Review: Brave New World

Title: Brave New World

Author: Aldous Huxley

Genre: Classic/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Suicide, racism, sexual content, drug use, drug abuse, death of parent, self-harm, physical abuse (mentions), fatphobia/body shaming

Back Cover:

Brave New World is a dystopian novel written in 1931 by English author Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State of genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to make a utopian society that goes challenged only by a single outsider.

Review:

I was not entirely sure what to think about this book after finishing it. Despite Aldous Huxley only being 37 when he wrote it, it has a very strong “old man fears societal change and scientific advancement” vibe. I had hoped there was a #disrupttexts discussion about it so I could get some other perspectives, but I can’t find one. So I’m left to interpret it on my own. This review may get long.

In the World State, babies are no longer born out of human wombs. Instead, they are grown in test tubes, selected and genetically manipulated from even before the moment a sperm hits an egg in a fertilization tank, and conditioned until age twelve, all in the interest of producing a strictly class-stratified society where each person is genetically manipulated and mentally conditioned to not only accept but love their lot in life. Alphas are the prettiest, tallest, smartest, and one-of-a-kind, and lowly Gammas and Epsilons are conditioned to hate knowledge and beauty and are only one of up to ninety-six genetically identicial people. Excessive consumption is practically law, leisure is mainly sports that require lots of expensive equipment, free sex without commitment is the relationship model, and if you start having negative thoughts, the drug soma will make you feel good again.

In the beginning, the book bounces through a bunch of different characters in the effort of illustrating how the world works. It eventually settles on Bernard Marx as something of a main character. Bernard is very much a misfit in his world – he is much shorter than people of his class (Alpha, the highest) are supposed to be, and he likes solitude and monogamy and doesn’t like sports or soma, all of which are considered practically pathological in World State society. But he does desperately want to be accepted and be considered normal.

So when John shows up about halfway through the book, it almost immediately pivots to him as the main character. John is the natural-born son of a woman from the World State who got lost and trapped on a “Savage Reservation.” John was born and grew up there, a world where people age, babies come from wombs, honor and suffering are important parts of life, and consumption isn’t an option. He is the outsider that challenges the societal norms of the World State because he finds a challenge-free life of uninspired contentment and free sex without romance completely intolerable.

John is portrayed as the “noble savage” (despite being 100% white), the only person in the whole of society who prefers a life with challenge to a life without, who understands that heterosexual monogamous marriage is the only correct sexual arragement, who knows and follows the traditions of past great men, who finds the honor in devotion to religion and its rituals, and who accepts unhappiness as part of the human condition. Bernard likes solitude and doesn’t like drugs, but it’s implies that he doesn’t go far enough. Tradition is better than progress, the book seems to say. Natural things are better than whatever science can come up with, loose women will destory male-female interaction altogether, old works are better than new, letting scientific discoveries and societal advancement keep us from being unhappy is actually a very bad thing. Practically the only thing I agree with this book about is that strictly stratified societies consigning people to a particular caste even before their birth and giving no opportunity for individual choice are a bad thing.

This is a very complex book, and I know there’s more to be said about it than what I’m saying here. There’s definitely some notes to be made about race, gender, queerness, and religion that I just don’t have room for since this review is already so long. I would love to see the people at #disrupttexts put out something on Brave New World with an English teacher’s analysis on what this book is trying to say. Despite my mostly-negative-but-still-technically-mixed feelings on the morals here, it actually is an interesting dystopian world.

Review: Girl at the End of the World

Title: Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future

Author: Elizabeth Esther

Genre: Memoir/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, spiritual abuse, fundamentalist Christianty

Back Cover:

Elizabeth Esther grew up in love with Jesus but in fear of daily spankings (to “break her will”). Trained in her family-run church to confess sins real and imagined, she knew her parents loved her and God probably hated her. Not until she was grown and married did she find the courage to attempt the unthinkable. To leave.

In her memoir, readers will recognize questions every believer faces: When is spiritual zeal a gift, and when is it a trap? What happens when a pastor holds unchecked sway over his followers? And how can we leave behind the harm inflicted in the name of God without losing God in the process?

