First off, we’re the only jokers in sight. All kinds of people fill the sidewalks, rushing back and forth to wherever.
We’re not in Jokertown anymore.
First off, we’re the only jokers in sight. All kinds of people fill the sidewalks, rushing back and forth to wherever. Young, old, men, women, all ethnicities, in suits and skirts and raggedy jeans and workout clothes. None of them are jokers. It’s actually weird, seeing so many people and not a scale or tentacle in sight.
hey, just me again over here reviewing my weekly tor short a little bit behind schedule.
last week was another week sans a new shorty dropping, but now that i can hang with y'all wild cards kids, i have ample oldies from which to choose, like this charmer of a tale.
since i had been so mystified years ago reading Nuestra Señora de la Esperanzabefore i was initiated into the wild cards-verse, i decided to read this one, also penned by carrie vaughn, with my newfound understanding of what this world is all about.
and it is a delightful, almost YA-feeling romp of a story, full of the wholesome energy and feel-good vibes that are What We Need Right Now.
it's a reasonably self-contained/self-explanatory story, so even if you are completely new to wild cards (or someone like me, with a whopping 4 WC stories under yer figurative belt), you won't be out of your depth here. sure, the specific details might be unfamiliar, but the woes of the adolescent experience are pretty much universal.
I’m sixteen, and near as I can figure all my friends and I do is worry. What are we gonna be when we grow up, who’s gonna ask us to prom, how the hell do you fit in when you don’t look like anybody else in the whole world. We’ve got a lot to worry about.
the worriers in this case are a group of four joker pals: a gentle fuzzy giant with horns and claws called beastie, splat (née franklin steinberg); who can flatten his body out bonelessly, kris; whose skin is a color-shifting human mood ring, and our narrator miranda; who is built like a whippet with mongoose-like fangs earning her the nickname rikki. and rikki can RUN.
they all live in jokertown on the lower east side, whose residents enjoy a lovely sense of community rooted in their shared-but-varied afflictions, and there's a real old timey small-neighborhood vibe to the place, marred only by the occasional gawking tourists.
Jokertown gives you some weird ideas of what’s normal, but if you never leave, you never need everybody else’s normal. Normal normal.
still, part of growing up is a restless yearning for new experiences beyond the hometown's borders, and rikki's particular joker-trait makes her especially restless—barred from competing in high school track because of her unfair advantage against the nats, she's longing to release some of that pent-up running energy and just ...GO!
There’s gotta be something out there for me to do, where I can run and have it be useful and not just some weird joker trick.
to that end, the foursome decide to take the subway to central park, and, after braving the stares of commuters, they have a fine day in the sprawling privacy of cultivated nature and rikki does indeed find something useful to do with her gift.
i liked this one very much, and i'm glad i was able to right the wrong i'd previously done to carrie vaughn. her relief, is, i am sure, immense.
fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one ARC each month i'd been so excited to get my hands on and then...never readfulfilling my 2021 goal to read one ARC each month i'd been so excited to get my hands on and then...never read...more
fulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
this book is...fine.
i liked the puzzle-driven energy of The Infulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
this book is...fine.
i liked the puzzle-driven energy of The Inheritance Games enough to overlook all the things i didn't like about it: the multitude of timely coincidences, the love triangle(s), the implausibility baked into every step of the plot. it was a fast, fun book, and i expected the same from this follow-up.
however, this one brought back all of the targets of my gripes, but didn't have as much puzzle-fun to offset those gripes, so the series lost a little steam for me with this middle book.
but if being an adult reader of books intended for a teen audience has taught me anything, it's that sometimes you not only have to suspend your disbelief but you also have to suppress your world-weary cynicism.
for best results, you have to embrace the fantasy here, accepting everything as written without questioning the logic or likelihood of the events. you have to accept the existence of a deceased, but otherwise infallible mastermind behind a succession of secret-revealing codes and puzzles whose clues are discovered IN the right order BY the right people AT the right time THROUGH the right secret passage. you have to accept that the thrill of the puzzle is as satisfying as a multi-billion dollar bank statement, that adolescents preternaturally gifted at...everything they attempt, and have also mastered patience, empathy, restraint, and have curbed all selfish and thoughtless impulses. and that the adults have not.
like the clue-based YA mystery trilogy, this one is wholesome enough to hand down to younger tween-types, unless they're more freaked out about adults trying to manipulate and murder a teenage girl than the characters in this book are. the lack of serious consequences for attempted murder is another thing you gotta breeze over with your brain's logical bits.
it's a less-exhilarating outing than the first, but i'll be back here reading the final book before too long, and i only hope it's got more in the way of brain-teaser-y puzzles and less in the way of puzzling "but, HOW?" questions.
here's a bonus riddle for you:
when is a character not a character? when she's max.
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FIWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FIFTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2020 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards, because i have not compiled as many as usual this year.
IN ADDITION, this may be the last year i do this project since GR has already deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. because i don't have a lot of time to waste, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case gr decides to scrap 'em again. 2020 has left me utterly wrung out and i apologize for what's left of me. i am doing my best.
