Though I didn’t find myself too impressed with The Passage, the first in Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire trilogy, I ended up reading the second novel in the series, The Twelve , since my hold on a library copy finally came through. (I requested it when it came out in October 2012, so that should give you an idea of how popular the series is!) But the all-too literary treatment of vampires that The Passage offered only continued in The Twelve, with an added dose of forced spirituality and unbelievable coincidences.

This all makes it sound like I hated The Twelve, which I didn’t. It’s a solid three-star read, thanks to Cronin’s ability to inject real fear and tension into the narrative, one or two interesting and pitiable characters, and the desire to know how the heck he is going to wrap this sprawling thing up. Mostly, I think I’m just a sucker for hype. But this series is so fawned over, to the point of garnering a movie deal and getting accolades from writers like Stephen King, that I can’t quite help but feel that I’m missing something.

In The Twelve, we are introduced to several timelines and groups of different characters. One thread runs during the initial spread of the virals, and follows a group of survivors as well as some of the military leadership responsible for the experiment that turned twelve death-row inmates into near-unstoppable, inhuman creatures. This was probably my favorite part of the book! We were denied much of the actual apocalypse in The Passage (instead seeing far before and far after), and this section makes up for that. It felt appropriately desolate and creepy and desperate, and Cronin pulls no punches in showing just how low humanity can sink. However, this section is all-too brief, and we are brought forward to various ‘future’ timelines, where we are reintroduced to characters from The Passage, including Peter, Alicia, Michael, and Amy as they try to live their live in the aftermath of the last book’s events, while still hunting down virals. These parts of the novel dragged for me due to a lot of mundanity or repetition, such as long traveling sequences.

The sheer amount of coincidence (or, as Cronin would have you believe, the machinations of a higher calling) that takes place in The Twelve is truly baffling.  Sure, the human population of the United States has been decimated, but does that really mean that every character we know has to be reunited at the same place, around the same time? At one point near the novel’s end, when yet another missing child is reunited with her long-lost father, I actually rolled my eyes. (I would have thrown my hands into the air in exasperation, but I was standing on the subway.) Be prepared to have to swallow a whole lot of coincidence, or to chalk everything up to “destiny,” as Amy, Greer, and many of the other characters intimate.

But the biggest issue with The Twelve is the lack of connection I felt to the characters, especially Amy. She is supposed to be the emotional core of these novels; the love between her and Wolgast is arguably the most powerful force in the world, more powerful even than the hold Zero and the Eleven have over their viral hordes. But Amy (and to some extent, Alicia, who is criminally misused in this book) just seems to become this cipher, an odd combination of an unbeatable action girl and unknowable yet all-knowing messiah. (And her relationship with Peter feels both random and slightly creepy.) The rest of the characters fade into tired archetypes: we have Sara, the downtrodden-but-not-broken Mother; Greer, the military-prisoner-turned-soldier-of-God; Lila, the bereaved-mother-living-in-a-fantasy-world, and on and on. One of the only interesting characters was Horace Guilder, but even his sub-plot becomes mired down in having him do evil things for evil’s sake, and just ends up spinning its wheels–evilly, of course.

Despite all of my critiques above, I imagine that I’ll read the final book in Cronin’s series, The City of Mirrors, out of morbid curiosity when it comes out next year. But I may soon be finished with arch, literary treatments of the sci-fi and fantasy genres written by those who are merely dabbling in them, as I almost always  find myself disappointed.

Fool me three times, shame on my reading habits.

Bookwanderer Rating: Three out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “‘For you, hunting the Twelve isn’t an answer. It’s a question. Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving?’”
Other Reviews: The New York Times, The Guardian, The Book Smugglers, Coffee and a Book Chick

In a futuristic Johannesburg, South Africa, our protagonist Zinzi December is eking out a living by finding lost objects with her burden and companion Sloth by her side. Like hundreds of other people around the world, Zinzi is ‘animalled’–after an incident of wrong-doing and the ensuing guilt, an animal has appeared and has become physically and psychically linked to the offending human. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of order to the type of animal that becomes linked to each guilty person; there is a brief mention of someone in prison with a butterfly companion, for example.

