Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater by Jean-Claude Forest

I like to center the positive, as much as I can, so I'll start out by saying: this book has a single, consistent plot throughout, and isn't a fix-up of disjointed stories like the first book. It still bounces around more than a little, since I think that's the way creator Jean-Claude Forest liked to work, but it's a roughly 80-page comics story from the early 1970s, which is earlier than I thought we'd see something consistent at that length.

So that is commendable, and interesting, and noteworthy.

Barbarella, Book 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater is still a Barbarella story: everything I mentioned about the first book is still here, to the same degree. It's very talky, and the talk is bafflegab most of the time. The world-building is a weird combination of overly baroque, quirkily uninformed, and entirely nonexistent. Characters are mostly ciphers who do things to make the plot advance another page or three - even Barbarella is, at best, a caricature mid-century "woman" subject to massive mood swings, from lust to anger to sadness, each one overwhelming at the time, in the standard pop-culture "Dames! What'ya gonna do?" laziness.

This time out, we begin with Barbarella as impresario of a circus - a sexy circus, in ways the narrative emphasizes but resolutely refuses to describe or show - in a milieu that seems to be just the solar system, though one filled with "worlds" (I assume habitats and terraformed moons, though I frankly doubt Forest thought that far). This is very different from the galactic scope of the first book's opening, but don't mind that, because a water-breathing man with a teleportation device has come to join the circus, for murky motives, and that will send the circus, for insufficient reasons, to "the obscure worlds," which "supposedly evolved in another space-time."

Like most of Barbarella, this is nonsense, but Forest commits to it: not just regular nonsense, but nonsense compounded and extended into a fantastic frothy edifice, by the time he's done.

Again, the bulk of the action takes place on one world: the spaceship Barbarella and her merry band of circus performers take to Spectra is important as both a method of travel and a plot token, but once they do the bafflegab aligning of time-streams and Barbarella is on Spectra, space-travel is off the menu for the rest of the book.

As in the first book, there are factions with silly names fighting over Maguffins with silly names and male leaders that Barbarella can fuck to get her way, as much as she wants anything in particular beside getting to fuck them. It probably all could make sense to the devoted mind, with enough study, several large sheets of graph paper, and gallons of strong coffee. But the point is that events happen, tables turn, Barbarella goes through all of her emotions (and the beds of most of the other main characters), and everything gets back to something like normal in the end.

Given the time-dilation effects, it should be several hundred years later in the normal universe at the end of the book, and there's a shrug in that direction, but who knows? As far as I can tell, this was the end of the Barbarella stories, and they stopped just as coherently as they began. (Which is: not a whole lot.)

Bottom line: there are very talky, confusing, goofy French comics, whose point was to be "sexy" in a way that will look quaint or pass unnoticed for most modern readers. Forest's art is dynamic and interesting; if you can see it large, and fight your way through the far-too-many captions covering it, that's probably the most intriguing aspect of Barbarella these days.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I'm usually not one for the positive, heartwarming books, so I apologize if I start taking random unfair potshots at this one. It is positive; it's smoothly and engagingly written; I enjoyed reading it from beginning to end; and I only deduced the exact ending about 20% of the way into it.

But there are a lot of books where you know how they're going to end, aren't there? Every tragedy, most comedies, and a whole lot of drama, especially in genre fiction. Sometimes I think that's what makes a book popular: that the average reader is confident they already know the ending, and relaxes to let the author deliver that to them.

The Midnight Library is an afterlife fantasy; it's probably Matt Haig's best-known and most popular novel. It was a Good Morning America book-club pick, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and has three pages of laudatory quotes at the beginning of the copy I read. It was also published in 2020, a year when I think a lot of people were not just looking for an uplifting book with a predictable ending, but one that let them think about all the different ways their lives could have gone.

