The Library at Mount Char

Even before I became a librarian, I've always been drawn to books that feature libraries or librarians, especially the ones that are magical (such as the Ex Libris series by Jim C. Hines) or galactic-spanning (such as the one featured in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers). So I was naturally inclined to be interested in Scott Hawkins' debut novel The Library at Mount Char. Here's a bit from the back cover description of the book's galley:

Carolyn's not so different from the other people around her. She's sure of it. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. She even remembers what clothes are for.

After all, she was a normal American herself once.

But she and the others aren't really normal. Not anymore. Not since their parents were murdered. Not since Father took them in.

Now, Father is missing -- maybe even dead -- and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded.

Although this description is accurate, it gives almost no idea of how strange and unusual this book really is. It also doesn't convey how dark this book is. I wasn't very far in when I realized The Library at Mount Char felt like a horror novel to me, and that's something I don't read very often. Not sure whether to continue, I flipped to the back cover again and re-read the description. Then I noticed one of the blurbs, in which Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Nancy Kress calls the book "The most genuinely original fantasy I've ever read."

Wow. That's quite a statement by an author I admire.

So I kept reading, and after a while I found myself thinking, "Hey, this really is fantasy -- dark fantasy, to be sure, but it's not just horror."

Then I read further, and thought "But wow, this is really dark. And horrible." But I kept reading, because I wanted to find out what happened, and I was certainly never bored, just feeling a little squeamish about some of the dark bits.

And I am so glad I kept going because it turns out that this is one of the most original fantasy books I've ever read. (Thanks, Nancy Kress!)

I don't want to say too much about the plot, but just a little bit more of the set-up: Carolyn is one of twelve children that "Father" has taken in. In return, he has ordered each of them to study a particular "catalog" of knowledge, complete with periodic exams. Carolyn studies languages -- all languages that have ever been, including animal languages. Michael studies the animals themselves, and occasionally goes to live among them. David studies all forms of war and combat. Margaret studies death, while Jennifer studies healing, including the healing of death.

And so on. These children, now grown, have done nothing and still do nothing other than study, study, study. They vaguely refer to everyone outside of their world as "Americans" and cannot really function among them. And they are absolutely forbidden from sharing knowledge with each other from the various catalogs -- in fact, enforcement of this rule is where an important part of the "horror" in this book comes from.

The book isn't perfect, but then again, what is? My main quibble was that there were a couple of sections that brought in minor characters for brief scenes from their points-of-view. These scenes felt intrusive, and it seemed like I could "see" the effort behind the author trying to write, for instance, from the POV of an asshole rap star. There was also a spot, maybe 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the book, when I thought "Really? The story's not ending here? It seems like it could (or should) end here, so am I going to like the rest of this book, or is it going to drag after this?"

And it turned out that it's everything that happens after that point that makes the book one of the most original fantasies I've ever read. But don't underestimate the stuff up to that point, either, because there's nothing wasted here, not even the rap star scenes that I didn't care for. The climax is set up perfectly. I finished reading this book about three in the morning, and then lay there thinking about how much it had surprised me.

I highly recommend this book, but I also think people should be warned: there are a lot of brutal scenes in it, including rape and torture. They're not gratuitous, but they are disturbing. But even though these are usually things I avoid, I anticipate that I'll be revisiting this book comes next year's awards season.

On a different note, I wanted to mention that I got this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. If you don't know LibraryThing, it's a social book cataloging website that's a bit like GoodReads but better, in my admittedly biased opinion. Read more!

Quakeland

I first came across Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books during my young adult lit class in library school. They weren't required reading for that class, but another student spoke very highly of them and I eventually sought them out. I found them to be lovely and charming, and I followed them to FLB's Violet & Claire, which was much darker in tone and subject matter, but still contained the magic quality I had come to associate with FLB's writing.

Unfortunately, Quakeland has not followed suit. The dustjacket describes it as an "intertwining series of emotionally charged stories," but I found it to be a depressing and utterly confusing mess. The main character, Katrina, experiences disaster on every level. She has prophetic dreams that foretell September 11 and the Asian Tsunami of 2004, and her name was certainly not chosen by accident. She takes Zoloft to control the dreams, but stops taking it when her new boyfriend, Jasper, tells her to. She has a sex addiction that qualifies as unhealthy. A close friend experiences a recurrence of skin cancer. And the worst is that instead of being supportive, Jasper is cruel to the point of abuse. Because he's so "in touch with his feelings," he believes he must tell Katrina every hurtful thought he has about her, including the fact that he's glad she's not as attractive as other women because she's therefore not as much of a distraction.

Depression and pscyhological abuse are valid subjects for both fiction and nonfiction, although they are not subjects I tend to read about because, quite frankly, I already know a lot of people who are either clinically depressed or have other anxiety problems, and I don't feel I gain much by witnessing even more of it via fiction. But even without this personal bias of mine, I don't feel that Quakeland presents these subjects in an effective way.

First, there's just too much going on. (Warning: spoilers follow.) Katrina's friend Grace does indeed die of skin cancer, leaving behind three-year-old twins who have always sparked Katrina's jealousy, since she herself wants a baby and has already had a miscarriage. Jasper is impotent. Another friend named Kali reads Katrina's past lives, naturally "discovering" that Katrina has been through this victim cycle before, possibly with Jasper in one of his previous lives. Kali too was once ruled by her belief that she was nobody without a man. Katrina obsesses about earthquakes. People keep taking off their clothes and dancing for no apparent reason. Katrina has a hideous dating history. And on and on and on....

And while many novels (or collections of linked stories) both justify and effecitvely manage this level of complexity, Quakeland makes it worse by containing sections in which the reader cannot tell if Katrina is awake or dreaming; whether Katrina is writing a letter or writing in a diary or simply relating something to the reader; or whether another character entirely is "speaking" (made even more confusing in that some sections are headed by other characters' names). The book also seems, to me, to have a higher-than-average number of typos, the kind that exist specifically for copyeditors to find, such as "she couldn't bare to have her children see this."

