Girl Detective

Here’s how I’m reading the book. I read another book Monday through Friday, set aside the weekend for Brothers K, then after I’m finished with the book, check in with the summary at Schoop.com to make sure I got the broad strokes. My fave note this week was from Book 3 Chapter 5 Confession. ‘Heels Up”:

Complicated much?

Book 3, at 71 pages, is our longest so far, and it was a doozy. I was struck by how so much of the book is drunk men shouting at one another. These Russians are certainly not buttoned down and quiet and Victorian like the characters of Dickens and Austen. Dostoevsky is certainly succeeding in his goal of having a characteristically Russian book (though whether it’s a “true” portrait we can’t know.)

Ready for a whirlwind summary?

Book III The Sensualists

chapter 1: In the Servant’s Quarters

Grigory and Marfa have a happy marriage. They had a child with 6 fingers who died. The night of the burial, they heard cries, and found a girl and newborn in their bathhouse.

Chapter 2: Stinking Lizaveta (which this band took the name of)

The birth mother is called Stinking Lizaveta, a beloved town oddity, holy fool, ascetic and mute. When she becomes pregnant, the father is rumored to be Fyodor Pavlovich, and he doesn’t disavow the rumors (though neither does he explicitly confirm them, though we wouldn’t believe him if he did as he’s such a liar). Grigori, the all-father to FP’s sons (or supposed ones) brings him up, calls him Smerdyakov (son of stinking one)

Chapter 3 4 and 5. Alyosha goes to visit Katerina Ivanovna, encounters Dmitri hiding out waiting to ambush Grushenka, and a very long confession by Dmitri begins. KI’s father got into financial trouble, D said he’d bail him out if KI “came to him” She did, he didn’t actually abuse her, but she was shamed by the memory. He did bail them out, the father died. Then D got entangled with Grushenka and spent 3000 roubles that KI had entrusted to him.

Chapter 6: Detour to Smerdyakov, beloved by FP, sullen and mean, and now an epileptic chef.

Chapter 7: Disputation: Argument about denouncing God. Smerkyakov is provocative.

Ch. 8: Over the Cognac: Much drunken shouting. Alyosha begins to have a shrieking fit (still not certain how this is different from epileptic one?) FP says it’s like his mother. Ivan says, she was my mother too. Has FP just forgotten?

Ch 9: The Sensualists. Dmitri beats up FP and exhorts Alyosha (yet again) to go to KI.

Ch 10: The Two Together. Meaning KI and Grushenka. Creepy with intimations of girl-on-girl actions. KI enthuses about how lovely Grushenka is, then G shows herself as the liar/provocateur she is. KI cries, Alyosha leaves, and she gives him an envelope.

Ch 11: One More Ruined Reputation. Dmitri pretends to threaten Alyosha, then runs off saying foreboding words. At the monastery, Alyosha prays humbly, then reads the letter, in which Lise declares her love for him, which she says ruins her reputation, but he seems happy with, not troubled by.

Whew! Book 4 for next week is shorter, at 50 pages. Are we on the verge of FP’s death, foretold on page 1?

What did everyone else think?

I bought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies right when it came out, then it sat on my shelf for years. The idea was amusing, but the slew of horror/classic mashups that followed made me less inclined to begin even the first one. Seeking a light read in between books of The Brothers Karamazov, I picked it up and enjoyed it.

Much of the prose is Austen’s own, which I thought would make for a fast read, given my familiarity with the text. For whatever reason, though, I did not fly through this. I was charmed and amused by the zombie twists that were woven into the text. I especially liked this book’s take on Elizabeth and Darcy’s meeting at the parsonage, and the reason Darcy gave for separating Bingley from Jane.

I was less enchanted with the overt sexual innuendos. It also departed from Austen’s text by doing a lot of ’splaining. What Austen leaves for the reader to infer, Grahame-Smith sometimes spells out. I think he also included some elements from the 1995 P & P miniseries that weren’t Austen’s own. These all made for a slower, less enjoyable romp than it might have been. Still, diverting and entertaining enough.

Book 2 of The Brothers Karamazov is “An Inappropriate Gathering” but would perhaps be better called a deeply uncomfortable one.

