lightreads

Kinda Like Brothers

3/5. It's all well and good for our protagonist's mom to take in foster babies. But the most recent baby comes with the baggage of an older brother, and that just doesn't work for our protag thank you very much.

I think this was a disabilityinkidlit rec? It had to be a rec from somewhere because I don't pick non-specfic YA lit without a prompt these days. But this is great. Well, okay, it's cringily great. Our protagonist is terribly eleven – he's convinced everything is criminally unfair and he's a little shit roughly 90% of the time, with the other 10% being overwhelming sweetness. And he's eleven, and this book is super honest, so there's enough social embarrassment going on here to make me use my one-minute audio skip button more than once.

But really, it's great, particularly if you have a thicker skin than I do. Non-traditional families of all sorts, relationships that don't fit a tidy box, complicated adults doing their best. And there's a lot in here about being a community of color, from the overt – a totally wrenching scene in which an older man teaches a roomful of pubescent black boys how to act when they are stopped by the cops because it might save their lives one day – to the more subtle work embedded in the unfolding of everyone's backstories. I'd definitely buy this for a kid.

P.s. The commercial audio is A+++. John Clarence Stewart is hilarious and pissy and sad and just perfect.

Six of Crows

4/5. Fantasy heist caper where the team of lowlifes and outcasts has to break someone out of the unbreakable prison, also politics.

"Caper" seems like the wrong word. Far too cheerful for this tense book that manages to balance grimdark with humaneness better than anything I've read in a while.

One of those books that I think is classified as young adult only because the protagonists are under eighteen. (Well, and because YA is often more lucrative). Because this is otherwise an entirely adult book about adult themes – the costs of survival, the rigged game of life when you don't hold power, being the dupe, being the one duping. I really liked this. The heart of this book is partly the heist, but it's mostly the team, and its interlocking sets of relationships, romantic and otherwise. It would be a wild oversimplification to say that this book is about hardened people coming to care for each other, because it is vastly more messy and satisfying than that. But if simplification you must have, there you go.

Oh, and did I mention half of the team is composed of persons with disabilities? Because it is.

Broken Harbour by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proving that, along with everything else, French can bring the creepy. Investigation of a triple familial homicide reveals a house with holes knocked in the walls and cameras pointing into them, which is just the start.

This was, hm. I can't say I wasn't riveted, because I was. And I can't say it isn't a good book, because it is. It's more complicated than this sounds, but it's about the order that we keep to shut out the wild, and about where violence comes from. Our protagonist genuinely believes in victim-blaming – it's not that he won't pursue justice, he's just so very sure that anyone who gets dead did something to open up a crack in their life and let the violence in. And it doesn't take much, just the smallest slip will do it. The book is – I won't say sympathetic to him, but it is even-handed. We know why he thinks that – he has to think that – and French is very, very good at complicating the viewpoints of people with those kinds of self-serving blinders on.

But for all that, and I've said this before. I really wish she'd write a different book. Like around the 20% mark of this one, two characters began deliberately building a strong, healthy, functional emotional connection, and I knew instantly that it would be destroyed, and had a pretty good guess as to how. French writes that kind of destruction beautifully, but come on. We've seen this before. Maybe I've just read all of her books too close together, but there's a sameness to them which is frustrating given her obvious and ridiculous talent.




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The Disabled Woman's Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by Judith Rogers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A full-service book from pre-conception to post-partum, written based on extensive interviews with a cohort of women with disabilities.

I picked this up thinking there might be something for me here. It turns out none of the interviewees share either my major or minor disability issues, but I found this so interesting, I skimmed through it anyway. This book would be particularly useful for a woman with spinal issues, or any of the neuro-degenerative disorders, or amputations, or paralysis, or fibro. In fact, I bet this would be an invaluable resource, since the experiences of others are one of the very few reliable resources pregnant disabled women have. If nothing else, this book proved just how lacking the research is; it cited studies where it could, but it would usually be with a lot of caveats about how this was conducted in the sixties oh and the study population was ten people oops.

So I'm kind of rating this positively just for existing. It is good in its own right, though dated at this point. But it is thorough and well-intentioned, and it has that particular body frankness that a lot of disability writing does. There's something refreshing about a series of disabled women describing in hilarious, graphic detail all of the bodily substances that came out of them during labor. You don't see that in a lot of pregnancy books.