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Girl at the End of the World is a story of the lingering effects of spiritual abuse and the growing hope that God can still be good when His people fail.

Review:

This was so … traumatic to read.

I wanted to read this because I’ve also escaped fundamentalist Christianity. I’m not sure what I hoped for out of this book – a little more hope, maybe? – but it definitely wasn’t to viscerally relive all of my religious trauma along with watching Elizabeth experience hers.

Perhaps if I were a little further along in my dealing-with-religious-trauma journey I wouldn’t have had such a strong reaction to it, but I’m not and I did. It was painful, and yet I couldn’t look away because Elizabeth was describing familiar experiences – different names, slightly different situations, but the same feelings. Lots and lots of Trauma Feelings, which I was not particularly prepared for. (Also I read this at work. Mistakes were made.)

Uh, the book itself … it was solid. It had a coherent narrative of Elizabeth growing up indoctrinated, starting to think for herself a little, getting married, and eventually leaving the cult and finding peace with God through Catholicism. It’s interesting and well-done and Elizabeth tells her story well.

I was affected deeply by reading this because of my own background with fundamentalism. The description says “hilarious and heartbreaking,” but I saw none of the hilarious – it was all heartbreaking. It dug up traumas that I don’t think I’m quite ready to deal with yet.

But besides that, yeah. Good book. Definitely worth reading, as long as you’re prepared for it.

Review: Sarah, Son of God

Title: Sarah, Son of God

Author: Justine Saracen

Genre: Historical

Trigger Warnings: Transphobia, outdated transgender terminology, sexual assault, drunk driving, death (mention), blood (mention)

Back Cover:

Against her better judgment, Professor Joanna Valois takes on sexually undefinable Sara Falier as her assistant on a trip to Venice. The object of their research is a sixteenth century heretical book and the truth about the woman condemned to death for printing it. The book, a translation of an ancient codex not only shattered the lives of nearly everyone who touched it but, 400 years later, could still bring half the world to its knees.

Like nesting dolls, this story within a story within a story raises the question as to whether gender-breaking has not only challenged the boundaries of love and sexual desire, but altered the course of history.

Review:

I’m not normally into historical fiction, but I just couldn’t get over how much I love the title of this book. Especially with the way the description strongly hints at it being queer, I was actually pretty excited for this one.

Joanna is the “main character,” but she kind of receeds to the background a little bit. She’s a professor, a lesbian, and a bit bland all things considered. She’s not a passive character – it’s her research trip, after all, she’s making decisions and driving the research – but she still serves more as a vessel to make the story happen than as a vivid character to enjoy.

Sara does seem less bland, but that’s purely because of her trans-ness, which is her main distinguishing characteristic. She starts off the story as a gender-nonconforming man named Tadzio who is considered for the research trip because Joanna’s original translator has died and he’s a native speaker of a particular Italian dialect she needs. Tadzio gets rejected for the trip because Italy in the 70s (this book is set in the 70s) would not have approved of his gender-nonconformingness, but when Joanna discoveres Tadzio can become Sara, a woman who completely passes for female, Sara gets invited on the trip. Sara passes very well and is good at charming men, and that and her transness makes up everything interesting about Sara.

The story starts with a prologue about the woman who originally published the heretical book, which was interesting and fills in the beginning of the story that Joanna and Sara learn about. Then it has a bit about Tadzio getting arrested during the Stonewall riots, which isn’t bad but is completely irrelevant to anything else that happens. Most of the story is Joanna and Sara going around Venice, tracking down bits of the story behind this book and what happened to it. The Venitian atmosphere in the book is good, and the plot is solid.

The part where my suspension of disbelief falls apart, though, is when we get to read the actual text of the heretical book, which is a translation of a supposedly “original” manuscript, and it’s really not compelling enough for me to believe that it shook the foundations of so many people’s faith. This could be because I’m just coming off reading Misquoting Jesus, which is all about how incredibly unreliable these kinds of manuscripts are, but I found it difficult to believe that A, this manuscript was 100% genuine, and B, just reading it would cause people to question their faith so hard. I’ve shown die-hard Christians actual scientific facts and they still preferred to reject them in favor of their faith, I can’t believe reading one outlandish manuscript would shake anyone’s faith.

