Review: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body - Audiobook – Unabridged

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body - Audiobook – Unabridged by Roxane Gay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s always a treat to listen to a memoir narrated well by its author. It makes the book feel intimate. Until recently I had only listened to happier memoirs – the kind written by TV comedians about their careers and artistic lives. Roxane Gay’s Hunger is certainly a change of pace, then, but it was a welcome one for me. To hear a woman talk about the difficult moments in her life, big and small, was poignant and powerful. As she remarks, it’s easy to forget to think about the different ways in which people move through this world. She talks specifically about bodies and their shapes and abilities, but it’s true more generally. Her voice is gentle and cozy. It sounds like she is reaching back through time to tell her younger self that it’s okay to hurt and that eventually, even if she has not fully accepted herself, things will be a semblance of okay. It was both challenging and comforting to listen to (especially as I listened to it on a flight, and I’m an anxious flyer). She does not shy away from discussing the traumatic gang rape that led her to re-shape her body into a “fortress” that would be safe from men or the psychological fallout of that event that still affects her today, but she is also unafraid to set firm limits on how much she will tell and how much is hers to keep. Some of the most moving passages for me were about more mundane things - hiding her secrets from her parents, moving to various academic positions in the middle of nowhere. This is the epitome of memoir: her life has been shaped by forces that many will never understand, and yet there are moments that will resonate with every reader’s life.

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Review: We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love bookstores and libraries of all kinds. Big ones with an endless buffet of options, curated collections with a peculiar slant to them, haphazard piles of books that the owners clearly didn't know what to do with. But I have a secret test for any book vendor that few pass and those special few have a permanent place in my heart: is there any Joanna Russ?

Russ is a classic SF writer who published during the New Wave and won or was nominated for most of the major SF awards. She also wrote kickass feminist nonfiction. She's a big enough name that most people who've read SF have heard of her, but I've only seen her books on the shelf in two bookstores ever, and through one academic library's interlibrary loan. I went into D.C. with a few friends to play Pokemon GO and we wandered our way to several bookstores until we finally settled in one that was next to a Pokemon gym. Just after taking over the gym, my phone ran out of battery, so I was able to devote proper attention to the books themselves. Their SF section was delightfully pulpy and meticulously shelved, and when I climbed up onto a step stool to check the top shelf, I found two Joanna Russ novels with green-edged pages and crazy pulp covers. I was ecstatic. (I also got an old collection of SF by female authors, which is also a rare find - things like that are much more common from the past 15-20 years).

Anyway, the book itself starts out like a pulp sci-fi novel. A group of travelers crash-lands on an uncharted planet where it's fairly certain they'll never be found. It's essentially Gulliver's Island in space. The first-person narrator is savvy and cynical and knows several things from the get-go: 1) there is no hope for long-term survival, 2) her fellow passengers will hold onto hope and try to perpetuate humanity (which means impregnating all fertile women ASAP whether they like it or not) and 3) she finds a respectable death far preferable to most of her other options.

The first half of the book explores the passengers' first week on the planet, the alliances and plans that quickly take shape, the growing distrust everyone has for the narrator. The book takes a sharp (but not unexpected, especially if you read the spoileriffic blurb on the first page of the book) turn about halfway through. The focus narrows to the narrator as she chronicles her slow death by starvation. Her hallucinations, her memories, her vacillation between panic and acceptance, her determination to die a deserved death. It's solid Russ work - even in the more lucid passages it can be difficult to follow a line of thought, and most passages are meaty enough to bear re-reading. It's a short book, though, so even though the second half is a slow march, it doesn't feel too long. And unlike 'The Female Man,' another of Russ's books I've read, it was just challenging enough to make me work without leaving me completely confused and in need of a syllabus to prep me for a re-read. Russ shows us glimpses of her characters' pasts and the world they come from that make me want to read other books set in the same universe, but she (and the narrator) refuse to elaborate on the history implied by the bits and pieces because they are irrelevant to the main event: the narrator's slow death.

It's a fascinating read with equal parts pulp and intellect. If you can get your hands on it, it's well worth reading.

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SF Women Read-A-Thon

I'm back! It's been a while since I've posted and I have a new project. I'm still going to read and review pretty much everything I read (including my yearlong backlog of read books, and including ARCs/galleys). But now I have a goal: prove to the world women have been writing sci-fi for as long as it has been around.

I'm tackling that goal by proving it to myself, first, by reading as much and as widely as I can by women who have written sci-fi. Then, when someone asks for recommendations for "something like Piers Anthony" or "really hard SF" I can offer up some great SF by a woman. Specifically a woman who is not Ursula Le Guin, who is amazing, but is so so often the only woman I see on 'best sci-fi' lists.

My methods are a little suspect but they're not difficult. I went to my favorite used bookstore and found about 20 sci-fi books written by women that were written in the 1970s or earlier. I picked women I'd never heard of, with a few exceptions for classics I hadn't read. It cost me about $16. I might end up reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi this way, but people have been reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi by dudes for decades and keep recommending those books so other people read them et cetera ad nauseum until they become canon. I know I'll also find some gems, then I'll recommend them, then hopefully other people will read them because I reached outside both the canon and my comfort zone.