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, living in the provincial city of Bedford in England. She never became any of the things she at one point thought she might: not an Olympic-class swimmer, not the frontwoman of a famous rock band, not studying glaciers in Norway, not living with her best friend in sunny Australia, not married to the guy she practically left at the altar, not working in an animal shelter, not anything big, not anything impressive.

Instead, she has one weekly piano student (a teenage boy), she works in the local music shop, and that's about it.

One day, it all breaks. Her cat dies in the street. The music shop owner fires her. She forgets the lesson and loses her one student. Her never-husband sends pestering texts; her brother has stopped talking to her; her former best friend is living her best life in Australia. She decides she can't go on. She doesn't go on.

And she wakes up at the door of what seems to be an infinite library, where it is eternally midnight. Inside, she meets what seems to be Mrs. Elm, a librarian who was very kind to her as a child. And Mrs. Elm tells her the library is filled with books about Nora's life - one very heavy, very painful Book of Regrets, and an infinite number of green-covered stories of other lives. She can pick any one of the green books and fall into that life: if it's right for her, she'll settle in there and forget about the Midnight Library eventually. If it's not right, she'll bounce back and choose again.

Most of the book is made up of Nora going one by one through those major regrets and trying out the life where she did the thing: married Dan and helped run a rural pub, moved to Australia with her friend Izzy, kept swimming and entered the Olympics, stayed with the band and made it big, studied climatology and went to Svalbard with a research team, worked at the animal shelter instead of the music shop, agreed to a date with that nice surgeon who asked her once.

Of course, all of those lives have some good things about them. In a few, she's globally famous. In just about all of them, she's in a physically better place than her root life. But there's something wrong about all of them - her brother is dead, her relationship is sour, or she's just not that person after years of divergence. All of those lives are different because of a choice she made - but they're different in other ways, too. Her choices don't shape the whole world, just send her down different paths - she can't choose the perfect life, because it's not all down to her choices.

(You have probably figured out the ending by now, too. It is the obvious ending.)

She meets another jumper along the way, another person going through multiple lives. He's happy to have the infinite variety, and doesn't think he will ever pick one. Nora isn't happy with that idea, and also has been getting increasingly ominous warnings from Mrs. Elm when she bounces back: she probably can't keep going forever. In her root life, she's lying comatose in her grotty flat, suffering an overdose - time might not be moving in the Midnight Library, but it is moving somewhere, and eventually it will move enough that she will not be alive anymore.

The Book of Regrets gets smaller and lighter as she goes along and realizes she could have been unhappy in those other lives as well - maybe not as unhappy, maybe not unhappy in the same ways, but none of them are perfect.

And, eventually, Nora does need to choose the one life she will hold on to. And it is the one that it has to be.

I don't want to belabor the point: this is a very nice novel that ends nicely. Haig is positive and thoughtful, creating the kind of book that makes you feel happier when you're done - which is often denigrated in literary circles. It is maybe more than a little bit obvious, but many of the best lessons in life are obvious: we all know we're supposed to sit up straight, treat others as we want to be treated, and eat our vegetables. Midnight Library is like that.

Spy Superb by Matt Kindt

Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career - but he's found a new take this time.

Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional - but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than he was in his previous stories of spycraft.

This, instead, is a take on the James Bond idea: the suave, omnicompetent operative who can go anywhere, do anything, and always wins out for his side. (Which is, as it must be, our side, the side of freedom and democracy and English-speaking peoples.) Like so many other people doing James Bond takes over the past few decades - most obviously Austin Powers - Kindt makes that idea an obvious fake: no human being could actually do that, so what's the real story?

In Kindt's version - and this is explained in the first pages; no major spoilers here - the "spy superb" was constructed from the beginning in WWII as the perfect operative, by the fictional Half-Huit organization (co-run by the US OSS and their French equivalent). There was an original Spy Superb, but he died, stupidly, in his first mission, an immediate failure.