Also, this is possibly a spoiler? But if, like me, you were hoping the title pointed to the manuscript saying Jesus was trans, that’s not it. I was disappointed, but there is no trans Jesus in this book.

Overall, this book goes solidly in the “good” range. It wasn’t spectactular, and I found the heretical book itself to be fairly disappointing, but it was good. I enjoyed the read, Venice as a setting was fantastic, and besides the suspension of disbelief problem, it was a pretty good read.

Review: Misquoting Jesus

Title: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Author: Bart D. Ehrman

Genre: Religion

Trigger Warnings: Discussion of Jesus’s death/suffering

Back Cover:

For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand––and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself are the results of both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes.

In this compelling and fascinating book, Ehrman shows where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, explaining for the first time how the many variations of our cherished biblical stories came to be, and why only certain versions of the stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today. Ehrman frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultra–conservative views of the Bible.

Review:

I didn’t set out to review every single book I read this year, but I’m 9 for 9 so far so I might as well continue.

This is going to be a short review because I don’t have a whole lot of thoughts on it. It was very interesting, and I learned a lot. Bart talks about a lot of things I didn’t know about in the early history of the Christian church/Bible, including some of the controversies of the day and how the books and letters that make up the New Testament were copied and distributed.

He also brings up a lot of the differences in the manuscripts, and spends quite a bit of time talking about how textual analysts determine which variation is most likely to be the original text when none of the originals survived to be compared against. He talks about how scribal mistakes caused variations, as did intentional changes made by people who copied the documents and wanted to be sure there was no ambiguity that it should be interpreted the way they thought it should.

Personally, I found the arguments and translations set forth in this book very compelling – but I’m already predisposed to accept them. I don’t think they’d be nearly as compelling to my biblical literalist family, who would want a lot more authority than “I went to college” to take Bart’s word for this.

However, whatever your beliefs, this is best read with a Bible on hand to cross-reference some of the verses Bart mentions. And if you happen to have access to translations of the Greek texts mentioned, even better. The book can absolutely be enjoyed without supporting materials, but having them on hand will enrich the experience.

Review: Not Even Bones

Title: Not Even Bones

Series: Market of Monsters #1

Author: Rebecca Schaeffer

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood/gore, body horror, torture, pedophilia mention

Back Cover:

Nita doesn’t murder supernatural beings and sell their body parts on the internet—her mother does that. Nita just dissects the bodies after they’ve been “acquired.” But when her mom brings home a live specimen, Nita decides she wants out — dissecting living people is a step too far.

But when she tries to save her mother’s victim, she ends up sold on the black market in his place — because Nita herself is a supernatural being. Now Nita is on the other side of the bars, and there is no line she won’t cross to escape and make sure no one can ever capture her again.

Nita did a good deed, and it cost her everything. Now she’s going to do a lot of bad deeds to get it all back.

Review:

This book is really really dark and really really gory and also really really good despite (or perhaps because of) all that.

Nita is the narrator. She doesn’t kill people or sell their body parts, but she does dissect the people her mother kills so her father can sell their body parts. A huge part of the emotional arc of the story is Nita insisting to herself that she’s a good person, and then as things get worse and worse crossing her own lines and trying to reconcile the fact that she may not be that good after all. I don’t read enough antiheroes to be able to positively identify her as one, but I know that despite all the bad things she does, I liked her a lot.

The story actually takes a little bit to get to the “Nita gets sold on the black market” part, but I was okay with that. It took time to set up a complicated dynamic between Nita and her mother, establish a world where nonhuman creatures are known and some of them are on a “legal to murder them” list, and tease a few things that get explained later on. And once it gets into the “Nita gets sold” part, wow, does it get intense.

This whole book is intense and vivid. Rebecca does an amazing job writing about pain – and there is a LOT of pain in this book. Torture, cutting off body parts, broken bones, stabbings … Normally the amount of sheer violence in this book would put me off, but somehow I didn’t mind (that much). It was intense, but it was also engrossing.

