Off the Shelf – Dystopian Fiction

Posted on April 9, 2020 by Christie

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So, we’re all trapped inside for the foreseeable future and I have been preparing for this for many years by hoarding books. I have enough unread books on my shelves to keep me reading for the next decade.

If you haven’t already dipped your toes into dystopian literature – maybe now’s the time to start since we seem to be living in a dystopia.

Dystopian literature is a form of speculative fiction (a genre of fiction that encompasses works in which the setting is other than the real world, involving supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements) that began as a response to utopian fiction, which is a term coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 with his book Utopia (Greek for no place). So we have come to understand a utopia as a perfect world – clearly not the world we are currently living in. Dystopian literature explores the dangerous effects of political and social structures on humanity’s future. When the structures that are meant to keep us safe start to break down, we are heading into dystopian territory.

According to Masterclass.com, the central themes of dystopian novels generally fall under these topics:

Government control
Environmental destruction
Technological control
Survival
Loss of individualism

If you are interested in seeing how authors imagine a future world, there’s lots of great titles out there.

Margaret Atwood is considered one of the very best writers of dystopian literature and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is widely regarded as one of the great dystopian novels. After some sort of environmental disaster, America has reorganized itself into a patriarchy where women are basically used as baby-makers. This novel is 35 years old, but it certainly rings true today and although I can’t say that I am huge Atwood fan, this novel is probably required reading. The sequel The Testaments was co-winner of the Booker prize last year. One Atwood book I did enjoy was Oryx and Crake, which is another book that makes you think Atwood must have had a crystal ball. It’s the first book in a trilogy about a guy named Snowman who is – seemingly – the last person alive on earth. The landscape has been devastated, there’s no food and scientists have created scary genetic mutations.

Another masterpiece of dystopian literature is Stephen King’s novel The Stand. The National Post just published an article titled “Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) is either the perfect distraction from COVID-19 or too eerily accurate to consider” The article’s author, Calum Marsh says The Stand is “an engrossing, sweat-inducing, eerily plausible 1,400-page epic about the inception and spread of an extremely deadly global pandemic, kick-started inside an underground biological testing facility in the Mojave desert and sent hurtling in all directions across the world with irrepressible speed.”

The Stand is about a deadly strain of influenza has ravaged America killing most of the population. The American government tries to cover it all up…and the fun begins.

The Stand is considered King’s masterpiece, but I have never been able to finish it – and I would consider myself a King fan…just there’s a lot of characters to keep track of in the beginning, but maybe now’s the time to give it another go because from all accounts it’s totally worth it…and hey, I’ve got the time.

The Girl With All the Gifts– M.R. Carey is a great book if zombies are your thing…and, 17235026 really, what’s more dystopian than a zombie novel. In this book ten-year-old Melanie is kept caged up with a bunch of other kids because they are flesh eaters. This is happens after some horrific event in England. This is actually quite a philosophical novel which asks questions about what makes us human…and how we react to catastrophe. I am not a zombie girl, but I really liked this book. Total page-turner.

And then I have a couple titles for young adult readers:

Monument 14 – Emmy Laybourne – an environmental disaster forces brothers Dean and Alex to hole up with the other kids on their school bus in a huge superstore.

The Knife of Never Letting Go– Patrick Ness – one of my absolute favourite series about a kid named Todd who lives in a world without women and where everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts.

Ashes– Ilsa Bick 17-year-old encounters a post environmental disaster world filled with flesh eating teens and blurred morality

These are all first books in a series, which would definitely keep your teens reading.

I wonder if part of the appeal of reading dystopian fiction doesn’t have to do with the extreme nature of the stories? I mean, did you ever imagine you’d be confined to your house or have to follow arrows when you go to the grocery store? I don’t miss shopping; I miss my friends and my family. Dystopian fiction capitalizes on the fears of the characters and the readers and encourages them to make choices that will benefit the whole community. Perhaps some really good things will come out of Covid 19.

Looking for more great reads in the dystopian category?