Why? Because I want to help good books get read, and because people seem to believe that women don't write SF or don't write SF as well or didn't used to write SF for some reason and I want to prove them wrong. And because many good books by women especially from 30+ years ago get left on the shelf at the used bookstore because no one recommended them.

Largely, because every single time I go into a "looking for recs" thread for SF on reddit there are literally zero recommendations for books by women. Except Le Guin, probably because a lot of people didn't know Ursula was a woman's name when they were kids. (They only read a woman because they didn't know better!) In threads specifically requesting books by women there are always the 'why are you only reading women, that's sexist' responses, but when someone points out in other threads that only men have been rec'd, that's also called sexist. I'm tired of that. It is not the case that women don't write good enough SF to be recommended. It's not the case that women don't write SF, don't write hard SF, don't write good SF. 

And because these all seem to me to be problems that regardless of cause, I can't do much about except to be loud and vocal about books that I love, and to find more books I love and share them! So I'm going to stock my arsenal to launch a silo of recs.

I'm going to call this my Sci-Fi Women Read-A-Thon and tag my Goodreads shelves, Instagram, and blog posts with #readathon_sfwomen, so follow along!

I started this project about a month ago so I'm excited to see that other people like Liz Bourke from Tor.com feel the same way.

Review: The Core of the Sun

The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one gets a lot of comparison to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," and deservedly so - both are dystopian futures focused on women and gender relations. Sinisalo's tale has its own spicy flavor as part of the Finnish Weird genre, but the similarities to Atwood's tale are strong: women are divided into distinct castes based on their desirability and kept essentially illiterate, and while men are allowed to work and learn, most of the men are not necessarily fulfilled or happy with this arrangement. Sinisalo has been getting a lot of buzz lately in the English-speaking SF world, partly due to this translation and partly due to some good press from the Vandermeers (who are established fans of Weird in all its forms).

The story centers on Vanna, who has lived her whole life pretending to be a gender she isn't. She has the body (or "phenotype") of an eloi - she's a blonde, sexually desirable woman - but unlike the rest of the airheaded, brainwashed eloi, she's a sharp and intelligent woman, and that makes her a morlock. She's spent her whole life in the country with her grandmother (who's old enough to have a special immunity from gender assignment) and her sister (a happy, oblivious eloi). When she moves into the city to go to eloi college - where they study how to keep house and bake - she gets caught up in the illegal chili trade.

And that's where the weird comes in. Chilis have been banned like alcohol and drugs because of their addictive, mind-altering properties. That's also just about where the weird ends. The story reads as familiar to me as a non-Finnish reader. It focuses on the relationship between the sisters and Vanna's struggles as a false eloi and chili addict. Much too much of the story is devoted to basic exposition for this very familiar landscape and still doesn't fully explore little gaps where things would be most interesting. What are the lives of morlocks and minus men like? How permeable are Finland's borders? The third act hints at answers but it's not given quiet enough space in the story to explore them.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this so much. I read the whole thing in one late night with a tiny booklight - something I don't do so often anymore. But there were definitely some flaws - it did feel too familiar, the feminist critique of patriarchal societies felt flat and unsubtle, and the story relied too heavily on flashback and "newspaper-article" insert exposition. I think I would've loved it unreservedly if I hadn't already read "The Handmaid's Tale" and other, more nuanced feminist dys/utopias. But the flashback/article format meant that the relationship between Vanna and Manna, upon which the story rests, doesn't get fully explored or have its full weight until late in the story.

The things "Core of the Sun" does that no other story like it does that I love are 1) critiquing not a patriarchal capitalist society but a socialist one and 2) loving its zany bits. The first is something you don't see in contemporary, revolutionary American literature, and it's interesting to see that whether the government i s capitalist or socialist, what we fear about it is over-regulation and prescription of our lives. I'd love to read this in conjunction with "Herland" or "The Woman at the Edge of Time" or "The Female Man" as part of a course on feminist dys/utopias. The second is mostly rewarding but occasionally a bit of a stumble. There are lots of little tidbits and facts in the books - lots about chilis, some about psychological and evolutionary research, a bit about synesthesia - and clearly Sinisalo enjoyed researching and writing about them. But sometimes they're just not as interesting to me, or they don't weave in to the story in any meaningful way. Vanna's synesthesia is an example of that. I think the writing is beautiful because of it, but having a character comment on it in the last 10% of the book made me think it would matter, and it really doesn't. Still, I learned a heck of a lot about chilis and evolutionary psychology.

I enjoyed this quite a bit, and would highly recommend it.

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Review: The Geek Feminist Revolution

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Geek Feminist Revolution" sounds like literally everything I would want out of a book of essays. It's one of those books I heard about months ago and instantly marked the release date on my calendar. Unfortunately, while it's a pretty good collection, it definitely suffered from by super high expectations.

The collection is broken into four parts: Level Up, Geek, Let's Get Personal, and Revolution. They're roughly themed into essays about writing, pop culture, the author's life, and social justice movements, respectively. There's some overlap - in fact, a lot of overlap, which is reflective of one of the key problems I had with this collection. Much of the content is repetitive. There are a few major incidents in the author's life that are the focus of personal essays but also appear in many of the other essays, either as a core theme or in passing. The essays are, obviously, generally all related to geek feminism, which I love, but which gets treated with pretty much the same few notes in all of her essays.

