***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it isn’t fair to review a first novel written in 1957 from the point of view of 2001, but at least it’s interesting.

Spirited sorority star Beth takes high-strung newcomer Laura under her wing, with results that can be predicted from the title by anyone familiar with 1950s terms for gay people. What follows is a drawn-out love triangle with the two young women and a fraternity hunk, tinged with a sense of inevitable doom.

If that summary sounds like I didn’t enjoy it, it’s giving a false impression. The mistakes the characters make pile up and not all plotline leads where you’d think, which keeps one interested and keeps one reading. There are no easy solutions and only a couple of happy endings. On the whole the novel was an enjoyable mix of tragedy and pleasure, and an interesting look into 50s sexual politics.

The picture painted of American colleges of the time was one where sex occurred all the time, but was never discussed except between trusted friends and always secret, despite the social expectation of constant dating. Attention is drawn to this when Beth and Laura’s roommate Emmy is caught and humiliated by the sorority. The behaviour of the interested male characters towards the women also strikes me as particularly heinous – even that of the supposedly wonderful Charlie. The punchbag male of the novel is Bud, an irresponsible musician with a roving eye, but I find dashing Charlie much more disturbing. Charlie doesn’t take no for an answer. Charlie thinks it romantic to hold Beth by the neck until she stops struggling. The passages describing his “easy authority” and how much Beth loves to be “commanded” by him certainly made me squirm. I knew this about 50s romances and it’s not like the idea of the sexy rapist doesn’t survive to today, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to read.

Certain familiar and expected patterns occur in the characterisation and attitude towards queerness, but there was nothing painful about how the novel finished. Inconstant Beth makes her decision, and both she and especially Laura have grown as people because of their affair. Laura’s queerness doesn’t disappear, nor does she go mad or kill herself or go to ruin or to a nunnery. The central story was of growing up, of Laura shedding her nervousness and pettiness and the self-harming habits that she used to cover her inner turmoil with in exchange for true inner strength. It was uplifting, even for me, an openly queer woman in the 2000s who’s had remarkably little hassle over it, and who can use that word for herself without anybody being particularly shocked – much less taking it like a slap in the face, like Beth does.

That’s not to say that there weren’t issues with the writing and plot points. Especially in the beginning of the novel point of view seesaws wildly between the characters, and although this gets less as the novel goes on – or perhaps you get used to it – it’s a little disorienting at first. Many tropes appear and are dealt with, and many coincidences are a little too convenient, too dramatic, like scenes in a movie rather than a novel. Odd Girl Out needs to be taken for what it is – a first novel, a tragic romance, a novel written in the 50s and sold cheap with likely very little editorial finetuning. If you can manage that, it’s a very enjoyable novel. If you also manage to imagine being a gay woman who has never read anything about gay people before that didn’t say they are unmentionable, horrible, dirty and wicked, it’s tremendous.

***~~ (3/5)

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The year is 1962. Bobby Blanchard is fresh out of college, and fresh out of dreams since a nasty fall disqualified her from professional field hockey. Instead, she’s taken a post as the Games Mistress in the exclusive Metamora Academy for Young Ladies. Behind its tall gates await spooky mysteries, learning experiences and true – and not so true – love. As the tagline says, “She schooled them in field hockey… and desire!”

I won’t deny I enjoyed this novel immensely, though it wasn’t without some guilt. I barely notice how I miss stories that focus on gayness and women with no straightness or men to upstage them until I come across something like this. On a purely personal level, I found Bobby Blanchard deeply satisfying.

Even as I say that, I can’t deny its faults. All the women may be gay, but they’re also all white. The sole non-white character, the Japanese exchange student Misako/Mimi, barely has lines, and is used by the school’s Young Integrationists Club as an example of how pro-integration Metamora is. Is this conflation of Asian American experience with the African American a parody? I can’t tell. I suppose you could excuse the lack of non-white characters because of the pulp genre, or say it’s because of the exclusive environment the novel is set in and the segregation that still separated the races in 60s America, but that doesn’t make the novel any less white-white-white.