DECEMBER 1: PG - COURTNEY SUMMERS
this is another fantastic piece of writing by courtney summers, who writes her YA with claws and teeth; sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. this one is on the figurative side—a day in the life of a female coming of age and all the bullshit littering her path thru adolescence. it feels real enough that i'm glad to be grown, although the kicker is that so much of this sexist, double standardy stuff isn't left behind when you reach adulthood. sorry, kids, but it's true. the story has great details, a scathing rimshot of an ending, and it was the perfect way to ring in the final month of this terrible year.
fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i have never read despite owning more than one of their books.
this is the first book fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i have never read despite owning more than one of their books.
this is the first book in the queen's thief series, which so many of my fantasy-loving friends have singled out as being the childhood books that turned them into readers. all of us booknerds have specific books like these, that shaped us—dog-eared beloveds we read and reread during our formative years that we still think of with fond nostalgia. these special few create a sort of undercrust that shapes our adult reading tastes, and it's fascinating to little readers' advisory geek me hearing other booknerds talk about their childhood favorites so i can trace that through line and see how their preferences developed and evolved over time.
i don't have a strong fantasy background, and i'm low-key intimidated by all of the supersmart, confident, articulate fantasy readers i've met over the years whose frames of reference are completely out of my depth, so hearing these women (they were always women) speak of this series (that i am too old to have encountered in my own childhood) in such hushed, reverential tones, how could i not want to horn in on that?
so, i went out and bought all of them in one fell swoop because little old ladies ain't got time for half-measures.
i'm not sure if these books were intended for a YA or a middle grade audience—before reading this one, i assumed they were middle grade, but now, judging by the pacing and the complexity of the plot, it seems better suited to an older audience.*
regarding the pacing, i recently rewatched the dark crystal (holy cow, is this lady ever going to talk about the book or is she just gonna keep sundowning into endless digressions?), and i was struck by how long it takes for anything to happen. there's no dialogue for about 10 minutes—an eternity in child-time—just voiceover exposition over a static landscape before slowly panning over those skeksis k-holing around that dang crystal, and the mystics mournfully moaning and it's visually intriguing, but for a kids' movie, it's striking that it takes so long to get anywhere, like those slow-ass mystics doing their slow-ass plod across an expanse of nothing.
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i saw it in the theater back in 1982 when i was a tiny person, and i don't remember being bored at all by it, but if it were to be made nowadays, an editor would have lopped off 75% of that opening sequence because kids are squirmy little adderall-filled buggers who need their stimulation right off the bat.
all of that prelude to say that this book came out in 1996 and it is a damn slow burn. even for me, an adult who primarily reads adult fiction, it seemed remarkably slow. not draggy and not boring, but deliberate and leisurely, in no hurry to ferry the reader to the narrative conflict.
the first 3/4 of the book is a journey/quest story, set in a fantasy-grecian realm where a young thief named gen is scooped out of the royal prison where he's been languishing in a cell for months after a particularly cheeky bit of thievery. although he's still technically a prisoner, he's conscripted on a mission to use his skills to steal a Very Important Thing and allowed to free-range (chained and disdained), traveling alongside a magus, a soldier, and two young men close to gen's age; one younger and one older, and the older one is a real jerk.
incidentally, i have no earthly idea how old gen is. because this is a book for younger readers, i started out thinking of him as maybe twelve, but the more i read, the older he seemed and i don't know whether i missed the part where his age was specified or if it's left up to the reader to fill in that gap.
gen is a grows-on-you kind of character—a sympathetic unreliable narrator whose mental wheels are always turning as he observes and plots, sussing everyone else out but divulging little of himself, entertaining himself with the light but enthusiastic pestering of a tiny puppy towards a much bigger dog.
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he's charming when he wants to be; not often to his companions but to the people they meet along the way, particularly when there's a chance of him getting some extra food out of it. gen is so hungry. all the time.
although little seems to happen on the journey, there's a lot of character development and worldbuilding going on, most notably the stories-within-the-story in which we learn a great deal about regional history and the subtle ways a tale can be framed.
the last quarter of the book picks up a lot of steam, becoming a sort of mashup of a heist plot and indiana jones (specifically the last crusade (view spoiler)[
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(hide spoiler)]), and like a classic heist story, all the small details that surfaced when not much seemed to be happening are revealed to have been very important, indeed. there's some redemption, some grudging respect, and some surprises for these uncompanionable companions (view spoiler)[especially for ambiades, o noooooooooo [image] (hide spoiler)]
i enjoyed this introduction to the series, and i'm keen on burning through the rest of them to see what adventures await for gen and his thiefways now that the things that have happened have happened. .
* although those madeleine l'engle books were middle grade and my memory of them is that they were highly complex and sophisticated in their themes and storytelling and i was probably seven or so when i read them. NB: "highly complex and sophisticated" were perhaps not the EXACT words i used to describe them when i was seven.
fulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
in my review of The Initial Insult, i said, "before i read thisfulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
in my review of The Initial Insult, i said, "before i read this i was excited to see there was already a follow-up planned, but now that i’ve finished it, i’m apprehensive."
that was me being a polite little milquetoast. i wasn't apprehensive, friends. i was PISSED.
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the ending of The Initial Insult was perfect: unexpected, shocking, ballsy—not just "for a YA book," but for ANYTHING, and the fact that it wasn't going to stand as written—an upraised middle finger to happy endings everywhere...it felt like a betrayal of that boldness.
i was leery that a second book might soften the blow of it, but i should have trusted in her enough by now, after reading four of her books; i should have understood that 'softening' just isn't her thing. i mean:
You can only swallow so much of your own blood before it turns your gut black, tinting everything inside you darkly.
she's not interested in going easy on her readers, and The Last Laugh is just as bold and brutal as the first—my god, the maggots. the spray paint. this is not an "everything's gonna be okay" palliation of what happened during our first trip to amontillado, ohio. everything's not going to be okay.
