toastykitten

After 40 years together, Don and Rodney face the end of the world from a black hole that will swallow the Earth in exactly one month. So they embark on a road trip to keep a promise they made to their son.

Klune sells very well at my shop. He is good at doing what he does, and what he does is gay, twee, and glurgy. I did not enjoy The House on the Cerulean Sea and I did not enjoy this either. Both of them made my eyes glaze over. I started both of them, disliked them both, started skimming, still was bored and irritated, then skipped to the end to see how it all came out. Then I learned some information that made me revise my opinion of the book even lower. In the case of The House in the Cerulean Sea, it was an interview where he mentioned that his sappy, trivializing book was inspired by the Sixties Scoop. In the case of We Burned So Bright, it was his afterword.

Spoilery. ( Read more... )

Klune's books are very deeply meaningful for a lot of my customers, but UGH. The best thing I can say about it is that I quite like the covers.

A very loose take on "Little Red Riding Hood," set in modern times post-apocalypse!

Cordelia, nicknamed Red because she hates her given name and always wears a red hoodie, is the sole survivor of her family. She's traveling the post-pandemic wilderness to get to her grandmother's house in the woods, armed only with an axe. She's used a prosthetic leg since losing one in a car crash when she was a child, so people underestimate her. They shouldn't.

The story alternates between her post-pandemic journey and the events leading up to it, when Red lived with her mom (a Black college professor), her dad (white, I forget his job) and her older brother Adam. Red is about 20, Adam is about 22; they're both college students. Red is extremely into horror movies and preparing for danger, so she sees the urgency of the pandemic well before most people. Unfortunately, that's not enough to save her parents and brother.

I was absolutely glued to this book, staying up past midnight to finish it, despite its many flaws. If you, like me, enjoy a small scale apocalypse story with a focus on the logistics of survival, this is a must-read. The logistics of survival bits are GREAT.

It's repetitive (HOW many times do we need to be told that Red can't run fast because she has a prosthetic leg?), everything is over-explained, Red is somehow able to use a small axe to kill multiple men armed with guns (all at once in addition to sequentially!) despite having no training, and the ending is incredibly abrupt and has more loose ends than a half-finished sweater. I cannot believe the author's chutzpah in setting up all sorts of fascinating mysteries only to have Red conclude that she's not the main character (what?) and so no longer cares that she'll never know the answer to any of them. Okay, but I care!

And yet, I enjoyed the hell out of it, right up to the non-ending. I am just a sucker for people searching for beef jerky in looted supermarkets and rescuing kids.

Spoilery details.

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Halfway through this book, I was looking up all of Henry's other books, which are horror or thrillers, many dark fairytale retellings, so I could read them all. When I got the end, I looked up their reviews. Many mention "abrupt" endings and none of the rest are post-apocalyptic, which was by far the best part of the book, so I will probably leave my reading of her books right here.

Erica Skyberg is a 35-year-old teacher in a small town in South Dakota who’s just realized that she’s a trans woman. Or rather, the knowledge that she’s a trans woman has finally become impossible to suppress. Unfortunately, she’s deep in the closet and the only other trans person she knows is Abigail, who is 17 and the only openly trans student at her high school. Erica is in the stage of identity where she can’t think about anything else; Abigail is fine with carrying the banner of being out but would really like her life to not be just about Being Trans.

Erica comes out to Abigail, who is equal parts annoyed and fascinated by the chance to take on the role of being a mentor to an adult. Their relationship is definitionally inappropriate, but not predatory or harmful. Abigail can be a lot and Erica has enormous issues with self-esteem and boundaries, but they’re both essentially kind and well-meaning people trying to just live their lives in a world that has cast them as Public Enemy # 1.

This novel is also essentially kind. It’s a very warm and often pretty funny look at two people who have one somewhat random thing in common and create a relationship based on that one thing, which becomes a relationship based on more than that, and how the repercussions of that relationship spiral outward and affect others: Erica’s ex-wife, Abigail’s boyfriend, Abigail’s boyfriend’s mother, a lonely student who wants to be friends with Abigail, the woman running against an anti-trans political candidate who is guaranteed to win, and many more.

Content note: Obviously transphobia and internalized self-hatred are central to the overall story, but it’s not the kind of book where people are constantly getting slurs screamed at them.

I will mention, since it’s a mistake that I made, that Emily St. James is not Emily St. John Mandel who wrote Station Eleven.

Recommended by Naomi Kritzer. Thanks!