Before I delve into my thoughts on Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, I need to make an announcement. I will be appear on Nicole Bonía’s That’s How I Blog talk show/podcast on Tuesday, April 27th (at 6 p.m. PT). Basically, Nicole is interviewing her way through the book blogging world, getting people to opinionate. And I am good for an opinion or two! I guarantee I won’t be bland. Stupid, uninformed, and ill-considered are all possibilities, however.

For that appearance, I selected Mr. Whitehead’s Sag Harbor for the 20 Minute Book Club segment that follows the main interview. As you’ll see in the text below, it’s an excellent book, and I think it will be a fun discussion. If you haven’t read it, you have about two weeks.

What is there to read in Sag Harbor? It’s a nostalgic look at a mid-1980s summer in the Hamptons by a 40 year old man. It’s largely a character based novel. The summer is event-filled, but the plot does not build toward any climax. At the end of the summer, the main character, Benji, will go home. That’s it. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would be shredding such a book as pointless. But Colson Whitehead kept me riveted.

Style-wise, the book contains some masterful metaphors. Man can metaphor get tiring sometimes, but these were great. His are descriptive, but not forced or obtrusive. Benji and Reggie hang out with Marcus until they are kicked out the sticky green door to the next afternoon oasis. Shortcuts are a slim corridor into the woods. The sun is a sick death ray cutting through the sky. Okay, that last one is a little more obtrusive, but it’s still great! Everything beside the dialogue inspired images and sound. It’s rare for description to thrill me so much.

After this, there may be spoilers.

Benji narrates the story and is the older of two brothers. Reggie trails him in age by 10 months. Like twins, the often go together. At the beginning of the book, Benji tells us that the two brothers are starting to become individuals rather than a pair. Their closeness comes across in Mr. Whitehead’s characterization, as does Reggie’s increasing identity separate from Benji. Benji is far more comfortable together and far less comfortable when he has to socialize.

Other characters are just as complete as the two brothers, sometimes more so. In fact, Reggie was the one character I felt like I didn’t really know. N.P. gets his nickname from his tall tales and the group’s typical response (read the book for the reason). Randy is the older kid with a car, hanging out with the younger ones so he can be the big man. There’s others. I liked all of them.

Benji’s father is a podiatrist. His mother is a government lawyer. During the school year, the family lives in Manhattan, where Benji and Reggie attend a prep school. They summer in Sag Harbor, a black enclave in the Hamptons on Long Island. The summer that is the subject of the book, the two get to stay in the summer home by themselves, with their parents present for the weekends.

The narration is by a 40 year old Benji. This results in a nostalgic and somewhat melancholic quality to the text. I suspect that everything narrator Benji tells us isn’t quite the truth. I don’t expect he’s intentionally deceptive. It’s that we all look back at our childhood’s through a prism of memory and baggage, sometimes seeking out the experiences which formed our current world view. Benji rather ominously foreshadows future tragedy for the summer playmates, which leads me to believe he’s looking at this time in his life for clues.

The interactions slowly reveal more and more behind the façade of the perfect middle-class black family. Rest assured, when the curtain is swept aside, they aren’t monsters (a bit spoilery there, I know). But Benji’s father is an alcoholic and domineering. Still, Benji loves him and only slowly comes to realize his father’s faults, despite living with them his entire life. What I really like about the writing is that Benji doesn’t consciously acknowledge these shortcomings even to himself during the time period described. It’s very much the adult narrator who has complete knowledge. Mr. Whitehead deftly let’s the reader in on the secret so that we learn it not at the beginning, but gradually and before the teenage Benji does.

Benji also has a tenuous relationship with black history. He’s one generation removed from the civil rights movement and views it as something his parents did. Young Benji that is. He’s subjected to racism, some of it pretty overt, but little of the outright discrimination previous generations experienced. (Which makes me want to go find some non-fiction that covers the transition in black civil rights concerns from de jure discrimination to less overt prejudice underlying our society.) What he experiences doesn’t produce instant outrage, and allows him to ignore civil rights figures like Marcus Garvey, or the details of Malcolm X’s life. I get the feeling the older narrator Benji regrets his younger incarnation’s naivete.

One big part of my reading of Sag Harbor is that I kept thinking about how similar my life was to Benji’s. Obviously, my white suburban self did not experience racism nor did my parents feel the weight of being a first generation of the middle class of their race. But, my grandparents did buy a vacation property (in the Cascades) where I got to spend time during summers, though not as extensively as Benji and Reggie do. I got to spend a few weekends every summer. There I ran with a gang of kids that resembled Benji’s summer gang. Our gangs never persisted from year to year like in Sag Harbor. Also: similar prep school, and similar issues with my parents.