Everything is going to be fucking awesome.
so mea culpa. mea maxima culpa. i will not doubt her again.
the poe references in The Initial Insult were laid on so thick it was almost obscenely referential, yet somehow she found more gold to mine for this one: the tell-tale heart-shaped best-friend necklaces. the orangutan doing her rue morgue thing. digging deep into poe's catalog to dust off the name "ada lalage." it's so saturated with winks and allusions that it would come off as silly if there weren't so many horrific things happening in the meat of the story, but no one's laughing at The Last Laugh. not for long, anyway.
it is impossible to talk about this book without bringing The Initial Insult into the discussion, and BOTH of them are impossible to plot-talk without sounding unhinged. although i don't recommend reading this sequel without first reading The Initial Insult, mcginnis does such a great job reminding you of the first book's...events, one could get away with only reading this one. but don't. that first one's a whirlwind journey, equal parts brutal and bananas.
this is a fierce, clawed-and-toothed follow-up and i loved every minute of it—layer upon layer upon explosive layer. tress is a master class in endurance and perseverance; the antiheroine you root for despite her/because of her flaws and simmering savagery.
Sloppy work gets you killed around wild animals, and my good habits extend to when I'm the danger in the room.
i loved this book, and i am deeply grateful to mindy mcginnis for giving me something so wonderfully distracting to read while i was flattened by food poisoning that it took my mind off how lousy i was feeling for a few too-short hours.
before we start, i need you to understand something. i’m a grown ladyperson who grumbles about semantic bleaching and doesn’t bandwagon onto contemporbefore we start, i need you to understand something. i’m a grown ladyperson who grumbles about semantic bleaching and doesn’t bandwagon onto contemporary youngperson slang unless i’m making a comedic point about how out-of-touch i am. i’m never gonna be modern enough to tweet about literally starving to death waiting for a table at the cheesecake factory. so know that when i say this, it's not some casual colloquialism, but after that ending?
i. am. shook.
i am stomach-dropped awe.
i am, to quote this book, a stinking sack of skin.
mindy mcginnis has written some ballsy-ass YA, but this one takes the don’t back down-ness of The Female of the Species to a whole nother level.
to quote this book at greater length:
”I’m holding someone captive in the basement,� I tell him, and the ear comes back, cocked. “I hit her in the head with a brick and I chained her to the wall, and I’ve got her halfway sealed into a tomb, and I probably gave her a concussion, and I think she’s got the flu, and I might have fractured her ankle.�
It’s a lot, when you string it all together like that.
it is a lot.
and yet that whole basement torture/revenge plot is just one slice of a narrative pie which mishmashes Thirteen Reasons Why with tiger king and pretty much everything edgar allan poe ever wrote. the biggest players are the cask of amontillado & the masque of the red death, but there are so many little nods to the man in the character names (including a dog named william wilson), and a where’s waldo of poe-symbols: a pendulum, an orangutan, a raven, and a black cat, here taking the form of a panther. and for those of you who prefer poe’s b-sides, the hop-frog/ribbit parallel will be a real treat.
it's not cover-to-cover perfection—some of the poe-winks are a little too winky (tress' parents' names are 'annabelle' and 'lee,' for goodness' sake), and i could have done without the panther's POV, which is in verse. i have a pretty staunch and long-standing aversion to poetry infecting my prose. some of the poems were evocative and lovely, but i had no idea what was going on in at least one of 'em, so it didn't really work for me.
there were also some moves and explanations i found unconvincing—like why tress was sent to live in her weed-farming grandfather's trailer, often forced to sleep outside with all the indifferently-caged apex predators and made to endure his "hold it in" approach to menstruation instead of living in the crumbly house of usher with her aunt and cousin. i mean, when a girl comes to school smelling like a zebra every day, maybe it's time to give cps a ring. there were some assorted odds and ends i didn't really buy, motivation-wise, but in a book where a girl's walling up her former bestie in the basement of an abandoned house while a deadly flu tears through the partygoers upstairs, it's not particularly useful to scrutinize the details. this is where we are because this is where mcginnis wants us.
before i read this i was excited to see there was already a follow-up planned, but now that i’ve finished it, i’m apprehensive. the ending is a searing slap in the face and i don’t want whatever comes next to walk it back into 'jk everything is all right' territory. i trust her to deliver something badass, but i don't want any cold water poured onto this sizzle.
i am, and remain, shook.
*
i. can't.
**** if i didn't already ADORE mindy mcginnis, this paragraph of the synopsis:
Tress has a plan. A Halloween costume party at an abandoned house provides the ideal situation for Tress to pry the truth from Felicity � brick by brick � as she slowly seals her former best friend into a coal chute. With a drunken party above them, and a loose panther on the prowl, Tress will have her answers � or settle for revenge.
woulda made me hit that 'to read' button hard enough to sprain a finger.
A Cinderella story with deadly stakes and thrilling twists, perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying and Knives Out.
i am very much a fan of knives out aA Cinderella story with deadly stakes and thrilling twists, perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying and Knives Out.
i am very much a fan of knives out and not so much of One of Us Is Lying, but fortunately for me, this is only like that book in that it is a fast-paced distraction-read. and YA. to me, it was like knives out meets the liza, bill, and jed series by peggy parish that i devoured as a kid, loving its scavenger-hunt mysteries and solve-along word-nerd clues. but i guess no one reads those anymore. they should. you should.
the 'inheritance' part of this title is indeed very similar to knives out—a tension-filled will-reading with all the assembled heirs getting less than they'd expected, side-eyeing the charity case who's just been left billions by their eccentric relation. in this case, however, there's no suspicion of foul play, and the recipient of the money isn't the kindly care worker whose years of service have made her part of the family, it's a sixteen-year-old orphan who's been living with her half-sister (or, occasionally, in her car) with no connection to the family whatsoever, and no idea why she's been left this fortune along with a note from the deceased that simply says, "I'm sorry."