In the end, I'm afraid that I couldn't quite finish this book. I'm willing to work for it, but at two-thirds of the way through, Quakeland has too little payoff for too much effort. Read more!

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: And Other Stories

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: And Other Stories is a collection of stories by John Kessel. The publisher, Small Beer Press, made the book available both through LibraryThing as an Early Reviewer title, and through the Small Beer website as a free PDF download (still available here as of May 12, 2008). As well as, you know, a book you can buy.

This book is worth purchasing solely for the story "Pride and Prometheus", in which Mary Bennett, the serious and studious Bennett sister from Pride and Prejudice, encounters Victor Frankenstein and for the first time in her life is moved by romantic feelings. Frankenstein is likewise drawn to Mary, but makes no secret that his motivations lie elsewhere. I don't want to spoil the story for anyone, so I will say only that this story is beautiful, serious, and heartfelt, never descending into parody or gimmickry.


The other story I was most interested in reading was the title story, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence". In this story, the narrator picks up his relationship with Dot right where he left it off when he went to prison because of something the two of them did together. Because he can't refuse Dot anything, they break into a house Dot has heard contains a great deal of wealth, and are surprised when a passage from a bedroom closet leads to a train station that in turn leads to something like the Emerald City we know from Oz.

I found this story, and indeed most of the stories, very well written, but many of them, including "The Baum Plan", have an arbitrariness and/or lack of resolution that left me wanting something more. Kessel's prose contains lovely details, but there is sometimes a clean quietness to the stories that feels almost antiseptic, even when the characters are filled with strong emotion. One story, "The Snake Girl", appears to have no speculative element, which is certainly not a crime, but it reads a bit like the type of earnest literary magazine story that an intense college student writes just after suffering the end of his/her first profound relationship, rather than a story that offers any of its readers anything particular to think about.

Another story, "It's All True", is about a man who goes back into time (well, one timeline, anyway) to try and persuade Orson Welles to join him in a future that will appreciate his brilliance. (I understand that this universe is the same in which Kessel's novel Corrupting Dr. Nice takes place, although I did not recognize the connection myself.) This was a neat concept, and the resolution of the Welles element is generally satisfying, but I still came away with a slight feeling of "why does the story end here as opposed to anywhere else?" Also, in a few of the short-shorts, I felt as though the author clearly knew what was going on, but somehow I was missing critical information and/or the joke and/or the point. I also consider it a strength that Kessel does not browbeat the reader with clumsy exposition, but at the same time I felt like I often didn't get enough information to work with.

All that said, it's worth your time to take a look at this book. Different stories will appeal to different readers. And again, "Pride and Prometheus" is worth more than the price of admission (which is $0 if you do the download -- but it's still worth the actual price of the book!) all on its own, with an ending that is not only not arbitrary, but feels necessary and just right. Read more!

Dreamers of the Day

I first encountered Mary Doria Russell's fiction in her debut novel The Sparrow, which was followed by a direct sequel, Children of God, both of which are perhaps best characterized as literary science fiction. I don't normally read historical fiction, but on the strength of Russell's superb characterization and scene-setting, I will read any fiction she writes no matter what the genre.

Dreamers of the Day is told from the point of view of Agnes Shanklin, a never-married Ohio schoolteacher who has lost all of her family in the great influenza epidemic that followed World War I. Her beloved younger sister and her brother-in-law had spent several years near Beirut as missionaries, and Agnes, inspired by her sister's life, decides to use her inheritance to visit Egypt and Palestine. Once in Cairo, she immediately becomes an intimate witness to the doings of the Cairo Peace Conference, where T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), Winston Churchill, and other luminaries are gathered to determine the fate of the troubled Middle East.


As always, Russell's characterization is brilliant. I love Agnes's personality, and her honesty with herself and the audience to whom she's narrating. Her relationships -- with Lawrence, with a German Jew and intelligence officer named Karl Weilbacher, and even with her dog, Rosie -- are utterly charming. I also enjoyed the larger-than-life personalities of Churchill and Lawrence himself.

As expected, the setting is well drawn. There are so many details of sights, sounds, and smells than it's easy to imagine the Cairo that Agnes experienced. I admit that the historical elements were a bit dry for me, and that the subtle political machinations were sometimes over my head, but that's a failing in my knowledge of history rather than a failing on the part of the author.

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

My only real quibble is with the conceit of having Agnes narrate these past events from her afterlife-in-limbo along a ghostly Nile River. It's an awkward device, and the supernatural element is at odds with the realism that Russell's detailed settings always evoke. Further, it appears that Russell did this mainly because she wanted to comment upon, without naming it outright, September 11 and its aftermath, and how that tragedy can perhaps be traced back to the Peace Conference in the 1920s. I would have much preferred an elderly but still living Agnes to look back on her life and the historical events she witnessed, but obviously a character that age could not have lived to see September 11, so we are stuck with this awkward pseudo-afterlife that does not reveal anything of Russell's idea (if she has one) about the reality of God or Heaven.

Going one step further, it even seems to me that Russell wrote the entire book to be able to write one particular line almost at the end, about men selling fear, an obvious comment on this country's current administration. I agree with her sentiments, and I understand that she would have been leaving out something important to her by not commenting on current events, but the awkward device just doesn't work for me.

Nonetheless, I would still give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Russell's writing is just that good, plain and simple -- and, to be fair, other readers may not find this narrative device as problematic as I did. There were many wonderful lines that I marked as I read so I could peruse them again later. I'll continue to follow Russell's fiction anywhere she chooses to take it. Read more!