Vulture’s Pandemic Reading List

Oprah’s List of the Best 20 Dystopian Novels of All-Time

Happy reading.

Stay safe.

Miss You – Kate Eberlen

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Christie

Well, one positive side effect of Covid-19 (or ‘the ‘rona’ as we call it in my house) is that I missingyou actually have the time to tackle some of my longer books — you know, the ones that you keep putting off reading because it feels like such a time commitment and time is definitely at a premium during the school year. And, really, what do we have right now besides loads of time?

Miss You is British writer Kate Eberlen’s debut novel and it tells the stories, in two first person narratives, of Tess and Gus. The novel opens in Florence; Tess is with her best friend, Doll, and Gus with his parents. They are both 18. They have a couple teensy encounters, but the sort of casual meetings you would have with a stranger. Their paths do not cross again for sixteen years. The story is really about what happens in those sixteen years.

Tess returns from her holiday excited to attend university in London. A family tragedy prevents this, and she has to ditch her plans to look after her fourteen-years-younger sister, Hope. Gus returns from his holiday and does, in fact, head off to university in London. He looks at the opportunity to escape the crushing weight of his parents’ expectations (they want him to be a doctor) and grief (Gus’s older brother, Ross, had died in a skiing accident at Christmas.)

Miss You is really a book about all the little things that can happen to you over the course of a lifetime (or part of a lifetime, at least.) We watch Tess and Gus morph from slightly awkward teens to adults in their twenties. They make mistakes in their personal lives and relationships that have consequences, and in that way they are incredibly relatable. I actually really liked both of them and spending time in their worlds was a true pleasure.

And that makes the next bit hard to say: I wasn’t a real fan of the ending. I mean, we know all along that Gus and Tess are meant to end up together — even though their initial meeting didn’t even allow them to exchange names or seem all that significant. Perhaps we are expected to buy into the notion that Gus and Tess weren’t ready for each other at eighteen. Fair enough. Their individual experiences over the next sixteen years shape them into stronger, more compassionate people, sure. My issue doesn’t really have anything to do with that. Nor does it have to do with the fact that it’s essentially fate that brings them back into each other’s orbit in, you guessed it, Italy. I think my problem was that from the moment they figure out who the other is, they’re both ALL IN. And, of course, if it’s fate, it’s fate. There’s no fighting it. And I have a romantic’s bleeding heart, trust me. It’s just, Eberlen took such care with their individual stories that their reunion should have been — I don’t know — something more than it was.

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I love Italy, and time spent there was a delight. I loved these characters. They were human and impulsive and delightful. Probably everyone else on the planet would find their eventual union deserved and perfect. Not disagreeing. I just wish it had been allowed a little bit more breathing room.

Still, a perfect book to settle into.

My Dark Vanessa – Kate Elizabeth Russell

Posted on March 27, 2020 by Christie

vanessa I finished Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa a couple days ago, but I had to let it sit with me before I made any attempt to write about it. It tells the story of a relationship that develops between fifteen-year-old Vanessa and her English teacher, Jacob Strane, who is 42.

Jacob Strane is an imposing teacher at Browick, a boarding school in Maine, “gleaming white clapboard and brick.” When the novel opens, Vanessa is returning to Browick for her sophomore year. Her freshman year was a disaster, ending in a shattered relationship with her best friend and roommate, Jenny.

A bit of a loner, Vanessa is immediately taken with Mr. Strane. It’s kind of hard to miss him.

He has wavy black hair and a black beard, glasses that reflect a glare so you can’t see his eyes, but the first thing I notice about him – the first thing anyone must notice – is his size. He’s not fat but big, broad, and so tall that his shoulders hunch as though his body wants to apologize for taking up so much space.

Encouraged by her faculty adviser, Vanessa joins the creative writing club and starts spending more and more time with Strane. He encourages her writing, talks to her like an adult, shares books and poetry with her (including, unsurprisingly, Lolita) and begins the slow and careful grooming process, which ultimately leads to their sexual relationship.

