Points to Lockhart for making you feel sorry for the narrator right off the bat. She’s a poor little rich girl, but her inner pain is vividly portrayed as physical: imaginary knives sink into her skin, objects cleave open her brain, and as blood and viscera pour over her clothes her mother tells her to stand straight and look calm… so she pulls herself together, and does as she is told. As the book goes on, it’s hard to distinguish reality from internal metaphor, but as the clues pile up you begin to understand the origins of her mental disturbance, as well as the ghosts that haunt her wealthy family. The writing style was full of sentence fragments and occasional mid-sentence line breaks; it could have been awkward, but settled quite nicely into the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness narration. Pretty bravely experimental for YA, all things considered.
Tag: genre-gen fiction
Hotline, by Dimitri Nasrallah
This book was tearing up the review scene in Canada so I gave it a shot. The pace is slow and patient, mostly moving through mundane details and only hinting at the broader picture, but builds on itself until the smallest actions carry huge emotional weight. Muna is a Lebanese immigrant teacher whose French skills are not as useful as she had hoped they would be in Montreal; to support herself and her son Omar, she takes a job at a call center selling a weight loss program. It’s hard scrabbling out a living as a single mom in the Montreal winter, but in Muna’s life, the small victories and occasional moments of grace balance out the casual racism and institutional disregard. The gradual unfolding of the events in Lebanon that drove her to Montreal are illuminating as well. Really well done storytelling.
Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, by Andrea Lawlor
Paul Polydoris is a queer teenage bartender in a college town in 1993; he can change the shape of his body at will and frequently does, assuming whatever shape and gender that will get him laid (which is depicted quite graphically). After romping his way through various parts of the queer scene, Paul takes on the form of “Polly” and accompanies his friend to a lesbian retreat, where he falls in love with a girl named Diane and eventually follows her to San Francisco. Paul is filled with an intense longing to belong to someone and to give them his whole heart; at the same time; he chafes at being restricted to just one form and one role, restlessly changeable both outside and in. With such a mutable character it’s hard to have any kind of growth arc, and indeed, the lack of any kind of arc was one of the worst things about this story. Without any particular self-reflection on Paul’s part, his endless sexual escapades began to feel like just another part of the character he was performing, each encounter yet another experience he wasn’t learning from. I can’t tell if this book is a love letter to the queer scene of the early 90s, or a condemnation of the fact that the scene seemed to force people into rigid gender roles. Maybe, like the protagonist, the author also wants to have it both ways.
Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong
I honestly wasn’t grabbed by the book at first, but as I read, I slowly became invested. Ruth, escaping from a failed engagement and tepid career, returns home for the holidays and finds herself sticking around to help her mother care for her father, whose dementia is worse than Ruth had realized. Ruth finds herself settling into the mundanity of basing her father’s diet off of online nutrition research, slowly mending fences with her mother, and colluding with a pack of her father’s former university students to create for him the illusion of a normal life. Interspersed with the story are her father’s journal entries from when he was besotted with her as a child; I like how they reflected the role reversal now taking place between them.
Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Oh man if you thought Yellowface was a vicious takedown of racism in publishing, wait until you read Disorientation, which does the same thing to academics but multiplies it by ten. The main character, Ingrid Yang, is in the middle of a dissertation she hates, a deep dive into the works of famous poet Xiao-Wen Chou. One day, a chance find in the archives sends her into a deep dive into Chou’s history and a bombshell of a discovery that upends everything Ingrid thinks she knows, including about her own conception of herself, her race, and her relationships. Neurotic, self-doubting Ingrid is contrasted against her confident best friend Eunice Kim, as well as her rage-filled rival Vivian Vo; the way the three women choose to conceive of, and express, their Asian-Americanness provides an undercurrent of identity exploration to the race-related ripples caused in the larger society around them by Ingrid’s discovery. The satire in this book is incredibly heavy-handed but the zingers keep landing, so you keep reading.
Still Life, by Sarah Winman
A slow, patient journey following Ulysses Temper through four decades (with occasional interludes with Evelyn Skinner, art historian). In 1944 Florence, British soldier Ulysses makes unexpected connections with the people that follow him back to his home in London, and eventually draw him back to Italy. Though Ulysses is the main character, it is the ensemble cast around him, and their connections to one another, that provide the warm heart that centers the story. I love how each of them is allowed space to grow, learn, and change, and how they each do their best to support one another. The writing is just gorgeous and both London and Florence are beautifully and wistfully rendered.
The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, by Sonora Reyes
I loved this book so much. Yamilet Flores follows her brother Cesar to a very rich, very white Catholic school, where she already stands out for being Mexican-American and would rather not also stand out for being queer. (Also her mom would likely kick her out if she knew.) It gets very hard to keep pretending to be straight, however, when her new friend Bo is the prettiest, smartest, friendliest, and bravest girl she’s ever met. Yami deals with very typical teen drama, from mean girls at school to problems caused by race, class, and sexuality, along with complicated family dynamics and the burden of juggling secrets. I loved how the adults in the book were each doing what they thought best for the kids, and how the kids find their way through to their own truths by the end. Great cast of well-formed characters; great commentary on existing social structures.
The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Victoria Jones, a bitter foster child who loves only plants, is finally “graduated” out of care and into adulthood. She manages to get a job with a local flower shop, and finds that her knowledge of the Victorian flower language gives her an edge when designing flower products for clients. However, her buried trauma does not let her pivot so easily to adult responsibility, especially when she meets a man from her past and must face her issues head-on. The story unfolds extremely patiently, gradually walking us through Victoria’s formative years while also giving the secondary characters depth and personality. Although things do come together a little too smoothly at the end, there’s no denying that Victoria had to fight for that to happen. I thought the flower language bits were a little overdone, but the personal dynamics between characters were spot on.
The Golden State, by Lydia Kiesling
The stream-of-consciousness style of this book took a bit to get into, but drags you deep into the head of a young mother trying to find her way. Narrator Daphne is clearly not well as she takes her baby from her 9-to-5 job in San Francisco and drives out to her grandparents’ old trailer in the high desert; once there, she experiences every moment of the joy and boredom of being sole provider for a small child while also dealing poorly with her feelings of loneliness and inability to reunite with her husband (stranded outside the US because of citizenship and visa issues). Her social interactions are mainly with secessionist neighbor Cindy and senior citizen Alice, and the two relationships come together in a very interesting way. I really liked the realistic and sympathetic illustration of how the mental state of a first-time mother could spiral downwards in the absence of outside help, and although the Cindy-and-Alice plotlines were a little weird, their impact on Daphne was really well done and just what the story needed.
On Rotation, by Shirlene Obuobi
This was three genres in one book: 1) a coming-of-age story about nerdy med student Angie Appiah and her journey towards defining herself apart from her family’s expectations; 2) a rom-com between her and handsome artist Ricky, culminating in 3) a medical drama that ends up involving them both. The three stories sometimes sit oddly with one another, making Angie’s character arc feel uneven; however, they’re all enjoyable, even if at times things feel a bit too perfect. I liked how Angie’s identity as Ghanaian-American made her more alert to the racial disparities faced by patients at the hospital, but still left her unaware of the history of medical prejudice and suspicion in the Black community. Overall a very sweet and uncomplicated read.