One character, the juvenile delinquent Angle, reads rather like a trans man, but this – ahem – angle is never developed. Of the three gay men (two of them merely strongly implied to be so) who appear in the novel, only one does not strike you as a stereotype. It’s most striking when a character that appeared in an earlier novel by Monica Nolan and was described as “brooding” turns out, now that we know he’s gay, to love fashion and dancing and teasing Bobby about her love life. If Nolan can write such varied and differently beautiful female characters, even if many of them, too, were partly based on stereotypes, why does this variety end when it comes to gay men? Is the lack of non-white characters truly necessary for the genre and setting, or just moral cowardice that prevents writing about the delicate subject of race in the 60s? I guess I won’t know unless Nolan’s next novel in the Lesbian Career-Girls series is a black/white romance, which was a sub-genre of original lesbian pulps.

From a story-telling point of view, the novel suffered from having too many named characters to keep track of, and an over-use of “the (adjective) (noun)” to describe people. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of description unless it appears several times in each page, as it does here. Nolan’s habit of describing people by their profession as often as by their name also gets to be such a quirk it distracts from the narrative. However, I have no complaints about her use of cheesy lines, especially to describe sex and arousal. Those are part of the pulp genre and hilarious, adding a great deal to the novel’s humour, which is never very up-front. This isn’t an over-the-top parody so much as a genuine genre novel, just written decades after the genre’s heyday and infused with modern sensibilities, including a lack of shame over sexual orientation. I much prefer it that way.

Let’s talk about what I liked. The novel’s mystery plot unfolded so slowly it would not have maintained its interest on its own, but it did not need to. Other plots involving the formation of the Metamora field hockey team, Bobby learning to become a better teacher and use her brain, the drama and competition among the girls, the mistakes made and rectified in guiding the students to learn, were quite enough to keep you interested. The shape of the plot reminded me of the Harry Potter series, as if the school setting with its houses, factionality and prefecture weren’t enough, but it worked. The novel sells with a single idea – she’s gay, she’s a gym teacher – but there’s a story there as well as character development that doesn’t solely revolve around Bobby’s sexuality, or Bobby herself. Instead of dropping a gay character into a straight environment to create friction, pretty much everybody in Metamora already is gay and the friction lies elsewhere, in the much more universal problems of teaching, learning and growing up – and mysteries, of course. Who among us wasn’t called to solve the case of a ghostly cyclist or a disappearing locket while in our teens? I only wished it could have gone on longer, and tied up more loose threads.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to pulp fans, lovers of light literature, and anybody who wants to read a book that is not about men or straight people. You may have to forgive a few things, but it’s worth it.

**½~~ (2.5/5)

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Note: I realize it’s a bit cheeky reviewing a book of quotations, but it’s either this or another bit of nothing.

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Horseradish is a book of quotations drawn mostly from Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events books. The author, as you might know, is also a fictional character, and one with a uniformly bleak view on life. The name of the novel refers to a particularly unpleasant vegetable, and forms a part of the introductory tale of the book, that of a woman who goes in search of a wise man to find out if there’s more to life than utterly depressing things like family, work and literature. She is, as can be expected, disappointed, and ends up worse than she started.

The opposite of a positive thinking book, Horseradish’s “wit and witticism” centers on putting things into a depressing perspective. It’s interesting to note that recent research suggests attempts at positive thinking make a person with low self-esteem feel worse, while flat, unpleasant facts cheer them up. This makes perfect sense to anyone who has ever had a low self-esteem, and none at all to those who haven’t, as false optimism only serves to underline a sense of hopelessness and make a person feel more alone. As such, Horseradish might work to cheer some of us up, by mocking platitudes and coming up with better, funnier, more realistic, wonderfully depressing ones instead.

That being said, I would have wished for more consistent sets of thoughts in each of the thirteen categories, and perhaps even a sharper focus on truly sad ideas. The quotes range from the flat (“Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable too. But it never helps.”) to the keenly observant (“When people ask you if you play a certain sport, it is likely that they are very good at that sport and are hoping you are only mediocre so that you can waste an afternoon losing a game.”) to the pointless (“A good thing to do when one is sitting, eating and resting is to have a conversation.”) and the facetious (“There are some who go through life with a shadow hanging over them, particularly if they live in a building which has long, wide awnings.”), with some nearly positive messages thrown in between just to keep you off balance.

