Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena by Julia Reed
Random House, 2005
11/11/11 Category: Books I bought new but then never got around to reading

I picked up this book in New Orleans last summer, while shopping for books about the region. Julia Reed was raised in the South, moved to Washington and New York for school and work, and recently moved back to New Orleans. The essays in this collection are ones she wrote for various papers and magazines about being a Southerner, living in the South, and how neither of the most common perceptions of the region (that it’s stuck in the 1900s, or that it’s hopelessly homogenized) are true.

While the topics interested me, Reed’s writing doesn’t rise to the level I expect from a contemporary essayist. Compared to contemporaries such as Susan Orlean or Anne Lamott, David Sedaris or Michael Chabon (though that last may be unfair, given Chabon’s fondness for the sound of words—and I say that not in scorn) Reed’s work is serviceable but not beautiful, and I think it’s not too much to expect beauty in the contemporary essay. There’s also a hint of special pleading that only shows up when you read all the essays back to back, as I did last Sunday; individually, each is a fond tribute to the quirks of Southerners, but together, it sounds like Reed is trying too hard to prove a point. I’m not sure whether the point is that Southerners are quirky, or that everyone else is too, but it’s a little awkward.

On the other hand, the material of her essays is usually original and sometimes amazing. Food is a major theme, something I already knew from eight days of gorging myself on every kind of cuisine New Orleans had to offer. But Reed also points out that in her experience, people who are not from the South, when asked about their favorite meal ever, will talk about the restaurant they went to and how hard it was to get a table, and Southerners invariably recite a menu with the kind of dreaminess usually reserved for talking about one’s first love. Other essays go into the history of debutantes and how the tradition is maintained in the New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes, or why Southerners love their guns and their freedom so much, or how it’s common for people in the Southern states, plagued by hurricanes and bugs the size of a Volkswagen bus, to speak of problems as if they are beyond human control—even problems like drinking yourself to death or shooting your husband.

I’m more likely to recommend this to readers who are actively interested in getting a taste of one Southerner’s take on life, rather than those who are fans of contemporary essay. Overall, it was an enjoyable read.

The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson
Book one of the Forensic Mysteries
Viking, 2006
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

I was really getting into this book when I ran into a roadblock. A huge, frustrating, book-killing roadblock. Right around page 155, a printer’s error had inserted the wrong pages: it went 154, 155, 154 again, 157, 155, and then to 159, or something like that. So basically two non-consecutive pages were missing and a couple of pages had been printed twice, right at a point where the information on the missing pages was crucial to the mystery. I was willing to put up with it once, but it happened two more times in the exact same pattern. This is not something you want to discover in an exciting book two hours after the library has closed. Fortunately, the nearest branch had a copy without errors, and I finished it the next day. It still irked me, mostly because I wondered if the entire print run (3rd printing) had the same problem, and hundreds of other readers around the country had also screamed in frustration. (Also, I had to destroy the book so no unsuspecting reader would fall into the trap, and I hate doing that.)

The Christopher Killer really is that gripping a mystery—a forensic mystery, as the series title says, meaning that it’s the literary kin of CSI:All Those Cities. The main character is Cameryn Mahoney, whose father is the coroner for the small town of Silverton, Colorado, that’s not so small that he doesn’t need help.  When the sheriff hires a new deputy, but refuses to hire Mr. Mahoney an assistant, Cammie asks for the job. She’s fascinated by forensics and wants to become a forensic pathologist when she grows up, she’s smart and intuitive, and best of all, she works cheap. Cammie’s being hired for such a responsible and gruesome job when she’s barely 17 is a bit of a stretch, but once you’ve accepted the premise, the story works very well.

