Bookzzzzzzz

Apparently, I need a nap.  A long one.  Two of my most recent reads have been, quite unintentionally, re-tellings of Sleeping Beauty.  Then I caught Maleficent.  This theme is not helping with my yawns.  

Anna Sheehan's A Long, Long Sleep is fun.  Fluffy, and somewhat predictable, but fun. Poor little rich girl Rose Fitzroy has just been woken from her stasis tube...after 62 years.  Needless to say, somethings have changed.  During her extensive nap-time,  the world suffered through a few resurgences of plague--seriously, bubonic plague returned--and social upheaval.  Rose is overwhelmed with the new world, complete with an overload of new technology, political maneuverings she can't understand, and atrophy-induced physical weakness.  Oh, and embarrassing teen crushes (told you it was fluffy, Gentle Readers). 

The ending is a bit odd, and feels vaguely icky, but it does wrap everything in a nice, neat little bow.  I have a feeling that with one of the Big Reveals in the climax of the book, we'll be seeing a sequel, possibly a trilogy.  I'm not planning on reading the possible sequels--this one wasn't strong enough to pique my ongoing interest--but I'm sure there's a YA audience out there somewhere that will.

Speaking of YA re-tellings of Sleeping Beauty, I also finished Karen Healey's When We Wake.  My favorite part of the book is the cover.  This is not necessarily a slam: LOOK AT IT!  It's gorgeous.  The book is, you know, readable.  Tegan is a contemporary teenager who dies suddenly and wakes up a hundred years from now in a military facility.  (Note to self: don't donate your body to science in Australia; you'll become cryogenic government property.)  Australia is the preeminent world power in a future of food and water shortages, rising ocean tides, and dying ecosystems. So Tegan talks her way into going to school (where she crushes on the one boy she shouldn't), agrees to supervised media outings (that go horribly wrong, of course), and realizes that the future is still full of prejudice, cruelty, and indifference (shocking).  Oh, and there are chase scenes, because, you know, she once did parkour for fun...and now she does it to save the world!   

Will it have a sequel? you ask.  Yup.  I saw While We Run in the bookstore just today.  Nope, I won't be reading it.  But I do want to wear the book cover makeup for Halloween.

Then, absolutely without planning it, I swear, I went to see Maleficent in the local second-run movie theatre.  While this movie is certainly not all it could be, it was pretty good.  I did roll my eyes more than once in the dark, I must admit, but I blame Disney for keeping to the animated Sleeping Beauty script a bit too closely.  Not sure we needed the three fairies, and some of the clunky dialogue could have been re-tooled.  Plus, I know we needed to see Prince Phillip, but I just wanted to give him a haircut; he looks like Justin Beiber.  And am I the only one who noticed that Sleeping Beauty was only asleep for, like, 20 minutes?  That's not Sleeping Beauty; that's Napping Teenager.  

But can we talk about the costumes?  O holy schnikes, Gentle Readers, I want me some Maleficent horns.  Apparently they were made for the movie by artisans who specialize in fetishware.  I don't know what kind of fetish needs to have Maleficent horns, but I might be willing to look into it.  The costumes are just SO GOOD.

I just can't get on board with the critics, though.  This is not a "feminist revisionist backstory" of an evil fairy, O Kate Taylor of The Globe and Mail!  It is certainly female-centric, and yes, it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, but I really can't see it as a feminist fairy tale.

My biggest issue is the rape narrative.  When greedy Stefan is tasked with destroying Maleficent, he can't stab her to death while she's in a drugged sleep.  They're childhood friends, after all.  But he has no problem sawing off her wings, in a pretty clear rape narrative.  He can't dominate her through penetration, so he violates her body through mutilation.  Thanks, Disney.  You gave me nightmares.  

While Maleficent does reclaim her agency and her power, she does it through violence and a continuation of abuse.  Plus, if we read the narrative in this way, her (spoilers!) reclamation of her wings at the end is a weird negation of the violence visited upon her.  It's as if the movie is trying to erase her trauma.  This doesn't feel like a healthy working-through of issues (or, you know, a kids' movie).  I love Jolie in the movie, and I want her clothes.  But I have serious reservations about the film.  I found it watchable, but I just can't enjoy it.   

I need a new fairy tale to fixate on.  Maybe a nice Little Red Riding Hood.  Death to the wolf, and all that...

