Annexed by Sharon Dogar

Sharon Dogar's novel, Annexed, presents the story within Anne Frank's famous diary through a new, imagined perspective. Peter van Pels was the teenage boy who shared the Annex with the Franks and his parents. In this novel, Dogar tells the story of their struggle for survival through Peter's eyes. This dramatic shift in point of view has the potential to influence readers' perception of Anne's story, and that fact is part of why there has been some controversy around the release of this book. You should take a few minutes now or later to read some of the opinions (1, 2), and then Dogar's response. I hadn't been aware of the discussion prior to reading the book.

I read Anne's diary at least three times when I was young, beginning when I was twelve or so. It's been a long time since I reread it. Dogar's book made me want to do that, and I hope that this response is shared by other readers. I think I need to reread the diary in order to say definitively how I feel about Annexed. I don't think that the characters - particularly Anne - come off with the same complexity as I remember in the diary, though the tone of the book often felt very much in line with the original work - tense, at times hopeful, full of frustration and barely suppressed fear.

Sandstorm by Christopher Rowe

Rowe is a Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist who has written several fantastic short stories of speculative fiction. He’s also a good friend, so when he told me his first novel was going to be a Dungeons & Dragons book, I thought, “huh. Well, at least he’s got a book coming out.”

I haven’t read a D&D novel since before the original Dragonlance books. I’ve always heard good things about those in particular, but my experience with stories based on role-playing, or even based on other kinds of properties (the Star Wars movies, or the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, or even comic books), has been rocky to say the least. It seemed that the very way in which RPGs free your imagination to create any kind of story you might want to tell somehow constrained fiction, limited it and made it feel flat and small.

Questions like this occupied my mind as I picked up Sandstorm, Christopher’s book. In the initial pages, I found myself asking whether or not characters or actions worked “in-game” or not. What might be a character’s stats? How might a fight work in terms of attack dice and hit points and initiative?

Without realizing, though, those kinds of questions and thoughts quickly faded. Instead, I asked questions like, “what’s going to happen next?” and, “how will the hero, Cephas, get out of this situation?” and, “what does the mysterious Corvus Nightfeather, a crow-headed assassin, want with Cephas?” In short, all the things you ask about a compelling, character-driven fantasy adventure.

All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg

Writing about the modern South is hard. Lazy authors slip into one of two extreme caricatures. Either they get caught up in the romanticism of white-columned porches and the Kentucky Derby, or they take cheap shots at the tacky poverty of trailer parks and BBQ pork rinds.

In his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’, journalist Rick Bragg traces his path through the best and worst aspects of the South. The son of an Alabama cotton picker, Bragg climbed up a pile of journalism awards to the New York Times, then returned home as the newspaper’s Southeastern corespondent. Along the way, Bragg witnessed extreme poverty but also the stubborn pride and deep faith that come with it. He discusses racism--even sharing vague memories of a George Wallace rally--but Bragg never lets slurs become the full measure of the people they’re screamed at or the people screaming them.

GB Tran's "Vietnamerica"

Arist/writer GB Tran is the first American-born son of a couple who fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. Though "fall" is a multi-layered word in this context, connoting loss (from an American perspective), and that mid-70s moment that represented the first time Vietnam had been united under its own rule, after battling the French, Japanese and Americans (of the recent conquerors -- there were the Chinese before that).

That their first "unified" government turned out to be as radically imperfect as the ones it replaced, is all too typical of history, and here, we see the stunning nexus of family, national, and global histories, the last two constantly affecting the first.

In Vietnamerica, Tran gives his account of growing into adulthood, an American future as a videogame-playing graphic artist ahead of him, while finally becoming curious about what his own family's role in those previous events (and the role of events in his family) actually was. And curious, too, how it came to be that he was the first native-born American among his half-sisters and secret-wielding parents. Like a peeled onion, much of the structure in this graphic novel is curled and a bit scattered, and with the cross-cutting and time-shifting -- between his father's and mother's families -- you're not always sure whose story you're following. But by the last act, with a shattering, unresolvable reveal about his paternal grandfather, and a series of splash panels leading up to his parents' nose-hair escape, you're riveted.

As a side note, Vietnamerica shares a title with an earlier prose book, about the "homecoming" of Vietnamese kids fathered by U.S. serviceman, who, abandoned in Vietnam, were airlifted back here some decade-plus later.