Most of the deaths Mr. Mahoney handles are ordinary, but things heat up when a young woman Cammie worked with at the local (and only) hotel is found murdered with a St. Christopher medallion tucked into her bra. The murder method, and the medallion, are the mark of the so-called Christopher Killer, who has killed three other girls in places all across the country. Suspicion lands on a young man named Adam, a Goth-type who’s just plain weird and therefore suspect by the locals, but Cammie wonders if it might not be the mysterious and handsome young deputy, who’s also new to the town. Cammie’s friend whose name I’ve forgotten, Haven or something like that, is convinced that a talk-show psychic named Dr. Jewel can contact the dead girl’s ghost and learn her murderer’s name, and when Dr. Jewel comes to town for that purpose, Cammie’s skepticism about psychics is tested to the limit.

One aspect of this book that I liked is that Cammie is both scientific-minded and a faithful Catholic. Her thoughts about how she reconciles the conflicts between science and faith, and her questions about how psychic ability might fit with both of them, make this story unusual. The focus of the story is not on “proving” one way of thinking correct over the other, but it adds depth to Cammie’s character and gives her a good reason to start believing that Dr. Jewel may have extrasensory powers. The mystery is well-played, and the secret of the murderer’s real identity stays secret right up to the end.

It’s a new series, and for all its intensity, the book feels a little undeveloped, but that’s something that should develop over time. I’m interested to find out more about Cammie’s wayward mother, who left the family when Cammie was very young and in this book is reaching out to reconnect with her daughter; I also like the accuracy of the forensic aspects of the story, which may be too gory for some readers. My biggest problem is with Cammie’s unofficial nemesis, the forensic pathologist who believes (reasonably) that she is too young to have this job, and who (unreasonably) belittles and ignores her input right up until the point where he doesn’t, which coincidentally saves her life. Cammie’s also a little too much cleverer than the adults in the story, which is something YA authors have to balance carefully; teen readers want teen characters who are competent and able to cope in the adult world, but when teen characters are surrounded by stupid adults it’s either parody or one of those awful Disney Channel sitcoms.

I liked The Christopher Killer enough that I’m planning to read the rest of the series—just as soon as I buy a replacement copy for the horribly mangled book.

Drinking Midnight Wine by Simon R. Green
Gollancz, 2001
11/11/11 Category: Fantasy

I think I expected something better from this book. Simon Green’s writing style is enjoyable and clever, and I liked the idea of the book—the two worlds of Veritie (the real world) and Mysterie (where magic happens), someone from our world being drawn into the other, that sort of thing. It’s not an original idea, but it hasn’t been done to death yet either. In the end, though, it just wasn’t very compelling.

For one thing, there are three different “first chapters” in a row—each chapter introduces a different subplot of the book, all of which end up connected, but each of them felt like the beginning of a new book instead. The main storyline follows this guy named Toby Dexter, a random schmoe whose extremely boring life takes him from his boring apartment to his menial job in a bookstore and back to his boring apartment again. The one bright spot in his life is a beautiful woman he sometimes sees on the train between these two locations. She’s clearly out of his league, but he imagines someday falling into conversation, finding out who she really is, and developing a relationship with her. One day, he gets his chance; it starts pouring rain just as they both get off the train, and the woman has no umbrella. But when he tries to approach her, the woman makes a door appear in the station wall, and Toby follows her…into a place that looks a lot like the real world, only the rain is gone, and the woman is extremely annoyed that she has a tagalong.

Things aren’t going well for the folks in Mysterie. The oldest evil, the Serpent in the Sun, is stirring; his son is trying to find a way to free him and remake the world; and the people who should keep this from happening, among them the mysterious woman Gayle, are at a disadvantage. Gayle reveals that Toby is the key to everything, a human with the power to change Mysterie. Toby, who as I’ve said before is a schmoe, doesn’t like this idea at all, but goes along with it because he’s in love with Gayle. Gayle warns him that she can’t love him in return, and he will get hurt, but Toby doesn’t care—so when he does get hurt by her, it’s hard to feel sympathetic. As the final confrontation approaches, nobody’s sure that Toby has what it takes to save both worlds, least of all Toby himself.

