Oh my god, this book was terrible.

I don’t even quite know why I was reading this one.  Every couple of months, I throw a handful of books on my ebook “wishlist” with the Brooklyn Public Library, and then when I find myself in search of something new to read, I go look over that list and see what’s available.  I don’t know, as a result, why I first put this book on the list.  (Was it a recommendation? Did it show up on a suggested reading list? Did I just see the title somewhere and grab it because I’m interested in books about Africa? I have no idea.)  In any event, it’s terrible.  I finished it mostly just to see if it ever stopped being terrible.  (answer: no.)

So, the book.  Corinne Hoffman was  a twenty-something Swiss woman, on holiday in Kenya with her boyfriend, when she saw a young Maasai man at a ferry platform and became immediately fascinated by his proud exotic beauty.  She left her boyfriend,  sold her small dressmaking company back in Switzerland, moved to Kenya, found and courted the Maasai man, and married him.  She lived with him for a while in his village, they had a daughter, they moved to a major city to try and run a business selling tourist crap to tourists, and finally she gave up on the whole Kenya/Maasai thing as a bad idea and moved back to Switzerland, taking her daughter with her and leaving her husband behind.  She then wrote a memoir about the whole thing and apparently became famous off of it; the memoir was turned into a movie, and then she wrote a couple of follow-up memoirs.

The biggest problem I had with this book, frankly, is Hoffman’s crazy exoticizing bullshit.  She’s pretty up-front about the fact that she upended her whole life because she was obsessed with the idea of “her” Maasai–the idea of him, not actually him.  She doesn’t know him at all when she does this.  She writes the story as though it’s some intense fairy-tale-like coup de foudre, but her obsession with Lketinga feels creepy more than it feels romantic.  She chases Lketinga because he represents something different from the rest of her life, and there’s never any sense in the book that they particularly like each other, much less understand each other.

Throughout the book, she so clearly wants approval (from Lketinga, from his mother, from her ex-pat friends in Kenya, from the reader) for her committment to being a Maasai wife, except she never really makes that committment.  She doesn’t want to accept the Maasai gender roles, the Maasai courtship customs, the Maasai diet and lifestyle, the nature of living in extremely isolated rural regions–I mean, I don’t honestly blame her for not wanting to accept all of that.  As she describes it, it’s all pretty miserable.  In all her time in Kenya, she never really stops finding Maasai food disgusting.  Sex with her new husband is brutal and unsatisfying, and never seems to get much better, but she makes a point of telling the reader that it doesn’t matter because she loves him so much. He also won’t speak to her as an equal, and as the book progresses he has increasingly violent fits of jealous rage because she continues to have casual interactions (conversations, business contacts, etc) with other Maasai men.  She witnesses some incredibly gruesome stillbirths while living in the Maasai village, and her own daughter is only born healthy because she ignores the advice of everyone in her adopted community and goes to live in a European-run hospital for the last two months of her pregnancy.  Her daughter, once born, only lives past infancy because she sneaks the child back to Europe for months at a time, to get better nutrition and health care.  The picture she paints of life among the Maasai is unrelentingly brutal, and the picture she paints of her relationship with Lketinga is likewise unrelentingly depressing.  Except she also keeps telling the reader how happy she was, without ever actually showing herself enjoying any aspect of her new life.  (Except the parts where she’s hanging out with other Europeans–her relief at these little interludes among the comfortable is absolutely clear in the text.)

I think part of what I’m reacting to is the framing of the book–by calling her memoir The White Masai, Hoffman is trying to present herself as someone who became Maasai, while the whole story of her time in Kenya seemed to me to be the story of someone who really wanted to think of herself as becoming Maasai while in fact resisting most aspects of Maasai life and trying to graft a more European style of living onto a fundamentally different culture.  She’s unhappy in her marriage because her husband wants her to be like a Maasai woman and she wants him to be like a European man.  She’s unhappy with the isolation of life in Maasai villages, so she insists on buying a Jeep so that she can get back and forth to Mombasa, and then spends huge amounts of the book complaining about all of the ways in which owning a vehicle in rural East Africa (where there are, for the most part, not even roads, much less gas stations or mechanics) is a giant fricking hassle.  Every trip to the city requires an enormous amount of advance planning and coordination, and is fraught with danger and uncertainty every step of the way, but she needs to keep doing it over and over again, because despite her protestations to the contrary she appears to actually hate living in the villages.