Still, dated. And quite heterocentric. And full of great advice about all sorts of practical issues like dealing with muscle spasms while pregnant, or transferring in and out of the wheelchair in the third trimester, or adjustments that may need to be made to prosthetics as pregnancy progresses, and on and on, but less good on, hm. On some of the trickier, more fraught stuff. Like, the book would throw out a series of anecdotes about the horrible way many of these women were treated by the medical profession – this one was forced to have a caesarian because her doctor did not believe paralyzed women can give birth vaginally (they can) and refused to do the relevant research, this one was threatened and not allowed to leave the hospital because she couldn't prove she could feed her baby with the inaccessible tools on offer even though she had perfectly functional accessible solutions, that one was abused by nurses when they discovered she was incontinent, this one was pressured repeatedly to have an abortion because her doctor did not believe she could care for a child, and on and on and on. And the book's response to that will be like, "so find a medical professional who is educated regarding your disability!" Um. . . . Wow. That's, like, step zero to the complex set of legal/interpersonal skills and emotional resilience a person needs to navigate these waters.




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Silence by Michelle Sagara

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Teenage girl discovers she can see the dead, stuff happens. I liked the way this book walked with grief. Our narrator lost people, naturally, but it wasn't about that in some dramatic, weeping way. And it wasn't about pain. It was about grief, which is an exponentially more complicated beast.

Still, this lost me. Partly it was YA nonsense – leaden bickering, stupid POV tricks, that sort of thing.

I also had this whole train of thought about the autistic best friend, and how I would reserve judgment* on the way he is immune to certain kinds of magic, but how there is something labored about the presentation of disability in this book, like he never gets to be a person, he is always, always, always an autism-delivery-mechanism and we've got to stop to narrate about autism for a while, but, I just don't have it in me tonight, sorry.

* Were I to continue the series, which eh, unlikely.




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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So I'm going to one-sentence this book, and you guys are going to make The Face, which I also made, for the record, and then we're going to talk about the ways it's great.

This is a book about Hazel, who Is sixteen and terminally ill, and the boy she meets at support group.

*Pause for The Face*

So it's a book about being young and being sick. And also being in love, but honestly that part was by far the least interesting to me, so we're basically skipping it. Because for me, this was a book about being young and being sick, and it was great. Around the time three disabled characters shared a scene together with no able-bodied characters present, and they sat around and discussed their love lives? Yeah. I was like holy shit, right, because I have read a lot of books, okay, and a lot of books about disabled people, and I have never seen such a thing. Ever.

I'm actually selling this book short by talking about it like that. This book gets at the experience of chronic pain in such casual, tangential, brilliant ways. And it gets the ebb and flow of illness, the way you just have to ride with it. And it is a bold-faced, no fucking around, passionate argument to the world that people with disabilities and people who are dying are still human beings. Which is absolutely something that we need to argue about, because for almost everyone I have ever met, illness or disability puts you in a box marked other in ways conscious but mostly subliminal. This book gets most of those ways – the infantilization, the way people eulogize before and after death, so much of it. And to see a book – and a very popular book – arguing the other way to teenagers, of all people, with conviction and clarity (and a startling lack of treakly bullshit) was pretty amazing for me.

I was far less impressed with this book as a story. One of the other things it's doing is cutting at this notion of disability and illness as metaphor. I don't know how many times I have shouted at a book or the TV about this. Disability isn't a metaphor for moral decay, or the dangers of industrialized society, or, I don't know, the fatal flaw of the human race. And it's not a learning experience, and it's not a gateway to wisdom. It's just disability. It's a thing that happens. It's chance. And as one character puts it in this book, "it's bullshit." I'd modify that to chance bullshit, but yeah, pretty much.

So the book is arguing about how disability isn't a narrative device. It spends a lot of time making fun of 'cancer books' where illness is the gateway to one heartwarming epiphany after another. But then this book turns around and delivers a plot designed to lead the protagonist through a series of epiphanies concerning what she wants out of the rest of her life, how she can make peace with her [parents and the hurt she will leave behind, etc. And it just . . . I didn't need that. And I didn't want it. This book could have been a series of days, it could still even have been a love story, and as long as it kept on about being young and being sick, I would have thought it was great. Everything else felt contrived to me, and particularly in light of the explicit arguments of the book.

Also, is John Green physically capable of writing a book in which no one ever takes a transformative road trip? Because honestly….

So yeah. Basically it's great on the page-by-page level. And I am so so glad this book was written and that it's doing so well. (Though the day a disabled author gets to write a book about disabled characters to international acclaim will be the day I'm truly impressed). And yes, it will make a lot of you cry. And I really did love it, even though his characters are beginning to sound pathologically witty to me after only two books. But I actually would have enjoyed this book more if it had less 'book' in it.