Whether or not you’d enjoy this book as a stand-alone depends on no-one but you. To some, it will seem pointlessly depressing, and others, a handy go-to when you feel like an inspiring sentence or two to remind you that a lot of other people have it pretty bad too. If you’re a fan of Lemony Snicket and have read all his Unfortunate Events novels, this book is truly pointless because it’s just repurchasing the words you already purchased before, with only a few new sentences thrown in. But, at least it was printed in an eco-friendly way, cost a couple of coins, and I, who haven’t read the series, personally rather enjoyed it for the 30 minutes it took to read it.

***~~ (3/5)

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Perhaps it’s a mistake to even attempt to review a P.G. Wodehouse novel. If you’ve read one, you have a pretty good idea of what they’re all like, and you’ve probably already decided whether or not you like them. I happen to like them.

In case you’re one of the people who haven’t read one, they are light comedies with plenty of mix-ups and broken engagements, clever language and inanely blathering young gentlemen. Pip-pip, what ho, stiff upper lip and so forth. Eminently charming – somehow only made more attractive via the passage of time, though this may only be true to people used to overlooking early 19th century race and gender fail and the occasional touch of classism. As much is inevitable.

A Man of Means consists of a series of six short stories that originally appeared in The Strand in 1914, a chronological and a consistent whole that – perhaps due to the co-writer C. H. Bovill – read as particularly snappy and satirical for Pelham Grenville W. The theme might have been the corruptive power of sudden wealth, but turned in the end into a light farce on greed, in which a simple and innocent young man, Roland Bleke, learns to avoid traps laid by mercenary characters after his prize winnings. The most biting of these depictions is the unscrupulous stock broker whose operation eerily resembled that which led us to the global financial crisis almost a 100 years later. He ends up losing while Roland gains via the vagaries of the stock, and Roland never even realizes that he was being used. The most oppressive and dare we say sexually charged of the stories is an affair where Roland finds himself engaged to a beautiful dancer from a fictional South American state, who turns out not only to be after his money to finance her country’s royalist revolution, but also married.

The stories read easily and segue into each other seamlessly. For a fan of P.G.’s, this makes pleasant light reading. I’m almost ashamed to say how little I was bothered by the exoticism and classism, when there was so much simple and clever delight to go with it. At the same time, I do not whole-heartedly recommend this to anybody who happens to come from a South American country, or any nation torn with internal conflict.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Warning: Contains the f-word, repeatedly.

I give up, Greg.

Wicked gave us a gritty re-imagining of a fantasy world that most of us know best from the saccharine weirdness that was the 1939 film, with intricate characterization, gay people, complex morality and sex! And a weird-ass disability depiction. Okay. I got past that, though it’s a huge peeve and marred my enjoyment of the novel, along with its eventual cop-out concept of evil.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was a gritty re-imagining of an escapist heteronormative fairytale, with feminist themes, intricate characterization, and complex morality! And then a goddamn offensive depiction of disability

Mirror, Mirror equates humans with dwarfism with mythical creatures who are half object and half person and I just fucking give up, Maguire.

You may have been trying to pull the same trick of making a female villain character likeable but a) she’s still shown to be selfish and evil, b) contrasting her with the pretty pale purity of the Snow White character is not challenging the virgin/whole dichotomy but reinforcing it, and c) what the fuck is up with this fucking disability thing?

Not only does your mythical half-man half-rock creature recognize himself in a picture of a human with dwarfism – meaning shortness of stature is a defining feature of the creature’s species rather than, I don’t know, being mostly mineral-based – a dynamic, powerful old woman is rendered helpless and submissive when she becomes disabled.

