Her Fine Eyes

I love Julie Berry. She's quietly breaking boundaries in young-adult literature, and doing it with hard work and beautiful prose, and good on her for that.

This one is exceptionally researched, as always. The framing device--having the stories of these four human characters told through the eyes of the Greek gods who are watching and influencing their lives--is a brave one. However, it asks us to be invested in the gods' story, too (Hephaestus's jealousy over Aphrodite's affair with his brother, Ares, god of war), and...I wasn't, terribly...invested, I mean. I was amused, though, and that's probably enough.  

Another trouble I had with the novel was a slight lack of depth of all the characters. They all had definite personalities, and we know what we're meant to feel about them, but they remain a bit distant and perfect. Aubrey felt the most rich to me, despite having less page time than others. The gods were a bit inscrutable--which maybe gods should be.  

Just keep at it, Julie. You're doing wonderful things.

This was helpful for me in teaching me to let go of any expectations or judgments I have about my loved one leaving her abuser, and instead learn to be a better friend to her--so that she can leave him if she chooses to leave, or she can have me as a source of support and safety if she chose to stay.

I had an "aha moment" when this book talked about how my insisting that my loved one leave the relationship, and badgering her about it, was precisely what the abuser does to her--tries to exert power over her and control her actions, and implies that she cannot be independent and is not capable of making her own choices.

The book helps you to let go of your old goals for your loved one and form new, healthier ones that you have control over.

This is a must-read for everyone--for people who are being abused, people who are not being abused, family members and friends of people being abused, people who have escaped abusive relationships, people who want to understand angry and controlling men... EVERYONE. It demystifies partner abuse in a way that our society NEEDS to understand.

***Warning: This review assumes that you've read the book.***

I so wish this book had done more. It's hard to say this, but it felt phoned-in. I'm surprised it was long-listed for the National Book Award.

It felt a bit like Ms. Mafi was not writing from a need to write this story, although I'm sure she felt passionate about the project when the idea occurred to her. It's Own Voices about a Muslim girl's struggle with prejudice (others' and her own), it has a sweet young-adult romance, and the heroine has a hip, unusual hobby. But everything was explored on such a superficial level, I found myself thinking, "I guess it's nice to have a meh book about diverse characters." We need diverse books that hit it out of the ballpark, but we also need diverse books that are just okay. 

I got the sense that Ms. Mafi began writing this with the idea that there was an important story to tell: a person who is unjustly rejected and ridiculed by society because of her religion and clothing can herself begin to adopt prejudices. But then I picture Ms. Mafi unexpectedly finding herself slogging through the manuscript, trying with some discomfort to make it part memoir, second-guessing herself on how to tackle these serious issues, wanting it to be YA, thinking (erroneously) that the romance was the key to her character's growth, and the whole while she wasn't achieving the depth or lyricism that she wanted. But she'd written something by the end, it was finished, and her editor liked it well enough.

It was so benign, as literature. Shirin's family's religious life is oddly absent (the only mention of praying is when she and her brother lie to their parents that they've said their morning prayers) while focusing almost exclusively on the family's cultural traditions. The sections about break dancing are described without a hint of passion, or what it feels like for the character to dance, or what dancing makes her feel. (Some of the sections about her hobby sounds almost rote, like a wikipedia entry of break dancing and its history.) Break dancing doesn't tie in thematically in any sense, it just moves the plot along. The prose is flat and telling. ("Music [through earbuds hidden under her scarf] made my day so much easier. Walking through the halls at school was somehow easier; sitting alone all the time was easier.") And by the end, the story spends far too many pages and too much emotional energy on the struggle that the white boyfriend character, Ocean, faces when he dates Shirin. (He loses his basketball scholarship, gets expelled from school, Shirin worries about what their relationship has done to his college prospects and breaks up with him for the sake of his future, etc.)

It's incredibly valuable to show not only characters of color and of diverse religions and cultures in YA literature, but also the wide range of diversity there is. For example, undoubtedly Ms. Mafi's family and many other Muslim families are very accepting of white friends, so that the parents' welcoming attitude toward Ocean reflects an accurate part of the spectrum of the lives of children of immigrants. But while I don't expect Shirin's parents to reject Ocean, I do think his whiteness, his boyness, would create at least a small issue for these otherwise traditional parents--would be discussed, would be grappled with. By eliminating all sources of conflict about Shirin and Ocean's relationship other than what the outside world lobs at them, we get that same sense of superficiality that the novel has in so many dimensions. (Even Shirin's otherwise protective brother arranges for a quiet rendezvous for them in Shirin's bedroom.) In general Shirin's parents are not three-dimensional characters but a montage of charming, jovial characteristics. 

After reading the focus on Ocean's struggle toward the end, I became suddenly disappointed by the title, too. A Very Large Expanse of Sea is, in fact, an ocean. I have an active imagination, and I picture Ms. Mafi's beta readers or editor pointing this out. I see the author tossing in this line to try to deflect the criticism that this book is too much about the boy: "We broke apart, fighting to breathe, holding on to each other like we were drowning, like we’d been lost, left for dead in a very large expanse of sea.” See there, she says? Now it's a line in the book, now it's only a double entendre.

We need diverse books, even the ones that are just okay. This one is just okay.

This was on sale on Audible for 99 cents, so I couldn't resist. 

At two hours and forty-three minutes, it's a short, self-help pick-me-up, designed to encourage artists of all sorts to set aside negative internal thoughts about their work and just get back to making stuff.

The tone is warm and encouraging, which is precisely what the material calls for.

It might be most useful for someone who's just embarking on a creative enterprise, to give them courage, and to force them to stop and think about why they might have negative thoughts about themselves. (Did you receive a negative critique in the past? Did a parent or teacher dismiss your art as a child?)

I'm not much of an "exercises" enthusiast (e.g. thirty-day projects, writing prompts, painting prompts), so I wasn't interested in those suggestions.

I wish it had been more carefully researched and edited. I don't need it to be a scholarly tome--it's supposed to be light and fun, after all--but a little fact-checking always helps to make a published work feel more authoritative. 

