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Tender is the Flesh – Augustina Bazterrica

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I mean, there are dystopian novels and then there’s Tender is the Flesh.

Marcos Tejo’s life has fallen apart. His father has dementia and is existing in assisted living. His wife has had an emotional breakdown and has left to stay with her mother after the death of their infant son. Oh, yeah, and a deadly virus – well, that’s what the government claims anyway – has made it impossible to eat animals, so everyone now eats humans. That, of course, helps with population growth too, so it’s a win win.

People are specially bred as meat and Marcos works at one of the country’s best slaughterhouses.

No one can call them human because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

Bazterrica’s book is all kinds of ick. In scene after scene, we are treated to graphic descriptions of how this “special meat” is treated. And trust me when I say, it’s not good. It will be impossible not to imagine how the animals we eat every day are treated, and if there ever was a case for veganism, this book would be it. But, according to the scientists in Tender is the Flesh,

animal protein [is] necessary to live [and] doctors confirmed that plant protein didn’t contain all the essential amino acids, [and] experts assured that methane emissions from cattle had been reduced but malnutrition was on the rise, [and] magazines published articles on the dark side of vegetables.

When Marcos is gifted an F.G.P. (First Generation Pure) “head” to consume, his ambivalent feelings – which he mostly keeps buried – come to the surface. Once he cleans her up and discovers she’s beautiful he moves her from the barn to the house and one thing leads to another. The head can’t talk, of course; their vocal chords are removed – the killing is less noisy that way – so I guess their relationship is based on a needs must basis.

I mean, sure, I guess Tender is the Flesh has stuff to say, but Marcos is a hard character to warm up to. And you have to wade through a bucket of entrails and other gruesome stuff to get there. You’d kind of hope that Marcos would have some sort of epiphany or something, but this book is bleak start to finish.

And also. Yuck.

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

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Madeline Miller’s Orange Prize winning debut The Song of Achilles is one of those books that, for a while at least, everyone was talking about. I watched a student in my Young Adult Literature class gasp and weep while reading the book. I just knew that I had to get to it over the summer.

Miller reimagines Achilles’ story through the eyes of Patroclus, a son of King Menoetius. In telling the story of his birth and younger years, Patroclus says

Quickly, I became a disappointment: small, slight. I was not fast. I was not strong. I could not sing. The best that could be said of me was that I was not sickly.

When Patroclus is nine, he commits an act of violence that exiles him to Phthia, and the care of King Peleus who was “one of those men whom the gods love: not divine himself, but clever, brave, handsome, and excelling all his peers in piety.” Peleus is father to Achilles. Even if you know nothing about Greek mythology, you’ll likely know Achilles.

Despite Patroclus’s dim view of himself, Achilles finds Patroclus “surprising” and the two become fast friends.

Our friendship came all at once after that, like spring floods from the mountains. Before, the boys and I had imagined that his days were filled with princely instruction, statecraft and spear. […] One day we might go swimming, another we might climb trees. We made up games for ourselves, or racing and tumbling. We would lie on the warm sand and say, “Guess what I’m thinking about.”

It’s not long before Achilles is all that Patroclus is thinking about, and then the two become lovers – which was not a big deal during the time and may or may not be historically accurate. According to Wikipedia, “The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is a key element of the stories associated with the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer describes a deep and meaningful relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, where Achilles is tender toward Patroclus, but callous and arrogant toward others. Its exact nature—whether homosexual, a non-sexual deep friendship, or something else entirely—has been a subject of dispute in both the Classical period and modern times. Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers,[1][2] but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato.”

Miller’s story follows the two men as they go off to the Trojan war, where Achilles grows into the revered warrior it is prophesized he would become.

Of course, there’s a tragic ending for our characters – as we know going in there will be. How emotional you feel about what happens will depend on how much you care about these characters and how invested you are in their love story. I felt sort of ‘meh’ about the whole thing, to be honest.

