Why aren’t more people reading this book? Let this (the first review on GR) change that. Mind you, this wasn’t an obvious choice for me either, I’m not exceptionally into technothrillers and I’m really not into spy fiction, I don’t normally commit 400 pages of reading to a book by an unknown author and yet there was something very intriguing about this book and I’m so glad I put reservations aside and decided to try it.
The technothriller aspect comes into the plot pretty much straight away, one of the characters, Alice, gets involved with starting up a new kind of cryptocurrency. Michael, her boyfriend, isn’t really into it, isn’t on the same tech savvy or social conscience level to really get into it, but then the events decide things for him. Alice dies, Michael gets recruited to work for a tech giant named Fess and then once again recruited by an Irish spy named Aoiffe to work for a suspicious puppetmaster of a man named Towse. Cue in a globetrotting adventure, serpentine intrigue, taut suspense, the forever changing powers that be and endless manipulation, scheming and sneaking around that one normally associates with spy fiction and voila, this not so Edenic world comes to life in all of its confusingly exciting splendor. And lo and behold, I really liked it. Might be the first spy book I ever did. The writing certainly had a lot to do with it, from the get go it draws you in with this omniscient perspective done by an unknown narrator. This perspective seems to be accumulated through various data, which is clever in that it immediately establishes the tone for the story, factual instead of emotional, observed instead of experienced, dispassionate in a way and yet strangely compelling at the same time. This remove allows the book to rely on pure plot drivers, requiring structure where every action drives the narrative forward, even as the characters may go around in loops and spirals. But it doesn’t (though it easily might have) leave the character development by the wayside. In fact, in Michael and Aoiffe you get two very interesting leads, outsiders both though in completely different ways, one raised off the grid by foreign exiles in Canada just wants to have a quiet life, one is a young woman from Ireland who is looking for the right sort of excitement and danger and meaning in her life to make things interesting. And Towse…well, Towse is mainly unknowable as a proper spy master ought to be. Once the action kicks into high gear, it moves along with all the terrible and awesome gravity of an avalanche, one country to the next, one adventure to the next, one revelation to the next. Until it all so cleverly comes together at the end. Don’t know if it made me a spy fiction convert or a technothriller fan, but then again it didn’t have to. Because really good books delight irrespective of genre boundaries. And this is a really good book. I enjoyed it very much and it read surprisingly quickly for its size. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
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Reality, subjective and increasingly surreal as is, gets a literary going over by a first rate talent with a dangerously dark imagination.
Oh how I loved this book, lemme count the ways… 1. Originality. 2. Terrific writing. 3. Atmosphere. 4. Clever plotting. 5. The social commentary. I can go on, really, but it’s more fun to just write about it. Didn’t know what to expect with this one, never read the author, but the Black Mirroresque scenarios with horrific tinges were too intriguing to resist. And sure enough, this collection had me from the get go. The main thing here, me thinks, is that Lanchester is a literary author, so he approaches these stories from that angle and they end up as these very well written thinking man’s nightmares about the modern world’s increasing reliance of technology and gadgetry the development of which is steadily outpacing social progress. In fact, an argument might be made that socially people are regressing, in some way potentially proportionately to the rates at which the technology is evolving. The phones get smarter and the people get dumber. That’s a scary thing in and of itself, but Lanchester takes it further, with Matrix like scenarios and haunted selfie sticks, ghosts attached to their mobile phones and families who assemble their own…well, let’s not give away too much, because the surprises in this collection are just too good to even hint at. You just have to read it. Black Mirror, especially at its earlier best, set the bar really high for socially relevant speculative scenarios. Now all sorts of things get compared to it to grab at audiences and very few actually live up to it, but this one actually did, all the way. It went darker too, all the way to the classic scary tales of the bygone era, it has the language and the formality that would delight the fans of M.R. James and the like without the ponderous slowness that’s typically associated with those. The stories in this collection are very modern thematically and timeless stylistically. There is an undeniable elegance to the writing. And it’s so excellently clever too. In fact, We Happy Few might very well be the best short story I’ve read all year and one of all time greats in general. It’s just…awesome. There’s something weird about the way my brain processes short fiction and my reviews of short story collections and anthologies usually reflect it…the individual stories tend to get deleted, usually there are just general impressions of the overall quality. But not with this book, this one was way too memorable for that. Which is as high of a praise as I can provide for it, really, on top of the awesome and excellent and clever. So yeah, a great read. I enjoyed it tremendously. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. Mirrorland. An imaginary place with surprisingly real dimensions. When Catriona and Ellice were kids, it was their secret world, the place they were safe and happy. And memory being the tricky imperfect thing that it is…to a great extent it remains that in their minds, or at least for one of them. The mirror twins, Cat and El, grew up to be undistinguishable in appearances and quite different in most other ways. So much so that familial ties weren’t enough to stay together and so for 12 years, since they were 19, the twins have been living separate lives on different continents, El stayed in gloomy Scotland, Cat went to sunny California. No contact, just memories and even those are wildly different from person to person. And then El disappears on her boat, presumed dead, a catalyst potent enough for Cat’s return, possibly even strong enough for return of some of those tucked away and misinterpreted by child’s mind memories. This entire time El has been married to the love of their (both twins) life and that marriage may not have been all that perfect, according to people who knew El. Plus isn’t it always the spouse in these sorts of stories? So there’s all sorts of suspense, mysterious notes and emails and a passionate love triangle reignited once again. Oh my, as George Takei would say. So there you have it, another of these ubiquitous female thrillers. What makes it different is the approach here, this is first and foremost a story of a profound psychological trauma and the way it echoes throughout someone’s life. Or at least, that’s what it was for me. Because if you choose to read it as a dark psychological drama with crime elements it may be more satisfying than just having another fairly predictable he said/she said thriller. The trauma here is very significant indeed, as the story progresses, the Mirrorland unravels secret after secret, each darker and more disturbing than the next. We’re talking extreme psychological and physical abuse, so be warned readers, this isn’t light in any way. This book being a debut, there are some things the author does nicer than others, the first person suspense is taut and terrific (and, smartly so, uninterrupted by alternating perspectives as so many genre entries do) and this also contributes to a more literary novel sort of thing going on. The Mirrorland is somewhat overwritten (yes, even despite its crucial significance to the story) and so is the do we trust him/do we not romance angle. The plot twist at the end is fairly obvious, though nice for those who invest the time in the story and emotions in its characters. The fact that two young children can go through such a great deal of abuse and emerge relatively functional seems to stretch credulity, but then again kids can be surprisingly resilient. So all in all a very decent entry into the ever expanding genre, darker than most, definitely well above average in quality. Not revolutionary in any way, but pretty good, especially for a debut. The book features a superlative opening quote from The Count of Monte Cristo about the power of imagination and the danger of superlative quotes from superior works is that the book sort of has that standard to live up to. Not a great set up for oneself, but the author’s ambition is to be admired. It is fascinating though from a purely psychological perspective how the mind works and adapts in extreme circumstances, the self defense mechanisms, the walls and armor build for specific purposes and their staying power. For those aspects alone this was a worthy read. But genre fans will also find plenty to enjoy within these pages.Pretty good with notable efforts at originality.. Thanks Netgalley
I love novellas, I like scary stories, I’m somewhat reluctantly intrigued by new authors. So this should have been right up my alley and really the only reason it took me a minute to check it out is that one of the reviews described it as poetic. Well, good news…this novella isn’t poetic unless you’re using that as a synonym for a thing of beauty. Because then, yeah, sure, poetic.
The poetry of succinct perfection. The poetry of telling a story so well and so completely, despite such a tight page count. This is exactly how one a novella should be. To be fair, there are a few chapters of italics featuring something like stream of consciousness rants of a disturbed psyche, but they are actually very relevant to the plot. And the plot is simple enough, tale as old as time, it’s a love story. In a shape of a triangle. Boy meets and loves his best friend’s girl. Boy writes songs and gets famous, girl marries the best friend, has kids, dies young. Boy goes mad with grief. Just how mad…you have to read to find out. Is it a tale of a downward spiral of a man trying to smoke and drink himself to death over an unrealized romance or a tale of a man haunted by love’s ghost? It’s subtle enough and well crafted enough of a book to offer options. I absolutely loved it. The desperate energy and atmospheric beauty of it all. Loved how much the author fit into a novella and how well he did it. Loved the writing itself. It plays like the darkest of love songs against the soundtrack of a starless night. Just as hauntingly and starkly. Bravo. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. Weird fiction by its very nature can be an acquired taste, but Jeff Noon has been putting out just the right kind of weird out there. I’m a huge fan of his John Nyquist series (and I don’t even like series) and was very excited to find book four out on Netgalley. I didn’t even read the plot summary, because I kind of had a pretty good idea of what to expect based on the first three books. And sure enough, expectations met. Another strange, exotic and completely bonkers world for Nyquist’s latest investigation.
