#they were on my tbr but this properly pissed me off

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2019

#58 - Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence

Mount TBR (40/100)

Rating: 1/5 stars

[CONTENT WARNING FOR MY REVIEW: RAPE, MURDER]

I had to make myself finish this book, just to be sure I could criticize it properly. And unlike my usual write-it-blind method, where I don't read other reviews first, I did some digging, so I could react to them and really let what I did and did not like about this book crystallize in my mind. Jorg is a reprehensible person, I have no argument with that. Everyone using the "worse than Joffrey" image isn't wrong (except I think if Joffrey had been around longer, we would have seen him sink far lower, but that's a comment on ASoIaF, not this book.) Jorg can't go five pages without raping a girl (tastefully [ahem] off-page,) knifing a "brother" because the dude pissed him off, pushing someone off a cliff, using a weapon of mass destruction, and so on. If he's not actively committing a crime or a sin, he's strongly considering his next one. Was this off-putting? Oh, absolutely, at first. And there's my problem. Even if it's not the author's intention to condone any of this behavior in writing about an obvious psychopath doing these things, by putting the narrative in first person, we're living inside Jorg's head and seeing his reasoning and eventually, maybe, sympathizing with him. By the end of the book, I wasn't cheering for Jorg exactly, but I did get swept up in the action and read the second half of the book in one long sitting, whereas at the beginning I had to take frequent breaks to deal with my disgust. I won't criticize anyone, ever, for indulging in escapist fantasies, and yes, that includes reading/daydreaming about committing atrocities. I've thought about killing someone before, especially back in my angry teenage years. It's an outlet for anger that doesn't harm anyone, as long as you understand that's all it is. But I didn't do it, and Jorg does. And the book makes it seem cool and edgy, and oh look, what a terrible life this kid's had and here's how awesome it feels to get revenge. That, I have a serious problem with. Moving on from the fundamental issue with "murder, yay!" messaging, there's still a lot I don't like. The frequent pre-chapter character notes about Jorg's "brothers" were a lazy way to (attempt to) give them depth, usually right before they were killed. One in particular towards the end of the book mentions a name I honestly don't think had ever been included before, a brother the reader hadn't been introduced to. (I may be wrong about this, because there are many brothers and they die off like flies. If Young Sim actually was mentioned earlier, he wasn't significant enough for me to remember.) I can rationalize in my mind that making Jorg's band of brothers interchangeable and disposable fits his psychopathy, and it does, but it doesn't make for interesting reading. I wanted the secondary characters to have more personality. Even Makin--I mean, the dude was the head of the royal guard, and he becomes a brigand in order to stay by Jorg's side. Why is that not given more page time? That's a great hook! Write a book from his POV while he watches his charge devolve into a monster--how does he deal with that? What would break his loyalty? Next up: when is this? At first, I thought it was separate-world fantasy. Then classic authors start getting thrown around--Plutarch jumped out and grabbed my neck and smashed my face in the idea that, no, actually, this is our world. Okay, alternate history then? Except eventually we get clues that this is actually a far-future world, post-apocalyptic, and the "castles" the kings occupy are skyscrapers or other modern-world structures. As far as that goes, I'm on board, except that there are very few answers given, the descriptions of those structures are so vague I can't picture most of them (I had no idea what kind of facility the Great Stair was a part of, though some of its bits were clearly reinforced concrete fitted with a high-security steel door,) and there's so little done with this concept that I'm afraid it's just supposed to be cool flavor instead of real world-building. The revelation near the end, and the ending: oh, so someone messed with Jorg's mind, setting him up to be able to be like, all that crap I did may or may not have really been me, I was being guided, now I'm not necessarily so horrible going forward. I call bullshit on that. BULL. SHIT. If the protagonist is a psychopath, own it, don't erase it so he can be less awful in the next book. And finally: this is 110% male fantasy. The women are beloved but dead (Jorg's mother,) evil (the crone, Jorg's step-mother,) objects of desire (Katherine,) or victims (everyone else who is raped, killed, or both.) So whether or not you might be okay with the other problematic content of the book, there's no way around its inherent sexism. I can't recommend this to anyone, because even as a piece of escapist fantasy where it's okay to want to kill people, it's just not any good.         