Sound silly? Well, I absolutely loved the concept of the ‘animalled’. Beukes sells it through Zinzi’s wry, no-nonsense tone and the solid world-building. These aren’t just people with animal friends; they are faced with fear and hatred from the non-animalled, lack the opportunity to get jobs, and are haunted by their fear of the Undertow, the mysterious force that kills them if their animal dies. Beukes’ world is helped along significantly by the inclusion of several ‘non-fiction’ chapters that feature academic papers, IMDB pages, and more that show the various ways in which culture and society have adapted to the ‘animalled’ in their midst. (Additionally, this section’s shout-out to Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass was a well-done treat for fans of his series, since most of them will probably be thinking of daemons on their foray into Zoo City.)

Zinzi herself is a wonderful character, flawed, with a tough exterior that hides a heavy heart. She is a former drug addict who is responsible for someone’s death, and has found herself working for her ex-dealer in order to pay off her debts. She ends up taking a missing person job (which she usually spurns) in her desperation, and winds up entangled in a much larger and more insidious plot that targets her fellow ‘animalled’. I though Zinzi’s voice and personality were great; within just a few pages her character had been broadly established, and her snarky pop culture references were very funny. The cast is rounded out by Zinzi’s boyfriend, her employers Maltese and Marabou, teen pop idols, music moguls, and various other crooks and two-timers. Though the setting is quite sci-fi in flavor, the characters and plot is almost entirely thriller/noir, and the question of who to trust is brought up constantly by Zinzi.

The only thing that kept Zoo City from being a five star review, for me, was the pacing. It has the twists and turns of a noir novel, but unfortunately, too many of them seem to come right at the end, and there wasn’t really enough time to follow all the threads, or to let the impact of each cascading action really sink in. Allowing the reader some space to catch their breath would have allowed the various revealed secrets and betrayals some more ‘oomph,’ as well as a better understanding. This is one case where I wish the book had been 50 to 100 pages longer, or had been expanded into a sequel. I loved the unique world Beukes created, and I hope to be able to return to it (either through a movie–reportedly in the works!–or through a reread).

Despite the pacing issues, Zoo City is an incredibly innovative novel that uses some well-established tropes to great effect. The atypical setting, engaging characters, and excellent world-building all make this a novel to remember.

Zoo City was on my to-read list for the 2013 TBR Pile Challenge. So far, I think this has been my favorite read for the Challenge, which is hosted by Roof Beam Reader!

Bookwanderer Rating: Four out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “‘Don’t get too close buddy,’ I warn Sloth. Unofficially there’s a code of conduct but animals are still animals. And animals can be assholes too.”
Other Reviews: The Lightning Tree, Lady Business, The Guardian 

My apologies–I have been absent from the last few Top Ten Tuesdays, for absolutely no good reason! But this week was a great time to get back in the game.

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This feature was created to share lists with other bookish folks! For this week’s Top Ten Tuesday list, we’ve got a rewind–we can choose any past Top Ten Tuesday subject that we missed! I chose March 26′s prompt: the top ten  books I recommend the most! (Fittingly, many of these are going to look familiar to you TTTers…)

1. Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
I will never stop talking about this book. It represents everything sci-fi should be: believable characters, fantastic technology, and timeless themes. I try to press this novel on everyone!

2. West with the Night, by Beryl Markham
Whenever the subject of memoirs comes up, I immediately recommend West with the Night. It’s one of the only memoirs I’ve read that is well-written, engaging, and impressive, while still being relatable and truthful. Seriously, read it!

3. A Song of Ice and Fire, by G.R.R. Martin
I successfully got my boyfriend and father to read these, and am now trying to force them on my brother. These are great for seasoned fantasy readers who can spot the tropes Martin gleefully butchers, as well as people who watch the HBO show but haven’t yet read the source material.

