Is This Book Trying To Kill Me?
Rating and reviewing is more complicated than it seems at first glance. At some point you have to make a decision: is it about whether you enjoyed the book or whether the book is good? Because yes a lot of the time these things go together but sometimes they don't and then you are in a bind.
I tend to lean towards my subjective experience these days. But I feel this conflict most acutely when I read a book that is admirable--well crafted and solid--but that made me want to die the entire time I was reading it. This tends to happen most with thrillers. Thrillers are all about generating tension and suspense, that's where the titular thrills come from. And I love an edge-of-your-seat book, I love wanting to know what's going to happen. I even love the growing sense of dread that something bad is going to happen. But there is an occasional thriller that just makes me feel dizzy with its thrills. It is too much! It is too intense.
More specifically, what gets me is when too many bad things are happening. There is a point where I am like nope no thank you this is too many bad things we need a break on bad things we have passed my quota thank you.
This is not the same as a bleak book. I love bleak, weirdly. But in a thriller, the bad things are so big and loud and piled up one on the other on the other for maximum response. Bleak books tend to be quieter in their misery, which somehow makes a difference.
I am thinking about this because THANK GOD I just finished reading Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra. It didn't take very long at all for me to realize that this book wanted me dead. This book was going to raise my blood pressure and never stop. This book wanted to torture me slowly for the entirety of its 10 hour duration. It was even worse on audio where it seems to play out even more slowly somehow.
Why did I keep reading it? Because it was good. It drove me absolutely up the wall. How dare this book be good and also want to kill me? If only it was not good I would have easily given it up and moved on.
I have no idea how to rate this book. I did not enjoy it! I was pretty miserable! Also it was good!
If you are a glutton for punishment and are wondering if you should read it, I should warn you that it does involve a women and her kids and a home invasion. (The children are okay, you deserve to know this in advance. The book is not THAT mean.) It unfolds basically in real time for the first half. Actually not real time. Like slower than real time. In the first 5 hours of the book maybe 2 hours max passes. And while there are a couple limited flashbacks to make sure you do not throw something at the book, generally it is not much for breaks and it is just going to hold you in this very tense situation and not let up. It is also going to be mostly realistic enough that it is all much worse.
Thankfully I did not have the kind of experience where I started imagining my own terrible home invasion stories. It was not that kind of wanting to kill me. Instead I just felt my blood pressure rise and my jaw clench every time I turned it on. An hour in and I couldn't fathom how it could possibly keep going like this. By the time I hit 7 hours, I was desperate for it to be over.
The closest I've come to this before is another very stressful book, Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson. Jackson is the QUEEN of stressful books. I always have to prep myself before I read them. They are Young Adult, which helps, because there are some rules for that audience that I know she will follow that make it at least the slightest bit easier.
Allegedly also had so many bad things happen I thought I was going to explode. Nightwatching is about a well off white lady's nightmare, but Allegedly is about a Black teen girl in a group home. The stakes are as high as they get in both books, but Allegedly is starting you off in what you think is as bad as things can get only for them to get worse.
They are both constructed meticulously. They are both debut novels (how???). Jackson's gets the edge because I could feel the thrillery-ness of it, could feel her manipulating me and slow rolling the cards she held in her hand. That kind of pleasure makes me want to stick around. (And it was worth sticking around.) Sierra isn't manipulating you, instead she lets the reader see just about everything so you are frustrated by every one of the protagonist's limitations, and fuming at all the people who won't accept reality. I listened to (was tortured by) both on audio and here Jackson gets another edge because the reader is the supreme Bahni Turpin, while Sierra's has a perfectly good reader but one of those women who makes a weird low voice when she does men's voices. (This bothers me just as much as men who do weird squeaky voices for women.) I felt comfortable giving Allegedly 4 stars because it was pleasurable pain.
But if we are judging books based on whether they make us feel things, whether the author made me feel the things she wanted me to feel. Well then, Tracy Sierra, you get five stars. But for my personal pleasure? I'm not sure if I can even give it 2. I did not enjoy myself at all.
I still don't know how I'm going to rate it.
March books! We did it!
March is a HUGE release month and I ended up reading and enjoying a bunch of them so it's gonna be a long list.
A satire on race, class, and privilege that has a lot of things going for it, the story of a Latino kid raised in the Bronx by a single mom who learns how to use his sad story as a way to get ahead. It's an impressive debut with a sharp eye. I think it bites off a little more than it can chew, but I read it in two days so it's definitely propulsive. And we really don't get enough satire.
