Tag: review

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The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani

Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up, up, to greater things, so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet. Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite, veiled, yet ever near, closer than the pulse of the jugular.

The Blood of Flowers, pg. 359

Are you familiar with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau? It’s found in the Old Testament book of Genesis, chapter 25, verses 29-34. There are twin brothers, Jacob and Esau. Esau was born before Jacob, so as the oldest son he will inherit his father’s right to the priesthood and he’ll be the patriarch of the family after their father dies. Esau is an outdoorsy type of guy, and he comes in from hunting one day to find that his brother Jacob has made a bunch of “pottage,” or soup. He’s been out all day and he’s hungry, so he tells Jacob to serve him some of the soup he made. Jacob tells him he’ll give him some soup only if Esau sells his birthright for it. Esau agrees. He gets some soup and Jacob gets the right to his father’s priesthood. Now, this does not seem like a good look for my guy Jacob. It’s super sneaky, after all. But really, Esau is the jerk here, because he sells his birthright for literally a bowl of beans, and then later he gets mad about it when Jacob claims the birthright. It was his own shortsightedness that causes himself to sell his most precious possession for nothing.

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani brought this story to mind. The protagonist is an unnamed teenage girl in 16th century Persia. Her loving parents have raised her to expect marriage to a man who will “pave [her] path with rose petals,” (11). But when her father dies unexpectedly, she and her mother are left destitute, and they leave their small village to seek refuge with her father’s half-brother is Isfahan. Her uncle is a renowned, well-to-do carpet designer. The girl is a fledgling carpet designer herself, and her uncle, recognizing her potential, takes her under his wing and instructs her on how to improve her designs and select just the right colors. Her aunt, however, sees her and her mother as a drain on the family’s resources.

When a wealthy man proposes marriage to the girl, they are ecstatic. That is, until they learn that he is proposing a sigheh. This was an interesting piece of Persian culture to learn about. A sigheh is a temporary marriage. In the girl’s case, she would be married to the man for three months, with an option to renew for another three months if he was pleased with her. Additionally, he would pay her family, as opposed to requiring a dowry from them. If this sounds like legalized prostitution…it kind of is. From my research, at that time a sigheh could be made for almost any length of time, even for just an hour. It was legal, but definitely not looked upon as a marriage of equal value and honor as a permanent marriage.

Her aunt encourages her to accept the proposal, but the girl is hesitant. To her mother, she says, “It feels as if he wants to buy me cheaply…You and my Baba raised me to expect better,” (123). But her mother insists that they need the money, and orders her to marry him. Like Esau, the girl’s family sells her for the equivalent of a mess of pottage.

Despite her marriage, the girl continues to create carpets and learn under her uncle’s tutelage. As her skills grow, so does her confidence, and eventually she realizes just how unjust her family has been to her. “…I have skills enough to join the royal workshop, if only I had been a boy. But rather than let me ply my craft and find a virtuous marriage, you sold me for next to nothing,” (278). She takes steps to reclaim her dignity, but in doing so she angers her aunt and uncle and finds herself struggling for survival.

I wanted to cheer as the girl began to value herself highly enough to take risks and take charge of her own life. This is a story of hope, of finding your voice, and of deciding what you really want out of life. This unnamed protagonist teaches us that we don’t have to accept other people’s assessment of our value. We need to know our own worth, and not allow fear to convince us to sell ourselves cheaply.

Happy Reading!

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The Beautiful, Renée Ahdieh

“Didn’t you know, darlin’?” he drawled. “All the best saints are sinners.”

Renée Ahdieh, The Beautiful

Having absolutely loved this book, I was surprised, even shocked, at the numerous bad reviews on Goodreads. I’m honestly baffled, and I’m here in defense of The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh.

The Beautiful is what Twilight might have been if it had been written by a competent author, if Bella had a personality, and if Edward wasn’t an abusive creep. I unapologetically loathe Twilight, and it’s colored my feelings about the whole vampire genre. So when I picked up The Beautiful, I didn’t have high hopes. Mostly I just wanted something a little different, and I thought I’d give it a try. I definitely didn’t expect to love it the way I did. I devoured it.

Renée Ahdieh had me with this sentence from the first chapter –

“Night had seeped through the water, like a dark stain across organza.”

I remember thinking what a vivid description that was. I could see the lowering of the sun, the shadows spreading across the water. What’s more, we find out later that Celine, our protagonist, previously worked for one of the best dressmakers in Paris. That beautiful description of a stained organza is the kind of thing that would make sense to someone familiar with fabrics. Right away, we’re getting insight into the way Celine thinks.