What I didn’t realize when I picked this up is that it’s first in a series. I’m actually not sure if I want to go on to the second book. There are some loose ends that weren’t tied up and that’s the only reason I’m considering reading book two – I really just wish everything had been resolved at the end of this one. It was really good, don’t get me wrong, and I enjoyed it. I just don’t know if I can handle another book as violent as this one. If I do, it’ll be sometime in the future, not immediately.

The Market of Monsters series:

1. Not Even Bones
2. Only Ashes Remain
3. When Villains Rise

Review: Stand Firm

Title: Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze

Author: Svend Brinkmann

Genre: Self-Help/Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: Mentioning death

Back Cover:

The pace of modern life is accelerating. To keep up, we must keep on moving and adapting – constantly striving for greater happiness and success. Or so we are told. But the demands of life in the fast lane come at a price: stress, fatigue and depression are at an all-time high while our social interactions have become increasingly self-serving and opportunistic.

How can we resist today’s obsession with introspection and self-improvement? In this witty and bestselling book, Danish philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann argues that we must not be afraid to reject the self-help mantra and ‘stand firm’. The secret to a happier life lies not in finding your inner-self but in coming to terms with yourself in order to co-exist peacefully with others. By encouraging us to stand firm and get a foothold in life, this insightful anti-self-help guide offers a sobering and realistic alternative to life-coaching, positive thinking and the need always to say ‘yes!’

Review:

This is not really what I thought it would be. I liked the concept so much because I like self-help stuff and I thought it would be really interesting to see a critique of that. That’s not really what this is, though. Stand Firm is just a self-help book that claims Stoicism is the way to go.

This book is really short, which I was glad of, because I forced myself to finish it even though I lost interest pretty quickly. I wanted the anti-self-help book this promised to be, not the modern-self-help-is-bad-let’s-do-Stoicism-instead that I got. A lot of the thesis of this book came down to, “constant self-improvement is too fast-paced. Stoicism is more steady and reliable.”

This book is broken down into seven “steps” to take to switch from constant self-improvement to Stoicism, and each step takes up one chapter. Each chapter has several sections of Svend trying to make his point and then prescribing what you should do. I don’t know if it’s because the English version is just a translation or because the book itself is actually unfocused, but it really felt like the book danced around the point a lot. None of the arguments were very compelling and they’re all based on a lot of assumptions (such as “being yourself intrinsically has value”), not all of which I agreed with.

This book is really just represented as something it’s not. It’s not an anti-self-help book, it’s just a self-help book that has a different philosophy than most of modern self-help books. I am extremely disappointed.

Review: The Blue Sword

Title: The Blue Sword

Series: Damar #1

Author: Robin McKinley

Genre: High Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, war, kidnapping

Back Cover:

Harry Crewe is a Homelander orphan girl, come to live in Damar from over the seas. She is drawn to the bleak landscape, so unlike the green hills of her Homeland. She wishes she might cross the sands and climb the dark mountains where no Homelander has ever set foot, where the last of the old Damarians, the Free Hillfolk, live.

Corlath is the golden-eyed king of the Free Hillfolk, son of the sons of the legendary Lady Aerin. When he arrives in Harry’s town to ally with the Homelanders against a common enemy, he never expects to set Harry’s destiny in motion: She will ride into battle as a King’s Rider, bearing the Blue Sword, the great mythical treasure, which no one has wielded since Lady Aerin herself.

Legends and myths, no matter how epic, no matter how magical, all begin somewhere.

Review:

This book was published in 1982, but it isn’t dated at all, which is what I most worry about when picking up old books. It turned out to be just a really, really good book.

I struggled to get oriented with the world at first. One geographic area is literally called Home, and that was super confusing. So was the fact that it was obviously high fantasy but there’s also trains. This was mostly just a problem in the first couple chapters, though, and once I got past it the story was amazingly absorbing.