Also, Greg, I’m afraid this just wasn’t a very good book. I realize you had something poetic you wanted to achieve here, the idea of formation of identity, lots of pretty mental images of blossoming and blood and sex and violence and primordial psyche, but it doesn’t work. Disbelief can be suspended quite far if you get the details right, but that wasn’t the case here. A child survives under ground without food or drink because, well, it’s just a special spot where that sort of thing can happen. She can make dinner out of thin air, too, because of the spot she’s in. She also spews out years’ worth of menstrual blood because, well, she just does, okay. By the way, there really is a God.

Add to that the necessary historical inaccuracies needed to make Lucrezia Borgia your decadent murderess stepmother and no amount of silly preachers or descriptions of rowdy delightful old peasant women (who end up disabled) or “slow” incestuous goose boys… No, wait, that wasn’t going to help your case anyway.

I am angry because you used to get so much of it right, Greg. You depict non-normative people with compassion, you show the humanity of villainous acts, and the villainy of hypocrisy and racial segregation. You create wonderful characters. You show a fabric of humanity that is more varied than just white, pretty people against ugly, usually coloured people. You can’t follow that up with pretentious ableist bullcrap like this and not expect to make your readers angry.

Stop writing for a while, Greg, and read instead. I suggest starting with FWD.

*~~~~ (1/5)

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Young Victoria ascends the throne of England, and her first lesson as queen is this: that demons are real, and they threaten the nation in a very immediate sense. Soon, the young queen herself picks up the sword, the dagger and the spinning saw axe, and does bloody battle with the fiends from hell.

While an original novel, in a manner of speaking, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter very much reads like another offering in the recent craze for mixing so-called dry subjects with horror genre elements – a craze that tends to produce novels that are more thrilling in concept than execution. Not being constrained by another’s storyline does make the monsters in this offering more of a part of the plot, but the writing is amateurish, with scenes jumping to flashbacks and back without so much as a tense change and the language only really taking off when there is gore to be described – which, fair enough, is done with stomach-turning gusto.

Characterisation is flat when it comes to Victoria and Albert, whose fairytale romance was so poorly written it may as well have come from a pre-opening credits scene in an action movie, setting up the tragedy that would then motivate the hero – as it does in this case. This flaw does not exist across the board, though. Standing out from the rest of the cast were the entertaining duo of the amoral Lord Quimby and his zombie manservant Perkins; however, these two seem almost superfluous to the main plot. Victoria herself remains very much the bland protagonist, which is something no amount of weaponry can cure, and is also upstaged by her protector and instructor, Maggie Brown (mother of John, for you history geeks). I get the feeling this book would have been much better had it been about Maggie and the Quimby/Perkins duo, who the author really seemed to enjoy writing, too.

Given the many fun ideas in the novel, such as a zombie massacre in the Parliament, creepy street urchins, rat massacres and, well, Queen Victoria as a demon hunter, I regret having to give it only one star, but I must be honest. It was just too clumsy for more – and that’s still without going into inevitable historical inaccuracies and the demonisation of the mentally I’ll, which, while a Victorian idea and a traditional in part of the horror genre, is still a travesty.

I did find it readable, but I have a low threshold for readability, and I suppose, if given to a skilled director, it could make a fun film.

**½~~ (2.5/5)

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The family of the late Mr Dashwood, consisting of his second wife and three daughters, are left with very little property after Mr Dashwood is torn to pieces by a hammerhead shark, and must remove themselves to a rattling shack on Pestilent Isle. Life settles down despite the continuing ravages of supernaturally malicious sea creatures, but the two elder daughters, the sensible Elinor and the romantic Marianne, are caught up in hopeless romances. They play out over a year of heartbreak, careful attention to propriety and the dire consequences of its lack. And some sea monsters.

One thing to be said for this novel is that it is better than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In both novels the monsters are superfluous to the plot, tacked on rather than made an essential part of the story. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters at least attempts to tie the added elements to the plot and achieves some truly hilarious moments, where ladies beset with creatures and surrounded by death and disaster still manage to discuss prospective engagements.

