“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi

This book has been on my reading list long enough that I started it and was surprised at my choice. The plot gets turned on its head though halfway through, and again just before the end. Then I realized why I was so interested in it.

The book starts with a story about teenagers Sarah and David who are both in the theatre program at a performing arts high school. They start off in love but then drift apart. Sarah can’t figure out why and is constantly orbiting David trying to get his attention again. They end up hosting a theatre troupe from England as well, and Sarah starts a thing with their unattractive star Liam.

The narrative abruptly stops at page 131, which is revealed to be as far into a book that “Karen” gets. “Karen” is the pseudonym for a classmate of Sarah’s, who is now an adult and reading Sarah’s fictionalized version of their high school experience. She stops at that point as it becomes clear that she isn’t going to be fully portrayed in the story. Karen keeps the use of the pseudonyms to be consistent, but she talks about how she swapped to dance and left town, but then ended up coming back and befriending David in the process. David is also in their hometown and directing theatre there, he wants to put on a play written by Martin, the director of the English troupe that was in town when they were students. Karen was implied to be in a relationship with Martin, and she manages to get cast in the play. She also goes to meet Sarah on her book tour and convinces Sarah to be her backstage dresser for the show. Having done all this, she was supposed to shoot a blank out of a gun backstage with Martin so that there’d be a gunshot for the play. Opening night though, she shoots him in the crotch. Her narration reveals that he got her pregnant before leaving town and she gave up the baby for adoption.

The final chapter is from the point of view of her daughter. Real names are now used so it’s hard to be sure who anyone is at first. But she goes to the school to try and figure out who her mother was. She talks to their teacher, and the chapter opens with her attending a memorial for his life. In a flashback she talks about how she went to his house to try and get information from him and he sexually assaulted her. She never figures out her mother’s name.

The twist halfway through was by far the most interesting part of the book, because it allows the focus to go from these teenagers to the unreliable narrator that we’ve been hearing from this whole time. There’s such a long amount of time dedicated to Sarah and David in the beginning, you really have to slog through all of that before it gets interesting. Many of the details are woven into there, such as the characters that Karen gets chopped into, but the author really makes you work here. Post changeover, with the change in focus to Karen it really sets things on their head. You start off rooting for Sarah, but Karen has very little patience for Sarah the author. She’s even downright unkind at times. But you start to piece together what’s been changed and what’s been even deliberately left out.

I found the ending also really striking. You never figure out Karen’s real name as she just goes by “Karen” and her daughter never gets that information from her failed trip to the school. It says a lot about sexual assault cases, especially with teens, that the victim is never named but the villain has articles and papers written about him as he gets accused. Not to mention that the two main father figures both turn out to be sexually assaulting students. There aren’t any major female adults, just those two male ones, so definitely a pattern going on there. It speaks to the power that adults have other these teens that are trying to prove themselves as artists and as individuals. And that the power is so long lasting that it transcends generations with it impacting Karen’s daughter as well.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think I even had a better experience going in a little blind. I really had to commit to that first section and then got so excited when it got interesting. My favorite kind of books are the ones that make you think about the medium, so I’m really glad I found this one.

This Is Beautiful: Things Starting

 I'm such a sucker, I love doing nothing and the free time that I have over the summer, but I'm also getting excited about being back from vacation and things starting up for the fall. I just feel like I need something to look forward to, you know? The dance group I'm with is announcing pieces to sign up for and I'll be teaching a low-key lab class. It'll be good to be in a classroom again. I'm just hoping that the academic year has a good balance of time to work on my things (or I'm never graduating) and fun stuff to do.

Madeira

So for two weeks in July I was on vacation and we spent a lot of time in Madeira, a small Portuguese island. It was really lovely! We were close to the city of Funchal without being directly in the middle of it and there was a great mix of nature and city. We tried to see Lisbon as well but between flight delays and things being closed on Mondays, there wasn’t much I saw or did. So I’ll have to head back there to check it out properly, but I feel like I can definitely talk about Madeira!

We got there and immediately I was struck by the beautiful flowers and insects. The area is tropical so I think pretty much everything grows and likes being there. It’s gorgeous! There are also banana trees everywhere, plus grapes for their wine and passionfruit and things like that. We figured out that there were so many monarch butterflies because there’s a population of monarchs that were blown there accidentally and just never left the island. So they have a slightly different wing shape since they don’t have to fly as high to migrate and everything. Also eating the fruit is amazing, there’s passionfruit in most things but everything is good.

