Book Review: "Wigrum" by Daniel Canty

Wigrum is not a novel in the traditional sense; rather, it's a collection of objects and descriptions of those objects that the main character collected and kept. Canty originally published Wigrum in 2011, in French, and will be released this fall as an English translation by Oana Avasilichioaei.

Sebastian Wigrum, the protagonist who only appears once at the very beginning of the novel, spent his life collecting small pieces of people's lives: hazelnuts, pieces of string, keys, and the like. Upon his disappearance in October of 1994, Wigrum's collection is documented and published, following his last request. The result is a glimpse into the ordinary, everyday things that gave meaning to people's lives, blurring the line between fiction and reality.

The book is arranged as a catalog, alphabetically, featuring items that Wigrum kept in separate groupings. There are sketches and footnotes to go along with each item's history, featuring a unique layout to the book that won Canty the 2011 Grand Prize in the Quebec Graphic Design Competition Grafika.



The individual items don't have a connection to Wigrum himself. Instead, they're more like flash fiction pieces, each telling a meaningful story that could easily be either fact or fiction. Some of my favorite objects in the collection are a bundle of love letters never sent, a bottle full of Chinese fortunes, and a cosmonaut pocket watch. Many of the objects reference things like missiles, and one particular reference to bananas at the beginning of the book, hint that Canty may have been heavily been influenced by Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Unlike Pynchon's writing though, Wigrum is much easier to read in short bursts because of the book's innovative format.

If you're ready for a new kind of novel that blends the line between reality and fiction in small ways that are nonetheless important, if you like flash fiction, or if you want a peek into the lives of random, ordinary people who have extraordinary stories to tell, pick up a copy of Wigrum by Daniel Canty. It will be released in English in October of this year, and is presently available in French.

While You're Waiting....

Many genres, particularly ones that fall under the SpecFic umbrella, have in recent years really begun to embrace the idea of more unconventional gender and sexual orientations in literature. If you're interested in exploring more from that area of SpecFic, I highly recommend a blog called Parallel Worlds, where you'll find lots of great, informative book reviews. Nearly all of the books there will feature non-normative gender or gender roles, and minimal sexual content. Check it out while you're waiting for the next review here!

Book Review: "Guests on Earth" by Lee Smith

Lee Smith's latest novel is a story of unexpected comradery and self-discovery in a mental hospital. Evalina Toussaint, our protagonist, grew up in New Orleans with her beautiful, vibrant mother whom Evalina adores. They are happy together, and life just seems to get better when her mother becomes pregnant. The father moves them all to a nice house in the suburbs, but shortly after Evalina's baby brother is born he sickens and dies. Evalina's mother, once so full of hope and life, soon follows.

The father, wracked with guilt, brings Evalina home to live with his other family - including a wife and other children. That works about as well as one would expect, and overcome by grief and her new hostile environment, Evalina finds herself shipped off to Highland Hospital in Asheland, North Carolina. It is one of the most defining moments of her entire life, and possibly one of the best things to ever happen to her.

The year is 1936. As she quickly recovers from her depression at Highland, Evalina soon makes friends with both fellow patients and with staff memebers. Notable among these are Mrs. Carroll, who encourages Evalina's natural talent for the piano, and the mercurial but fascinating Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the famous writer. Both of these women take Evalina under their wings, in their own separate ways, to teach her lessons about life, loss, and love.

Thanks to her talent for piano and much encouragement from all of her fellows, Evalina eventually leaves Hillcrest to attend music school. She eventually ventures abroad to perform, but her career stutters and collapses after a series of personal tragedies. Evalina finds herself once more a patient at Hillcrest, perhaps the only place where she has ever really felt at home. She reconnects with Zelda and eventually finds herself more staff member than patient as she slowly recovers from her loss. Hillcrest remains her home until the fateful night when it burned down, taking many patients along with it.

Smith paints a beautiful protagonist who acknowledges the flaws in her own point of view as a narrator, but still strives to show ups, the reader, the beauty she found in a life that was not what society said she "should" want or be a part of. I also strongly identified with Smith's portrayal of the people who had been committed to Hillcrest, not as madly frothing lunatics but as normal, feeling people with demons and challenges, who needed help and encouragement to overcome their problems and who worked hard to do so. Evalina and her fellow patients have a lot of fun in each other's company and get into more than a little mischief on occasion.

One of my favorite parts is when Evalina begins to acknowledge Zelda's shortcomings and troubles underneath her manic vibrancy and energy, recognizing the person as well as the presence. Another of my favorite moments was the Christmas scene, when Evalina finds herself in kind of a trance with the piano, as though continuing to play it will allow her to clearly see the whispers on the edge of her consciousness of what happened to her when she left Highland.