However, there are obviously some differences. Big differences. I’m white and I grew up in a pretty white neighborhood. My prep school, like Benji’s, had only a few black kids in it. I was on the other side of the racial coin. For all I remember, I might have been perpetrating some of the same prejudices against black students that Benji talks about. My memory of high school is very fuzzy. White kids like me, particularly prep school attendees, generally have the privilege of not having to think about race outside of the school curriculum. I didn’t. Things like that wouldn’t have imprinted on my memory.

I liked Sag Harbor because, in addition to liking the characters and wanting to see how they handled situations, it got me thinking about a blank spot in my racial awareness: middle class black communities. It’s not that I didn’t know they existed, or that I was surprised by anything about the Sag Harbor community in the story, but that I just didn’t think much about them. Mind you, I have no clue how representative or authentic the story is. I’m not using Whitehead’s story to fill a knowledge gap. Or at least I hope I’m not. Even if it’s not authentic, the situation is certainly plausible, and should get people unaccustomed to looking for subtle racism to think about it.

From the acknowledgments at the end, I gather that Colson Whitehead spent some time in Sag Harbor as an adolescent, possibly making this partially autobiographical. Not the first autobiographical book I’ve ever read, of course. Some parts might be from Mr. Whitehead’s own experience, some might be made of whole cloth (they didn’t happen the way it’s told in the book, but it makes for a better story), and some might be amalgamations of the experience of others either with him or relayed after the fact. I wonder how a writer’s headspace differs for each category. I.e., when it’s personal experience, you can relive it to create the scene. When making something completely up, you can’t pull details from memory; they have to be invented. Where does using someone else’s experience fall? Is this even a relevant question? I dunno. I’m a reader and normally I don’t care too much to see how the sausage is made, but for some reason I’m pondering this.

Really good book. Hopefully I am able to discuss it well for That’s How I Blog.

Title: Sag Harbor
Author: Colson Whitehead
Cover creator: Rodrigo Corral (designer) / Tracy Morford (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Doubleday / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 273 p.
Publication date: 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-52765-1

I’ve read good things about Varian Johnson’s books, so I looked through the Seattle Public Library’s ebooks and audiobooks available for download in order to try his writing out. Red Polka Dot In A World Full Of Plaid is what they had, so I downloaded it to my MP3 player.

I have very mixed feelings about the book. On the positive side, the main character Maxine Phillips is a likable realistic confused teenager. Johnson handles the issue of racial identity thoughtfully. On the negative side, other young adults act more like adults than teens and are very one dimensional. The teen love story follows the standard best friends should be together script, a standard arc that I think is unrealistic and can sometimes be creepy when it happens in real life. More personally, the treatment of religion pushed some of my atheist buttons.

There are some minor spoilers in the rest of this discussion, so skip reading if you care.

Maxine Phillips grew up in South Carolina with her best friend Deke and her single mom Catherine. All her life she’s been told that her father died. Mom loves her, but became a workaholic to provide for Maxine. She takes offense when she doesn’t feel like Maxine properly acknowledges her sacrifices. At the start of the book she’s 18 and has just graduated from high school when she finds out her father is alive. She’s impulsive and has a quick temper, so her quick decision to drive to Oklahoma to meet her dad without her mom’s permission causes some consternation among her family.

On arriving in Oklahoma, she learns several unpleasant facts for her. First, her father Jack is white. This does not go over well with Maxine who has some prejudiced views about whites. The second is that the reason why Jack Phillips abandoned his family is that he spent 15 years in prison for manslaughter. Nevertheless, she decides to face these family problems head on and stay with Jack for the summer to get to know him. Despite her dislike for the man. Deke stays with her for moral support.

I really liked Maxine as a character. As noted, she’s impulsive and quick tempered. She changes her mind often. She doesn’t know how she feels about things. All this matches up well with the teens I know. Her resistance to authority appeals to me as well. She’s a great rebel without being a delinquent. She’s not trying to be bad; she’s just trying to find a her own way to being good. When she finds out her parents have lied to her about her father’s absence and race, the hurt comes through the words.

The short version of Maxine’s view is that she takes pride in being black, and finding out that she has a white father makes her think that pride is misplaced. She also doesn’t feel at home with the white country kids who populate Jack’s hometown of Chickasha, Oklahoma and doesn’t see many black faces (with whom she does identify) either. A large part of Maxine’s bluster is rooted in her uncomfortableness of her situation. She uses a lot of defense mechanisms to avoid facing truths she doesn’t want to know.

While Maxine is awesome to read about, the other teens bothered me. Deke spouts religious platitudes much as a condescending adult would, rather than how religious teens do. He started off well. But midway through the book he transforms into a junior Billy Graham. The religiosity fit the character, but the manner changed from realistic to aphoristic (and that leads into my criticism of religion a few paragraph from now). Other characters like Marcus and Abby were straight out of central casting from the beginning. They were smooth talking players who say all nice things beforehand that get vicious the second they don’t get their way. Any reader should be able to pick up Marcus’ exact role in the story within a couple of sentences of his appearance. He could have been written with far more depth and still retained his spot as the traumatizing force.

Deke’s obvious from the start crush on Maxine really bothered me too. This aspect doesn’t ring false, it’s that I’m not a fan of the best friends who realize they are meant for each other trope. A nice guy that stays close to his not so secret crush is pathetic, manipulative, and creepy. By that I mean the practice of sweeping in to save the girl using all the confidences he’s gained over the years, of playing the nice guy sidekick while the girl goes after the assholes. I think it’s much healthier for people to move on rather than hang on for years.

And lastly, while not something innately bad about the book, the role religion played in the book bothered me. I don’t mind religious characters. Deke and Jack being religious is fine. What bothers me is that Johnson had a free-thinking girl like Maxine become religious because she’s told some b.s. platitudes like god only gives you what you can handle. I don’t insist that my characters stay as resolutely atheist as I am, but I do expect them to have a transformative spiritual experience to switch, and not of the no atheists in a foxhole variety either. Christianity comes off as if it is intrinsically the right thing. For believers I’m sure that makes sense, but I want justification of sorts for belief. Or meaning. It’s hard to explain. Religion should not be a law of nature like gravity that just exists.

Despite all the sour notes, I do recommend the book. Maxine as a character and her struggle with her heritage are readable and meaningful. The bad aspects keep it from being great, but it’s still quite good.

Title: A Red Polka Dot In a World Full of Plaid
Author: Varian Johnson
Narrator: Sisi Aisha Johnson
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Netlibrary download
Length: 5 h. 51 m.
Publication date:
ISBN-13: 978-1-4294-1206-3
Subject: Father and daughters — Fiction
Subject: African American women — Fiction
Subject: African American families — Fiction
Subject: Fathers and daughters — Fiction
Subject: African Americans — Fiction
Subject: Self-acceptance — Fiction
Subject: Interpersonal relations — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.J63844 Red 2005

I really liked Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker, and seeing Nnedi Okorafor on a couple of panels at Wiscon made me like her even more. I’d be hard-pressed to think of someone more positive than her. So I picked up The Shadow Speaker at the dealer room.

The Shadow Speaker has a lot in common with Zahrah the Windseeker: a setting that appears in both books, a young female protagonist learning her new powers, male supporting cast, and similarly creative fantastic creatures. All of that was awesome! What wasn’t awesome was the disjointed hero quest plot. Zahrah had to save her friend. Ejii has to save five extra-dimensional worlds from war. Along the way she encounters seemingly random obstacles that seem to be there only to introduce Ejii to her traveling companions. I was disappointed overall.

Ejimofor Ejii Ugabe is a shadow speaker living in magical Kwàmfà in West Africa in 2070. The Great Change, a nuclear war semi-aborted by interfering technology released by a peace group, released magic as a more powerful force than technology. Some people fear meta-humans such as flying wind-seekers and extra-sensory shadow speakers because of superstition and some view them as normal.

The semi-mythical Jaa has ruled Kwàmfà for a few years. She’d established the town and then gone away. During Jaa’s time away, Ejii’s father ruled the village in manner similar to current day Islamic countries, hard and discriminating, before Jaa returned and summarily executed Ejii’s father. Time has passed though, and Jaa heads to a great peace conference in Ginen across the desert and through a dimensional portal. Ejii, no lover of her own father, follows and hopes to join Jaa because the shadows have told her she must go to prevent the war.

The strength of the book is the creativity Okorafor used to create creatures and situations. She included giant sentient sandstorms, talking camels, ostrich-like birds that will carry women but not men, and more.

Ejii is a solid main character, particularly for a girl. She isn’t a cookie cutter stereotype that seems to plague a lot of young adult female characters. She’s smart but not super-brainy. Mostly respectful when she deals with others. Sometimes resourceful, but able to let others such as her fellow school-age shadow speakers help her. In short, I like her. Her traveling companion Dikéogu treats her as an equal or sometimes as his better. He’s charmingly stubborn.

Stubbornness seems to be a prominent characteristic for every character though. In addition, the adults all seem to have a streak of knee-jerk in them that felt extremely false to me. I might not have noticed if it weren’t combined with the mundane plotting.

And that’s the Achilles heel for the book, the plotting. As Ejii journeys, she periodically encounters obstacles, resolves them, and moves on. Episodic is the mold for a hero quest, of course. In this case, each obstacle, whether it’s a group of man-eating cats, a sandstorm, a magician, or a hotel desk clerk, follows a very predictable path and then goes away and Ejii continues her journey. They don’t build on each other, excepting the lesson Ejii learns from each builds on previous lessons. But the events themselves usually just leave Ejii back on her journey having learned her lesson but having advanced no further in her actual quest.

I think lots of people, possibly including the young adults at which the book is targeted, won’t have that reaction to the plot because they will be enjoying the scenery. So I hesitate to unrecommend it. For me though, it was very middle of the road.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Attention Rebellious Jezebels
• Morsie Reads
• Muslimah Media Watch
• Becky’s Book Reviews
• SherMeree’s Musings
• Andy Wolverton

Title: The Shadow Speaker
Author: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Cover creator: Elizabeth H. Clark (designer) / Luca Trovato and Colin Samuels (photographers)
Imprint / publisher: Jump at the Sun / Disney Hyperion
Format: Paperback
Length: 336 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-142310036-2
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
Subject: Sahara — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Africa — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Sahara — Fiction
Subject: Africa — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.O4157 Sh 2007

Before this review devolves into my musings on the meaning of it all, the most important thing to say about The Taqwacores is that Michael Muhammad Knight has filled the book with a group of young engaging characters. They don’t do much, and nothing much happens, but I liked the characters so much I didn’t care. A house full of young American muslims struggles to reconcile their religion with their personal values. Mostly not very devout, the youth are into the punk scene. One of them regales his housemates with tales of taqwacore bands from his days on the west coast as he tries to set up a giant punk show played by the legendary taqwacores. The punk ethos collides with islamic tradition and theology.

The narrator is Yusef Ali. He’s from Syracuse, attending college in Buffalo where his parents think living with muslims will innoculate him from the sins of the non-muslim school body. Yusef is a follower. The house is filled with ne’er-do-well ringleaders, Jehangir Tabari chief among them. He’s the former west coaster. Mohawk. Alcohol. Marijuana. Girls. Punk. Jehangir rejects most of muslim culture but proudly claims it’s mantle. He believes that the United States will be the center of a new islam. Punk is a new mystic sufist islamic tradition to him. The important part of islam is belief in allah along with occasional ritual prayer, conducted very much not in accordance with older tradition that is.

Other members of the household: The most devout of the group is Umar, who continually blows up over the rest of the household not following religious rules. Rabeya is the only woman living there. She wears a burqa 100% of the time so the house has never seen her face. Rabeya will lead prayers, or cross out portions of her q’uran with which she doesn’t agree. Her reasons for wearing the burqa remain unsaid the whole book, but it certainly not because she feels it denotes a woman’s lesser status. Fasiq Abasa mainly exists to smoke marijuana on the roof, where he’s joined by Amazing Ayyub and Rude Dawud. Fasiq and Ayyub are couch surfers, and Umar kicks Ayyub out of the house for a time after he catches the amazing one having sex in his bed.

The second strong points of the book is it’s depiction of the culture clash. I can’t speak to the authenticity of either culture, as I’m neither punk nor muslim. Perhaps it’s all made up, but it’s imagined superbly. Islam is submission. Punk is quite the opposite, rebellion. Most of the house tenants don’t struggle with claiming both mantles, but they run into practical problems all the time. Rabeya leads prayer, which is normally forbidden. The direction of Mecca is marked by a hole in the wall created with a baseball bat. While they continually question what it takes to be muslim, they also occasionally challenge their own punk status means anything, once noting that a wallet chain could suffice to be punk.

I think it’s a little ludicrous to ignore or reject 99% of the precepts of a religion yet still identify oneself as an adherent. But such cognitive dissonance is certainly not limited to muslims. Christians have been following that outline for centuries. Some catholics do little more than attend mass on christmas and easter. Even while rejecting the tenets and social structure, the near apostates still derive some measure of comfort from their membership. In the book, being muslim is part of who they are even if it means little.

For those who are squeamish, The Taqwacores is full of muslims behaving badly. If sex, drugs, or poor treatment of q’urans will offend you, stay away from the book. One of the closing scenes contains a sex scene that I would classify as must read, but it’s crude and dirty and not for the faint of heart.

Other blogged reviews:

• Under the Midnight Sun
• The Word Hoarder
• Brilliant Disguises
• Lazygal Reads
• Bonbonloverr
• Tazzy Star

Title: The Taqwacores
Author: Michael Muhammad Knight
Cover creator: Goodloe Byron
Imprint / publisher: Soft Skull / Counterpoint
Format: Paperback
Length: 254 p.
Publication date: January 2009
ISBN-10: 1-59376-229-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-229-2

I can’t remember where I first saw Deadville mentioned. I put it on my wish list and more or less forgot about it. Ron Koertge does not come up often in my blog reading, so nothing kept him in the forefront of my mind. Last week I picked his book off the wish list to check out from the library. It’s really good. Mostly believable teens. Great treatment of death and illness. And good music thrown in to boot.