This time it’s a world defined by its numerous boundaries, with every border delineating a new set of rules and social norms. There are some interesting, strange and dangerous things occurring within and without those. There are also personality enhancing transplants that may or may not be sentient and literary characters residing in the attics of one’s mind. If it’s sounds completely wild and out there, it’s because it is. So much so it’s actually difficult to do justice describing, especially after reading Noon’s descriptions. And so I’ll just leave it at that. Suffice it to say, Noon’s got a wildly prodigious imagination on a permanent overdrive setting and it results in some of the most spectacular worldbuilding speculative fiction has to offer. And having that been said, I should also mention that this one didn’t quite wow me the way its predecessors did. I’m not completely sure why. Something about this world wasn’t as exciting as the others or maybe it just veered down too many too strange alleys. Or maybe I wasn’t entirely in the mood for it this time. To be fair, having just revisited my review of book three, this is much of the same reaction as I’ve had then. Madly loved first two and then not quite getting the same high with the last two. Still though, even if it isn’t love as such, there’s so much to appreciate here and the entire thing is just so original and different and wild that it’s absolutely worth a read. Not sure where it’s going to go after that ending, but trust Noon to come up with something awesome. After all, he’s really got a knack for it. Strange, bizarre, trippy…what an adventure. There’s nothing like it out there, nothing to compare it to. Which is excellent in and of itself. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. Not only is Catherine Steadman quite steadily one of the best beach thriller (That’s a genre, right? Kinda mindless, but really fun. Sunny. Features sea on the covers.) writers, she’s also quite possibly the best looking one. What kind of a superficial comment is that, you ask? Well, it’s actually pertinent, because prior to her writing career, Steadman was an actress. Still might be, actually. And yet, interestingly enough, it took her until book three to bring all that experience and firsthand behind the scenes knowledge into her writing. But here it is, a thriller that’s a perfect marriage of Steadman’s writing talents and acting career. The perfect storm of write what you know from an author who has already perfected her thriller game.
And so Mia, the book’s protagonist, seems to have outdone her creator fame wise, she’s just done a starmaking turn as Jane Eyre and amid the talks of the Bafta nomination and in the wake of her actor boyfriend literally trading her in for a younger model, she jets off to LA, to take her mind off things and strike that proverbial iron while she’s red hot. Tinseltown is all agog for the new British it girl, there are auditions, parties and a potential hunky love interest, but Mia gets distracted by a fellow actress who does the eponymous disappearing act on her after a chance meeting at casting. Really distracted. So much so she decides to Nancy Drew this thing to the bitter end instead of leaving it well enough alone. After all, no everyone wants to (or needs to) be found. And so you get to follow Mia’s investigation amid all the tinsel of the town known for it and it’s just as fun as geographically close to the ocean to yet again make it a great beach thriller. Plus such a timely one, MeToo ready for the post Weinstein era. I’ve been watching a surprisingly good and addictive Search Party recently and thematically this book went perfectly with season one of that show. Plot wise it’s very much its own thing, though interestingly enough, despite being the one so obviously near and dear to the author on a personal level, it’s also her least compelling book thus far. Or maybe not least compelling, because Steadman’s writing is really compelling by nature, she writes very well (not just well for an actress, either), her books are genuinely tough to put down. It just wasn’t as exciting or as mysterious as its predecessors. It was still very good and the behind the scenes material make it all the more so, but the story itself…much like the first season of Search Party…guess I just wanted more out of plot, more mystery. It isn’t bathetic as such, it just somewhat milder on wow effects. Still, though, very enjoyable, very entertaining and lots of fun. LA after dark proves to be a great stage and one of the most famous signs ever makes for an especially striking finale. There are morals and lessons, but in the end it’s all about the high cost of and the irresistible siren song of fame. And irresistible is about right for the general book appeal here too. Don’t fret, as light as it may seem, this is very much the dark psychological thriller you were hoping for, the sunny skies are deceptive. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. I’ve been a fan of Massie’s since her Leisure publishing days. So it’s been a minute and yet she never disappoints. And so I was excited to find her latest collection on Netgalley, grabbed and read it right away and sure enough, still good
