Saga Volumes One – Three (CBR14 #71-73)

I’m working on a re-read of the Saga before I indulge myself in the latest, Volume 10, now that Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples are back from their sabbatical. It’s been four years since I last cracked these books, but I was immediately pulled back into the world that Vaughan’s writing and Staples’ beautiful art bring so vividly to life. Its easy to remember why this series possesses so many awards (seriously, its got Harvey Awards, a Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, Goodreads Choice Award, Shuster Award, Inkwell Award, Ringo Award, and has the record for most Eisner Award wins in the “Best Continuing Series” category).

 For those who may not know, Saga tells the story of Marko and Alana, star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of a galactic war. The first issue of Saga literally begins with the birth to their daughter Hazel, and we the readers have spent every issue since watching the various ways in which this little family unit is trying their best to nurture and protect Hazel against a universe that doesn’t want her to exist. Saga is a sci-fi fantasy that up to this point has centered on them being chased around the galaxy.

Volume One introduces us to our family on the run and all of those who are chasing them. There isn’t a lot of lumbering info dumps, the universe that is a scary, crazy, fucked up, violent place is easily understood and the peril facing the young family is illuminated: the antagonist characters are quickly made complex, but also frightening. Volume Two may be a perfect space opera: adventure, romance, and humor. It is the story of the coming together of family across planetary divides as Marko’s parents join in the adventure. Volume Three pulls together the themes of the two previous ones and adds some of its own. It explores how to make a life while on the run, what finding love after a loss might look like, and how to feel about it.  There’s also a bit about getting over a breakup and that violence only begets more violence. While this go round I had even less patience for the tabloid journalists than I did last time through but am even more in love with Lying Cat.

Hazel is the gravitational center of the entire story. I love, love, love that these books contain Hazel’s voice from the future in form of narration around the text blurbs in Staples’ handwriting. It brings such a poignancy to what we’re seeing, reminding the reader always of the larger emotional stakes. Because while these are all about family and the relationships between kids and their parents, that is an enormous thing to tell against the backdrop of a survival story. I’ll be digging into the next three soon.

Transcendent Kingdom

I am an outlier on this work. Yaa Gyasi writes like a motherfucker and I will continue to seek out her work, but this book just wasn’t for me. Transcendent Kingdom aims for big, heavy topics but its treatment of them never feels more than surface level.

This work stands in stark contrast to Homegoing, and while I can see the impulse to go for a different tack there’s such a bare bones approach to the very heavy topics that Transcendent Kingdom attempts to wrangle with – race, depression, and addiction to be specific – that I had a difficult time tracking what Gyasi was after. In fact, it reminded me in that way of We Are Our Completely Besides Ourselves. There was so much that Yaa Gyasi did well, but unfortunately, it’s all the mechanical stuff, the imagery, the word choice. The character growth, development, and pacing are all lackluster and was very clumsy. The narrative is also broken up and told with flashbacks and memories interspersed throughout instead of in a chronological way which only increases the meandering feeling of the book. This is neither an effective character study nor a heavily plotted work. It just is, and that’s a shame.

This book is interested in asking questions about the interplay of religion and science and looks at it through the lens of familial loss and addiction. Transcendent Kingdom is largely composed of Gifty’s recollections and her internal monologue. In that way we are locked with her in her present as a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. But… Gifty has shallow character growth. She was detached and emotionless, which is characteristic of someone undergoing profound PTSD (which she is, full stop, not going to argue that fact about this character as her clinically depressed mother is living in her bed) but Gyasi leaves it unexplored. Since the anecdotes are told in retrospect instead of in the moment there is no obvious difference between Gifty as an adult and a child, specifically as refers to her brother, Nana, who was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. At the end of the book Gyasi has Gifty tell us she’s made progress, but we don’t see it. We don’t see her create a healthy romantic relationship with Han, or even in it, we are just told it exists and given a hand wave of reassurance that he truly knows her, that’s she’s let him. We are told that Gifty and Han are with her mother when she finally passes away, years later in her own home, in her own bed, having been taken care of by a home health aid as she had once been. We hear that she is running her own lab at Princeton as she wanted to (well, she wasn’t specific about the wished-for university, but Gyasi does like to give Gifty only the best), but we don’t see her in that space leading as she wished she was led. The book is in the gap between the penultimate and final chapters, and we are denied it.

The 1619 Project (CBR14 #69)

I don’t imagine this will be a long review, not because the work doesn’t deserve it, and not because there wasn’t plenty to discuss during the Cannonball Read book club earlier this fall, but because after spending months with this work, I don’t know how much more brain space I can give it. In a not insignificant way, I need to be done with this work for now.

This book is a discussion. Its various contributors are providing context, new or more in-depth analyses of how so many topics that make up civics and citizenship can be traced back further than people may anticipate. This is a work interested in historiography (the study of historical writing), and in being historiographic. It wants to be a place to begin a shift on how we tell history because it knows it is not the final word, but a jumping off point. It invites discourse. It is my hope that perhaps it will help elucidate the way in which professional historians work. That it is a constant process of discovery and analysis. That there is really no such thing as one accepted history – that way lies the obliteration of the non-white, non-male, disabled, queer and so many other perspectives.