Harry is the main character. She’s the classic misfit I’d-rather-be-riding-than-doing-ladylike-things trope, but she does have a lot of self-control and is able to at least act like a lady when she has to. When the book opens she’d recently moved to the desert of Damar with her brother after the death of her parents, and she actually kinda likes it. She catches the attention of Corlath, king of the mysterious Hill People, when he comes to her town to do some diplomacy. The diplomacy does not go well, but before Corlath returns to his people, he kidnapps Harry and takes her with him. (I don’t feel like this is a spoiler because it happens in chapter two or three.)

Harry is remarkably chill with this new development, which I actually really enjoyed. It was so much fun to watch her earn the respect of the Hill People, get to know their culture, and learn some of their skills without a bunch of panicked what-is-going-on-take-me-back or simpering homesickness moments. Harry is really good at keeping her emotions bottled up – but there actually is a logical and plot-relevant reason for it. Mostly it keeps drama out of the way and puts the focus on the Hill People culture and Harry learning all sorts of awesome skills. Harry’s just a character that definitely has feelings but doesn’t display wild and dramatic emotions, and I actually really liked that about her.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot because watching it unfold is the best part. A lot of different things happen as Harry becomes more and more a part of the Hill People, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Each new happening is better than the last one, to the point where the climax made my eyes literally tear up from … epicness? Is “I’m reading something epic” an emotion? Either way, I unequivocally loved it.

Spoilers – highlight to read: My only real problem with the book was the denouement (the part after the climax), and that’s really a personal thing. Harry leaves warrior-ing behind her, gets married, and has kids. I did not like that ending at all, mainly because that’s not a choice that I would have made. If I defeated a demon hoarde singlehandedly, there is no way in hell I would give up being a warrior to raise kids. I understand some people actually want to raise kids, but that seems like a major downgrade to me.

I don’t actually think I’m going to read book two, which is actually a prequel focusing on Lady Aerin. I’m sure it’s good, but I don’t really feel any need to read it – this book was perfectly self-contained and supremely satisfying. This book was really, really good and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The Damar series:

1. The Blue Sword
2. The Hero and the Crown

Review: Refuse to Choose!

Title: Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams

Author: Barbara Sher

Genre: Personal Development

Trigger Warnings: None noted

Back Cover:

Don’t know what to do with your life? Drawn to so many things that you can’t choose just one? New York Times best-selling author Barbara Sher has the answer–do EVERYTHING!

With her popular career counseling sessions, motivational speeches, workshops, and television specials, Barbara Sher has become famous for her extraordinary ability to help people define and achieve their goals. What Sher has discovered is that some individuals simply cannot, and should not, decide on a single path; they are genetically wired to pursue many areas. Sher calls them “Scanners”–people whose unique type of mind does not zero in on a single interest but rather scans the horizon, eager to explore everything they see.

In this groundbreaking book, readers will learn:

• what’s behind their “hit and run” obsessions
• when (and how) to finish what they start
• how to do everything they love
• what type of Scanner they are (and which tools they need to do their very best work)

Review:

As someone with a lot of disparate interests, I was really excited to read this book. However, my final opinion of it ended up being fairly low, as the book started off good and then went steadily downhill.

Barbara spends the first bit of the book talking about how it’s not bad to be a Scanner (her name for people with a wide variety of interests and/or who bounce between interests, so named because they’re always “scanning the horizon” for new opportunities – personally, I think her way of naming things is absolutely terrible, but that’s neither here nor there). Her whole idea in this section is that not everything you’re interested in has to turn into a business or a career. It doesn’t have to be marketable or make money. It’s totally okay to do something purely because you enjoy it. Which, great. I can absolutely get behind that, and resisting the pressure to monetize everything I like is something I struggle with.

Part One is good, too – she goes over the details of a Scanner, what they tend to have in common (feeling unfulfilled, unable to find the “perfect career” or stick with things, more than one passion, and more) and where they struggle. I actually enjoyed going through this part and picking out where I related to the concept. I thought her take on Scanners never finishing things was great – the idea being Scanners stop something when they get what they wanted out of it, but what they actually want might be something like “a feeling of understanding how X works” rather than completing the project they started.