No matter: the organization realized they didn't need a Spy Superb: they needed the idea of a Spy Superb, and a series of patsies to do the actual work - each one handled by career spies, generally given one small task to do, usually not even aware they were doing spycraft, and often liquidated afterward for maximum secrecy. Then all of the successes of Half-Huit would be attributed to their immortal, unstoppable premier agent.

Fast forward several decades. The most recent Spy Superb has been killed by someone unknown. And a disk he had, containing details of all the previous Spies Superb and other damaging details of the program, is on the loose. So all of those other spy agencies could learn the secret: it was all a trick.

To respond, the masters of Half-Huit activate the most delusional patsy possible: Jay, a wannabe novelist who is the guy on the cover. And their adversaries, sensing something big, send their best operatives: a Russian codenamed "Roche Chambeaux" and a Chinese woman who turns out to be a double (triple? quadruple?) agent, to kill what they still assume is a deadly super-agent.

Jay, of course, believes he is the best at whatever he does: he's the kind of guy who mansplains absolutely anything at the drop of a hat, even though (no: entirely because) he knows nothing about it. He wanders through assassination attempts and globe-hopping adventure, surviving due to luck and his unassailable belief that he's actually good at all these things.

There's a good fight scene early where Jay accidentally kills three highly-trained Russian agents in his kitchen, just by trying to talk to them. After that, the random luck quiets down: I would have liked to see more of that, more of the clearly ludicrous silliness. Kindt instead mostly plays the action scenes straight, having Jay accompanied by a competent agent who wants him alive for most of the rest of the book, and so Jay mostly survives because of someone else's ability rather than his own stupid incompetence.

That's my overall take on Spy Superb: it's fun, but doesn't go quite as big or silly as it could. Jay is an idiot: that's very clear. But we only see his idiocy save him once or twice - it could have been a lot funnier if it happened more often, more obviously, more blatantly.

There's no reason there can't be a sequel, though: even if Kindt doesn't want to use Jay again, the concept means there will always be more Spies Superb, someone else even dumber and less connected to reality. And what we have here is funny - and having it in the same scratchy, rough art style that Kindt uses for his serious spy stories makes it that much funnier.

Portions for Foxes: Laura Stevenson and the Cans

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

One of the great tricks across all media is the tonal mismatch - the chipper fairy-tale tone telling stories of woe and despair, the bright smash-cut movie all about ennui. Done right, it throws the material into higher contrast - sometimes with irony, sometimes a blunt honesty.

This song does something very similar, with a tinkling, cheery opening and mostly conversational tone, as Laura Stevenson (and her backing band the Cans) talk directly to some specific listener, telling what I picture as a girl of ten or so that she needs to be brave and strong for her family.

The song is The Healthy One. That's who Stevenson is singing to. And the title gives away the story, just a bit - if there's only one "Healthy One," what does that mean for the others?

Stevenson doesn't say, exactly. We don't know the timeframe. She implies she may not be singing about today. But the repeated chorus at the end gives us a hint, as the music swells and she belts it out:

And you will live long
You will bury them all in the ground
And your body will grow
You will bury them all

This is a song from 2011. I don't think it had a vogue nine years later - it was too much on the nose for right then. But more time has passed, those of us left are living long. I guess we're the healthy ones, for what it's worth.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 26, 2024

I have one book this week: I bought it from That Internet Retailer soon after I hit the end of the previous Jack Vance omnibus I was working through. I suppose I'm now re-reading Vance semi-seriously, but I'll have to see how far I get. (He wrote a lot of books over a long time.)

Planet of Adventure collects four Vance novels from the late 1960s, a series all set on one planet during (I think) the Oikumene period of Vance's loose future history. A human ship crash-lands on a far alien world, and the sole survivor makes his way across that planet to escape, finding several strange and warlike alien races along the way.

