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Book Review: Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Summary:
First published in 1975, this explores the adult life of Ursa Corregidora, a Black woman blues singer haunted by trauma – both intergenerational and the violent loss of her fertility. Her great-grandmother and grandmother both were enslaved by Corregidora – a Portuguese enslaver in Brazil. He raped both of them, meaning he was the father to all the Corregidora women until Ursa herself. Her female ancestors constantly told her the importance of keeping the truth of their suffering alive through telling the story down through the family. So what will happen to the story now that Ursa, an only child, can no longer have children of her own?
Review:
This made it to my to be read pile before the current surge in interest in the history of the blues, partially coming from the newly released movie The US vs. Billie Holiday. This book demonstrates how clearly the blues and the trauma inflicted on Black folks in the US are intertwined, with the blues granting an outlet for speaking on at least some of the suffering but also a source of Black joy.
I have seen some reviews talk about how this book is about Ursa’s anger. I strongly disagree. This book is about Ursa’s intergenerational and current trauma, but she is absolutely not, as the GoodReads summary states, “consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slavemaster [Corregidora].” Ursa suffers from trauma and struggles to deal with this trauma, but she is not consumed by hatred. I dislike how this summary seems to place the blame for her suffering upon Ursa. Ursa is doing the best she can with a whole pile of trauma. She’s not perfect, but, in my opinion, this isn’t some cautionary tale about being consumed by hatred. It’s an eloquent depiction of the intergenerational trauma of slavery and racism.
It is so immediately understandable why Ursa’s whole world is rocked when she loses her fertility due to abuse at the hands of her husband. (This happens very early in the book and is not a spoiler). Not only does she have a drive to have children that many women have, but she also has the lifelong expectation that she will fight injustice and white supremacy by passing the true story of what happened to the women in her family down along to the next generation. How can she manage her life when it becomes impossible for her to fulfill that expectation?
This book is not just about fertility/infertility and intergenerational trauma but also about the blues. Why Ursa is so drawn to the blues and what she is willing to give up and fight for in order to continue to sing them. The balance of moving among these themes is handled very well.
There are also some difficult moments where we see that Ursa is homophobic. She has a female friend who engages in relationships with other women and Ursa is, at the very least, uncomfortable with this. However, I do not think the book is necessarily in agreement with Ursa. Time is spent discussing why two Black women might be empowered by loving each other. However, time is also dedicated to discussing how white women have also raped enslaved (and servant) Black women, and that memory is part of what makes Ursa so uncomfortable. It is not an easy topic, and there is also the additional layer that Ursa finds this out right after she’s lost her fertility and others are questioning whether she counts as a woman anymore due to this. I think this section is handled honestly but readers who are more sensitive to negative reactions to queerness should be aware of its presence in this book.
This book is an engaging, powerful, and in many ways, unexpected, read. While I think everyone could get something out of this, I specifically want to mention that if you’ve read the white women’s feminist classics of the 1960s and 1970s, you definitely need to pick this one up and diversify your perspective.
4 out of 5 stars
Length: 192 pages – average but on the shorter side
Source: Library
Buy It (Amazon or Bookshop.org)
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Book Review: The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (Bottom of TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
In the near future world with no war and totalitarian governments there’s an ever-looming threat of starvation thanks to overpopulation and diseases attacking the crops. The governments have responded with worldwide one child policies and psa campaigns to encourage homosexual relationships. Englishman, Tristram Foxe, lives in a skyscraper with his wife, Beatrice-Joanna and works as a social studies teacher. But his advancement suffers both from his status as a person with siblings and as a married man with a child. When he discovers that his wife is cheating on him with his passing as gay brother who works for the Infertility Bureau, his world falls apart just as the world around him tilts from totalitarian regime to cannibalism and pagan fertility rituals.
