Review: Pure

Title: Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

Author: Linda Kay Klein

Genre: Memoir/Sociology/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Sexual content, sexual assault, rape, pedophilia, child sexual abuse, incest, religious trauma, religious bigotry, homophobia, body shaming, medical content

Back Cover:

From a woman who has been there and back, the first inside look at the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s purity culture has had on a generation of young women—in a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir.

In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame.

This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with.

Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question the purity-based sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality.

Review:

I went into this book going, “I had no guilt or shame having premarital sex after I left Christianity, so it will be interesting to read about other people’s experiences but I’m not going to get swamped with feelings like I did with other similar books.” And if you want to take a moment to chuckle at the naïveté, go ahead, because somehow I had entirely forgotten that purity culture was about so much more than “premarital sex is bad.”

This book is a combination of sociology and memoir. Linda starts each section with an extended story from her own life, but continues with interviews she did with other people who grew up in purity culture (some of whom are still Christian, some of whom aren’t) and ties it all together with a narrative of the problems purity culture causes. If you’re familiar with autoethnography, it feels like one that’s just written for a general readership instead of an academic one.

For being as short as it is (the audiobook is only 9 hours), it packs a lot into its pages, and yet still feels like there is tons more to say on the topic. Which there probably is – purity culture is a broad topic that’s hurt a lot of people and there’s no way anyone could cover all the nuances in one book, even if that book was twice as long as Pure. Though an insider like me can point out all the nuances Linda missed, she did a really good job portraying the major factors and making the ideas accessible to people outside purity culture.

There are a lot of intense feelings and traumas in these pages, but also a lot of revelations for me as someone who grew up in purity culture. Linda’s example of her struggle with Crohn’s disease was especially revelatory in how her physical suffering redeemed her evil body (which had developed undeniable hips and breasts and therefore was unquestionably Sexual and therefore Evil) and made her good in the eyes of her church.

This book is a lot. It’s intense and full of trauma, body shaming, and little girls being sexualized so they can be shamed for that sexualization. But it is very well-written and the stories contained well-told, and it strikes a good balance between being relatable and helpful to the purity culture survivor and accessible to the purity culture outsider. This is a very worthwhile book.

Review: Adult Children of Abusive Parents

Title: Adult Children of Abusive Parents: A Healing Program for Those Who Have Been Physically, Sexually, or Emotionally Abused

Author: Steven Farmer

Genre: Self-Help

I don’t like categorizing this as Self-Help because of the connotations of the modern Self-Help genre, but this is Self-Help in its most basic meaning: A book with practical instructions to help yourself overcome childhood abuse.

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child sexual abuse/pedophilia, emotional abuse, physical abuse, child neglect, cisnormative language (descriptions of abuse are extended and often graphic but done with very clinical language and obviously condemned)

Back Cover:

A history of a childhood abuse is not a life sentence. Here is hope, healing, and a chance to recover the self lost in childhood. Drawing on his extensive work with Adult Children, and on his own experience as a survivor of emotional neglect, therapist Steven Farmer demonstrates that through exercises and journal work, his program can help lead you through grieving your lost childhood, to become your own parent, and integrate the healing aspects of spiritual, physical, and emotional recovery into your adult life.

Review:

I was going to start this review with, “I can’t help comparing every book in this vein that I read to The Body Keeps the Score since that was the first one I read on this topic,” but it turns out there’s very few comparisons to be drawn. There are no studies or scientific inquiries in this book, no discussions of past or current research, and no focus on anything beyond the emotional and behavioral aspects of having been abused.

This is a therapy program in a book, basically. It starts off with describing some dynamics different varieties of abusive homes fall into and the different ways you might have responded (the book is written addressing you the former abused child). It discusses how abuse splits you into three “children” inside – your Natural Child, emotionally free, untraumatized, and not reacting to abuse; your Controlling Child, the one who took over to protect you from the abuse and is now making a mess of your adult life; and a third one that I don’t remember because it hardly got mentioned.