This is a book for die-hard fans of re-tellings and Greek mythology, but I think for anyone who is looking to dip their toe into the incredibly rich water of the Greek myths, this is as good a place to start as any. Just not my thing.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty – Akwaeke Emezi

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Akwaeke Emezi’s novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty is not the book I thought it was going to be. What did I think it was going to be? Hmmm. Good question. Given the accolades (NYT Notable Book, NCAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work) and positive reviews, I thought I was going to get a relatively serious story about overcoming grief…with a side of romance. What I got was a straight-up romance novel ripped from the Erotica 101 handbook. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing…but it’s not really the sort of book I am interested in reading anymore. That’s on me, not on Emezi.

Twenty-nine year old Brooklyn-based visual artist Feyi Adekola is still grieving the tragic death of her husband, Jonah. It’s not something she likes to talk about, it was “an easy secret for Feyi to keep,” but she’s been stuck in this endless cycle of grief for the last five years. Her BFF Joy thinks it’s time she got back out there, and that’s how she meets Milan and then his friend, Nasir.

There’s an immediate connection between between Feyi and Nasir, and Feyi “felt like she was in the path of something, but she wasn’t sure what.” Still, she’s reluctant to move too quickly, and Nasir suggests that they be friends first, which suits her fine. A few weeks into the relationship, Nasir invites Feyi to fly to his family home in the Caribbean. Through his connections, he’s secured her a spot in a gallery show and besides, his father and sister live there and she could get to know them. It isn’t until they are on the plane that Nasir reveals that his father is Alim Blake, a celebrity chef with two Michelin stars.

As soon as Feyi sees Alim she feels, “a twinge of attraction unfurling in her stomach.” She can barely meet his eyes, let alone be in the same room with him. She and Nasir are not sleeping together, and it’s clear once she meets Alim that they never will.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty leans into familiar romance conventions. Releasing breaths characters didn’t know they were holding and men commenting on how tight the women are – that sort of thing. There was one scene that actually made me burst out laughing. Feyi apparently didn’t know what julienning meant and…this is where my 24-year-old son said “No, tell me he didn’t stand behind her and put his hands over hers to guide them!” He’s definitely not a romance reader, but he saw that one coming a mile away. So, yeah, this book is filled with the requisite romance writing quirks. Beautiful people in a beautiful setting eventually having beautiful, mind-blowing sex.

Perhaps I am cynical about romance now, but I am not sure that’s it. Alim and Feyi have a connection because Alim is also widowed, although his wife died 20 years ago. And sure, they talk about their loss and the impact it’s had on their lives, but mostly this is a book about Feyi wondering whether this thing she feels is real. Nasir soon becomes a bit player in the story because the heart wants what it wants.

I guess I like my romances to be a little less ripped from the Romance 101 playbook. More The Paper Palace than well….most of the spicy romance book on BookTok these days. That said, I suspect that loads of people will love this book. It wasn’t my cup of romantic tea, but I doubt I’m the book’s intended audience.

Lessons in Chemistry – Bonnie Garmus

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I don’t know what it is about hyped books, but I rarely like them as much as everyone else does. It probably says more about me than it does about the book, really. Everyone and their dog loved Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry and I was actually looking forward to reading it when it was chosen for my RL book club. Sadly, it just wasn’t for me.

The novel is about Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant woman who is a chemist without the credentials because she was forced to leave her program after being sexually assaulted by a lecherous professor. It’s the sixties and there is no recourse for her. When she files a complaint, the cops ask her if she would “like to make a statement of regret” for defending herself. It’s the 60s and that’s the world Elizabeth is living in.

When the novel opens, Emily Zott is working as the host of a cooking show called Supper at Six. She is not a natural in front of the camera and she certainly won’t play the games demanded of her by the studio execs including smiling a lot and wearing tight fitting clothes. She does, however, tap into something women seem to want: someone who sees them and understands them.

You’d never find Elizabeth Zott explaining how to make tiny cucumber sandwiches or delicate souffles. Her recipes were hearty: stews, casseroles, things made in big metal pans. She stressed the four food groups. She believed in decent portions. And she insisted that any dish worth making was worth making in under an hour.

The novel unravels Elizabeth’s story backwards from this point. We learn how she ended up, a single mother, in front of the camera. We watch as her relationship with Calvin Evans, a brilliant and award-winning chemist unfolds, from its antagonistic meet cute to its tragic ending. We watch as she struggles to be taken seriously in the man’s world of science. We watch her teach her dog, Six-Thirty, to understand human words.