4. The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
I recently wrote about The Golden Notebook being one of my heart books, and I meant every word! I passed on my recommendation to good friend J, who also very much enjoyed it, and I tend to want to pass it on to just about every female friend I have.

5. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
UGH this book is so painfully good. I mention it in almost every TTT post I’ve done! But I can’t help myself. It’s just so well-written and interesting and chock-full of intrigue and pathos.

6. Passage, by Connie Willis
This is one of those books that I recommend and then get upset if the recommendee doesn’t like it, because it resonated so deeply with me. (Thanks, Dad.)

7. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
I could NOT stop recommending this book to friends once I finished it. Willis is great at getting you to care about characters who are marked for death. My boyfriend ripped the cover of my copy and it infuriated me, because now I can’t lend it out anymore.

8. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
This is a classic graphic novel that even non-comic book fans should read. It plays with many well-known superhero tropes and can inspire tons of passionate discussion between friends. A great example of the form.

9. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russel
Not for everyone, this beautiful tale of a Jesuit mission to a newly-discovered planet is both harrowing and redemptive. And guaranteed to make you cry at least once.

10. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
This  is just a straight-up classic that everyone should read. I am continually surprised by how many people, even people who are fans of Steinbeck, haven’t read it. Don’t be intimidated by the length; it’s worth it.

Here is the summary from Goodreads:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963: two students meet one autumn evening during their senior year at Harvard–Ed, a Jewish kid on scholarship, and Hugh, a Boston Brahmin with the world at his feet. Ed is unapologetically ambitious and girl-crazy, while Hugh is ambivalent about everything aside from his dedicated pining for the one girl he’s ever loved. An immediate, intense friendship is sparked that night between these two opposites, which ends just as abruptly, several years later, although only one of them understands why. A Dual Inheritance follows the lives of Ed and Hugh for next several decades, as their paths-in spite of their rift, in spite of their wildly different social classes, personalities and choices-remain strangely and compellingly connected.

I’m a sucker for collegiate settings, and though we are only at Harvard briefly, I think Hershon does a commendable job using it as a backdrop to the relationship between Ed and Hugh. College is a period where people from disparate upbringings and backgrounds interact, often for the first time, and appropriately, Ed and Hugh could not be more different. However–as again often happens in college–the two become intensely close friends, each grappling with their own similar emotional ‘inheritance’ from their parents.

This section especially reminded me of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides–and I mean that as a compliment, as I enjoyed both of these books. Both have young people trying to define themselves, their relationships, and their aspirations; A Dual Inheritance focuses more on the impacts, intentional and otherwise, that parents have on their children. It also lacks the pretentiousness that some found so distasteful in The Marriage Plot; indeed, people are consistently and realistically dealing with their weaknesses.

As the boys grow up, they drift apart thanks to some poor decision-making late one night, and from that point on, the book follows their separate journeys. While Ed does eventually come to achieve the success he has always wanted, his relationships suffer. Hugh, on the other hand, is able to lead the morally-upright life he sought, but finds himself compromising his own integrity personally and professionally.

Then we meet each man’s child, and watch as the cycle of inheritance starts all over again. What do we pass on to our children, consciously and unconsciously? How much of our personality is learned and how much is bred? These questions propel this second generation’s act forward, and it is surprisingly uncertain, even at the end of the book, what the answers are. I really liked that.

And sure, while there are a few moments that might stretch your disbelief–that Hugh’s and Ed’s children not only attend the same boarding school, but manage to become friends, for example–they are easily overlooked due to the real and raw emotion that Hershon elicits from these characters. I empathized with each character in turn, and even saw a bit of myself reflected in each one. Hugh’s desperation to do measurable good in the world; Ed’s need to rise above his humble origins; Ed’ daughter’s all-consuming drive to achieve that ends up leaving her unhappy.