This isn't that, but Tran-- who, I'm given to understand, was discovered by his publisher at artists' alley at the San Diego Con -- tells of homecomings here too, in the sense of people reconciling themselves to who and and where it is they come from, and just as importantly, where they find themselves at now. Here it's a multi-generational task, not just a young person's. Or as he notes, "a family's journey."

A journey where "home" is often the hardest thing to find. But this is fine take-along reading for your rucksack, when you're on similar travels of your own. Or sitting exactly where you're at, right now.

Burton & Swinburne Adventures #1 by Mark Hodder

After finishing up my January column, I had a couple more alternate history titles drop in my lap, and after I read the description of Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, it took about two seconds for me to dive right in: “Sir Richard Francis Burton, an explorer, a linguist, a scholar, and a swordsman. His reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead.” Richard Burton? Seriously? Really? Burton was one of the greatest explorers in British history (and they have a lot of explorers to choose from). He was brilliant and fearless and sexy, and right up until he settled into a life of domesticity and, well, dullness, he lived larger than most of us can imagine. It’s not so much that his later years were bad ones, just that they weren’t as exciting as his earlier ones, and when you read about him you have to wonder, what if. Mark Hodder clearly wondered the same thing, and he dropped Burton into an alternate history title that doesn’t just assume times have changed, but makes that change a plot point that is the tip of a mystery of epic proportions.

What you have is a creature right out of B-movie science fiction who appears in the streets and countryside of Victorian England to grope young women and leave them shocked and/or permanently damaged. The creature gets into an altercation with Burton, making several statements that suggest they know each other, and then vanishes, leaving the explorer alarmed and shaken. He barely has time to register what has happened before he is summoned by the Prime Minister and offered a job working unusual cases that fall outside traditional police work. It seems a pack of wolfmen (not what you think) are attacking people in the poorer sections of the London. Burton sets out to investigate and soon enough, as we know it will, all hell breaks loose.

It doesn’t take long for the reader to grasp some serious differences in Hodder’s London. Most noticeably, this is not Victorian London, as Victoria herself is dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet in 1840 (in real life the assassin was unsuccessful). In the years that followed, there has been some minor political upheaval and a ton of technological and religious upheaval. As Booklist noted in its review, Hodder includes “steam-driven velocipedes, rotorchairs, verbally abusive messenger parrots, a pneumatic rail system, and robotic street cleaners.” Throw in the Libertines, Darwin, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, inventor Isambard Kingdom Brunel, some engineered messenger dogs, and a ton of other intriguing characters real and imagined (Oscar Wilde, newspaper boy!) and the history and action converge in an enormously compelling way. But the heart of the story remains the question of Spring Heeled Jack, and what he is hunting for. As Burton gets ever closer to answers, readers will find themselves surprised in numerous ways -- all of which come together in a fantastic ending that promises more adventure in the future. (The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man is due out at the end of the month.) I loved the thrills and chills, and my inner historian geeked out all over to see Burton and Swinburne together (Hodder hews quite closely to Burton’s biography, here which raises the novel’s impact several notches), but it’s the way the mystery comes together that kept me turning the pages. Start this one only if you have some time on your hands; it won’t be easy to put it down.

Crossposted at Bookslut - more on Clockwork Man here.

Tristan: Strangely Modern Medieval

Wagner’s operas don’t exactly burst with action. For all the battles and dragons and curses, they often boil down to a lot of standing around and singing. Tristan and Isolde is the pinnacle of this tendency, as frustrated love is sublimated into long-form meditations on Schopenhaurian dichotomies placed musically atop the tension of unresolving harmonies. Lots of content, but little action. So it is surprising to find in the source material, Gottfried von Strassburg’s medieval epic Tristan, not high-minded philosophy, but an unexpected blend of King Arthur and Terry Gilliam.

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in all Fifty States

When Pete Jordan started college, "Other classmates talked about becoming lawyers. Still others aspired to being accountants and dentists. When asked of my own plans... What I wanted was to be free of a job; to travel the country and have friends nationwide whom I'd visit. So my standard answer was, 'I'm just gonna come crash on your floor when you're a successful lawyer/accountant/dentist.'

"It was a claim many took as a joke. Years later, they'd discover firsthand that I wasn't kidding."

After his rude mouth cost him his college bookstore job, Pete worked at a burger joint, and was demoted to dishwasher fairly quickly. "Why the others despised this chore was beyond me."