Description is one of this novel’s strong points. The author paints a world with her words, and I found myself vividly imagining the New Orleans of Ahdieh’s fantasy. From the smell of beignets from a boulangerie to the trembling bougainvillea on a shuttered terrace, the author really brought New Orleans to life for me.

Additionally, I found the characters to be multi-layered, interesting, and likable. The trouble with YA novels is that the young women are often one-dimensional, thinking only about and existing only for their romantic partner. (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan, you bland, miserable waif.) In Celine Rousseau, we have a protagonist who, sure, has a love story, but also has her own stuff going on outside of her relationship. In this novel, we see Celine come to appreciate her mixed heritage, something she’d been taught to be ashamed of and to hide. We sit with her as she ponders sin, guilt, remorse, and absolution. We join her in coming to terms with the events that led to her fleeing Paris for New Orleans. On top of that, Celine has a skill set as a dressmaker that is valued and marketable. She sometimes accepts help from others, but she certainly doesn’t need anyone to make her way for her. She’s portrayed as competent, intelligent, and level-headed, even in the face of challenging circumstances, and she exercises a tremendous amount of agency.

Similarly, Bastien is a solid character in his own right, separate from his relationship with Celine. And he gets bonus points for not being a misogynist. One of the first things that draws Celine to him is the fact that he treats her as an equal. During their first meeting. he swears in front of her, and she ponders the fact that her father had always told her that curse words weren’t meant for female ears. But here’s a young man who curses in her presence, just as he would if she were a man. She’s appalled, but she also appreciates the fact that he doesn’t treat her with kid gloves. Throughout the novel, Bastien recognizes Celine’s strength and competence. He fights with her, he threatens her, but he never condescends to her or orders her around.

This is, in my opinion, what makes their relationship work. Because the author gives Celine and Bastien stories separate from one another, I am able to see why they like each other. Sometimes YA authors write about the protagonists as though they’re The Lover from Shakespeare’s The Seven Ages of a Man. (“And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.”) We read about their feelings of love, usually ad nauseam, but we’re left completely clueless about what they actually like about one another, aside from their mutual physical attraction. Ahdieh doesn’t make that mistake with Celine and Bastien. They spend enough time together that we’re able to see clearly why they’re drawn to one another.

There are a pair of scenes that stick out to me as demonstrating this pretty well. Don’t worry, there’s nothing super important in these scenes, so no real spoilers here. In the beginning, Celine is sitting with her friends Pippa and Annabelle at a booth selling items they’ve made. One of the girls laments the fact that they’ve worked the whole day and haven’t sold much. Celine jokes that maybe they should try making their money at night. It’s a bawdy joke, and innocent Annabelle doesn’t get it, but it shows us that Celine has kind of a raunchy sense of humor. In a later scene, Celine meets Bastien, and they’re bantering. She poses the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” and Bastien remarks that the rooster must have come first. Celine is simultaneously surprised and delighted by the off-color joke, and gives a genuine laugh. These two scenes set us up to see Celine and Bastien as a pair. They’re both a little rough around the edges, with the same sense of irreverent humor. Ahdieh does this several times throughout the book, and it lends a lot of credibility to the relationship.

The world-building itself left a little to be desired. I feel like Ahdieh will need to explain a lot in the sequel, The Damned. There were definitely things that needed elaboration. Things that I still have questions about. But overall, I was satisfied with the answers I got, and I’m confident that more will be explained in The Damned.

I enjoyed the ending simply because it surprised me. Throughout the novel, there is a string of murders, with Celine as the thread that apparently links the victims together. She spends the whole novel trying to lure the murderer out of the shadows so she can confront him, and I spent the novel pretty confident I knew who the murderer was. It seemed obvious, but I was completely wrong. I love being caught off guard. The ending tied up most of the loose ends, but it left me with several more questions that I’m dying to have answered.

I also really appreciated the diversity of Ahdieh’s characters. New Orleans, as a southern port city, was a multi-ethnic and multi-racial place in the late 1800’s. But the author also doesn’t portray New Orleans as some sort of colorblind, post-racial utopia. There are several tense, racially charged scenes, specifically one in which some local boys are reluctant to do business with Bastien because he keeps company with people of various races. He lets them know, in no uncertain terms, that their racist sentiments are unwelcome, especially as he, himself, is of mixed heritage. Similarly, Arjun confronts several British characters with their ingrained imperialist attitudes, challenges their claims that they don’t benefit from a racial hierarchy, and chafes at the restrictions placed on him because he is Indian. I was glad that Ahdieh didn’t shy away from addressing the very real issue of race relations, even though it wasn’t the focus of her story.

There was just so much meat here, along with a truly fun story. I’m annoyed that my library doesn’t have The Damned yet, but considering it was just published at the beginning of July, I suppose I’ll have to cut them some slack. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it as soon as I can.

Happy Reading!

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There There, Tommy Orange

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

Tommy Orange, There There

We’ll start today with that heavy quote because There There by Tommy Orange is a heavy book. It’s brilliant. It’s eye-opening. But it’s heavy.

There There was put on my reading list as part of a mass addition of Authors of Color. With everything that has been going on recently, I’ve become aware that I have too long allowed myself to be one of the people on the above-mentioned yacht, mostly unaware of the struggles of the people in the water and my own position of privilege aboard the ship. As I’ve opened myself up to the message of Black Lives Matter and other similar movements, I have come to see some of the ways in which I’m part of the problem. One thing that stood out to me, as a reader, is the fact that I have read an embarrassingly small amount of literature written by People of Color. I counted. Of the over 500 books I have listed as Read on Goodreads, just over 30 of the authors were People of Color.

So, a few weeks ago, I did some googling and found lists of must-read books by Black authors, Latinx authors, Arab authors, East Asian authors, and Indigenous authors. If you haven’t done this exercise, I’d encourage it. It was enlightening to see the mountains of rich literature that I’d been previously unaware of. There There was one of my finds.

This book centers around one event – the Big Oakland Powwow. In little vignettes, we’re introduced to a huge cast of characters who are all tied to the powwow in some way. There’s Tony Loneman, a twenty-one year old drug dealer of Cheyenne heritage living with fetal alcohol syndrome. Dene Oxendene is an aspiring documentary maker who is trying to capture stories of Native people. There’s Edwin Black, a biracial man who never knew his father, is battling an internet addiction, and is pushed by his mother into an internship helping with the powwow. There are Opal and Jacquie, two middle-aged sisters dealing with the fallout of their childhood involvement in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the 1970s. The character list is extensive. Those are just a few. The way that Tommy Orange is able to weave the strands of all of these lives together, to get them all to that powwow, is masterful.

He really succeeds in giving each character a different voice. In fact, when I first read a portion narrated by Tony Loneman, I was a little put off by the excessive swearing. It seemed like every other word was a curse, and I started to get annoyed. “Does this author not know any other words?” I wondered. As I continued reading, I realized that the character didn’t know any other words. Tony Loneman, a drug dealer, raised by his grandmother, someone whose IQ measured extremely low due to fetal alcohol syndrome – he cursed a lot. When the author shifted to another character’s point of view, the vocabulary changed. It added authenticity to the voice of each character.

The book starts with a prologue, and there’s an interlude as well. These sections are filled with short essays on issues in the Native community at large and in the community specific to Oakland. These were some of my favorite bits of writing. It’s the kind of prose must take tremendous effort to write, but Tommy Orange made it seem effortless.

Orange addressed several themes in There There: suicide in Native people, addiction, the search for identity, gun violence, privilege, and what it means to be Native.

On suicide:

“Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better that leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we’ve made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths…or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.”

On identity:

“…Anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian.”

There’s so much more there, and it was the first time I’ve ever heard a Native American story told by an actual Native American. For so long, these people have had their story told by other people, by history books written by white scholars, by elementary school students playacting the First Thanksgiving, by Hollywood movies in which the powers that be cast Johnny Depp (of all people) to play Tonto in The Lone Ranger. It was moving, in itself, to hear a Native American story told by someone whose story it is to tell.

Okay, there are going to be spoilers from here on. If I’ve convinced you, go read There There, and then come back.

The culminating event, the Big Oakland Powwow, is marred by tragedy when Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin all try to rob the powwow. In the interlude, Tommy Orange lets us know that that’s where this is going, so we watch it happen like a car crash you see coming but can’t prevent. Orange shifted through the points of view as Dene, Bill, Orvil, Tony, and others got shot, so it was like watching each one of them fall. You’d think that after one death scene it would be like beating a dead horse, but Orange managed to make each death impactful.

I think it was also poignant that most of the deaths were accidental. Octavio, Tony, Charles, and Calvin weren’t intending to kill the people at the powwow. They just wanted the money. They got into a fight among themselves and the passersby were caught in the crossfire. This seemed to me to be a symbol for the deaths of Native Americans as a whole. In some cases, the U.S. government absolutely committed active, unapologetic genocide against Native Americans. But there were other times when it seems like the lives of Native Americans were collateral damage, caught in the storm of bullets simply because they were in the way.

This quote, in particular, broke me:

“Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”

I’ll leave it there.

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The Red Rising Trilogy, Pierce Brown

All that we have is that shout into the wind – how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.

Pierce Brown, “Morning Star”

There are those books that come out and dominate the conversation. You wake up one morning and suddenly everyone is raving about this book or series or author. Apparently this was one of those series, and I totally missed it. The first novel in this fantastic saga by Pierce Brown is called Red Rising, and it was the 2014 Goodreads Choice winner. The two follow up novels, Golden Son and Morning Star, won the 2015 and 2016 prizes, respectively. So apparently these books have been around, and applauded, for half a decade, and I had no idea. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention? I don’t think I have an excuse other than the fact that I don’t read science fiction books as often as I’d like to. It seems to be the genre that gets put on my back burner. But don’t worry, scifi enthusiasts. These books have called me to repentance.

I started the first book, Red Rising, about a week before I was due to give birth. I’ll be honest. I wasn’t excited. I’d seen a few reviews that dubbed the series, “The Hunger Games in space!” and I wasn’t particularly eager to read The Hunger Games…in space. Please don’t misunderstand me. The Hunger Games was an enjoyable series. But I’ve already read it. I certainly didn’t need to read it again (in space!).

All this to say, I had set myself up to not be blown away by Red Rising. But my friend Abby (who, incidentally, is notoriously reluctant to read any type of series) insisted that I had to read this trilogy. So I gritted my teeth and started in. The first few chapters lived up to my expectations. That is, I was underwhelmed. Maybe it was pregnancy hormones. Maybe I was overly critical. Whatever it was, reading became a chore. So I moved on to something else, and then promptly had a baby, which dropped reading several rungs down on my ladder of priorities.

I returned to Red Rising a few months later, committed to finish it this time. I remained skeptical until the middle of the book, when I suddenly realized that I couldn’t put it down. I thought, based on the thousands of other dystopian novels and that pesky “Hunger Games in space” label, that I knew exactly where the author was going with these books. My fellow readers, I am here to tell you that I did not.

The Red Rising series describes a dystopian future in which human beings have spread throughout the solar system and genetically altered themselves into a caste system based on “color.” If you’re a Yellow, you’re a physician or scientist. If you’re a Blue, you’re a pilot or a spaceship crew member. Golds are the aristocratic rulers of the Society, the highest cast; Reds are manual laborers, the lowest. There are fourteen colors in total, but I’m not going to enumerate them all. You get the idea.

If you’ve read any dystopian fiction, you can probably guess what happens. Certain members of the lower castes realize that their system is oppressive and unite together to challenge the injustice endemic to the color hierarchy. However, unlike other books with a similar plot line, the Red Rising saga places less emphasis on the “overthrow the government” bit and more focus on character development and philosophy.

Pierce Brown does such a good job of painting his characters in shades of gray. Let’s get real. In a book about class warfare, no one is walking away untarnished. Brown’s characters get dirty. Many of them start with good intentions, but all end up sullying themselves with underhanded deals, betrayal, and violence. What we are left with is not a band of noble heroes, but a cast of believable, three-dimensional, honorable, crooked, loyal, backstabbing, peace-seeking, violent, idiot geniuses. Did you get all that?

One thing I admired about Brown’s treatment of violence in this series is that he doesn’t glorify it. You’d think that a book steeped in blood would be more cavalier about it, but the author never loses sight of the horror of this brutal world he’s created. The characters are allowed to feel the violence of their actions, even as they commit them. He lets them sit with the emotional pain of war, of friends lost and lives destroyed.

But in spite of all of the ugliness, the thing that blew me away was Brown’s treatment of themes of friendship, loyalty, and forgiveness. He asks questions of the characters and, by extension, of the reader. What is honor? Is there a difference between “honor” as reputation and “honor” as integrity? (As the characters discover, yes, there is.) What makes a good leader? What is power, and who is worthy of it?

I realized that this series was going to be different when our protagonist, Darrow, started grappling with the weight and responsibility of leadership. I was moved by Darrow’s struggle as he fought, made bad decisions, trusted the wrong people, and learned, through cruel experience, how to be a leader worth following.

There are three more books in the series; two (Iron Gold and Dark Age) have already been released, and one more is in the works. I’m going to take a break from Darrow’s story for now, because there are hundreds of other books on my To Read list, but I’ll be back sooner than later. I’m anxious to discover what Pierce Brown has in store for Darrow and his friends.

Happy Reading!