Review:
When I picked up this book, the summaries I’d seen were nowhere near as clear or straightforward as the one I just wrote for you. I’m not sure I would have ever picked it up if I’d had an inkling of an idea as to what I was getting myself into. All I saw was a dystopian overpopulated future by the same author as A Clockwork Orange
The first half of the book reads like a treatise by a Quiverfull (Evangelical Christians who believe in having as many children as possible, more info) with some terror of a hyper-liberal future where people are denied their right to choose to have children (funny how they fear that but don’t get that pro-choice is all about protecting a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own reproductive organs but that’s another rant for another day), and people are forced into being gay/lesbian. I know this sounds like it could be an interesting flip-flop of current times, but it didn’t read that way for me. It read as a lot of homophobia and yelling about how population control goes against god’s plan and going against god’s plan sends the plagues. Seriously. That’s how it reads. But, I traveled on because this is Anthony Burgess, and characters don’t have to be likeable. They could be used to show the opposite point. But that’s not really what happens. What happens is that this set-up gets ditched for a mad-cap dash through sociology.
The last half of the book is kind of an interesting sociological exploration of how the world moves through the liberal/conservative/military cycle. It is mad-cap and bizarre, and as a person with a BA in History, I really enjoyed seeing a country move through those cycles at rapid-fire in a slapstick humor style. This part of the book felt like an entirely different book in fact. But I also think only a certain type of person would enjoy it. (Like, oh, Political Science and History majors).
As for character development, there is none. Everyone ends up pretty much where they started after having lived through the cycles of political change. It really reminds me a lot of playing Civ or SimCity where you move artificial people around to illustrate greater points. I enjoyed this alright, but I would have preferred stronger characterizations or at least some growth.
So, is the book a phobic conservative dream of what a liberal society would look like? I don’t think so. I think Burgess actually presented each part of the political cycle as awful, including the fall into tribal-feeling paganism. It sort of felt like the book was saying that someone somewhere will always be unhappy no matter what the political/sociological situation is. Depressing, huh? And yes I know it’s dystopian and lot of people think dystopias are innately depressing, but personally I think they can frequently offer a lot of insight and hope for the future. This just felt a bit defeatist. With some Quiverfull and homophobic characters to boot.
Overall I’m left feeling decidedly no reaction either way to this book, which is not what I was expecting from Burgess. I was neither offended nor enlightened and mildly entertained but I could have had the same entertainment from playing Civ on my computer. I think this book best appeals to readers who also enjoy studying political science or the history of societies, but even they should proceed with the caution that this is decidedly a mad-cap, non character-driven look at those topics.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: PaperBackSwap
Book Review: The Department of Magic by Rod Kierkegaard, Jr.
Summary:
Di Angelo and Farah thought they were getting a typical, boring DC government job. But it turns out they have been assigned to the Department of Magic, and whether they like it or not, their horogaunt boss is having them face down demons, shifters, and more in repeated robberies to gather the pieces of George Washington in the hopes to bring him back to life to fight off the ancient Mexican gods who were stirred out of slumber by all the talk of the ancient Mayan prophecy of the end of the world in 2012.
Review:
I have not hated a book this much since finishing Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift in February (review). On the plus side, this means you all get to enjoy an angry Amanda take-down style review. On the minus side, I had to suffer through this horrible thing. But this is what book reviewers do. We suffer through things and tell you about them so you don’t have to.
This book has a triple-whammy of awful. It has so many grammar and spelling mistakes that I can’t believe it ever made it through an editor (oh but it did!). The plot is confusing and ill-paced. Finally, and most importantly, it is so prejudiced I had to double-check that this wasn’t a pen-name for Ann Coulter. Too often I’ve made these assertions in the past but been unable to truly show them to you since it was a library book or some such. Enter: the kindle. But first let me quickly explain the plot/structure/pacing issues.
So Farah and Di Angelo aka Rocky are hired by this mysterious department in the US government. There is a lot that makes zero sense about the department. First, it appears to only consist of Rocky, Farah, and their boss Crawley (a horogaunt). Anyone who has worked in the US government *raises hand* knows that they do not underhire. They overhire. So this just makes the author look like he knows nothing about government.
Throughout the book, Farah and Rocky have this problem of carrying out covert operations for the department and almost getting arrested and wanted for murder and blah blah blah. Um, excuse me. This is the motherfuckin government. If they want George Washington’s sword they “borrow” it. If they can’t “borrow” it, they send in government agents and protect them from prosecution because, I reiterate, this is the motherfuckin government. A department that supposedly exists to keep America aligned with the goddess America and protected from demons and vampires and what-have-you that no one else knows about would probably be a Big Deal on the inside. So this plot point makes no sense.