and then the 'games' part of the title begins! because our dead billionaire liked a good puzzle, had a penchant for building secret passageways and hidden compartments and for pitting his four high-performing teenage grandsons against each other in competitive games featuring codes and wordplay and secrets. and avery grambs—this stranger in their midst—may be just another puzzle for the boys to crack.
it's all short chapters and intrigue—a one-sitting book if you don't have to spend time baking snickerdoodle cheesecake and, while not without its problems, it is super-fun and will hold your attention and keep you from watching the news.
yes, virginia, there are love triangles. there's a love triangle in the present-day narrative, there's a love triangle in the backstory-narrative, and—since there's a sequel on the horizon, it's safe to assume there's gonna be a love triangle in the future.
it's not the book's best feature, but it doesn't overshadow the WHY WE'RE HERE of the story—which is for the puzzles and passageways. it helps that avery isn't dominated by her hormones—for the most part, she's practical and unfussy, smart and normal-person brave (as opposed to mary sue YA heroine brave).
i will say, however, that these people are as casual about attempted murder as their mom is casual about being nekkid 'round the house mega-mansion.
also: I HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT BARK. show me the science on that scene, please, because deeply embedded beggars belief.
the ending is a bit of a weeeeelllll, and so much of the book is a house of cards made out of convenient coincidences and fortunate stumbles orchestrated by an all-knowing master of foresight, but if you're turning to these kinds of books for your mirror-up-to-life fix, you're doing it wrong.
i still have questions, and i expect some of them will be answered in the sequel, but i fear i may never learn who is in charge of stocking the fridge in a secret wing behind a combination lock with AN ARRAY of novelty sodas, all for the benefit of someone who comes and goes like a tomcat. also, where can i get a bacon and jalapeño soda?
i hope the sequel sheds some light on this matter. in fact, i hope it is the sequel's central mystery.
*
1/7/21: today is definitely the day for an escapist book!
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****
pre-review review: it strains credulity, but it's really fun.
plus, i got the bn exclusive edition with the extra chapter, so i apologize to all the indie bookstores.
fulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
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book two! okay, so if you've read my GIF-heavy review offulfilling my 2022 vow to read more YA/finish series i have started and left unfinished
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book two! okay, so if you've read my GIF-heavy review of In the Hall with the Knife, you will understand that Clue is my all-time favorite movie, so this series was bound to find its way into my hot little hands.
i read the first one with the highest expectations, but although i bought the rest of the series the day each of them came out, i've been sitting on 'em without feeling any urgency to dive back in. however, since one of my 2022 goals is to finish some of the series that've been sitting on my shelves unread, here i am, dutiful AF.
both books are fine YA murder mysteries, but if i'm being honest, a lot of the affection i feel for them is being carried over by my love of the movie, which is a double-edged sword knife in the conservatory. i know this series isn't intended to be a muppet babies kind of thing and these teenversions of the characters have no connection to their cinematic predecessors, but try telling that to my brain and my heart. these characters have been in my bones for nearly forty years, so peterfreund's new coke versions are somewhat jarring to this old dog. i mean, obviously some character tweaks were necessary to keep it YAppropriate—after all, a teenage procuress would be pretty dark for a light murder romp—and kudos to the author for updating and diversifying the cast, but—although she's CLEARLY established that these characters are WHOLLY distinct from that iconic ensemble of yore, she's gotta know that, thanks to her, some of us readers are over here picturing (view spoiler)[christopher lloyd and martin mull making out, which is not the fanfic the world needed. besides, any real Clue fan knows where the sexual tension's at, and it's between mustard and green. obviously. (hide spoiler)]
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as an aside to a review that is basically one long aside already, i still can't wrap my head around
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and since orchid and no-connection-to-Clue-whatsoever vaughn are pretty much the series' focal points, it's just one more obstacle standing between me and my potential for loving this series.
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mrs. white appears as a significant side character, which i appreciate, but swapping out mrs. white for dr. orchid in any Clue-related property is not appreciated.
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if the crime is "stealing my heart," mrs. white will always be the one whodunnit.
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so even though i want to love these books more than i do, i will finish the series, because every time there's a little referential easter egg, my heart soars.
fulfilling my 2020 goal to read (at least) one book each month that was given to me as a present that i haven't yet gotten around to reading because ifulfilling my 2020 goal to read (at least) one book each month that was given to me as a present that i haven't yet gotten around to reading because i am an ungrateful dick.
**** review to come!
****
this BARELY counts, since it is a present from THIS YEAR'S gr secret santa, but i'm getting a head start on not being a dick in 2021, yeah?
oh, man, this book. i thought i knew what i was getting into and i was so wrong.
it’s YA with balls and a vintage [image]
SPOOKTOBER CONTIIIIINUES!!!!!
oh, man, this book. i thought i knew what i was getting into and i was so wrong.
it’s YA with balls and a vintage horror cover i wanna marry, about a girl named quinn who moves from big city philly to ketttle springs, missouri—a small town saturated with its own secrets and tragedies; a town struggling to get by; a town trying to make itself great again; a town whose corn syrup mascot, frendo the not-at-all-creepy clown is part and parcel of their heartland identity of diners and parades and old-fashioned values.
but this book goes from suggestive smalltown creepiness to
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and it never lets up.
once city-girl quinn falls in with the kettle springs� cool kids, she soon notices that the relationship between the adults and her new friends seems fraught, tense. at first, it’s unclear which side is really causing the strain—if the blame falls on delinquent teens or sinister adults, so for a good long while we don’t know whether we’re dealing with a variation of Children of the Corn/Village of the Damned, or Mom and Dad, or maybe even a Wicker Man situation.
but no. it’s sort of some of these but it’s also its very own thing that is still, unfortunately, our thing, and it gets so, so splattery. you might be tempted to say, while reading this, “that would never happen,� but i am no longer convinced there’s a level to which we won’t sink. america is broken, send in the fucking clowns.