Zombie (Ants)

The book opens with a lovely, precocious little girl named Melanie living in a military testing base straight out of Dark Angel or Universal Soldier.  She describes her sterile living environment, her slapdash education, her solitary existence.  Oh, and then she describes Sundays, when she eats her one meal a week.  Of live grubs.

Yep.  Welcome to Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts.  Little Melanie is a zombie.

This book scared the bejeezus out of me.  Most zombie books have some sort of rabid rhesus monkey who bites activists, or alien goo that eats brains, or whatever.  This book’s science is real, and it’s freaking terrifying!  Have you read about zombie ants?  Do you ever want to sleep again, Gentle Readers?  Yeesh.

So in this book, humans have become susceptible to a mutation of the zombie ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  You know, an actual fungus that takes over ants’ brains and controls their actions and explodes their heads and…  Have I mentioned the yeesh?

The science is pretty spot-on, for a horror book.  And that only makes it creepier.  I prefer to be afraid of unlikely things, thank you very much.  Now I have a creepy aversion to ants.

So most people are walking fungus zombies with no brains, just a hunger to snack on them.  But there are exceptions.  Children, who look and act normal, but are infected with Ophiocordyceps. Melanie is the brightest of these.

Helen Justineau is Melanie’s favorite teacher, and has become emotionally attached to her charge, in spite of all the restrictions against it (Slate.com calls their relationship "Matilda...with zombies.")   When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, Melanie and Miss Justineau are joined by a few soldiers and the head of the zombie research program in a desperate run for safety.  

The research director, Dr. Caroline Caldwell, has a desperate need to examine Melanie’s brain.  Yep, the scientist in charge of saving humanity needs braaaaaaaaaains.  So many zombie metaphors, so little time.  She is cold, calculating, and fascinating, seeing the children's human tendencies as nothing more than a clever evolutionary tactic by the fungus.  She reminds a colleague “that the subject presents as a child but is actually a fungal colony animating a child’s body. There’s no place for sentiment here.”   Certainly the reader wants humanity to defeat the fungus, but it’s hard to like this unpleasant woman.

And therein lies the most interesting thing about this book.  We don’t know who to root for.  Melanie is our protagonist; she's also a zombie who has to fight not to eat Miss Justineau's face.  Dr. Caldwell is fighting to cure humanity, but she's pretty nasty.  You can't root for (or against, really) fungal spores...and it all leads to a very muddled sense of hero and villain, in a truly delightful way. 

The ending, too, will knock your socks off.  Not the climax, but the very end.  About two pages before the book closes, Carey yanks the rug.  And you'll like it.  Clever, intriguing, and completely unexpected.  If you'll excuse the pun, Gentle Readers, this is a zombie book with brains.  

BRAAAAAAINS!

Nigerian Apocalypse

I was really looking forward to Who Fears Death.  It’s billed as feminist post-apocalyptic African science fiction.  Do you see, Gentle Readers, why I wanted so badly to love it?  Unfortunately, it is pretty forgettable, in spite of all the accolades it has received: winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award (speculative fiction dealing with race/ethnicity), and nominated for the Nebula and the Locus Fantasy Awards.

I was so excited to read a book by a female Nigerian author with a magical female protagonist.  The idea of African science fiction is be fascinating!  Science plus magic is a great starting point for a story, especially with the varying African traditions of juju, vodoun, hoodoo, etc.  I even like the cover art.  

I began this book expecting to be a fan.  I am a firm believer in supporting diversity in the world of literature, especially in speculative fiction, which has so long been a bastion of DWM (Living White Males, too).  So bring on the women, the non-European traditions, the queer, the trans, the subversive...  And I went into my reading experience with a giddy literary crush on the author.  The New York Times Book Review says Nnedi Okorafor is the heir to Octavia Butler!  That's her above, hanging out with Wole Soyinka!

I really, really, REALLY wanted to love Who Fears Death.  

...It's fine.

For me, the book never found a focus.  At times, it was a clear magical bildungsroman.  Then an exercise in contemporary tribal politics and prejudices.  But then the book became a desert road trip focused on female friendships, and I got bored.  The quest—saving the world, averting genocide, defeating evil—becomes secondary to a juvenile squabble for power in personal relationships.  For a book that takes on such massive, serious topics as weaponized rape, female circumcision and ethnic cleansing, the big ideas are too easily pushed aside and made secondary.  There was so much to write about, and so little addressed.  I was disappointed.   