My Dark Vanessa is a difficult book to read on a lot of levels. For one, I am a teacher and Strane’s abuse of Vanessa’s trust is despicable. He manipulates her in ways that are apparent to us, but not to her. At one point he tells her “I want to be a positive presence in your life…Someone you can look back on and remember fondly, the funny old teacher who was pathetically in love with you but kept his hands to himself and was a good boy in the end.”

In some ways, Vanessa is aware of her own power over Strane. After this admission she “becomes someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love.” But even this seeming self-awareness is coloured by the fact that he has groomed her; it would take a very mature and confident person to see through Strane’s flattery and gaslighting.

The novel jumps back in forth covering the period of time when Vanessa is at Browick, in 2000, and then seven years later and seventeen years later. Vanessa revisits her relationship in light of allegations that Strane had been inappropriate (to put it mildly) with another student, possibly more than one. It’s the beginning of the #MeToo movement, after all. The book captures how this relationship has completely derailed her life and coloured all her subsequent relationships. Even though Strane is repulsive, Vanessa seems unable to disconnect.

I wouldn’t say My Dark Vanessa was an enjoyable read, but it is compelling. It’ll make you feel squicky, and it will frustrate you, but I don’t think you will be able to stop turning the pages. I think it’s a very accomplished debut.

There is some controversy surrounding the book. This article in The Guardian offers a comprehensive look at some of it.

The Railway Children – E. Nesbit

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Christie

One of my all-time favourite childhood movies is The Railway Children. I don’t remember the-railway-children-26 specifically when I first watched it, but it came out in 1970 and I probably saw it shortly after that. I have it on VHS somewhere, but no longer have a VHS machine. I did, however, have the book.

E. Nesbit’s story, first published in 1906, tells the story of siblings Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis who live with their well-to-do parents “in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa.” Their father works in government and their mother was always “ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons.”

One evening, out of the blue, two men arrive at the villa and the father is “called away on business.” Afterwards, the children and their mother leave London and head out to the countryside where they will live in a “ducky dear little white house.” Although they seem to be destitute they get by. The mother is a writer and when she sells a story, the children get a treat of buns.

The children occupy their days with adventures, including making friends with the porter at the local railway station and an old gentleman who waves at them from the window of the 9:15 train they nickname the Green Dragon. There is pretty much nothing sweeter than what these three kids get up to. They are thoughtful, resilient, and kind. Revisiting their story was like being wrapped in a warm hug and Bobbie’s sentiments seemed particularly poignant given the circumstances in which we find ourselves at this point in history:

I think everyone in the world is friends if you can only get them to see you don’t want to be un – friends.

How to Make Friends with the Dark – Kathleen Glasgow

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Christie

I started reading Kathleen Glasgow’s YA novel How to Make Friends with the Dark at school last week…and then all hell broke loose. On Friday March 13 (how appropriate, eh?) the government of New Brunswick closed all schools in the province for a two week period (minimum) in an effort to slow down the spread of Covid-19. So, that’s me, home for at least two weeks. These are weird times, people.

Luckily, I have enough unread books in my house to last a least five years and so I am going to to look at social-distancing as a gift of time. If nothing else, reading will distract me from this new world. I am a naturally optimistic person and I hope that when we come out on the other side we will be kinder to each other, and gentler to the planet.

How to Make Friends with the Dark is the story of fifteen-year-old Grace “Tiger” Tolliver. She lives with her single mother, June, a kind but ineffective parent.

We’re what my mom likes to call “a well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine.” But I need the other half of my machine to beep and whir at me, and do all that other stuff moms are supposed to do. If I don’t have her, I don’t have anything.

On the day Tiger and Kai, a boy from school, finally kiss (something Tiger has been dreaming about for a long time), the unthinkable happens: Tiger’s mother dies. (Not a spoiler, the blurb tells you as much.) The aftermath of her mom’s death, and Tiger’s grief is what Glasgow’s very affecting book is about.