1. It did not take Thomas Edison 10,000 attempts to produce a successful lightbulb. This is an often-repeated myth. See the explanation of his trials and errors here. (His lab did apparently conduct thousands of experiments while designing a storage battery.)

2. The phrase "working in a vacuum" does not refer to a vacuum cleaner. At first I thought Ms. Krysa was talking about it being dusty and too small inside as a play on words, but she continued the description throughout the chapter. She does understand that the metaphor means "working in isolation," but doesn't seem to realize that the origin of the expression is "a space devoid of matter," not "a machine to suck up dirt." :)

3. She asks "What if Leonardo da Vinci had thought painting the Mona Lisa was a waste of time?" In fact, da Vinci is a terrible example if you want to portray a healthy attitude about one's artistic career. He was notorious for not completing commissions, for leaving paintings unfinished for years, and for feeling like an abject failure because of it. He carted the Mona Lisa around with him until his death, rather than present it to the patron who commissioned it.

This book surprised me in the best way. I thought it would be another fluffy young-adult historical fiction novel that veers off into a jolly romp at the expense of getting the time period and the history right. But Ms. Lee takes her research seriously all while providing colorful, rich characters and slamming her readers with adventure.

There is anachronism, yes. There is the spunky sister who secretly wants to be a physician but is being sent to finishing school. There are occasional slips into modern slang (I can't find the first recorded date of "absobloodylutely" but it does seem to be Australian, not English). 

Perhaps the novel doesn't commit to its genre early enough. The fact that alchemy is a real kind of magic in this world, not a fruitless scientific pursuit, makes it a touch fantastical, although nothing else in the plot suggests that (and the alchemy turns out to be more of a MacGuffin than something the characters use). And the author herself seems to realize that she sat down to write about a young man who is in love with his best friend and going on his Grand Tour, yet it somehow became an amusement ride instead. Monty nearly breaks the fourth wall with his meta comment, "We've had an adventure novel instead of a Tour." 

But I enjoyed the action, and maybe even the surprise of it. I learned to accept that the privateers are unusually sensitive because of their pasts, not cutthroat--when in reality maybe they'd be more violent because of the wrongs committed against them. I only rolled my eyes a little when Felicity stitches a large gash on her own arm without even wincing, because she's that tough and clinical. I decided not to be disappointed that the Duke of Bourbon is a one-dimensional villain. I closed my eyes to the fact that this incredibly important box that drove the action of the book was just sitting on a desk where anyone could take it. I forced myself not to investigate whether Venetian islands can actually sink while you're standing on them. I just went along on the romp.

I loved that Ms. Lee had a goal of telling a story about queer, disabled, bi-racial, feminist characters in a historical setting. I thought it was a nice realistic touch that Felicity never quite accepts Monty's attraction to Percy, though she doesn't get in the way of their relationship. 

One tiny plot question: the deal with the privateers was that Percy would go back and get a letter from his uncle allowing them to legally patrol the seas. And yet at the end of the novel our protagonists haven't stopped back "home." Did I miss something? I don't think a long-distance message from Percy to his uncle would suffice in getting that letter--he'd have to show up personally to secure it. Perhaps the sequel will start with their return to England, though my impression is that the second book is about Felicity on the high seas.

(Not: I listened to this in audio, and Christian Coulson's narration is excellent.)

***spoilers ahead****

BURIAL RITES is lovely and poignant. The writing is beautiful. Unfortunately, since you know the ending before it happens, it fizzles a bit. Interestingly, I did not feel the same way about Madeline Miller's SONG OF ACHILLES--another novel where the ending is fixed and inevitable. I think this is perhaps because the plot and character changes were somewhat predictable in BURIAL RITES: Agnes is portrayed as a bright, hardworking, unconventionally pretty, sympathetic heroine trapped in her circumstances, and the people who live with her (and care for her) at the end of her life are wary and judgmental but are eventually won over by her relative humanity. These side characters (the farm family at Kornsá, and the assistant reverand), whose points of view are in third-person, are never quite as rich and fleshed-out as Agnes, who speaks in first-person.

There are hints at ambiguity that I would have liked to have seen pursued more: Agnes's first-person-internal version of her story is different from what she recounts aloud to Margret. There are hints that she is an unreliable narrator. (Although it's obvious that she also has given up on telling the nuanced truth, which is that she both loved Natan and suffered terrible emotional abuse at his hands.)

As I was reading, I even thought there would be an implication of sexual harassment on District Commissioner Blöndal's part--that we'd find that his vindictiveness was based on Agnes rejecting promises of leniency in exchange for sex (and that Siggy had given in, and thus gotten an appeal). None of that came to pass, although it's made clear that being older (in her early 30s) and being intelligent made Agnes seem threatening and evil to the court, where young, pretty, and seemingly simple Siggy was considered more of an innocent victim of her accomplices.

Still, this novel is well researched and so evocative of time and place. An accomplished, highly readable debut.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence review: the hand of the author was too visible to allow me to fully immerse myself in this one.

My favorite part: Brava to Ms. Graudin for showing so subtly and clearly that, no matter how hard one tries, one can never inhabit another person's thoughts or fully understand that person. This was the subtlest theme of the novel, and one I truly enjoyed--watching Yael realize the tiny ways in which human relationships, even when public, are by their nature intensely private, and how another person's mind and life are impossible to grasp, despite intense research and investigation.

Premise. The most common praise I've heard for Wolf by Wolf is that it has a unique and fascinating premise. The alternate-history aspect, in which Germany and Japan have won the war, is not in itself unique. (See this Wikipedia article entitled "Hypothetical Axis Victory in World War II.") Even the element of an underground resistance movement that wants to kill Hitler has been done before in this same alternate-history context.

So the unique aspects in Wolf by Wolf are the facts that Yael is a shapeshifter, and that she has to win a cross-continent motorcycle race in order to get her shot at the Führer. Unique, perhaps, but these two features actually weaken the novel somewhat in my opinion: 

Road Race. For me--and this may not be true for other readers--a race is just not interesting enough to sustain the entire book. It very quickly felt like a series of hurdles: problem introduced, problem solved; another problem introduced, etc. Sometimes solving one problem created the other. Many times, Yael solved the problem simply by revealing her plan or identity to the person involved. (More on that below.)