The bulk of this book is a step-by-step program to integrate all three “inner children” and let your Natural Child drive the boat most of the time. It’s very comprehensive, not only addressing emotional symptoms but also practical social symptoms like struggling to make friends and being afraid of touch. I think in an ideal world you’d go through this guided by a therapist who can help you deal with things that come up, but therapy is not affordable for everyone and this book seems doable on your own

There is no nuance in this book. Steven leaves no room for complexity, differing situations, or other reactions outside his framework, and the healing program he sets out is very much of the This Is The One And Only Way To Do It variety. That said, this book was originally published in the 1980s, and understandings of and treatment for mental health problems and childhood abuse recovery have come a long way since then. I think the lack of nuance and flexibility is just the book being a product of its time.

I still think this is an incredibly valuable book. I always appreciate books that are practical, and it doesn’t get more practical than two-thirds of the book being a step-by-step program with exercises and journal prompts. I would love to tell everyone to find a good therapist to help them through this process, but if you can’t afford that, I found this book for $2 at a used bookstore. I’d call this the next best thing to an actual therapist, and a whole lot cheaper.

Endnote: This book seems to be the only sane thing Steven Farmer has written. Everything else on his website is about spirit animals and earth magic and such. I have to assume he went into the magic nonsense after he wrote this book, because he does have genuine psychology credentials and this book is very sane, practical, and useful in the real world.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score

Title: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Author: Bessel van der Kolk

Genre: Health/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Pretty much every event or circumstance that can cause trauma responses is mentioned, including graphic descriptions of self-harm, suicide, suicide attempts, sexual assault, sexual violence, rape, child abuse, child death, child sexual abuse/molestation/pedophilia, incest, domestic abuse, 9/11, car crashes, and war atrocities

Back Cover:

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children.

Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring–specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy–and a way to reclaim lives.

Review:

I think this book is supposed to just be a review of Dr. van der Kolk’s research on trauma, with an overview of the physiological effects of trauma and discussions of the various therapies he’s tried with traumatized patients and the biology and neuroscience of how they helped or didn’t. However, all of these points are made with stories of Bessel and his patients, and I found it to be a combination of the science of trauma, insights about my own trauma, and hope that there are effective therapies out there that might help me.

Like all good books that make me recontextualize my past, I could only read this book in small doses. But that may not be a bad way to read this book – it is absolutely packed with information and you’ll need time to absorb it. From the history of trauma being recognized as an actual problem to the biological and neurological underpinnings of the symptoms of being traumatized to the different therapies he has found to be effective and the neuroscience and psychology of why they work, it’s thirty years of trauma research condensed to less than 500 pages. One read doesn’t feel like it’s enough to grasp all the information and possibilities here.

To my non-medical-trained ears, some of the problems caused by trauma and some of the miraculous healing from trauma described in this book seemed nothing short of outlandish. However, Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world’s top researchers in trauma studies and is partially responsible for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (a Congressionally mandated initiative for helping traumatized children) and for PTSD being considered an actual diagnosis in the first place. So he probably knows what he’s talking about.

The main drawback to this book is that the people who most need to read it – i.e. people who are dealing with the long-lasting effects of trauma – are the ones most likely to be triggered by the graphic descriptions of abuse and neglect. It does make for much less boring reading than facts and statistics and I recognize that knowing about the specific traumas is integral to most stories of how the patients recovered, but I found myself wondering if the graphic details couldn’t have been toned down just a bit for the sake of traumatized non-doctors reading about this research on their own behalf. Bessel does mention in one anecdote that an instructor in one of the therapies he was learning criticized him for “voyeuristic tendencies” and wanting to know everything about his patients’ traumas, and I wonder if the graphic descriptions in these anecdotes were an unintentional expression of his own interest in other people’s traumas.

This book is very thorough and very intense. If you’re in the medical field, it’s absolutely worth reading. If you’re traumatized yourself, it’s also worth reading, but take it slow and be aware that it’s full of descriptions of abuse that might be triggering. But it’s also full of hope that we don’t have to be defined by our trauma forever.