And it seems almost unfair to dislike her just because she disliked living in such extreme conditions.  What I’m objecting to more, I think, is that she seemed entirely unaware of the fact that a lot of her problems came from mismatched expectations.  It’s like she went chasing off after some romanticized vision of The Other, only to be unhappily surprised to realize that The Other was actually different.

This is one of the new entries in Lauren Willig’s “Pink Carnation” series–I thought it was the newest, but I’ve just realized that another one was published this winter.  I can’t remember if I’ve written about these before–Lauren Willig was one of the participants in Word’s first romance event, and I liked how she talked about her books so much that I basically bought the whole series.  They’re romances with mystery elements, set during the Napoleonic Wars, following a group of British spies, many of whom happen to be women.  (Read them!  They’re fun!  Start with the first, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation.)  There’s a framing story for the series as well–woven in with the story of the Napoleonic-era spies is the story of a present-day history grad student writing her dissertation on the Napoleonic-era spies.  As Eloise follows threads in her archival work, the books go down the same paths, telling the stories of individual women in the Pink Carnation spy ring.

Willig is doing a lot right with these books, and I enjoy reading them, but as the series goes on (The Orchid Affair is the eighth book) I’m realizing that I’m just really bored with reading about Eloise.  The dual-narrative conceit has never been my favorite thing about these books–the present day story feels kind of chick-lit-y, because while Eloise might be a crack historian, she also borrows a little bit heavily on the dotty-heroine character type.  She frequently has awkward clumsy moments, like walking into furniture or adorably dropping packages in the street (to be fair, I don’t know if she actually does either of those things, but she does stuff in that range), and she has deep neuroses about not being as glamorous as her fabulous best friend, and even though she’s constantly thinking about how socially awkward she is, everyone she encounters finds her totally charming.  In the first few books in the series, Eloise’s quest for new archival sources puts her in frequent contact with a hot-but-broody British guy; the guy turns out to be a descendant of the Pink Carnation, so dating him (as she inevitably does) kills two birds with one stone, in that she gets a hot British boyfriend -and- gets access to his family’s fabulous archives, thus allowing her to complete her dissertation.

When Eloise and Colin started dating, her narrative almost immediately became really boring.  Willig sustained a little tension in that story by having Eloise suspect that Colin was a spy, but that didn’t go anywhere.  Most romance novels end at the happily-ever-after because a good story requires dramatic tension, and good relationships lack dramatic tension.  The seventh book in the series, The Mischief of the Mistletoe, was fabulous in many ways, and one of those ways was a complete absence of Eloise.  (Another way The Mischief of the Mistletoe was fabulous: it took the most affably stupid minor character in the whole series and turned him into a believable romantic hero without selling out the way his character was written in earlier books.)  I was so happy to see that–I figured that Willig had realized that the Eloise/Colin/dissertation story had run out of steam, and I thought it was a gutsy but smart move to continue the series without them.

But, alas, it was not to be.  Eloise is back in The Orchid Affair, fretting aimlessly about what will happen to her relationship with Colin when her research grant runs out and she has to move back to America, making a big production out of feeling inferior to skinny women with expensive haircuts, having stressful but ultimately meaningless miscommunications with Colin, and eating cutesy chocolate in adorable Parisian cafes.  The modern-day parts of the narrative felt like wasted time in this book, and that was disappointing.

The main narrative in The Orchid Affair is charming, though, and very well done.  A former governess, trying to start a new career as a spy, is sent to France to act as the governess for the children of a high-ranking official in the French government.  He’s a widower whose wife had been a major figure in the French Revolution, and the governess slowly discovers that he’s lost faith in Bonaparte’s government, believing that it’s betraying the original values of the Revolution.  She’s just trying to prove her worth as a British spy, but they all get caught up in a much bigger espionage plot, and then there’s an interlude with a travelling theatrical troupe, and oh by the way the governess actually has some big French secrets in her past, and it’s all kind of pleasantly madcap without ever feeling frivolous.

Oh!  Describing the book reminded me of the other frustration I have sometimes with the Pink Carnation series.  Early on in the series, Willig dangled the premise of the Selwick Spy School, a kind of spy academy masquerading as a finishing school for proper British ladies.  I keep hoping we’ll actually see the Selwick School in one of these books, because it sounds like so much fun, and it keeps not appearing.  The heroine of The Orchid Affair is a graduate of Selwick, and that’s the closest we’ve come to it yet.  Spy school!  That has so much promise!  Less mopey Eloise, more awesome spy school!