Shapeshifter. Alternate history and historical fiction are a great pairing, but the fantasy element of Yael being able to shapeshift made the history less believable. In every other way, the world was like ours: unmagical. And other than the implied existence of other shapeshifters, nothing else is fantastical in this book. It made me wonder whether a) shapeshifting was necessary to accomplish what Ms. Graudin wanted to achieve, and b) if it was necessary, why this world didn't have more fantastical elements.

The science. Because let's face it, the science-fiction aspect was not convincing. When your plot device is medically based, I want some sort of plausible mechanism. You can make it up, but it should be based on something scientific or biological. What sort of injectable agent could possibly cause a person to be able to change their body, right down to bone shape and length, within minutes? The reader is meant to accept this as the premise and move on, but I got stuck in Untransported Land.

The hand of the author/author devices. When the author allows implausible things to happen just to keep the story moving, it becomes difficult to stay transported as well. How likely is it that in a concentration camp the gate guard would allow Yael to exit the camp when she tells him the doctor has requested to see her? Wouldn't he accompany her from the gate to the doctor's door? How likely is it that the nurse wouldn't accompany her from the clinic to the commandant's door? Ms. Graudin needed to develop a more sophisticated escape route, rather than ask us to believe these two impossible moments could occur.

Similarly, how likely is it that the race organizers have stocked fuel but not drinking water at the checkpoints? They've lugged spare motorcycles to each checkpoint, but no water? This was an author device to get Yael to approach Luka for a favor. And even that is unbelievable: why would Yael go to Luka, her nemesis, for a canteen, rather than to Adele's brother, who has said he wants to protect her? And why would Luka bargain the water for a mere favor, rather than demand that she partner with him, which is what he really wants?

Why does it take so long for Yael to ask Felix where he got his information about a "big event" happening at the race. Wouldn't Yael be suspicious of him?

How is it that the Russian partners in the resistance don't know Yael's code name, or that she's on this crucial mission, even though the race goes through their territory?

The Russian commander says that his life and the life of his men are forfeit if he lets her go, yet if she "happens" to escape "that's a different matter?" Really? He wouldn't be punished in the extreme for his incompetence in allowing an escape? 

Linearity. Although Ms. Graudin tries to break up the monotony of the motorcycle race by inserting flashbacks of Yael's origin story (which I did find interesting), it's hard to stop this book from feeling very...linear. There is a hurdle, then a solution, repeat. The solutions are often Yael skinshifting her way out of the problem, spilling her plan--to the soviets, to Felix--or provided by a deus ex machina (e.g. Felix fixes her bike for her).

The Soviet side-trip. Why is this in the novel? It achieves nothing in service of the plot. I can only think that Ms. Graudin thought the monotony of the race needed something to break it up. Everything that she achieved (getting the competitors to rely on each other) could have been done another way.

Research. There were some errors here:

Ms. Graudin painted a picture of Cairo with "carts full of pomegranates and figs." Well, this race begins in early spring (late March, early April) and Egypt's pomegranate season runs from early September to December. Figs are more complicated (they have two seasons, a big one and a small one), but since Ms. Graudin doesn't specify dried or fresh, we should probably cut her some slack by assuming the cart had dried figs.

Luka says, "Not such a great bullet point on your curriculum vitae." And the narrator says, "No number of bullet points and biography facts could pin the soul behind her eyes." Unfortunately the term "bullet point" is from 1983, and the advent of wordprocessors.

Miriam reassures Yael that Babushka and Mama, both deceased, will be "watching" her escape from beyond. This implies a Christian view of heaven, doesn't it?

The writing. The language is meant to be evocative, but sometimes it simply doesn't make sense: "Act like you belong, not a hollow stuffed girl."

Sometimes the descriptions are so unspecific as to not be helpful, visually:

[To reach the knife in her boot,] she had to bend her body at awkward angles (which might have been impossible if Yael hadn't used her skin shifting to lengthen Adele's arms a few centimeters)...

Tell us how her body is bending, please.

Ms. Graudin also likes to serially pair nouns and/or adjectives, which might be fine in moderation, but there's a little too much of it of it. For instance, in describing Luka's lips:

Moving and melding. Soft and strength, velvet and iron. Opposite elements that tugged and tore Yael from the inside. Feelings bloomed, hot and warm. Deep and dark.

And speaking of "soft and strength," she has an interesting habit of using nouns for adjectives (strength instead of strong) and adjectives for nouns ("the tight of his fist"). Pretty, or distracting? I truly couldn't decide.

I had questions:

Why was the Japanese racer crying, only to be murdered without our finding out why? 

What the heck are the rules of the motorcycle race, and how is it timed? We're given some information, but if I had to reconstruct it to hold an actual race, I couldn't.

In sum: This was refreshing YA fantasy for not being yet another Beauty and the Beast retelling, and for choosing an alternate history for its "dystopia." I was totally happy to keep reading it, but now that it's done I find I'm enjoying watching The Man in the High Castle more.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: A John Green read-alike, plus an asteroid hurtling toward earth.

The good. This book is charming and wholesome, and I'm thrilled to see a STEM kid as the hero. There's a disabled teen in a wheelchair who becomes a good friend, which is great. The prose style is good--not pretentious, not overly descriptive, just plain and pretty.

Just...not for me. I read a lot of young-adult literature, but it's very hard for me to find a YA contemporary novel that I savor, that I learn from. I read this (listened, actually) a little too dutifully, feeling distant from it the whole time. 

I feel particularly removed when a book reminds me of John Green's writing, where the characters seem more like clever, quick-witted, quirky teenage ideals than potential living people. This novel does not share the sometimes precious prose style of Mr. Green, but it has the lonely-boy main character (in this case Russian) who "suffers" from his nerdy awkwardness, it has witty dialogue at inappropriate moments, and it has the deal-killer for me: a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who has very little internal life of her own and whose purpose is to cause emotional growth in the main character. Here, the girl is part of a Manic Pixie Dream Family--hippie types who celebrate their own, quirky secular holidays and welcome a wayward teenage Russian scientist into their lives as if he's family, too.