The sentiments of pain, healing, and accepting that what the societal ideal of "healthy" and "happy" are isn't necessarily what's best for a given person are very sweet and give the reader a subtle message of self-acceptance and serenity in spite of - maybe because of - the human condition.

If you liked The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow or other stories of quiet, graceful struggle and eventual self-discovery, set against a backdrop of beautifully described scenery and memorable characters, pick up a copy of Guests on Earth by Lee Smith. It's available starting October 15th at your local independently-owned bookstore.

Book Review: "Seed" by Rob Ziegler

I've heard it said of late in the book world that the term "post apocalyptic" has become overused and trite; it's "over" as far as literary trends go. I disagree wholeheartedly with this assessment, as someone who loves to read and has written more than one tale of a future world of war and desperation. Even were that not the case, there's really no term other than gloriously post apocalyptic to describe Rob Ziegler's first book, Seed, a thrilling novel about the harsh future of the Human Race.

Severe climate change forces humanity in North America into a yearly migration pattern to plant crops in the North when the winter is over, then move back South to avoid the freezing weather extremes in the winter. These specially designed, genetically programmed seeds that withstand such a harsh environment all come form Satori, a strange and insular living compound built on top of what was Detroit.

Brood and his strange younger brother, Pollo, are migrant con men scratching out a living in competition with La Chupacabra, a massive organized crime ring preying on migrants. When they hear of a strange woman from Satori, the Corn Mother, who has defected and is starting an open settlement, Brood and Pollo are caught up in the search for this new little Eden. Brood makes it. But Pollo is swept off to Satori itself, with severe consequences.

Meanwhile Doss, an agent for the defunct U.S. government, is sent to find the Corn Mother. If the government can capture her and her genetic technology, and lessen their crippling dependency on Satori, they may have a chance to regain some influence. But stuck between Satori and La Chupacabra, Doss finds herself caught up in the fight of her life alongside Brood and an army of tough-luck child soldiers.

While Doss and Brood make their way toward the Corn Mother and each other, another part of the story unfolds within Satori itself: Sumedha, one of the genetically engineered humanoids who oversee Satori, searches for a genetic mutation that would allow humans to survive the harsh planetary climate like Satori does. Pursuing this genetic graft though will have severe consequences for Satori as a living thing, as well as bringing together Doss, Brood, Pollo and Sumedha to determine Satori's future and the future of humanity.

Even though the characters from each of these story branches don't come together until the very end, I felt the connection between them very keenly. Three very different protagonists with points of view that vary significantly all orbited around the central issue of Satori's presence and what it meant, lending complexity to the story without giving most of it away. A particular point of interest to me in this vein was the open animosity between Brood and La Chupacabra, often ending in blood, and how it was juxtaposed with Doss's status as a figure very well respected by the gang. She is even gifted by the gang's leader with two young Chupe soldiers as bodyguards.

Zeigler also does a wonderful job of creating a mentality for a hopeless migrant population entirely dependent on something that they fear, hate, envy, and don't understand: Satori. To keep themselves going they turn to crime, to drugs, to religion; to anything that will keep them going for one more day. The idea of the Corn Mother, leaving Satori to set up a new beacon of hope for migrant people, fell perfectly into this pattern of the search for something mystical and better.

I will say that if you don't speak Spanish, you'll have a hard time understanding most of the migrants, particularly Brood and Pollo, and members of La Chupacabra.

The complexity of Satori, a living building perfectly designed as a closed system to withstand the harsh environment, is truly brilliant and more than a little bit fascinating. Add to that the question of life versus sentience, and what a lack of sentience means for a living thing, and you've got an important ethical puzzle cleverly woven into an action-packed thrill ride of blood, guts, glory and desperation.

If you like Ender's Game-type moral and political complexity but are ready for something grittier and more visceral, I highly recommend Seed by Rob Ziegler. It was released in 2011, and is available now in both hardback and paperback. Just look for the awesome and distinctive cover art at your favorite local bookstore!

PSA: Behind the Curtain at Amazon

As a bookseller at a bricks-and-mortar community bookstore and a "localvore" in general, I am hugely biased when it comes to the question of Amazon.com and its business practices. But even from a journalistic viewpoint, Amazon is not the civic-minded giant that it pretends to be. The Seattle Times (which is Seattle, Washington's most prominent newspaper and is located in Amazon's hometown) did some digging into Amazon and came up with the following four-part series, which I hope that you as a consumer will take the time to read.

Read about Amazon here.

Again, on behalf of myself and booksellers everywhere, thank you for supporting your small community bookstores.

Book Review: "The Arrivals" by Melissa Marr

What do you get when you combine time travel, travel between worlds, Egyptian tombs, vampires, and the Wild West? The answer, my friends, is the latest novel from Melissa Marr. And as eclectic as it sounds, it works. Mostly.