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it’s way more brutal than i was expecting for YA. it builds slowly up to its action sequences, but once it gets there, it’s relentless in its violence. when the blood starts flowing, there’s probably a lot you’ll predict, but there are still some things that’ll sneak up on you. the way a clown sneaks up on you.
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don't be afraid. it's just a clown in a cornfield.
i spent a chunk of my quarantime rewatching all three seasons of Sneaky Pete (RIP, ricky jay) AND Logan Lucky, so even if i hadn't alrNOW AVAILABLE!!!
i spent a chunk of my quarantime rewatching all three seasons of Sneaky Pete (RIP, ricky jay) AND Logan Lucky, so even if i hadn't already read-and-loved this author's previous book�Don't Get Caught, i probably would have been lured over to it anyway by the prospect of all-new CON-tent.
(pause for laughter and thunderous applause)
anyway, this is a genuinely fun and funny YA adventure, full of elaborate cons and witty banter. it stars boone mcreedy, the likable son of an incarcerated con man who is following lightly in his father's footsteps, using the art of the con to humiliate bullies, cadge free drinks, and sweet-talk the ladies. by which i mean age-appropriate teenage girls.
he will also, occasionally, use it against you, the reader.
boone helps out by doing odd jobs at the flea market his mom runs: 20-acres of commerce known locally as “garbage mountain,� containing 120 booths with names like Next Stop, The Dump, and Tats and Tots, which is a tattoo parlor that also sells tater tots. obviously.
despite the conceptual cleverness of their vendors, the market itself has seen better days, but those small businessmen and -women, selling their velvet paintings of the baby Jesus swaddled in an American flag, their dictionaries in every language, their OH I DON’T KNOW haunted dolls over at Karen’s Nightmare Toys, are like one big extended family—helping boone develop his fashion sense, steering him towards whatever clogged thing needs unclogging, and occasionally assisting him in his exploits.
but, sometimes a teenage boy will do a thing that deeply disappoints his family, such as oh-so-ironically falling victim to a pretty girl’s con and losing $15,000 of the flea market’s ca$h, making it even more vulnerable to being bought out by the competition across the way: the much fancier castle-shaped "treasure palace." and in a “family� of that size, there’s a lot of disappointment to go around.
but maybe, with the help of his still-resentful martial arts-teaching ex-girlfriend darby, he can get it back? or at least earn back the equivalent through a series of mini-cons? does that sound like a fun book to read?
spoiler alert: it IS!
i barely read YA anymore, not for any particular reason other than that i mostly read stuff i get sent by publishers these days, and i don't seem to be on any YA-publishers' radars. back when i was reading it more frequently, it was mostly survival or horror/dark fantasy stuff because teens in contemporary/realistic fiction annoy me. (maybe this attitude is why i don't get sent a lot of YA ARCs...) but dinan's brand of teen characters don’t annoy me at all. i appreciate boone’s voice; his self-deprecation and smart-ass humor as much as the twists and turns of the cons. this one has the same energy and spirit as Don't Get Caught, and it is genuinely funny and good-hearted with excellent conning and a wonderful resolution.
boone may not be toothpaste-ad wholesome because of the cussing and conning and drinking and…dating he does, but in all the ways that actually matter, you can tell he’s on his way to becoming a good adult person—he’s hard-working, respects his mother, protects nerds from bullies, has his own hard limits about conning, and—if he starts off the book a little careless and immature in how he conducts his…dating life, he’s at least willing to learn how to be better.
and if he still needs some lessons, darby'll be there to kick his ass. or have a nine-year-old do it.
this is out on august 3rd, but if YOU CAN'T EVEN WAIT, you can read this: The Con Artist Dates, which contains three short prequel stories featuring boone and darby that i am going to read myself as soon as i figure out how to work this here kindle john gave me.
**
i was propositioned...by an author!!
I want to give you a booth in the flea market, but I want to tailor it to you, specifically. So come on, ever dreamed of being the owner of a flea market booth? What would you want to sell? Name it, and it's yours! Yes, I'm making your dreams come true today! No need to call me a hero.
Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make—and no one but the two of you can break.
lo is nineteen, working as anNOW AVAILABLE!!!!
Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make—and no one but the two of you can break.
lo is nineteen, working as an executive assistant at a fledgling magazine whose founder’s mission to expose the truth at any cost is one she deeply admires and hopes to someday contribute to in a more meaningful way than fetching coffee. the truth she would most like to expose is that of the unity project; a religious group in upstate new york dedicated to social betterment through community outreach under the guidance of the charismatic lev warren.
it’s also a straight-up cult.
six years ago, when lo’s sister bea was herself nineteen, she met warren in the hospital chapel where she was praying for thirteen-year-old lo, clinging to life after the car crash that killed their parents instantly. desperate and alone in the world; a teenager tasked with the burdens of funeral arrangements and medical decisions in the midst of her own grief, bea is as shattered emotionally as her sister is physically, so when lev appears, and seems to perform a miracle—bringing lo back from weeks-long unconsciousness, it is as though he is the literal answer to her prayers. once lo is well enough to be left in the care of a great-aunt neither of them know, bea joins the unity project, becoming more and more distant until she eventually cuts ties with lo altogether.
lo is convinced that the unity project is shady—there have been controversies and rumblings over the years, but no one has been able to uncover enough dirt to stick. when lo witnesses the suicide of a young man affiliated with the group—who calls her by her name and mouths “find it� before stepping in front of a train—she sets out to investigate the group on her own, hoping to find her sister, bring her back and hold lev accountable.
