Month: December 2019

Girl Gone Viral by Arvind Ahmadi (YA / speculative fiction)

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 3.5/5

An engaging, fun, speculative fiction read blending mystery, politics, and technology in the slightly future Palo Alto, CA.

A Facebook++ VR entertainment platform called WAVE. A father who “disappeared” seven years earlier while working on a stealth startup. A shocking win by a Luddite presidential candidate. It is within this setting that high-school tech wunderkind Opal Hopper (an homage to Grace Hopper?) and her friends start a VR show that goes viral — all based on how people lie — even to themselves.

While the teens get caught up in their instant success and the avid interest of the company that invented WAVE, they are also stressing about college admissions, romances, and a world gone haywire with the election (sound familiar?). Some reasonable discussions about the pros and cons of technology — job losses, fears of a robot president, tracking and privacy loss on the one side and going back to the stone age on the other. At the individual level, there are some good messages about self-awareness as Opal explores her own motivations for doing things that feel wrong in some ways and right in others.

A big theme in the book is “it’s complicated” — and it is! I liked the way the characters kept coming to this conclusion. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the extremists make it sound, and it’s important to face the compromises that must be consciously made.

A well-written look at a future Silicon Valley, America, and world.

Quotes:

“When we make eye contact, he ducks like a whack-a-mole.”

“You look down on people like me,” Matthew finally spits. “People who read and write and appreciate art. Who enjoy irrationality and inefficiency. Who don’t live optimized lives.”

“Anyway. I know how the game is played. Comment sections are less playground, more kiddy pool of pee, and maybe deep down, that’s why I never check them any more.”

“One day, while we were working on a problem set in class, Moyo looked around the room of white and Asian boys, sighed, and turned to me.” You know it’s on us to flip the scripts,” he said. That’s when we promised ourselves that someday, we would build an empire together.”

“It reminded me of how I act around people like Kara — people in your world with power, whose attention you’re almost ashamed of wanting to win.”

“Now, the Luds want to take us back to that old place — where people like us, the coders and the dreamers, are relegated to the loser table.”

“What you tech types need to understand is that humans are the dominant species. We’re storytellers. We don’t just want to listen to perfect stories. We want to create them out of our imperfect lives.” … “So I’ll continue writing my own novels, thank you very much, even if robots might do a better job someday.”

“Smartphones ruined our attention spans. Self-driving cars took away our freedom And now, artificial intelligence and virtual reality will take us the rest of the way in rendering humans obsolete. It will make us ignorant. Weak. This technology you’re building will corrupt us further with narcissism and greed, alienate us further from our best selves.”

“He’s the nerdiest of our nerdtastic unit, an honor we liken to being the tallest giraffe.”

Good Talk by Mira Jacob (Memoir / Graphic Novel)

A memoir in graphic novel form. I had read a great review which never even mentioned that it was a graphic novel — so it was a big surprise to me when I got it from the library! I’m not generally a graphic novel fan — I like language — but I found it to be an excellent medium for this book. Most of the content is in the form of conversations between the author and her son, her husband, her parents, her in-laws, and her friends — punctuated by the occasional “letter” or statement. The artwork provides the context which allow for the content to be more pithy — highlighting the essence in a way that is difficult to do with too many words.

The author is East Indian and is married to a Jewish man. Much (most) of the book is about her experience as a person of color, extending from childhood, through 9/11, and to the current Trump era. The opening chapter features a conversation with her six-year old son about Michael Jackson — whom he loves — and whether Michael is black, brown, or white and which of the three he liked best. A brilliant opening. The closing is a kind of letter to her son about the man she hopes he can become given the current political climate.

For me, her descriptions of bigotry and racism as she struggled to explain them to her curious son were both fascinating and educational. The word “racism” is thrown around a lot these days, and her definition (supplemented by some google searching) helped me understand the difference between them in a way I hadn’t previously. I appreciated the many different examples of stereotyping and the confusion that ensues even when people want to treat others the “right” way. In her life, her own extended family in India found her “too dark” to ever be attractive to a good candidate husband; she stumbles over what to say to the first lesbian she meets; and is given a particular job because the wealthy white woman hiring knows they will have a lot in common because she (the white woman) likes yoga and is spiritual. The author has to explain to her son that sometimes Indian people can be mean to others on the basis of race also, which saddens him because he wanted to be one of the “good guys”.

This is a riveting, well-written exploration of one woman’s experience as a person of color and — due to the graphic format — a pretty fast read!