The asteroid. The premise of the book is that there is an asteroid hurtling toward earth, and Yuri is shipped off from Moscow to the U.S. to help decide on the model (and do the calculations for) the country's anti-asteroid defense, primarily because of his specialization in anti-matter. It's a risky thing for an author to write about difficult science when they're not a scientist, particularly when the situation is supposed to be grave. In this case, the author seems to think of the asteroid more as a plot device than the main conflict--which has the odd effect of making it feel unthreatening. Even the characters treat it lightly. Moreover, Yuri's work is almost exclusively mathematical, in a windowless office, which also reduces the tension. But mostly, I found myself questioning so much of the science, and then thinking, since the novel is really a contemporary and not sci-fi or fantasy, "Why do we even have that asteroid?" The very first scientific premise in Learning to Swear in America, that we can know the impact will occur precisely in Los Angeles, is already wrong. 

(In Tommy Wallach's We All Looked Up, another contemporary YA novel that features the imminent destruction of the earth by an asteroid, there is no attempt at science. The conflict is thus how the characters deal with the notion of the end of the world.)

Forced immigration. Another technical detail that had me scratching my head was the idea that Yuri, a seventeen-year-old boy on loan from the Russian government, would be kidnapped by U.S. intelligence and forced to live in the U.S. for having peeked at a weapons list. It felt like another plot device, and I struggled to suspend my disbelief: would Russia willingly let one of their most valuable scientists go without a fight?

The author's hand. This is something that I'm a stickler for: I really do want to believe the premise of the book I'm reading. I don't want to see the author's hand--see her thinking about how to achieve something, see her troubleshooting in response to an editor's comments. The Nobel Prize quest felt this way to me. Actual real-life scientists know that winning the prize is a crap shoot, not a "goal." It's a lovely bonus that no one plans for or talks about, other than to speculate on names every year--they do their research because they love it, and because they couldn't imagine not doing it. So the convenient introduction of the son-of-a-party-leader who is going to steal Yuri's work (and half his Nobel Prize) felt doubly forced, to make us root for Yuri to find his way home--to make him give up something he cares deeply about in order to save Lennon. The author struggled with a problem: this is a boy who has so little "life" in Moscow that he brought a photo of his thesis advisor as his personal memento when he packed for the U.S.. So how can she motivate his desire--his need--to return? Well, she adds in the threat of his work in Moscow being stolen. That creates another problem: what about that thesis advisor, who cares enough about Yuri to defend his work? Well, that thesis advisor will be forced by powerful politicians behind the scenes to retire. And in terms of character development, I imagined Ms. Kennedy (or her editor) worrying, "What about this girl, Dovie, who seems to have limited internal life, compared with Yuri? How can she be fleshed out?" The "answer" is she's a passionate artist, and an art teacher who prefers teenage cleavage to real talent has told her to tone down her colors, which is a metaphor for toning down her dreams. Don't give up your dreams of being an artist, Dovie!

Which brings up the question: why can't the STEM main character be a girl, and the artsy character who paints rainbow fingernail polish be the boy?

The "real" plot. The asteroid and the threat of being forced to live in the U.S. are plot devices that are there to cause growth in Yuri. He's a somewhat well-adjusted guy who doesn't know he's really grappling with the following emotional problems: having given up his childhood to be a scientist; having a distant relationship with his physician mother, who is successful but busy and non-maternal; and placing all of his self-worth and the legacy of his dad into winning a Nobel Prize in Physics. So what does he really need? He needs a girl with dyed hair and glittery eyeshadow and a disabled brother to help him uncover those emotional problems, and to show him what's really important in life. 

Which brings up the question: why can't the physician mother (a female STEM character) who is successful and busy also be nurturing?

In sum. Not engrossing or illuminating. But many reasonable people have enjoyed this book. It's highly readable, and it mostly does readers no harm, except for perpetuating the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: a quick read, and the story goes down easy, but the "cerebral" protagonist is too familiar from other YA novels (see: John Green, Becky Albertalli, David Arnold), and the author is so busy hitting his notes correctly that the result feels less like a plot and more like a checklist of YA.

Consumable. On the other hand, maybe the familiarity of this novel is one of its good qualities. If I were a highly verbal gay teen boy who loved to read contemporary novels, I'd want a big supply of them. Here's the formula: a contemporary young-adult story about a teen boy coming out and coming of age, with a high-concept hobby (making short films), a quirky habit (writing the perfect movie scene of his life when he's uncomfortable or under stress), and a first romance, all set against the backdrop of a tragedy that the protagonist is slowly recovering from.

Positivity. There's are healthy relationships and a fair amount of diversity in the book, and it's all treated positively. Quinn's best friend, Geoff, is rock solid (other than keeping a secret of his relationship with Quinn's late sister). Quinn's mom is overweight, but she's beautiful to Quinn, and Quinn is not ashamed of her--he sees the real her, not her obesity. Quinn is fully accepted by everyone who loves him when he comes out (they already knew). Is all of this too bland? Mr. Federle seems to want to restrict Quinn's true hardship to grief, and not burden him with more, which means his myriad other conflicts feel unnecessary and easily resolved. (The "betrayal" of finding out that Geoff was dating Annabeth didn't feel terribly authentic to me.) 

First romance. I'm not sure why Amir is in the book, except to check off a couple of YA boxes (first romance, first sex). We know the relationship can't last because Amir is leaving town. There is some growth in Quinn's realization that Amir isn't a great writer, and that even though he's attractive, he's not a lifelong love. But is that the point of Quinn's growth? To see the world in more realistic detail? Perhaps this would work if Mr. Federle had introduced Quinn's problem as "seeing the world as a movie," so that his growth was learning that some things are just ordinary and not glamorous.