As you may know, I’ve worked in public history for the past dozen years and was a classroom middle school social studies and history teacher covering world history, world geography, U.S. Civics and U.S. History to Reconstruction for grades 6-8 for a few years before that. I think there’s a great disservice done in how we teach history and that the process of how history is made and remade isn’t understood. It’s iterative. My senior thesis was a historiography related to one individual, comparing and contrasting the ways they had been portrayed and their actions interpreted over the course of a hundred years. Historians write perspective grounded in the interpretation of primary and secondary sources created by people of all sorts of experiences, backgrounds, amounts of power. People who did, people who observed, people who may not remember accurately, but their feelings can tell us so much. Those writing for The 1619 Project are unpacking more and more of those voices, of those people and I honestly think everyone should spend time with this book. May it not take you as many months as it took me.   

Ace of Hearts (CBR14 #68)

Even before Read Harder had a task for reading a book with an asexual or aromantic character, I had been on the lookout for a Romance featuring them. It was a niche within the larger Romance genre that I wanted to explore. With that in mind I had added Lucy Mason’s Ace of Hearts to my to-read list in October of last year. And then I waited, patiently (or not so patiently) for a publication date to be announced. Fast forward to this fall, and the book became available from NineStar Press, a publishing house that is a boutique publisher of quality LGBTQA romance, erotica, and literary fiction.

Ace of Hearts first caught my attention based on the bullet points it can be broken down into provided by its author: a pun-loving himbo, only 1 bed, childhood friends to lovers, fake dating/marriage of convenience. While that does an okay job of painting an appropriate picture, I have a minor nit to pick regarding classifying its male lead as a himbo (he’s a bit too serious for me to consider him one, but I’ll accept that he has a lot of the identifiers). Ace of Hearts is the story of Hesper Stallides and Felix Morlan who have been best friends for as long as they can remember. Growing up they bonded over their troubled home lives and together moved east to leave those lives behind for college. The book begins with Felix suffering a horrible sports injury which derails his professional athlete hopes and results in the loss of his scholarship. Hesper steps in, eventually offering a proposition: a year-long marriage of convenience so he can get free tuition at the college where she works to finish his degree. She doesn’t mention her selfish reasons for wanting to keep Felix close, even though a sexual relationship is not what she wants (nor is it what he expects).

Everything looks like it won’t be too complicated, until they fall in love. When Hesper reveals that she’s asexual, Felix must reassess everything he thinks about love, and ask himself what he’s willing to sacrifice for a future with Hesper—before the past she’s spent her life running from can take her away from him forever. I thought this book did a really good job of letting the reader into the headspaces of its two leads, of seeing Hesper’s various emotional battlefields and also a view into her being a sex repulsed asexual. We also spend time with Felix as he weighs what that means, really, for the relationship he wants with Hesper. Mechanically there were times that the pacing was a bit off, where time jumps or leaps of thought happen without being denoted in any way on the page, but on the whole for as high stakes as parts of this book were, Mason does a good job of keeping it anchored in a believable reality. And Felix and Hesper are a great pair to read.

Content Warning: Abuse of an adult child by a parent, stalking/harassment, kidnapping/abduction, references to alcohol abuse, incarceration of a parent.

Passing (CBR14 #67)

Passing is about pretense, jealousy, psychological ambiguity, concealment, and duplicity. The messiness of being human s portrayed in the relationship between two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. It is through this narrative that Larsen suggests that both racial and gender/sexual identities are as much artifice as they are intrinsic. Larsen is specific in the manner that she portrays her characters. The mechanics of the writing – and its brevity – are significant indicators of the level of craft on display. Larsen is doing big work in this novel, commenting on the social upheaval of the late 1920s. It is a story of social obligation balanced against personal freedom where really no one comes out the winner.

Irene Redfield is married to Brian, a prominent physician, and they live a comfortable life in a Harlem town house with their sons. Her work arranging charity balls that gather Harlem’s elite creates a sense of purpose and respectability for Irene. But Irene is thrown into a panic when she encounters Clare Kendry, a childhood friend with whom she had lost touch. Clare—light-skinned, beautiful, and charming—tells Irene how, after her father’s death, she left behind the black neighborhood of her adolescence and began passing for white, hiding her identity from everyone, including her racist husband. As Clare begins inserting herself into Irene’s life Irene is terrified of the consequences of Clare’s dangerous behavior. And when Clare witnesses the vibrancy and energy of the community she left behind, her burning desire to come back threatens to shatter her careful deception.

The main characters in Passing are two sides of a coin, two biracial women whose identities are performative as they navigate life with the privilege of passing as White. Clare is inscrutable but her passing is not for the greater good, or a statement. It’s based on how she knows to survive, how being raised in the home of her white aunts impacted her perception and her options to avoid poverty. Because at the core, all passing stories are based around class and the social ladder. Irene’s version of the story is about engaging with her life as a Black woman in order to be a shining example of the possibilities and putting to the side the white parts of her background which provide her outlets.