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Visibility by Boris Starling

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Police procedural turned spy thriller in the 1952 Great London Fog. This made the rounds of my disabled friends with general approbation for the blind police diver turned love interest for the protagonist. She is, indeed, lively and independent and smart and fierce, and she is allowed to have a sex life without being killed off! And her regular putdowns of the protagonist’s standard-issue ablism are pretty great.

I wish I could have liked this more, but despite her, I found this intensely tedious. I generally have that reaction to spy nonsense, and I also found this thematic London fog/blindness/visibility/seeing with your eyes versus seeing with your mind thing kind of obvious and tiresome. This also took a few . . . odd psychological turns, and when it was all said and done, I just . . . didn’t get it. Not even enough to know whether someone who digs spy nonsense would dig this.




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Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


And now we have to talk about The Thing. Spoilers abound, for once, because I’ve really just gotta get my teeth straight into this.

Before that, though, the rest of the book. It’s . . . honestly, I’m not crazy about it. I remember that this was never one I reread much as a child. Well, that’s not true – I reread the first third all the time, but I’d stop whenever the magic started coming thick and heavy. There is something so wrenching about Will and his brother by the river, about Stephen caring enough to ask, and his blunted adult incomprehension of Will’s answers, the depth of Will’s loss in that moment. Contrast that to the back half of the book, which is having a quite high-level discussion of the production of art, and it just . . . it’s not like it isn’t a good discussion. Cooper is and was a hell of an artist herself, obviously. I’m just not engaging on that level, after the book opens so viscerally.

All right, enough stalling. The Thing.

As a child, the end of this book was arbitrary and cruel because it directly opposed my main interest in fantasy. Nothing unusual about what I was after – I wanted to read about kids having access to a world bigger than the regimented, difficult, pedestrian one I lived in. I wanted to read about kids being able to open a door into power and wonder. And the end of this book slammed the door in all our faces.

This time, of course, I knew what was coming, and as an adult I can follow the argument Cooper has been having about it all along. Mostly in Greenwitch, much to my adult surprise. And it’s . . . look, it’s not like I agree with her. I don’t, to put it bluntly.

But I do get it now, and I think it’s actually some really difficult territory she’s on. Losing the memory of what has happened isn’t a way to strip everyone of the power they’ve accessed; it’s the only way to open the door to a new power and responsibility. That’s what Merriman says, anyway: “For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children,nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping. And you may not lie idly by expecting the second coming of anyone now because the world is yours, and it is up to you.

It makes me think of my favorite monument, which is in fact a “countermonument.” It’s a monument against violence and fascism, a pillar designed, over time, to sink into the ground and disappear. Eventually, the monument space will be empty because, as the monument itself reads, “in the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”

I love it. It’s a symbol of how collective recovery is a process. We have to remember, but the obtrusion of the memory into the world changes over time – the emotional shadow it casts (literal shadow in this case), its usefulness for the business of living.

Not a perfect analog for the end of this book by a long shot, but thinking about the monument helped me to . . . grow a general respect for the decisions Cooper made. She wrote about the passing of an age, about the ascension of man. No longer caught between the temptations of the dark and the outsider rebuttals of the Light. So yes, casting the Dark out of the world means that the Light, too, must go, and I can see the . . . esthetic sense in which she concluded as a matter of course that they must forget. No one is coming to save us, as Merriman says, and the kinds of power she was writing about – the alien magic of the Light and the complicated ownership man has over the world – could not . . . exist in the same space.

It still deeply offends me on a personal level, on behalf of the Drews. They earned those memories with a lot of courage and striving. Living through it changed them, and to have it all so casually erased is still outrageous to me, a kind of assault. But on the broader thematic level . . . yeah, all right. I get it. I don’t like it. But I get it.




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Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth by Anne Finger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A lovely memoir of Finger's pregnancy interspersed with recollections of coming into her political identity as a disabled person. How her political activism worked with and against her personal activism of being a disabled woman having a child.

This book was hugely helpful to me in processing things it has nothing to do with. This book was about Finger's planned home birth, and how it went so terrifyingly wrong, and her son's first six months, and the way she had to reconcile her political beliefs with how she viscerally responded to the possibility that her child would be disabled. And I read it, and I thought about the conversation where my sister was talking in a restrained, wistful way about how she still wasn't pregnant, and how even if she could be, there was a pretty big question about whether she could ever safely carry to term. And without thinking even for a second, without stopping at all, I blurted, "I'll carry for you." And I have wondered in some astonishment ever since, through everything (carrying someone else's baby is not as easy as they made it look on Friends, shockingly), why I said it. Not regretting, just -- why? I'm a self-centered career woman with a hugely draining and important job, and I didn't know it back when we first talked, but I was about to go through a couple years of unrelated low-grade personal hell. Dedicating my body and my time and my hopes and my care for months and months to make another person's dream happen is not something I should have volunteered for like that, in that instant of course way. But there it was.