This is a lovely piece of literary fiction, particularly if you are interested in the idea of children trying to find identities separate from their parents, and I highly recommend it.

I received this book free for review from Ballantine Books through Netgalley. A Dual Inheritance will be available for purchase on May 7, 2013.

Bookwanderer Rating: Four out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: TBA
Other Reviews: Publishers Weekly, 1776 Books, The Reader’s Commute

Niffenegger’s attempt at a gothic novel concerns two sets of twins: Edie and Elsbeth, who have not spoken or seen one another in over a decade, and Edie’s children, Julia and Valentina. After Elsbeth’s death (not a spoiler, as it happens within the first few pages!), Edie and the twins discover that she has left her London flat to Julia and Valentina, with a few stipulations–the first being that they have to live there for a year before selling it, and the second that Edie and her husband Jack can never set foot inside. With that, Her Fearful Symmetry is off and running. We follow Julia and Valentina as they attempt to navigate a new country and culture, and not least of all their own identities, as twins and as separate individuals. Oh, and did I mention that Elsbeth’s flat is haunted, by Elsbeth herself? The reader is treated to Elsbeth’s slow realization of her death and her increasing powers as a spirit.

The writing itself is lovely and haunting. Niffengger has a flowing and poignant (yet dark) style, and it lends itself well to the gray and isolated life the girls lead in London. Sometimes she captures a feeling or a moment so well that I paused in my reading to allow it to fully sink it. She fully plays up the atmospheric elements of a haunted flat in London, next to Highgate Cemetary, heavy with history and things left unsaid. Certain scenes, like Elsbeth’s death and her partner Robert’s grief, are emotional without being treacly or overwrought, and are a testament to Niffengger’s strength as a writer.

Unfortunately, the characters are all unremittingly selfish and unlikable -except, perhaps, for Julia (the twin, in fact, who is originally painted as bossy and unreasonable) and Martin, the twins’ upstairs neighbor who suffers from OCD. Even characters who start out as likable, like Robert and Valentina, quickly become illogical, thoughtless, and–worst of all–stupid. The original plot point (the stipulations about the flat in the will) is somewhat silly, as is one of the two big story twists–characters act entirely nonsensically and most of the large conflicts could be solved by characters simply talking to one another. So many of the characters’ actions are simply unbelievable and the leaps of faith required to buy into them were just too large for me to make. While it may make for fast and breathless reading, it also didn’t link me too emotionally to them, Valentina, Elspeth, and Edie especially.

Really, the book was most successful when read as an ode to Highgate Cemetery. The stories of the cemetery’s inhabitants that Robert shares, through his dissertation research and his tours, are more realistic and gripping than the book’s actual story. The cemetery’s grounds are lovingly detailed, intermixed with its tumultuous social history. (It will definitely not surprise you to learn that Niffenegger herself is a guide at Highgate.) Honestly, it made me want to pick up a nonfiction book about Highgate!

Ultimately, I would only recommend this for die-hard (pun intended!) Niggenegger fans, who can’t get enough of her beautiful prose. For everyone else, I would say to start and end with The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Her Fearful Symmetry fulfills one of my books for the TBR Pile Challenge, hosted by Roof Beam Reader.

Bookwanderer Rating: Two and a half stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing.”
Other Reviews: New York Times Book Review, Dear Author, Stainless Steel Droppings, Book Chick City

The Huffington Post has created a slideshow out of GRMM’s suggested reads. It’s a great mix of fantasy classics and more contemporary novels. (There are even some fantasy novels that I’ve never heard of.)

Visit Martin’s list of recommendations here!

The Wild Iris consists of a set of poems written from the points-of-view of three narrators. One is a human, I assume Gluck herself. One is a series of flowers in her garden, from the rose to the witchgrass. And the third is an omniscient, omnipresent god-like force. Gluck doesn’t necessarily tell you this; it is only through reading and re-reading the poems in sequence that these narrative voices truly emerge. Each narrator has conflicted thoughts and feelings about the others, and the way in which they question, doubt, and supplicate one another.

