Cormoran Strike by Robert Galbraith

September 13, 2017 |

I used to read tons of adult mysteries, from the time I was a tween all the way up through grad school in my early twenties. Both of my parents were really into them, so we listened to lots of (mostly) kid-friendly titles on long car trips. Elizabeth Peters, Alexander McCall Smith, and Janet Evanovich were a few favorites. As an adult, I loved reading Elizabeth George, Alan Bradley, and Deanna Raybourn.

And then my deep dive into the world of YA happened, and my focus shifted to mainly YA SFF. I’d always read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I didn’t touch another genre for quite some time. It’s only recently that I’ve drifted back into adult mysteries, and I have J.K. Rowling to thank for it.

Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, she’s written a series of three mysteries (so far) featuring private detective Cormoran Strike (a very Harry Potter-ish name). And they are really, really good. Rowling’s plotting of the Harry Potter series has always been one of its main joys for me, so it makes total sense that she’d rock writing mysteries. The plots of the Strike books are complex, sometimes convoluted, with red herrings galore, but always, always a solution that makes complete sense and ties up all the myriad clues.

And of course, a good mystery series features a dynamic, interesting lead detective. In the Strike series, we get two: private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, who was initially assigned to him as a secretary through a temp agency. She quickly proves herself to have a knack for detective work, and the two make a great team. Their relationship has its ups and downs – Cormoran doesn’t always value her as he should, and Robin is often unsure of herself and her new role, leading to miscommunications – but it’s one of the joys of reading the books. Cormoran himself has a fascinating backstory (son of a famous rockstar and a groupie, lost his leg in Afghanistan) that Rowling/Galbraith teases out through the three novels currently published. Robin, too, has a backstory, arguably equally tragic, but the focus with her is usually on her current troubles (an awful fiance who wants her to give up detective work).

I listened to these on audiobook, and the narrator, Robert Glenister, is fantastic, one of the best in the business. He partly voices each character, and the pace of his narration is terrific – no need to speed him up like so many other audiobook narrators. He is the voice of Cormoran Strike for me, and he even does the women pretty well – they’re not breathy or weirdly high-pitched like male narrators often do for female characters.

The three currently published books have been adapted for a BBC television series, which has already begun airing in the UK. HBO has picked it up for distribution, but there’s not yet a release date stateside. The fourth novel in the series, Lethal White, should be out sometime in 2018 (Rowling hasn’t finished writing it yet). If you’re in the mood for a really well-done contemporary mystery series, this is a great pick.

“What If” and Choices in SF: Version Control by Dexter Palmer and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

June 7, 2017 |

I’ve been on an adult science fiction kick lately, seeking out the hottest and best recent standalone titles. Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road kicked it off earlier in the year, and since then, I’ve been craving more of the same. Two titles – Version Control by Dexter Palmer and Dark Matter by Blake Crouch – have helped sate this craving. Fortunately for me, not only are they well-written and exciting science fiction, they also feature two interlinking tropes that I can’t get enough of: time travel and parallel worlds.

In Version Control, physicist Philip Steiner has been working on a Causality Violation Device for the past decade. This is really a fancy phrase for time machine, but he hates it when anyone calls it that. A time machine is fiction; the CVD is real. Or it would be, if it worked. He and his assistants are on test number three hundred something and the result is always the same: nothing. On the surface, Palmer’s novel is about Steiner, his wife Rebecca Wright, Steiner’s lab assistants (also respected scientists), and Rebecca’s best friend Kate. It traces Rebecca and Philip’s meeting and marriage, their respective jobs (Rebecca works for the dating site where she met Philip), their relationships with their friends, and the fallout from Philip’s obsession with the CVD. Perspective shifts at times between all of these characters, though it focuses mainly on Rebecca (with Philip a close second), and much of the novel seems to be a story of a marriage that is falling apart. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Rebecca and Philip suffered a tragedy a few years ago, one they haven’t really recovered from.

But this is science fiction, so that isn’t the whole story. From the beginning, readers will notice small details that are different about the world Rebecca and Philip inhabit. It’s the present-day, but self-driving cars are ubiquitous. The president will pop up on people’s electronic devices every so often, addressing them by name and complimenting them on a particular detail of their dress, for example. It’s…weird. Off-putting. Intriguing. Rebecca has a general feeling that something isn’t quite right, and when others start to feel this too, psychologists put it down to a side effect of the overuse of technology like smartphones. But because this is a science fiction novel, readers will know right away it has something to do with the Causality Violation Device, that folly of Philip’s that has never shown any evidence of actually working.

Palmer’s novel is clever in many ways. It’s divided into three parts, each more intriguing than the last. The finale is elegantly perfect, reasonable in context of the “physics” Palmer has created for his story, and satisfying in a story sense as well. In fact, I wish I knew some people who had read this so I could discuss the ending with them and just how perfect it is. His version of time travel is also fascinating, different from any other kind of time travel I’ve read about before in fiction.

The book is a big self-indulgent at times. It’s long and wanders down a few paths that aren’t strictly essential to the main plot, like the world of online dating. But in Palmer’s capable hands, these lengthy asides are fascinating, and they lend further insight into this world that is just barely wrong. He tackles casual sexism and racism through a couple of characters’ points of view as well. The asides and deeper themes give the book a more literary feel. One Goodreads reviewer wrote that this book might be “too SF for the Literature with capital L-lovers and too literary and ‘normal’ for the die hard SF-lovers” which I thought was apt. But if you love both Literature and SF, you’ll love Version Control.

Dark Matter is also the story of a marriage, though the tone is quite different. Whereas Version Control was deliberate and thoughtful, Crouch’s story reads much more like a thriller. Jason Dessen teaches physics at a mid-rate local college in Chicago. He’s married to Daniela, who gave up a promising art career to stay home with their son Charlie, whom she became pregnant with before the two were married. Jason himself gave up a much more lucrative physics career because their son (who was born premature) and his marriage required more time than he could give as a scientist stuck in a clean room for twelve or more hours each day. He often wonders what his life would have been like had he not had to do that; he wonders if Daniela has regrets, too. But overall, he’s happy with his choices.

Then one day, as he’s driving home, he’s abducted by a masked stranger. He’s knocked out; when he wakes, he’s in an unfamiliar laboratory and the people around him are welcoming him back home. But this world is not his world. He and Daniela never got married. Charlie was never born. People seem to believe he’s a celebrated scientist who won a major award and has been missing for the past eight months. After a brief time believing he may be crazy, Jason figures out he’s actually been forcibly sent to another version of his world, one where he made the choice to break up with Daniela when she became pregnant and pursue his career instead. Crouch shows us that the person who abducted Jason is now inhabiting his own life, sleeping with his wife and raising his son. Original Jason embarks on a journey to get back, no matter how impossible it seems. His love for Daniela drives him, haunting him across the multiverse as he runs into version after version of her.

The major fault I found in Dark Matter was its drawn-out beginning. It took too long for Jason to finally realize he’s not crazy, he’s not in his own world, and there are in fact infinite versions of the world that he now has the ability to travel through. Anyone who’s read any SF will have figured all of these things out long before; this concept is not new to the genre and is a primary reason why many readers will have picked up the book in the first place. While the beginning is interesting in a character sense, it’s once Jason learns the truth that the story really takes off. Crouch’s multiverse is fascinating, and I loved reading about the many different realities – terrible and wonderful and just plain weird – that Jason explores on his journey to find the one where he belongs. About a quarter of the way from the end, the story goes full-on bananas in the best kind of way, and I was worried that Crouch had written himself into a corner. But he found the solution for his characters (the only one possible, really), and the end is supremely satisfying.

Interestingly, the words “abortion” and “rape” are never used. In the world that Jason wakes up in initially, Daniela was pregnant and then she wasn’t. In Jason’s original world, Jason’s abductor is having sex with his wife without her knowledge of who he truly is. I don’t know if these two elisions were a conscious choice on Blake’s part, but they are two more aspects of this book for the reader to unpack.

The common themes between Version Control and Dark Matter are obvious, and they’re ones science fiction is perfectly suited to tackle. Are my choices permanent, or can they be changed? Should I even wish to change the past? Would I have turned out to be the same person I am now had I made a different choice – big or small – five years ago? Fifteen years ago? What is it that makes me uniquely me? How much impact do my choices make upon the rest of the world? Readers will come away from both of these novels pondering these timeless, thorny questions. Both books are highly recommended.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

May 31, 2017 |

A private plane carrying eleven people crashes in the Atlantic. The only two survivors are Scott Burroughs, a mostly has-been painter, and a four year old boy, the son of a Rupert Murdoch-type media mogul named David Bateman who founded an analog of Fox News. Burroughs swam the several miles to shore while towing the boy and as a result is now a celebrity of sorts. But his celebrity status is wholly unwelcome, as he’s hounded by reporters and his every move is monitored. Soon, perhaps inevitably, he’s targeted by a “journalist” who works at the right-wing television station and begins to insinuate that Burroughs had something to do with the crash.

Before the Fall follows each of the victims of the plane crash in the years, months, and days preceding the accident. They include each member of the Bateman family (David, his wife, his nine year old daughter, his four year old son), the Batemans’ bodyguard, their friends the Kiplings, Burroughs, and the plane’s crew. Each person had an interesting life, in the way the old British saying “May you live in interesting times” is often interpreted to be a curse. The Batemans’ young daughter was kidnapped (and recovered) as a toddler, the Kiplings were being investigated for money laundering, one of the flight attendants was being routinely harassed, and so on. It’s in illuminating each of their lives that Hawley’s writing shines. I was initially concerned that his depiction of Maggie Bateman, David’s wife, would be the blueprint for how he wrote about all the women in the story (Maggie as a young woman gave up a career as a schoolteacher somewhat reluctantly after marrying David and now all her thoughts are consumed by her children), but I was relieved that this was not the case. The women in the story, as well as the men, are varied, with unique experiences, thought processes, and personalities. Hawley (and the audiobook narrator Robert Petkoff) excel at getting readers deep into their characters’ minds, and reading about their lives only compounds the tragedy of their deaths.

When he’s not chronicling what happened before the fall, Hawley’s story follows Burroughs after the fall, including the way he deals with the reporter hounding him and slandering him on air. This storyline in particular is hugely satisfying and didn’t play out the way I anticipated. Hawley deftly skewers Fox News and its talking heads (Bill O’Reilly comes to mind as a timely analog for the reporter who targets Burroughs here) and highlights the way certain media outlets fabricate the news instead of reporting it. There’s also the added wrinkle of the incredible amount of money the young boy has just inherited, and the book includes a small but fascinating subplot about the boy’s aunt and her husband under whose care he is now placed.

Readers may be disappointed by the ending; the reason for the plane crash is simple and involves only a couple of people out of the many that Hawley’s book follows. This is a very television-esque kind of way to tell a story, and Hawley, who currently writes for tv series Fargo and Legion, is very good at telling it. So even if you’re a fan of novels where all the disparate threads join together into one satisfying tapestry at the end, you’ll likely still be riveted by Hawley’s story, which does precisely the opposite. Perhaps that is the point. People lead complicated, messy lives, and often, their deaths are without purpose. For most of the people on the plane, the crash really was just a tragedy – they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and their lives had nothing to do with their deaths.

This is a good pick for readers who enjoy character-driven, rather than plot-driven, thrillers.

Book Club Roundup

February 15, 2017 |

I’ve been a librarian for seven years, but I had never been a member of a book club until I joined one late last year. The idea of being assigned a book to read – one that probably wouldn’t be a fantasy or romance novel – was just too much like school for my tastes. But in the past few years, I’ve been consciously trying to expand the range of my leisure reading, and I’ve discovered I like lots of different kinds of books I never would have picked up on my own. The books selected for this particular book club have been pretty eclectic, which I appreciate. They’ve also all been adult titles so far, so it gets me away from my steady diet of YA SFF, something I’ve found I really need.

Here are brief reviews of the first four books I’ve read as part of the club.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Though fiction, this book read a lot like a memoir to me. It’s not a traditional story in that it doesn’t build to a climax and a resolution – it’s more a straightforward relation of the events of a girl’s life up until around age 16. Elena narrates in the first person, and the friend of the title is Lila, a girl who seems more like what we’d call a frenemy nowadays for much of the book. Set in Naples, Italy, in the 1950s, this book is fascinating for its historical detail (the author herself is Italian) and the complicated relationship between Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s Naples in the 50s is unromanticized: it’s violent, misogynistic, poor, and overall a tough place to grow up. The mystery surrounding Ferrante’s identity adds another layer of interest to this novel.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

I love Atwood’s science fiction. Oryx and Crake, which I first read as an undergrad, is my favorite of hers. I hoped I would love this historical novel about a real-life teenage murderess in Canada in the 19th century almost as much. While Atwood’s layered writing is on full display here, I found the plot itself a bit plodding. The story centers on Grace Marks, a woman who was convicted many years ago, while still a teenager, for the murder of her boss and his housekeeper. Grace was a maid in Thomas Kinnear’s house and was sentenced to die alongside her alleged co-conspirator, but her sentence was commuted to life in prison. She served some time in a mental institution as part of her sentence as well. Now, she is considered a model prisoner, and a young doctor has come to speak with her to research her case. Atwood expertly gets us inside the head of this doctor, Simon Jordan, but deliberately keeps us at a distance from Grace, who narrates part of her own story. She is an unreliable narrator – or is she? Atwood explores mental illness and its historical treatment, the Canadian criminal justice system, and society’s perception of women (particularly violent women) in this novel which provides no real answer to the most pressing question – did Grace do it? Because of the plot’s ambiguity, this is a great book for discussion.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

I’m a big fan of Wilson’s comic book series Ms. Marvel, so I was pretty happy when this was selected for January. It’s not a perfect novel by any means, but it’s fun and broad in scope and provides lots of fodder for discussion. Wilson, a white convert to Islam, writes in her author’s note that she wanted this book to speak to her three audiences who don’t always overlap: “comic book geeks, literary NPR types, and Muslims.” The plot of the story proves this goal, since it features a unique combination of computer hacking, genies from the Quran come to life, devout and non-devout Islamic characters, a white American convert, and a focus on the text and scholarship of the Quran that both Islamic and non-Islamic readers can understand. The pacing was slow at times, but overall this was a really fun, unique book.

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne

This was my pick, so it’s no surprise that it’s the one I’ve liked best so far. It’s science fiction set in the near future and follows two different characters. Meena, a young woman, is traveling from India to Ethiopia along something called the Trail, a futuristic piece of technology that harvests energy from the sun and the waves of the Arabian Sea. It’s not meant for walking – it’s forbidden to walk along it, actually – but Meena travels it regardless. Mariama, a prepubescent girl, is also traveling to Ethiopia, but her reasons are very different from Meena’s. Their stories converge in a surprising and satisfying way at the end, and part of the fun of reading the book is puzzling out their relationship along the way. I loved reading about the Trail and how Meena survived on it (it’s not easy). I also loved that this was set entirely in Asia and Africa, two continents I don’t read much about in my fiction. Byrne is a white woman, but her details about the cultures and the landscapes appear well-researched, and the near-future setting is well-realized. Her characters are fascinating, if not truly likeable by the end. This is literary science fiction that also provides a lot to talk about.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of the Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden

November 16, 2016 |

Do you need something happy and palate-cleansing to temporarily take your mind off the shithole that our country is descending into? Are you a fan of The Princess Bride? If your answer to both of those questions is yes, and I’m assuming it will be for most of our readers, allow me to recommend As You Wish, an excellent audiobook by Cary Elwes (with some help from Joe Layden) about the making of The Princess Bride, full of fun little stories and a huge heaping of love for everyone involved.

If you’re at all like me, it can be a bit of a bummer to learn that some of the actors or writers or creators involved in a piece of art you love actually hated each other. We want the actors to be as charming and kind as the characters they portray; we want their on-screen friendships to be mimicked behind the scenes. There’s nothing to fear about The Princess Bride in this regard – according to Elwes, Rob Reiner was the kindest of directors, Robin Wright was the most talented and beautiful of co-stars, and Andre the Giant’s stature matched his heart. In fact, everyone got along so well and the movie they made was so magical, many of them remember it as the best movie-making experience of their entire careers.

Elwes takes his listeners on a journey from the time he was cast as Westley to the movie’s release and the cast reunion 25 years later. Other actors and people involved voice their own parts as well, including Rob Reiner, William Goldman (referred to as Bill by Elwes), Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal (calling in by phone), Christopher Guest, and Chris Sarandon. Hearing this chorus of voices really does an excellent job of bringing the listener right back into the world of the movie, and I highly recommend you listen to this on audio because of it.

We learn that Elwes, on Andre the Giant’s urging, took Andre’s ATV out for an ill-advised spin and broke his toe, which is why you can see him limping a bit as he and Buttercup race into the Fire Swamp. There’s an amusing story about one of the stuntmen who portrayed a rodent of unusual size, and Wallace Shawn talks about his enduring fear that he could never measure up to Danny DeVito, whom the producers initially wanted for Vizzini (Reiner is quick to reassure us that Shawn was always the top pick and did a perfect job). Billy Crystal and Carol Kane’s improv skills are lauded, and Elwes talks about how difficult it was not to laugh while he was supposed to be mostly dead at Miracle Max’s. There’s nothing hugely revelatory in any of these little stories, and that’s kind of the point, I think. Everyone got along and they all remain friends. The film was a joy to make, and they produced something they’re proud of and that endures. Elwes portrays the film’s making as we all hoped it was: just like the film itself.