When I was working on my dissertation, I used to like to say that I loved studying American history in the late 1800s and early 1900s because it was a time of so much change–the way I described it was that American society in that period, like 1880-1910, was like a snow globe right after someone had shaken it.

I haven’t yet found novels I love set in that period in America (if anyone knows of any, I’d love a recommendation), but I have in the last couple of years become fascinated by novels set in England in the late Victorian period.  They don’t have quite the same feeling of chaotic energy as America in that period, but rather a sense of a society perched on the edge of a change.  (I’m sure a lot of the difference comes from the fact that the historical novels I’m reading deal primarily with the aristocracy, who were resisting the effects of the big social and economic changes that drive that sense of chaotic motion in America.)  I think a lot of writers are capitalizing on the tension that’s created by that sense of imminent change.

Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia series absolutely makes use of that tension.  At the start of the first book, Julia Grey is a widow, or about to become one.  She’s from a distinguished English family–her father, Lord March, is an Earl, and was a childhood friend of the Queen–and the family’s wealth has always been a cover for its eccentricities.  Julia’s Aunt Hermia runs a charity that helps former prostitutes, her sister Portia has been openly living with another woman since her husband died, and her brother Valerius apprentices himself to a Jewish physician in order to improve his knowledge as a doctor.  They’re an odd family, for British aristocrats, is what I’m getting at, and Julia was always one of the more conventional among her siblings.  She married young, for love, to a very conventional and very respectable family friend, and seemed on track to a totally respectable and conventional life as a society matron.

Until, of course, her husband was murdered, and she began to work with Nicholas Brisbane, a very un-conventional and not-respectable private inquiry agent, to try and figure out who poisoned him.

They’re mysteries, not romances–even though a romance does begin to develop between Julia and Brisbane, the first book in the series is mostly about trying to solve the murder of Julia’s husband.  (The romance plot is just a slow burn in the background over the course of several novels.  It’s beautifully done, and I think much more compelling because it’s all tension and restraint for several books at a time.  This isn’t a romance-novel relationship that’s equal parts snappy dialogue and sheer physical attraction; it’s a partnership before it’s anything else.)  Julia is trying to figure out who she is now that she’s not just someone’s respectable wife; Brisbane is trying to figure out how to navigate around several dark and dangerous secrets in his past; they’re both trying to figure out some twisty and interesting crimes.

I really like these books.  They’re well-written, richly textured, with strong characters and mystery plots that find the right balance. (It’s a tough thing in mysteries–the resolution can’t come completely out of nowhere, but it also can’t be too predictable.)One thing I particularly appreciate is that they break out of the London-centric mode of a lot of the British historical romances and mysteries.  They spend time in rural Scotland and on a tea plantation in India, for instance, and in both places there are aspects of the plot that center on the difficult and complicated relationship between the English ruling class and the local populations they find themselves governing in an age of empire.  Other things you don’t see every day in historical genre fiction: Julia’s sister Portia, as I mentioned, is gay, and the relationship between Portia and her sister Jane is very well-developed.  I have no idea what an actually historically accurate picture of women in a same-sex relationship in Victorian England would look like, but this felt real to me.  Jane and Portia are shielded to a large extent from social condemnation because of their wealth and status in society, and their families accept their relationship as a real and central part of their lives, but that doesn’t mean that things are easy for them.  (I don’t want to go into specifics, because I don’t want to give anything away–I found the developments in Jane and Portia’s relationship over the course of the books to be some of the most emotionally compelling parts of the series.  I also had some concerns about some of those developments, but none of it ever felt like cheap narrative tricks.)

In any event, I have many Things To Say about a lot of the March and April reading, but in the interest of not losing track, here’s the overall tally for March.

1. Silent in the Grave, Deanna Raybourn
2. Silent in the Sanctuary, Deanna Raybourn
3. Silent on the Moor, Deanna Raybourn
4. Dark Road to Darjeeling, Deanna Raybourn
5. The Dark Enquiry, Deanna Raybourn
6. And Only To Deceive, Tasha Alexander
7. Conspiracy in Death, JD Robb
8. Loyalty in Death, JD Robb
9. The Orchid Affair, Lauren Willig
10. Witness in Death, JD Robb
11. Judgment in Death, JD Robb
12. Betrayal in Death, JD Robb
13. The White Masai, Corinne Hoffman
14. The Accidental, Ali Smith

1. Faking It, Jennifer Crusie
2. The Cinderella Deal, Jennifer Crusie
3. Strange Bedpersons, Jennifer Crusie
4. Charlie All Night, Jennifer Crusie
5. Getting Rid of Bradley, Jennifer Crusie
6. What the Lady Wants, Jennifer Crusie
7. Crazy For You, Jennifer Crusie
8. Vengeance in Death, JD Robb
9. Unraveled, Courtney Milan
10. Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler
11. Holiday in Death, JD Robb
12. Midnight in Death, JD Robb

Peter Hessler spent a few years teaching English in a small town in Sichuan Province, and then went on to stay in China for almost a decade as a freelance journalist, eventually attached to the New Yorker as a Beijing correspondent. This book, originally published in 2006, is meant to be a kind of snapshot of China as it goes through rapid economic and political change.

