Snake Ropes by Jess Richards

Longlisted for the Green Carnation prize, which is open to GLBT authors worldwide, Snake Ropes is Jess Richards' debut novel. A matriarchal society of about 150 people subsists on a remote island and holds its secrets close. The only outside contact is through mysterious traders who come once per month. Richards has created a quirky world where ghosts converse with the living and a Thrashing House is used to mete out punishment. Selkies search for their skins. Ropes bite with the venom of snakes.

The narration alternates between two 18-year-olds, Mary and Morgan. One steals keys and the other is locked up, so of course they will help each other. I was immediately drawn in by Mary's voice in the opening lines:

"The tall men in boats are coming. I see them through the window, close to the beach. My little brother is sat on my lap. Him puts hims hands on the table, leans round and looks up at me. Hims brown eyes have my reflection inside.

I smile at him, stroke the curls on the back of hims head where them need a wash. I say, 'Sorry Barney. I've got to get you hid, them're coming.'"

Boys have been disappearing from the island.

On the other side of the island, the eldest of three daughters chafes at being locked up for her own safety:

“I know from all the storybooks that wicked stepmothers are to be avoided if you wish to remain good or pure or ignorant. I really want one.”

Morgan has books for company, but they no longer sustain her. 

“I’ve been dancing in ashes for a hundred years with a frog that has turned from me, kissed a prince and become a toad. I’m meant to have been a much loved daughter made from snow but my parents used icing sugar so I can’t melt and leave them thinking I was always perfect.” (I was delighted to see this reference to the same folk tale that inspired Ivey's The Snow Child.)

Even though it's a Green Carnation book, Snake Ropes has no overt queer content. Look for lesbian subtext between the lines. An older woman advises one young woman to look after another, stressing mutuality. “Not have one care more than the other, but both have to care just enough. Be yourself first.” 

Jess Richards appears to have followed that final bit of advice in creating this unique and enchanting fantasy. I loved it.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White is said to be the very first detective novel written and dates from 1860. Wilkie Collins presents first person statements from a number of different witnesses in order to expose a complicated case of subterfuge. I remained enthralled for nearly 25 hours by the audiobook narrated by Ian Holm [AudioGO], which won an Audiophile Earphones award in 2011.

Summaries of this classic are so widely available (Wikipedia entry here) that I'll go directly to why I recommend this book. As with other works that were first published in serialized installments (from Dickens to Armistead Maupin), the episodic quality is part of its appeal. Piecing together a puzzle through multiple viewpoints; wrongful incarceration in a mental institution; a dastardly evil count; and volatile family secrets are some of the other attractions. I also liked the characters of Walter and Marian very much, even though Laura Fairlie seemed too weak and insipid to have inspired such devoted love and loyalty from them.

I did not like some of the Victorian-era viewpoints, such as the belief that no woman could create art as good as that of a male artist, but that didn't detract from my overall enjoyment.

Readalikes: Fingersmith (Sarah Waters) for a lesbian take on Victorian skulduggery.

Jeeves to the Rescue by P.G. Wodehouse

Novels by P.G. Wodehouse fill several shelves in the library where I work. I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to try one, but I am very glad that I finally did! I listened to Jonathan Cecil perform Code of the Woosters: Jeeves to the Rescue [BBC Audiobooks America; 7 hours] and it was hilarious.

In the opening pages, Bertie has a hangover and asks his manservant, Jeeves, if he might provide his usual remedy:

"He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes. On the previous night, I had given a little dinner at the Drones to Gussie Fink-Nottle as a friendly send-off before his approaching nuptials with Madeline, only daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE, and these things take their toll. Indeed, just before Jeeves came in, I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head -- not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones."

Later that morning, Bertie goes to see his aunt Dahlia, who "laughed a bit louder than I would have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused."

Bertie Wooster gets out of one wacky predicament after another with the help of Jeeves. The farce is sustained because Bertie is oblivious to his own ineptitude. Bertie's way of expressing himself is also quite inventive, so I didn't grow tired of the schtick. I wouldn't want a steady diet of Wodehouse, but I'll certainly pick up another one sometime.

