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Culture Consumption: October 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂

Books

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha WellsIt’s been a phenomenal month of reading. In addition to Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (discussed here and here), I read Artificial Condition, the second book in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. After the events of All Systems Red, Murderbot goes looking into its dark past in an attempt to remember just what happened on the day when a number of humans were killed. Of course, there are problems along the way.  I read this novella all in one sitting. I love Murderbot and all his anxieties and the way he somehow tries to do what’s right by people, even when all he wants to do is hide away somewhere and watch vids. So far, there are two more books in this series and I’m looking forward to reading them.

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Book Love: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

DESCRIPTION: “Follow a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe—in this light-hearted debut space opera from a rising sci-fi star.”

I did not read the description or any reviews before picking up this book. Enough people told me this was a necessary read and so I read it. As a result, I was expecting quite a different book than the one I got. What I expected was a gritty space thriller (not sure why I came to that assumption). What I actually got was the aforementioned light-hearted space romp — and I’m thrilled, because this is a delightful book.

The story begins with Rosemary Harper who joins the crew of the Wayfarer in order to flee the misfortunes of her past. On the ship, she’s presented with a (mostly) lovable bunch of goofballs and odd characters — Ashby, the pacifist captain, Sissix, the reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks, Lovey, the ship’s AI system, among several others — who go around tearing holes in the universe (creating wormholes for ships to pass through). It’s dangerous work, but their new assignment is even more dangerous still, as they are tasked with traveling to a war torn galaxy in order to make their jump.

The way these crew find friendship and family through each other is just, oh, so wonderful. It’s funny and charming and so heartwarming. Conflicts naturally arise within any group working in a confined space, especially when that crew contains a diversity of not only cultural but species differences. It’s the ways these characters address these conflicts, always with compassion and a desire to understand another person’s perspective at their heart.

Each chapter feels like a semi-contained story within the overarching storyline of the novel, revealing some piece of personal history or new connection between the characters, with everything coming together in the end.

I love each of these characters so much, and love seeing the way they care for each other. One scene in particular moved me so much that after finishing the book, I read it all over again — something like three or four times. And I’m sure that I’ll return to moments in this book in the future, whenever I want a little comfort in my life, a moment of believing that people can be good to each other after all.

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Book Love: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep.
He’ll follow you home, and he won’t let you sleep.

The island of Sawkill Rock is a idyllic place, where the the ocean crashes against rocky shores, prize horses graze in green pastures, and where the people are lithe and prosperous and unconcerned. Yet the Rock carries a dark secret — girls have been disappearing there for decades and urban legends abound about a monster in the woods. No on has braved out the truth about the missing girls, not until three girls come together to peer into the secrets hidden on the island.

The story is split between each of the three girls — Marion who is weighed down by loss and is the steady mountain her mother and sister lean upon, Zoey who bares her outcast status with pride and longs to gain justice for the friend she is sure is not just missing but gone, and Val who rules as Sawkill royalty, gorgeous, privileged, and ruthless.

I love novels that center female relationships at their core, and this is the thread that holds this story together. As narration shifts between their perspectives, we get to see and understand  each of them from different angles and insight — the weight each of them carries and their individual sense of isolation and loneliness. It’s as they begin to understand what links them together — friendship, love, or enmity — that they are able to find away to face the monsters of their world.

Structurally, the novel is tight, each scene feeling essential, with nothing wasted — not one felt like filler, just something put there to take up space. And yet, the story also felt multilayered and complex enough to keep me fascinated and surprised the whole way through. This is combined with beautiful, clear language that brings Sawkill Rock and its girls vividly to life.

I also appreciated how Legrand doesn’t pull punches. The novel walks the borderline between dark fantasy and horror, with the monsters being truly monstrous. There’s also enough suggestions of bloodshed and dark moments to make this book quite unsettling at points, which I loved.

It also made me cry, which I also loved. So much to love about this book.

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Culture Consumption: September 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂

Books

I read and adored I Am Not Your Final Girl, a collection of horror-themed poetry by Claire C. Holland (review) and Nova Ren Suma’s latest eerie YA novel, A Room Away from the Wolves, for which I’m hosting a giveaway. Although each has a very different tone, both books explore the strength of women when faced with unsettling or violent circumstances. I highly recommend them.

I also enjoyed Jeremy C Shipp’s novella The Atrocities, which is a tightly told horror story. Ms. Valdez is hired as a private teacher for Isabella. She journeys to an labyrinthine estate adorned with grotesque statues and painting, where she learns that the young girl she is supposed to teach is dead and a ghost. As Ms. Valdez begins to uncover the truth about this strange family, she faces the hauntings of her own past. Great story.

Sticking with the horror theme, I finished the graphic short story collection Fragments of Horror by Junji Ito. I adore Ito’s work in general, though this collection didn’t quite meet the same level of unsettling beauty as Uzumaki or the stories in Shiver.  Still, there were a couple stories that stood out for me, with images that linger, including “Dissection-chan,” in which a woman is obsessed with the idea of dissection, and “Blackbird,” in which a man survives a hiking accident through horrific means.

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Book Love & Giveaway: A Room Away From the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma

A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma

Feeling betrayed after her mother kicks her out of the house after another supposed indiscretion, Bina takes immediate action — choosing to leave of her own accord. She grabs what money she can and travels not to the family friends her mother selected, but to Catherine House in New York City, the woman’s residence her mother once lived. Bina has heard many stories of Catherine House, stories to fascinate her, stories to make her believe she can regain some connection to her mom by going there herself. But when she arrives at Catherine House, she is confronted with dark secrets she doesn’t understand and which may leave her trapped within its walls.

Nova Ren Suma is one of my favorite authors. I love the way she builds unsettling atmosphere into her stories and how she complicates female relationships, which are never simple in her tales. A Room Away From the Wolves does both of these things — both Bina’s relationship with her mother and her strange friendship with her downstairs neighbor Monet are complex, loving, and problematic. Much of her story is trying to find herself outside the context of her mother, while also confronting her own fears.

As Bina learns about herself, she works to understand the mysteries surrounding Catherine and the house. One of the things I love and am frustrated by in this book is how the story is comfortable allowing some secrets to remain secret. Not every mystery is explained. Not every dark corner is revealed. And the reader is left wondering. It makes me want to pick up the book and start rereading to see if there were some clues I missed the first time around, knowing that I would get to enjoy the beauty of Suma’s prose and storytelling all over again.

Footnote: This is the second book by Suma that I immediately saw being perfect for movie adaptation (the first being Imaginary Girls). This could be made into a beautiful kind of haunted house movie, one with complicated female characters at its center.

Giveaway

So, it turns out I have an extra copy of  A Room Away From the Wolves. How? Well, I’m a goof.

It went like this: as soon as I found out it was available for preorder, I clicked the order button. Then, time went by — and I saw another mention of the book. How have I not preordered this yet? I demanded of myself. It’s absurd! So, I ordered it again.  Hence: extra copy.

And what am I do with this extra copy? Why spread the love, of course.

If you would like to get your hands on my extra copy of A Room Away From the Wolves, all you have to do is leave a comment with your name and email by October 25th.

Want an extra chance of winning? Then, also subscribe to my newsletter, where I talk about books, poetry, and the writing life.

That’s it. I’ll use a random number generator to select the winner.