This omnibus is from 1991, and it's a bit odd to see something from the very dawn of my career in the SF field still in print in the same edition all this time later. But, then again, what would you need to change? The series was long-complete even then. And it does look like the cover changed sometime in the past thirty years, from a somewhat blockier, 80s-look Tor font to the current thin lettering.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Character-Building

Even among the summer people there are tensions. When you put enough affluent white people into a closed system, they will turn on each other eventually. That same summer, my wife signed up both of our children for lessons at the nearby yacht club - sailing for our daughter, rowing for our son, She did this because she had taken sailing lessons there herself as a child, and she hated it. She felt out of place and under-rich and scared, and I guess she wanted our children to have similar trauma. It worked: my son got bullied.

 - John Hodgman, Vacationland, p. 165

Quote of the Week: Inevitabilities

Her second favorite game is Go. She loves the feel of the stones. Each time she picks one up, she lets her fingers tell her how much has worn away under Oscar's fingers, under her own,. They are making the smooth stones smoother. There is one black stone with a fracture point, a weakness invisible to the eye, nearly across the middle. She loses track of it sometimes, then finds it again by touch. Put enough pressure on it, and it would break in two.

It will break one day: no matter.

 - Kelly Link, "The Game of Smash and Recovery," p.148 in White Cat, Black Dog

Vacationland by John Hodgman

I have to start off this time by talking about book packaging. The point of a book's outsides - title, cover art, any descriptions or quotes - are to attract readers and tell them what kind of book it is. For some writers, particularly those who write the same thing in vast quantities, just putting that author's name large and using a standard look is enough - make sure the title is in the right vein, some glowing quotes and copy that says what the deal is this time, and you're done.

Most writers aren't at that level. For most writers - and I want to emphasize that this includes many, many writers who have already been bestsellers once or repeatedly - the packaging needs to work harder than that. Any writer who changes focus, or has more than one mode can be in particular peril of being stuck into the wrong bucket by random readers. For a very banal example: Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of books. His publishers made it very clear when he had a new SF novel; those looked nothing like the many non-fiction books he also wrote.

John Hodgman wrote a weirdzoid trilogy to begin his literary career - three books full of fake facts, bizarre stories, and endless footnotes. They were like nothing else anyone did, and they had complex, wordy covers that presented their wacky nature well. They were bestsellers.

A few years later, Hodgman had a fourth book, in a different mode. So it had a different look - so far so good.

But let me ask a question. Take that cover above. You see the title and subtitle: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches. The back cover has a long laudatory quote about what a great writer Hodgman is from Michael Chabon. The inside has three pages of quotes, all about how funny it is. At no point is there any other indication of what Hodgman is writing about.

Do you think this book is:

A. Another big complex collection of fake facts

B. A touching memoir of Hodgman's mother's death and how that changed his life

C. A collection of stories of Hodgman going to various odd places and probably not enjoying himself there

Pencils down. Which would you choose?

I thought it was C. I vaguely avoided this book for seven years because I thought it was another "I can't enjoy myself on vacation" book by a rich white guy. (It sort-of is, actually, but in a very different way.)

It's actually B, though I'm cheating a bit. If I were marketing this book, I'd call it something like "a memoir of family history, growing older, and summers spent in rural Massachusetts and coastal Maine."

The thing you absolutely need to know, and the marketers behind this book scandalously forgot to mention, is that "Vacationland" is the slogan on Maine's license plates. Hodgman means it ironically - we all figured it was ironic somehow, but the specifics of the irony are important.

Vacationland has a very handsome package that completely fails to explain what the book is or why someone would want to read it, other than "Hey, you know John Hodgman, right?" or "lots of people say this is really funny!" Those are two half-decent reasons, admittedly - but the family history bit is more central, and more resonant for more readers.

It physically pains me to see book-marketing bobbled like this, which is why I'm wasting all this time on the packaging.

Oh, sure, the book is funny and thoughtful - it's apparently the distilled version of a series of stand-up shows Hodgman did in the mid-Teens, which may explain the structure (lots of relatively short essays; two big sections about basically the summer house in Massachusetts and the summer house in Maine, plus interstitial material). That much is true. But unless you're the kind of reader who completely buys celebrity blurbs - and I would argue a John Hodgman reader is the opposite kind of reader to that - you will want more details to believe that.