This collection comprises a bunch of short stories, a couple of poems (which honestly I can do without, but that might be a personal preference and they are at any rate too short to mind) and one novella, which takes up the final third of the book. It starts off with a bang, with a titular tale about, among other things, the dangers of grabbing secondhand furniture. A great story that really showcases Massie’s storytelling talents. Then there are a couple of just ok stories and then it really revs up into the high gear and stays there. Am I biased in adoring the tale of a clever Angus steer named Poopy Tail who gets back at his horrible owners? Possibly, but come on, how can you not love that. Massie’s really good at animating the animals, actually, and unlike the bipeds, they are uniformly likeable. So yeah, the short stories are pretty much all good to excellent, with a lovely range and even lovelier dark flights of imagination. The novella is a somewhat different beast, for one thing it’s s social satire. Specifically, it satirizes a society that declines into an idiocracy after a large percentage of the population develops a passionate disdain for science of any kind and, with it, intelligence, education, diversity, etc. You can tell these individuals by their red…Well, read and find out. What oh what might have inspired such a story. A story presciently enough finished at the end of 2019. Technically a global scenario, but really a distinctly American dystopia. Brutal, viscerally disturbing, kind of over the top as far as satires go, but then again this isn’t a genre known for its subtlety. Genre wise these are definitely tales of horrific persuasion, but not precisely so, more like dark speculative fiction if you had to put a label on it. Original, exciting and fun…morals included. Another very good read from a reliably very good author. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. here’s literary fiction and then there’s literary fiction and typed up this doesn’t have the same effect as when spoken aloud, so how do I describe the sort of self indulgent, preciously worded, overwrought and overwritten work like this? It’s certainly literary in that it goes a long way to showcase the powers and beauty of words and in its efforts to understand and elevate emotions and inner workings of the mind. But very consciously so, reading this book you are constantly aware of the author doing this, the stylistic linguistic tricks don’t disappear into the story, in fact it’s almost as if they use the story as a mere canvas to show themselves off against.
Which still might have worked had the story and its cast not been so fundamentally offputting. So let’s talk about that…there’s a very simple basic plot that involves a middle aged woman who has a nice comfortable life and a lovely comfortable man to share it with who takes care of her financially and emotionally, but apparently not enough, so that she develops something of a crush on a famous artist and invites him to stay with them, on their property, in the second place they have built just for guests. It’s a sort of thing from a bygone era, when the wealthy got actively involved with the arts by sponsoring (in a way) the artists. And in fact, this is precisely what this book was inspired by Lawrence’s stay with a wealthy NY socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan at her Taos estate. Though one can only hope the real thing was way less convolutedly antagonistic than the fictional account. L, the artist, known by the mere first initial, is from the get go a giant turd of a person, a precocious prick whose early found fame has apparently liberated him from all manners. At first he tosses the invitation aside, but eventually dire financial circumstances force him to reconsider and so he shows up, with a much younger woman in tow no less and expects to be doted on. And the protagonist of the novel is thrilled to do so. In fact, she relocates her own daughter and her milquetoast of a bf into the main building with her and her ever patient spouse, so that L and his lady might have the privacy they require. From then on, it’s all about the screwed up group dynamics of this uneven and unpleasant situation. The protagonist never becomes likeable in her fawning adoration of the man who plainly wants nothing to do with her, but use her for her money. L never becomes…well, he doesn’t even come close to likeable, he remains a prick throughout, graduating from precocious to petulant and then descending into his own tragedy too profoundly to be rescued even by money. L’s lack of any semblance of gratitude is only ever as striking as the protagonist’s lack of need for it. She’s driven by something different, something less quantifiable and infinitely sadder. In the end, they are both tragic in their own ways, though she manages to maintain her unevenly loving marriage as a safety net. L, to the very end, remains unworthy of attention or affection. The note in the end doesn’t do much to rectify that. And yes, I know, I know, it’s dangerous and possibly wrong to view fictional characters through the prism of one’s own morality, but it can’t be helped. We read as we are and as I am, I was appalled by this characters. And not all that enamored by the overdone writing either. There is, objectively, a certain beauty to it, but it’s too much of the same, most meaning and profundity wrapped up in so many words that it’s all but obscured. There are some interesting and well done meditations of the nature of relationships, marriage especially. But overall the affect is mostly muted but the thoroughly unpleasant story. The book’s official description mentions female fate and male privilege, because of course that’s what you mention nowadays to sell books, but frankly the female in this book is the privileged one and the power games played between her and L have less to do with feminism and wokeness than they do with personal shortcomings of those two as people. The publishers have obviously tried to make the book fit into the contemporary hot button mold, but it’s nowhere near there. In the end, I can’t remember the last time an obviously well written literary book has made me so angry. The look at me, look at me, look how clever I am with words thing it had going was just much too much. And who the f*ck is Jeffers? Why is the entire stupid thing addressed to Jeffers who never makes an appearance or is mentioned otherwise? Is it to justify the epistolary form? Is Jeffers the one who gets and enjoys this sort of thing? Well, good for Jeffers. I’m out of here. At least this book had the decency to be short. Definitely an acquired taste. Thanks Netgalley. I’m always up for an immigrant experience/ culture clash story, but this book is so much more than that. Also, I’m usually cautious about memoirs, graphic or otherwise, main reason being that oftentimes people who write memoirs haven’t lived the lives worth memoirlizing. The book must always, always have a good story.