There are lots of repeating images and themes here, from death and rebirth to identity to the responsibilities of a creator to his creations. The flower-based poems, for example, both fear death and recognize that death is not the end; their seeds will spread and spring will come for them once more. They also call out feelingly for their gardeners’ help to survive, a sentiment echoed in the poems narrated by humans and addressed to a divine force. I read somewhere that Gluck often introduces elements from the Bible, and some of those stories seem to be present here as well, when the god-narrator speaks (sometimes exasperatedly!) about the needs and fears of his inventions. While I’m not particularly religious, I did enjoy how simultaneously accessible and alien Gluck’s god sounded.

If I’m honest with myself, though, I think I was more emotionally-connected to the previous collection of Gluck’s that I’ve read and reviewed, Averno. Perhaps it’s because I am much more familiar with Greek mythology than I am with the books of the Bible. I felt like I had to work a bit harder to unearth the meaning in The Wild Iris‘s poems–not necessarily a bad thing!–and still walked away not knowing if my interpretations were correct. Still, for anyone looking to read more of Gluck’s work specifically, or more poetry generally, I would highly recommend this collection.

Some of my favorite poems from this collection were “Retreating Light,” “Witchgrass,” and “Matins” #3. In fact, because I loved it and its sentiments so much, here is “Retreating Light”:

You were always very young children,
always waiting for a story.
And I’d been through it all too many times;
I was tired of telling stories.
So I gave you the pencil and paper.
I gave you pens made of reeds
I had gathered myself, afternoons in the dense meadows.
I told you, write your own story.

After all those years of listening
I thought you’d know
what a story was.

All you could do was weep.
You wanted everything told to you
and nothing thought through yourselves.

Then I realized you couldn’t think
with any real boldness or passion;
you hadn’t had your own lives yet,
your own tragedies.
So I gave you lives, I gave you tragedies,
because apparently tools alone weren’t enough.

You will never know how deeply
it pleases me to see you sitting there
like independent beings,
to see you dreaming by the open window,
holding the pencils I gave you
until the summer morning disappears into writing.

Creation has brought you
great excitement, as I knew it would,
as it does in the beginning.
And I am free to do as I please now,
to attend to other things, in confidence
you have no need of me anymore.

The Wild Iris fulfills one of my books for the TBR Pile Challenge, hosted by Roof Beam Reader.

Bookwanderer Rating: Four out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “I told you, write your own story.”

I’m a birder (though not on Gallagher’s level), and in addition to having birded in some cool places, I’ve also been lucky enough to have traveled throughout Mexico as a result of my father’s family still living there. So really, this book seemed as though it was tailor-written for me!

However.

I had a very difficult time connecting with this book–and I truly enjoy travel writing! (Redmond O’Hanlon and Bill Bryson, for example, are two authors whose travel books are hilarious and heart-warming and frightening by turns.) It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Imperial Dreams failed for me, but something about Gallagher’s narrative voice felt disengaging. Humor was rarely attempted and fell flat. There was a lot of emphasis placed on what they ate (which never seemed to diverge too far from eggs, peppers, beans, and tortillas–completely fine, but why mention it each time, then?). Sometimes the writing felt like more of an itinerary than a piece of travel writing, due to the amount of back-and-forth travel going on as the group chased rumors and tried to avoid areas of drug cultivation and violence.

Perhaps it is because their search ends, sadly but probably predictably, in failure. They never see nor hear any sign of an imperial woodpecker, despite their many encounters with residents of the area who recall seeing the birds in the past. Gallagher also gets hurt, even blacking out on a mountain trail at one point, and that slows his journey immensely, causing them to cut short their explorations.

It’s much harder to write about a journey that ends without that satisfying moment, and so I’m sympathetic to the task that Gallagher undertook here.