Then there’s the pacing issues. The pacing goes up and down and up and down and the reader keeps prepping for a climax only to get none. I think you see the analogy I am going for here. And it sucks.
Moving right along, let’s get to just a few of the more egregious grammar, spelling, and other writing I caught in this *laughs hysterically* edited book.
rung off. (location 385)
Americans hang up. No one in this book is British. The narrator is not British. This is stupid.
He could feel her hot breath, fetid as a zoo animal’s gorged on fresh meat. (location 752)
This is a bad analogy, as any high school student can tell you, because the vast majority of people don’t KNOW what a zoo animal’s breath smells like. An analogy is supposed to help a reader connect an unknown thing to a known thing.
Kabbala (location 858)
This is not how you spell Kabbalah.
Then she pulled both of their caps off and bit him on the mouth. (location 1889)
No, this is not a scene between one of our heroes and a demon. This is supposed to be Farah romantically kissing Rocky. Was that the image you got from that? Didn’t think so.
The most terrifying form devils or demons can take. No one has lived to describe them. (location 1889)
This comes from the federal book on beasts and demons that our heroes read and start every chapter with an excerpt from. Question. If no one has ever lived to describe these demons then a) how do you know they exist and b) how the hell are you describing them in this book?!
Her face was beautiful, appearing radiantly soft-cheeked and virginal in one instant, a rotting grinning skull, a death-mask in the next. (location 3922)
If you are writing a sentence comparing something from one instant to the next, you can’t compare three things! Two. Two is your limit.
Ok, but obviously I wouldn’t hate a book this hard for bad plot and some (ok a lot of) writing problems. I’d give advice and encouragement. The hating on the book comes from the prejudice hitting me left and right. It was like running the obstacle course in Wipe-Out! I can’t and won’t support or recommend a book to someone else as not for me but maybe for them when it’s this painfully prejudiced throughout. Let’s begin, shall we?
Look, hon, you know you’ve got zero will-power. Honestly you’re like a lesbian. You go out with this guy a couple times, you’ll move in together on your third date. I see him all day, every day. I don’t want him underfoot when I come home too. Plus he’s too poor for you. (location 741)
Oh look! Homophobia! The sad part is you can tell that Kierkegaard thinks he’s being funny when he’s just flat-out offensive. To top off this delightful bit of dialogue, we’ve got classism. And I feel I should mention the man they are talking about is an Iraq War vet. But he’s poor. And clearly that is what matters in dating. Homophobia is not quite this blatant throughout the rest of the book, although we do have a *delightful* scene in which Bobbi (a girl) shows up to seduce Rocky, who she thinks is gay, since Farah spread a rumor that Rocky is gay to keep her fiancee from being upset that she’s working with a man. Yeah. That happened.
There is more blatant classism, though.
Baltimore is the blue-collar ugly step-sister of the white-collar Washington DC metropolitan area. (location 1250)
Noooo, comparing hardworking people with blue collar jobs to the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella is not offensive at all.
*sighs*
Also, pretty much every demon “disguises” themself as a homeless person. This means almost every homeless person our heroes run into is a demon. Seriously.
And what about women?
The reason I’m so into Nineteenth Century romantic literature, I guess, is because I love anything that reminds me of growing up with my mom and my sisters and gets me inside women’s heads. (location 1214)
Yes! Let’s just go ahead and say that Jane fucking Austen represents every woman’s head everywhere in the 21st century. That’s just awesome.
Speaking of women, I will say this. Farah is the more talented of the duo in climbing, which is nice. However, she and every other woman are presented as shallow and obsessed with fashion. Also, a baby is born, and Farah turns overnight into a doting mother-figure when she was a sorority-sister type girl mere hours before. Meanwhile, the actual mother fails at parenting, and the only explanation for this utter lack of ability with babies is that she is a vampire.
I’m not sure what the precise word is for it….xenophobia perhaps? But Kierkegaard makes it abundantly clear that only Protestants have the whole religion thing right.
White or “good” magic, he told her, already had a name. It was called “prayer.” And even prayer, unless directly addressed to God the Creator, is in essence a Luciferian transaction, because it relies on the intercession of intermediaries, such as saints or boddhis, and inevitably involved some sort of quid pro quo. (location 1545)
Speaking of religion, no hateful book would be complete without some anti-semitism tossed in there, would it?
