learnedfoot

This is the sequel to Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, which I read and enjoyed a few months ago. My last review is here, but to recap: Vera is bored and lonely middle-aged woman who runs a tea shop in San Francisco's Chinatown. She inserts herself into a murder investigation, adopts a gaggle of lost Zoomer ducklings, and is in general a nosy, pushy, endearingly batty character with glowing good intentions and a knack for getting shit done. I absolutely love her as a character and in principle I am very on board with her becoming a new detective character in an ongoing book series.

I just ... I think this new book may have stretched itself a bit too far. I hate even saying that, because I LOVE Sutanto for the topic she chose to tackle and I do actually believe there's a place for playful approaches to serious issues. Not everyone has it in them to read heavy misery lit or dark real-world thrillers (hi, it's me, I'm Not Everyone) but still wants to broaden their awareness of the world and its many dark sides. There was a lot in this book that really did work, but the way it all resolved just broke my suspension of disbelief.

I'm talking circles around the issue, so let's be upfront: this is a cosy amateur sleuthing novel about a human trafficking ring.

That's not a spoiler. One of the major characters is introduced very early on as someone who has been trafficked; the tension comes from wondering exactly how Vera will solve the mystery, rather than any suspense over what the solution will be. What I will say without revealing any more specifics is that the stakes are just too high. Vera is a character well suited to investigating accidents or isolated crimes within her neighbourhood; she's not equipped to tackle major organised crime. The believable version of this story ended with Vera dead or in witness protection.

But like I said, I do love that Sutanto took this beast by the horns and decided she was going to make her audience ride it with her. I think human trafficking is one of those subjects where popular awareness is sensationalised, borderline eroticised - we picture the Taken style of kidnappers snatching up conventionally attractive young women to staff their glamorous brothels - but far more common in reality are boring-ugly horror stories of impoverished, undereducated people ensnared by employment scams and forced to do shitty, menial work under abusive conditions. This book really understands that, and has enormous respect and compassion for trafficking victims, especially those who are then coerced to behave in less than prosocial ways themselves. It's also a quick, compelling read that despite its dark focus captures much of the magic and fun of the first book. I don't not recommend it. Come love Vera Wong with me, guys! Just ... I don't know, be ready for some tonal whiplash in this one.

The epilogue has Vera jetting off to France. I hope the next instalment in the series will be a hilarious Parisian caper that takes full advantage of its intensified culture clash possibilities.

The upside of being stupidly busy is that, somewhat counterintuitively, I end up getting lots more reading done; I'm too tired by the end of the day to socialise or catch up on chores or pursue any of my usual hobbies, so I might as well curl up with a book till lights-out time. In the past week and a bit I've wolfed down several books based on Dreamwidth chatter and really enjoyed all of them! Thoughts below.

Piranesi by Susanna Clark: I've been meaning to read this ever since that time earlier this year when we were all making book lists, and virtually everyone seemed to be including it on theirs. The description - guy lives in magical house full of ocean, wanders around discovering endless rooms - did not sound especially gripping to me. But oh, the execution! I think this is a book that, by the necessity of avoiding spoilers, it's really almost impossible to pitch in terms of its actual plot. Cleverer readers than me have tried, and I'm not going to poorly duplicate their efforts here. But I will just say that the experience of reading it was exquisite. The prose was beautiful in its simplicity: I could taste the brine, hear the waves, see the towering marble. The protagonist was a rare example of childlike innocence done in a way that's genuinely touching, never twee. The mystery of the house was gripping, the sense of building tension was deliciously awful, and the bittersweet ending tore a hole in my heart that's still aching days later.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: This is literary horror about a group of Blackfeet men haunted by the murderous spirit of a pregnant elk who they killed on a hunt many years ago. A better description is here via pauraque; their review convinced me to give it a try, and I'm glad I did. I had to work for it. SGJ's prose is assertive and heavily sylised in the way that I always seem to stumble over in litfic written by men (which, admittedly, isn't often; I don't know if Rough Tough Manly Man Words are endemic to the whole genre or just to the books whose concepts I find interesting enough to reach for). It took me time to get into the flow of it and for the first few chapters I thought I would probably DNF. The pacing also sags in the middle; the first and final acts are electrifying, but in between them is a long stretch of meandering reflection on cultural identity and generational trauma that rather bleeds away the tension. I actually really like the idea of two horrors intertwining - the white-hot shock of being pursued by a vengeful supernatural entity, versus the numbing daily violence of systemic racism - but the balance between the two was off. I wish that section had been tightened up a bit.

There's some reasonably high impact gore, most of it directed at animals, but even as a squeamish softie I agree with pauraque that it felt necessary and effective. No children are killed or permanently harmed. (I include that mild spoiler because without it I'd have quit the book.) My few gripes not withstanding, this was a chewy, thought-provoking read with a pleasantly scary atmosphere and a villain who I genuinely loved and cared for so much despite all the killing.

Katabasis by RF Kuang: A confession: I had written off this author based entirely on internet hearsay until troisoiseaux convinced me to give her a chance. I think possibly there's a benefit to arriving late on the scene of any new cultural phenomenon. The readers who've heard Kuang built up as a genius have had the understandable hype-backlash response; I've had time to digest their backlash, come in with greatly lowered expectations, and rediscover the hype for myself in a more organic way than those who were fed the promise of Groundbreaking Literature. Katabasis is not groundbreaking anything. It's an indulgent piece of pop academia in a similar vein to The Good Place, where deep scholarly questions of philosophy and religion (and also, in this case, logic and maths) are deliberately given the most superficial treatment possible for the sake of entertainment. It's a witty, quick-for-its-length romp of a story about two PhD students of magic journeying through Hell to rescue the soul of their abusive former advisor so they can graduate. Like the SGJ book it sagged in the middle; the first and last few levels of Hell were delightfully imaginative (I especially liked the sinners sentenced to work on their dissertations for eternity, never passing or receiving any feedback that could help them pass) but the middle couple were so perfunctory and unimaginative that I genuinely think Kuang must have just run out of ideas for satirical hellscapes. But the rest of the book was enough fun to be worth enduring that lull. I loved the magic system in all its dry, pedantic detail, and I loved the idea that magic could be real and end up occupying much the same space in our culture as linguistics or advanced mathematics: theoretically impressive and prestigious, but in practice an academic circlejerk whose real world applications are barely understood by anyone outside the bubble.

A lot of the online discourse I've seen about this book has centred on ( spoilers, and my thoughts thereon )

( More slight spoilers, cw: abuse )

So this wasn't a life-changing read and I'm not rushing out to buy myself a permanent copy, but I did thoroughly enjoy the experience, enough to then also pick up:

Yellowface by RF Kuang: When Athena, a young literary darling of Chinese descent, dies in a freakish mishap, her white friend June - also a novelist, though massively less successful - steals her latest manuscript and passes it off as her own. The manuscript in question? A deeply sensitive, passionately angry, very much Own Voices oriented story about the WWI Chinese Labour Corps. June reworks the story to include a bunch of noble white allies, remakes her authorial persona to be racially ambiguous, and launches herself towards literary stardom with all the reckless confidence of Icarus charging headlong at the sun.

( More thoughts )