I am not really into post-apocalyptic dystopian novels, but considering the bewildering time we are living through this moment, this novel, The Fireman by Joe Hill, and its 752 pages seemed to be just what the sociologist ordered. It was a page-turner despite its intimidating size (and I even read it in hardback!). I found myself shunning television or other distractions to get back to the book. The main character, Harper Grayson (Willowes), is a complex and strong female character -- I sure did appreciate that. The novel is told from a third person limited POV, which I think was a strength, and perhaps, a weakness. I reveled in thinking of the capable nurse who is finding her strength as the world goes to hell, but it also forces other characters to launch into long monologues to provide background. I don't know why, but that always annoys me. It wasn't cringe-worthy in this novel, but I did think it stood out like a sore thumb just a little bit. It is something to think about, right? POV is so important when authors choose to tell a story, yet we hardly consider it sometimes, even as writers of our own fiction.
So, why did I even pick up this novel? I might have said so in the previous post about Save Yourself -- I can't remember. Joe Hill is the son of the infamous Stephen King and the brother-in-law of Kelly Braffit who wrote the aforementioned novel. I heard an interview with Hill on Terri Gross's Fresh Air. I was gripped by how Gross described the "disease" that Hill created for this for this novel is at once both beautiful and terrifying. The spore, commonly known as Dragonscale (the scientific name, Draco Incendia Trychophyton) has this terrible beauty as it smokes its way across the East Coast of the United States and Canada. When Harper first contracts the disease she notices "Two days later her arm is sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them" (58). The frightening part is that several people who contract Dragonscale spontaneously combust. They literary begin to smoke and then explode into flame, yet some do not, but that danger always looms and lingers and puts everyone on edge -- that might be putting it lightly...
It's funny because Hill finished this novel on October 9, 2014. It seems prescient. The aftermath of the Dragonscale rips the world into camps -- those who work together to survive and those who fight to destroy the disease, and therefore, other human beings. I am writing this blog post in the aftermath of the two political conventions -- conventions that echo these same themes: "The Law and Order" candidate versus the idea that "We are Better Together." It freaks me out when science-fiction writers do this kind of thing. I mean Hill even includes little gems like "FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. ... Then Glenn Beck burned to death on his Internet program, right in front of the chalkboard, burned so hot his glasses fused to his face, and after most of the news was less about who did it and more about how not to catch it" (13). When you read this novel of disaster, you will recognize the glimpses of the world that has reared its ugly head in the past couple of months. Yet, why does this surprise me -- writers are observers and these politics are nothing new, right? Writers often just see clearer than we do.
And the allusions. Who are the fans of Fahrenheit 451? Do you get the title now? There's more in there. This is also, undoubtedly, a nod to Stephen King's The Stand.
Monday, August 1, 2016
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Summer 2016 Reading: 1st Blog, 2 books!
I am back. Not sure what the last summer posting hiatus was about, but here I am again. So far this summer I have read two books (along with about 1, 750 AP poetry essays at the AP grading in Louisville, KY): Aiming for One Hundred by Sara D. Toney and Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet. Wow, I hadn't really thought about it before writing the titles together, but these two books are worlds apart. Worlds.
Aiming for One Hundred was written by my mother-in-law's friend, Sally Toney. Sally will be 102 this fall. Yep, 102. She is still sharp and walks every day. This book is a collection of stories, poems, essays that she wrote in the 1980s for a course titled "Finding Your Voice." She tells stories about her childhood, her experiences as a student and athlete at Pembroke College, the women's college of Brown University, and her adult married life. What made reading Sally's musings so poignant for me was that she is the same age as my grandmothers if they were alive. Although, Sally led an amazing life that was much different than the world my grandmothers experienced, witnessing how Sally navigated those times provided a new perspective of the past. Sally certainly has lived an extraordinary life, forging an intellectual path when it was difficult for women to so. Her life was not without trials -- one of the most devastating being the memory of her mother's "lovely face in the dark carriage smiling gently as she rolled away from [her]" This would be the last time Sally saw her mother who died after surgery. If you are interested in the past, wanting to glimpse into one woman's interesting life, this little gem of a book is for you. The vignettes aren't long, easy to fill 10 or 15 minutes of time you might have to savor a morsel of Sally's life.