We did a few hikes on the island, it’s pretty mountainous and really only half of the island gets rain. So they have a system of levants that are these canals to bring water to agriculture. And that creates these pretty level walking paths. People clearly use them, we ran into folks bringing groceries home while hiking which was pretty funny. And the views were incredible, I felt like we covered so much ground so quickly and got to see mountains from a few different angles and things like that.

We also spent a few days wandering around, there was one afternoon we went to a beach in town. It was essentially a very big pool, and there wasn’t any sand or rocks or anything, but you could also jump into the ocean. There were a couple floating platforms and rocks to jump off of, but no way to walk into the water. It was still really nice, but after a bit we wanted to be able to stand in the water haha. Still, it’s been forever since I’ve been in the ocean and that was lovely.

There was also one day we spent in town, we checked out the cathedral a little and the Museum of Sacred Art. The museum had more history of the island and how it was used for sugar cane production with the help of slavery until it was outcompeted, and that there was a lot of Flemish trade that brought in more art. Some of the objects in there were still used by the cathedral which was really neat as well. There are a few other museums but they were closed unfortunately. We did get to a food market to try some bananas and see the attached fish market as well, which was so cool! And we stopped at a wine place for a quick tasting on the way back.

Speaking of food, I already mentioned the fruit but the seafood was also very good as well! I really enjoyed the espetada I had, or beef skewer. It was super tender, very tasty. The scabbard fish with a fried banana and passionfruit sauce (of course, you need the passionfruit) was also amazing. I could have also had their grilled limpets all day, it reminded me of mussels but loaded with butter haha. The drinks were also so fun, I loved my nikita since it’s like an alcoholic milkshake and could not find it in enough places. And finally the Portugese custard tarts, pastel de natas, were my favorite snack, I could have eaten those all day. We also tried the Madeira honey cakes and queijadas (more like a cheesecake tart) but the custard tarts are still my favorite.

I do feel like we had a very good and just well-rounded experience of the island, but I would be so ready to go back for another vacation. It was beautiful and quiet and I could hang out on a beach with a nikita all day! Well worth the trip!

"The Queen of Attolia" by Megan Whalen Turner

 My partner started reading this book series to me, we started with The Thief and recently finished The Queen of Attolia (with a pretty big gap, we forgot about it a little in the middle there). It was a pretty interesting continuation of the world set up in the first book, as well as the journey that our protagonist is on.

The book starts with Eugenides, who we know as the Thief of Eddis from the first book, getting captured in Attolia. He meets the Queen again, and she keeps him in captivity. To send a message back to the Queen of Eddis, Attolia has his hand cut off. Jen returns to Eddis depressed and having a hard time recovering. After a while, he starts to return to his old self, and he suggests going to kidnap the Queen of Attolia to resolve the war that has sprung up between their countries. 

Meanwhile, the Queen of Attolia is hosting the Mede, an advisor from a larger country. She knows that he is after her hand in marriage, but she's stringing him along for now. She's familiar with backstabbing advisors and court drama. Jen successfully gets the Queen of Attolia to come with him, and he proposes his plan then. He'll let her live, if she'll marry him and end the war. Attolia is skeptical but angrily agrees. Jen tells her that he loves her and has for years. That's really why he did all this. 

They are stopped by the Mede's forces and head back to Attolia. The Queen there sets a trap for the Mede and ousts him for good with the help of Eddis. The book ends with her agreeing to marry Jen and them saying that they both love each other.

The decision to maim your protagonist in the second book is a pretty bold choice, but I kind of like it. Jen can't just have successes as a thief, and now he has to adapt in pretty significant ways. He can still steal things, sure, but he ends up becoming a king instead as well. It forces the story to change with him.

The love story felt a little forced for sure, I'm not totally convinced that Jen has loved the Queen of Attolia his whole life. But he never mentions it in the narration until his confession so there's some plausibility there. It is weird but there is a lot of effort put into the ending to make their decision to get married also seem realistic and not a convenient change of heart. Attolia barely talks to Jen for a while and insists that he's lying until the Queen of Eddis talks to her. And then she finally talks to Jen about it and how she cut off his hand and all that. Then it finally gets resolved.

There appears to be some larger arcs with the Mede going on, and that'll be interesting to see how they develop. But the next book is my partner's favorite, so I'm excited to finally get to that!