Part Two is where it got rough. This is entirely descriptions of different types of Scanners, listing 10 different subtypes of Scanners, how they operate, what they struggle with, letters and comments from real people who are those type of Scanner, tools and methods they can use, and different “life design models” that will help them make money while still doing everything they want. It honestly starts to drag, and I think it could have been better done with a summary of the different types at the beginning, maybe with some kind of quiz or test to help you determine which one you are, and then you could just flip to that section and read only about the type of Scanner you are. Reading about all of them was … a lot, and not really very helpful because some of them were so different it was obvious the strategies wouldn’t work for multiple types.

After Part Two is the epilogue. I expected there to be more, and there wasn’t, so it felt like it ended really abruptly – which, again, could have been fixed by changing it to an “only read about your type” structure.

So now let’s talk about the main problem with the book: Authority. Or rather, lack thereof.

Barbara gives the reader absolutely no reason why they should listen to her, other than the fact that the Scanners she wrote about talking to seemed excited about her ideas. She puts in a lot of letters, comments, and interviews with other Scanners, but not a single one has any suggestions or tips for how they dealt with it. They all follow the same formula: “Here’s my problem, showing I’m obviously a Scanner.” *Barbara makes a wise suggestion perfectly fitted to the type of scanner they are.* “I can’t believe I never thought of that before, that’s perfect for me, Barbara you’re amazing.” Barbara is always the Wise and Knowing One who has the perfect tool/advice/life design model for every scanner, but there’s no indication of where she got those ideas or that they would even work. I think there’s only two or three Scanners in the whole book who actually get a follow-up where Barbara includes what they told her about how her ideas worked in their lives.

Sure, some of the ideas sound really good. But I’m not inclined to trust that Barbara is just the Scanner Whisperer who automatically knows how each Scanner should structure their lives, and she gives no sources, interviews where she learned anything, or any indication of how or where she learned how each type of Scanner should live. It can’t even be from personal experience, since there’s no way she is all 10 types of scanner. In some ways it just comes across as a “life coach” (which Barbara is) trying to be life-coachy and sell you a way to live your life that sounds good but may or may not work.

That said, was the book bad? Not really. There’s a lot of good things in it. I appreciate knowing that I’m not the only person who doesn’t have a singular passion, and there are some good ideas and I do actually plan to try out a few of the exercises mentioned. That said, though, there isn’t enough authorial authority in this book for me to fully trust everything Barbara says, and I don’t plan to drop everything and restructure my life according to Barbara’s method any time soon.

Update: If you’re the kind of person who feels like this book could be helpful but it isn’t really giving you what you want, try I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was instead.

Review: The Swan Riders

Title: The Swan Riders

Series: Prisoners of Peace #2

Author: Erin Bow

Genre: Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, seizures, transhumanism (combining technology and organic life)

Spoiler Warning: This book is a sequel, and this review has spoilers of the first book, The Scorpion Rules. If spoilers matter to you, proceed with caution.

Back Cover:

Greta Stuart had always known her future: die young. She was her country’s crown princess, and also its hostage, destined to be the first casualty in an inevitable war.  But when the war came it broke all the rules, and Greta forged a different path.

She is no longer princess. No longer hostage. No longer human. Greta Stuart has become an AI.

If she can survive the transition, Greta will earn a place alongside Talis, the AI who rules the world.  Talis is a big believer in peace through superior firepower.  But some problems are too personal to obliterate from orbit, and for those there are the Swan Riders:  a small band of humans who serve the AIs as part army, part cult.

Now two of the Swan Riders are escorting Talis and Greta across post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan. But Greta’s fate has stirred her nation into open rebellion, and the dry grassland may hide insurgents who want to rescue her – or see her killed. Including Elian, the boy she saved—the boy who wants to change the world, with a knife if necessary.   Even the infinitely loyal Swan Riders may not be everything they seem.

Greta’s fate—and the fate of her world—are balanced on the edge of a knife in this smart, sly, electrifying adventure.