Ricky. In a similar vein, I wonder why Mr. Federle included the next-door neighbor, Ricky, who was Quinn's screenwriting idol and onetime mentor. Ricky's slightly disappointing reappearance (which really goes nowhere for the reader) seems only to serve the purpose of making screenwriting seem like a real job, not a mysterious, glamorous, unattainable thing. But that wasn't Quinn's conflict, was it? As a result we simply have a dropped thread: Ricky is in town filming a movie that actually tells the story of his relationship with Quinn--which should be a pretty big deal for our protagonist--but after Quinn visits the set we never hear about the movie again. (Of course, Ricky serves a practical purpose to the plot of living in L.A., where Quinn's film scholarship will take him over the summer, and we readers are meant to assume that he will house Quinn for free, making that trip possible.)

The writing. Clever, erudite, first person. We've seen this a lot. I also found that the beginning dragged--to the point where I would have put this book back on the bookstore shelf if I hadn't bought it already. Are we really going to talk for several pages about how hot it is in Quinn's room, and how he hasn't had the energy to do something about it? We literally begin with Quinn waking up in the morning. (Now I understand why writing manuals warn not to do that.) And on a slightly tangential note, I was disappointed that Quinn's film references were all classics, and that a person who adored filmmaking would categorically reject foreign films. 

The issues. There are too many issues. A dead sister who was Quinn's film collaborator (but secretly not that interested in the art form, just a loving collaborator). Quinn blaming himself for Annabeth's death because she was texting him when she crashed her car. An overweight, grieving mother who won't leave the house. A best friend keeping a secret. The protagonist's coming-out moment. Virginity. Attention-deficit disorder. First romance. A film competition. Finding the oomph to get involved in life again after a tragedy. 

Can we talk about dead siblings? So many YA novels use the death of a sibling as the backdrop for the character's conflict. In the U.S., we're so lucky in having this be a fairly uncommon life experience. Like red-haired characters, the percentage of dead siblings in novels has got to be many times the national average. It means death has become a trope. ("What can I throw at this character to hobble him at the start of my book?") I think that's actually counterproductive to our discussions about illness and death in this country--discussions we don't have enough of, in real life, with our family and friends. It's particularly a problem in this book because Quinn's sister is already dead when we meet Quinn, so we have no chance to become attached to her.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: this novel was a beautiful work of historical fiction until the last twenty pages, which were so unbelievable and out of context that the book was ruined for me.

The writing. I absolutely loved the research and the language of this novel. Ms. Brooks did a beautiful job of depicting a 1600s English village--especially the brutality of their hard-scrabble life. Everything was small and gritty and real. The research regarding mining in the 17th century and life in a mining community was fascinating. The prose was almost poetic at times.

Distance of the main character. However, I struggled throughout the novel to feel close to Anna Frith. This book demands closeness--we are, after all, stuck in a village of some 300 people, quarantined with them by the plague--but I felt like I was observing her from a distance. I respected Anna, I admired her, and enjoyed watching her growing (and believable) strength in that isolated community, but I didn't feel she was...real? I still wonder how this happened: was it her relative perfection? The way even her flaws were excusable, particularly from a 21st-century feminist morality? Somehow she was a bit reserved and formal, even to me, even while experiencing such pain and revealing her inner thoughts. Why?

The ending. This absolutely killed the novel, in as little twenty pages. Such a disappointment! It would have been quite unusual enough (and a great ending) for Anna to become a healer in her own village--to replace the Gowdies. But instead Ms. Brooks throws twists and impossibilities our way: the rector that Anna (and we) admired turns out to have been a horrible husband to Anna's best friend and a religious fanatic. Anna rescues a newborn baby and runs away to North Africa, marrying an old Barbary doctor (but in a platonic arrangement, which seems unlikely), becoming a midwife for Muslim women, and raising her two daughters in the "safety" of the doctor's harem. WHAT.

My second try. This was my second Geraldine Brooks novel. I found the historical sections of People of the Book to be a bit cold and distant, and the melodrama and feminism of the contemporary sections to be overwrought. Year of Wonders is clearly the work of the same author, with a mysteriously distant main character, and an unnecessarily melodramatic ending--meant to be cathartic to the reader, but instead being so impossible and unrealistic as to be disappointing.

One-sentence summary. This is a thin biography of several generations of the Medici family, written at the level of a good wikipedia entry, with no depth or complexity, and unfortunately nothing new to add.

Research. I was prepared to think the author had trained himself well enough in the history of the Medici to write this book until I came to the period of time I actually knew something about (1537 to about 1545). Three glaring mistakes made me mistrust everything else I had read in the book to that point: Caterina Soderini Ginori is described as Lorenzino di Pierfrancesco de' Medici's sister, when she was his mother's sister (p. 326); Maria Salviati is referred to as Lorenzo the Magnificent's daughter, when she was in fact his granddaughter (p.328); the author calls Eleonora da Toledo "Don Pedro's only daughter," when Cosimo I was famously offered the hand of Don Pedro's eldest daughter and vehemently refused it, insisting on the younger daughter, Eleonora, instead. (p.334) A smaller mistake--which should have been caught in copyediting--was that Emperor Charles V was referred to as Charles VII in one paragraph.

Homophobia. I was offended and perplexed by the author's frequent, sometimes pointless references to homosexuality. He rarely makes it clear whether he's expressing the opinion of the time, or letting his own feelings intrude. Given that "homosexual" wasn't even a word until the 1800s, it seems irresponsible to make commentary about sexual behavior without attribution, and without delving more deeply into the historical attitudes regarding sexuality. A few examples:

In the words of a contemporary: '[Henry III of France and his buddies] all dress alike in coats of many colours and they are sprinkled with violet powder and other sweet perfumes.' Catherine [de Médicis] seemed to accept [her son Henri III's] homosexuality as perhaps inevitable in the weak son of such an overbearing mother. However Henri III's pathological extravagance, together with his interest in zealous religious flagellants, appear to hint at deeper deviancy from the norm. (p. 350)

Just who is saying what, here? Is the author saying that Catherine herself accepted that her own overbearing personality "made" her son a homosexual? Or is that the author's opinion? Is it the opinion of the unnamed "contemporary" at court? And how are we to interpret "deeper deviancy from the norm?" Does it mean that homosexuality is "deviant?" Is that the author speaking? If not, is it a historically accurate viewpoint of the time? 