A quick summary of the chapters, which have a profusion (overabundance, perhaps?) of characters:

1: “They Arrive at the Monastery.” They are Fyodor Pavlovich (the father), Ivan (2nd of BKs), Pyotr Alexandrovitch (cousin of FPs 1st wife and helped care for all 3 BKs after their mothers’ deaths), and a relative of his, Kalganov. Not Dmitri. They are met by a landowner, Maximov, then invited to dinner.

2. “The Old Buffoon” They are joined by 2 other monks, 2 Fathers (Paissy and the librarian), a seminarian, Alyosha, and Zosima. FP talks and talks, Zosima is very kind to him, tells him to stop lying and better things will follow.

3. “Women of Faith” Zosima blesses women waiting for him, some of whom have traveled far.

4. “A Lady of Little Faith” A lady landholder has also come to thank Zosima for curing her lame daughter, Lise. Lise mocks Alyosha, says she has a message from Katerina Ivanovna to give him for Dmitri, and Zosima tells them that Alyosha will visit them.

5. “So Be It! So Be It!” A long, involved discussion of church, state, Ivan’s article and various arguments. Dmitri arrives.

6. “Why is Such a Man Alive?” Lots of bad behavior, though Dmitri is the first to be respectful to Zosima, who ends up bowing to him and touching his head to the floor, which alarms Dmitri and others.

7. “A Seminarist-Careerist” Zosima tells Alyosha he’ll have to leave the monastery. Alyosha meets Rakitin, another novice. Rakitin has much gossip: Dmitri is engaged to the respectable Katerina Ivanovna, but sleeping with Grushenka. Ivan is interested in KI now that Dmitri is wandering. And FP also likes Grushenka. Rakitin thinks Zosima’s bow to Dmitri presaged a crime.

8. “Scandal” The dinner with the father superior goes badly. FP said he wouldn’t come, he shows up, angers Miusov again and insults the monastery. All leave,with Maximov trying to go with FP and Ivan. Ivan becomes cold to FP.

I found Zosima to be most engaging, and FP most disturbing, as I’m sure the author intended. The talks on ecclesiastical courts, while probably politically timely when published, went on and on. Lots of women introduced, and it’s obviously the groundwork for what will unfold.

What did everyone else think?

My husband recommended Precinct 13 by Tate Halloway to me. He’s friends with the author and liked the book. I was skeptical. The cover features a pretty woman in leather, and it’s billed as a paranormal romance. Then again, these aren’t things my husband usually reads either, so I gave them both the benefit of the doubt. After a slow start, I was completely drawn in to this tale of a young woman coroner in Pierre, South Dakota.

Aside. Did you know that it’s pronounced PEER, not Pee AIR?

Anyhoo. the heroine, Alex, has run away from a bad boyfriend and a bad situation, but seems to have landed right smack in a doozy of a new one. Her new job has some strange aspects, and she can’t quite let go of the old boyfriend, no matter what she promised to a phalanx of shrinks. Magic, dragons, fairies, trolls, and lots more. This was a fast, fun, funny romp of a read. It was meant to be the first in a series which, alas, didn’t get picked up, but on its own its still well worth it.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is an intriguing premise for a graphic memoir. The author, Mary Talbot, was the daughter of a Joycean scholar. She alternates between her coming-of-age story and that of Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter. It’s illustrated by Mary’s husband Bryan, an award winning English comic book creator. Both stories were involving and sad, but I felt the connection between them was strained, and that neither achieved a depth because both were being told.

Last Friends is the third book in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy, after that book and The Man in the Wooden Hat, both of which I loved. There’s also a related book of stories, The People on Privilege Hill. I have so loved those previous books and the characters in them that I had high expectations for this book. A small English country town has histories and people who are far more complicated than any of them suspect of one another.

I was happy to spend time with the characters again, but the plot seemed meandering instead of layered and complex as in the previous books. I got stuck several times on awkward sentences or plot inconsistencies. And yet, these were minor annoyances, because the world and the people in it that Gardam has created are so rich and real that I still counted myself as privileged to have spent time with them, and was sad to see them go for what is probably their final bow.

Oh, there are some drool-worthy photos of book stacks in Japan, for example:

Image: Twitter. Via.