I was with the author for about the first sixty pages. There’s a lot of mythological detail in the story that interested me, and I was a little curious about how much of a whiner Toby would continue to be. When Green started dragging me around while Gayle introduced Toby to all these different people in Mysterie, all of whom had variations on the theme of “you’re the chosen one, but you’re a waste of space while I am immense and immortal,” I got bored real fast. It wasn’t a story, it was a fantasyland tour. The bad guys weren’t much better, despite being the son of the ultimate evil and an angel whose exact origins are a mystery. Lots of sitting around talking, not a lot of action. When the action finally started, it was too little, too late.

What really killed it for me was the awesome super powers of every Mysterie resident we met. There’s a point at which characters are just too powerful for a particular story, and when you have embodiments of natural forces who are, naturally, immense and immortal, it’s hard to see how they connect with ordinary human life, let alone fall in love with a human, LET ALONE a human who is as passive as Toby Dexter. Even the descendant of Thor, who was the least powerful of Toby’s allies, is still far, far beyond the average human guy. It would have been less of a stretch if Toby had ever really become someone creatures like that could respect or need, but despite the author’s trying to make him so, there wasn’t enough in the story to support the transformation. There was the kernel of an interesting story there, but if gormless British milquetoasts as heroes is what you want, you’re better off reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

King’s Property by Morgan Howell
Book one of the Queen of the Orcs series
Ballantine, 2007
11/11/11 Category: Fantasy

I really didn’t expect this to be as good as it was. I have a bad attitude about the generic tripe that takes up too much space on the fantasy literature shelf these days—heroes with a worldshattering destiny; characters who are just so Beautiful and Powerful and Magical that they rise against overwhelming odds to become, well, whatever is the most Beautiful, Powerful, Magical person around; weirdly spelled and pronounced names with too many apostrophes and not enough vowels; evil enemies who are so evil they defy all logic. I’m not sure why I put this book on my list, except that when my husband picked it up, I glanced through it and was drawn by…something, who knows what. Something that suggested it might not be the same old story.

This first book of the trilogy is the story of a backwoods girl named Dar whose family turns her over to the army as part of an agreed-on tribute. Her mother died in childbirth, and her spineless father married a shrew with whom he started a new family, and Stepmamma didn’t like having resources diverted from her own kids. Also, Dar’s father sexually abused her after her mother’s death, so Dar’s just as happy to be rid of them, even as she’s outraged by the betrayal. So far, the whole abused-woman-despised-by-all is a bad sign, and it sounds worse when I put it as baldly as this. Stay with me.

The story gets interesting when we learn that Dar is going to be serving in the king’s regiment of orcs. The orcs are not Tolkienesque monsters; they’re big, brutal, but reasonably humanoid creatures who fight like demons and, for some reason, insist on their food being prepared and served by women. Dar, whose behavior is that of a woman with nothing to lose, rather than a self-assured feminist icon, catches the attention of an orc called Kovok-mah. He’s surprised at her fighting spirit and at first treats her like a kind of pet (the orcs believe humans are a kind of animal, for several reasons) and then, as she gains his respect by learning the orc language and customs, as a human talisman. When Dar is claimed by one of the human leaders of the regiment, Kovok-mah defies his own people by putting her under his protection. Dar’s horrible experiences with the brutality of human men leads her to adopt orcish ways instead, and eventually she gains the respect of the entire band.

What keeps this book from being an eye-rolling anthem to the superiority of women over brutish men is that Dar is never once out of danger because of her defiance, either from men or from orcs. When she stands up to her would-be rapist, he has her beaten; when she humiliates him, she’s only saved from gang-rape by a bunch of the soldiers (with the officer’s approval) by Kovok-mah’s intervention. Similarly, Kovok-mah is ostracized by his own fellows for treating Dar like a “human” in opposition to everything the orc culture believes. At one point, he’s even demoted in rank because the orcs believe his foolish whim is the sign of a weakness that would get any warrior who followed him killed in battle. Dar and Kovok-mah form a kind of alliance based on the fact that both of them see the world differently than their peers: Kovok-mah figuratively, when he extends the respect orcs bear for females to an “animal,” and Dar literally, in the form of mysterious visions she believes are coming from the Earth itself.