Lessons in Chemistry is a book crammed with characters and ideas and lessons about chemistry equality, but none of it is subtle. The narrative isn’t just Elizabeth’s, either. We get to hear about Calvin and his personal tragedies. We even get to hear from the dog. Yep. This book tried so hard to be funny, but mostly I just rolled my eyes at how unbelievable these characters were. The ideas are sound; the delivery not so much.

I wanted to like it, but I just didn’t.

Please See Us – Caitlin Mullen

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Caitlin Mullen’s debut novel – and Edgar Award Winner – Please See Us is well written, but it took me forever to read. I don’t know: is that a bad thing?

Twenty-something Lily has run away from NYC and a messy breakup with about-to-be-famous sculptor Matthew and landed back home in Atlantic City. She needs a job but “it was unsettling to be in Atlantic City again — coming home had filled [her] with an inarticulate dread.” She takes a job as a receptionist at a hotel spa, a job she doesn’t want but needs if she wants to get back to her life, a new life, in New York.

Ava, aka Clara Voyant, is a teenager who reads tarot cards and palms on the strip. She lives with her aunt, Des, above the shop. They’re behind on their rent and Ava lives with the dream of saving enough money to join her mother in California. When the novel opens, Ava reads the cards of a man looking for his niece, Julie. Ava has seen the missing posters around town, but she doesn’t want to mislead the man.

I didn’t want to disappoint him with the truth: what I saw was limited, out of my control. I couldn’t just call up information from the universe as easily as plugging a question into a Google search.

Ava and Lily’s paths cross and soon they are working sort of together to find out what has happened to the missing girl who, turns out, is one of several missing girls. Of course, the reader will already know that the outcome of the man’s search probably won’t be good. The novel’s opening lines tell us that “By the second week of June, there are two dead women laid out like tallies in the stretch of marsh just behind the Sunset Motel.”

Mullen’s novel meanders through the interior lives of Ava and Lily and also, Luis, a deaf and mute janitor who works at the spa. We also get a glimpse into the lives of the girls who end up in the marsh, poignant snapshots into who they are, and the circumstances and choices which led to this most horrifying end.

Ava and Lily are compelling characters, both young enough – especially Ava – to use poor judgement and make bad decisions. Please See Us definitely has a something to say about the violence against women, and how society sees and judges women who, often through no fault of their own, end up using their bodies as a means to an end. (Frankly, the most despicable character in this whole thing is Ava’s Aunt Des who essentially pimps her out to make rent money.) There is a mystery here, but it’s a s-l-o-w burn and might not appeal to readers who want things to move along a little more quickly.

Vladimir – Julia May Jonas

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Vladimir, Julia May Jonas’s much-lauded debut novel, tells the story of an unnamed English professor at a small college in upstate New York. She and her husband John cohabitate in a house filled with the detritus of a long marriage, of “times passed and things seen.” Their academic lives are winding down; John has recently been suspended for a series of accusations about sexual misconduct with former students. Their adult daughter lives in the city.

While I wouldn’t call the narrator happy, she has carved out a life for herself. She forgives her husband’s transgressions believing that the accusations against him demonstrate a “lack of self-regard these women have – the lack of their own confidence.” She and John have had a long-standing arrangement: they can sleep with other people without acrimony.

Her life begins to unravel a little with the arrival of celebrated novelist Vladimir Vladinski, the new young professor who has come to teach at the college. Her attraction to him is immediate.

I wanted to be intimate with him, so deeply intimate, from that moment that I saw him with his legs crossed in the reflection of the window. It was as if an entirely new world had opened up for me, or if not a world, a pit, with no bottom – a continual experience of the exhilarating delirium of falling.

The narrator’s infatuation is problematic and not just because of their age difference: she is 58 and he is 40. He is married with a young daughter, too. His wife, Cynthia, is a brilliant, albeit troubled, writer. None of this impedes the narrator’s fantasies, though. She imagines scenarios where Vladimir returns her feelings; they are physically and intellectually aligned.

But the narrator also realizes that she is perhaps past the point where she is sexually alluring.

…as I looked in the bathroom mirror at the webbing around my eyes, my frowning jowls, and the shriveled space between my clavicles, I felt desperation at the idea that I would never captivate anyone ever again. A man might make a concession for me based on mutual agreeability, shared crinkliness, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, be in my thrall.