Kitty and Jack, a brother and sister from a rough Western town, have spent almost thirty years in the Wasteland, an alien world full of strange and often dangerous creatures. They don't know how or why they were brought here, but at least they're not alone; others like them from different times and places have been mysteriously transported to the Wasteland as well. The natives don't go out of their way to bother them, but neither are they an accepted part of the community. The only thing that the Arrivals all seem to have in common is that each of them, intentionally or not, has killed someone before in their lives.

Kitty and Jack look after their fellows as well as they can, while trying to steer them away from Ajani, an Arrival who exploits the Wasteland and its native people for personal gain and pursues Kitty with a disturbing singlemindedness. Tensions between Kitty and Jack's small group and Ajani have always been high, but when Chloe is suddenly swept into the Wasteland from our modern day, her presence changes everything and will lead to a final showdown with Ajani and his empire.

Let me first say that this is a really good story. It's simple, it's very creative, it involves lots of action and romance that doesn't feel smutty; the plot progression is so smooth that I didn't even notice its movement until I was already being swept along with it. The story doesn't really get started until Chloe shows up though, and so the first part of the story (which takes place in the Wasteland) was a little bit directionless. It set up a few important things, like Kitty and Jack's personalities and Kitty and Edgar's relationship, and the unusual way in which death works for the Arrivals (sometimes, six days after being killed, Arrivals wake up again. Sometimes, they don't). But I felt like I was just waiting for the story to begin until about chapter five, which was frustrating.

Ajani's character makes a really great bad guy, the perfect foil to Jack even down to questions of self-image and philosophy of existence. These are very important but subtly expressed, implied even. The plot is simple and straightforward but it is the complexity of the characters that make this an interesting read.

And as fun as it was to see so many different genre types thrown together into one book, there were some parts in which Marr wandered a little too far off the beaten track. The result of drawing from too many different detail origins (like in the naming of Wasteland creatures, where she pulls from everything from Norse folklore to psychological conditions to Biblical names. Or the use of an Egyptian spell in the middle of everything to open up a portal between worlds). The result was a cluttered feeling, like there was no common thread running through the book, origins-wise. Even an alien point of commonality would have felt more helpful. Again I point you toward the characters to pull the fraying random edges of the story together and carry them through to the conclusion.

*SPOILER ALERT*
I really did like that at the end after Ajani was defeated, the Arrivals didn't just all happily go home to their own times and places; the rules of the wormhole still applied. I also really liked how Kitty's telepathy and affinity for some of the Wasteland's denizens were worked into the plot. It was, again, indicative of a subtlety that was lacking in the collage of origins in the Wasteland setting.

So. If you're ready for an awesome, character-driven tale of good and evil, you want a story that's just plain fun to read, and you love a good cross-genre novel, pick up a copy of The Arrivals at your favorite local bookstore. It was just released this month.

Book Review: "A Spark Unseen" by Sharon Cameron

Sharon Cameron first came to my attention as an author when I read her first book, The Dark Unwinding, last fall. I fell in love with it, finished it in two days, and have been combing through piles of Advance Reader Copies ever since, looking for the next installment of the story. Welp, I finally found it, and it's called A Spark Unseen.

But before I tell you about this second book in the series, let me introduce you to our protagonist, Miss Katherine Tulman, as I first met her in The Dark Unwinding.  She was then the orphaned ward of her aunt Alice in London, where she was little better than a servant. Her only goal in life was to secure enough funds of her own to escape her aunt and useless cousin, and that goal began to seem possible when Katherine was sent to Stranwyne Keep, her grandmother's estate, on Alice's business. The estate had been held by Katherine's uncle, her father's brother, for years. But rumor had been circulating that he had lost his mind, and so Alice jumped on the opportunity to secure the estate for her own son. She did this by sending Katherine to observe her uncle and attest to his lunacy upon her return to London. In exchange, Aunt Alice would ensure that Katherine was not completely destitute.

Katherine is determined to send her uncle "Tully" away to an asylum and finally win her freedom from the vile Aunt Alice. But once she arrives at Stranwyne, she discovers an entire world built around her rather unique uncle. The townsfolk think of him kindly, despite his many oddities and reclusive nature, and the town's commerce is thriving with the pottery that is produced there. The estate is well-managed, and in no real need of Aunt Alice's intervention. Indeed, Katherine becomes more and  more aware of what she would be destroying should she choose to put her uncle in an asylum, as she well could. But the marvels that he designs in his workshop with the help of the handsome but aloof Lane fascinate her, as they do Ben Aldridge, who is studying Uncle Tully's creations and how they work.

As her time at Stranwyne continues, Katherine becomes more and more convinced that Uncle Tully must not be committed. But as her certainty grows, she becomes less and less sure of herself, and her strange bouts of lost memory and strange states of mental vacancy worsen. Is she losing her own mind just as she gains the trust and possibly love of Uncle Tully's closest caretakers (including Lane, a silent boy named Davy and his bunny, and the dour Aunt Bit)? Will she be packed off to an asylum just as poor Uncle Tully?