Vacationland is inherently about being John Hodgman - he's always been his own best material, and he knows that. This is what he wrote when he ran out of fake facts and needed to dig into his own life for material. The title is not inappropriate, but it's about living in places, not just visiting them, and the connections Hodgman and his family have to specific places - the parts of Massachusetts where he spent his summers as a kid, the coast of Maine where his now-wife did the same.

And it really is as funny as the blurbs say. I don't know if you'll believe me any more than you believe George R.R. Martin or Neil Gaiman or Sarah Vowell or Jon Stewart (all of whom are quoted in the book), but I guess we all agree, which is nice.

But more importantly, it's not just funny, which a lot of the quotes try to get into. It's funny about real things, in an honest way. Oh, Hodgman will always have that wild-hair goofy streak - the fake-facts mines are always at his back - but this time, he's in a clearer emotional register and telling the truth as best he can. It's a shame his editor and book designer didn't actually try to say that.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy by Stan Sakai

The fourth collection of Stan Sakai's long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long - some would say "epic" - storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It's largely the "gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters" arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for tween readers tone as the rest of Usagi. [1]

In the interests of clarity, I should note that "Dragon" is a metaphor and "Conspiracy" is overblown: this is one feudal lord, conspiring with only his own lord and minions, planning in secret to launch a rebellion that could, potentially, maybe, topple the Shogun and would definitely knock off a couple of his local rivals and give him much more power and influence. "Dragon Bellow" is an artsy way of saying he's going to use guns to do that.

Thus Usagi Yojimbo Book 4: The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy. There are basically two intersecting stories, neither one of which initially involves Usagi, our rabbit-samurai hero.

In the main plot, good-guy (super-literally: he is drawn as a baby panda) Lord Noriyuki thinks his neighbor Lord Tamikuro is up to something mischievous. Tamikuro is a supporter of Lord Hikiji, the big bad of the series, who is continually scheming to depose the shogun. (Everyone seems to know this - perhaps except for the shogun.)

So Noriyuki sends a delegation to visit Tamikuro, led by the female samurai Tomoe Ame, who Usagi met and almost had a romance with in a previous story. And of course Tamikuro is scheming, having gathered a large stockpile of guns, and will be attacking Noriyuki any day now. Tomoe attempts to get back to her lord with the big news, but is captured.

Meanwhile, the ronin Gen (a big, mostly honorable rhino) is chasing the blind swords-pig Ino for the bounty on the latter's head. Both of them had been occasional allies of Usagi in the past, and they're heading through this same territory right now.

Usagi gets pulled into the story as he's also traveling through this region on foot: he sees Tamikuro's forces riding off with a captured Tomoe and tries to follow. But a rabbit on foot is no match for multiple...cats?...on horseback, so he's quickly left behind. He did hear her call out something about warning Noriyuki, and is torn between saving the damsel from unknown peril or warning the lord "hey, your samurai damsel is in some kind of peril." While pondering, he wanders into what had been a secret ninja village - they're like carpenter ants, there's one behind every hillside in this region - to find all the inhabitants had been slaughtered.

Quick background note, to explain what readers learned in bwa-ha-ha style gloating dialogue among the villains: this particular group of ninjas is opposed to Hijiki, for whatever reason, and has been spying on Tamikuro, trying to figure out his plans. So Tamikuro had his men slaughter their village.

Anyway, Usagi is an honorable rabbit, so he drags all of the dead bodies into one hut, in hopes some kin will eventually bury them. He is witnessed leaving the village, with not a little blood on him, by Shingen, a leader of those ninja, who has the reasonable misapprehension that Usagi was responsible. So he starts following Usagi to take his vengeance.