Review:

This book is intense. It’s not action-packed – in fact, most of the story takes place on a horseback journey across the Canadian wilderness – but oh god, the emotions.

This book has a bigger thematic element than The Scorpion Rules. Now that Greta is an AI, it asks the questions, “What is it that truly makes us human?” and “Can an artificial intelligence become more human?” Which are both very interesting questions to me, a person who is very uncomfortable with and kind of scared of transhumanism. The story leaves the second question ambiguous but does answer the first question – in a way that I liked but still felt a little clichéd.

There is a lot of really cool stuff in this book. There’s a lot more about the Swan Riders, including several major Swan Rider characters, and Talis the head AI is a major character (and actually quite enjoyable). The world and the other characters are all excellently done, and provide an excellent backdrop to Greta’s story.

Like I said in my review of The Scorpion Rules, if you don’t like Greta, you’re not going to like this book. This is very much her story, and not just because she’s narrating. She’s the first new AI in a while, she’s the first one in ages to look at being AI with fresh eyes, and her processing it, learning to deal with it, dealing with feelings of love and caring, and figuring out what it means to be AI and what it means to be human is the story. Sure, there’s a rebellion and some unexpected betrayal that adds tension, but that’s not really what the story is about. The story is about Greta, love, and the nature of humanity.

Which I had no problems with, because I really like Greta.

There were a few minor details I had issue with. The romance from the previous book, even though it wasn’t huge, was abruptly dropped. And a few of the AI-related details at the end got confusing. But the problems were small enough that I’m willing to overlook them – and besides, I was too busy enjoying the intensity of the emotions to worry about it.

I don’t think there’s going to be a third book in the series, and I’m okay with that. There’s room for one if Erin wanted to write it, but the series also wrapped up really well here. The ending is somewhat open, but it still brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed this journey.

The Prisoners of Peace series:

1. The Scorpion Rules
2. The Swan Riders

Review: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (DNF)

Title: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Author: Gail Honeyman

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Fire, hospitals

Read To: Page 156 (large print edition)

Back Cover:

No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The only way to survive is to open your heart.

Review:

The only reason I opened this book at all was because it was September’s book club pick. Never before have I not finished a book club book (even Little Fires Everywhere, which I wasn’t a fan of either, I finished), but I dislike this book so much that I looked up a plot summary for the rest of it and that’s going to have to be enough, because I can’t stand it enough to finish.

The reason I can’t stand it is twofold: the writing and Eleanor herself. So let’s talk about the writing.

The main thing I didn’t like about the writing was how utterly boring it was. It went on so many tangents, none of them interesting, and presented the lamest details about Eleanor’s life as if they were extremely important. The fact that she buys a certain type of pizza every Friday is irrelevant. Where she got her furniture is irrelevant. The details of her favorite mug for drinking vodka are irrelevant. There is nothing important going on in Eleanor’s life (intentionally), but the writing seems desperate to make everything as boring as possible in the meantime.

So let’s talk about Eleanor. She is very bad at social skills but blames everyone else for it – and that’s the main thing I hated about her. Desire minimal contact with people? I understand, I went through a period of that, too. Want an isolated life? That’s fine, you do you. Have terrible social skills but be so oblivious to it that you think it’s literally everyone else who’s bad at conversations? That got under my skin. At first I was afraid she was supposed to be autistic, but thankfully she’s not. After reading the summary I think her weirdness is supposed to be some sort of trauma response from some stuff that happened in her childhood, which – okay, that’s fair. I had a pretty similar trauma response, I can get that.

But the problem was Eleanor was the narrator, and having her blocked off from her emotions so much meant the entire story was emotionless. You don’t get a feel for any of the other characters because Eleanor doesn’t feel anything for them except annoyance. The story tries to hook you on the curiosity of “what happened to Eleanor when she was a kid,” but that doesn’t come up until a little ways into the book and the pull isn’t strong enough to get over how unfeeling and utterly boring the story is.

I get what the author was trying to go for here – a small story about a traumatized woman learning to work past it and feel love again – but it was so profoundly uninteresting (and I disliked Eleanor so much) that I didn’t even finish the book.