The Forrests by Emily Perkins

In 1967, an unusual family moves from New York to Auckland in Emily Perkins' character-based novel, The Forrests. "Reasons to do [...] with lack of success back home, a paucity of funds, an excess of entitlement." Frank Forrest threw himself into directing an amateur dramatics society in his new community and alienated most of the membership. His family lived in poverty and his wife, Lee, was his only cheerleader.

"Dot and Eve agreed that they hated their father."  Three years later, Frank abandoned them all and flew back to New York. Lee packed up her four children -- Michael, Evelyn, Dorothy and Ruth, plus Michael's friend Daniel, who at age 13 had pretty much moved in with the Forrests permanently -- and they moved to a commune on "wimmin's land" outside Auckland.

"Dot lay in the children's cabin on a bunk bed, on top of the thin red sleeping bag, sloughed like a cocoon over the foam mattress, yellow and bitten, that covered the plywood bunk base, and she wept over The Little Mermaid and for all her selfishness. When her father returned she would love him with an open heart."

Dorothy was 7 when the family first moved to New Zealand. The story follows the stages of her life in vivid, sensory snapshots all the way through to old age. From a child reading fairy tales to a senior woman with an eReader:

"Dot scrolled the pages of her book, another book she couldn't read without her glasses and magnifying glass; all very well enlarging the font but not when it ended up three words per line."

Perkins' writing style brings not only people but also individual moments into focus:

"The light was indecisive, shifting between bright and low, and it disoriented her, made her hurry in case of being late, so that when she reached the floral clock, tightly coiled in this early spring but still marking time between the green minutes, the Roman hours, it took Dorothy a moment to be able to read that she was early." (See a heritage photo of the clock online here.)

A beautiful, unsentimental look at the hardships and the rewards that make ordinary lives extraordinary.

Readalike: Carry the One (Carol Anshaw) for the examination of family dynamics over a long period of time.

A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel by GRR Martin, adapted by D Abraham, art by T Patterson

I've been wanting to read George R.R. Martin's acclaimed series, A Song of Ice and Fire, but have been daunted by its length. The five books together are over 4,000 pages long. That's why I was pleased to see a graphic novel adaptation of the first book, A Game of Thrones. I hoped to get a feel for the original work through the creative collaboration of Daniel Abraham and Tommy Patterson.

Result? Unsatisfactory. I enjoyed the epic scope and the multiple narrative threads. There are interesting relationships between different sets of siblings. Individuals are changed by power and circumstance.

Patterson's full colour art, however, is unappealing. It's hard to tell who is who because many faces are similar. (And similarly unattractive, distorted.) Narrative boxes are in saturated colours that don't allow enough contrast to easily read the black text. The men bulge with muscles. A giant of a groom is three times the size of his bride. The women are shown naked as often as possible, bathing and dressing as well as during sex. It put me in mind of the erotica in John Norman's Chronicles of Gor. Examples include a female attendant who has both hands on a young woman's waspish waist, supposedly assisting her into a bath; an outdoor sex scene where both participants are aware that everyone in the tents around them are watching; and an orgy scene in a brothel (traversed in order to get to a woman hiding for safety on an upper floor).

I'm not planning to read beyond volume 1 of the adaptation. The original books, however, still interest me. And the television series as well, perhaps.

The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, translated by Alistair McEwen

In Sicily in 1963, the death of the Alfallipe family's longtime maidservant is not the end of her influence upon them. Known as Mennulara (the almond picker), Maria Rosalia Inzerillo had worked for the Alfallipes since she was 13. At the time of Mennulara's death, she had been managing the Alfallipe family estate for years. How did she come to hold such power, far above her station in life? Why did an important mafia boss attend her funeral? And what about the inheritance due the three adult Alfallipe siblings? Will they still be forced to follow Mennulara's instructions now that she is dead?

Simonetta Agnello Hornby's The Almond Picker spans one month in time and encompasses a multitude of characters, each contributing a piece to the larger picture. I sometimes found it hard to keep track of how the different townspeople were related to each other and what their connections were with Mennulara. It didn't matter if the voices occasionally blended into a noisy crowd because the remarkable woman at the centre emerges clearly by the end of the novel. She was despised, loved, scorned and admired, depending on the individual.