the story alternates between these two parallel stories in different timelines; bea gratefully entering into the project’s fold and lo barging in with her notebook, skepticism, and virtuous agenda. the more time lo spends with lev, however, the more she begins to question her own beliefs about the project, her sister, and herself.
i put off writing this review for like five months, partly because i was tears-in-my-eyes touched that courtney summers even knew who i was, let alone was offering to give me a copy of this gorgeous creature, and i wanted to Do a Good Job, but also because i 徱’t love it right out of the gate, on a visceral, emotional level.
now that some time has passed for reflection, i’m able to see that on a craft level, what she did is really impressive, so even if it 徱’t ponch me in my feels the way Sadie did, it’s more important and resonant a reading experience, chronicling the influence of a strong personality on two vulnerable women: both nineteen, both alone in the world, both emotionally underfed; one who wants to believe very much and one who’s not gonna believe anything.
we’re drawn to bea’s story because we want to know where she is and what happened, but we naturally align ourselves with the skeptical lo (right?), and as her resistance is chipped away by doubt, it is a potent destabilization for the reader.
it’s been a year of mass manipulation, of people believing unbelievable shit, of herman cain tweeting weeks after his own death-by-covid that the pandemic was no big deal—so many things you would read in a book and think, “that’s too contrived.�
but here we are. and this book’s depiction of the seductive appeal of being seen, of sinking into someone’s ideology, in being told how special you are by someone everyone around you regards as capital-c chosen, how, among so many true believers, a little self-doubt goes a long way; it’s masterfully written and needs to be read. the exploitation of loneliness is reprehensible.
I can’t stand it, anymore, when people touch me and I find it hard to explain. It’s not that I don’t want to be touched. It’s because I do—so much—and I’m afraid I’ll give away what’s left of myself to feel less alone.
I already did it once.
i read this and the (still-unreviewed, grrr) We Can Only Save Ourselves months apart, and—oddly enough—they both pub on feb 2. if you're gonna read one cult-themed book this year, i'd go with this one, even if you're not into YA, because—like so many of her books—it's got crossover appeal for days.
looking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the monthlooking for great books to read during black history month...and the other eleven months? i'm going to float some of my favorites throughout the month, and i hope they will find new readers!
fulfilling my 2020 goal to read (at least) one book each month that i bought in hardcover and put off reading long enough that it is now in paperback.
why did it take me so long to read this book when i knew the first time i saw that cover that it was coming home with me?
[image]\
THAT COVER
it may have just been zombie-fatigue—i'm more inclined these days to read zombie-variants (like RABIES-ZOMBIES) or one where the zombie threat is more of a secondary/subplot conflict than the novel's main focus.
this one features your straightforward nom nom zombies, but it has the novelty of being set in an alt-history reconstruction-era america where the (re)birth of a postwar nation and all of the expected challenges facing a fractured country are complicated further by the rebirth of SO MANY CORPSES!! and the students of Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls shall employ their scythes against them.
so, yessssss, it's more of those same-old/been-there/done-that zombies, but the human characters are terrific and the story is great fun; fast-paced and actiony without being insubstantial and i loved it right down to its bones, both for what it is and for what it is not. i love jane's wry angry voice and general badassery; killing shamblers and kicking racists when they're down, not so focused that she doesn't notice when there are pretty boys around, but really just far too busy to engage in a romantic subplot, tyvm.
equally busy but also refreshingly uninterested in any romantic entanglements at any time, secondary character/frenemy katherine is just as appealing a heroine, and an excellent foil to jane—a little more patient and adept at the long-game, weaponizing her beauty and trying to ignore the discomfort she feels in being white-passing, and all of the advantages that brings.
i love their bicker and their banter; their vinegar turning into honey as they band together by necessity to take on whatever gets in their way. and while the zombies are certainly there, they're far from being the only or even the most prominent threat because white men have all kinds of ideas and no kind of restraint.
and i hope i don't put off reading the second book as long as i did this one because that cliffhanger had teeth and this cover is equally swoony.
People forget that. The glossy brochures for state parks show nature at its most photogenic, like a senior picture with all the
The world is not tame.
People forget that. The glossy brochures for state parks show nature at its most photogenic, like a senior picture with all the pores airbrushed away. They never feature a coyote muzzle-deep in the belly of a still-living deer, or a chipmunk punctured by an eagle's talons, squirming as it perishes in midair.
If you're quiet in the woods long enough, you'll hear something die. Then it's quiet again. There's no outrage about injustice, or even mourning. One animal's death is another's dinner; that's just the way it is. What remains will go to the earth, yesterday's bones sinking into today's dirt..
and that's how you open a book.
i expected to like this book because mindy mcginnis and survival stories are chocolate and peanut butter, but it turned out to be even more aligned with my personal tastes than i’d realized. not only is it a survival story, but it’s a grit lit survival story, set deep in the tennessee part of appalachia's woods-and-mountain isolation, trailers and factories and working poor resourcefulness, with some unexpected meth. at the center of it all is wilderness queen ashley—independent and impulsive, reluctant to ask for help, not reluctant to get her hands (or fists) dirty (bloody), stubborn as balls, and entirely capable of being on her own in the un-airbrushed part of the woods.
usually.
on this occasion, she gets in a little over her head during a boozy camping trip with her friends, after catching her boyfriend reacquainting himself with his ex, and i admit—at first i was unconvinced that a girl so familiar with the do’s and don’ts of wilderness safety would find herself in this situation—getting herself lost after stomping off into the woods, barefoot and enraged, and—worth repeating—BAREFOOT, but then i remembered that inebriated teens lack judgment and i just rolled with it.