I would not recommend this novel for any particular fan of the Regency period or Jane Austen, because the author seems to have transported the story to the other end of the 19th century. The first decade of that century had not yet even heard of bustles, and did not favour pointed heels. Then again this could be attributed to the author’s general lack of knowledge regarding period clothing; a gentleman would never refer to his trousers – should he indeed be wearing trousers rather than the more formal breeches – as “pants”. The technology described is also more reminiscent of late 19th century fiction but, then, they didn’t have underwater cities at that point either, so we can put that down to the novel being science fiction in the first place.

I might recommend it to people with very low expectations. The Lovecraftian mood is nicely set, the best parts involve mixing convoluted Austenian sentences and repressed propriety with scenes of bloody loss of life and limb, and there is, after all, something entertaining about bloody pirates and tentacled beasts. There was a great deal of potential here, but I just don’t think that potential will ever be realized before these re-writers are allowed to rip the original text apart even more. Until then, the monsters will be nothing but window-dressing and that, ultimately, doesn’t excuse their presence, and will never truly satisfy.

***~~ (3/5)

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It’s pretty clear what Gregory Maguire’s schtick is – find a well-known story and derivate the heck out of it. He writes a very specific kind of pro-fanfic, which challenges the accepted interpretation of a beloved tale by injecting realism, death, sex and grime and telling it from a different viewpoint.

He’s not the only one. Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch springs to mind, as well as Neil Gaiman’s short stories Snow, Glass, Apples and The Problem of Susan – not to mention countless of examples from non-pro-fanfic writers. Maguire is special in writing almost exclusively within this genre, and for having shot to success thanks to that one musical inspired by his Wicked.

This one takes the story of Cinderella to Holland during the infamous tulip mania in the 17th century. Iris and Ruth are half-English daughters of Margarethe, who arrives penniless from England to her family’s home town and through many travails marries far above her station to the father of a beautiful, shy child who never steps foot outside the house. Iris, the protagonist and the “clever” sister, manages the passions of the people around her and dreams of becoming a painter. Ruth, apparently mentally disabled, hangs around in the background. Clara, the Cinderella sister, is spoiled and wilful, constantly clashing with her mother-in-law and convinced (perhaps accurately – no spoilers) that Margarethe did away with her natural mother. Eventually, Clara must be pushed and shoved by Iris into her happy ending – though the true resolution depends upon a change in Clara’s heart.

Central themes in the novel include aesthetic fascination with both heavenly beauty and deformity, mistaken impressions, riches and poverty, and sexual awakening. They are rather hammered in, and tend to be more noise than signal, but put together, they make a compelling mix.

You could say the novel was too orchestrated, too stylized to flow naturally, but personally I tend to like my fiction stylized. The one discordant issue that most hampered my enjoyment of the novel was the handling of the character of Ruth. Maguire had already raised my ire in Wicked by representing the disabled Nessarose as unrealistically helpless, spoiled, a burden and, in case that wasn’t enough, evil. Here we have the apparently mentally disabled Ruth, who may be some undefined variety of neuroatypical, but she’s presented as monstrous, animalistic, impaired – even beyond that being just how the people around her see her. But wait, she’s also faking it! And dangerous! If that doesn’t get a bingo in some ableist bingo card somewhere, I’d be surprised.

The most compelling character for me was Margarethe. If she was evil, her evil was a very human variety, and Maguire affords her a certain degree of sympathy, pointing out from the start that her anger and her malice arise from fear, and her fear arises from her intimate understanding of poverty, of the basic helplessness of a person without connections. Maguire’s habit of forcing the reader to be critical of the idea of evil and evil in other people is the thing I most appreciate about his writing, and it’s what I keep coming back for.

If only he realized his own ableism and filed his criticism of the concept of evil to an even finer point, Maguire would likely be one of my absolute favourite writers, and this review would have given him at least a star more.

**~~~ (2/5)

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When lay-about gentleman barrister Robert Audley finds his friend missing on a lazy summer’s day at his uncle’s house, he starts from a dreadful suspicion and goes on to unravel a story of bigamy, deception and murder.

It’s not as good as it sounds like.