This book does. It isn’t just a memoir (been here, done that sort of thing), it’s a personal journey into reckoning one’s own life and family within the context of one’s culture, country and world. Krug might be an international person, citizen of the world, but there is past, an indelible weight of belonging to a country that has caused such devastation less that a century ago that it can’t be ignored. And so, after living stateside for years, Krug returns to her native Deutschland to track down her family and learn all about their personal involvement in WWII. It’s a brave personal quest and in the end definitely one worth taking and worth reading about. For the author it seems to offer a lot of closure. For readers it offers a fascinating first person perspective, cleverly cobbled out of art, biographical writing, photos, memorabilia entries, etc. into a mentality of being a modern day citizen of a modern progressive country, whose dark and terrible past still echoes and resonates globally, all these decades later. Great literature is meant to help us understand the world and people in it, though they may be wildly different from us and all we know. It makes you think about the world in more informed way and helps exercise the compassion muscles by providing context for the actions of others, incomprehensible as they may seem on the outside. This is what this book does and does it well. It takes what might have been (Nazi) caricatures and gives them dimensions and layers, makes them real, real people, often faces with terrible choices and trying to do their best. It’s really difficult to accept because, you know…Nazis. But it’s interesting to read about through the prism of such a personal perspective as Krug tries to objectively determine her family’s culpability and take stock of the subsequent trauma. Really interesting and well worth a read. The book is text heavy and very creative, not your traditional graphic novel in layout of stylistic choices, but very well done. The narrative voice is compelling and honest and the art really compliments the story. Not alight read by any means, quite heavy in fact, but very good. Certainly merits all the acclaim. Recommended. In interests of diversity and just for a nice change of pace, I like to mix female authored thrillers with male authored ones. Accusations of sexism and generalizations aside, there really is (usually) a significant difference, in tone, mood, pacing, so many things. And this is the author I’ve been meaning to try and Netgalley accommodated.
So then…imagine if someone came to you and told you that you had to kill your wife or she’ll end up causing a global catastrophe and death of millions. This someone would claim they were a representative of a secret society centered around a man who knows the future, a society dedicated to making precognition based murderous decisions for the greater good. Crazy, right? Moreover, positively unthinkable. Also, makes for a good story. Now meet Nate and Jenny, a loving couple in a longtime committed relationship, parents to two small children. Both are lawyers by training (the adults, not the kids), but Jenny is the six foot tall breadwinner of the family, while six foot four Nate is a stayathome papa. Just imagine how tall their baby girls are going to grow up to be, pure WNBA material. Anyway, Nate is the one presented with the unthinkable choice in the beginning of the novel…way to take the trolley hypothetical exercise to the new levels. And Nate is freaking out. Especially after the proof of the future predictor’s abilities is presented. What do you do what all the options are terrible? Well, first research. Then weapons. Then go on an all out ballistic assault like a popcorn action thriller that you’re in. Which is to say at some juncture the novel abandons a lot of its theoretical and cryptic aspects and just turns into a good old fashioned shoot ‘em up. And that’s actually totally fine. Because this isn’t meant to be some profound morality play, this is meant to be 100% pure fun. Fun with an intriguing premise, sure, but more so just a summer movie type of fun. With likeable leads going up against sinister forces…a sinister secret society (unlike all those other cozy kinds)…with enough gusto and cheese for an Italian restaurant menu and omnia vincit amor message to boot. Cute, wildly entertaining, more than mildly preposterous when seriously contemplated. Preposterousness has to be mentioned. The entire plot hinged on the fact that people apparently can’t properly communicate to their loved ones. I tested this, I conveyed the plot to my fiancé (and we’ve been together as long as the couple in this book) and asked would you walk away from a work project if our lives depended on it and the answer was yes, of course. There, it was that easy. But then of course there’d be no book. Plus, to be fair, the author does throw in more plot twists in the end, so that it isn’t just as straight forward as one decision/sh*tton of deadly consequences. But the motif of having secrets from your spouse and not communicating properly remains prominently featured. Anyway, all that aside, this was a fun read, dynamic, entertaining and it went by quickly. An easily likeable book, good introduction to a new author for me and an exciting energetic camera ready sort of story. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley. |
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