Freemasons–A Lucifer-worshipping conspiracy cult dedicated to Zionist one-world government, heirs of the Christ-murdering Pharisees and the Knights Templar. (location 1596)
Christ. Murdering. Pharisees. He actually went there. And not only are they the Christ killers but! They also secretly run the world through a Satan-worshipping secret organization!
I would have thrown the book across the room at this point, but it was on my kindle, and I love my kindle.
And finally. To round it all out. We’ve got some good, old-fashioned American racism.
First we have the black man who spoke entirely normally until this sentence:
You got any questions you need to axe me, you know where I live. (location 1193)
Then we have the Asian-American man who can’t pronounce his own name:
There they consecutively picked up a squat red-faced Asian named Robert, which he pronounced as “Robot,” and a noisy and vituperative older black man in a water-sodden daishiki named Walkie-Talkie. (location 3225)
Beyond these blatant examples there’s the fact that every person of color is either actually a demon in disguise or working for the seedy underground of some sort of organization. The exception to this is Farah, who is Lebanese-American, but Kierkegaard takes extreme care to point out that she is NOT Muslim. She’s one of the Christian Lebanese-Americans. She also basically acts just like a white sorority girl but with an exotic look!!
See? See? I just. *sighs* The only people who might not be horribly offended by this book are the type of people I don’t really want to recommend books to anyway, except to be like “Here, read this book that might make you realize what a douchebag you are being, like say some classics of black literature or books on how hard it is to be gay in an evangelical family or maybe read about the real history of the Bible.” You see my point.
The only people who would enjoy this book are people who have this same prejudiced world-view against basically everyone who isn’t a white, straight, Protestant, American male. So, I guess, if that’s you, have at it? But it’s riddled with spelling, grammar, and plot problems, so you won’t enjoy it anyway. So hah.
1 out of 5 stars
Source: Netgalley
Book Review: Arizona Free by Doug Martin
Summary:
Three white collar schmucks sign up for a classic pyramid scheme selling energy drinks known as DINAmite. Gradually, they start noticing disturbing changes in the consumers of the energy drinks and find themselves pulled into the world of a nefarious plot to change humanity as we know it.
Review:
Not in years have I read a book I disliked this much. I generally try to find at least one redeeming quality when reviewing a book, remembering that not everyone likes what I enjoy, but honestly. This book is terrible, and I have zero idea how it managed to get published in the first place. The publisher’s website doesn’t give very much information on how and why they choose books to publish, so no answers to that particular question were found there. Anyway. On to why this is the first book ever to receive one star here on Opinions of a Wolf.
First, there’s the writing. I felt like I had landed back in beginner’s creative writing in high school and had been assigned the worst writer’s short story to critique. It abounds with showing, not telling. The dialogue is painfully fake sounding. Most of the characters are completely unmemorable, and the few that managed to put some image into my brain were simply charicatures lacking any dimensions at all.
I’ve read books before that struggled with sophomoric writing but that at least showed potential through a strong, uniquely imagined plot. There is none of that here. The plot changes its mind so many times throughout that I honestly have no idea what actually happened in the end. I’m completely baffled. You can’t throw that many surprises at a reader without offering some modicum of explanation or elaboration. The characters are simply straight up told “This is happening now,” and they go along with it.
Of course writing and plot are the core of what makes a good book, so it’s bad enough this book fails on both of those already, but it’s topped off with a nice icing of homophobia and womanizing. The characters and the narrator repeatedly make slams against gay people. One of the characters, Catherine, plays tennis with a lesbian, who yet again is a characature who speaks in the most fake Russian accent ever. This lesbian tennis player is interested in Catherine, and this of course grosses out everyone in the story, including Catherine. Also, the lesbian is turned into a hulk-like villain, complete with horns. I was so disgusted by the homophobia that I almost stopped reading the book, but I refuse to write reviews of books I didn’t finish, and frankly, I wanted a bad review of this homophobic piece of trash out there.
Bottom line, I can’t recommend it to anyone. It’s completely made up of bad writing, terrible plot structure, and rampant homophobia.
1 out of 5 stars
Source: Free copy via LibraryThing‘s EarlyReviewers program
This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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