This Is Beautiful: Vacation

 I'm heading out on a 2 week vacation on Saturday, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will be a working vacation as I make sure all of my i's are dotted and t's crossed on this paper, but that's ok. Gives me an excuse for a little alone time. And it will be so nice to just take a break from the grind. The summer has been restorative, but there's always less that I could be doing.

"Dragonflight" by Anne McCaffrey

 I honestly don't remember how I found out about this book, but I am not surprised that a book about dragons got caught in my radar. This is an award-winning book from a female author written in 1979, so I expected to both be excited and probably have some disappointments along the way. Unfortunately though, I think the disappointments outweighed the excitements here.

The book swaps between the narration of Lessa, a young girl seeking revenge for her family's murder, and F'lar a dragonrider. Lessa has been hiding out as a dirty servant girl in the castle where her family used to live, until they were murdered by the ambitious Fax. F'lar is a dragonrider on a Search, where they are trying to find new dragonriders. He is brought to the castle with Fax where he senses Lessa's power as she goads him into fighting and killing Fax. From there, F'lar brings Lessa to the Weyr when the dragon hatching starts. Lessa bonds with Ramoth, the queen dragon and starts to be educated in the ways of the dragonriders.

The previous Weyrleaders and dragon queen were both lazy and neglected the traditions. The country that they're in gets passed by a Red Star (implied to be Jupiter, of which they are on a moon) that sends out Threads from the sky that burrow into the ground and feed off of life. There have been no Threads in a few hundred years, so people doubt the importance of dragons and their keeping. A lot of knowledge has been lost as a result, but F'lar and Lessa believe. Anyways, a change in regime comes with Ramoth mating with F'lar's dragon, making F'lar Weyrleader. Also now the humans are a couple as well. F'lar starts trying to uncover the lost secrets of the past. Lessa desperately wants to fly and go between which is this way dragons can pass through space to get somewhere quicker. Lessa in her untrained habits then discovers that they can go through time as well, and dragons can time travel!

The Threads come sooner rather than later, and they are very unprepared. To help, F'lar sends some dragons back in time ten years to mature them faster. This is hard on those people, humans don't like being in two places at once, and Lessa discovers that the reason most of the dragons disappeared 500 years ago is because they came forward in time to their aid. She decides to go back to 500 years ago and manages to bring them forward with their knowledge, technology, and the like. The group is much more prepared to face the Threads now and can fight together!

Alright so I have a whole lot of issues here. First they're doing the whole "not like other girls" thing with Lessa as during the hatching she keeps making fun of the other girls who are terrified of the dragon (the dragonling does kill 2 of them). Not to mention that the gender of it all is handled pretty poorly in my opinion, it's never explained but it's evident that boy dragons mate with boys and girl queen dragons with girls. F'lar and the others keep making a fuss about how the girl has to be "pretty" which isn't explained until the mating. Guess they all want her to be pretty because as soon as the dragons start having sex the humans do too. Not to mention that there's a paragraph in the book about how if the dragons aren't involved F'lar is basically raping Lessa which seems entirely unnecessary. 

Then there's the time travel. Seems a little ridiculous to me that Lessa would be the first person to figure out that dragons can do that at all, but even if I excuse that there's all of these plot holes that time travel introduces. The biggest being that if the dragons all disappearing contributed to the decline in their culture and traditions, wouldn't leaving them in their own time mean that the traditions would have a better chance at carrying forward? And then they wouldn't need to get the dragons from the past. Or at the very least, send them back to their own time once the Thread fighting was done. They can't all have been happy abandoning the rest of their lives and living in the future. It's a very big sacrifice for not entirely necessary gain.

There is a while series here, but I am feeling very done after this book. I respect what it's doing and that it's award winning and all that, but it is pretty clearly not for me. I don't think I could do another installment of this, I just haven't really connected with the characters and don't think I could cheer them on through more of this.

This Is Beautiful: Getting Close

 I am nervous about posting this as I might be proven wrong, but I do feel like I am getting close to the end of the process with this paper. Things I think are coming together pretty nicely, and I feel as though most of what I'm doing is wrapping up things and settling details. Again I might be proven wrong because my advisor consistently can't go through everything that I'm working on so I'm just making a judgement call in places, but I'm really hoping it's getting close. The passage of time is freaking me out a little, it's July already, and I want to just get this out of my hands.