After more than a little swordfighting and yelling at each other, the good guys not in Tamikuro's prison - to sum up: Usagi, Shingen, Gen, and Ino - meet, work out their differences at least temporarily, and band together to assault Tamikuro Fortress with a force of those handy ninja.

There are battles, there are deaths, there is a conspiracy foiled. But, in the middle-grade friendly standard for the series, no recurring characters are harmed in the melee. As usual, I'm finding Usagi Yojimbo to be well-constructed, beautifully drawn, and compellingly told - but inherently a watered-down story for young readers. It definitely has a niche, but I'm finding that niche increasingly restrictive as the story goes on.

[1] See my posts on books one, two, and three for more details on the series, if you're interested.

Fly By Night by Tara O'Connor

Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It's not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that's what you're doing.

For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and a thriller/mystery plot, the reader needs to remember that the characters have to solve the dangerous problem themselves. Sure, they might be in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a preserve of ecological interest to at least a national if not international audience. And they might also be right in between two massive media markets full of reporters who would be happy to make a lot of noise about this particular issue. But adults sweeping in - even if the teens strategize and find those adults - is not what this kind of story is about. So I really shouldn't have spent so much time thinking about the ways these characters could have done any of that.

My foibles aside, Tara O'Connor's Fly By Night is a thrill ride with heart, a few good fakeouts, and an ending that goes big when it has to. I grabbed it randomly from the YA GN shelves at my library - it's set in New Jersey, where I live, and that sealed the deal - but I've never read any of O'Connor's work before.

Dee Ramirez's twin sister Beth has disappeared mysteriously, in the small Pine Barrens town where they both spent their childhood. After their parents divorced about six years ago - in middle school; the girls are high school seniors now - Dee went with her father to live in a new town, Westbury (and eventually with a new wife) while Beth stayed with their mother. O'Connor is a bit shaky on some details, both here and later - how exactly did Beth go missing? have the girls really not been in touch at all for six years? what actually is the name of this town? - but it works, psychologically. 

(I also initially thought that Dee was the older sister, and her talk about graduating meant she was nearly done with college - the twin thing isn't mentioned until a number of pages in. Fly By Night trips over its own feet a few times like that.)

Anyway, Dee is back in her childhood home, with her ex-cop (or maybe still currently cop, somewhere else?) dad and something-or-other mom, as they squabble with each other over everything. (They got divorced for a reason. Mom is a bit passive, but Dad comes across as a minor-league asshole a lot of the time.) Dee is going to snoop around at school to find out what happened to Beth, even as a police investigation continues. She meets back up with her old friend Tobi, and spends some time with Beth's boyfriend Lucas, who has a gigantic "Suspect Me!" sign on him but she still goes out into the Barrens with him alone.

At the same time, there's a big evil company - Redline Oil, recently taken over by your standard evil businessman, Marshall Monroe - intending to run a big pipeline through the Pine Barrens. It's not clear where this pipeline is going or why - I gather there is actually a similar pipeline proposal in the real world, so maybe it's a big natural gas feeder from Philly to Atlantic City or something, but O'Connor just focuses on Big Evil Scary Polluting Horrible Thing - and the local students, led by teacher Mrs. Ruby, are predictably organized against it. Monroe more-or-less admits that he's buying his way into this project, and we assume it must have some expected profit for him, but it's mostly "I'm rich and powerful, and I want to do this, so I will buy it, and the rest of you can go pound sand."

(Frankly, everyone seems to be against it, because it is cartoonishly evil. We have a couple of scenes of board meetings, and even the random adults don't seem to want any of this.)

The where-is-Beth plot and the stop-the-pipeline plot are never as connected as they feel like they should be. They intersect, sort-of, out in the Barrens, but they diverge in the end. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned this before, but the Jersey Devil is real - this is a supernatural story. There is a big confrontation in the woods at the end, which for dramatic purposes happens right in the middle of the prom - this is the kind of town so far away from anything that they have the prom in the high school gym, which I didn't think was a thing in NJ anymore - and there are dramatic revelations about the evil CEO and a big fight.