The fact that Donatello's David is "erotically homosexual" is mentioned without controversy and almost obsessively several times (pp. 108, 109, 111, and more...). There's considerable disagreement among scholars about whether sexuality was one of Donatello's points while creating this sculpture.

The author suggests that Poliziano was gay, and that his relationship with Lorenzo the Magnificent wasn't platonic:

This raises the question of [Poliziano's] love for Lorenzo, and of Lorenzo's feelings for Poliziano; risking widespread outrage, it is possible to suspect that their attachment may on occasion have been more than platonic. In the light of [Poliziano's presumed] sexuality, the ardent love expressed by Poliziano for Lorenzo takes on a less purely poetic aspect. There is of course nothing but suggestive evidence to support this suspicion. Apart, that is, from one disputed fact about Donatello's somewhat ambisexual David... (pp. 178-179)

Mr. Strathern goes on to say that Lorenzo may have been the one to install Donatello's statue in the Medici courtyard, rather than Cosimo the Elder, and this could mean it was a hidden message from Lorenzo about his own sexuality. Lorenzo's "covert bisexuality" is postulated without a single scholarly footnote.

Later, Leonardo da Vinci's strong personality is attributed to his homosexuality, which is in turn due to...the devoted love of mother figures in his life?? Really?? 

[Leonardo da Vinci's two stepmothers] doted on the young Leonardo as if he were their own." When they died in succession during his teenage years it must have been a source of deep personal pain, and this may have been responsible for a certain reserved self-possession that soon became evident in his character. Yet it was the continuum of unquestioning female love that lasted through his childhood, youth and into early manhood which affected him most. This gave him the utter self-belief which comes from being the centre of such a worshipping motherly world; and it may also have contributed to his homosexuality. (p. 188)

In sum. I'm sorry that some people will read this book trying to understand the Medici family, and will unwittingly read something that's not particularly well researched, that contains inaccuracies, and that contributes nothing new other than guesses at the sexuality of historic figures and what might have "made" them that way. 

A note to Pegasus Books, the publisher: my first-edition hardcover of this book had very wonky print. The font changed sizes from one sentence or paragraph to the next, and almost seemed skewed in some places, as if it were a bad PDF of a printed copy. It was distracting, and hard on the eyes.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: this is a cheesy, purple-prose-ridden, slightly annoying, but inexplicably enjoyable finish to a two-novel series.

Despite myself. The writing in this series has driven me batty from day one. The anachronisms, the flowery-formal language mixed with contemporary clichés, the Disney-movie version of medieval Arab culture--all of it made me want to cringe. But Ms. Ahdieh won me over, perhaps by giving herself wholeheartedly to the world she had built, and by not allowing the book to be anything higher-and-mightier than it is. 

On the other hand, I wrote in my review of The Wrath and the Dawn that I hoped Ms. Ahdieh would address the "disturbing ethical issues she brought up in this installment," and she clearly hasn't done that. I said, "To be a series of any literary merit, the second novel in this planned duology has its work cut out for it--it will be a disappointment if it doesn't dissect the moral quagmire that the first novel dropped us in." I suppose that means I must pronounce The Rose and the Dagger not to have serious literary merit, even though there's a slightly better balance of politics and romance in it. But still, it's quite enjoyable in the genre of "potato-chip, romance fantasy novel," like the first book, and at least we suffer through fewer descriptions of the caliph's tiger eyes.

The plot. Ms. Ahdieh long ago lost track of the premise of this story--that Khalid's curse required him to marry and kill one maiden a night to stave off the misfortune of his entire kingdom. In the first book, not killing a maiden led instantly to drought in Khorazan. Yet when he fell in love with Shahrzad and failed to kill her, there were apparently no repercussions. Instead, the destruction of Khalid's city happened at the hands of Shazi's power-obsessed father.

In this second installment, there's a wandering plot, trying to find its way to the end without distressing too many of the main characters. Shazi has been whisked away to the desert by Tariq, with Jalal's odd approval. (She'll be safer with the man going to war against Khalid than with Khalid himself?) There she reunites with her sister Irsa--a good addition to the cast, a kinder, gentler version of Shazi--and their father, who is recovering from blowing up an entire city using only his bare hands and poor Irsa's horse. We wander in the desert a bit: Shazi practices magic every night and returns to her tent to sleep away the day; Tariq doesn't notice Shazi's disappearances--even though he's obsessed by her--because, well, because it's not convenient to the plot, I guess; we meet a magical character with a pet dragon, and his aunt, Isuke, who's apparently a mighty genie, but we have no proof of that; we see Khalid spending time rebuilding libraries and giving snacks to smart little orphans while we worry he should be fortifying the city walls and rebuilding his army; Shazi learns that the only way to break a curse is to fulfill it; wait, no, Shazi and Khalid learn that if she and Khalid destroy her father's book, Artan's auntie will break the curse for them as a favor; and on and on. There doesn't seem to be a real arc to this, but we're happy to go along for the meandering ride, and it does come to a satisfying conclusion for most of the characters. (Poor Irsa, though, her lover was a redshirt.)

The dragon. Can I just say this is the biggest waste of a dragon I've ever seen in fiction? And while we're at it, Artan and his aunt Isuke can wield fire, and Vikram (the Rajput) can breathe enough heat to melt metal, and there's a book with untold (literally--Ms. Ahdieh doesn't tell us what they are) powers; and even Shazi has some powers and can ride a carpet like a surfing pro...but the magic really is not developed or used at all. Why include it, then?

Shazi's dad, Jahandar. Well, now, it turns out he's the main antagonist, doesn't it? He's at least one of the bad guys in both the first book, where he destroys Rey, and in the second, where he colludes with Khalid's uncle to rule over all of Khorazan, and then he actually stabs Khalid to death. Why don't we know more about this guy? Why don't we have a good understanding of his relationship with Shazi? It makes his immediate about-face of giving his own life in Khalid's place slightly incomprehensible to us. We get the feeling that the author wanted to ratchet up our worry by killing Khalid before giving us the happy ending, at the expense of fleshing out Jahandar's character.