Ryan is a stoner. Listens to music all the time. I kind of want to make a list of all the music listed in the book, cause I’m betting that most of it I would like. I digress though. One of Ryan’s schoolmates, Charlotte, is thrown from a horse and is in a coma in the hospital. Charlotte was part of the popular crowd. Ryan isn’t in her circle. But he decides to visit her in the hospital anyway.

It quickly becomes clear that Ryan has a few demons of his own. While the jacket blurb comes right out and says that Ryan’s sister Molly had cancer, in the story it’s revealed gradually. It broke him, watching his sister ill. Rather than deal with it, he started getting high before going to the hospital to visit. Now he gets high all the time and squabbles with his parents, though they aren’t particularly dysfunctional. Just neurotic.

Back to Charlotte. His first visit is straight, but he lights up immediately after leaving the hospital. He’s drawn back, thinking about how early on his sister Molly had lots of visitors but fewer as the days continued. Charlotte seems to have the same experience as she lays asleep; even her boyfriend only visits once. Her family is there frequently and regularly. Ryan doesn’t develop much of a relationship with them, but he does with Betty, one of Charlotte’s volleyball teammates.

Koertge handles the subject matter incredibly well. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t detect one false note about how anyone handled death or serious injury. Particularly Ryan. He never really liked Charlotte. Still doesn’t. But he’s drawn to her in a totally believable way and wants her to get well. (I’ve had my own similar experiences.)

The one thing that felt a bit false to me was that every teen seems pretty psychologically aware. Some obviously weren’t as academically gifted. But they all seemed to know themselves in a way that teens I’ve worked with aren’t. Real life teens are certainly capable of it, and they show great skill in it sometimes. But they don’t consistently take steps back from their own situations and see them as outsiders would. The feel in this book is that they do.

Definitely recommended reading, that’ll fit the attention span for anyone.

Other blogged reviews:

• Andy Wolverton (this might be where I first saw the book…)
• Knight Reader
• Thumbs Up 2009

Title: Deadville
Author: Ron Koertge
Imprint / publisher: Candlewick
Format: Hardcover
Length: 212 p.
Publication date: October 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-7636-3580-0
Subject: Death — Fiction
Subject: Grief — Fiction
Subject: Dead — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.K81825 De 2008

Have you ever wondered what a person thinks as their life spirals out of control? Then read this book. If not, it’s very middle of the road. I had to finish the book though. I’m bemused too much by train wreck personalities.

Alison Poole is a spoiled rich kid living on dad’s money, hanging out with other rich girls and boys, doing drugs and sleeping with various men. Also these people engage in low grade warfare the entire time, fighting with each other, messing around psychologically, and creating all sorts of unnecessary drama. That’s about the story.

As a portrait of rich kid New York City life in the late 1980s, perhaps it’s accurate. Even if it is, I don’t think it says anything. Does McInerney have a keen eye for incongruities of urban life as the New York Times Book Review stated? Is Poole caught in the traumatic reality of her times as the San Francisco Chronicle wrote? Bah.

One thing I did notice is that the character Poole portrays all her sexual conquests as her choice, but often portrays the drugs as inevitable with statements implying the social faux pas of not doing someone’s drugs was too much for her to bear.

As Judge Judy might say, I think it’s mostly a portrait of someone without much character. If she wanted to sleep around, do drugs, and skip class, I have very little problem with it. I wouldn’t be hanging around personally with a person like that beyond the occasional voyeuristic accompaniment (which is essentially me reading the book). But I would he a hell of a lot more respect for the person if they acknowledged the choice made rather than complain about all the things that have gone wrong.

One thing I did think was pretty weird though is how philosophically logical Alison Poole is. None of the drug addicts I’ve known made that much sense. Alcohol and drugs in the quantities used by the character have a way of making people stupid.

My quick search of the internet shows me that Alison Poole is more famous than I thought. McInerney based the character on Lisa Druck, now known as Rielle Hunter. She made the news this fall for being John Edwards nookie on the side. Given that she slept her way around the campaign, I have a little bit of evidence that the description in the book is apt. Always creating drama. It fits.