It's the same problem I had with "Bad Feminist." I like all the content, but collecting previously-published thinkpieces/personal essays by one author into a collection reveals that 1) the essays are all pretty similar, 2) thinkpieces are short and 3) internet publishing favors strong, vibrant rhetoric over nuanced logical argument. To be clear - I'm not saying that either is better, or that the latter is absent from either of the collections. I favor academic writing because that's what I'm familiar with. If I'd read all of Hurley's pieces separately spread over the several years they were originally published, I'd appreciate them more. She has several pieces where she takes nuanced, controversial stances and defends them well. There are others where she argues from a place of passion for things that I also strongly believe in, but her approach loses all steam if you don't already agree with everything she's saying. Not every piece has to be written to argue, to persuade, to convince - some can just be written to 'y'know what? I think this sucks, don't you?' and vent some steam. But there were too many of those for me in this collection.

It's a breeze to read, though, and I especially loved her essays on her history and her writing. I read the essays in the first section slowly, one at a time, because every time I finished one I immediately wanted to spend the rest of the night writing stories. It was inspiring. And for such a young author, she's lived a (hard, but) incredibly interesting life.

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Review: Too Like the Lightning

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I received a free e-galley of this book via NetGalley.

How many books do you get in your life that make you sit in a stunned daze then cry softly because they are such a beautiful, moving piece of art that's now over, and to which you will constantly compare every book you read until you come across another book that moves you so strongly?

Well, add one more to my pile.

This is a book I've been waiting for since the cover reveal months ago. I put its release date in my calendar, I was so intrigued by the gorgeous cover art and the wonderfully strange synopsis. I was lucky enough to get an ARC from NetGalley but I'm probably going to go out and buy it anyway, because this is something I want to own and lend and proselytize, I need to spread the word of this Good Book.

So what makes this so good? So many things. The worldbuilding is phenomenal. This is Earth 400 years from now, recognizable but foreign in the same way that Earth 400 years ago is to us. Our history - both the history we are familiar with now and the history we're writing for people 400 years from now - is woven into the fabric of the world. Some threads are predictable, and some aren't. We finally get flying cars and it changes the world in a surprising, sensible, fundamental way: no two locations on Earth are more than a few hours from each other. It's a change that seems obvious - yes, that's exactly how that would happen! - now that it's pointed out (a feeling I got about so many things in this story). The effects of these changes are much more subtle, and it was a joy discovering the fascinating ripple effects that turn up in unexpected places (the flying cars change the shape of the family unit and government) and interact so cleverly with each other.

The voice of the story, Mycroft Canner, is like a song stuck in my head. He is a criminal, but also a genius and a charmer, and his frequent eloquent, rambling asides are as confusing as they are illuminating. He is the culmination of the unreliable narrator. He is writing or maybe telling this story for posterity and he tries to explain to the reader the way things are in his time, but he is a poor example of a creature of his time. He introduces us to a fantastically large, diverse cast of power players in the economic, political, and artistic spheres.

The plot. Oh man, the plot. I don't want to get into what happens (I know I'll regret this in December when I'm prepping to read book two) because, well, a lot happens. Let me just say that every action of this story has impact, every moment has meaning, and while it starts out fairly slow (thank god, because the layers of culture and character and world needed to understand the plot can nearly drown you), it picks up quickly. It's as if I was in a giant house and just when I had explored the main building, new doors opened up. But not even like that - more like new rooms slammed from the sky, fully formed and fully compatible with what I knew but completely new and different.

Even with all of those great elements, I think what made me love this book was that it wasn't perfect. About a third of the way through I almost gave up. The world is chaotic - just familiar enough to lure you into assumptions but different enough to overturn them all, leaving you knowing less than you knew before. The international power dynamics of the world didn't add up. Gender was supposed to be fairly unmarked but so many characters supposedly luxuriated in extravagant gender performance. Many small things (for example, a tree that grows dozens of kinds of fruit in a home kitchen) feel too wonderful to ever exist, and I felt somehow wronged by their inclusion, even though I loved them. But this is an optimistic world, so those marvels can be marvelous. I pushed through, and I'm glad I did. I underestimated how deep the planning of the story runs, and everything paid off in the end.

This is magical, powerful, strange, and smart. Read it if you like well-written, well-plotted, engrossing SF.

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Review: The Winged Histories

The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I received an e-galley copy of this book from Edelweiss and Small Beer Press.

I went into "The Winged Histories" without reading its companion novel, "A Stranger in Olondria." Sofia Samatar's first book came out three-ish years ago, and I'd heard of it in passing but never picked it up. I love Small Beer Press, though, so between that and the positive buzz I jumped at the chance to review this.

Now, "The Winged Histories" is explicitly not a sequel, but for a large chunk of this book I felt like I was missing something. Much of this review is going to detail what my expectations were based on the back-of-book blurb and my experience at points in the book, and how they didn't quite match up to what the book actually was. As the blurb states, it is the stories of four women - a soldier, a poet, a priestess, and a socialite - and their involvement in a war.