The second book I burned through. Kelly Braffet is the daughter-in-law of Stephen King. I had not heard of her until I listened to an interview on "Fresh Air" with her brother-in-law, Joe Hill who highly recommended her books. I ran out to purchase Joe Hill's Fireman (my next read I plan on beginning tonight) and grabbed her Save Yourself along with it. I don't even know how to describe this novel. First of all, Braffet's writing is so damned satisfying. Let me see if I can deconstruct why. Her sentence structure is varied in a way that follows a pattern of thought. For instance, I just opened to a random page:
"In the end, Karen Hensley retired. A week later Layla came home from school with her lovely hair chopped to her chin and dyed jet black. Her wardrobe quickly followed suit. Soon she was haunting the dinner table like a snarling, sarcastic ghost. The rapid transformation left Mother and Dad hurt and angry--they called it concern, but it felt like hurt and anger to Verna--and the members of her father's home church baffled. Everyone blamed Layla's new attitude on the corruption of the secular world. But now it seemed that even the secular world disapproved of her, and Verna didn't know what to think" (31).
Look at those sentences -- the varying between the long and short and they seem to follow Verna's thinking, the widening of her thinking about her troubled sister.
What also kept me reading is the satellites of conflict Braffet mounted. There are several characters, but the narration follows Verna, Patrick, and Caro. Although there are strange intersections of their lives, I could not figure out what was going to happen--what all the tension was leading toward. Braffet did not let me down, and she grapples with topics that have been rolling around my brain lately given the tragedies in Orlando last week.
These characters also lead lives that I fear living, but that I have been privileged enough to avoid. It also provides a perspective into the lives of young people that we adults are too stultified by the world to see or too much in denial to recognize. Braffet tapped into that pain of not being seen, listened to, understood, considered -- all things that I should keep in mind as a mother and a teacher.
I also have to say that Braffet also knows to write about the raw and gritty. She does not shy away from the darker sides of human nature. That voyeurism also kept me turning the pages.
Aiming for One Hundred was written by my mother-in-law's friend, Sally Toney. Sally will be 102 this fall. Yep, 102. She is still sharp and walks every day. This book is a collection of stories, poems, essays that she wrote in the 1980s for a course titled "Finding Your Voice." She tells stories about her childhood, her experiences as a student and athlete at Pembroke College, the women's college of Brown University, and her adult married life. What made reading Sally's musings so poignant for me was that she is the same age as my grandmothers if they were alive. Although, Sally led an amazing life that was much different than the world my grandmothers experienced, witnessing how Sally navigated those times provided a new perspective of the past. Sally certainly has lived an extraordinary life, forging an intellectual path when it was difficult for women to so. Her life was not without trials -- one of the most devastating being the memory of her mother's "lovely face in the dark carriage smiling gently as she rolled away from [her]" This would be the last time Sally saw her mother who died after surgery. If you are interested in the past, wanting to glimpse into one woman's interesting life, this little gem of a book is for you. The vignettes aren't long, easy to fill 10 or 15 minutes of time you might have to savor a morsel of Sally's life.
The second book I burned through. Kelly Braffet is the daughter-in-law of Stephen King. I had not heard of her until I listened to an interview on "Fresh Air" with her brother-in-law, Joe Hill who highly recommended her books. I ran out to purchase Joe Hill's Fireman (my next read I plan on beginning tonight) and grabbed her Save Yourself along with it. I don't even know how to describe this novel. First of all, Braffet's writing is so damned satisfying. Let me see if I can deconstruct why. Her sentence structure is varied in a way that follows a pattern of thought. For instance, I just opened to a random page:
"In the end, Karen Hensley retired. A week later Layla came home from school with her lovely hair chopped to her chin and dyed jet black. Her wardrobe quickly followed suit. Soon she was haunting the dinner table like a snarling, sarcastic ghost. The rapid transformation left Mother and Dad hurt and angry--they called it concern, but it felt like hurt and anger to Verna--and the members of her father's home church baffled. Everyone blamed Layla's new attitude on the corruption of the secular world. But now it seemed that even the secular world disapproved of her, and Verna didn't know what to think" (31).
Look at those sentences -- the varying between the long and short and they seem to follow Verna's thinking, the widening of her thinking about her troubled sister.
What also kept me reading is the satellites of conflict Braffet mounted. There are several characters, but the narration follows Verna, Patrick, and Caro. Although there are strange intersections of their lives, I could not figure out what was going to happen--what all the tension was leading toward. Braffet did not let me down, and she grapples with topics that have been rolling around my brain lately given the tragedies in Orlando last week.
These characters also lead lives that I fear living, but that I have been privileged enough to avoid. It also provides a perspective into the lives of young people that we adults are too stultified by the world to see or too much in denial to recognize. Braffet tapped into that pain of not being seen, listened to, understood, considered -- all things that I should keep in mind as a mother and a teacher.
I also have to say that Braffet also knows to write about the raw and gritty. She does not shy away from the darker sides of human nature. That voyeurism also kept me turning the pages.
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