I feel a little strange calling it a snapshot in that way, because Hessler clearly wants to frame his story of China in the early 2000s as part of a longer story about Chinese history, but I found the historical interludes (the “oracle bones” framing of the title) to be the least compelling part of the book.  Hessler is at his best when he’s telling the stories of the people he knows in China, using those personal stories as a window into a country whose culture is a lot messier and more energetic than it sometimes seems from the outside. Throughout the book, he follows a handful of people as they try to make their way.  Most of them are students he knew while teaching in Sichuan, but the story of a Uighur trader living on the fringes of Beijing society was my favorite strand in the narrative.  While reading the book, you also get a lot of Hessler’s own story of living on the fringes of legality as a half-accredited freelancer navigating Beijing bureaucracies.

This book was a happy accident for me–despite my promise to myself that I would stop buying new books until I’d read all the ones I have sitting in a big to-read pile at home, I still found myself bored and restless one afternoon, scanning the non-fiction shelves at Word for something that would hold my interest. I picked this one up for a few reasons: it had a good cover, it was a National Book Award finalist, and I’m an absolute sucker for anything on contemporary China. It turned out to be a good pick, because I really enjoyed reading it, and I expect that I’ll be back at Word before too long to get Hessler’s other two China books (River Town and Country Driving).

One last thing: Oracle Bones reminded me a lot of Beijing Welcomes You by Tom Scocca, which I read last year, ironically enough on the flight home from Beijing. Beijing Welcomes You is a little smaller in scope, with more humor and less in-depth examination of the experience of Chinese citizens, but they’re similar in a lot of ways. Both books are written from the perspective of American journalists living in Beijing, although Hessler is dealing with China more broadly and Scocca is assigned to Beijing specifically to cover the Olympics. They’re set almost ten years apart, which I think would make them interesting to read together. And they make some similar points–the discussion of hutong modernization is very similar in both books, for instance, and both books have a kind of delicate touch in how they deal with the status of Chinese ethnic minorities. I think they also both make the same point about dealing with Chinese bureaucracies, namely that most Chinese citizens have a very casual approach to the concept of “the rule of law”, because Chinese laws are so elaborate that it’s impossible to actually stay within the law at all times, and so inconsistently enforced that the causal connection between law-breaking and punishment has been effectively severed.

As mentioned earlier, I will read almost anything about the complexities of life in modern China, but even by those pretty accepting standards, this was a good read.

February 2012, #9: Unraveled, Courtney Milan

When I wrote in January about Milan’s Unclaimed, Sarah Prineas mentioned that the last Turner brothers book was out, and I went looking for it.  In an authors’ note, Milan mentions that the whole Turner series started with this brother, Smite, and the idea that he’s trying to overcome his traumatic past.  All three of the books are, to some extent, about the brothers trying to overcome aspects of their pasts, and Smite’s is by far the worst.

I have to say, though, that I didn’t quite love this one. I enjoyed it, but a lot of little things were off. The basic outline: Smite Turner is a magistrate, the only judge in Bristol who actually cares about justice, especially justice for the poor and underprivileged. Miranda Darling is an aspiring milliner who mostly acts as a low-level grifter in the employ of a shadowy underworld figure. Miranda’s employer tries to use her to bring down Smite, but because this is a romance novel, Miranda and Smite instead fall in love. Miranda helps Smite overcome some of the traumas he still suffers after horrible things his religious-fanatic mother did to him as a child, and Smite helps Miranda escape from the messy criminal underworld.

That much is fine, as far as it goes. They’re good characters, there’s a good pacing to the story, the romance is believable. But a lot of the book rests on the Patron, the shadowy criminal mastermind, and I just found the Patron stuff unconvincing. I also found Smite’s eidetic memory kind of annoying–quite a lot is made, and quite often, of the fact that Smite remembers every damn detail of everything that’s ever happened to him, except for the fact that he can’t remember smells. Which is relevant only because he really likes Miranda’s perfume but can’t remember what it smells like after she’s gone. (Also: Miranda’s full name is Miranda Darling, and there’s a recurring set piece in the book where Miranda wonders, when Smite says her name, whether he’s saying “Miranda Darling” or “Miranda, darling.” It’s super-cute the first time, and itchily irritating by the tenth time.)