Love never waivers. I have to say one very refreshing thing about this series is there is never a competing love interest, and the devotion of our characters to each other doesn't waiver. No one questions the other's love, "book-reasons" style (i.e. due to poor communication). Which makes it all the more peculiar that Ms. Ahdieh begins to introduce strife in two places, only to drop the thread: the burned letter at the beginning, in which Khalid professes his love but then destroys it, and the pretend relationship between Tariq and Shazi to appease the soldiers in the camp. We think these two events will lead to wounded lovers thinking the other has betrayed them, but they don't. (I suppose there's an argument that Khalid destroys the note because he has promised himself never to use the words "I love you," but only to show his love through deeds.)

The epilogue. Pretty cute. I like it when YA novels aren't afraid of showing marriage and children.

The writing. Ah, so...the writing.

1. Ms. Ahdieh's philosophy seems to be: why say something clearly, with simple words, when you can load it up with flowery-formal complexity instead? I don't object when the dialogue is ripe and stilted, if the author wants to build a distinctive tone for her characters: "Are you finally starting to breathe in a normal fashion?" or "Is it a matter of import?" But the narration in this book is generally so purple, it needs to take a big oxygenating breath.

--Kicking water at the ocean's edge becomes, "The boy continued to exert his irritation on the hapless sea."

--The word "hidden," as in "keeps her reasons hidden," becomes "shrouded in mystery."

--The word "emanate" is a favorite: "The soft shuffle of slippered footsteps on polished granite emanated nearby." "Soon, the sound of swords being torn from their sheaths emanated on all sides." The word "regarded" is often used instead of "looked" or "watched."

2. Excessive, unnecessary, and sometimes unhelpful explicating: "And now Shahrzad had been successfully taken unawares, to a place she was certain would bring about a predictable turn of events. Especially since Shahrzad had a sinking feeling she knew where she had been taken." 

3. Clichés, many of which feel anachronistic:

--The army is at his "beck and call"

--Beg, borrow, or steal

--Without missing a beat

--Full of vim and vigor

--Turncoat (from 1557)

--Mouth (or lips) in a moue--the use of this word is only about 150 years old

--"Despina is the only reason you have a palace-rat's chance of escaping" (the expression "a rat's chance in hell" may be old--I honestly don't know--but the shortened slang version of "a rat's chance" feels very contemporary)

--Begging, bartering, and stealing my way there

4. Small mistake, but where was the copyeditor?-- When Artan is lying "prostrate" (i.e. face down), he can't also be "regarding the night sky above." Supine is the word Ms. Ahdieh needs here.

The audiobook narrator.  Ariana Delawari has a sweet, frank voice, and she speaks clearly and slowly, but she has very little acting ability and no sense of lyricism or melody. There is no distinction between voices, she actually mispronounces words she could look up in the dictionary, and her performance is flat. For the first couple of hours I found myself comparing her reading to Natalie Portman's bland portrayal of Padmé Amidala.

One-sentence summary: though it has the title Galileo's Daughter, this is an ordinary, relatively superficial, definitely uncritical biography of Galileo himself, with its only "innovation" being the interwoven portions of his daughter's 124 extant letters.

A little background. Galileo had two daughters and a son by Marina Gamba of Venice: Virginia, Livia, and Vincenzio. He supported all three of his children, and eventually had the Grand Duke of Tuscany legitimize Vincenzio as his son. Virginia and Livia were consigned to a convent, "for their safety," and because Galileo thought their marriage prospects as bastard children were not good. They became Suor Maria Celeste and Suor Arcangela. Ms. Sobel perpetuates the notion that Marina eventually married a man named Giovanni Bartoluzzi, and that Galileo had a cordial relationship with them, purchasing lens blanks for his telescopes from Giovanni. However, Marina Bartoluzzi is probably a different Marina, and was entrusted with the care of young Vincenzio after mother Marina's death in 1612. If that's true, Marina Gamba may have suffered the same fate as Suor Maria Celeste—death through neglect by the man in her life who held the purse strings—though we'll never know.

***Note: this review assumes that you've read the book.***

One-sentence summary: Fans will be highly satisfied with this ending, and much of The Raven King is beautiful, smart, and engaging, but in some ways this final installment got away from Ms. Stiefvater, with a touch of bloat, some dropped threads, introduction of a previously unknown villain (for lack of a better word) and rushed copyediting.

Many of the same wonderful things about this series are present in my previous reviews of The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, and Blue Lily Lily Blue, and many of the same failings are here, too. 

The good: a band of friends who are in love with each other; a believable, languid southern setting; characters who follow their passions; playful language that makes you laugh out loud; several scenes with exciting action; a powerful, budding gay relationship; a sense that magic is real.

The less good: the introduction of characters who are there to get killed off; said characters being somewhat cartoon-like; convenient removal of characters who are no longer necessary to the author; an unwieldy plot that Ms. Stiefvater barely wrangles into submission; a sense that the author had a notion of where the series was going, but no detailed route laid out for herself; the belated introduction of the real magical problem that needs solving; lost threads and repeated words that make it seem the author/editor team barely made their deadline. 

The ending. I'm not sure I followed the ending. I caught the general sense of how the resolution worked, but not the specifics: Cabeswater gives its "life" as the sacrifice that will bring Gansey back. I admit that I was confused about Noah's final death, and about the sudden description of circular time in the last quarter of this novel. Cabeswater's "death" almost seems like the cousin to a temporal time-travel paradox. (Ronan dreamed the forest into existence; it gave its life to save Gansey; but Gansey had already given his life to save Cabeswater and the world...from a demon that traveled to our world through Cabeswater?) I think Ms. Stiefvater tries to explain all this by telling us that what Ronan brought forward already existed somewhere, in a different form: Opal speaks a language that's not Latin or English, for example, but a third language even Ronan doesn't know; and Artemis told Blue that his ancient form was not actually a tree. We're also told that Cabeswater's natural state isn't really a forest at all, further adding to the notion that it pre-dates Ronan's dreaming. Gansey has déja vu, and feels time slipping--though both of these symptoms feel new to this installment, which seems a bit unfair to the reader. (It's true that he was characterized as seeming to be both young and old in past books.) Finally, by not tying all the threads, it almost seemed that Ms. Stiefvater left room for future adventures. For instance, Ronan finds an ancient Camaro steering wheel that he somehow knows is not from past adventures but from a future one. (How he can tell the difference isn't explained. Is it because all the other ancient steering wheels would have been destroyed with the unmaking of Cabeswater?) And Mr. Gray is off on his own quest of sorts. 