[thecloserkin]

book review: Mira Grant, Feed (2010)

Genre: Sci-Fi

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: No

Is it explicit: No

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: Hell to the yes

Bottom line: Creepily Codependent Siblings Survive the Zombie Apocalypse! They are adopted but the way they refer to each other as “my brother” and “my sister” when they could have used given names instead? I am here for it. While tight plotting is not one of this book’s strengths, you should slog through the infodumps to the ending which packs one hydrogen bomb of an emotional wallop.

This is the first book in the “Newsflash” trilogy about a pair of journalists, Georgia and Shaun Mason, who begin by blogging out of their parents’ basement and end by uncovering a vast governmental conspiracy subtended by various alphabet-soup agencies. The zombie apocalypse itself happened 23 years ago, and it happened the way these things invariably happen: Scientists try to cure cancer/the common cold, unleash freak virus on humanity, cue end of the world as we know it. Georgia and Shaun are the paradigmic products of this remade world: They, like many children born in and around the chaos of the outbreak, were orphans. On their adoption papers their birthdays are given as the same day—an arbitrary made-up date, but it makes them twins even if George is def a few months older. She acts older too, acting as the business brains of their fledgling journalistic operation while Shaun’s job is to “poke dead things with sticks” and look good while doing it. There is a performative aspect to Shaun’s mugging for the camera and flirting with anything in a skirt. He’s doing it because outrageous behavior garners them more hits, obviously, but he’s also doing it for George who gets a kick out of watching him charm the pants off people. She is bemused but not remotely threatened. George is all-business all the time, emotionally guarded and wary of physical contact, and one time when someone tried to hug her Shaun smoothly stepped up to intercept the hug to spare her the discomfort of enduring it. I SCREAMED. Note that George doesn’t mind being touched if it’s Shaun doing it:

I shuddered. Shaun caught the gesture and put a hand at the small of my back, steadying me. I flashed him a smile.

Shaun put a hand on my knee, steadying me, and I covered it with my own.

These small moments of tenderness punctuate an endearingly banterful sibling rapport. This is them reacting to the news of their big break—they’ve been tapped to cover the presidential campaign of an idealistic Wyoming senator:

Shaun was sure we’d get it. I was sure we wouldn’t. Now, staring at the monitor, Shaun said, “George?” “Yeah?” “You owe me twenty bucks.”

This is George shooing Shaun out of her room so she can change her clothes:

I pointed to the door. “Get out. There’s about to be nudity, and you’ll just complicate things.” “Finally, adult content! Should I turn the webcams on?”

This is big sister Georgia mocking Shaun for his youthful indiscretions:

”Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled.”

In conclusion I love them sfm they are perfect.

As an aside, the people tagging this book “horror” on Goodreads have either not read the book (which is legit, TBR piles are a thing) or don’t understand what horror is? It’s like they saw the word “zombies” and just auto-completed the genre. What defines horror is not blood, gore, or violence but the fear and loss of agency engendered by that violence. That’s why so many horror film protagonists are women, who experience loss of agency in large and small ways on a daily basis and must learn to survive in the face of it; it’s cathartic to watch them take back control. The point of this digression is that THIS IS NOT A HORROR NOVEL. It’s not about that kind of fear!!! This is a political thriller so buckle in kids we’re going for a ride.

Twenty-three years ago during the outbreak, Georgia and Shaun’s parents lost their eight-year-old biological son. He was bitten by the neighbors’ dog. This was before it was widely understood that the virus could jump between mammalian species, and that anything surpassing the 40 pound threshold was susceptible to its effects. The dog weighed over 40 pounds. The Masons, who were award-winning reporters in their own right, dealt with their grief by channeling their emotional resources into chasing the news ratings. They continued to be phenomenally successful journalists as well as shitty parents to Shaun and Georgia, whom they seem to have adopted entirely for publicity purposes. The narrative invites us to draw the comparison between George and Shaun, who have chosen to pursue this career out of a thirst for THE TRUTH, and their parents who have less lofty motivations. Not to put too fine a point on it but their parents are mercenary motherfuckers. These kids survived their childhood by building an emotional bunker that they never learned to climb out of. This line from the very first chapter is so telling because they’re out in the field and Shaun is being chased by a zombie right?:

I screamed, images of my inevitable future as an only child filling my mind.