The soldier, Tav, gets the first story, and we're thrown into her life as a warrior right away. This was my first stumbling block: it's difficult to tell what the timeline is in this first story, at least in the beginning. Tav is disoriented and remembering events, and she alternates between short, sequential anecdotes and summary recollections with few cues for the reader. Part of my confusion might have been due to my disjointed reading, and I strongly feel a re-read would solve all of my problems (but not starting the book with this particular sequence might have prevented them, too). Once things settled down and became linear, I had an easier time with it.

The second revelation that helped me cope with the story came from another reviewer as I was skimming reviews, about halfway through. They suggested reading this as if it were four short stories, not one narrative, and that immediately made the story 100% better for me. I thought the book was going to be a slow burn that would encompass Tav's emotional trauma and recovery, paralleling the nation of Kestenya's trauma and recovery during and after the war, mostly focusing on Tav but with the other three women woven into her narrative. And even halfway through, toward the end of the priestess's chapter, I was still expecting the rest of Tav's story. That's not exactly what I got, but from this point on, I was able to adjust my expectations and thoroughly enjoy the book with no qualifications.

So, aside from the confusion, I loved this book. All the characters were beautifully written, compelling, tragic, human. The story is, generally, about a war for Kestenya's independence, led by Tav and her cousin, Dasya. The drama of the story is based largely in the elaborate culture that Samatar has created. Inheritance goes to nephews before sons and nieces before daughters. Dasya is the son of the Telkan, and heir to the throne because he has no male cousins - only Tav and her sister, Siski. Legends of Drevedi - winged vampires who supposedly share a lineage with humans - are the fantastical element lurking in the background, waiting to step forward. The Drevedi are maligned, supposedly extinct, but intertwined with the traditional religion - which has now been outlawed in favor of the Cult of the Stone. The Stone in question is covered in fragments of writings in many different languages, and supposedly fell from the sky to the middle of a desert. All in all, the worldbuilding here is fantastic, rich, and decadently layered - and remarkably fresh and original.

The characters Samatar chose to follow - Tav, Siski, Tav's lover, and the isolated daughter of the high priest of the Cult of the Stone - are all of varying importance in the war for Kestenya's independence and its fallout, ranging from Tav, who leads the charge, to her lover, who comforts her and who doesn't shy away from reminding her of the cost of such a war to the women like her who are left behind. Tav's story, appropriately, is more narrative, but troubled by the trauma of war. Her lover's story is absolute poetry. Siski, the socialite, tells a story of romance and loss of innocence. And the priestess reveals the secrets of the Priest of the Stone, who claims to know secrets of the gods but knows nothing about people. Together they form a portrait of a country that strives for unity and independence but is itself a messy, heterogeneous collection of peoples and beliefs. This is a story about history, and how what 'history' is depends on the perspectives that construct it.

This book also shines in its prose. This is the most elegantly, painfully written fantasy book I've read in years. Samatar's language is subtle but impactful and haunting. She writes poetry, outside of her novels, and it's clear and apparent on every page. She knows the power of a word in the right place and when to hold back, to wait or omit entirely. The result is a treasure where every page is steeped in beauty and emotion.

Overall, this was definitely a challenge, but one that was absolutely worth the effort and perhaps worth more because of it. The characters, the prose, the world-buidling are rich and beautiful and I am itching to pick up "A Stranger in Olondria" as soon as I possibly can. Read this book, even if you're not a fantasy fan, because this is a beautiful book first and a fantasy book second.

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Review: Find Me

Find Me by Laura van den Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Find Me" is an ethereal, eerie character piece about displacement. Its post-apocalyptic backdrop that feels almost inconsequential to the story, which focuses on a young woman named Joy and her hazy wandering existence, both in this new world and in the past. It's very much a 'literary' novel doing what a lot of 'literary' novels are doing lately - snatching bits and pieces of the sci-fi genre and weaving them into more mainstream (or prestigious) genres. I like this trend - the more SF the better! - but I'm also a little wary, as authors sometimes try to deny the SF-ness of their writing to keep themselves out of the genre ghetto. Either way, the SF premise drew me in, and while it didn't turn out to be hugely necessary to the story I wasn't disappointed at all (well, at least in terms of genre).

Joy is in a hospital. At first, it's unclear what kind of hospital she's in, or why. Outsiders gather outside, trying to get into the hospital, and no one in the hospital seems ill. Slowly, we discover that all the patients in this hospital are thought to be immune to a plague sweeping America, one that causes amnesia and then death. Joy suspects she's immune because she's already lost the memories that are important to her. She has recently received her first photo of her mother, and there is a curious year of her life in foster care she doesn't remember at all.

Joy eventually leaves this strange hospital and the people she has met there. She runs into the only foster-brother she's ever cared about while wandering the east coast on a series of sketchy long-distance buses. She's searching for her mother, who she believes she identified from TV as a lost-ship-chaser who lives off the shore of Florida.