Bullet points of things that troubled me:

--Something about Piper's death befuddled me. For a long time I didn't believe that she was truly a living human being after her resurrection, so I was  surprised that she could be felled by a gunshot. Silly, I suppose. But more important is the sense that Piper is yet another character who exists to be killed. We see her strained relationship with her dad, and we get a hint that she has a deeper motivation--a desire, maybe, because of her domineering dad and husband, to succeed independently in a competitive, gangster-like field--but it's not explored enough for us to understand it. She comes off as flippant, power-hungry, strong, but somewhat clueless. She doesn't quite rise to the status of an important secondary character in terms of substance, though she gets a lot of screen time and is the catalyst for the climax of the entire series.

--What happened to the demon and the purchasers-of-magical-things after Piper was shot? I think we see a sudden scene change, after Seondeok yells "Call me!" to Mr. Gray as everyone disperses. This is all we get in the Gray Man's story line: he is going to work to disband the mobster ring that traffics in magical goods (but the "how" seems a little nebulous, and even Seondeok points that out). In a plotting sense, the "Call me" line felt thrown in to tie up that thread for readers.

--What happened to Ronan's dream attempts at creating a safety-skin to protect Gansey from bees? Didn't he pull a working skin out on the last try?

--Come to think of it, did the threat of a sting turn out to be a red herring throughout four books? Was RoboBee an attempt to make us think there was a thematic purpose to the bees all along, when they are simply a dead end? Similarly, is that why the demon was wasp-shaped (to tie in symbolically with the whole Gansey-is-allergic thread)? Are we meant to think Gansey's literal death by stinging insects represents, metaphorically, the death of the world at the hands of this waspish demon? Or did causality go the other way: did Ms. Stiefvater make the demon a wasp to explain Gansey's obsession with them?

--Were the Laumonier triplets really necessary? Like Malory, they felt like caricatures. Even with their own, dedicated chapters they failed to feel fully developed.

--Orla is sent away in what seems to be an authorial move of expediency, to have one less character to deal with. Similarly, Matthew and Declan are whisked to safety.  

--Devices introduced in previous novels are missing: for example the orb that allowed Ronan to wake his mother after his father's death. (We do see the translating box again.)

--Noah gets several paragraphs at the end to explain his confusing "circling through time," but we still don't understand...or I didn't. And he says this is his final time watching Gansey die--but do we understand the repetition and why it's ending? Why would Noah have a final death now, if Gansey has died before and this is cyclical?

-The Welsh King, Glyndwr is actually dead, not sleeping. It makes Gansey's quest through three and a half books feel a bit pointless, other than drawing the four kids together so that they can eventually face and defeat the demon.

--Does the demon have motivation, other than pure evil? What does it intend to do after Cabeswater is unmade? Where did it come from?

--Did the word "demon" even appear in any of the previous books?

The big picture. If you step back and look at the series as a whole, you get the strong feeling that Ms. Stiefvater wrote it by the seat of her pants, and had trouble shaping all the clever ideas into a coherent arc. We never do get a bee sting, dangled so prominently throughout the previous books, we don't get a sleeping king, who was for so long the point of Gansey's quest, there is a belated introduction of a demon who turns out to be the real problem the teens need to solve. (The form of the demon is incredibly cool, though.) And Henry Cheng becomes important to the plot...or maybe not. Did he need to be added as the "fifth friend?" Does he actually exist so that his mother can exist, to give Mr. Gray an ally? These issues made it feel as though the author was fishing for a way to conclude the story, but couldn't figure out how to fashion the ending from the material she had already put in previous books. I suspect, given that the release date was moved back, this was actually the case--she was wrangling until the last moment.

Nitpicking. Ms. Stiefvater's prose is exceptionally good in the series (and particularly the moods it evokes), but this book was not edited or copyedited as well as usual. There is some bloat, with scenes that are unimportant (like Ronan's attempt to dream up a skin for Gansey, Gansey's mother's fundraiser at the school, Gansey's bribe of the headmaster to graduate Ronan--a graduation that doesn't even come to pass for him). The repetition of individual words made it seem that everyone was rushed to get the book to publication--editors and copyeditors included. Some nitpicking examples:

"Ronan flickered briefly back into consciousness, his eyes awash with black, a rain of flickering pebbles scattering from his hand and skidding to a mucky stop...."

"The easy rocking of [the door] indicated that it would open easily...."

"Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping one last time...."

"Adam's attention focused sharply at this. Grief sharpened his tone to a knife's edge..."

"She lifted her head, and the light through the window made a perfect square of light on her glasses."

"The engine roared to life. Or rather, the car roared to life. Who knew what was even making the sound. Blue made a ridiculous whooping sound of glee."

"There was a cave opening beneath the house. Not a grand, aboveground opening like the cave they'd entered in Cabeswater. And not the sheltered hole-in-the-ground entrance they'd used to enter the cavern Gwenllian had been buried in. This was a wet, wide-open maw of an opening, all collapsed ramps of dirt spread over concrete bones and bits of furniture, the ground splitting and part of a basement falling into the resulting pit."

In sum: Surprisingly, I found myself reading this last installment a bit dutifully, without the same joy as before. I love the language, and I love the characters, so I was willing to finish the ride. It was a big beast to corral, and Ms. Stiefvater was only partly successful in creating an inevitable arc from all the clever pieces in the first three installments. But the series is a triumph of effort, and has much to recommend it. It's smart, it's different, and the young protagonists have passions, projects, healthy friendships, and complexity.