The Witches (CBR14 #22)

Roald Dahl was one of the authors who dominated my childhood reading which makes sense as he is one of the most celebrated children’s authors of the 20^th century. I spent a lot of time deep in a few of his books, seeing bits of myself in his protagonists. But this is my goodbye to him. Dahl was an unrepentant bigot. He was profoundly anti-Semitic, perpetuating harmful tropes and falsehoods for years in his public statements and books. Dahl is also easily read as a misogynistic writer, in large part due to the openly misogynistic theme of The Witches. in this book women are demonized for dressing up, feminizing their appearances, and framed as monsters lurking inside seemingly sweet and complacent disguises. Its lurking right in the book’s blurb: This is about real witches. Real witches don’t ride around on broomsticks. They don’t even wear black cloaks and hats. They are vile, cunning, detestable creatures who disguise themselves as nice, ordinary ladies.

So why read this then? Read Harder has a task this year to read an award-winning book from the year you were born and The Witches won the Whitbread Award for Children’s Novel in 1983. The award is now known as the Costa Book Awards and are a set of annual literary awards recognizing English-language books by writers based in Britain and Ireland. The awards are more populist than some of the other major awards, being awarded for both for high literary merit but also for works that are enjoyable reading and whose aim is to convey the enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience. The awards are separated into six categories: Biography, Children’s Books, First Novel, Novel, Poetry, and Short Story.

The award makes sense to me, in retrospect. The Witches is less about the plot than it is about a feeling: it features Dahl’s signature sense of things being terribly messy, unnatural, and unjust. Dahl has long fallen into the classic tradition of British children’s literature, showing the world as a cold place in which wonderful things like magic and human kindness are rare gems. Dahl’s stories depend upon their hyperbolic portraits of how people live for their fanciful appeal and their ability to speak directly to young children as I had felt spoken to thirty years ago.

In the Hall with the Knife (CBR14 #21)

This book wound up on my to read thanks to a Read Harder Challenge from 2020 – read a mystery where the victim is not a woman – and the fact that I had loved the previous books I had read by Diana Peterfreund, For Darkness Shows the Stars and Across a Star-Swept Sea (as well as their accompanying prequel short stories Among the Nameless Stars and The First Star to Fall). It ended up in my hands thanks to my book exchange gifter, NTE.

What we have with In the Hall with the Knife is Peterfreund getting to play around in the Clue sandbox. You read that right, the title is not just a play on the game’s phrasing (there are two more books in this trilogy, In the Study with the Wrench and In the Ballroom with the Candlestick) but a direct homage to the source material. Peterfreund takes the board game and movie and turns them into a residence hall on a prestigious Maine boarding school where students Vaughn Green, Beth “Peacock” Picach, Orchid McKee, Sam “Mustard” Maestor, Finn Plum, and Scarlet Mistry—are left stranded on campus with their headmaster Mr. Boddy, the janitor Rusty Naylor, and Mrs. White, house mother due to a monstrous December storm that has flooded out the campus and separated it from the mainland due to a washed out bridge and must take safety in the high ground of Tudor House.

Oh, and they awake the next morning to Headmaster Boddy’s dead body. Some suggest an accident, other suggest suicide, but very quickly it is clear that it was murder. It is up to those remaining on campus to sort out what to do, and how to keep their various secrets safe.

The pacing of this one wasn’t great for me, but I think I might just need to take a small break from YA anything since I had similar feelings to Charm and Strange, but this book could easily have lost 50 pages to good, crisp editing (something I have complained about with Peterfreund before). This book begs to be read in the same campy fun as the movie, but the writing isn’t as sharp as the movie dialogue and if you are perhaps as familiar with that movie as me, it shows. I did enjoy the student characters as they are developed on page, although they start as stock characters. Each of the above getting chapters from their perspective (and in the case of tennis star Peacock they are her exercise journal entries). It’s also obvious that Peterfreund had one large story that she broke up into three pieces, while this story did have a definite end as the murderer is caught, the remaining mysteries are left spooled out and new ones introduced.

