August Reading Recap

While the real world keeps getting more unreal, I'm continuing to appreciate escaping into fictional worlds and people:

→ MEXICAN GOTHIC by Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Noemí is a socialite in 1950 Mexico City who enjoys parties, dresses, and flirting but would still like her father to take her more seriously and let her pursue a degree in anthropology. She was once quite close with her cousin Catalina, but they've been out of touch since Catalina married and moved to her new husband's family home in a remote town. When a bizarre letter arrives from Catalina, full of paranoid ranting about poison and ghosts in her new home, Noemí's father sends her to pay a visit and check on Catalina's health. At High Place, Noemí finds her cousin in a worrying mental and physical state in a decaying mansion where the family imposes strict rules. The ancient patriarch is obsessed with eugenics, Catalina's husband is alternately hostile and lecherous, and Noemí starts having nightmares about the men that grow more disturbing every night. Her instinct is to run away, taking Catalina with her, but the more time she spends with the family, the more doubts she has about what's happening, and the harder she finds it to leave the house.

This book is so impressively creepy. Even Catalina's letter in the first chapter made my skin crawl, and since I don't read a lot of horror, I wasn't sure if I could tolerate the rest of the book. The carefully managed tension and fantastic characters kept me reading to the end, even as the story became more gruesome and distressing. The dank, rotting atmosphere of the house rises off the page, and the text has seared into my mind several vivid images of repulsive things happening to bodies. This is all a testament to Moreno-Garcia's writing skills, as well as a fair warning to readers. MEXICAN GOTHIC is an excellent book that's very hard to put down, and it's also so effective that it's hard to read!

→ LOVING DAY by Mat Johnson: Warren is a not-too-successful comics artist and a Black man often mistaken for white, and he's pretty self-conscious about all of that. After the death of his father, Warren returns to Philadelphia to deal with the burned-out mansion his father was restoring, which is haunted by either ghosts or drug addicts. Warren intends to burn down the house completely, collect the insurance payout, and leave the country again, but before he can carry out that plan, he meets the seventeen-year-old daughter he didn't know about. Tal was raised white and Jewish, and she isn't too happy about discovering her Black roots, or about much of anything. She moves into the mansion with Warren, and he enrolls her in a new school for mixed-race students. Warren has no interest in embracing his own biracial identity, but he is interested in a woman who works at the school, so he gets a job there teaching art and postpones his arson scheme until Tal finishes school.

I had a lot of fun reading this book. Warren, Tal, and all the people they meet are great characters, sometimes absurd, largely human in their many flaws. Johnson's sentences are well-observed and often slyly humorous: "Its expansive lawn is utterly useless, wild like it smokes its own grass and dreams of being a jungle." Some made me laugh out loud: "They have two beautiful kids, and one okay-looking one." The exploration of race and identity is honest, even when it approaches satire. The story careens along through wild interactions, strange turns, and touching moments of connection. Throughout, LOVING DAY is a delight.

→ THE RELENTLESS MOON by Mary Robinette Kowal is the third book in the Lady Astronaut series and has a different protagonist, a character who appears in the earlier books. The story takes place during events of the second installment but could be read without knowledge of the first, since the relevant pieces of backstory are sufficiently explained.

In the years since a meteor strike destroyed the eastern US and permanently altered the climate, the international effort to relocate humanity into space has made great progress, but anger has grown among those who know they may be left behind. Nicole, one of the original class of astronauts, splits her time between piloting shuttles on the Moon and throwing parties for her politician husband on Earth. While she misses her husband when they're apart, she usually appreciates the calmer life of the lunar colony. But when Nicole learns that several recent space program misfortunes may be linked to sabotage, she realizes that this trip to the Moon isn't going to be anything like ordinary.

The story starts off with a couple of bangs, a window shattering during a riot and a rocket exploding on launch in the first dozen pages, and the catastrophes rarely let up. Things go wrong constantly in this novel, so it's an exciting (dare I say relentless?) read, and often upsetting, with characters who suffer in all sorts of ways. There's even a disease outbreak and a quarantine! The cleverly constructed plot revolves around a mystery, with suspects and clues that kept me guessing. I find the writing in this series clunkier than in Kowal's earlier Glamourist Histories, maybe because of the different narrative style or maybe because my tastes have evolved. While I was sometimes frustrated by narrator quirks and repetition, I remained caught up in this action-packed story.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Angelica Baker writes for Literary Hub about the thoughts behind her pandemic project of reading every unread book on her shelves: "...the place reading occupies in my life is really that of a vice. I apply myself to it like an alcoholic on a drinking binge that never ends; I do it compulsively, for days and hours I have pledged (to myself and others) to spend doing other things. It is no accident that I've arranged my adult life such that I can spend a full day reading and then lean on the pretentions of 'research' or 'craft,' as if I only dip into someone else's fiction as part of the diligent work of writing my own."