The story itself was, by all rights, interesting. Gallagher weaves the natural and human histories of place into his narrative, giving us a tour of a harsh land that nonetheless supports farmers and ranchers. He displays a good understanding of the Mexican illegal drug economy and didn’t seem to sensationalize it–this was truly a very dangerous undertaking, and it is not romanticized, which I appreciated. The landscapes sound beautiful, and the people that they do meet–from landholding Mormon families to Mexican biologists to poverty-stricken campesinos–are uniformly friendly, generous, and helpful. If anything, the book just made me want to explore the areas of Mexico that I haven’t visited yet.

I would be remiss, though, if I did not also mention that Gallagher does not give enough weight to those who challenged the Cornell team’s previous ivory-billed woodpecker sighting. (Gallagher’s previous book, The Grail Bird, focuses on the hunt and “discovery” of another large, rare woodpecker.) In Imperial Dreams, he sneeringly calls doubters “naysayers,” but does not describe for the reader at all who these naysayers are, or how they backed up their claims that the ivory-bill is, in fact, extinct. This presents a very one-sided account, and could easily lead to a reader assuming he really and unquestionably had re-discovered living ivory-billed woodpeckers.

But. David Sibley (yes, that David Sibley) and Kenn Kaufman (yes, that Kenn Kaufaman)–both widely renowned ornithologists, professional birders, field guide authors/illustrators, and conservationists–publicly cast doubt on Gallagher’s ivory-bill sighting. Sibley even tracked through the same Arkansas marches where the sighting took place, and was unable to find any signs of an ivory-bill.

I don’t think Gallagher is lying at all, and I don’t think his rare-bird searches were about recognition or fame. (You don’t go into ornithology for the money, that’s for sure.) He’s clearly a passionate birder, and you don’t get to work at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology without knowing your stuff; the book proves that he is adept at research and birding. I just think that perhaps wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. It’s easy to make misidentifications in the field–even more so if there’s a rare bird that is constantly on your mind, and it behooves him to be straightforward about his previous experiences.

With all of this backstory nagging at me, I realized that it was going to be a struggle for me to try to enjoy the book on its own merits; then, when the journey fizzled and the writing dried, the struggle became nearly impossible . For those of you who don’t care quite as much about current controversies in the birding world, and simply want a tale about exploring Mexico in search of a dream, Imperials Dreams might be a nice read.

Imperial Dreams will be available for purchase on April 16, 2013. I received a free copy from publisher Atria Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Bookwanderer Rating: Three out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “Virginia nodded as we asked her about the birds and described them accurately as “pinto” (black and white) and said that the black on their plumage had a bluish sheen at times if the light struck it a certain way. But she answered most of out questions with the same refrain: ‘That was long ago, and now they are gone.’”

Anyway, after reading Eva’s post and thinking of my own heart books, one in particular immediately came to mind: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, The Golden  Notebook is the story of Anna Wulf, a writer, and her five journals. Each journal is a different color, and represents a different point in her life (the red notebook, for example, tells of her time as a member of the Communist party). The fifth notebook–the golden notebook–is her attempt to tie all of the other notebooks, really all of the other parts of herself, together.

The Golden Notebook i’s now considered a feminist classic, but at the time, I didn’t know that. I picked it up from my local library on a whim; perhaps I recognized the title, or just thought the cover was interesting.

Then I started reading it, and it was as if a blinding light suffused me. This book–despite being  published in 1962, from the point of a view of a Communist and a mother–was speaking directly to me. Anna is disillusioned, confused, warring with both the freedom and the confusion that post-war London has brought her. She’s talented and ambitious, but emotionally and psychologically lost–floundering.