Review: Literature from the “Axis of Evil”

Title: Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations

Author: Various (anthology)

Genre: Poetry/Short Stories

Trigger Warnings: Vary between stories; include poverty, child abuse, sexual content, excrement, death, blood, injury, and war

Back Cover:

In thirty-five works of fiction and poetry, writers from countries Americans have not been allowed to hear from-until the Treasury Department revised its regulations recently-offer an invaluable window on daily life in “enemy nations” and humanize the individuals living there. The book includes works from Syria, Lybia, the Sudan, Cuba, as well as from Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. As editor Alane Mason writes in the introduction, “Not knowing what the rest of the world is thinking and writing is both dangerous and boring.”

Review:

This book is utterly fascinating. It contains thirty-five works of poetry, short stories, and excerpts from longer fiction from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Lybia, Sudan, and Cuba, all nations considered enemies of the United States, where I live. Each country’s section starts with a bit about the countries themselves and the cultural context the works were written in, and each work begins with a short biography of each author (excepting North Korea, where biographical information for most authors is not released by the state).

It’s hard to talk about these stories without rambling on, and it’s easiest just to have the experience yourself. They are windows into life in these countries, stories of real people with real feelings from countries that I had been taught were peopled with faceless Evil Enemies. I found the North Korean works especially interesting (and most especially “A Tale of Music” by Kang Kwi-mi, the longest of the four) – though North Korean fiction is regulated by the government, it gave a fascinating insight into how the government wants people to view living in North Korea, whether or not it reflects the reality of North Korean citizens.

Another thing I found interesting was how many of the Middle Eastern/North African sections were written by writers who had grown up in the countries in question but had either left or were in exile and wrote about their homeland from outside its borders. The context notes point out that most of these countries don’t look kindly on dissenting writing or the writers behind it, so it makes sense, it was just surprising.

And I will admit that even with the context notes in each section, sometimes I just didn’t have the cultural understanding to grasp the significance in some stories. “The Vice Principal” (Iran), for example, is a story of a boy who wrote an essay for school saying that the town body-washer performed the greatest service to society and nearly got expelled over it. I am still very confused over why this essay would warrant that large a punishment – or any punishment at all, really. The teacher was definitely expecting essays on doctors, teachers, soldiers, and such, but he did say that the students could make their own choices, and body-washers do perform a great service (taking care of corpses so they don’t lay around stinking and causing disease, providing proper respect to the deceased, preparing them so the grieving family can bury them properly) and yet are reviled for it. My American sensibilities finds it an unorthodox choice, but the boy’s essay (printed in the story) has a well-reasoned argument and the teacher did say the students were free to write their own opinion. My only conclusion is that I must be missing some piece of cultural context that would make this essay unacceptable for some reason.

I highly recommend this book. It voices almost never heard in the United States, insights and context to cultures Americans have been raised to think of as The Enemy, and works to humanize these perspectives that are often invisible to us. (I also think it would be an excellent book to discuss in a literature class.) If you want to broaden your perspectives, Literature from the “Axis of Evil” will do so.

Review: Red, White and Royal Blue

Title: Red, White and Royal Blue

Author: Casey McQuiston

Genre: Romance

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, homosexual sex (explicit), invasion of privacy, attempted rape (mention)

Back Cover:

What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?

When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius–his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.

Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn’t always diplomatic.

Review:

Things I generally don’t like in books:

1. The romance genre
2. Politics

Things that are in this book:

1. It’s a romance
2. Politics

Things that I really, really enjoyed:

1. This book

This was another recommendation from my mother-in-law, and I’ll admit I was skeptical. I’m not a romance fan, I’m not into rom-coms at all, and it’s the rare book where I’m not bored by any politics involved. So I was gobsmacked by how much I loved this book.

It’s just absolutely adorable. In this fictional world, the next president after Barack Obama is Ellen Claremont, a Texas Democrat, and Prince Henry is the grandson of the current British queen, Queen Mary. I think I tolerated the politics in this book because it’s either a distraction so Alex doesn’t have to think about feelings or an impediment to him and Henry being together as opposed to actually being a big part of the plot.