When Shaun’s in mortal peril, Georgia doesn’t think of him as “the center of my universe”— which he is—she thinks of the void that would result in the loss of her brother. That’s how they fit together, that’s what they are to each other, and all the other stuff is layered on top of the shared trauma of their childhood. Ffs they even have a ritual for administering each other’s blood tests—you know that thing at wedding toasts where the bride and groom loop their arms together and tip the champagne flute into the other’s mouth? Like that:

Moving with synchronicity born of long practice, we broke the biohazard seals and popped the plastic lids off our testing units

So the protocol for taking blood tests, which everyone has to do all day long to prove they’re not infected, is to come into the foyer/antechamber/vestibule one at a time and once you test clean you proceed into the building while the next person cycles into the chamber. That way, if anyone is found to be infected, they can be isolated. Georgia and Shaun have never once complied with this rule:

Our next-door-neighbor used to call Child Protective Services every six months because our folks wouldn’t stop us from coming in together. But what’s the point of life if you can’t take risks now and then, like coming into the damn house with your brother?

Implying that if one of them ever got bitten by a zombie the other one would rather spend the rest of their short life trapped in a garage with the shambling corpse of their sibling than die in their sleep at a ripe old age. Talk about ride or die.

I said before that this presidential campaign, this is their big break as much as it is the candidate’s. Up till now George and Shaun have been blogging under the umbrella of news aggregation entities (sort of like how BuzzFeed and HuffPost and Medium are populated by user-generated content that isn’t necessarily making the content creator an appreciable pile of money), but now they’ve finally landed the story that will let them strike out on their own. One of the sharpest things about this book is how it depicts journalism as a job, and a tough one to do right. Nashville does the same thing for the music industry, and as over-the-top as that show is, it shows you the nuts and bolts of success in a profession where practitioners are supposedly driven by “passion” alone. Here the distribution of labor is skewed pretty heavily towards George:

I get the administrative junk that Shaun’s too much of a jerk and Buffy’s too much of a flake to deal with.

Buffy is their business partner and some kind of auteur hacker + tech whiz. Shaun is the public face of their media brand. But make no mistake, George is the heart and soul and brains of this operation. You see her business acumen in drive-by observations like “Replacing that much equipment would kill our operating budget for months,” or when she talks about i n s u r a n c e. And George talks about insurance a lot. She mentions how a certain camera covered in zombie body fluids is an insurance write-off, how being present in designated high-risk zones during certain times of day can triple your insurance premium, how a certain treatment for her chronic vision condition isn’t covered by health insurance. I … just wanna point out that the human race has survived a flippin’ zombie apocalypse, but the United States remains wedded to private for-profit health insurance where who and what are “covered” remains a game of Russian roulette?!! Whoever said it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” was onto something. This society is functioning cohesively enough that elections are a thing (thus, nation-states are still a thing). If you want to tell me our fragmented, inefficient, fee-for service model of paying for medical care that routinely bankrupts & kills our citizens has weathered the end of civlization and emerged intact from its ashes, you better look me dead in the eye and bring receipts.

What’s really impressive about Georgia is she’ll rattle off exactly what kind of activities (those forbidden by her journalistic licensing) will invalidate her life insurance if she’s stupid enough to get killed while doing them. From which I surmise that she and Shaun are both covered by pretty hefty policies of which they are each other’s sole beneficiary. Which makes sense, they’re in a dangerous line of work, but I feel like it’s a poor investment since whoever was left behind would be doing their damnedest to climb into the grave next to their sibling lol.

Another little requirement of the household insurance—since we leave safe zones all the time in order to do our jobs, we have to be able to prove we’ve been properly sterilized, and that means logged computer verification of our sterilizations.