But my favorite part is the brief last sentence:

While still an emerging art, the ultimate book stacking style would combine style and strength but also allow customers to actually pick a copy up so they can buy it.

I have been mulling for a while that I want to create stacks with my TBR books, not buy more shelves, but have the books be removable, at least one at a time, without it all tumbling down. My summer project? Or another brick on the road to hell? Only time will tell. I wouldn’t put money on it.

I started to write this, then got sucked into Facebook, and well, I’m not sure how much time has passed.

A friend lend me Come Closer by Sara Gran, and said that both she and her husband liked it. Since I know they often disagree significantly, I was intrigued, and then the book itself proved them out. It’s about a young woman who starts having personality problems and wonders if she’s becoming possessed by a demon. It’s a scary, fast but complex read, reminding me of Rosemary’s Baby and other classic horror stories without being overly gory as much modern horror is. Highly recommended.

Then, in a weird burst of synchronicity, I found two related articles online yesterday.

1. How a brain affliction can mimic possessions symptoms

and

2. How a doctor got in trouble for diagnosing possession

Apparently Boston is the crazytown bananapants of possessed/not possessed.

Wow, the descriptive clause in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking does go on, doesn’t it?

For one of my book groups, Quiet was one I almost abandoned. I didn’t care for the author’s take on Rosa Parks’ story as she focuses more on Rosa as lone superhero than on Rosa as the superhero who inspired everyone else to be heroic. But I pressed on, and as the book goes beyond the sometimes trite stories and gets into some of the science, I found it very interesting. No surprise to learn that brainstorming in groups doesn’t work, or that persuasive talkers are more listened to even if they’re not right. By the end, this book had won me over so completely I kept bringing it up in conversations with friends and family. It’s overly reductive, and she protests for the amazingness of introverts (among which she counts herself) too much, and yet, it’s still a fascinating window into behavior and interaction. Highly recommended, with a grain of salt, if that makes sense.

I meant to read Jess Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets for one of my book groups last year (or the year before, or the year before that; hard to say), but I couldn’t manage it, and didn’t get around to it by the time this year’s Tournament of Books happened, where Walter’s Beautiful Ruins was a candidate, so I ended up reading (and loving) that before this earlier one that had been sitting on my shelf. I attended a recent reading he did here in town, and that spurred me to have another go.

This is a WMFU novel, an acronym from the comments of this year’s Tournament of Books: White Male F-Up. Kind of like a bildungsroman, just taking place in a man’s thirties or so rather than in his teens. it reminded me a lot of another WMFU novel that I enjoyed, Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You.

Here, Matt Prior the protagonist is married but having trouble financially and with his wife. This novel is firmly situated in the wake of the housing crash of last decade, and it explores what happens when balloon payments on shifty mortgages suddenly come due. But it’s a comedy, and so there are many different elements that get tossed in: infidelity, pot smoking, drug dealing, parenting, and more. I will never be able to think of the phrase “make good choices” in quite the same way. It was a fast fun read, with some laugh out loud moments. Recommended, though not as highly as Beautiful Ruins.

Welcome to The Brothers Karamazov Summer Readalong! Should I call it The Summer of K? BK? will always be associated with the Newark, Ohio Burger King, and KB are my initials, so perhaps we are best left to the name. We’ll be reading one of the novel’s 13 book sections a week.

What’s in a name, though? One of the many people I talked to about the book asked, “is it about a circus,” perhaps because of the title. I find it intriguing that only the Oxford World’s Classics version is called The Karamazov Brothers, which scans more regularly, though is certainly less familiar and distinct.

Then, what’s in a name? According to Pevear/Volokhonsky, the translators of my edition, the zee/zed of Karamazov is like zoo, not Mozart.

And, why did I pick this translation? I’m reading it with a book group, so I find it best to go with the most readily available in stores, which is this one. The P/V version is even available in more than one edition/publisher. After some poking around, though, I think I might have preferred that Oxford edition. There are a couple times already in just 33 pages that the translation has “hiccuped” for me:

“he is a strange man, even an odd one.” (3) What’s the difference between strange and odd?

Then, among the translations, there’s disagreement on an adjective to describe the brothers’ father, Fyodor Pavlovich. Some choose muddleheaded (P/V, MacAndrew), McDuff, Avsey), others senseless (Garnett, and another, perhaps Oddo’s Norton?) I find scatterbrained perhaps more apt.