The main plot is an enemies-to-lovers romance, except it isn’t really enemies-to-lovers because the only thing Alex really hated about Henry was that he wasn’t kissing him right that instant, even though he didn’t know it yet. I can see how someone might find Alex’s complete inability to figure out that he’s into Henry unrealistic, but as a Known Bisexual who took nearly a decade to realize thinking about scissoring with same-sex friends were not in fact Straight Thoughts, I found it incredibly realistic and absolutely hilarious. My Kindle copy of this book has no less than 10 notes to the effect of, “Alex, you are so obviously not straight.”

This is just a feel-good read all the way around. The stakes are higher than what I assume an average rom-com would have just because Alex and Henry both have such high profiles, but it has a happy ending and it’s cute and fluffy and full of mutual pining and nothing too dark. The main antagonist is politics for the most part – the pressure to keep up appearances so Alex doesn’t screw up his mom’s reelection campaign and Henry doesn’t “hurt the British royal image.” But they’re so in love (and so horny, there are a bunch of sex scenes and I actually enjoyed them) that they’re determined to make it work even if they have to give up everything in the process.

I did not expect to like this much at all, let alone like it as much as I did. It’s adorable and sweet and cute and overall a really good story. (Plus the author is nonbinary, and I love seeing other nonbinary people succeed!) I absolutely see why my mother-in-law liked it so much, and I absolutely agree.

Review: Making Stuff and Doing Things

Title: Making Stuff and Doing Things: DIY Guides to Just About Everything

Editor: Kyle Bravo

Genre: DIY

Trigger Warnings: Excrement, menstruation

Back Cover:

When you’re young, broke, and in search of a life of adventure, Making Stuff and Doing Things is the most useful book on the planet. It’s an indispensable handbook full of basic life skills for the young punk or activist, or for anyone who’s trying to get by, get stuff done, and live life to the fullest without a lot of money. The book started in the 90s as a series of zines, with dozens of contributors setting down the most important skills they knew in concise, often hand-written pages. If you want to do it yourself or do it together, this book has it all, from making your own toothpaste to making your own art and media, feeding, clothing, cleaning, and entertaining yourself, surviving on little, thriving on less, and staying healthy for all your life’s adventures. You’ll never be bored again.

Review:

This is more of a reference book than a book you’re supposed to read straight through. Personally I think the best way to read it is to skim through it first, then go back and thoroughly read the entries for the projects you’re actually interested in doing.

It’s roughly divided into sections by type of project, but all of the content comes from various punk and anarchist zines in the 90s. A lot of the projects are timeless, but some of them are fairly dated (the one turning an 8-track tape into a hidden storage box comes to mind – I don’t even know where I would find an 8-track tape in 2021). And some of them didn’t seem exactly useful to me, like the one about how to make the socks you wore for a week straight not smell anymore – but that would be more useful to someone in a different situation than me, such as someone who didn’t have access to water to wash their socks or who only had one good pair that they needed to wear repeatedly. There were also several sections that fell into the “modern medicine is bad and you should do homeopathy instead” camp, so be aware of that.

The way to get the most out of this book, I think, is to treat it like a reference book. Read through the sections and projects that interest you. Ignore the rest. Some of them will be useful and some of them won’t apply to your situation or won’t be interesting to you. Take what you need, and ignore the rest.

Review: Anansi Boys

Title: Anansi Boys

Author: Neil Gaiman

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Nudity, death of parents, hospitals, blood, kidnapping, guns, police/being arrested, heterosexual sex (implied), rape by deception

Back Cover:

God is dead. Meet the kids.

Fat Charlie Nancy’s normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn’t know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother.

Now brother Spider’s on his doorstep — about to make Fat Charlie’s life more interesting… and a lot more dangerous.

Review:

The StoryGraph lists this book as “American Gods #2,” but the only thing it really has in common with American Gods is the idea that gods live among people and the god Anansi, who shows up briefly in American Gods and is the father who drops dead at the beginning of Anansi Boys. That’s it.

Aside from Anansi/Mr. Nancy himself, there’s a whole new cast of characters – Fat Charlie, his newly-discovered brother Spider, Charlie’s fiance Rosie, Rosie’s mother, Charlie’s boss Grahame Coats, Daisy who gets involved purely by accident, and a few others with supporting roles who only show up briefly.