You feel skinned. Like whatever held you together has been peeled away. You half expect to look down and see your heart hanging out, a slow-beating, nearly dead thing.

Your legs wobble and your mouth tastes dry and your mother is dead.

Because Tiger has no other family member available to take her, she is placed into the foster system (which is shocking given that her best friend’s parents are willing to look after her, but rules.) Her first foster placement is not great; her second placement is better.

The book traces Tiger’s journey down into the dark sinkhole of grief. There is very little light down there and Glasgow doesn’t shy away from the ugly places grief sometimes takes us. If you think you’re in for an unremittingly grim read, you’re not totally wrong, but there is some light in the darkness. Tiger is a sympathetic character and anyone who has ever lost someone dear to them will recognize her struggles, her small victories and her grief.

The Outsider – Stephen King

Posted on March 7, 2020 by Christie

I haven’t read anything by Stephen King since Joyland but I am a fan from wayyyyy back. Despite the often creepy subject matter, King is like book comfort food. I know when I read him, I will not be disappointed (The Tommyknockers aside). The Outsiders delivers in every category…and lucky for me I started it at the beginning of my March Break because I could not put that 560 page sucker down.

Flint City, Oklahoma is a quiet little ‘burb, but something horrific has happened there. outsider Eleven-year-old Frank Peterson has been found dead in the woods. The crime is unspeakable – so I won’t speak of it here, you’ll get enough of it in the book – and Detective Ralph Anderson is determined to catch the psycho who committed the crime posthaste.

It actually turns out to be a pretty easy case to crack: the DNA evidence is ironclad and there’s a handful of reliable eye-witnesses. Soon, Anderson is arresting Little League coach Terry Maitland. Maitland, a high school teacher and well-respected member of the community, maintains his innocence, and there’s irrefutable evidence to prove that he didn’t kill Frankie. Like the detectives and the District Attorney, you’ll be trying to figure out how any of this is possible. And then, about half way through the book, you’ll be reminded that you’re in King territory and he doesn’t play by the rules.

The Outsider is a puzzle of a book and in some ways it sort of reminded me of It, which is probably my favourite King novel. I mean, there’s not really a lot of similarities, except that a strange assortment of people gather together to fight evil, but the showdown at the end of The Outsiders gave me all-the-feels.

Here’s what I have always admired about Stephen King. He writes a cracking good story. The writing is unpretentious. It doesn’t get in the way, as writing often can. Story is king (excuse the pun) and he just lets his characters go about their business. And his characters are believable. You’ll root for them; you’ll care for them; you’ll want them to be safe. (Can’t help you with that, unfortunately. As King famously said in his memoir On Writing, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”)

If I have one niggle – and it’s so tiny and insignificant it’s hardly worth mentioning, but I will just so I don’t go full-on fangirl – sometimes, occasionally, the dialogue made me wince just a teensy bit.

But who cares?! Seriously. I had a ball reading this book. It’s all kinds of awesome. And the HBO series looks pretty dang good, too.

We Are Still Tornadoes – Michael Kun & Susan Mullen

Posted on March 4, 2020 by Christie

Yes, it was a million years ago, but I do remember that first year of university right after high school. Most of my friends went away, but I stayed home. This was before the Internet and way before long distance was cheap/free. How did we keep in touch? We wrote letters.

I was a big letter writer back in the day. I had a zillion pen pals and then when all my friends went off to university, I wrote letters. I miss letter writing because, while it’s not as immediate as sending an e-mail, it gives you the opportunity to think about what you want to say, to catalogue the minutiae of your life and allow your recipient to have a little time capsule of your thoughts and feelings. It’s kinda cool.

That’s what Scott and Cath do in Michael Kun and Susan Mullen’s epistolary novel We Are Still Tornadoes. Cath has gone off to Wake College in North Carolina, but Scott has stayed home. He’s currently working in his father’s men’s clothing store — a job that is the subject of much derision until it’s not.