Nothing in this book is in the foreground. Joy's memory problems and the inconsistency of memory throughout the story constantly displace both event and emotion. Though the story is roughly chronological, life-changing moments happen off-screen and are not referenced until Joy has digested them enough to temper their emotional impact. Thus the tone perpetuates a constant, unchanging level of emotional valence. Often, this deliberate disaffection creates a clashing contrast with the actual events Joy remembers, and the slow, steady grind of emotion becomes a relentless crashing wave of white noise drowning out all the things Joy should be concerned about but ignores with her single-minded goal.

It's an impressive build, but the question for me is: what does it build to, and how does it land? And, unfortunately, the answers are a disappointing 'not much,' and 'no.' I shouldn't have been surprised (and I wasn't, as the novel neared its end and with only pages left Joy was supposedly only moments away from her mother) that a novel that is primarily about lack and uses lack as a literary device displaces the ending beyond the final page of the book. Perhaps this means for the reader that we must understand Joy's journey is not about the destination, but about the getting there, but for Joy herself this isn't even the case. She has undergone a lot and her life has drastically changed, but her primary concern is still finding her mother and she refuses to foreground any of her more immediate problems.

Still, up until the last page, it was engrossing read. I could have used some closure and I feel the story would've benefited from it, but the author clearly disagrees, and I respect that.

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Review: Only Ever Yours

Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book at the suggestion of my friend Caroline, and with some hesitation because of its YA categorization. Young adult novels are not a disqualifier from my reading list, but I do tend to scrutinize them a little more prior to reading them. This was absolutely worth the risk. There are stretches where it's heavy on the YA feeling, but in the end it commits to the darkness within the story and the characters in a way that's more typical of classical dystopian literature than any YA novel I've read in the past 15 years.

A brief summary of the premise reads like a YA version of "The Handmaid's Tale" mixed with a morality tale about social media: In the future, some sort of ecological disaster has happened, the oceans have risen and separated the world into geographically and economically distinct 'zones', and female babies are no longer born naturally, but manufactured. They come off the production line with features like Perfect Green eyes, Ebony #2 hair, Flawless Pink skin on body template #607. The number of girls produced each year equals the number of men born that year in that zone, multiplied by three. This is because there are three roles a woman can fill: companion (the equivalent of wife), chastity (future teacher to young girls), and concubine (this one should be obvious). Until the age of 16, all girls are raised in a School where they learn all the things that women should learn to fill these roles, which, in this world, is mainly just how to be prettier, skinnier, and better than everyone else. They have no contact with the outside world (and, indeed, the novel never leaves the School, one of the many devices used to create a feeling of panic with no chance for escape), but are rated by the men of the zone based on weekly pictures, which determines their school rank and essentially their entire life.

I won't bother with a summary of the plot, because the standout of this novel is not plot but character. The main character, frieda (women's names and titles aren't capitalized here), has never been low in the ranks, but never been #1, either. That spot, from age 4 to 15, has gone to her best friend, isabel. But at the start of their final year, isabel suddenly withdraws from frieda and loses all interest in her ranking and physical appearance. frieda, unmoored from her emotional, psychological rock, slowly begins a slide into insanity. This is where the novel excels, wholeheartedly. frieda begins to crack under the constant pressure to be perfectly beautiful, her constant failure to do so, and the competing demands of what perfect entails (we're talking 'blonde or brunette?' here, not 'pretty or true to yourself'). It's a gut-wrenching, painful train wreck as we watch frieda try to navigate a social field she's never had to before, because she had one friend and that was enough. One of the understated messages of the book is the need for true human companionship; it's not just isabel's honesty or decentness or kindness that frieda desperately needs, but simply her presence, her interest in frieda. The presence of someone she can trust. When everyone treats you as an object, obstacle, or tool to leverage themselves, you have no context for 'self' beyond that, and frieda is not strong enough to create one from scratch. But their trust is broken, frieda can't bring herself to truly trust isabel again. There is a point where it seems like frieda might get the typical YA happy (or at least bittersweet) ending - she might land the hottest guy (who's nice, and into her as a person!) - but the novel grimly marches past that to the logical conclusion of frieda's personality and instability and what is allowed for her in this society. There are obvious comparisons to "The Handmaid's Tale" in terms of worldbuilding, but the most apt comparison for me in terms of how this novel felt was "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or maybe "Woman at the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy. Hell, throw in some "1984" for that ending. It's a tragedy in the classical sense, and an entertaining (if horrifying) spectacle to read.

There are some sizeable flaws in the story. Most notably, this world holds up to absolutely zero scrutiny. There are only 40 people born in a year in an entire Zone, and 30 of those are women with absolutely no skills, not even an idea of what 'math' is? And this place is somehow functional? No animals exist? It's not particularly solid storytelling in that respect.

The novel walks a fine line between 'satire or dystopia' and 'caricature,' and occasionally crosses that line. All of their high-tech sci-fi devices have names like ePad and MyFace - cutesy concatenations that seem like snide jokes, like what a middle-aged adult thinks things that teenagers like are called. Every Zone on the planet apparently functions in the same way and has the same culture (with strikingly Western values). Some of the world-building problems are a result of this effect, where something is so obviously exaggerated for effect that it couldn't possibly actually work. But this isn't always a problem. I don't think there's a single thing in this story that isn't just an exaggeration of what women experience in the real world on a regular basis. This world is clearly intended to be the real, gendered (Western) world with the contrast and saturation turned up to maximum.