Hey, did you know there’s a 1958 film adaptation, and guess who’s the main character, Alexi?

SHATNER.

On to the book. Part I, Book One contains five chapters. We’re introduced to the depraved and scatterbrained father Fyodor Petrovich, his first and second wives, and most importantly, his three sons, of the title.

Dmitri, from the first marriage. A wild uneducated soldier who resents his lack of inheritance. Fights with FP.

Ivan, the elder son of the second marriage. Gloomy and a scholar, also resentful about living on handouts but gets along with FP.

Alexei, the youngest son, who is proclaimed the hero of the novel by Dostoevsky on page 3. Introverted, intelligent, religious, a peacemaker. Loved by his father, liked by Dmitri, but distant from Ivan.

The narrator tells us that FP dies a dark and tragic death, which he’ll discuss later. Several other times we’re told that we’ll be told things later. This book ends as the brothers, their father, and a relative of Dmitri’s mother plan a metting with a respected monastery elder, Alexei’s mentor Zosima. Alexei does not have a good feeling about the upcoming meeting.

Meet us back here in a week to discuss book two. What did everyone else think?

Nothing like flying by the seat of my pants, skin of my teeth, riding the ragged edge of disaster, la, la, la.

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for one of my three book groups this summer, and I’d love it if you’d join me! I will even blog regularly so we can “talk” about it every week. I’m using the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, but I bet any one would do as long as it’s divided into 13 books. Here’s the schedule. START NOW!

This Sunday, June 2, 2013: complete book 1. I’ll post to blog on Monday 6/3, and we can discuss in comments.

Sunday June 9, 2013, complete book 2. Discuss on Monday 6/10.

Sunday June 16, 2013 complete book 3. Discuss on Monday 6/17

Sunday June 23, complete book 4. Discuss on Monday 6/24

Sunday June 30 complete book 5. Discuss on Monday 7/1

Sunday July 7 complete book 6. Discuss Monday 7/8

Sunday July 14 complete book 7. Discuss Monday 7/15

Sunday July 21 complete book 8. Discuss Monday 7/22

Sunday July 28 complete book 9 Discuss Monday 7/29

Sunday August 4 complete book 10 Discuss Monday 8/5

Sunday August 11 complete book 11 Discuss Monday 8/12

Sunday August 18 complete book 12 Discuss Monday 8/19

Sunday August 25 complete book 13 and Introduction. Discuss Monday 8/26.

Books range from 20 pages long to 101, averaging 60. For this Sunday, it’s a mere 33 pages in my edition.

See? Totally do-able.

I found Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali a wildly uneven book, so my reaction falls between didn’t like (or, often hated) and it was OK. For me, effective memoirs are written by people with self insight and empathy, possibly leavened with humor. She’s writing about a difficult childhood and harsh reality for women abused in the name of Islam, so I’ll give her a pass that this book is humorless. But I find her lack of self-insight, her protestations of innocence in situations of obvious culpability, and her readiness to trot out other people’s horror stories in lieu of aforesaid self insight all pretty damning. The book is often poorly written with stunningly awkward transitions. Few if any other people stand out in the book because she is The Star. I found her disingenuous when claiming non-inflammatory intent when she over and over said incredibly outrageous things. This and other instances in the book led me not to believe her as a reliable narrator. Get thee to a therapist, I hope, to work out your childhood issues, especially with your father, and your inability to own your responsibility for your words and actions.

BUT, and it’s a huge BUT, she’s absolutely right that outrages against women and in general take place in the name of Allah, that this is sometimes (often?) ignored in the name of political correctness. She focuses more on this point at the end, so the book has a stronger finish that it does a beginning or middle.I found it unfortunate that she throws pretty much all of Islam under the bus in order to make this point. She makes an important argument, but one that is easier to dismiss because of the often offensive nonsense she surrounds it with.

This is a complicated book about complicated issues. It spurs me to find out more about Islam, but not by reading more of her writing.

Post-apoca-fic (PAF) is most recognized as a sub-genre of science fiction, but end-time narratives are at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah’s ark. Modern PAF is marked as beginning with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written by a woman by featuring a male protagonist.

I recently re-read the PAF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. Published in book form in 1959, it collected 3 sections that had previously appeared in a sci-fi magazine. It centers on a monastery in post-nuclear Utah. There the monks seek canonization of the sacred Leibowitz of the title. A man of science instrumental in the nuclear holocaust of the mid 20th century, Leibowitz converted to Catholicism and advocated peace and learning. The book’s first section is set in the mid 21st century:

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

The subsequent sections jump ahead hundreds of years, though there are through lines for characters and artifacts that are fun and satisfying to recognize. I found the first section with Brother Francis, the most engaging. It’s the most funny, and Francis was my favorite of the many characters in the book. As the novel progresses, though, it shifts from being speculative to more preachy and explicative. The only females are in the third section, and this book fails The Bechdel Test, which identifies gender bias in fiction, in that no female has a conversation with another female.

Since the book is set in a monastery, it could be argued that it wasn’t within the scope. Yet after I read this book, I longed for a female perspective, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Since I hadn’t read her most recent post-apocalypse novels, I decided to check out Oryx and Crake, the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, which was followed by The Year of the Flood and completed with MaddAddam, to be published this September.

The events in Oryx and Crake are typical of PAF: a genetically engineered plague has wiped out probably all humans except one man, our narrator:

Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wve sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. ..

Out of habit he looks at his watch–stainless steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.

Snowman is not alone; he is surrounded by a variety of genetically spliced creatures. The series proceeds ahead then flashes back. Typical Atwood, she breaks every rule of how to write fiction, yet the story unspools seamlessly into a compulsively readable narrative. Although devourable, the book left a bitter aftertaste. The central characters are a love triangle: two men and one woman, who embodies several cliches, and meets a clicheed end. She never converses with another woman, so this book too fails the Bechdel test. And, for anyone expecting closure, remember: you’re reading Atwood.

I continue to puzzle over this book. What does it add to the PAF genre other than a ripping yarn typically devoid of females? Is there a deeper layer of irony that I’m missing? Is Atwood saying a fully realized female is impossible in PAF? Is this an extension of the female-suppressing world of Handmaid? Does the apocalypse somehow preclude women? Certainly, it’s provoking, though what it has provoked is perplexity and anger and disappointment at Atwood, not my usual admiration.

I found a possibly parallel question in Vanessa Veselka’s essay in The American Reader, “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why It Matters“:

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road.

Left to my own devices, I’d go down a rabbit hole and explore PAF with female protagonists. Maureen McHugh has done some excellent stories and her novel Mission Child is one of the few I can think of. Octavia Butler? Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country? Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time? YA PAF often has female protagonists, e.g., Katniss Everdeen, only to shackle and domesticate them in the end.

Alas, being part of 3 book groups, one of which I lead (hence Canticle, which sent me down this “road”) means my dance card is limited, so I’m unlikely to read up on these questions soon. If any of you kind readers have any insight, please, please, start a thread in the comments section.

I love most of Hope Larson’s graphic novels, Gray Horses, Chiggers, Salamander Dream, Mercury, with the exception of her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. I was interested to see how I’d like the oddly titled Who is AC? which is written by Larson, whose art I really like, but illustrated by manga artist Tintin Pantoja.

Lin is moving to a new town with her family. She’s a writer who puts out her own ‘zine. On the plane she gets a mysterious phone call that somehow results in superpowers, and further shenanigans ensue in creating a villain. There are a handful of strong female characters.

There’s lots going on with a big cast of characters. Good and bad lurk in the cyber-background and while this is clearly the beginning of a series, it is a standalone story. While it worked better for me than Foiled and Curses Foiled Again, this feels more disposable than Larson’s earlier works.

Oops. I’ve accidentally now watched more movies this year than I’ve read books, and have been reading a bunch of graphic novels, so it isn’t even like there are chunksters slowing me down. For a while I stopped requesting DVDs from the library because the queues were so long. Now I’m back in the habit. And a habit it is, in the negative sense of the word, when my husband has to warn me to stop using his account to reserve things or he’s going to change his password.

I can’t even blame recent binges or Blu rays from Half Price Books, since none of the recent viewings are from recent used purchases. Sigh. I suppose there are worse habits to have.