George is talking about the AI that is apparently located in her showerhead that douses her with a bleach & antiseptic compound when she comes back from being in the field?? That sounds painful but what concerns me is the breathtaking scope of the Internet of Things’ penetration into her life. The AI is in the bathroom. It knows exactly where she’s been bc ofc her GPS location can be tracked via her phone, and it’s merrily sending packets of information off to …. somewhere, where it will doubtless be aggregated with all the data collected about George from other sources, and combed for patterns to predict future behavior. That’s how surveillance capitalism works. if this sounds chillingly familiar it’s because it’s already happening, it’s what the tech giants are already doing—gobbling up as much data about as many people in as many contexts as possible—and leveraging that data for profit. Privacy is a joke. George is not unaware of this, but what choice does she have? It’s either install the damn AI in her showerhead or get her parents’ homeowners’ insurance policy cancelled for being too “high risk.”

I want to circle back to George’s chronic medical condition for a sec. She’s got a disability—what’s a called a “reservoir condition” where the virus takes up residence in a body organ, in her case the retina—meaning essentially that she has zombie vision; she can see ridiculously well in low light situations but direct sunlight will blind her. She has to wear shades even indoors and is literally incapable of crying since her tear ducts are inoperative. So there’s a testy situation where a federal agent tries to get her to take off her sunglasses so he can verify her identity with a retinal scan right? And because they’re standing outside this is obviously a recipe for permanent blindness, quite aside from the fact you wouldn’t be able to get a valid scan anyway due to the virus over-dilating George pupils. But instead of checking George’s files, where her disability & its effects are prominently listed, this grunt insists on making her remove her glasses because Procedure. It’s a pretty tense moment. Shaun goes ballistic. He doesn’t physically threaten the dude, or insult his mom or anything. No, Shaun understands that he needs to make this pencil-pusher more afraid of the consequences of taking George’s glasses than of Not Following Procedure. And it works. YEET.

On the campaign trail the Senator’s aides arrange for sex-segregated hotel rooms but Shaun and George are having none of it:

On the few occasions when I’ve tried sleeping without Shaun in the next room, well, let’s just say that I can go a long way on a six-pack of Coke.

The ostensible reason the sleeping arrangements need to be reshuffled is, Buffy can’t sleep without a nightlight and George’s eyes can’t tolerate a nightlight. Clearly the real reason is George and Shaun are c l i n g y and codependent as FUCK. One night after a zombie attack and the long grueling hours of cleanup/decontamination that followed it, they actually climb into the same bed—I guess this room only had a double instead of two singles?? The scene the next morning, the two of them having predictably overslept:

“Fuck a duck, Buffy, what are you trying to do, blind her?” … Shaun, clad only in his boxer shorts, staring at an unrepentant Buffy.

So Shaun’s beef with Buffy is not that she barged in on them while they were asleep & half-naked but that she opened the curtains, thereby triggering a painful migraine for George’s sensitive eyes. Buffy explains she didn’t shake them awake because they both sleep armed, lmao. George’s disability and Shaun’s practiced ability to help her maneuver around it (like a trusty prosthetic, he’s an extension of herself) serves to highlight how in this partnership they are one unit and they know each other inside out. This is them after their close shave with the dunce who tried to take George’s glasses:

“Fuck you, too,” I muttered as Shaun got his arm around me and hoisted me away from the barn. “You kiss our mother with that mouth?” “Our mother and you both, dickhead. Give me my sunglasses.”

And this is George waking up in their hotel room, eyes squeezed shut against the glare of multiple computer screens:

He touched my hand with the tips of his fingers before he pressed my sunglasses against my palm.

This is absurdly, spine-tinglingly intimate. First he touches her hand with the tip of his fingers, the most fleeting of touches to let her know it’s him, and then he presses the glasses into her palm to restore her agency so she can, you know, open her eyes. And that earlier scene with him guiding her by the elbow in broad daylight!!! I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

Sometimes I can hardly believe that George and Shaun are twenty-three years old. When I was twenty-three I … was not adulting half so well as these kids. But then, giving their barbarous upbringing, that’s not surprising; my parents loved and nurtured me. When I look at George and Shaun and the successful business they’ve built and the professional relationships they’ve cultivated and their expertise and their bravery I just feel this proud parental glow you know?