I personally think there is a huge missed opportunity with this story in the relationship between frieda and isabel. The book is billed as a story of a deteriorating friendship between two girls; the title is "Only Ever Yours," referring to the girls' belonging to each other, not to these men. I was expecting something along the lines of Black Swan, maybe, but where the girls begin as true friends. But the novel begins at the end of their friendship, and while there are some moments of near-reconciliation, their relationship is not the story at all. A bigger focus on these two girls as friends, trying to be functional together but failing somehow, would've added a lot to the story (especially toward the middle, where it feels a bit repetitive).

Highly recommend this. I'm rating it 4 stars because of how powerfully the characters are written, but I suspect that after a few months I'll want to bump it down to 3 because it's not particularly complex or groundbreaking.

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Review: Bad Feminist

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's been quite a while since I've read an essay collection the whole way through. Story anthologies tend to be uneven, and that was what I was expecting here, but instead I got a pretty consistent collection - consistently pretty good, never bad but never great. The essays are generally themed on the intersection of pop culture and gender/race issues, with a few detailing the author's background and her relationship with feminism.

My main problem with a large number of the essays is their focus: so many started out on one topic and ended on another. Generally there was an evident connection between the two halves of the essay, but the second half was never tied back to the beginning to make the essay feel cohesive. One started as a discussion of "bad feminism" on a personal level, continued on to briefly talk about several high-powered women and their feminism (or lack thereof), and then ended with a long dissection of "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg - and then ended, very abruptly, without tying in that initial theme of "bad feminism." Obviously, these parts are connected. Meandering through related points is not a flaw in itself, but the lack of cohesion and repeated failure to eventually connect the initial THEME of the essay to its subject was disappointing. Often, this leads to the essays feeling unfinished.

Related to the above, Gay addresses a lot of tough issues - but rarely does she give them complex enough treatment. I felt like there was often an obvious next step in her argument or discussion and I was surprised it was left off. Perhaps this is because these essays were originally for wider audiences and not necessarily for a feminist essay collection, or because she is having a more a raw, passionate discussion than an academic one. Still, I was disappointed again there.

There were also three essays, right after another, that discussed race and media. I don't have any problems with the point of these essays - that movies (usually written/directed/produced by white people) like to fetishize black pain and slavery and use it to sell tickets, instead of telling any other kind of story about black people - but they were all essentially the same essay. Passages from each one felt re-hashed from others, especially because the movies discussed in-depth in one essay were often referenced more briefly in another. This is not a flaw of the individual essays, but a flaw of collection. They could have been adapted and combined, but one after another they are repetitive.

On the upside, though, there was a lot to enjoy about this. The prose was easy and enjoyable to read. You get a sense for the author's passions and personality in the early autobiographical essay, and her voice comes through consistently throughout. She brings up many tough issues, and usually gives them a pretty decent treatment. The occasional lack of cohesiveness is not a fatal flaw, because it feels like she is sitting there talking to you about things she cares about.

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Review: Bitch Planet, Vol 1: Extraordinary Machine

Bitch Planet, Vol 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly Sue DeConnick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received an e-galley copy of this book from NetGalley.

I've been absolutely dying to read this - the description and the kick-ass covers had me basically drooling. Dystopian feminist satire of exploitative comics set in space? FUCK yes I am all about that. And it MORE than lived up to my expectations.

The premise of the story is simple: when a woman is deemed non-compliant with the patriarchal laws of this society in any way, she is sent to a prison planet, colloquially known as "bitch planet." That sentence, I think, says a lot about the kind of society this book imagines. Important men in politics (whose actual role I can't quite figure out yet) have the title "Father," while "Mothers" seemingly run homes for single women. Non-compliance can be anything from murder to obesity to being a tease. But that's not all there is to the world - so far, I think the authors have done a pretty good job of creating a world that is obsessed with gender roles but also exists in a coherent way beyond the parodic aspects. People interact with each other in a way that feels natural and real, and that contrasts nicely with how people are "supposed" to act according to how they should perform their gender. The men generally have more freedom in their interactions, both in terms of what the reader sees and according to the rules of this world, but they still refrain from showing emotion in the political sphere (though we see it happen in private); compliant women are demure and nurturing in public, though we haven't seen any in private yet; non-compliant women are not afraid to show the full range of their emotions, their anger and frustration and desire; and I'm interested in seeing some non-compliant men who show their taboo emotions, too. It's a great commentary on how rigid gender roles limit not only the range of expression and emotion, but also constrain who is allowed to be a particular kind of person.

The main characters, of course, are non-compliant women who have been imprisoned on Bitch Planet. They get a rare opportunity to maybe earn some respect (or possibly freedom) by competing in a male-only domain: sports. As the main character puts her team together, we get to know a few of the inmates more closely. I appreciate that the authors chose to include a lot of women of color and queer women - the kinds of women who are, in real life, disproportionately incarcerated and deemed "non-compliant" for existing the way they are.

There are only a few things that are less-than-perfect about this book. First, the plot moves rather slowly, partly because of the guest comic every 3rd issue (in this case, a flashback history of a character) and partly because there are several different locations and groups of people moving the plot forward, so the storytelling is diffused. There's a major event in the final issue of this book that had less impact than I would've liked, and it would have packed a much bigger punch if we'd been given a little more story - even one more issue would've been great (especially because the author has indicated that the next issue is going to be a history of one of the characters involved). Other than that, this first volume is getting a story with a lot of moving parts up and running, so I understand the slow pace. My second complaint is that the artwork is a little less than exciting. The covers are fucking awesome, but the pages don't quite live up. It's not bad art at all, just not as great as I wanted it to be. And my third complaint is that the collected volume lacks a lot of the back matter found in the issues, which is a bummer. I read a couple of the issues and really enjoyed the essays and discussions at the end of each.

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Review: Orlando

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm afraid that my review of Orlando might sound like I hated Orlando, so I want to say up front that I didn't hate it and talk about the stuff that I liked. It was a delightfully whimsical read, and I was surprised at how contemporary it felt, in certain ways. Woolf was did a lot of interesting things with perspective and mildly fantastical elements. I'm also really excited about the nuanced exploration of gender and love and romance. There were also moments that were dense and wordy, but poetic and rewarding.

But really 'moments' are all there were. There is no plot at all, simply a continuous description of incidents and thoughts of the title character. I guess that's to be expected from a faux-biography, but I wish it had built more, or had a more conflict to get invested in. And not every book has to be a page-turning plot-driven quest. I just found myself wondering where it was going and if anything would ever have consequences.

I'll also say that this book would have been a lot more rewarding as part of a course, because it's hard to tell whether a given turn of phrase or strange occurrence was supposed to reference something literary or historical, or if it was some detail about Vita's life or inside joke between Vita and Virginia. I'd like to read something a little more traditional from Woolf to see how this compares.

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Review: Warm Worlds and Otherwise

Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Tiptree Jr., if you didn't know, is a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who wrote many short stories in the 60s and 70s. Tiptree was known for a while for being very reclusive and quiet about 'his' identity, and this early collection begins with an essay by Robert Silverberg on the theme of "Who is James Tiptree, Jr.?" Silverberg correctly picks some of the easy identifiers out - he figures out that Sheldon worked for the government and lived in the DC area - but also goes on what is a deliciously fallacious spiel about how Tiptree is obviously male, because of the "masculine" qualities of his mind evidenced by his interest in the nature of the universe and big, SFnal ideas. There is also a short editor's note after the essay, from Silverberg, mentioning that after Sheldon's identity came to light she sent him a letter saying that she hoped he wasn't embarrassed by his emphatic insistence that she was male, and he writes that he has now had to grapple with some confusing ideas about gender and the mind. I enjoyed every minute of it.

The story collection itself is a bit of a mixed bag. I started with "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," since that was the story I had heard about and was most eager to read. "Plugged In" uses a device common to several of the stories in this collection, wherein the narrator is speaking to the reader. This device takes on different iterations throughout the anthology - sometimes it's simply a narrator/reader relation, sometimes a character in the story is telling the story to you as if you were a friend who needed to be filled in - and I don't quite think it always works for me. Sometimes it adds a frame to the story that makes the story a bit bigger, takes it beyond the thought-experiment quality that many SF short stories have, but sometimes it's used to lower the level of detail and formality in the story, taking what could have been a much fuller, more structured story and turning it into a casual conversation over drinks with many unrelated interruptions. It almost works better within the anthology than not, because the repeated use of the device creates the idea that these are all just casual happenings in a world where weirder things happen regularly.

There is also a strong pulp feel to all of the stories, a sense of a luridly colorful, occasionally grimy world filled with wondrous strangenesses. Several of the stories are knockout classics - "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is one, "Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" and "The Women Men Don't See" are two others. The others, while varying levels of quality, all have a depth to them that is both literary and pulpy at the same time, a sense that there are layers left to explore on further readings, but that those layers are dark crevices and alleyways. Some stories are primarily character studies, but most are iterations of our own world with a slight technological/SFnal twist. A few, like "Plugged In," go beyond the here-and-now and stretch into the future, or into other worlds. Most are concerned with human nature (the big ideas that Silverberg considered so masculine), a few with gender and other social issues. They are all well-constructed and intriguing, if occasionally uneven and bewildering on a first read.

I may add short summaries of each story to this review at a later time, because I'm having a hard time finding summaries of the more obscure stories elsewhere.

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Review: Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland," I had an itch for more feminist utopias. "Woman on the Edge of Time" was exactly what I wanted. Thematically, it reads almost like a combination of "Herland" and Gilman's more famous "The Yellow Wallpaper," since WotEoT focuses on a woman forced into an asylum by her family, and then starts communicating with people from the future. It's left unclear whether what Connie sees in the future is 'real' or not, but that's not the point - the point is the exploration of the failings of today's world and how it would change if we truly valued both individuals and the world's resources.