A socially pretentious setting that functions as an artistic choice, a stage setting to allow its (white) contemporaneous audience to engage with the story on its terms and not to fight against it. Larsen structures the novel in three acts, in a typical stage play format. While I could see the work Larsen did, and why nearly a hundred years later its still an important work of literature it didn’t pull me in which is unfortunate because I really wanted to love it.

Ship Wrecked (CBR14 #66)

I am unsure how to review this book. I loved it. I knew I was going to love it. I am enthralled with the choices Olivia Dade makes with her main characters throughout this three book series (this being the finale following Spoiler Alert and All the Feels). I want everyone to read it and have the same experience that I did. I’m aware that most likely not everyone will as I think there’s a certain kind of lived experience needed to fully grapple with the characters Olivia Dade is choosing to forefront in her work.

Ship Wrecked is built on the back story of lovers turned friends before finally exploring their romance. Maria and Peter felt immediate sparks when they met, and it’s only a few hours before they acted on that attraction (we in fact join the characters mid-act as the book begins). After spending the night together Maria left without a word or note – she had no further expectations for their interlude – only to see Peter again when he’s cast as her co-star on Gods of the Gates. The co-star she’ll be filming with, on an isolated island, for six seasons.

In fact, the two are the only cast members in their plot line and will film 95% of their scenes on a remote Irish island with a small crew. Maria, based on her priorities and needs chooses to make the location a happy family unit, including Peter in that warmth even though he has been a complete jackass to her following their mutual audition. She can see that Peter will not create his own pathways to friendship (though she does not yet know the whys or the full extent of his isolation) so she takes the first steps, slowly but surely weaving him into the web of connection that builds amongst the crew. Eventually, Peter recognizes what Maria has done for him and continues the work on his own. Once they are past their initial issues their mutual respect and adoration for each other becomes evident and is put on hold as Peter declines a return to a sexual relationship with Maria while they are filming.

Dade’s stories are always very character-driven, which is on display to great effect in Ship Wrecked with two characters well-developed outside of their romance. Maria and Peter have deep emotional backstories which Dade utilizes to craft a story around trust and recognizing what one needs in order to be happy and to put aside the baggage given to us by our past traumas. Because they both have traumas that haunt their pasts and influence their actions, although one of them is much further along the path of making healthy choices. This wouldn’t be an Olivia Dade book without humor, and we’re gifted with that with the rest of the Gods of the Gates cast and Maria’s family, assuming a bit of absurdist humor is your thing.

There is also a bit of an age gap – 11 years to be specific. On their first encounter she’s 25 and he’s 36, when action picks back up again in earnest after 6 years she’s now 31 to his 42 (which also qualifies this for Read Harder Task 7: read a romance where one of the leads is over 40). It also feels important to note that this is a sexy, body-positive work that does not fetishize or erase the fatness of the characters. Instead, there a plot points that circle directly around their size and their respective choices.  Dade, again, created, fully embodied people whose fatness is a trait as simple as her blonde hair or his aloof demeanor.

Unlike All the Feels I do think that you should probably have read the first two I order to properly enjoy this one. There are fewer interstitials, but there are enough, and the third act brings in plenty of characters from the earlier books.

Thank you to Avon for the advance review copy. It has not affected the contents of this review, only its timing.

The Best American Travel Writing 2020

One of this year’s Read Harder tasks was to read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice. I had a couple ideas and went perusing through my library catalog to see what I could come up with. And then I saw The Best American Travel Writing 2020 edited by Jason Wilson and the absurdity of these pandemic years meant that this one won out. Consider me intrigued to know what won out in a year that no one travelled very far.

In reality these pieces were written in 2019 when the world was still travelling and selected in spring 2020 when it stopped. But from their forewords series editor Jason Wilson and edition editor Robert Macfarlane it is apparent that the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic effected their choices.

I found this particular collection to be very uneven in content and quality. I enjoyed about half of the pieces included, but for most enjoyed is perhaps a stretch. For far too many I caught myself skimming. Only a few really held my attention: Life, Death, and the Border Patrol by Jackie Bryant where she writes about the humanitarian work undertaken by hikers caching supplies for migrants, What I Learned in Avalanche School by Heidi Julavits which chronicles the author’s choice to go to Avalanche School and what that experience was like, My Father’s Land by Courtney Desiree Morris which delves into the embedded racism in tourist attractions – historical or otherwise, and Vacation Memories Marred by the Indelible Stain of Racism by Shanna B. Tiayon where the discrimination becomes directed squarely on one family in a National Park.

Based on my own work the final two of those pieces struck me as the most pressing, but that isn’t to say runner up pieces such as How to Mourn a Glacier by Lacy M. Jones, Glow by James Lasdun, and The Last of the Great American Hobos by Jeff MacGregor didn’t have their strengths. I’m ignoring the rest which dragged my rating down. Instead I want to mention that as of 2021 this series has been cancelled by the publisher, and even though this particular edition didn’t give me a lot personally the depth and breadth of the kinds of writing which qualify as “travel” writing do deserve a spotlight (there is no writing award for the category) so I am sad that this process will no longer exist, to catalogue what the writing looks like.