Django Unchained (2012) Hyper violent, of course, it didn’t impress me as Inglourious Basterds did. Good, but overlong and unfocused. I do like the revisionist history/wishful thinking aspect that it shares with IB.

Pitch Perfect.(2012) Flawed, but charming, like a real person. Don’t have high expectations, and it’ll be fun. Geek note: I bought the soundtrack, plus Kelly Clarkson’s Greatest Hits after watching it.

Dredd (2012). This I borrowed from the library because I thought my husband would like it and I watched it too. Hyper violent, again, but with dark humor, and an intriguing villain.Like V for Vendetta, this comic-book adaptation made more sense when it was grounded in Thatcher’s England.

Clueless (1995). I was reminded of it when I saw this article on game theory. Charming and fun, but a little low on the acting quotient. Paul Rudd has come a long way.

Iron Man 3.(2013) Date night. Glad I saw it before anything got spoiled, ’cause there’s loads of stuff to spoil. But overloud, overlong, and over ’splodey. Towards the end stuff was going down and I just kept thinking, “I’m bored. This is silly. Please move the plot along.” It does set things up interestingly for the future. But I’d say see it at a matinee, though sooner is better because of spoil-i-tude.

P.S. We saw a trailer for The Lone Ranger, that has Johnny Depp playing Tonto, and in Iron Man 3, Ben Kingsley plays a character called the Mandarin. Why are white people playing non-white roles, still? Shouldn’t we have moved past this? Can’t we PLEASE move past this, and have more non-white roles in movies played by non-white actors?

I listen to the Current radio station, and my favorite of their DJs is Mary Lucia. Yesterday, she played Squeeze’s first hit single, Take Me I’m Yours, which I knew from their collection Squeeze Singles 45’s and Under. It jolted me back:

18 years old, I’m new to a stickshift, grinding the gears and riding the clutch of a cheap, noisy car. 7:45 in the morning, running late on the way to school, my best friend is in the passenger seat. Between my knees a cold Diet Coke. (This was in the days before cupholders.) In my left hand, a Marlboro Light. Squeeze Singles blaring from the tape player. We laughed. We stalled out. We cursed. And somehow we got to school.

Foiled by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mike Cavallaro is a middle-grade graphic novel about Aliera, an introverted girl who fences who is ostensibly in high school, though she feels much younger to me. There’s a cute new guy at school who seems a little odd and when she tried to meet him at the train station, things become really odd. Aliera’s only friend is her wheelchair-bound cousin with rheumatoid arthritis. She just got a new practice weapon (NB: not a sword) that her mother picked up cheap from a Chinese woman at a tag sale. (I don’t like the Mystical Asian cliche).

My description of the book won’t flow, because my experience didn’t either. It also ends just as it’s getting good. While I know this is part of what a series does, I do feel that each volume should have a complete story, and I didn’t think this one did. So I had hopes for the sequel, Curses Foiled Again. Alas, this worked even less for me, as a big villain was revealed, whose identity, past actions, and motivations I didn’t buy at all.

The illustrations are strong. Aliera is smart and funny, but as a whole, this didn’t work for me. There’s little subtext, so it’s all on the page, and the story isn’t complex enough to fully engage me. Perhaps because I’m not the target market? My children, 7 and 9, both boys, loved them.

Was it possible to die of loneliness, Nicole wondered. She lay alone in the giant king bed, listening to the neighbors having raucous sex, and didn’t doubt it for a moment.

[this is another fragment of a bigger piece I recently unearthed, one that I thought worked as flash fiction on its own.]

Right after Julian left town, people missed him. Time passed, and they began to miss other things. One of his roommates, Adam, couldn’t find his portable CD player. Their other roommate, Jason, couldn’t find his concert T-shirts. The bookstore discovered it no longer had a copy of the Hardcover Oxford Abridged English Dictionary. A co-worker couldn’t find his favorite bong. One of his exes couldn’t find her favorite sweatshirt or U2 CD. As people talked, they began to put it together. The conclusion was unmistakable. And in the NW corner of the country, Julian was safe from reprisals.

About a month after Julian left, everyone still missed their things. But they’d pretty much stopped missing Julian.

[Found this when I was putting together a writing sample. It was part of a larger manuscript, but I wondered if it worked as flash fiction.]