First of all, this isn’t really a detective novel. Audley is not a detective, and the secret in almost all of its particulars can be inferred before the disappearance even occurs. It is really more of a gothic romance, save that its hero is a gentleman rather than a harassed lady; in fact, the harassed lady is the villain.

Secondly, the novel is woefully predictable. The only two twists of the plot that I did not anticipate I am inclined to think the author made up on the spot. The novel very much has the air of being written in one go, from returning in latter descriptions to earlier points in the story with a “as I have said before”, and correcting an outburst of description in the previous paragraph with “I am speaking now of his feelings in the period that…”

It almost begs to be rewritten as a real mystery, by withholding details and elements from the reader by rearranging he events and how those events are revealed.

So why two stars instead of one?

Even though many of the characters, events and situations are cliché upon cliché, on occasion the author hits upon a character portrait that’s nothing short from spot-on and charming, or a playful, naughty paragraph that shows that she ought to have been writing comedies. Squeeze out some of the sappiness, leave out the gothic thrills and have the plot be about a missing dog or what-have-you, tidy up the results in editing and amp up the comedy, and you really could have had something. It’s almost a shame to waste a slow-moving, pleasure-seeking, well-intentioned Robert Audley on all this gloomy anguish and the edifying example of a man growing to have a purpose in life. It’s a pity that Sir Harry Towers was only there for a moment to harrumph and haw and feel pleased with himself, or that we didn’t see Mr Harcourt Talboys’ harsh narcissistic personality compromised. Miss Alicia, too, could have had a delightful comedy written all about her.

But no. Gloom and anguish it is, and horrors of madness and blackmail, and my lady punished cruelly with what, really, amounted to not being able to get divorce papers before remarrying and temporary insanity – at least until she tried to protect herself against accusations of the same.

I would not recommend this novel, unless you’re specifically curious about Victorian detective novels (or novels that could broadly fit that description), as I was. The predictability and the slow rhythm of the novel may very well be too much for any casual reader, and the virtues of it are few in comparison.

http://www.tananarivedue.com/

****½ (4.5/5)

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Jessica has the perfect marriage, but her husband has a secret. He’s a killer. He’s also an immortal with blood that heals.

That summary does no justice to the scope of this novel. It’s remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of it is the slowly oppressive style, the attention to detail and historical accuracy and vivid, realistic character portraits. It’s also remarkable in that it’s a fantasy novel in which most of the characters are black.

Jessica doesn’t find her husband’s secret sexy or exciting like she might in a lesser novel. She doesn’t stay with him after she finds out he’s a murderer. She reacts with horror, as you would, but at the same time has trouble breaking off the family bond she had with him. She is a Christian, but her religion is neither touted as the one true way nor made to look silly or insignificant or false; it simply is a huge part of her, and informs how she reacts to the knowledge that there is real, true magic in the world. Dawit, the immortal whose story this is as much as, if not more than, Jessica’s, goes through a hell of his own trying to protect his family and keep his secret, even as he bloodies his hands again and again.

The plot takes elements that have become downright cliché in genre novels – immortal lover, idyllic American home hiding terrible secrets, a mother protecting her child, an ancient occult order hunting the protagonists – and applies research, realism and a sense of real tragedy to them. On occasion I found this incongruity jarring, jerking me out of the novel and back into my analytical head, despite the fact that I love the idea of reclaiming clichés in this sense. The only other criticism I can levy is that the plot’s slow inevitability sometimes made me impatient and I found myself sneaking peeks at coming events just to assure myself I hadn’t figured out absolutely everything that was to come, yet. I hadn’t – and in any case, the rich storytelling made every turn of the plot, anticipated or not, a delicious read. I can see, though, how this might make it difficult reading for some. I find that sometimes a book and its reader need to match, or the rhythm of the novel might make reading it impossible, despite its length or literary excellence. I was just a touch out of rhythm with My Soul To Keep.

This is not a very fun book to read, but it’s compelling, powerful and just plain impressive. It’s the sort of novel that makes you look askance at the other fiction you’ve been reading and think, “Shouldn’t they have tried a little harder?” Due is a brilliant author, and I am happy she chose to write in one of my favourite genres.