Other blogged reviews:

• Nail File
• Light Motifs
• Trashionista

Title: Story of My Life
Author: Jay McInerney
Cover creator: Lorraine Louie (designer) / Marc Tauss (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Vintage Contemporaries / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 188 p.
Publication date: August 1989
ISBN-10: 0-679-72257-2
Subject: Young women — Fiction
Subject: Generation X — Fiction
Subject: Sex customs — Fiction
Subject: Drug abuse — Fiction
Subject: New York (N.Y.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3563.C3694 S76 1988b

My friend Kim attended WisCon this year. WisCon is a feminist S.F. convention. As steady followers of this blog may have picked up, feminism has been a minor theme of mine this year. Kim returned from the conference with a recommendation to read Perry Moore’s Hero. Kim read it, then lent her copy to me so that she could get my opinion. At no point has Kim told me what she thought of it, I presume so that my impressions would not be tainted.

So here’s the summary. I thought this to be fun, escapist fantasy at the core. It’s not specifically a feminist work. It’s a gay male superhero coming of age novel. It’s full of teenage angst. I can’t say if it’s true to the experience of a closeted gay teen coming out since I’m straight. It does seem exaggerated, but that’s to be expected in a superhero novel, even more so in a young adult novel. Thom Creed is a likable protagonist, somewhat mixed up but personable. Overall I’d recommend it.

I bought lots of comic books as a teen. I would take the money mom gave me for the bus and buy my stash, leaving me just enough to get to and from school if I creatively cheated King County Metro. Once downtown, my time was spent at Time Travelers and Golden Age Collectibles reading the latest issues of all the Marvel series. You could find me squinting as I walked the streets, imagining that my view a quarter mile away was so much better than anyone else and I was developing super-vision. Not only did thoughts of powers give me hope from (what I thought was) a dismal life, some of the female characters were fine objects of desire. I’ve never been particularly fond of the big-bosomed Amazons that were most female superheroes. I rather preferred the quiet Kitty Pryde (though perhaps my memory of her is confused).

If I were gay, I could easily seem myself as Thom Creed in Perry Moore’s novel. Blond Uberman in a skin-tight costume would be just as enticing as Ms. Pryde was for me. Thom Creed gets to imagine Uberman to fit his fantasies exactly. The superhero is a perfect canvas.

I do wish there were some normal people in the story. I don’t mean without superpowers. I’m fine with everyone being able to do something extraordinary. I mean that every character that has any screen time is neurotic or dysfunctional. At times it feels like a bad sitcom or a Woody Allen movie.

Basic story is this: Thom Creed can heal himself. He’s just learning how to do this at the beginning of the book. He lives with his dad, the former Major Might, in disgrace after his father botched a rescue years ago. Mom disappeared, literally. She can turn invisible and left dad. Thom’s other secret is that he’s gay. Dad is homophobic, so when Thom imagines that Dad has found a beat-off picture on the family computer and it’s male, he’s done for. Before that happens, he packs his stuff and runs away. Super-villains attack his bus coincidentally, and when the League saves the day, Thom’s chance encounter with them garners him a try-out. Powers and the League and pretty much anything having to do with super-powers is a taboo subject in the Creed household. So now Thom has a third secret. Hard to battle super-villains and keep it a secret though. When will dad find out? What will happen when he does? And will it be in the middle of Thom’s fight with Dr. Octopus?

The biggest part of the story is Thom’s relationship with his father. He wants to impress Dad, and so he plays hard. He works extra jobs to supplement Dad’s income. But he’s also quite afraid of Hal Creed too. Afraid not just of not impressing Dad, but that Hal’s love is fragile. And frankly, Hal gives son Thom good reason to be afraid. While he shows up at every one of Thom’s basketball games, he tells his son nothing of his own life. And there’s no support from dad when Thom gets trashed for being a suspected homosexual. *minor spoiler* When Thom gets outed, Hal does everything short of kicking his son out of the house. Probably common for gay men when they come out. But I am a little disappointed that attaining dad’s favor and rapprochement between the two is a goal. Hal should be begging his son’s forgiveness. I read where Hal Creed was base on Perry Moore’s own father. Perhaps Moore wanted this to be similar to his own relationship. Perhaps that would have just made it cliche, to have Dad learn he was wrong by the end of the book. It seemed like Hal never gave up his homophobia, even with respect to his own son. Thom’s continued groveling before his father, while understandable, was irritating. But then, I’m not a forgive and forget type.

There are some major plot holes and logic fails in the book, but that’s to be expected whenever you’re talking about superheroes. Just exactly how does the team manage to appear in the right spot for battle right when needed? And why does the bad guy bother with all the subterfuge? However, like a superhero movie the main focus is appropriate on the fight scenes. How you get there isn’t quite as important.

The story isn’t overt with any political message. Thom Creed experiences some pretty awful homophobia in the book. There’s no moralizing though about how this is wrong. It’s just presented as the awful experience that it must be. I think the message is more subtle. Substitute a woman in for Thom Creed’s unrequited love interest and make him straight and there would be little difference between him and me. Cause there really isn’t much difference. Other than the superpowers.

Title: Hero
Author: Perry Moore
Cover creator: Chip Kidd (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Hyperion / Disney
Format: Hardcover
Length: 428 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-10: 1-4231-0195-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-4231-0195-6

I vowed in April (or maybe May) to read five of the top ten obscure S.F. works that deserve more attention as selected by Feminist SF. Well, they took their time getting the list out, but they did and I’ve got five of them in hand. I won’t be reading them all in a row. Instead my plan is to alternate them with other books. The first was Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s young adult fantasy Zahrah the Windseeker.

I thought Zahrah the Windseeker was a beautifully imagined fantasy world that has one huge drawback. On the positive and even recommended side overall, but man is that drawback prominent. So let me get it out of the way. The plot is utterly unoriginal and predictable in the worst way.

Zahrah Tsami was born dada, which means primarily she has funky hair and people think she will be a witch or rebellious at least. Turns out it means she can fly as she finds out when she floats up from bed a few times. She and her best friend Dari sneak a little ways into the Forbidden Greeny Jungle which surrounds the Ooni Kingdom so that Zahrah can practice flying. There Dari is bit by an exotic animal and falls into a coma. Before recriminations can go too far, Zahrah sneaks back into the jungle on a quest for an unfertilized elgort egg, said to be the only thing with the properties that can save her friend Dari.

On the other hand, the setting is done incredibly well and originally. The Ooni Kingdom is mostly plant based; computers and mirrors and other gadgets are grown from plants. The plant and animals that inhabit the Kingdom and the Greeny Jungle are a good combination of real world (like the baobab tree) and fantastic (pink frogs that know the future). My favorite of course was the giant venus flytrap like plant that ate a deer in front of Zahrah. I need to get me a venus flytrap for my place. The idea of plants turning the tables on animals thrills me (as long as it’s not me).

I also loved the Zahrah and Dari characters. Neither were pig-headed in a way that adults often write teens. I can’t think of an example that compares to these two characters, but what comes to mind is how bullies are often written, as if they have nothing better to do than torment others. The couple of female bullies that make an appearance in the book act more with disdain than with purpose. Other than Dari being the popular kid befriending the unpopular one, I think the author did her teens well.

And lastly, Zahrah the Windseeker does a much better job at pushing nature than some other attempts I’ve read recently (I’m calling you out Isabel Allende). Rather than a force for good, it’s described more as something that simply is. A very powerful something. But something that has both good and bad faces, while civilization also has good and bad aspects. One doesn’t simply jut go out into the jungle and live happily ever after. Things in the jungle are used (particularly by medicine) to good effect. Gorillas in the jungle have their own civilization. They don’t just commune with nature, they build towns. In other words, everything flows well and you don’t get beat over the head with nature good.

If only the plot was less predictable, this would be my favorite young adult fantasy.

Title: Zahrah the Windseeker
Author: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Cover creator: Sheila Smallwood; Carol Chu (designers)
Imprint / publisher: Graphia Books / Houghton Mifflin
Format: Paperback
Length: 308 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-547-02028-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-547-02028-0
Subject: Adventures and adventurers — Fiction
Subject: Coming of age — Fiction
Subject: Flight — Fiction
Subject: Best friends — Fiction
Subject: Jungles — Fiction
Subject: Fantasy
LC classification: PZ7.O4157Zah 2005

Random House provided the ARC of American Wife I read for this review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. In return, I agreed to write a review of at least 25 words to be posted on LibraryThing.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s new book American Wife has certainly received a lot of buzz, and it’s not even officially out until 2 September. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. It’s a thinly disguised ripped from the headlines take on the life of Laura Bush. Some things have been changed: the Bushes are the Blackwells, the family is from Wisconsin, the elder Blackwell never made it to the White House as President, and more. But all the major events in Laura Bush’s life have parallels: an auto accident where Alice Blackwell kills a classmate, a quick marriage to rich ne’er-do-well Charlie Blackwell, Blackwell’s purchase of a baseball team, runs for governor and the presidency, and even a carefully scripted disagreement with her husband over abortion rights. I’m probably a little too cynical in thinking the differences are meant to either ward off legal action or the book was done with Laura Bush’s acquiescence and input and the differences were meant as cover. I don’t want to speculate as to motives too much though, because that’s my biggest criticism of the book.

The story is pretty pedestrian. Middle class uptight midwestern woman marries charming loose rich man, then subsequently sublimates her life to his. Really really pedestrian. And about a character type I hate. I hate female characters that have no lives of their own, where everything is domesticity. I recently found a link to the Bechdel test through Charles Stross’ blog. That test has three prongs: there exists more than one woman in the story, they talk to each other, about something other than men. Nominally this book passes that test (there’s a discussion about abortion rights and political responsibility between two women near the end of the book), but it sure feels like it doesn’t. This is all about Alice Blackwell’s kowtowing to Charlie Blackwell.

If the book were about her changing Charlie Blackwell, or being an equal partner or something redeeming, I might be more sympathetic. But it’s not. Time after time, incident after incident, Alice Blackwell metaphorically and literally says yes dear and goes back to cupcake baking and banquet hosting. Fine. Some people are like that. But I don’t need to read about it for 551 pages.

A couple of reviews I’ve seen have called this a sympathetic or compassionate portrait. Hogwash. Creating an image of someone who never participates in her own life is not sympathetic. Alice Blackwell doesn’t stand up to anyone. She doesn’t pursue the boy she has a crush on, she waits for him to make a move (which he takes over half a decade to do). She’s not responsible for hooking up with Charlie Blackwell, he’s just too handsome and charming and persistent. On and on. If these reviewers think that anyone wants to be portrayed like that, they run with a different crowd than I do.

The only way this comes out ahead for me is if it shows some sort of insight into the real Bush’s marriage. But there’s a problem with that. Curtis Sittenfeld is an author, not a psychiatrist with intimate knowledge of the First Lady’s psyche. Ability to divine the inner thoughts of someone else is not something I would credit to authors. Fictional people, sure. Real people, no. It’s simply another form of punditry and if you read folks like Beat the Press or the Daily Howler, you’ll have an idea of how futile it is to figure out motives.

So unless there’s some sort of deep research involved here, I pretty much have to say this doesn’t pass the smell test. It sure could be a portrait of Laura Bush. But more likely it is just conjecture.

Title: American wife
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 551 p.
Publication date: September 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6475-5
Subject: Presidents’ spouses — United States — Fiction
Subject: Women librarians — Fiction
LC classification: PS3619.I94 A8 2008

I moved Gifted to the top of my reading pile after it was put on the Man Booker long list this week. Now that I’ve read it, I can see why it was long-listed, but I am unsure if I like the book or agree with the status the literati have accorded it.

In addition to being a novel about a gifted child coming of age, Lalwani’s novel is also a novel of Indian people in the west. Rumika Rumi Vasi is the gifted girl. Her parents are Mahesh and Shreene. Her younger brother is Nibu. Mahesh and Shreene live precariously between the worlds of India and Britain. Rumi is much more firmly drawn to the West in which she lived (Cardiff, Wales), but her parents sequester her from everything to the best of their ability. Rumi doesn’t know any better than to follow along with her father’s desire for her to be admitted to Oxford at a young age, but she’s also clearly unhappy with the strictures with which he ties her down. She makes it to Oxford at age 15, but the pressure only increases on her.

Lalwani’s writing is generally good, but I found it to be choppy. It’s less a story than a series of vignettes. While the factual details of the story weren’t particularly important, I still found my immersion into Rumi’s character displaced by new things introduced in each vignette.

The writing does emphasize how isolated Rumi is. There are three characters in the book: Rumi, Mahesh, Shreene. Well, and one half character, Mark Whitefoot, a college buddy of Mahesh’s who stops by once per month to play chess with Mahesh. Everyone else is merely setting. Anyone Rumi could bond with is forced away from her one way or another, usually by the chapter after they are introduced. It’s an incredibly warped view of the world to grow up with. I got the feeling that Rumi was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

I felt very badly for Rumi throughout the book and wanted to strangle and slap around Mahesh and Shreene. The world is not as it was when you were a child, and the methods your parents used with you probably weren’t even appropriate then! And yet, when Lalwani delves into scenes from Shreene and Mahesh’s point of view, it’s incredibly clear that they aren’t evil people. They are Frankenstein monsters themselves. I pitied them, despite my anger at them.

I think a book worth reading, but in some ways because of how Lalwani ends the novel generally, though I have a beef with the very last scene. But no spoilers here since the book is barely out, so write me if you want to know that beef.

Title: Gifted
Award: 2008 Desmond Elliott Prize
Author: Nikita Lalwani
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: September 2007
ISBN-10: 1-4000-6648-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6648-3
Subject: Gifted girls — Fiction
Subject: Mathematics — Fiction
Subject: Immigrants — Wales — Fiction
Subject: East Indians — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Children of immigrants — Family relationships — Wales — Fiction
Subject: Culture conflict — Fiction
Subject: Cardiff (Wales) — Fiction
LC classification: PR6112.A49 G54 2007