Cath and Scott have been besties since they were kids. They live across the street from each other and know each other, in some ways, better than they know themselves. Of course, this relationship comes with the requisite squabbles and misunderstandings, but mostly they are each other’s best and most loyal cheerleaders.

Their correspondence — which starts with the note Scott leaves in Cath’s suitcase — is a joy to read. From these inauspicious beginnings, the two trade stories about their daily lives, their struggles to fit in or, in Scott’s case, figure out what he’s doing with his life. When things happen to them – good or bad – they turn to each other, as they always have. Cath meets new people; Scott longs for an old girlfriend; their lives, as lives often do, become more complicated.

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The novel takes place in 1982 – so just a couple years after I would have graduated from high school – and it is peppered with pop culture references (particularly musical) which I appreciated. Imagine talking about Thriller as if you were hearing it for the first time! Imagine going to see English Beat in concert!

I laughed-out-loud on more than one occasion, particularly at Scott (his sense of humour was totally my jam).

As for whether your parents are being weird, I don’t know how to answer that. The only time I ever see your mom is when she forgets to close the shade in the bathroom when she’s taking a shower, and even then it’s only if I feel like walking all the way over to my closet to get my binoculars, take them out of the box, walk back to the window, etc. It’s a whole production.

Ultimately, We Are Still Tornadoes is a coming-of-age story, but it is also a story about friends and how amazing it is to have one who, even when they let you down, always finds a way to pick you back up. I loved it.

Highly recommended.

The Poet X – Elizabeth Acevedo

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Christie

Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut YA novel The Poet X tells the story of fifteen-year-old Xiomara poetx who lives in Harlem with her twin brother, whom she calls ‘Twin’) and her Dominican immigrant parents. She’s a good girl; she has no choice. Mami’s rules are law, and Xiomara wouldn’t dream of breaking them. But there are some things Xiomara can’t control. For example, she is “unhide-able”

Taller than even my father, with what Mami has always said/ was “a little too much body for such a young girl.”/ I am the baby fat that settled into D-cups and swinging hips/ so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school/ now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.

She starts to question organized religion and at school, she finds herself drawn to her classmate, Aman. She starts keeping secrets from her mother because religious conviction is non-negotiable and Mami’s dating rules are written in stone: she can’t date until she’s married.

When her English teacher encourages Xiomara to write poetry, she discovers that she has a lot to say and there might actually be a way to say it. As she commits her thoughts to the page, her confidence grows.

…I know that I am ready to slam. / That my poetry has become something I’m proud of./ The way the words say what I mean,/ how they twist and turn language,/how they connect with people,/ How they build community,/ I finally know that all those/ I’ll never, ever, ever”/ stemmed from being afraid but not even they/ can stop me. Not anymore.

There’s no reason to be intimidated if you’ve never tried a novel written in verse. The writing is stripped down, these’s no pesky exposition, and it cuts straight to the bone. Xiomara is a thoughtful, intelligent character and you will be cheering her on as she finds the power of her own words.

I loved spending time with Xiomara. As an English teacher, I appreciated that words offered her an escape and comfort and eventually the freedom to speak her truth. I highly recommend The Poet X especially if you’ve never given a novel in verse a go.

Watch Elizabeth Acevedo talk about how the novel came to be:

The Fountains of Silence – Ruta Sepetys

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Christie

Ruta Sepetys has a gift. Well, she has many gifts, to be fair, but I particularly admire her ability to write characters that absolutely lift off the page and linger in your imagination long after the last page has been turned.

At my high school, we introduce readers to Sepetys in grade nine, when we read Between Shades of Gray. I have yet to encounter a student, even those who identify as non-readers, who doesn’t rip through that book, many reading way ahead of the class. In grade ten, when we introduce Salt to the Sea there are very few groans. Again, students quickly become wholly invested in the stories of the characters. When I read the final few pages out loud to my grade ten classes in the fall, I had to stop several times because I was so close to tears I couldn’t get the words out. That’s how you know these characters have become real to you, I guess: you care about their fate.