The narrator’s obsession with Vladimir deepens and about three quarters of the way through the novel the story takes a weird left turn. I am not sure I was 100% on board with the last quarter of the book, but it in no way undermined my enjoyment of the book overall. It has interesting things to say about academia, desire, family and marriage and female agency. It is also beautifully written and as a woman of a certain age not too far removed from the narrator, I felt seen on many levels..

Highly recommended

Watch Over Me – Nina LaCour

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Watch Over Me is quiet – which is exactly what I said about Nina LaCour’s book We Are Okay In this award winning YA novel, LaCour tells the story of eighteen-year-old Mila who has recently aged out of the foster care system, but is offered the opportunity to remake her life as an intern at a farm in Northern California. She’s told

“Quite a few people have turned it down. And some people haven’t known what they were getting into and it hasn’t worked out. You need to want it. It’s a farm. It’s in the middle of nowhere – to one side is the ocean and in every other direction is nothing but rocky hills and open land. It’s almost always foggy and cold and there’s no cell service and no town to shop in or meet people…”

The farm is owned by Terry and Julia, an older couple who have fostered dozens of young people including Nick Bancroft, a former resident who now interviews prospective residents and who tells her that the farm “becomes home if you let it.”

It sounds sort of perfect to Mila, though, a place to take a breath and think about what might happen next. She will be teaching a nine-year-old with a traumatic past and helping out with the farm’s booth at the local farmer’s market.

Once at the farm, she meets her fellow interns, Billy and Liz, and her new student, Lee, with whom she forms an immediate bond. Mila finds comfort in the farm’s structure and in Terry and Julia, who are patient and kind. There is a kind of magic in working hard and being with these people.

But there are also ghosts – figurative and literal.

The ghost hovered in place on the moonlit field. It lifted its arms to the sky and spun in a slow circle. A girl, I thought, by the way she moved. And, in spite of myself, I was mesmerized.

This is not the first ghost Mila has ever seen, and it’s not the only ghost on the property. But Watch Over Me isn’t a ghost story, per se. It is a story about one girl’s path to healing, the memories which haunt her, and finding a place to belong in the world. It’s a beautifully written book and, strangely, a page-turner, too. (Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.) And that cover!

Highly recommended.

History of Wolves – Emily Fridlund

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Emily Fridlund’s debut, History of Wolves, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 and was the winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for its first chapter. Awards generally mean very little to me because an award is no guarantee of my enjoyment. Just because someone is a NY Times best selling author doesn’t mean they can actually write. cough::Colleen Hoover::/cough

Linda lives with her parents on a lake in northern Minnesota. Once a part of a commune, Linda and her parents are all that remain.

I knew from stories how my parents had ridden in a stolen van to Loose River in the early eighties, how my father had stockpiled rifles and pot, and how, when the commune fell apart, my mother traded whatever hippie fanaticism she had left for Christianity.

The first thing to upend Linda’s life is the arrival of a new teacher, Mr. Grierson who “arrived a month before Christmas with a deep, otherworldly tan [and] wore one gold hoop earring and a brilliant white shirt with pearly buttons.”

Friendless and an outsider, Linda watches and “I wanted him to know that I saw how he looked at Lily Holburn.” The scandal about Mr. Grierson breaks in the fall of Linda’s grade nine year when he is accused of “pedophilia and sex crimes at his previous school and was promptly fired at ours.”

Then she meets four-year-old Paul and his mother, Patra, who have moved in across the lake. Thus begins a long, strange relationship which Linda recounts both as she lives it, but also from an adult perspective several years after the events take place.

At the trial they kept asking, when did you know for sure there was something wrong? And the answer was probably: right away.

History of Wolves is beautifully written, slow-moving novel about family, memory, faith and what it is to leave your childhood behind. Highly recommended.

Five Little Indians – Michelle Good

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It’s tough to review a book written by an Indigenous author about an important subject (residential schools and their traumatic legacy) and not sound like an asshole when you don’t love it. I had the same problem with The Nickel Boys. Five Little Indians, by Canadian lawyer and first time novelist Michelle Good, won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Amazon First Novel prize and the book was well-reviewed.