I want to say a word about Senator Ryman before we move onto spoiler territory. There’s a big controversy initially about whether the Senator is “genuine” or not (spoiler alert: he is). But what does that even mean, genuine? He’s a good egg, sure, but what are his policies, none of which are explored in depth except his support for horse farms??? I’m not kidding. In a world where any animal weighing over 40 pounds is a zombie outbreak waiting to happen, it’s a controversial position to say people should be able to keep pets in residential zones. Here is how George describes our Candidate:

He’s like a big, friendly Boy Scout who just woke up one day and decided to become the President of the United States of America.

I see two major problems with this: One, they say “Personnel is Policy” so who the hell is he planning to appoint to key Cabinet positions and can he trust them to pursue rather than undermine his objectives (and does he even have a deep enough bench of people to draw on)? Two, the Boy Scouts of America are not exactly, er, unproblematic, and while it’s safe to say our faves are always problematic, I think “Boy Scout” is shorthand here for “no skeletons in his closet,” which again puts the focus squarely on his personal qualities rather than what policies he espouses. It’s great that he hasn’t cheated on his wife or his taxes. But morality and ethics are not the same thing:

Morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know. Your morality is what makes you a good spouse/friend … Your ethics are what makes you a good politician … Morality dictates that you take care of your family, friends and even acquaintances first … For a large society—a society where you can’t know everyone—to work, ethics must come before morality, or ethics and morality must have a great deal of overlap. By acting morally, you must be able to act ethically.

I think we can all agree that this does not describe how our society is currently constituted, and it doesn’t describe George and Shaun’s America either. So this narrow fixation on whether individual candidates are “genuine” or corrupt imo kinda misses the point. George says:

I haven’t even been able to find proof that his campaign received funding from the tobacco companies, and everyone’s campaign receives funding from the tobacco companies.

I don’t want to undersell how important it is the guy is not taking tobacco money. But is he also eschewing Wall Street money, Big Pharma money, defense contractor money? How could George possibly have time to investigate all this dark money if she is supposed to be covering the actual campaign? Seems like it would be a lot easier to reform the campaign finance laws than to vet every single single candidate’s funding sources.

I think one reason the Senator is long on identity & personal charisma and short on policy is that he’s up against an opponent whose base of support is millenarian-fundamentalist “the Rapture is here, we’re all going to hell”:

it was either Ryman’s brand of “we should all get along while we’re here,” or Tate’s hellfire and damnation.

If that is the main faultline in society, I guess half the voters don’t really wanna hear how a given politician is planning to make a material difference in their lives, since they’ve already got eyes on the prize aka the next life.

So there you have it. George and Shaun are scrappy independent muckrakers digging for the truth. Time and again their allegiance to that holy grail overrides their concern for trivial aims like idk personal safety. There’s a vast, shady conspiracy afoot, and as our heroes get closer to it they start getting shot at. They lose comrades. None of this deters them because they are after THE TRUTH. Oh wait there is in fact one thing George values more than the truth:

”You’re more interested in your brother than figuring out the truth?” “Shaun’s the only thing that concerns me more than the truth does.”

And later:

The sight of him was enough to make my heart beat faster and my throat get tight. I knew he was wearing Kevlar underneath his clothes, but Kevlar wouldn’t protect him from a headshot.

Her first concern is always, always, for him.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

George gets infected. That’s the denouement. George is infected and Shaun has to shoot her before she turns all the way. Every single person who makes it to this scene is just bawling by the end of it:

His lips brushed the top of my head as he bent forward and pressed them to my hair. I wanted to yell at him to get away from me, but I didn’t. The barrel of the gun remained a cool, constant pressure on the back of my neck. When I turned, when I stopped being me, he would end it. He loved me enough to end it. Has any girl ever been luckier than I am?

The reassuring pressure of the gun on the base of her neck??? Has there been a more romantic moment in cinematic history??? I THINK NOT. Shaun is a crack shot—he’s the kind of guy who caresses his guns, names them after pretty women, causes his sister to grouse about digging through a suitcaseful of his weaponry to find her clothes—and yet here he is using his gun to kill the woman he loves most in the world.

It was supposed to be Shaun. They both took it as a given that Shaun would be the one to die first. Now he has to find a reason to continue living other than the obvious (vengeance). Stay tuned for the next installment, narrated by Shaun!

[rachaelslibrary]

Let’s Talk Books - The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

(yes I know that’s not the original cover, but it’s the clearest image I could find so forgive me)

This is a book that I had had on my TBR list for a very longtime and knew I would get around to it eventually.  But I had no idea what it was about. Then, sitting in theaters to watch Ready Player One, the trailer came on.  My friend and I watched it, and before the title was announced, we looked at each other and said “that looks like it would be a good book.”

And lo and behold, it was a trailer for The Darkest Minds, a title that I knew I had been wanting to read.  So a week later, on  my birthday trip to Barnes and Noble I made sure to pick it up.  And boy am I glad I did.

This book started off a little slow, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of it’s writing style.  But somewhere along the way (and I’m not sure where it was) it crept up on me and I absolutely fell in love with the characters.  I felt such strong emotions for every one of them, that by the end of it, I had a sudden realization that I loved this book.  I wasn’t sure when it happened and I wasn’t sure why, but god damn I love this book.

The Darkest Minds takes place in a United States where a deadly disease struck children and rendered 98% of the children between 8 and 14 years old dead.  The remaining children had special powers and were locked in “rehabilitation camps” that were really just prisons.  The main character is Ruby, a very powerful girl who has no idea how to control them, as she is broken out of camp and discovers what the world has become outside of it. 

She quickly decides to leave the people who broke her out, and joins up with fellow kids, Liam, Chubs, and Zu, as they search for a place that is supposedly the last safe haven for kids like them.  

Honestly this book is full of so many heartfelt moments and it’s written in such a way that you can really put yourselves in their shoes and empathize with them.  There were parts that made me smile and parts that broke my heart, but I did fall in love with it in the end. 

5/5 stars

Now spoilers below because I need to do some ranting 

FUCK CLANCY!  FUCK THAT KID!  I cannot explain how much I absolutely loathe Clancy Gray.  Everything with him in it was soooo difficult to read (in a good way) because, as a reader, you know that he’s messing with Ruby’s mind and he has a creepy obsession with her. But Alexandra Bracken did such a good job of keeping Ruby believably oblivious, mostly because he was fucking with her mind. 

When he was snapping at her for not being able to use her powers, I was soooooo pissed.  And I was working so I couldn’t even properly express my pissed offness. And then when he practically tries to rape her.  I  don’t know if I’ve ever been so angry at a book in my life.

I had my suspicions about him from the beginning though.  When Liam made the “I don’t think we’ve met” joke I immediately thought that Clancy had erased his memories of Emma to clear the way for Clancy to have her.  Gross.  Turns out that’s not the case, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

The whole family dynamic between Chubs, Liam, Zu, an Ruby is amazing.  You can literally feel how much these kids care about each other, and when Zu announced that she was leaving I could feel the pain that everyone else was in.  Also I started off not liking Chubs but by the end when he got shot.  It seriously felt like I had been shot. Like why?  Why do that to us?  Just when they all were free and clear...heartbreaking.

But the bit that truly broke my heart was the part in the book that I’m sure broke everyone’s heart.  Ruby agreed to work with the Children’s Federation as long as they let Liam go be free.  But she knew he would never leave without her.  So after he told her this really cute alternate reality story about how they were meant to be together, she erased all his memories of her.  Something that she had been terrified she would accidentally do the entire book.  Did Liam and Ruby’s relationship feel a little forced in the beginning?  Yes.  But I don’t blame Ruby for falling for him, especially after seeing how much he cares for Zu and Chubs.  So when that happened...I was gutted.

But anyway, I need to go marinate in sadness and heartbreak for a little while before moving on to whatever book I decide to read next.  Until next time.