I was very excited to read Sepetys’s latest book, The Fountains of Silence, because I just knew that I was going to meet a new cast of characters to fall in love with, and I wasn’t wrong.

Daniel Matheson is almost nineteen when he travels to Madrid with his parents during the summer of 1957. His father is an oil tycoon from Texas, and his mother is originally from Spain. Daniel’s dream is to become a photo journalist, but his father disapproves. While Mr. Matheson does business, Daniel takes pictures, and in doing so he starts to see that sunny Madrid is one city to tourists and another to people who struggle beneath Francisco Franco’s yoke.

Ana works in the hotel and is assigned to help the Mathesons. Her story is one of poverty and struggle. Her father was executed and her mother imprisoned and “Her parents’ offense has left Ana rowing dark waters of dead secrets. Born into a long shadow of shame, she must never speak publicly of her parents. She must live in silence.”

Ana and Daniel feel an instant attraction to each other, but it’s the classic case of being from opposite sides of the social spectrum. There is so much Ana wants to say and can’t, and so much that Daniel doesn’t understand, but certainly will.

Although Ana and Daniel’s story is central to the plot, there are other compelling characters in this book, including Ana’s older brother Rafa and his childhood friend, Fuga; Ben, a seasoned journalist who takes Daniel under his wing, and Puri, Ana’s cousin who works at a local orphanage. Although Ana and Daniel will take up most of the space in your heart, all the characters you’ll encounter are compelling and interesting.

Once again, Sepetys has mined history to find her story. This one concerns the thousands of children who were stolen from their parents and adopted by more ‘suitable’ families. It also provides a window into the period of the Spanish Civil War and the years immediately following, when “Helpless children and teenagers became innocent victims of wretched violence and ideological pressure.”

Their stories deserve to be told and Sepetys does them, and us, a great service by telling them.

Highly recommended.

The Only Story – Julian Barnes

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Christie

I very much enjoyed Julian Barnes’ novella The Sense of an Ending when my book club only read it eight years ago. (Yikes!) I can’t say that my experience with The Only Story was quite as enjoyable; however, we had a fantastic chat about it at book club.

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

It’s the 1960s. Paul is an only child and has a relatively distant relationship with his parents who are solidly middle-class. Home from university, Paul is “visibly and unrepentantly bored.” His mother looks for a diversion for him and hopes Paul might find a “nice blonde Christine, or a sparky, black-ringleted Virginia” at the tennis club. Instead he meets Susan Macleod, a middle-aged, unhappily married mother of two daughters who are older than our protagonist. Paul recalls “Who would have thought it might begin there?” The whole novel is a rambling recollection of their affair and the way such relationships are framed by memory, which is a theme Barnes visited in The Sense of an Ending.

Barnes wants the reader to believe, perhaps because Paul does, that this relationship is one for the ages. “Most of us only have one story to tell,” Paul tells us. “This is mine.”

I didn’t really like anything about this book and it pains me to say it because on the surface it seems like this book would be 100% up my angsty alley. Instead, I had a hard time connecting with either of these rather dull characters, who fumble their way through sex, and living together, and life in general. In the beginning, Paul spends a lot of time at Susan’s house; sometimes his university friends stay over, too. Paul is so self-involved that he doesn’t understand why Susan’s husband, Gordon, doesn’t seem to like him. Um, you’re sleeping with his wife! Under his own roof! Not that Gordon is at all sympathetic and he and Susan haven’t done the deed pretty much since the birth of their daughters.

Once they move in together – into a little house Susan buys in London – she (I thought) out-of-the-blue becomes a raging alcoholic, and things between the lovers start to deteriorate.

At first, Paul tells their story in the first person, but as things between him and Susan start to fall apart, he switches to the second person and then, finally, the third person. I liked this because I know how I view things from my past: sometimes it feels as though they’ve happened to someone else.

But for a story about love, the ‘only’ story – this one just didn’t work for me. No question Barnes is a master craftsman, and others in book club really liked it, but I found it a bit of a slog.