Before I go too much farther, this series of texts I sent to my husband pretty much sums up my experience reading this book.

Anansi Boys: Don’t like the main character as much as I liked Shadow, but it’s still pretty good

Towards the beginning, about an hour in

Anansi Boys update: I hate all these characters

Somewhere in the middle

Probably going to finish Anansi Boys after all, there’s finally something interesting

About 70% in

Not nearly as good as American Gods

After finishing it

Shadow in American Gods wasn’t really a fully fleshed-out character, but more of an audience surrogate that we could follow around through the world. The characters in Anansi Boys are a lot more fleshed out, and I disliked every single one of them.

• Charlie was spineless, ambitionless, and upset that things in his life are going badly while at the same time doing next to nothing about them. You could probably find his picture in the dictionary next to the entry for “pusillanimous.”
• Spider is an asshole. He’s an incredibly charming asshole, partly due to god-powers from being the son of a god, but he has no regard for other people’s feelings. Not really in the sense that he enjoys hurting people, but more in that he’ll take what he wants and it won’t even cross his mind that other people might have feelings about it.
• Rosie is a do-gooder in the most derogatory sense, the kind of person who wants to feel like she’s helping people but she does the deciding about what helps and if it actually makes your situation worse, too bad, she thinks she did good and she’s very proud of herself about it.
• Rosie’s mother is every evil mother-in-law and controlling mother stereotype and actually supposed to be unlikeable, so I don’t feel too bad about disliking her.
• Grahame Coats is a slimy weasel of a financial advisor and he’s supposed to be unlikeable too.

To be fair, “I hate all these characters” was not entirely accurate. I didn’t hate Daisy, but she wasn’t in enough of the book for me to particularly like her, either. And Charlie had some major character growth in the last 15% of the book and ended up being not so bad. Spider also got better in the last 15%. Before that, though, it was a struggle. Spider shows up on Charlie’s doorstep and decides he’s going to live with him for a while, they clash and Rosie gets caught in the crossfire, Spider screws up Charlie’s life, and about 60% through Charlie tries to find a magical way of throwing Spider out since non-magical ways weren’t working and that’s when things finally get going.

Women in general really get the short end of the stick in this book. There are some old ladies Charlie knew growing up who know things that might help but aren’t telling him because reasons, there’s Rosie’s mother the horrid old crone, there’s Rosie herself (who I’ll talk about in just a second), and there’s Daisy whose main role seems to be “Charlie’s happy ending needs a girl and this one is convenient.” Those are all the female characters in this book. The older women get some agency (even though it’s to either be withholding information for who-knows-why or being a horrible and miserable person), but the two younger women don’t. Rosie especially gets screwed over – Spider spends one day pretending to be Charlie, falls for Rosie, and uses his god powers to keep her thinking he’s Charlie so he can keep having a relationship with her. There is absolutely rape by deception in this book, even though none of the characters seem to notice or care.

There are a few twists towards the end, and as I’d expect from Neil Gaiman they are pretty good. But they don’t cover over the multitude of things I dislike in this book. I really only picked this up because A, my husband owned a copy, and B, I loved American Gods so much I was hoping for more. I did finish it, and the end was good, but I’m not really sure it was worth going through the beginning and the middle to get there.

Review: American Gods

Title: American Gods

Author: Neal Gaiman

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Gore, blood, death, death of spouse, murder, murder of children, suicide mentions, guns, excrement, kidnapping, car crashes, explicit heterosexual sex, body horror, prison, racist language, transphobia (brief), near drowning, autopsy procedures, vomit (mention), animal death, eating human remains

Back Cover:

Days before his release from prison, Shadow’s wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break.

Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, American Gods takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You’ll be surprised by what – and who – it finds there…

Review:

The story is a solid adventure through magic and a bunch of different mythologies, with Shadow following Mr. Wednesday through a lot of crazy stuff and meeting a host of interesting people. Then at the end it hits you with a bunch of twists one after the other and bumps a very good book up to a fantastic one. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Shadow is not, in a sense, a character. He’s there, sure, and he says things and does things, but he doesn’t feel like a fully realized person and I don’t think he’s supposed to. He has a lot going on all of the sudden that he doesn’t really know how to deal with, and even another character points out that he doesn’t seem very alive. That’s a part of his character’s journey, but he also functions as his namesake – a few stereotypes stacked together into the shape of a likeable but not remarkable shadow we the reader can follow to experience this world and these events.

And said world and events are worth experiencing. The gods came with immigrants from the Old World, but America has forgotten the old gods and worship the new ones of technology and innovation that they create. There is a storm coming. Gods live among humans and survive on the worship and sacrifice they are given, and as you might imagine, the “new gods” of TV and phones and the internet are getting a bit more worship from Americans than Odin and Anansi and Ishtar. Mr. Wednesday wants to do something about that.

His full plan isn’t clear until the end of the book. But in the meantime, Mr. Wednesday takes Shadow all across America and to places beyond reality, meeting old gods and new ones and legends and monsters. Shadow rides a carousel into Odin’s hall, plays checkers with the Slavic god of bad fortune in a dusty Chicago apartment, sporadically lives an ordinary life in a small town under an assumed name, and journeys to the halls of the dead. He meets a host of fascinating characters, some human but many not so much, and it’s great to just follow him around and experience all the wonder and magic under the skin of the world we’re familiar with.

And then the book comes up on the end and hits you with several twists, one after the other, but it doesn’t feel startling as much as the puzzle pieces finally fall into place all at once and the picture revealed is shockingly different from what you thought it would be. (To be fair, I probably would have called one of the twists early on if I’d been reading it instead of listening to an audiobook, but the other ones I don’t think I would have seen coming either way.) Up to this point the book was absolutely good, but those twists bumped the needle of my opinion from “solidly good, I recommend it” to “stunning and magnificient.” Whatever your opinion of the idea or the storyline or the characters, this book is worth studying just for technique, because this is how you write a twist ending. The whole story is great, but with the ending, it’s a masterpiece.

Review: Dracula (DNF)

Title: Dracula

Author: Bram Stoker

Genre: Horror/Classic

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, suicide, medical procedures, mental asylums

Read To: 38%

Back Cover:

The aristocratic vampire that haunts the Transylvanian countryside has captivated readers’ imaginations since it was first published in 1897.

Review:

It took me nearly half an hour to find a back cover blurb to put in this review that said anything about the story itself, as opposed to just listing the commentary this particular volume has or quoting people on how much of a classic the book is. And I suppose that’s for good reason – everybody knows the story of Dracula. It’s not even a spoiler at this point to reveal the twists, because it’s so ingrained in pop culture that literally everyone knows Count Dracula is a vampire.

But knowing that fact (which you really can’t escape without living under a rock) really ruins the experience of reading this book.

To be fair, Bram Stoker is very repetitive. Literally my last two hours listening to the book were a repeating series of, “Oh no, Lucy is so sick and she seems to have lost so much blood but we don’t know why!” Mysterious things in the night. “Oh no, Lucy looks worse!” “I’m Lucy and I’m afriad to sleep because terrible things happen at night.” Something happens one night to prevent Dracula from getting Lucy alone. “Oh good, Lucy seems so much better!” Repeat. It gets boring pretty quickly.

Already knowing the twist – that Dracula has gone to England and he’s a vampire sucking Lucy’s blood – made the repetition seem more annoying than it probably would have if I didn’t know. It seemed to be trying to build up suspense and horror. But not only is Dracula the most well-known vampire figure out there, vampire lore is so prevalent in pop culture that any modern person who didn’t know the twist would immediately guess “vampire” as soon as the two pin-pricks on Lucy’s neck were mentioned.