Although Who Fears Death is not a young adult novel, it reads that way.  Okorafor has four other books out, ranging from middle grades to YA, and this book just hasn’t seemed to make the leap from one to the other.  Now, Gentle Readers, you know that I adore my YA reading, and sometimes it is as effective, if not more so, than “grown up” books.  When I describe Okorafor’s book as being reminiscent of YA literature, however, it is not a compliment.  At first, I thought the problems I was having were merely stylistic, as if Okorafor were trying to write in the manner of a folk tale or an oral history, but that hypothesis just doesn’t ring true.  The characters are naive, and the conflicts are overwhelmingly simplistic.  While the subject matter is certainly adult, the book never feels complex.

The themes of Who Fears Death don’t shy away from the dark nature of adult post-apocalyptic literature (at least in the beginning).  Our protagonist is the child of rape, an Ewu child whose very mixed-race skin marks her violent origins and causes outsider status in her village.  Her mother, a dark-skinned woman of the peaceful Okeke race, was raped by a violent “sun-colored” Nuru man.  Onyesonwu, the resulting child, struggles to find her place in the world and to control her burgeoning magical talents.  I was impressed that this book addressed very real issues,  in that Onyesonwu was facing contemporary prejudices including being a mixed-race child, a female in a patriarchal society, and a child of a violent act.  In order to belong more fully to her village, Onyesonwu insists on receiving the traditional clitoridectomy of a maturing woman.  This book seemed to pull no punches!

Onyesonwu's romantic relationship has the opportunity to be a high point, as she and her lover Mwita jockey for control.  He is a traditional man who believes that he must protect her, but her magic is far stronger than his.  He tends to respond by withholding information, making her dependent on him.  It is a loving relationship, but one fraught with tension and one that should be far more nuanced than it is.  It has the opportunity to be a parable of the female within the traditionally male scifi community (for an explanation of this very real conflict, see here).  This book exhibits so much potential!

But then the magic appears.  While the mythology of the world has smatterings of “the time before,” there’s very little science in the fiction.  Although the characters do have water capture stations and palm-held computers, they rely mostly on magic and juju.  And unfortunately, Okorafor uses magic as a deus ex machina, a quick fix for every problem.  The voluntary clitoridectomy is causing discomfort and pain?  Onyesonwu magically reverses it!  In doing this, the trauma of the surgery is wiped out, and the subtextual discussion of why a young girl might choose such a mutilation is negated.  The choice has been reversed, and any emotional trauma resulting from the act (or of its reversal, and the rejection of the tradition) are ignored.

 

Other scenes of trauma are equally ineffective.  All suffering is given the same treatment in the book, so Onyesonwu’s physical pain during the clitoridectomy is equal to her emotional anguish watching a friend’s murder, but is also equal to having her feelings hurt by a misogynist sorcerer, or a stranger calling her names.  There is one emotional note for suffering, and it discredits the thought-provoking themes of the book by whitewashing them and making them too much alike.  

Even the climax of the book, a flurry of sacrifice, generation and war, is somehow unsatisfying. 

Onyesonwu wins the day, kills the evil sorcerer (who happens to be her rapist father), and prevents the genocide of her people.  She is, unfortunately, stoned to death for her trouble.  But here is where it gets disturbing.  She kills all the Nuru men of weapons-bearing age.  She seems to believe that it is the only way to prevent the slaughter of the Okeke, but still...she commits mass murder herself.  In order to atone somehow, for the death of all these young men, she spontaneously magicks all the women of child-bearing age.  Yep, all the women in town become magically pregnant.  

Now I know that this is not rape, and there is no physical trauma visited upon these women, but WOW.  That is still a helluva violation of personal choice, personal space, personal agency...  And somehow, the violation is greater, as it is practiced on women by a woman. 

All in all, as much as I wanted to love this book, I was disturbed by it.  I found it disappointing in plot, in politics, in tone, in follow-through.  I felt as if the book squandered its potential, and that I had squandered my attention.  

But if you try again, Ms. Okorafor, I will read another book.  I live in hope that you will find a way to harness all that dark, chewy, important "stuff" that needs to be said, and you will say it in an engaging, important book.  Let's both try again.