At this point, modern media actually becomes relevant, after I spent three hundred pages having the argument at the top of this post in my head. But there is a moderately happy ending.

Fly By Night looks gorgeous, has strong naturalistic dialogue, interesting and distinctive character designs, a strong sense of place, and a lot of ideas whirling around inside it. I didn't think it quite pulled all of those elements together as well as it should have, but it does a decent job, and it's a solid environmental thriller for teens, especially those with any connection to Jersey.

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is one of the best writers of our time: full stop. I can say more - I will say more - but I'll start with that bedrock. She's already one of the greats, from the work she's already produced. (And I say that knowing her first novel is fairly new in the world, and I haven't read it yet.)

White Cat, Black Dog was her new story collection last year, gathering seven stories from roughly the previous decade (including, as is traditional, one brand-new piece). Her previous collection was Get In Trouble, back in 2015; I know I read her earlier books but they were long enough ago that I might have read them for work, or just before this blog.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. It took me a long time to break the habit of writing about books like that, but short fiction always wants to drop me back into it:

Fantasy short-story collection, all based loosely on fairy tales, mostly reprint.

The White Cat's Divorce - A rich man's usual three unnamed sons are sent on various errands to win his fortune, over the course of several years. We follow the youngest son, who...

and so on drearily.

These are precise stories, told uncannily well. When I read these days, I keep an eye out for interesting passages to quote here on the blog - with this collection, I stopped and started dozens of times, wondering if I could quote some particularly devastating moment. Mostly, I couldn't - to explain the moment, it would have taken too much detail, too much explanation. The hallmark of a great short story is that it contains just the right words - no extras, no fluff, nothing extraneous. Link does that, over and over, here.

The collection does start with a white cat and ends with a black dog. Like so many other things, Link means that both literally and figuratively. A word or phrase will rarely have only one purpose in a Link story.

Look: just read it. It's a short book. It's been on multiple award shortlists and "best of" lists. Link has the narrative power of genre, the puzzling insight of fable, and the cuttingly pure prose of literature, all in one writer. You'll thank me afterward.

Portions for Foxes: Ellen Starski

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Another song of romantic conflict - this time out, it's Honey I'm Not Him by Ellen Starski, from her 2018 record When the Peonies Played for the Ants.

It's one of those great songs, in one clear voice, spoken to another person - the wife talking to the other woman, what seems to be late one night, out in the darkness.

Hey I heard you've been hangin' round my home
girl you better find another man to adore
the stars shine brightly on my pistol and this whiskey sure tastes fine

I love the directness of it, with that quiet country "Cheatin' Banjo" (from the album's credits) behind her voice.

And the title - the whole chorus it's part of - is just perfect:

Find yourself a lily white church
And ask forgiveness from your sin
I'm sure God will forgive you
But Honey I'm not Him

Cheating songs are legion, but "I know you're cheating, and it's time to stop" songs less so - this one takes over that territory for itself and does a brilliant job of it. The country/folky sound is just perfect for the material, as is Starski's quiet, slightly affected singing tone here.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: I Must Be TOO SMART To Be a Novelist!

The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels. Of course some degree of intelligence and education and overall knowledge is necessary to turn one out. I myself am not entirely lacking in those areas. At least I think so. Probably. But if someone were to ask me point-blank "Do you think you're smart enough" I'd have a hard time sounding confident.

 - Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation, pp.9-10

Quote of the Week: Audience Support

Watching a fight on television has always seemed to me a poor substitute for being there. For one thing, you can't tell the fighters what to do. When I watch a fight, I like to study one boxer's problem, solve it, and then communicate my solution vocally. On occasion my advice is disregarded, as when I tell a man to stay away from the other fellow's left hand and he doesn't, but in such cases I assume that he hasn't heard my counsel, or that his opponent has, and has acted on it. Some fighters hear better and are more suggestible than others - for example, the pre-television Joe Louis. "Let him have it Joe!" I would yell whenever I saw him fight, and sooner or later he would let the other fellow have it.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.15 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir

I've always liked surprises in my reading - picking up a book with very little idea of what will be in it, and seeing where it goes. That's hard to do a lot of the time, since books try very hard to explain themselves - that's how they attract readers, after all. But some of my best memories, especially of my time at the the book clubs, was picking up a book knowing little more than "this is a medium-future SF book coming from Tor in April, by a writer I'm not familiar with" - and then finding something wonderful.