I read The Golden Notebook at a time in my life where I was struggling to define myself in a job that felt increasingly unfulfilling. (And that’s not to say that I have all the answers now, but I do have a slightly better sense of the things I find important in a career.) I’ve always measured my self-worth by my academic and my work output, and after college, I felt a bit lost. I wanted to be a writer, but found it impossible to corral my thoughts enough to actually put words to paper (or computer screen). I was dissatisfied with living in NYC and craved change–I just didn’t know exactly what. It’s a feeling, I’m sure, that many people can commiserate with. And that’s what The Golden Notebook did for me: it commiserated. It showed me that these challenges were particular to ambitious women. I didn’t even need a happy ending; the commiseration, defined so unequivocally, was enough.

As I’m going through a similar period of dissatisfaction–of wondering how to best live by my values and still be able to provide for myself–I should probably pick up The Golden Notebook again, to see if it holds any new revelations for me.

What are your heart books?

As I read, I found myself wishing the Magonet had dropped the enthnography conceit entirely, and instead focused solely on the personal histories he had created surrounded his own personal netsuke. Those chapters, to me, felt the most in-depth, realistic, and creative. There are stories about a geisha cat, a pair of elderly sumo wrestlers, a fox priest, a professor, and more. They range from exploring themes of loneliness, relationships, and politics, with just a twist of magical realism, and are written with a certain detached wryness that I thought was appealing. Enough of the “other Japan” comes through in these stories, in bits and pieces that occur naturally as our characters navigate the world, as to make dedicated ethnography chapters seem flat and overly-expository. The geisha cat, for example, introduces the reader to the role of a geisha–to be a conversational, charming, objective of beauty–in addition to what her days and nights might look like, without necessarily going into a formal study of geisha culture. It probably also helps that I was the type of kid that totally believed her stuffed animals were alive, and had all sorts of fun adventures the moment my back was turned. It was very easy for me to fall under the spell of the netsuke characters!

The other thing is that I wanted to see more than just “another Japan.” Really, this could have been an ethnographic study of the Japanese; the fact that the netsuke were sculpted into the forms of cats and demons and shepherdesses didn’t factor into their society as much as one might think. Netsuke hold jobs and live in cities and towns; they are stereotypically a quiet and reserved people; they wear kimono and geta; they are considered cold and polite to outsiders; there is even a Netsuke Republic that is obviously China. This also highlights, for me, why the character-based chapters were the most effective. We can read nonfiction histories and ethnographies of Japan, but the character chapters of Netsuke Nation give us something unique: cultural studies by characters navigating that culture.

One of the more-successful integrations of netsuke culture with Japanese culture was that societal divisions are based upon the materials netsuke are made of. Bone netsuke were elite, whereas the newer materials (resins, plastics) made up the lowest caste. This was an imaginative way to combine status differences in Japanese society with the unique properties of the netsuke, and I wished that there had been more of this in the book, rather than relying so heavily on real Japanese culture. Magonet is obviously capable of this type of creative writing, and so I hope in the future he considers writing pure fiction!

One last concern was that the terms used for certain things made me wince, hard. For example, having the netsuke call horror films “holla” films, and Gene Kelly “Jinokerry” and flower power “fraupau.” First, it actually took me a long time to figure out what each of these terms was referring to. Secondly, and more importantly, this is racist. We are clearly supposed to identify netsuke society with Japanese society. For all intents and purposes, netsuke individuals are Japanese. This weird stereotype of Japanese people being incapable of pronouncing “r”–without challenging it, or calling it out–has absolutely no place in a book being published in 2013. Magonet obviously loves Japan, having lived and taught there, and so his usage of these terms struck me as very odd. Perhaps people of Japanese descent wouldn’t find it inappropriate, but I certainly did. And it’s too bad, because the imagined lives of netsuke lend themselves to some interesting and engaging stories.

Netsuke Nation will be released on April 1, 2013. I received a copy free for review from publisher Matador through Netgalley.

Bookwanderer Rating: Three out of five stars
Bookwanderer Tagline: “She would be the hero of her own story, and not some helpless, passive dreamer, endlessly waiting for her savior to appear.”