Monday, March 18, 2024

THE BLUE BUTTERFLY OF COCHIN, sweet story with gorgeous Siona Benjamin artwork



THE BLUE BUTTERFLY OF COCHIN
ARIANA MIZRAHI (illus. Siona Benjamin)

Kalaniot Books
$19.99 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Blue Butterfly of Cochin is the story of the ancient Jewish Indian community’s mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s. We follow Leah as she struggles to come to terms with leaving her beloved India and moving to the newly-formed country of Israel. Accompanied by a magical butterfly and through dream-like illustrations, both Leah and the reader, are transported from the lush Indian coastline to the awesome beauty of the Israeli desert.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Decades ago, I saw a documentary at the American Museum of Natural History about the Cochin Jewish community, of whose existence I had been utterly unaware until then. It was a typical documentary of its era, the 1990s, with the expected non-commercial production values; what came bursting through the auditorium screen was the gorgeous, lush architecture, evocative of great wealth; now, however, empty and becoming shabby with neglect. The community that had been so rooted in the tropical coastal state of Cochin for over a millennium and a half had just...vanished.

The beauty they left behind was haunting. The documentary set out to make a visual record of it before entropy carted its magnificence away entirely. This made a deep and lasting impression on me. (Clearly.) I saw this book on Edelweiss+, and of course had to have it for that reason first. Then I noticed the illustrator’s name: Siona Benjamin!

I had discovered how much I loved her Indian-miniature style images in the early Aughties, when I ran across her New York gallery’s website. Although these illustrations are not in that same style, they are just as beautiful, just as intricate, just as emotionally impactful.
These images all evoke in me the same energy that Marc Chagall’s 1960s paintings evoke:
The Circus Horse, 1969; via Wikimedia Commons
I don’t know about you, but I feel there is a creative DNA connection between these artists’ œuvres. Much joy, then, for me on the visual level; the story, with which I was familiar from that long-ago introduction, was here made personal through telling it from a displaced child’s viewpoint. That worked as a means to particularize the community’s collective decision’s personal cost.

The global rise in antisemitism is something I deplore. I think, quite apart from the State of Israel’s appalling actions in Gaza in 2023-2024, the threat of antisemitism is in its turn appalling; we have, in the last century, seen where that has led. Better by far in my view to oppose ethnic hatred wherever we find it. How better to start than with teaching children that Humanity is one race, made up of all kinds of people, and they all have very interesting stories to read, tell, and learn about.

Starting here, with this beautiful book, would be a great introduction.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS, complex consideration of the moralities around war



THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS
PREMEE MOHAMED

Solaris Books
$8.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning meditation on war, nationalism, violence and courage by a rising star of the genre.

The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war.

Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.

Ordered to infiltrate one of Med’ariz’s flying cities, obeying the bloodthirsty zealot Qhudur, he must find fellow anti-war activists in the enemy’s population and provoke them into an uprising against their rulers.

He should refuse to serve the warmongers, but what if he could end this pointless war once and for all? Is that worth compromising his own morals and the principles of his fellow resistance members?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: As you would expect from Premee Mohamed, this is a carefully constructed secondary world, with a deeply tendentious story playing out inside its rules. Moral greyness and relativistic morality are always welcome sights in the secondary-world fantasy genre. Meditating on what makes a villain villainous, what makes it possible to fight and kill in service of peace (as George Carlin famously observed, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity"), all the while still feeling Very Certain of one's own cause's Rightness. No one in one of Author Mohamed's worlds is Right. That being the reality of life on the Earth I like seeing it shown this way in very appealing fiction.

Bioengineering plays a very significant role in this fantasy world. (Including a use of wasps that absolutely *never* would've occurred to me!) I think it is best to leave the whats and hows of that fact alone, as there are surprises in store that hang on those hooks. If I am transparent about it, I would have been five-star warbling my fool head off had some of those fascinating facets found even greater, and sooner, uses in the story.

