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Mar. 9th, 2019 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraRecent books, fiction -
- Joseph Cassara, House of Impossible Beauties - Lyrical multi-perspective novel about a Latino house in the 1980′s Harlem ball scene, clearly inspired by Paris Is Burning. This is a complicated text of both elegy and imagination, and there’s a complexity in writing about real people who died very young and not so long ago. Cassara is trying to memorialize a queer history that is his own, but also not (I found this interview with him illuminating), and I have a lot to think about there. But it’s also simply a gorgeous first novel; I love the pacing, and the texture, and it made me cry on an Amtrak.
- Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies - This novel is actually a somewhat uneasy combination of two stories, told alternatingly - a historical story about Imam Shamil, who led a resistance movement against Russian imperial expansion into Dagestan in the mid-nineteenth century, and a contemporary story about a half-Somali, half-Russian professor in Scotland whose research on Shamil becomes uncomfortably relevant when one of her students is accused of terrorism. I really like Aboulela’s style, but the novel suffers from the fact that the historical narrative is vastly more interesting than the contemporary one, which could have complemented it but never quite gelled. I wanted a novel all about Shamil and his circle. That section of the book was fantastic, though, and had two contrasting really excellent hostage narratives, which we know I am so weak for.
- NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names - A young girl grows up making her own world with her friends in post-war Zimbabwe, and then has to abruptly adjust to life in the United States. This had really strong voice, and managed to get an effective and distinct child-pov without being either cloying or self-consciously edgy. It’s technically very well done, but I am not finding it staying with me that strongly.
- Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid - Three young Israeli women navigate their journey to adulthood and complicated experiences of military service. There were a lot of interesting pieces in this, but overall it was scattered and confusing. The three protagonists’ voices and perspectives were so blurred with each other that it was hard to keep them straight, and the narrative emphasis seemed skewed and difficult to follow.
- Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy - A young gay Indian-American boy growing up in Cincinnati tries to understand himself through a connection to the god Krishna. This was just immensely lovely, so much so that a summary cannot do it justice. The novel is set apart from other queer coming-of-age stories from the simple beauty of the protagonist’s voice and way of looking at the world, which is at once ironic and sincere. The role of religion in the story is excellent.
- Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves - This got compared to Pale Fire? Really? Ugh.
- Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road - A teenage girl in a very patriarchal fantasy world runs away from home and an intolerably limited future and finds herself. I wasn’t expecting to like this nearly so much as I did; I found Hartman’s Seraphina duology, to which this is loosely linked, enjoyable but largely forgettable (…except for the excellent poly triad), and the premise of Tess of the Road sounded like a million other YA fantasies that I’ve read. But something about this, about its use of the picaresque and the slow pacing of its trauma narrative, worked far more than I could have anticipated. It’s still not really my story-type, and there are places I would refine, but I am very glad to have read it.
(This is my Tumblr book post format - still experimenting over here.)
- Joseph Cassara, House of Impossible Beauties - Lyrical multi-perspective novel about a Latino house in the 1980′s Harlem ball scene, clearly inspired by Paris Is Burning. This is a complicated text of both elegy and imagination, and there’s a complexity in writing about real people who died very young and not so long ago. Cassara is trying to memorialize a queer history that is his own, but also not (I found this interview with him illuminating), and I have a lot to think about there. But it’s also simply a gorgeous first novel; I love the pacing, and the texture, and it made me cry on an Amtrak.
- Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies - This novel is actually a somewhat uneasy combination of two stories, told alternatingly - a historical story about Imam Shamil, who led a resistance movement against Russian imperial expansion into Dagestan in the mid-nineteenth century, and a contemporary story about a half-Somali, half-Russian professor in Scotland whose research on Shamil becomes uncomfortably relevant when one of her students is accused of terrorism. I really like Aboulela’s style, but the novel suffers from the fact that the historical narrative is vastly more interesting than the contemporary one, which could have complemented it but never quite gelled. I wanted a novel all about Shamil and his circle. That section of the book was fantastic, though, and had two contrasting really excellent hostage narratives, which we know I am so weak for.
- NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names - A young girl grows up making her own world with her friends in post-war Zimbabwe, and then has to abruptly adjust to life in the United States. This had really strong voice, and managed to get an effective and distinct child-pov without being either cloying or self-consciously edgy. It’s technically very well done, but I am not finding it staying with me that strongly.
- Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid - Three young Israeli women navigate their journey to adulthood and complicated experiences of military service. There were a lot of interesting pieces in this, but overall it was scattered and confusing. The three protagonists’ voices and perspectives were so blurred with each other that it was hard to keep them straight, and the narrative emphasis seemed skewed and difficult to follow.
- Rakesh Satyal, Blue Boy - A young gay Indian-American boy growing up in Cincinnati tries to understand himself through a connection to the god Krishna. This was just immensely lovely, so much so that a summary cannot do it justice. The novel is set apart from other queer coming-of-age stories from the simple beauty of the protagonist’s voice and way of looking at the world, which is at once ironic and sincere. The role of religion in the story is excellent.
- Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves - This got compared to Pale Fire? Really? Ugh.
- Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road - A teenage girl in a very patriarchal fantasy world runs away from home and an intolerably limited future and finds herself. I wasn’t expecting to like this nearly so much as I did; I found Hartman’s Seraphina duology, to which this is loosely linked, enjoyable but largely forgettable (…except for the excellent poly triad), and the premise of Tess of the Road sounded like a million other YA fantasies that I’ve read. But something about this, about its use of the picaresque and the slow pacing of its trauma narrative, worked far more than I could have anticipated. It’s still not really my story-type, and there are places I would refine, but I am very glad to have read it.
(This is my Tumblr book post format - still experimenting over here.)
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Date: 2019-03-10 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-12 04:45 am (UTC)I'd been wondering about Tess on the Road particularly because I had "it's fine, but not my thing" responses to Seraphina (so much so that I never got around to the sequel) and was wondering if it was more of the same, so I particularly appreciate your thoughts on that precisely.