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (Memoir)

Incredibly well-written and insightful memoir about the author’s trans-racial adoption (white family, Korean birth family), eventual reunion with her birth family, and the birth of her first child. I was constantly impressed by her ability to so clearly distill and express complex emotions and experiences. This is a testament both to her writing ability and her capacity for deep introspection and self-awareness.

This is a memoir — a deeply personal and honest account of the way she experienced her life. It is not a treatise on the pros and cons of adoption or the prejudice experienced by a person of color in an all-white community— there is no political agenda here. I absolutely loved her writing — the search for her birth parents and discovery of a sister is superimposed on her own pregnancy and the birth of her child, making sense out of the disparate pieces of her background, decisions, and plans.

Great for fans of Anne Lamott.

Separation Anxiety by Laura Zigman (Fiction)

Thank you to Harper Collins and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 3rd, 2020.

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 3/5 Characters: 2/5

I wanted to like this book — I loved Dating Big Bird and Animal Husbandry — but somehow it just didn’t work for me. What was intended to be “a hilarious, heart-breaking and thought-provoking portrait of a difficult marriage, as fierce as it is funny,” for me was just a thin veneer of attempted humor over a whole lot of neurosis, pain, and sadness. Some stories are too cringe-worthy to be funny.

The book opens with dysfunctional Judy deciding to wear her dog in a baby sling. All the time. Judy is a one-time successful children’s book author who has been suffering from writer’s block for years. She now writes for a self-help website, though she is remarkably unable to help herself. Husband Gary is a self-medicating pothead who has been unable to overcome his intense anxiety and has largely given up trying. They want to divorce but can’t afford to physically separate and so cohabit the family home. And their teenage son is … a teenager. Need I say more?

Zigman writes well and the book does end on a positive note in the very last chapter, but the positive ending isn’t supported by the events and cringe-worthy character actions of the rest of the book. The bulk of the book just tracks our educated, middle-class characters as they continue to not get their act together and irresponsibly run away from their problems (to be fair, Judy really did have to face a lot of depressing things, but I didn’t feel the novel really covered how she handled these things). I’m not a fan of dysfunction – we all have our problems and we all do things we regret — but I’d rather read about how people get a grip and turn things around — not about how they continue to screw up.

A Roomful of Bones by Elly Griffiths (Mystery)

Number four in the Ruth Galloway series — they just get better and better. The whole series has great characters, good writing, and intricate plots. Each installment includes some new piece of history and plenty of character banter on current social topics.

This story includes the surprising contents of of a medieval Abbott’s coffin, a drug ring with a creative transport mechanism, the push to repatriate a collection of Aboriginial bones, and of course, a couple of mysterious deaths. The regulars — now single-mom forensic anthropologist Ruth Galloway, the gruff and somewhat tormented DCI Nelson, and the intuitive Druid Cathbad — are joined by an Aboriginal visiting scholar, a trans local expert on Bishop Augustine, and the Lord who owns the local museum and racing stables.

Fast, engaging, read. I’ve already ordered number five.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (Fantasy / Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 World building: 5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 3.5/5

A compelling and intricate urban fantasy that explores the myriad ways stories pervade our lives. The narrative is “gamer style” — space and time gateways, bizarre characters and messages, and mysterious options for the traveler. Theatric and literary references abound — and there is no filler — every sentence counts in this elaborate and labyrinthine tale.

Our main character is Zachary Ezra Rawlins — two months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, the son of a fortune-teller, and a graduate student doing a thesis on gender and narrative in gaming. He is gay (or as his friend Kat says, “orientationally unavailable”) and a nice love story forms a narrative arc through the adventures, intrigues, and quests in the book.

It’s all story — no real messages, the characters are all interesting though not terribly deep (they are all seeking purpose — who isn’t?). The world is fascinating, the pacing is perfect, and the writing flows. Great for fans of Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January, Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and Setterfield’s Once Upon a River.

I liked the writing a lot but didn’t find a lot of specifically awesome lines — here are some quotes to give you a flavor of the writing:

“Much of it revolves around an underground library. No, not a library, a book-centric fantasia that Zachary missed his invitation to because he didn’t open a painted door when he was eleven.”

“Zachary takes out the book. He turns it over in his hands and then puts it down on his desk. It doesn’t look like anything special, like it contains an entire world, though the same could be said of any book.”

“Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”

“He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional.”

“The pay phone next to me started ringing. Seriously. I didn’t even think those worked, I had them categorized in my mind as nostalgic street-art objects.”

“I accepted because mysterious ladies offering bourbon under the stars is very much my aesthetic.”

“Sometimes life gets weird. You can try to ignore it or you can see where weird takes you.”