Oh, the horror of the lukewarm book review. I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

The other interesting thing about Unraveled, by the way, is that it’s self-published. The first two Turner books came out from Harlequin, and were extremely successful, but Milan chose to self-publish the third. She’s written a bit about the decision on her blog (including her reasons for self-publishing and how self-publishing is hard work), and in an interview with SBTB she explains a little more about how self-publishing gives her more financial control and more creative options.  I can see hints of the “more creative options” side in Unraveled; compared to her previous books, this one has more pagecount given to secondary characters and plots. It also has more explicit sex scenes, and it’s got a number of openly gay minor characters, which is something you don’t see much of in the historicals. (Or probably in contemporaries, either.)

I find the self-publishing thing so fascinating–I know a few other authors who have been finding it successful, or at least successful enough to keep doing.  Tim’s Kickstarter for the newest Marla Mason book was a huge success, and Maggie’s done well enough with Spots the Space Marine that she’s committed to serial self-publishing a few more books, and I get the sense that Cecilia’s having a lot of success with the Daron serial. It’s so much extra work for authors that I always wonder if it’s actually worth it, but the people I know who are doing it are all people who are pretty smart about the financial calcuations involved, so I’m willing to believe them.

(more pictures, and full sizes, at flickr.)

February was rough, people. And I find Jenny Crusie to be perfect for rough days (or weeks).  These are all some of her earlier books, and they’re not quite as awesome as some of the more recent ones–they have uneven patches, weird moments, off-kilter characterizations–but they’re fun.  There are a few common themes in these books.  (And Strange Bedpersons started out life as a rewrite of The Cinderella Deal, which heightens the sense of common themes.)  There are a lot of floppy awkward dogs, a lot of architecturally charming but slightly run-down houses (or apartments) all done in warm wood tones and vintage/heirloom furniture, a lot of women with independent/feminist principles clashing with slightly more retro men. They’re also mostly set in the same imaginary small city in Ohio. The dangerous stalker exes in Crazy For You and Getting Rid of Bradley are very similar to each other, as are the clueless loser exes in Charlie All Night and The Cinderella Deal.  Most of them feature people who aren’t young anymore, in their mid-thirties or so, and trying to make significant changes to their lives. And these books (like a lot of Crusie novels) mostly revolve around relationships between men and women who like hanging out together, and feel very comfortable together, but for various reasons don’t think they’d make a good couple.

And they’re fun. I mean, they’re not all fun all the time–the stalker ex in Crazy For You is actually kind of scary–but they’re good distracting reads.

“He’d been a pool player long enough to know that if you had to choose between skill and luck, you chose luck; a con man long enough to know that if you had to choose between a great plan and fate on your side, you picked fate. And here he was, up to his ass in skill and plans.”

I cannot even tell you how much I love this book.  I can’t claim that it’s high art or great literature, but it makes me happy. It’s a good comedy, a good romance, a good “family stands together through trouble” story, a good con artist story, and a series of good character studies.  And it’s just fun.

“Those were the days, the Golden Age, when men were men and women didn’t have to do their own second-story work.”

Tilda Goodnight has a newly-adopted misfit dog, a mother who buries her rage in Double-Crostics and vodka, a sister who buries her sadness in a secret double life as a torch singer, and a literal closet full of secrets in her basement.  She has enough to deal with, but when her niece accidentally sells a forged painting that could threaten the reputation of their art gallery, she has to try and steal it back.  And that’s how she meets Davy Dempsey, reformed con artist, who’s trying to steal a million dollars from the same woman who  has Tilda’s painting.

Whatever.  The plot isn’t even the point. Tilda’s mother, Gwen, used to put animals with tiny teeth into cross-stitch samplers, and now she’s collecting pina colada umbrellas from a sexy hit man. Davy and Tilda and Tilda’s niece Nadine run a simple but elegant con on a jerk at a flea market. Davy’s rogue father shows up and seduces the humorless oil painter who lives on the second floor. And Tilda and Davy have a flirtation that feels kind of like a racier version of an old Katherine Hepburn movie.  The resolution of the mystery plot is a little awkward, but it’s the only off note in the whole book. No, really, I love this book.