One of my one-sitting reads from my January newsletter, this is one of my favorites of the year. I love a story of self-destruction leading to self-discovery.
I really enjoyed Thorne's previous folk horror Lute so I was excited to pick this up. A story of a terrible family vacation where tensions between parents and adult children are only exacerbated by a deeply haunted Italian villa. This is not a one-note book, it loves to change it up. It's going to give you some expected tropes but it's also got plenty of curveballs. Thorne is so good at the horror and the dysfunctional family that I enjoyed every minute. One of the best horror's of the year, for sure.
If your book club can handle sex, then you should definitely put Annie Bot on your list. It's high concept and a short read (some concepts are so high that you really can't make them too long) that examines love and sex through its protagonist, the titular Annie Bot, who yes is a robot. She is The Girlfriend Experience in robot form, programmed to be sensitive to her owner's needs. There is a lot in here that will make you squirm, even when you know she is just a robot, and a whole lot about patriarchal relationship dynamics to pick apart. It'll definitely start some conversations.
I loved González's debut, Olga Dies Dreaming, and this is another story of self-definition this time following the parallel stories of Raquel and Anita. Raquel is an art student at an ivy (think Yale or Brown) in the late 90's. Anita is an up and coming artist in the 80's who--no spoiler this is the first chapter--is murdered by her artist husband. Even though one of our protagonists is dead, the novel already tells us that it's going to give Anita her postmortem happy ending from the title. The journey takes us through Raquel's own increasingly bad relationship with a white male artist boyfriend and her self-discovery that intersects with Anita's artistic legacy. I always complain about how artists are not depicted well in novels, how their art never comes alive. Didn't have that problem here at all, as González bases Anita on real life artist Ana Mendieta who was murdered the same way and whose art really comes to life on the page.
Téa Obreht's third novel combines the Eastern European folklore and strong sense of setting of The Tiger's Wife with the emotional core and tight plotting of Inland. A near-future novel about a flooded Manhattan now attempting revitalization by bringing in refugees, it's a coming of age novel and I'm not going to say too much more. I read it in one day. I will say to give this one a little time, it starts out feeling loose but it is one of those books where everything is there for a reason and it will absolutely all come together. I love those.
A gutsy debut novel that is a takedown of a fictional character who sure seems to be based heavily on (somehow not cancelled) Junot Diaz. The takedown elements are the boldest parts and the best. As a whole it didn't bring things together the way I wanted it to, it seems to pull its best punches at the last minute. But there's enough here to get my attention, for sure.
Ben H. Winters is one of those writers where I wonder why we don't talk about him more. I think there's a couple misses in his overall catalog, but his hits are so good. He excels at mystery-ish novels that also include some level of speculative or science-fiction, he dials each genre up or down in different books. This time we have a hitman kidnapping thriller combined with a regular-person-paper-pusher gets thrust into a conspiracy thriller combined with time travel. Sometimes he can get pretty meditative, which I think is why people don't talk about him as much. But this book isn't bleak, it's just a rollicking ride and a lot of fun.
This list is basically in the order I read these books, which is the only reason Jennine Capó Crucet is so far down the list. Make Your Home Among Strangers was one of my favorite novels of recent years, but this new novel is very different. Like her previous novel it embraces Miami's Cuban culture, this one is even more of a love letter to the city, even though it is very clear-eyed about how doomed and broken the city is. Our protagonist Izzy has one of the strangest epic journeys you will ever find. Determined to get his life together by following the path of Tony Montana specifically as depicted in the movie Scarface. Yes, Izzy knows how this book ends and yet he has still decided this is a good idea. Tells you a lot about Izzy. The other main character is Lolita, an Orca held captive in a run down water park. Yes, this just works, believe me. This is very much a "Just Trust Me" book. It's a weird, big swing and it's fantastic.
Finishing up with another thriller, this is the kind of thriller that works for me. It's simple. I was never once stressed. It is the classic Everyone Thinks I Killed Someone But I Didn't... I Don't Think plot plus true crime podcast plus small town. It is by the book in many ways, but it also is not lazy. It has some solid twists, twists that don't give you whiplash or make you feel manipulated. It understands the assignment. And honestly I find 95% of thrillers are dull and boring and so focused on twists that they don't have anything to them so it is always nice to find one that delivers and this one does.
Phew that was a long list. Congratulations for reading to the end. April is only half of this so don't worry.