And I am not going to crap all over it because there were some things I did like about the book, which follows five people who were sent to residential school as children and then were either released or escaped into 1960s Vancouver. The novel doesn’t spend much time at the school itself, but we learn enough to see how Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie suffer at the hands of the priest and the nuns, particularly Sister Mary. And suffer, they did.

The majority of the book follows these five characters after they’ve left the school, their lives intersecting as they try to make sense of a world they know next to nothing about. They are without skills, without family and really, without an education. The only thing they really have is trauma and that follows them throughout their lives.

Each of these five characters has a different experience once they are away from the school. Maisie, for example, seems to have it all together when another survivor, Lucy, arrives at her door. Maisie had gone home after she was released. “I lasted a month. No matter how hard I tried, this place, their house, was no longer home, and these people, though kind and loving, were like strangers pretending to be family.” She deals with her trauma by having sex in an alley with “The Old Man”, someone who berates her as he’s having sex with her, calling her the names the priest had called her as he raped her. “These were Father’s words. They took the rhythm of his thrusts. And I couldn’t breathe without this. I didn’t exist without this.”

Lucy fares a little bit better, going to school to become a nurse until she discovers that she is pregnant with the child of another survivor, Kenny, a boy she loved at the Mission school. They love each other, but Kenny has his own demons and try as he might, he just can’t stay with Lucy.

I did love each of these characters; that wasn’t my issue with the book. I just felt as though I was being told their story rather than shown it. This might have been remedied by sticking more closely with one character and having the others drift into their orbit. I felt like there was so much more that I wanted to know about each of them, but their tales felt somehow superficial – even though their individual trauma certainly wasn’t.

I finished reading Five Little Indians on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation which “honours the children who never returned home and Survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.” Personally, I think we have a long way to go to make things right.

Odd One Out – Nic Stone

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One of the topics the students in my Young Adult Literature class discussed this semester was the importance of diversity in fiction. Nic Stone wrote a wonderful opinion piece called “Don’t Just Read About Racism—Read Stories About Black People Living” where she expressed her own experiences with books featuring Black characters and the problem of having every single ‘diverse’ text tackle issues of police brutality and racism or simply featuring characters she didn’t recognize. Tokens or sidekicks.

“I met three African-American characters in books between 8th and 12th grade,” she writes. “The first was a Black man falsely accused of a horrific crime—literally because of #WhiteWomanTears—who despite his innocence suffers a horrific fate (Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird). The second was a Black man with a role so minor, most people don’t remember he was Black or don’t remember him at all (Crooks from Of Mice and Men). And the third was an escaped Black slave written (by a white man) in vernacular so dense that half the time, I had zero idea what homie was trying to tell me (Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).

I hated all of it.”

Why was it, Stone posits, that growing up she never read about Black kids going on adventures, solving mysteries, falling in love? “What if we’d seen Black people in books just being human?” she writes.

Cue her 2018 YA novel Odd One Out, the story of seventeen-year-old besties Courtney “Coop” Cooper and Jupiter “Jupe” Charity-Sanchez. Coop has been in love with Jupe for as long as he can remember, but Jupe likes girls. At least she’s pretty sure she likes girls. She hasn’t really had any experience with them. Then Rae Chin moves to town. Suddenly Jupe and Coop find themselves part of a very complicated triangle.

This is exactly the sort of book Stone was talking about when she described the sort of stories that were unavailable to her when she was growing up. The characters in Odd One Out are just trying to navigate family stuff (Jupe has two dads; Coop’s father was killed in a car accident; Rae’s mom took off, but all the parents in this book are professional, loving, sane parents – not a gang banger among them), school and what turns out to be very complicated feelings for each other.

All three main characters get a turn to tell their story (Coop was my favourite; I found him funny, loyal, and charming) and I loved every second I spent with them. The drama is all self-made, but these smart and sensitive teens are trying to figure it out and that sometimes makes for hurt feelings, which Stone doesn’t shy away from. Odd One Out is a coming-of-age story which will appeal to any teen who has ever been in love or questioned their sexuality. The fact that I adored this book proves Stone’s point that “the more we see Black people living—loving and doing and being and feeling and going on adventures and solving mysteries and being the heroes—the more we come to recognize our shared humanity.”

Amen.

Highly recommended.