Charm and Strange (CBR14 #20)

Something is going on with my reading this year, I seem to be swinging back and forth between 5-star books and 2-star ones, which means I should have anticipated trouble with Charm and Strange based purely on it falling in my reading order behind Boyfriend Material. This one didn’t make me angry as some of my other two star reads, Always, in December and Seduction, but it flirted with the line.

This 2014 Winner of the William C. Morris Award is designed to be read blind – you aren’t supposed to know more than a very basic description, that it’s the story of a boy who believes that he is a monster and it’s about understanding why. But if you are expecting a straightforward fantasy this isn’t it. This is much more a meditation on the psychology of trauma and how the placement of the “bad” descriptor on a child can destroy their self-perception. For that reason, its both difficult to provide an adequate content warning without spoiling the denouement of the story, but it feels entirely necessary to give one to prepare the reader for what they will encounter within.

This story is primarily in the mind of its protagonist, as he swings back and forth between the now of his time at a Vermont boarding school and the summer he was 10 years old. Normally I am all about a character study, which this falls firmly into, but Charm and Strange felt claustrophobic because the character we are studying, and whose thoughts we are sharing, is so profoundly depressed and isolated, and has suffered such immense harm at the hands of others.

CW: child abuse, sexual abuse, depression, disordered eating, suicide, self-harm.

Boyfriend Material (CBR14 #19)

I wasn’t sure how I was going to rate Boyfriend Material until I realized that I was actively putting off finishing it because even after nearly 400 pages I didn’t want to be done with the world Alexis Hall had created. So, five stars it is as well as relief that the follow up Husband Material will be published later this year (August 2022 to be exact).

Boyfriend Material is the story of Luc and Oliver, but its really Luc’s as he’s the one we’re with throughout its run. It is at the core a story of overcoming the things that we have let tell us what we deserve, and the steps we have taken in order to prevent ourselves from feeling staggering loss again. Luc’s backstory is firmly rooted in the tropes of British rom coms – rockstar parent abandonment, quirky friend group, a crush on a very handsome middle-class gent whom he has struck out with in past who is the answer to his bad press work predicament. Too bad Oliver has only put a fake dating situation on the table, one that has an expiration date that is mutually beneficial.

Normally I prefer a romance that swings back and forth in point of view, so we are able to really sink into the mindset of each character. I would have enjoyed it here I’m sure, but with the telling-you-a-story narration style employed by Hall for Luc we get a propulsive and funny narrator, and because Hall is very good at what he does we are shown the things that we need to know to unpack the neuroses and inhibitions that Oliver is deploying to protect himself from what he feels he can’t have in Luc. It’s a little past halfway before the fake relationship grows to something more, but it still doesn’t quite get to “real” until much later and it gives Hall a great space to pull apart the toxic coping mechanisms that Luc and Oliver both have, and how being in each other’s lives makes them better. They don’t need the other, but their time together helps them address things they’ve let go unaddressed far too long. Then they are left with a choice, and it’s a choice they make over and over again throughout.

Did I mention that this is funny? Because it is. It has all of these big, deep emotions but it isn’t afraid to find the humor in them and just in the absurdity of life. This book begs to be given the movie treatment as it has all the beats built it, but I worry that a 2 hour movie wouldn’t be able to capture the nuance that Hall gives us in this.

The Ex Hex (CBR14 #18)

When I started reading this book it wasn’t very far in before I was thinking to myself “hmm… I’m not sure he’s such a bad guy, ladies” as Vivienne is (accidentally) drunkenly hexing her ex, Rhys. This could be a function of any number of things including my age, my own romantic history, the fact that I waited three months on my library’s hold list for it, and the general state of the world. But it did affect my enjoyment because the thing I noticed by page five didn’t play out on page until about 85% in and kept scratching at the back of my mind. So… my 3.5 rounded up might resonate with you or leave you scratching your head – so fair warning.