and soon, ashley herself will roll with it, allaway down a hill, becoming seriously wounded on one of those bare, bare feet and separated from her friends with no supplies—no food, no water, no tampons. because—yes—mindy mcginnis has finally written the story i have always wanted to read—a survival story that directly addresses menstruation.
mcginnis does so many things well here—there’s great character work and strong descriptions of nature, which is just bare minimum your job as an author, but she goes on to perform the more subtle operation of gradually fusing the two. ashley is a little messy, in the way of teenage girls—reactive and hotheaded (one of the first things she does when she finds herself in her predicament is to get pissed off at a squirrel; throwing leaves at him and calling him a dick), while nature is its own kind of messiness, uncultivated, amoral, ungovernable and not even a little bit impressed by temper tantrums. ashley is introduced into this environment as other, but as the days pass and she travels deeper into the woods, further away from civilization, she becomes absorbed into the wildness—just another creature struggling to survive (or not), feeding and being fed upon in nature's relentless cycle.
eating a tick engorged with your own blood is some serious circle of life umami.
ashley is knowledgeable without being infallible, and her abilities are realistic and commensurate with her background and experience, details of which surface throughout the book. every part of her past has something to contribute to her fight for survival—her poverty taught her to ignore hunger, her cross-country training taught her to push her body past the pain, her father and her wilderness mentor taught her...all of the outdoorsy things—and she draws upon all of it, stacking up skills like building blocks in a—let's call it capability stratum—of brain, body, and spirit that give her a much better chance than i'd ever have of making it through. did i mention she's barefoot?
this pretty much sums up our ashley:
…the scar on my calf, the remnant of a deep cut from the steel siding of a neighbor’s trailer that opened me down to the muscle when I was trick-or-treating, my Wonder Woman cape getting stuck in between the stacked cinder blocks they used for steps.
I pulled my sock up and told them I was fine, because they were a nice old couple that gave out whole candy bars instead of bite-size, and I’d never had a whole candy bar to myself in my life. I limped home, shoe full of blood, and ate the candy bar in the back of the truck while Dad took me to the urgent care where they charge only half what the ER does and do stitches as good as anybody else.
she's badass, and it's not as though she doesn't struggle, because she certainly does, but she's grown up with the woods as a playground (Our games were made of mud and sticks, rocks and dirt.) and as a school—learning how nature is through years of observation, then learning how to be a part of it: how to make fire, build shelter, forage, hunt, fish, track, etc. along with the skills that can be taught, she has the innate deepgut character traits of pride and stubbornness that make a person endure, against reason, fighting 'til the end. this character in this situation is so much more plausible than some other YA survival books i could name, like ohhhhhidunno (cue anger-slitted eyes) The Raft? that book features a scene VERY similar to one here, which only one of the books does right. (view spoiler)[ohhhh mama possum!!! unlike The Raft, in which the stupidest character of all time manages to kill a mama AND a baby seal but can't bring herself to eat either of 'em, your sacrifice was not for nothing. (hide spoiler)] man, that scene was so goddamn sad. but not sad AND wasteful, which is something.
the only thing i wasn't crazy about was the coincidence-trail, wherein credulity was sacrificed for narrative appeal, and that's fine, but i didn't need it. what i DID need was that raccoon/buzzard story. it's only a couple of paragraphs long, but it says everything and it's a scene that's going to stay in my mind for a long time, reminding me to read anything she ever writes. ooh, especially if it is a reverse-jonah story written from the POV of that fish that ashley swallowed and then immediately vomited back up—still alive—into the water. what did he take away from the experience as he swam away? what did he do with his second chance at life? did he immediately forget being in ashley's tummy? these questions are more pressing to me than anything davey-related.
it was the perfect book to usher me in to my new way of life—my world comprised of just these walls and what even is this "outside?" oh, it’s full of hunger and wounds and possums who try to eat your bare feet? thanks for saving me from that, cuomo! it is not for me.
****
EXPECTATIONS: MET
review to come!
*
From the best-selling author of "Not a drop to drink" Mindy McGinnis comes a new contemporary book about a girl who gets lost in the woods.
mcginnis having brought The Female of the Species into the world means this tiny synopsis is all i need to know i need this.
i’m always down to read about insular cliques in academic settings that end in murrrrrrderrrrr, so i’d been lookingreat title, great cover, okay book.
i’m always down to read about insular cliques in academic settings that end in murrrrrrderrrrr, so i’d been looking forward to this one for a while. however, i’m ALWAYS down for books about insular cliques in academic settings that end in murrrrrrderrrrr, which means i have read A LOT of books about insular cliques in academic settings that end in murrrrrrderrrrr, and when you read A LOT of the same kinda thing, the lit-version of the law of diminishing returns kicks in and unless there’s some next-level game-changing subgenre-transcendence going on between the covers, these same bones/different skin books become less and less likely to surprise or impress.
so, YMMV, depending on how many of these kinds of books you’ve consumed. me, i thought it was fine.
it takes place at a long island prep school three years after a freshman girl was murdered during one of the elaborate hazing rituals that have long been part of the school’s social fabric, designed to separate the golden from the platinum. eight pledges are nominated from each incoming class, and must endure tests of physical and psychological fortitude before they can become one of The Players—envied for their status, earning them the best table in the cafeteria, the answers to all the tests, as well as favoritism perks extending beyond high school’s small stakes, since players alum go on to become the 1% of…everything? college admissions, internships, business opportunities, etc—all roads paved by people who were once part of an elite group within an elite private school still bound by codes of loyalty and secrecy. it’s YA so i’ll overlook the statistical improbability of all of that.