*SPOILER ALERT* I'm happy to report, dear reader, that she is not. In fact, it turns out that poor Katherine is being drugged with opium by the seemingly nice Ben Aldridge. He is actually a French spy, who plans on using Uncle Tully's innovations as the basis for a new weapon that we would today most closely liken to a torpedo. After nearly killing Katherine and flooding the lower village as well as part of Stranwyne Keep, Ben tries to make his escape with Uncle Tully's prototype device. However, Katherine manages to blow up his small boat as he's making his getaway. Ben is presumed dead, although his body is not recovered. In the fallout from all the intrigue and Katherine's refusal to go along with Aunt Alice's plan to take over Stranwyne, several things happen that prove important in A Spark Unseen: Aunt Alice comes to Stranwyne for an update and finds that Katherine and Lane are a couple of sorts. This is troubling since Katherine is a lady and Lane a servant. Additionally, Katherine discovers that her father left her a very large inheritance, and that Aunt Alice never had much of a hold on her to begin with. Katherine becomes the steward of Stranwyne Keep with the help of Mr. Babcock, the estate's solicitor. But this happy new life is clouded by the arrival of Mr. Wickersham, an agent of the British government. Troubled by Ben Aldridge's actions and by what the French could be planning, Mr. Wickersham enlists Lane with his French heritage to travel to France and spy for the British.

This is where A Spark Unseen picks up, with Katherine safely in charge of a once again thriving Stranwyne Keep and her uncle happily at play with his mechanical creations. But there has been no word from Lane in months, and most of the household has lost hope that he is still alive. After two men attempt to kidnap Uncle Tully out of Stranwyne, Mr. Wickersham arrives with the intention of bringing Katherine and Uncle Tully to London to continue work on a British prototype of a torpedo. Uncle Tully, in his mental state, does not react well to the new and unknown. So to ensure that he does not become a lab rat to the British government, Katherine and her faithful maid Mary contrive to fake Uncle Tully's death and take him away to Paris. Of course in addition to protecting her uncle, Katherine is determined to find Lane. But the situation is much more complicated than she imagines, and soon she's in over her head with both French and British spies, nosy English neighbors, a missing Mr. Babcock, the Emperor of France, Ben Aldridge, and still no sign of Lane. For just how long can one hide someone as brilliant as Uncle Tully in a city like Paris?

Please, please, please don't be fooled by the covers on these books. They look like ditzy teen romances, yes, but they belie the intricate story within. Katherine is a strong female protagonist who sometimes gets in over her head, but recognizes the hopelessness of anything other than slogging onward, and Mary is a wonderful, endearing friend and coconspirator to Katherine. In addition to Lane (who is still self-righteous enough to annoy me sometimes but it works well in context) and Mr. Babcock, a host of new characters is introduced including Frenchmen Henri and Jean Baptiste, and Josef, the return of Ben Aldridge under a different name, and the revelation of Mrs. Hardcastle as an ally.

The introduction of electricity to Uncle Tully's work is another stroke of genius, although not as much happened with it as I would have imagined until the final scene with Uncle Tully and Ben Aldridge. But I have a feeling that it will be playing a larger role in the next book, as will Lane's heritage. Ben's near insanity was very well written, and entirely believable. Similarly believable were Lane's actions while he was missing, although again here his attitude about not being good enough for Katherine made me "harumph" and shake my head in disapproval.

Uncle Tully in himself is a magnificent character, not just because he provides a focal point for the evolving story but because of who he is. If I had to make a guess, I'd diagnose Uncle Tully with some form of autism. He is brilliant and often single-minded in his work, creating the most fascinating machines from inside his own head. In addition, he has a preoccupation with time and numbers, and loves clocks, Lane, Katherine (whom he calls "Simon's baby" in reference to his brother, Katherine's father) and Marianna, who was Uncle Tully's mother. He is sweet and endearing but also sometimes frightening in his reactions to things that he perceives as "not right" and to things that interrupt his personal schedule. Katherine's struggle to understand and provide for her uncle are rewarded with the appreciation she develops for him and his talents, and the eventual demonstrations of love that he shows her. It's a beautiful sort of relationship that is often overlooked by popular literature, and I give an (extra) tip of my hat to Cameron for depicting it so beautifully.

So I tell you, get up and go find yourself a copy of The Dark Unwinding as soon as your favorite local bookstore opens! If you're a sucker for steampunk and Victorian England like I am, you'll adore it. And while you're at it, check out the inspiration behind Stranwyne Keep here at Sharon Cameron's website! The second book in the series, A Spark Unseen, will be released in October of this year. Check with your bookstore to find out about preorders!