The good news for me was that the vodka drunk hexing chapter is a prologue set nine years in the past, so we fast-forward from 19-year-old Vivi to 28-year-old Vivi and that version of her is much more put together, emotionally. She’s a lecturer at the university in town, back to living in her adopted hometown where her aunt and cousin run a witchy shop. Oh, and they’re all witches. The University even has a separate, hidden in plain sight, Witch program. Graves Glen, Georgia secretly houses a bunch of witches, was founded by witches, and has ley lines running through which help power the magic its witch resident use. Every year in October is Founder’s Day which features a huge fall festival and the tourists come to town following a decade long rebrand as a fall getaway by the town’s mayors. Unfortunately, this year’s festival is interrupted by the aforementioned accidental curse when Vivi’s ex and descendent of the town founder, Rhys Penhallow arrives from Wales to recharge the ley lines and attend Founder’s Day in his father’s place. Once Rhys is in town… the hex takes effect and magic begins to go haywire, eventually getting into the lay lines and effecting the entire town. But lifting the curse becomes a problem, and things get serious including a real threat to Rhys’ life.

There is a lot happening in this book, and the good news is that Sterling handles it well and is genuinely funny, writing characters with undeniable chemistry. The relationships between the characters, familial or romantic, all felt very real, as did the lingering hurt of young heartbreak. I struggled with the pacing a bit, there’s a lot of worldbuilding to lay in for both protagonists, their families, and the town itself before you get to Sterling’s version of magic (which I liked). It builds over the course of the first half in a imminently readable way (I devoured this book in one day) but we pay the price in the second half. The book is predominantly set between October 12 and October 31, we spend half the book leading up to October 13, and then the second half with the remaining two weeks, skipping over chunks of time and character development. We get it in passing, in reference to what happened off page, but with characters with such great chemistry who fell for each other intensely nearly a decade ago but broke up after three months on a blow up, and have been back in each other’s lives a matter of weeks… I felt we needed the time to see the new era of their relationship develop. Sterling sold it without, but it could have been so much better with even fifty additional pages (moving this book from 300 to 350, not uncommon in the Romance world).  

I’m interested to see what Sterling writes next under this pen name (she’s also Rachel Hawkins) as she continues in this universe and adult Romance.

A Spindle Splintered (CBR14 #17)

A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another?

Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought we were getting an introduction from the author before realizing we were in first person, which I don’t always enjoy, but it often works in novella length, and similarly well in YA, and A Spindle Splintered is both.

The story introduces us to Zinnia Gray on her twenty-first birthday. It is an especially important birthday since it’s the last one she’ll have. Zinnia with a rare genetic condition caused by an industrial accident in her hometown which causes proteins in her systems to build up and screws with her mitochondria. There is nothing the doctor’s have been able to do to extend anyone’s life who has the condition as far as their twenty second birthday.  With a ticking clock Zinnia has developed a set of rules to live by and pursued a degree in folklore and is somewhat of a specialist in the Sleeping Beauty tale, as she has always identified with its Princesses. So when she finds herself slightly drunk in a tower with a spinning wheel on her 21^st birthday thanks to the party planned by her best friend Charm she is uniquely prepared when she pricks her finger and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate asking for help. Zinnia finds herself doing whatever she can for Primrose, and beginning to wonder what she could accomplish if only she fought for survival instead of counting down the clock to her inevitable end.

I liked this one, but I liked the version my imagination kept coming up with more. Harrow wrote the heck out of this, its got a lot to say about the types of lives women have been allowed to live, what boxes we put around ourselves, how love can feel like an obligation, or a prison, instead of something that frees you. But… because Harrow is riffing on such a well known story my brain kept thinking it knew where she was going and as I mentally prepared for the zig I got a zag, and I didn’t always like the zag more. No amount of great Arthur Rackham inspired page art (seriously, it gave a great mood to this) could keep me from feeling the gap. All that said, I’ve still added A Mirror Mended the next Fractured Fairytale to my to read list.

banned book thoughts

Banning books works.

Unfortunately.

On a number of levels.

It keeps books out of the hands of the people immediately effected by the ban.

It emboldens the challengers to go after more. To look beyond the books themselves to take further action against the represented groups.

I would like to say that the benefits of exposure to the challenged titles outweighs the damage, but I can’t. Because media attention is short-lived and successful challenges can lead to bans that left unchecked can keep those books off publicly accessible shelves for years or decades.

It is a tool of power. Power and control. In both the short and long term.

Worse yet, the ban doesn’t even have to hold, or exist for long. Merely being challenged will often pull a book out of circulation due to fear of dealing with the fallout of shelving these ‘bad’ books. Libraries in the United States are, by and large, publicly funded institutions which means that the money that puts books on shelves at all can come under fire if public opinion isn’t good. Quietly across the country boards and directors are making the choice to pre-emptively pull books off shelves, effectively silencing the authors and leaving the readers who need these books out in the cold.

A lot of the rhetoric flying around right now (February 2022) is full of people with good intentions doing feel good actions that provide no real redress to the actual problem. And that’s shitty, because they are acting in selfish ways instead of in selfless action. And as usual, its people who look like me doing the shitty thing on both sides.

I read banned books as a student, not because I knew to look for them, or that they were available to me, but because I had adults putting those options in front of me, occasionally at their own peril, and parents who were supportive of my reading and education broadly.

I read banned and challenged books as an adult because the idea that someone feels they have the right to decide what is acceptable to read, makes my skin crawl.

Some of the most beautiful reading experiences I have had are with banned books… because often banned and challenged books are telling deeply personal stories of the vagaries of this life that we are given. The idea that anyone ‘needs to be protected’ from truth is so rage inducing that I often cannot put it into words, even while actively seeking to read and review banned and challenged books all the time, even while planning to lead a book club about banned books this September.

Because why are books being banned or challenged right now?

Ostensibly the major complaints come down to whether a book is appropriate for its audience. Your mileage may vary on that on its face value. What it is really being used for is to keep books that don’t fit into someone’s view of what “children” or better yet “their children” should be exposed to. Because we don’t talk about those things.

Things like racism or racial conflict.

Or war.

Or genocide.

Or violence.

Or gender identity.

Or queer love.

Or what constitutes blasphemy.

But the world has all these things. Some in greater proportion to others, but they are all true.

And objective truth is more important than comfort, is more important than the propagandist forces that would tell you to be afraid of it. That are after accumulating power based on what they can make you afraid of, of whom they can paint as the villain making your life worse.

Because the thing to fear is living in the dark. Of not knowing truth and believing lies. Of creating boogeymen where none exist.

Because lies are the tools of the oppressors.

And people are just people, beautiful and complex, and fascinating.

Fight back. Don’t be afraid.

Miss Iceland (CBR14 #16)

This is a book that you have to give yourself over to, you have to meet it where it is and accept its way of imparting the story, of whether there is a story at all, and how the author has built her main character, and how that main character chooses to share her world with you.

Once you’ve done that the book embraces you like waves coming onshore. But is it the cold waters of the North Atlantic or something warmer? I have my opinions, and I know you’ll have your own.

Through Hekla we see Iceland in the early 1960s as she endeavors to be a published author, but more importantly to be herself. We accompany her from leaving her family’s farm in the west of Iceland, travelling to Reykjavik with her few belongings including her typewriter, to meet up with her best friends who are already there, and then finally abroad. We meet Jón John and Ísey, and their own struggles with accepting who they are and what life has to offer them as a gay man and a young mother. We see self-invention in Hekla’s boyfriend Starkadur, of his expectation of who is he and who he will be, and of who Hekla will be in relation to that.

This is a book that deals with the desire for creativity and the desire for beauty and what that means in practical terms. There are those, the poets at the cafes, who spend their time around the idea of creativity and beauty and there are those who sit down and make it happen – Hekla, Jón John, and Ísey – in their own ways.Auður pokes at why there were so few women writers in Iceland in at the time, and how women writers were not expected or encouraged. It is also a book about how a society can limit the creative, sensitive people and following one who would push beyond that for as far as she can push.

All set against Iceland’s physicality, of glaciers and volcanoes, and newly birthed islands, and a city growing into itself.