When he moved to Kentucky, and found another dishwashing job, "hungover, I dragged my sore body and aching head over to Perkins, managing to arrive only twenty minutes late."

[Working at UPS, he was told, "You have a lack of enthusiasm for your work."

"Enthusiasm? I picked up smooshed boxes off the floor. What was there to be excited about?"]

"... Karl asked for my half of the rent...

"'Take it easy... I'm gonna find a job right now.'

"If I wasn't even qualified to pick up packages off a floor, then I definitely wasn't qualified for any of those jobs that demanded 'experience.'"

"A sign in a ... window caught my attention: 'Dishwasher Wanted.'

"The boss-guy asked if I could start in the morning. I could.

"That was it. I was hired."...

"Karl refused to believe that I'd found work in only ten minutes."

Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes

Eric and Sarah Byrnes (always with both names) have been friends since Eric was a fat kid and Sarah Byrnes was... that girl with the burns on her face. Through his involvement with swimming, Eric has slimmed down but he still loyal to the one friend he had during hard times. But now Sarah Byrnes is lying in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. It frustrates Eric that he's losing his friend and he seeks out a former mutual enemy for answers. When Eric hears that her facial scarring wasn't the accident she claims, he confronts Sarah Byrnes in the hospital and learns that she has been faking her catatonic state out of fear of her father.

It's heavy stuff, gritty and real, which makes it both challenging and rewarding for readers. Crutcher likes to populate his stories with underdog athletes because not every kid on the team is a star but they try just as hard, sometimes harder, that those it comes more naturally to. In Eric we see a kid who hated being fat enough to do something about it, but would then willingly give that hard-earned weight loss up to maintain his connection with his friend Sarah. It's that dedication and devotion that gives Eric his depth and makes him more than a character, it makes him real.

The Half-Life of Planets by Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin

A book that's a version of "He Said, She Said," The Half-Life of Planets is told in chapters that alternate between the perspective of Liana, a science-minded girl who is dismayed at having been called a slut, and that of Hank, a talented guitarist who happens to have Asperger's syndrome. The characters meet in the hospital's ladies room, where Liana is licking her wounds while waiting for her father to get some test results when Hank bursts in (by mistake, obviously) because he's spilled an energy drink in his crotch. As "meet-cutes" go, it doesn't actually get much better than this, really.

Liana and Hank meet again at the snack machine, and strike up something that looks like a friendship - or maybe a flirtation. Liana thinks Hank is merely intense and broody (a classic musician stereotype, if you will, and one that she digs), whereas Hank can't help noticing Liana's breasts. Oh - and he notices that Liana actually talks with him, an experience that Hank isn't quite used to. When you can't read social cues well, it can be hard to figure out how people expect you to react and interact, after all.

Rikers High -- Paul Volponi

Some advice from 17-year-old Martin Stokes on surviving Rikers High:

Forget about your homeboys. They mostly cut you loose when you're locked down. Mine did. My two best friends from my block, dudes I grew up with, hadn't visited once. I don't even mention their names to Mom anymore. It's like they don't exist to me now. Only people that really care about you, like your close family, would go through that kind of trouble just to see you.

Martin's been at the Rikers Island jail for almost sixth months, pending trial for a committing a crime that he didn't even know was a crime. His court date has been delayed for the third time, and his face has just been sliced open -- a cut that requires 53 stitches to close -- in a fight that he wanted no part of.

He's ready to go home. But now he's got two more weeks at Rikers until his next court date, and hopefully -- hopefully -- then he'll be headed home. Rikers High is the story of those two weeks, and everything that Martin witnesses and experiences during that time.

Rikers High is a compelling account of day-to-day life in a juvenile detention center -- and if it feels authentic, it should: in writing it, Paul Volponi drew on his six years teaching at Rikers Island. The book never seems Ripped From the Headlines or in any way exploitative, and while there are adults (and inmates) who behave abhorrently at moments, I didn't feel that any of the characters came off as two-dimensional. Especially given that the narrative was entirely from Martin's point of view.

There are wide ranges of pacing and tone as Martin counts down the days to his next court date. At moments, seconds seem longer than hours, while at others, time goes by so fast that there almost isn't enough time to process what's happening; sometimes, Martin has himself completely in control, stone-faced and silent, while at others... maybe not so much. All that said, there was only one storyline that really hit me emotionally -- but the one that did hit me hard.

Definitely recommended to fans of Monster, After and other stories about incarceration.

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Book source: ILLed through my library.

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Cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom.