Title: The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer
Author: Skip Hollandsworth
Narrator: Clint Jordan
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2016
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 325,765
Text Number: 1145
Read Because: reviewed by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
truepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An investigation into a serial killer operating before serial killers were an understood concept. I appreciate how frankly this discusses racism, because the expectation of a Black offender was inextricably tied to the scapegoating that rose in lieu of the language and explanation we would use now. There is no resolution, which isn't itself a flaw, but more could have been made of the ending—perhaps setting this case firmer within the developing understanding of serial killers, putting it in a larger context than the tenuous connections to the Ripper murders.
Title: You Let Me In
Author: Camilla Bruce
Published: Tor Books, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 326,020
Text Number: 1146
Read Because: reviewed bytamaranth, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This has a great central concept, a study of unreliable narration and ambiguity that marries well to fairies, rendering them suitably strange and untrustworthy. It reminds me of similar narrative ambiguity in the first season of The OA, but the consequences here force the issue of responsibility and guilt, and therefore of the raise the stakes of determining "realness."
A pity then that it's a debut and feels like a debut. The evocative language isn't, really—the repetitive imagery-heavy phrasing fails to be as distinctive as the relationship between the narrator and her fairies. The levels of narrative conceit are clever but strained—events are not what the in-fiction readers think they are, and we as an audience don't know the events at all; it's a contrivance of suspense that undermines later reveals. The direct address (to in-fiction readers) also makes the cliffhanger ends to the short chapters particularly clumsy. I wish those raw edges were more finished; it's still absorbing, complex, distinctive—but arguing with the narrative construction distracted me from the more interesting issue of narrative ambiguity.
Title: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Author: David Grann
Narrator: Mark Deakins
Published: Random House Audio, 2009
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 326,350
Text Number: 1147
Read Because: reviewed bytruepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A slow start, especially on audio; I rarely feel that lengthy autobiographical sections in nonfiction (especially when the author has limited direct connection to the subject) add much, and it introduces confusing time/PoV skips. But this improves as it goes on, because it's ultimately less about one explorer's quest than it is the context—the environment of the Amazon, whether it can sustain a city, what native populations and their histories indicate about the possibility of a lost city; the lens and influence of Western culture on these factors. It's a necessarily broad view that ultimately balances fascination and criticism. Further, the details of failed explorations are squeamishly satisfying and this has the luck of an equally satisfying conclusion.
Author: Skip Hollandsworth
Narrator: Clint Jordan
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2016
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 325,765
Text Number: 1145
Read Because: reviewed by
truepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: An investigation into a serial killer operating before serial killers were an understood concept. I appreciate how frankly this discusses racism, because the expectation of a Black offender was inextricably tied to the scapegoating that rose in lieu of the language and explanation we would use now. There is no resolution, which isn't itself a flaw, but more could have been made of the ending—perhaps setting this case firmer within the developing understanding of serial killers, putting it in a larger context than the tenuous connections to the Ripper murders.
Title: You Let Me In
Author: Camilla Bruce
Published: Tor Books, 2020
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 326,020
Text Number: 1146
Read Because: reviewed by
tamaranth, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: This has a great central concept, a study of unreliable narration and ambiguity that marries well to fairies, rendering them suitably strange and untrustworthy. It reminds me of similar narrative ambiguity in the first season of The OA, but the consequences here force the issue of responsibility and guilt, and therefore of the raise the stakes of determining "realness."
A pity then that it's a debut and feels like a debut. The evocative language isn't, really—the repetitive imagery-heavy phrasing fails to be as distinctive as the relationship between the narrator and her fairies. The levels of narrative conceit are clever but strained—events are not what the in-fiction readers think they are, and we as an audience don't know the events at all; it's a contrivance of suspense that undermines later reveals. The direct address (to in-fiction readers) also makes the cliffhanger ends to the short chapters particularly clumsy. I wish those raw edges were more finished; it's still absorbing, complex, distinctive—but arguing with the narrative construction distracted me from the more interesting issue of narrative ambiguity.
Title: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Author: David Grann
Narrator: Mark Deakins
Published: Random House Audio, 2009
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 330
Total Page Count: 326,350
Text Number: 1147
Read Because: reviewed by
truepenny, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: A slow start, especially on audio; I rarely feel that lengthy autobiographical sections in nonfiction (especially when the author has limited direct connection to the subject) add much, and it introduces confusing time/PoV skips. But this improves as it goes on, because it's ultimately less about one explorer's quest than it is the context—the environment of the Amazon, whether it can sustain a city, what native populations and their histories indicate about the possibility of a lost city; the lens and influence of Western culture on these factors. It's a necessarily broad view that ultimately balances fascination and criticism. Further, the details of failed explorations are squeamishly satisfying and this has the luck of an equally satisfying conclusion.