Meet Cute Club (CBR14 #15)

Last week the Twitter Discourse around Romance focused on fallout from a tweet by Jack Harbon about the intent of those outside a marginalized community writing exclusively about that community (he was specifically referring to women, often white women, writing only about queer men). Separate from the actual conversations that happened around that initial tweet, it made me realize that while I’ve read queer romance by queer women, non-binary authors, and those who identify as genderqueer I had not yet read a m/m romance written by a man. I decided to rectify that at once and went to see if there was a Jack Harbon book that looked good to me, because I might as well start with the person who made me conscious of my oversight (I had already put books by Alexis Hall and Cole McCade on my to read for this year but decided to hop Harbon to the front of the line).

Which brings me to Meet Cute Club, the titular book club run by Jordan Collins, who is struggling to keep this beloved part of his social life afloat. He loves romance novels, and he loves sharing that love with fellow readers. But as the months progress his book club is shedding members. The rest of his life isn’t faring much better apart from the time he spends with his beloved grandmother as he is trying and failing to make his case for a raise at his job that doesn’t exactly love but is stable and pays the bills. To help keep the book club afloat Jordan buys copies of all the books they read for his fellow members, provides snacks, and hosts in his own home and it isn’t helping his mood that the new part time bookseller at Jordan’s local indie bookstore is a frustratingly sarcastic handsome asshole who heckles him about the stack of romances he’s buying.

But Jordan gives Rex Bailey what for (several times in fact, a series of fun defenses of the genre for those of us who appreciate it as Jordan does), which in turn inspires Rex to show up at the cute boy’s house for a meeting of the book club to see what its really all about and if he can get Jordan’s sexy uptight demeanor out of his mind. Rex is only in town long enough to clean out and sell his recently deceased grandmother’s home so as a tentative friendship, which leads to dating, begins to develop Rex is as caught off guard as Jordan is by their connection, and they’ll both need to confront the challenges holding them back.  

Overall, I enjoyed the heck out of watching Jordan and Rex navigate their growing relationship. But there were a handful of pacing and POV issues that kept bringing it down to a three-star read from its four-star highs. Every so often Harbon would shortcut background information, for example how the Meet Cute Book Club started in the first place. I had some definite questions about the way this book club works, to be honest and none of them were answered. But more importantly, we don’t experience all the conversations to explain how each character gains that information or pieces together known information to come to a conclusion about their partner, sometimes we’re left to assume it’s in the text and phone conversations we don’t see, and sometimes there’s just no plausible way for them to have happened. Because both leads are unsure about what exactly is happening emotionally to match what is physically developing between them it feels like a big letdown, particularly as this is a first-person narration that switches between the leads (I noticed some of the POV switch issues others have in their reviews and other than some formatting changes needed I don’t think its as confusing as others did).

The book had some things to say about toxic relationships with parents, with what actual acceptance and love looks like, what pouring love into another person can mean and why it matters. It reminded me of Sally Thorne’s Second First Impressions thematically, and that is likely affecting my rating, as Thorne expertly paced out the emotional landscape between Ruthie and Teddy and it made me wish Harbon had given himself more space to give us more of the emotional landscape of the pair together in Meet Cute Club not just separately. But I can still absolutely recommend this 3.5 star read.

The Color of Law (CBR14 #14)

The Color of Law is the reason I have been absolutely plowing through Romances I trust to help feed my brain some needed positive feelings as this book is a big important book about a topic that is rage inducing.

In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Richard Rothstein marches the reader through the various manners by which the U.S. government has actively created and enforced the racial segregation we see all around us by baking it into the law and then denying it has done (fuck you Chief Justic Roberts) so as it is blatantly unconstitutional. The book, published in 2017, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation and irrefutably demonstrates that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that got us to today.

This is a history of the modern American metropolis told by a leading authority on housing policy, who uses extensive research to chronicle a previously untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how the process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. Rothstein shows how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The content of this book inspired rage in me that probably hasn’t come up since I read Evicted in 2017, the sheer frustration at the systems that are harming us, that are working as designed to harm instead of help. And that huge swaths of the population can’t be bothered to give a damn. But I can’t rate this book five stars, because as important as it is to understand de jure segregation Rothstein unfortunately writes in plodding layers, making for a slow and occasionally painful read.