Some interesting parallels with "Herland" include a focus on restructuring the family unit and a huge emphasis on children and education. People are life-long learners in WotEoT's utopia, and while they are also life-long workers, there's very little resembling either our current education system or career structure. Children are raised by three people who agree to co-parent together. If at any point during child-rearing either a parent or child decides that the arrangement doesn't work for them, the unsatisfactory parent leaves and someone from the community volunteers to take their place (this usually happens rather amicably). Children choose their own names and what they learn, which usually becomes what they do later in their lives, but as they're always learning people tend to play different roles over the course of their lives.

Commerce also no longer exists as we'd imagine it. There's a basic barter system between towns, and a lot of resource-sharing within towns. Very few things are privately owned - even luxuries are usually owned by the library/community and loaned out to those who wish to wear them.

I loved their funerals. When someone in the community dies, they gather and speak everything they remember about the person, both good and bad, and they all share in the ritual. Work stops for the evening or the day while people tell stories, drink, eat, smoke, and grieve.

My biggest criticism of the utopia might be that it assumes no "bad" people. Maybe this assumption is based on the idea that bad people come from bad environments, which might be true, but there's almost no discussion of crime or dissidents, aside from the mysterious war that they are constantly fighting against another civilization that holds very different values. Everyone who is within the society functions well within it, except for a very small number of people who are tolerated, but rarely integrate into a community.

The real plot, though, takes place in Connie's real life, where she is pulled from her normal asylum ward to become part of an experiment for "violent" patients. The treatments make her fellow patients disassociated or essentially nonresponsive. Connie makes several escape attempts and tries to convince her family to check her out, but finds it's much more difficult to get out than she thought. Her desperation and fear that she might actually be going insane were beautifully communicated; asylums are pretty dang scary, and some sections had me in tears.

Overall - excellently written, engaging story, great sci-fi/utopian material with a really strong message of equality.

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Review: Herland

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be one major spoiler in this review.

"Herland" is a feminist utopian novel, and a satire of both gender norms and early sci-fi/adventure novels. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is perhaps better known for "The Yellow Wallpaper," a quasi-biographical story of a woman who is diagnosed as insane by her doctor husband, confined to a room, and denied access to writing and reading materials. "Herland" builds upon Perkins Gilman's experiences, widens their scope, laughs at them, all in the guise of a serious adventure novel. The narrator is a young explorer and sociologist, traveling with his two friends (one a mechanic and rich explorer who is known to be *successful* with the ladies, and the other a poet/doctor who idolizes women from afar), when they find what is rumored to be an all-female society hidden in remote mountains. They are almost immediately captured by the women, but not as dangerous prisoners - as the first men the women have encountered in 2000 years, the women want to see whether they can successfully reintegrate with men and become a "bi-sexual" society. None of the men can actually believe that there are no men in this society. It takes a surprisingly long time for them to accept that (and if this hadn't been billed as an "all-female utopia" I probably would've had a hard time believing, too), but the women eventually explain that when almost all of their men died in a war/natural disaster/uprising that also cut off the only passage out of the mountain range, one woman spontaneously developed parthogenesis, and all of them are descended from that woman.

That premise provides a particularly interesting backdrop for their society. They can all reproduce as often as they please, and they grew from a society that didn't think it would ever have children and so value motherhood, but they have very limited resources. What results is a tightly controlled and incredibly productive civilization. Every woman is allowed to have one child (with rare exceptions in both directions for those who are deemed unfit, don't desire motherhood, or have particularly valuable skill sets). Every bit of available land is planted with the most fruitful combination of trees. And the highest concern of every citizen is making the world better for their children and their children's children, and so on. The only downside is that without war or conflict between the sexes, their art and media are supposedly strange and uninteresting, at least from the narrator's perspective. It really is a utopia - for everyone except the men, who are unsettled, to say the least.

And that's where a lot of the humor comes from. The three men provide a kind of Goldilocks range of reactions to Herland. The poet thinks it's wonderful and far better than the world they come from, the rich Casanova thinks it's suffocating and strange and that all of the women are rude (since they don't react well to his "charm"), and the sociologist holds a middle ground. Even before they reach Herland, they project their beliefs about women onto what they think the society will be like.

I loved the humor in the story. There are some wonderfully satirical one-liners. My favorite went something along the lines of "These women were frustratingly reasonable." I also liked the value that Herland placed on education as a life-long process, one that doesn't happen in classrooms but in every facet of life. They don't leave it up to chance, though; every bit of their development is carefully planned, with even nursery rhymes and children's games crafted and readjusted as times goes on to better teach the children. And although I should have expected it, I was both surprised and intrigued by the climactic event of the novel (SPOILERS): after each of the men marry, they find sexual relations difficult as the women don't really know what sex *is* after all this time, and when the rich explorer has had enough waiting, he attempts to rape his wife. The rape is unsuccessful, and he is asked to leave. I loved that in a society that hasn't experienced sexual violence in 2000 years, the reaction was swift, severe, and completely calm. His wife fights back and calls for help, he is subdued, and while perhaps the expected reaction of the society may be to call for blood or rise up in anger, they simply decide that there's no room for such behavior and he has to leave. It's foreign and scary, but they don't react in fear or anger, just out of the best interests for their future and survival. Overall, this is a story about women working together to do what is best for themselves and their children, and even in this case, they hold to that.

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