While I comprehend the metaphorical use of a flying city, I am deeply skeptical of any use of them because they use unrealistic tech to solve...nothing. There is no actual, practical benefit to a flying city that is not outweighed by real, unaddressed increases in the complexity of urban living. I guess the metaphorical "coolth" and visual appeal is just too much to resist, and the people with the flying city in this story definitely seem like the sort of culture that would develop one. Still...just no. Resist the pointed contrast of tech "coolth" to natural development and augmentation!

The absolute joy of the read is the very carefully natural debate between the competing moral certainties of pacifism and Security Über Alles from the alleged same side of the war. This is, to me, the best use of fiction: Don't give one side the monopoly on the good stuff or the bad stuff. Humankind doesn't, hasn't, and won't ever work like that. As you are telling this story, albeit set on a different world, to Humankind, follow our rules when it most counts. This being one of Author Mohamed's storytelling's strong points, I always enjoy her stories.

So, while not a masterpiece, this story of pacifism and its moral greyness, warmongering and its honest, if misguided, aims, and what men will do to WIN, is one fine read, indeed.

AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT, multi-award-winning novella and damning takedown of a hypercapitalist hellscape



AND WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU TONIGHT
PREMEE MOHAMED

Neon Hemlock Press
$12.99 all formats, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputaable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence, just what it says on the tin



THE NEW TRUE CRIME: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence
DIANA RICKARD

NYU Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How serialized crime shows became an American obsession

TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people―such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In The New True Crime, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder―these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”

With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media―which allows for binge-listening or watching―makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.

The New True Crime questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: I chose to read this in spite of my serious problems with making victimhood the center of yet another cultural conversation. The howls of outrage when another Black man is convicted, on the flimsiest of evidence, of raping a white woman, center her whiteness and the racism of the laughingly labeled criminal-justice system.

Many parts of the conversations we should be having are entirely missing, eg, Black women raped by white men get no podcasts, murders of Black men and male adolescents get fewer than the statistically appropriate number of hours devoted to them, and let us not even bring up trans folk and/or sex workers of any skin color or gender...why go on, it is all part of the entertainment industry and its long, deep relationship with Othering.

This is not, however, the story...or even more than a glancing part of the story...that Author Rickard tells in this book. It was not intended to be, so this is not a failing of execution but of design.

There is no point yelling at someone for not doing what *you* want done.

The book, as written, makes a strong case for the net positives of a field of entertainment that focuses cultural attention on the failings of a system designed to operate out of the majority’s sight. The techniques of the entertainment industry...heightened language, elisions of tediously bulky chains of evidence into more narrative-friendly sound bites...mirror the long-standing prosecutorial tricks of evidentiary manipulation that these podcasts and shows highlight, only from the other side.

Since the system we have is an adversarial one, with rules that...while on the surface even-handed...frequently get bent or ignored when convenient for those representing institutional authority, we will always need independent actors with the access and the desire to turn over the rocks plopped on top of the holes in evidence in service of the narrative needed to get a conviction. Everyone is guilty if the right/wrong storyteller gets hold of the narrative. (Side note: NEVER TALK TO COPS WITHOUT A LAWYER. NO ONE IS INNOCENT IF THEY SAY YOU ARE NOT.)

So this new use of the entertainment media does indeed do Society a solid service by shining harsh and unflattering light on the actors for the State. It highlights the miscarriages of fairness and honest dealing that are so very common in US society. These are net positives for all concerned. Right?

Crimes have victims or they are not crimes. Victims, living or dead, have no say in who, or how, or why, their trauma is presented, whether during or after the crime, its investigation, or its rehashing. Very few people are Alice Sebold or E. Jean Carroll, those eloquent enough, well-favored enough, or just willing enough to see processes like those needed to re-investigate their horrific personal and, all too often, intimate violations bandied about in public again and again. I dont know if you are aware of this,but there are truly shitty people out there on the internet who absolutely **love** making their ugliest opinons public. These already-traumatized people are all too often targeted by those rotten-souled jerks.

This book is not intended to solve these issues. That it does not is not a reason not to read it. This new use of entertainment to correct flawed narratives instead of spread copaganda is, in my own view, a net positive for society. It comes with problems and abuse vectors that are, sadly, not new. The possibility is that the new true crime could shine a bright enough light on those cyberissues that they will get onto the radar of the ones who can solve them, too.

Ain’t holdin’ my breath, mind you, but the possibility exists, and that is a good thing. Author Rickard makes the outlines of the emerging true-crime media landscape clear and comprehensible to non-expert readers. Her prose is up to the reportorial task at hand; her eye for the narrative strand is at the least as good as the podcasters and showrunners she reports on.

A read I recommend to any media junkies, all leftists, and the passively consuming podaholics who might read this review.

Monday, March 11, 2024

ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera, a vicarious stroll among the one-percenters



ONCE UPON A VILLA: Adventures on the French Riviera
ANDREW KAPLAN

Smuggler’s Lane Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this wise, warm-hearted, witty, and LOL hilariously funny true account, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Kaplan tells what it’s like when he, his wife, and two-year-old son decided to chuck it all and live the fantasy in a villa by the sea in that extraordinary corner of the world—part international café society, part billionaires’ playground, part provincial France—that is the French Riviera.

Whether it’s matching wits with French bureaucracy, searching for the perfect bouillabaisse, encounters with con men, eccentric ex-pats, and Monaco’s royal family, partying with the international set on Onassis’ yacht, playing chess with a philosophical police chief, or adventures and friendships with the rich and famous and the presumably standoffish French, Once Upon a Villa will transport you to a fascinating and shrewdly-observed world that you will savor like your first-morning bite of pain au chocolate.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: No idea if it’s just me or what, but I still crave comfort reads.

The world’s gotten way meaner here lately. It takes more and more effort not to simply check out and leave the awfulness to its own devices, perpetuating itself being its best-ever trick. Thus I approached this read with all the fervor I would’ve lavished on the Best-Costume Oscar had I known about the bit John Cena committed to this ceremony. The man’s fifty-five, y’all, give it up for growing old gracefully...and hotly.

Ahem. Focus, Mudge, focus!

So, back to Author Kaplan, and the idea of relocating to the Riviera. Short of money, the author clearly is not...and there’s my sticking point, the reason for my missing stars. The part of the read that was charming, the French and their cultural schizophrenia of warm, generous, welcoming people and cold, maddening bureaucracy, was outweighed in my pleasure-reading by a very arriviste kind of name-dropping and hobnobbing with the Society Set that has long made the South of France its own. So much of the book is about who the author and his shopaholic wife went around and about with that I lost my warm happy glow.

That was not fatal...the story is a lot of fun to read...it just hits me, the leftist redistributionist, in the wrong way. I do not care about Princess Caroline of Monaco. I do care about the neighbors who were kind.

I am not everyone, and I am quite sure many of y’all will not feel my collywobbles about the snobbery on view. I urge y’all to go to it, go get it, and enjoy its very real writerly pleasures. I felt uneasy about my own trip, but that is no reason you should. This tour of the land of naked privilege should entertain and distract (most) anyone.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, trauma victim’s voyage of discovery



SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET

Simon & Schuster
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Scarface meets Moby-Dick in this groundbreaking, darkly comic novel about a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.

Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull’s legal team and living in his aunt’s garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.

When Izzy’s efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are—permeating everything from Miami’s sinking streets to Izzy’s memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy’s story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana’s claws, and as menacing as a killer whale’s teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy’s boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review
: Izzy is as average a guy as you will ever find. He has a crazy-ass inner life which suggests to him that making a living as a Pitbull impersonator:
...so we have a visual lock on Izzy from the off. Though, speaking of "off," the novel opens with Izzy getting his life rearranged by a lawyerly letter telling him to cease-and-desist with the Pitbull-y stuff. Now he has to figure out a way to make a living, and a life. Where is his family, you ask. Nowhere. He’s got none.

That central reality, that lack of mooring chains, allows Izzy to follow his inner voice’s promptings to do the absolute most batshit-crazy nonsense...remember he *was* a Pitbull impersonator until forced not to be...like, oh, let’s say, model the entire rest of his life on the character in the film Scarface.

Follow the links, notice the patterns...this is not random pop-cultural detritus the author has randomly picked up.

Then comes the plot twist Lolita the Orca. How in the name of all that is holy did an ORCA show up in a novel about a Cuban-American man’s identity crisis?!

You really need to follow those links. Do some surface-scratching into the culture not already familiar to you. The word "reggaeton" will enter your vocabulary painlessly this way, and you will need it and the ideas it fronts for to wedge into your brain. The world is changing, and unless you intend to try to stop it by joining the banners and deniers on the radical right, you had best expend some brainergy getting convesrant with Izzy and his world.

Do it painlessly by reading this novel. Moby-Dick was nowhere near this much fun to read, and Izzy beats Ishmael all hollow as a cicerone through all things whale-y. The resonances with the culture of the past make the culture of this century accessible for us midcentury moderns. The read is fun, it’s fast, it’s trenchant...it’s saying a lot more than the words mean.

Isn’t that more or less a novel’s brief? This one does make you work. It requires some effort to get the pop-cultural zeitgeist. It does not pretend to be all about you and center your experience. That novel exists in droves, elsewhere. THIS novel takes you inside the head of a man so traumatized by his past that he can not afford to go deep into anything. This novel parses the cost of cheap thrills and entertainment. The plot, the spine, is the voyage of discovery that we take with Izzy. Like any voyage of discovery, it is not a straight line from start to finish, so douse that expectation right away. Go on the trip as Author Crucet planned it and it will reward you with knowledge and information about the world of a trauma survivor. That can only be a net gain to your own world, because you are statistically likely to know a trauma survivor.

You might not know it yet, but you could easily pick up on signs you would not have seen before if you get your hooks into this story and its meanings.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

A SHORT HISTORY OF FLOWERS: The Stories that Make Our Gardens, pretty pretty pictures celebrating springtime in the Global North



A SHORT HISTORY OF FLOWERS: The Stories that Make Our Gardens
ADVOLLY RICHMOND
(illus. Sarah Jane Humphrey)
Frances Lincoln Ltd
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Garden and social historian Advolly Richmond (of Gardener’s World) unravels the surprising histories of 60 flowers that shape our gardens.

Have you ever wondered where your favourite garden flowers came from? Where their names derived? Or why some cultivars go in and out of favor? Every flower in your herbaceous border has a story, and in this book Advolly Richmond takes you on a tour of the most intriguing, surprising and enriching ones.

Tales of exploration, everlasting love and bravery bring these beautiful flowers to life. Advolly has dug down to uncover the royalty, scholars, pioneers and a smuggler or two that have all played a part in discovering and cultivating some of our favourite species. From the lavish and exotic bougainvillea, found by an 18th century female botanist in disguise to the humble but majestic snowdrop casting a spell and causing a frenzy. These plants have played pivotal roles in our societies, from boom to bust economies, promises of riches, and making fashion statements. These unassuming blooms hold treasure troves of stories.

With specially commissioned artworks from award-winning botanical illustrator Sarah Jane Humphrey, which sumptuously bring each flower to life – this is a beautiful compendium for every garden lover.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: I needed something uncomplicatedly pretty. I expect y’all do, too.
There. Springtime sorted.

Of course, this being Reality, there are no uncomplicated pleasures. The stories of how your favorite flowers got to your garden is tied up with colonialism, capitalism, and the endless intertwining of greed and ownership between them.

Advolly Richmond does a far more deft job of making the connections than I have. She had a lot more room than I did:
This table of contents is like a really good garden’s plan, expansive and filled with beautiful sights. Richmond’s expertise is writing about the domesticated plants we adorn our built environment with, aka gardening. She has practiced the craft long enough to have honed her execution of it into art.

The fact that I myownself find the flower-gardening madness that so many of y’all suffer from inexplicable, and the money y’all lavish on it borderline obscene, does not mean I do not see and appreciate the beauty of the plants themselves.

I still think that the water, fertilizer, and hours of labor *should* be spent on growing vegetables.