Not to bury the lede, but: that just happened again.

I grabbed Secret Passages: 1985-1986 at a library, pulling it off the shelf for reasons I can't really explain fully. It was a standalone, it was tall so it stood out, and maybe the deep burgundy spine helped, too. But I'd never heard of the creator Axelle Lenoir, and the book itself was a bit vague - it's some kind of memoir, it says, of the author's life when she was a kid. Something about trees. Something about the death of a cosmic twin - I had a theory about that, which I suspect now is true, but it doesn't really come up in this this book, so I'll leave it there. Stories should be left to tell themselves in their own time.

Secret Passages might become a series: Lenoir covers barely a year here, and doesn't get to the central event she sets up at the beginning. I hope so: there's a lot of great material here, and a lot of room to go forward with it. I don't think this story is anywhere near done.

Lenoir, in the present day, is our narrator: she's going to tell the story of her childhood, all of her big secrets, to lead up to the moment she signposts on the first page: the death of her cosmic twin, her self in another universe, a man we barely see in this book, who died when they both were thirty. That's, I assume, going to be the central spine of the larger Secret Passages project, but this book is about her first year of school and about her fears.

That all sounds big and weighty and potentially dull. But Secret Passages is zippy and energetic and nutty, like a hyperactive six-year-old with more imagination than she knows what to do with. The weighty stuff is all background, or flavor, or moments - this is mostly the story of a very, very square peg finding herself in a round hole and what she does in that spot.

So she attempts to run away into the forest to hide from the first day of school. (That doesn't work; she's afraid of the forest.) She pays very little attention in class, being full of ideas in her own head, and keeps making wrong assumptions. (The first was that "school" would be just one day.) She thinks her parents are aliens - well, the adult Lenoir draws them as aliens, so let's leave that as a "maybe" to figure out later. Her brothers - older David, younger Antonio - are wacky and goofy in their own ways, with little Tonio seemingly haunted by a demon - or maybe that's just his imaginary friend...who is also actually a demon.

Little Axelle is central to all of the chaos, and her adult self is our narrator, but it's a wider world - as little Axelle sees it, of course, which means confused and subtly wrong in spots and full of frightening things. (Axelle was a very frightened child, she makes clear - the forest near her home was the biggest fear, but there were may more.)

This book covers that first school year, up through the summer afterward, culminating in telling a recurring nightmare that Axelle started having at that time - and had for years to come. Again, the book is mostly funny, but can drop into a more dramatic mode instantly, the way that kids' lives can switch from silly to dead-serious at any time. Lenoir has an amazing control of tone here, both in her captions and drawings - the book has a loose, I'm-just-telling-you-this-story-as-it-comes-to-me air, but it's clearly much more carefully constructed and arranged, the product of a comics creator with a bunch of projects behind her and a confidence in her own powers.

(This is even more impressive when you realize that Lenoir's previous works - most of them, at least; I'm not sure where the dividing line was - were in her native French; she's from Quebec and one of several unstated things in this book is that everyone is actually speaking French. This book doesn't credit a translator, but her previous books in English did - that doesn't prove anything, but I think it means this is Lenoir's first work created in English.)

I was hugely impressed with Secret Passages. I'm going to be looking to see what else Lenoir has done - but, even more so, what I want is Secret Passages 1987 or whatever comes next. This is a big, impressive work of comics memoir from a creator with a lot more to say, and we should be in for a few more books equally strong.