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juushikaFirst finished book of 2024 was five stars, quickly chased by a DNF. I like those odds: strong opinions feels like a good way to start the year.
Title: My Dark Vanessa
Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Published: William Morrow, 2020
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 502,715
Text Number: 1789
Read Because: multiple recommendations, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Beginning at fifteen, Vanessa was romantically involved with her 40-something high school English teacher. 17 years later, new accusations brought on by the #MeToo movement force Vanessa to reframe her experiences. Vanessa is a dynamic, nuanced narrator, "unreliable" insofar as she's traumatized but doesn't identify as a victim. The present-day narrative is the book's weaker half, but it's restrained - no cheap fixes here, just Vanessa's evolving conception of her own experiences, which are explored in corresponding flashbacks. Those flashbacks are marvelously written. They borrow from the thriller genre to maintain pacing, and are entirely loyal to Vanessa's perspective as a teenage girl swept up in a relationship with a powerful authority figure: she is in love and abused, she is special and groomed, she is "powerful" and disempowered.
I've had this on my TBR for ages but put it off because a serious treatment of the subject matter seemed cursed to be a miserable read. It's not. This is devastating but engrossing, compassionate, doggedly nuanced, and uncompromising in its focus on Vanessa while writing her abuser with a careful complexity, as someone who does indisputable harm with self-righteous, tortured conviction.
Title: Just Like Home
Author: Sarah Gailey
Published: Tor, 2022
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 345
Total Page Count: 503,060
Text Number: 1790
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Her mother dying, our protagonist returns to her childhood home - the house her father, a serial killer, built. This is a palimpsest of hauntings: domestic abuse, family secrets, a haunted house story, and the lingering question of guilt and the protagonist's possible, repressed role in the murders. I enjoy that tension, the sense that it could be either or all of those explanations, especially given Gailey's speculative background and the book's willingness to get weird.
The answers are nearly destined not to live up to all that buildup, and they don't, in large part because "all of the above" is a much more nuanced explanation than what's provided by the final reveals, allowing the mother to be simultaneously abusive and capable of love without being split into two discrete entities. The artist-in-residence character is also a plague on the story who further simplifies, or at least creates some cheap surface-level justification to, the ending. But I love the concept of an ambiguously-benevolent haunted house, embodied by the traffic of the home's residents. This is a weird one! I enjoyed the ride, bickered with the ending, and like the version in my head a lot better than the full, real text.
Title: They Never Learn
Author: Layne Fargo
Published: Random House, 2011 (1996)
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 503,315
Text Number: 1791
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 20%. There is an audience for feminist vigilante "good for her" dark fiction, but it's not me, at least not here. It requires turning off one's brain a little, which isn't how I read, and this take is as subtle and nuanced as a brick, so it doesn't hold up to a less mindless reading. Also I hate first person present tense.
Title: My Dark Vanessa
Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Published: William Morrow, 2020
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 502,715
Text Number: 1789
Read Because: multiple recommendations, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Beginning at fifteen, Vanessa was romantically involved with her 40-something high school English teacher. 17 years later, new accusations brought on by the #MeToo movement force Vanessa to reframe her experiences. Vanessa is a dynamic, nuanced narrator, "unreliable" insofar as she's traumatized but doesn't identify as a victim. The present-day narrative is the book's weaker half, but it's restrained - no cheap fixes here, just Vanessa's evolving conception of her own experiences, which are explored in corresponding flashbacks. Those flashbacks are marvelously written. They borrow from the thriller genre to maintain pacing, and are entirely loyal to Vanessa's perspective as a teenage girl swept up in a relationship with a powerful authority figure: she is in love and abused, she is special and groomed, she is "powerful" and disempowered.
I've had this on my TBR for ages but put it off because a serious treatment of the subject matter seemed cursed to be a miserable read. It's not. This is devastating but engrossing, compassionate, doggedly nuanced, and uncompromising in its focus on Vanessa while writing her abuser with a careful complexity, as someone who does indisputable harm with self-righteous, tortured conviction.
Title: Just Like Home
Author: Sarah Gailey
Published: Tor, 2022
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 345
Total Page Count: 503,060
Text Number: 1790
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Her mother dying, our protagonist returns to her childhood home - the house her father, a serial killer, built. This is a palimpsest of hauntings: domestic abuse, family secrets, a haunted house story, and the lingering question of guilt and the protagonist's possible, repressed role in the murders. I enjoy that tension, the sense that it could be either or all of those explanations, especially given Gailey's speculative background and the book's willingness to get weird.
The answers are nearly destined not to live up to all that buildup, and they don't, in large part because "all of the above" is a much more nuanced explanation than what's provided by the final reveals, allowing the mother to be simultaneously abusive and capable of love without being split into two discrete entities. The artist-in-residence character is also a plague on the story who further simplifies, or at least creates some cheap surface-level justification to, the ending. But I love the concept of an ambiguously-benevolent haunted house, embodied by the traffic of the home's residents. This is a weird one! I enjoyed the ride, bickered with the ending, and like the version in my head a lot better than the full, real text.
Title: They Never Learn
Author: Layne Fargo
Published: Random House, 2011 (1996)
Rating: 1 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 503,315
Text Number: 1791
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 20%. There is an audience for feminist vigilante "good for her" dark fiction, but it's not me, at least not here. It requires turning off one's brain a little, which isn't how I read, and this take is as subtle and nuanced as a brick, so it doesn't hold up to a less mindless reading. Also I hate first person present tense.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-13 12:49 am (UTC)