Some folks get in trouble for prying to closely into Mennulara's background: "Today, he found that someone had destroyed the engine of his car, a Fiat Seicento, by pouring cement into it. Neither he nor that spineless boss of his knows which saint to turn to." Meanwhile, the Alfallipe siblings are exposed for their grasping, lazy, presumptuous and ungrateful selves -- putting on quite a spectacle for the town.

It's a big-hearted Italian Peyton Place and I highly recommend it.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Apocalyptic daydreams, an ancestral curse, and the horrific regime of Trujillo -- "the dictatingest dictator who ever dictated" -- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a story of diaspora. From the Dominican Republic to New Jersey, author Junot Diaz follows the members of the fated Cabral family, mostly told in the voice of Yunior, a fellow Dominican immigrant. Yunior's narration is uncensored, as if the reader is one of his ghetto buddies. He sounds like Diaz's alter ego in this excerpt about fuku, a curse or doom:

"A couple weeks ago, while I was finishing this book, I posted the thread fuku on the DR forum, just out of curiosity. These days I'm nerdy like that. The talkback blew the fuck up. You should see how many responses I've gotten. They just keep coming in. And not just from Domos. The Puertorocks want to talk about fufus, and the Haitians have some shit just like it. There are a zillion of these fuku stories. Even my mother, who almost never talks about Santo Domingo, has started sharing hers with me."

Yunior was Oscar De Leon's dorm mate in college, as a favour to Oscar's older sister, Lola. Oscar was a lonely geek who weighed 307 pounds. He was obsessed with reading, and writing, science fiction and fantasy. Lola worried about Oscar's coping skills.

"I wasn't as old-school as I am now, just real fucking dumb, assumed keeping an eye on somebody like Oscar wouldn't be no Herculean chore. I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger fucking piles than him every damn day.
You can start the laugh track anytime you want.
He seemed like the same to me. Still massive -- Biggie Smalls minus the smalls -- and still lost. Still writing ten, fifteen, twenty pages a day. Still obsessed with his fanboy madness. Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In fucking Elvish! (Please don't ask me how I knew this. Please.) When I saw that I said: De Leon, you gotta be kidding. Elvish?
Actually, he coughed, it's Sindarin."

The story moves back and forth in time and place, occasionally switching over to a woman's voice. Audiobook narrators Jonathan Davis and Staci Snell take turns performing in the Penguin edition [5 hours], handling the intermingled Spanish words smoothly. (Davis grew up in San Juan.) I'll be seeing Junot Diaz at the Vancouver Writers Fest later this month, and I must be prepared that his voice will not be that of Jonathan Davis. (Nor of Yunior, for that matter). I'm curious, however, to hear if his conversation style is similar to that in his writing. His storytelling has impressed me immensely. Here's one last excerpt:

"The family claims the first sign [of the curse] was that Abelard's third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father's capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black -- kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack -- and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen."

I enjoyed the literary references throughout. Beli Cabral, Oscar and Lola's mother, is the black daughter mentioned above. She landed a scholarship at one of the best schools in her town in the Dominican Republic, but she had no friends there. "It wasn't like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student. No Miranda here: everybody shunned her." (Note to self: you must really get around to reading Julia Alvarez's novel about the sisters who resisted Trujillo and were murdered.)

I look forward now to Diaz's newest book, a collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which are also narrated in the voice of Yunior. Diaz was awarded a MacArthur fellowship earlier this week.

Readalikes: Diaz himself suggested one, by titling one chapter The Gangster We Are All Looking For; Le Thi Diem Thuy's award-winning first person narrative, shifting in time and place, is about a Vietnamese immigrant to America. The Dew Breaker (Edwidge Danticat) is about the Duvalier regime in Haiti. Fault Lines (Nancy Huston) moves backwards in time (as Diaz does in the first part) loosely linking characters in the Jewish diaspora. And for another account of survival under cruel dictatorship, The Orphan Master's Son (Adam Johnson).