Dar’s negative attitude toward men in general, and sex in particular, is well-supported in her backstory, despite how overly dramatic it is in places. Having seen her mother die in childbirth, and later watching a friend die after giving birth alone in the wilderness, Dar links sex to pregnancy and most of her aversion to a sexual relationship with the aggressive officer stems from that. Her attitude is also balanced by her relationship with a member of the King’s elite guard, a good man who grows to care for her and wants to free her, even if she never loves him back. His presence in the book goes a long way toward turning the viciousness of the soldiers in the orc regiment into a result of their environment rather than some Y-chromosome-linked biological failing. Howell also spends just enough time on orc culture (which is matriarchal without being generically so) to relieve the tension of the constant physical and sexual danger Dar lives with.

If I have reservations about this book, they’re due to that very premise. A story in which so much of the tension is provided by putting a woman in constant threat of rape and sexual degradation teeters on the edge of prurience, of being interesting more for that dark thrill of what might happen to her than because of the story itself. While I don’t believe this book goes that far, Howell’s second trilogy again centers on a woman in danger, this one a slave who falls in love with her master yadda yadda yadda, so I’m not entirely of the author’s motives here.  Still, King’s Property was an enjoyable book, the more so because my low expectations were entirely unjustified.

Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence
Delacorte, 2000
11/11/11 Category: Young Adult

Ghost Boy is a beautifully written historical fiction about being different, set in a time when old-fashioned circuses were dying out but hadn’t yet completely vanished from the American scene.  The titular character is an albino boy named Harold Kline, mocked and despised by the other kids in his small town for looking different, emotionally isolated from his family after his father and brother’s deaths in World War II and his mother’s remarriage to a man who doesn’t know how to deal with a damaged teenager. When the circus comes to town, Harold encounters the freaks—the diminutive Tina, the ogreish “Fossil Man,” and the enigmatic Gypsy Magda. More importantly, he learns of the Cannibal King, supposedly a barbarian from darkest Africa who happens to be an albino like Harold. Harold leaves home to follow the circus, always hoping to meet the Cannibal King who is always just ahead, scouting for the circus. But he finds his real talent is with the elephants, three sad creatures who are all that is left of the once-great menagerie. His idea to teach the elephants to play baseball as a gambit to draw audiences wins him the affections of Flip, a beautiful young horse trainer who doesn’t seem to care that Harold is different. But when he is torn between the genuine affection of the freaks and the lure of being treated as a normal person, Harold’s life is turned upside down, and he’s forced to grow up fast.

Iain Lawrence writes a beautiful book. You can’t help but be drawn in to the world he depicts, this post-war era in which the economy is recovering, but these little circuses that used to attract huge crowds are disappearing. Lawrence’s characterization is excellent, if a little too obvious. Unlike Harold, we know that Harold’s desperate love for Flip isn’t fully returned; we know that his choice to abandon his real friends when he’s teased about being a freak is going to end badly; we can see that the circus owner cares more about survival than he does about Harold. It all comes across, barely, as dramatic irony, but from a different perspective, it just makes you want to slap Harold so he’ll see the truth. If Lawrence’s skill as a writer weren’t so great, you could pass this book off as just another after-school special about believing in yourself and The True Meaning of Diversity.

That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this book. Harold’s sessions with the elephants are funny and intriguing, the more so when you realize that Lawrence based the idea of elephants playing baseball on a true story of English circus elephants who learned to play cricket. The melancholy mood of the story is a perfect fit for the growing despair of everyone in the circus, which will have to be disbanded if they can’t pull off a hit show in Salem, Oregon. Harold’s wild idea is what they all hitch their hopes to, so that the difficulties the elephants have in, for example, learning to throw the ball increase the tension of the story. The ending is tragic in some ways, redemptive in others, and while I knew all along that something really bad had to happen (one of the other sources of tension is the hostility Harold faces from Flip’s large, strong boyfriend), I could never have predicted what finally did happen, despite its being hinted at almost from the beginning.

Ghost Boy is an excellent story, maybe not the most polished young adult novel ever, but definitely worth reading if you’re in the mood for something sad and a little bit terrible.