic to the 1920s. In other words, while Prohibition is still in existence during the book, alcohol is pervasive in society. The downfalls of alcohol are well depicted, again, without being too gratuitous.
Overall, this is a well-researched and crafted piece of historic fiction that covers difficult ground with grace. Recommended to fans of historic fiction. But keep in mind the romance is a subplot in this one.
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4 out of 5 stars
Length: 336 pages – average but on the longer side
Source: Library
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Book Review: Haven by Emma Donoghue
Three monks struggle to survive on an inhospitable island off the Irish coast.
Summary:
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?
Review:
This is a quiet character study set on a windswept island with only one tree upon it but thousands of birds. (This is based upon a real place in Ireland.) It wrestles with how being with nature at a more intimate level than what is currently experienced by one’s peers can bring out great revelations about a person. Both good and bad. It demonstrates how a group with a leader can show great resolve through trials but also the weakness of unquestioned loyalty to a questionable leader. How do you know when it’s time to question the leader?
What I found particularly interesting was how the story itself shows the strange juxtaposition of this group going to nature but their leader not respecting nature simultaneously. While Cormac and Trian both have a respect for and understanding of nature due to their lives before they were monks, Artt as a scholar does not. He does things and asks the other monks to do things that strike them as odd. Two things in particular feel like wrongdoing to the other two monks although they struggle to articulate why. I found myself wishing that Cormac and Trian could find either Buddhism or a Christian sect that had a greater respect for nature (for example: Franciscans). They would surely have fit in better.
An example of something Artt asks along this line that isn’t particularly a spoiler. Trian, after they arrive on the island, eats some shellfish and brings some back for the others to eat. Artt tells them this food is unclean and forbidden. Trian’s thoughts later:
He wishes he still didn’t know it was forbidden; wishes he was innocent and could cram his belly with whatever dirty, delicious stuff he found.
page 161
Trian loves the birds and watching them. Artt is annoyed by the birds. He views their noisemaking as exacerbated by the devil to work against them and tells Trian that it’s not possible to pray with your eyes open. Trian internally resists this. He feels it is possible to pray with one’s eyes open. The reader is left seeing how much more spiritually Trian engages with God’s creation than Artt does. In fairness to Artt he does have a greater faith than the other two in God’s providing for them. When the other two might be willing to give up and take the boat to get supplies, Artt encourages them to wait and see what they can figure out on the island itself. He’s often correct that they hadn’t quite considered all options yet. One might say that Artt has a lot of faith in God’s creativity and perhaps too much suspicion of Satan’s creativity as well.
There is some queer content. I can’t describe what it is without spoilers. Highlight the next paragraph to see.
Trian is intersex. This is a critical plot point. Cormac and Artt are divided on how to handle Trian after finding out. I was pleased with the resolution and feel the ending is, overall, uplifting.
Overall, this is a quiet study of what happens when one person is given too much authority over other people’s spiritual development. It’s set in a gorgeous, richly imagined backdrop. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I read it, which is why I rated it five stars.
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5 out of 5 stars
Length: 272 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 