anyway, back to murrrrrrderrrrr: players prospect shaila died in the evening’s chaos, her boyfriend graham confessed and was sent to richboy juvie, and life went on for her pals, who are now seniors in charge of selecting the next batch of players. but what if graham 徱’t kill shaila?
the character types are pretty standard: sporty spice and bitchy spice and dauntless spice and scholarship spice etc along with a bunch of blandly interchangeable boys, except one is gay. for diversity. plus a young hot teacher, a bad boy playwright, and a lesbian. for diversity.
secrets, amateur sleuthing, and (mostly) white privilege ensues.
and i know I’M coming across a little bitchy spice about this, but just think of me as a big dumb puppy nipping playfully at a book that wasn’t all i’d hoped, but is perfectly fine. having been spoiled by some of YA’s edgier offerings, i found this one a little more Y than i typically dig. the whodunnit is pretty predictable, the fact that so many adults are invested in the game and complicit in the whole system is a little goofy—when a player is shunned, word spreads, and they are scorned not just by current high-schoolers but also grown folks who should have matured out of such pettiness, and surely some college deans would value actual academic merit over cheating cliques, regardless of what they themselves did in high school.
at the same time, where it could have been cool and original—the ruthlessness of teenhazing conducted by the scions of people whose tax brackets typically protect them from consequences—it went a little soft.
the “pops,� which are basically dares that the ’undies� have to perform to become a player are…pretty tame, yet they cause disproportionate emotional distress in the prospective initiates. having to read aloud dialogue from a porno—not being filmed re-enacting, just reading the words while fully clothed, or having to make out with someone of the same sex, these lightweight challenges are pretty standard slumber party fare that shouldn’t cause tears or inspire feelings of scorching humiliation, and yet they do.
and yes—some of the pops are more intense than these, including the one that led to shaila’s death, but for the most part it's silly stuff the achievement of which doesn’t seem commensurate with the supposed rewards of being a player.
there was a second opportunity to add some fresh spark here, but for all the emphasis and fuss made by the MC about how much harder the pops always are for girls than boys, and how even after they become players, the girls defer to their male counterparts, this supposedly big sexist misogyny conspiracy doesn’t amount to much—no girls are being made to pull any trains or sext politicians—except for the final, personalized challenge, everygender’s tasked with doing the same vanilla stuff. the one time something SVU-worthy could have occurred, the perpetrator was so quickly and easily diverted that the whole scene was like three sentences.
still, it was a good sickbed book, and now i'm recovered, and there's no proof this book didn't cure me.
BUT MY MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION ABOUT THIS BOOK:
where are these schools whose lunchrooms feature giant bowls of raw cookie dough?? and do they need substitute teachers? because—although presumably these students are plucking off pieces with their fingies, so if this is a thing that exists, they all have covid now—but if you're serving raw cookie dough at lunch, i'm first in line, before it gets tainted. and i’m not pinching off some ladylike portion—that cookie dough is my lunch, period.
references available on request.
**
perfect for those 'have a fever? read a book!' times.
review to come when i recover from koffing and moaning.
i am a fan of John R. Petrie as a human person, so when he asked me to read his first book, The Quarterback's Crush, OF COURSE i diHAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!
i am a fan of John R. Petrie as a human person, so when he asked me to read his first book, The Quarterback's Crush, OF COURSE i did, despite it being a YA m/m romance (so, probably more accurately b/b romance?) and me being pretty consistently romance-averse regardless of the genital combos of the characters. it 徱’t turn me into a fan of romance, but i found it goofily charming and sweet, bringing a little ‘awww� to my dried-corncob of a heart.
but now, after reading his second book, i am a fan of John R. Petrie as an author. because this one, although it does contain romantic elements, is a genuinely well-constructed mystery novel, which manages to squeeze MORE THAN ONE mystery into < 200 pages without feeling rushed.
it’s still YA, so it’s not explicit in its violence or romance elements, and there’s a real wholesomeness to it, particularly in the relationship between the protagonist timothy (NOT ‘timmy� or ‘tim,� tyvm) and his parents. they are super-supportive of his being gay, which is wonderful to read, and timothy doesn’t have a sullen-teen bone in his body, so their frankness with him and his willingness to spend time with them and share his thoughts and feels is very sweet and loving and could come across as unrealistic, but the fact that his mom is cool enough to crack grindr jokes saves it from hallmark channel feel-gooderie. it feels�nice.
Timothy wanted to be annoyed at what his brain thought of as his overprotective father, but his heart was grateful for a dad who watched over him so closely.
but it ain’t all pleasantville—teenagers in smalltown south carolina aren’t all as accepting as timothy’s parents, and as both the openly gay new boy and the son of the sheriff, he’s had to stand up for himself against some local bullies to earn his classmates� respect.
there’s also something else, something more shady n� sinister marring the idyllic smalltown facade which local broody chain-smoking teenhunk wyatt courtland discovers when, while broodily-hunkily working a construction gig, he finds a box hidden in the building’s wall whose contents relate to his friend bobby—a boy who’d gone missing four years earlier. although they aren't buddies, wyatt brings the box to timothy, asking for his help in looking into the matter—to find bobby or at least find out what happened to him. timothy, who wants to work in law enforcement despite his father’s attempts to dissuade him, agrees to investigate—hoping to prove to his dad that he's got what it takes. what the boys uncover brings them closer to the truth about bobby and several other missing teens, and also—you guessed it—closer to each other. which would be awwww, but because of all the danger, it's also aaaahhhhhh!!!
it's a solid YA romantic suspense, and a first-in-series title, so i am very much looking forward to reading more about these two teensleuths.
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