And that destroys the suspense and really the point of the novel. It’s gothic horror, it’s supposed to be building up to this horrifying reveal that the unspeakable things happening to Lucy are due to an undead monster drinking her lifeblood. It’s supposed to intrigue and thrill and terrify with the horror of the demonic undead feasting upon the living. But in modern times, we know vampires. We know Dracula is a vampire, and we also have lots more vampire stories – demonic and horrible vampires, yes, but also heroic vampires, sexy vampires, sparkly vampires, relatable vampires, tragic vampires, and vampires who we love and root for. What terrified Bram Stoker’s readers in 1897 isn’t nearly as terrifying to us. Yes, it’s still unnerving to find a blood-drinking undead creature in the shadows, but in the modern imagination, that creature is more likely to become a friend or lover than a nightmare.

Review: Dune (DNF)

Title: Dune

Series: Dune #1

Author: Frank Herbert

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Torture, torture of children, attempted murder of children, mentions of death, fatphobia (note: I’m pretty sure there are other trigger warnings in this book, these are just what I personally encountered in what I read)

Read To: 22% (4.5 hours of audiobook)

Back Cover:

Set in the far future amidst a sprawling feudal interstellar empire where planetary dynasties are controlled by noble houses that owe an allegiance to the imperial House Corrino, Dune tells the story of young Paul Atreides (the heir apparent to Duke Leto Atreides and heir of House Atreides) as he and his family accept control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the ‘spice’ melange, the most important and valuable substance in the cosmos. The story explores the complex, multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion as the forces of the empire confront each other for control of Arrakis.

Published in 1965, it won the Hugo Award in 1966 and the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel. Dune is frequently cited as the world’s best-selling sf novel.

Review:

My husband has been begging me to read this book for a long, long time. He kept hyping it up, and he wasn’t the only one – every single description I read of it was light on the plot and heavy on the “Dune is amazing,” “the best scifi novel ever written,” “Frank Herbert’s death was a loss to the world because he wrote Dune” stuff. So I went into it with high expectations and no real idea what the story was actually about.

At 7% into the story, I texted my husband and asked if it got better once they actually moved to the planet Arrakis, because so far:

• Paul took a torture test to prove he was human (there was doubt for some reason I guess?)
• there was an exposition conversation about a prophesied male savior who could access both male and female magic (I think it’s magic?) as opposed to the women who were limited to only female magic
• an antagonist got introduced briefly
• Paul did duke’s son things like having lessons and talking to members of the guard

My husband assured me that it did get better, so I kept going. And it did not. I felt more connection to the character being forced to betray the Atreides family than I did to Paul, his mother, or Duke Leto combined, because he at least had desires and motivations. And that connection wasn’t great – I don’t even remember that character’s name.

It seemed like the story was trying to be about The Prophecy That May Or May Not Be About Paul, but it was actually about politics. The politics of being a proper duke’s son and heir, the politics of establishing yourself as in charge on a new planet, politically defeating your political enemies, mining strategies and diplomacy plans and managing troops … it was boring. So insufferably boring. None of the characters were people, none of them had wants or desires or motivations or even agency. They were cardboard cutouts that shuffled each other around doing politics until something happened to them and they went, “oh, that’s what we’re doing now” and did more politics about it.

This is science fiction, but the only way you know is by occasional mentions of futuristic technology and the fact that they’re on a planet that isn’t Earth, with its desert setting and natives whose eyes are solid blue with no whites. (The desert planet Arrakis could have been a fascinating setting if it was in a book where people actually did things.) It could just have easily been dropped in a high fantasy world of elves and dragons, or somewhere in the historical Middle Ages, or almost any other setting with only minor adjustments.

I legitimately have no idea how this book became the world’s best-selling science fiction novel. I get that some people enjoy slow stories of politics and resource management, but if I’m picking up a scifi novel that’s not what I want or expect. It’s too long, too slow, following too many characters with too many names I can’t remember, and yet somehow nothing happens. (And from the Wikipedia summary, it doesn’t look like that gets any better.) I’m used to old genre fiction not giving female characters agency, but no characters seemed to have agency here. This isn’t a science fiction book, or a book about Arrakis or characters or even Paul becoming a gratuitously over-powered scifi hero. It’s a book about characters pointlessly doing politics, and a boring one at that.

The Dune series:

1. Dune
2. Dune Messiah
3. Children of Dune
4. God Emperor of Dune
5. Heretics of Dune
6. Chapterhouse: Dune