And this book really helped me figure it out. I won't go into the whole damn thing because really, this box is not that big. And also, this book deserves better than my tangent, because it is rich and interesting and very cool in its own right. It's a little sad how much it isn't dated -- there's a weird bit where Finger comments on how new ultrasonography is as a technology, and is it really safe to use on pregnant women? But then nearly every other political moment in the book was painfully real and true. Like when she stood up at an abortion rights meeting and said, "yes, I am with you, I support this cause, but don't you think the way this movement talks about how important it is to abort fetuses with disabilities is really problematic?" And the viciousness and hostility she was met with….yeah. There's nothing dated about that.

Anyway. I highly recommend to many of the mothers of my acquaintance who have thought about their ownership of their bodies in relation to motherhood, or who have considered motherhood to be a political act for whatever reason, or who have looked at their baby and thought, what if you are disabled?

Random pull quotes that helped me in my thinking:

"But I think too that we do our best work politically when we do the work that really tears at us."

"People who aren't disabled never seem less than human to me. But they sometimes seem to be missing a dimension, glib and easy, skimmers over the surface of life, not quite as real."

When I was pregnant I used to get so sick of people saying, "you won't care if it's a boy or a girl, as long as it's healthy." So sick of the assumption that health was all that mattered. But I sometimes used to say, "I don't care if it's healthy or not as long as it's a girl." It's not a joke I would make again.

Health, physical well-being does matter. It's my own internalized oppression that makes me fear having a disabled child, but it's not just that. It's the knowledge that being non-disabled is easier than being disabled. … But to admit that disability and illness are hard doesn't mean that they are wholly negative experiences, meaningless.

I had a child because I wanted something perfect to come out of me. I got just the opposite of what I thought I wanted. I don't believe in God or any version of God, any hand of fate or karma that was out to teach me a lesson. But my child's potential disability did teach me that I don't own my child, he's not an extension of me, not there to reflect me, not there to heal my past.

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The Grey King by Susan Cooper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The really upsetting one. I'd been calling it that in my head all along, but I didn't realize I didn't actually remember why. It turns out this upset me so much as a child that I literally blanked out the relevant details; I remembered about two pages before it happened, in the same horrible swooping lurch that Will experiences as he realizes something bad is about to happen. Animal harm, man, that shit fucks you up. /profound.



Anyway. I found this intensely interesting. It follows on very well from Greenwitch, like the next sentence in an argument. Which is how a series ought to work, in an ideal world.



My understanding of this book is filtered through two contrasting scenes. One is Will and Bran questing for the harp, coming before the three hooded powers and answering the riddles set them. There's something so constrained about that scene, so bloodless and controlled with the representatives of the polls of magic fulfilling their assigned roles. As a child, I found it hugely confusing that Merriman is one of the hooded figures; he's on their side, so why does he make them go through the song and dance? Because he has to, because the scripted magic prophecy says he must, and he is an Old One, so he does. (BTW, if anyone would care to educate me on what significance the three riddles have, I'd love to hear it. Their content, I mean -- they have always been entirely puzzling to me, and I did not stop to Google this time like I meant to).



Contrast that with the other scene of riddles asked and answered: Bran screaming at his father in the hut on the hillside, demanding to know who he is and where he came from. The complete opposite of bloodless and constrained. This book is like that -- the magic has that stilted, staged feel of predestiny, while the parallel human story is messy and wildly alive. The Grey King might roll out his menacing fog, and I'll grant you he's creepy. But the most profound, awful evil in this book for my money is purely human. And for all Will is the questing hero, the greatest kindness and bravery aren't his. They're John Rowlands's, and Bran's, and most profoundly, Bran's father's.



It all really works. See John Rowlands talking to Will about the coldness of the Light. This book really digs into what we've only seen in glimpses before about how the Light is fighting for mankind while being profoundly outside it. Try and picture Will screaming at anybody, demanding the secrets of his history. Doesn't work, does it?



Humanity has a range, a resonance in the book that the people of power just don't. Will's most profound moments for me come early, when he is still amnesiac and in a fundamental way, not himself, just a boy. Will gets his memory back and instantly steps out of the center of the emotional arc, which belongs almost entirely to Bran and his connections.



Which is another thing -- why the hell is Bran albino? I've always wondered, and I figured an answer would come to me on this reread, but nope. There's the obvious -- Cooper is using physical disability as a marker of strangeness. Bran's appearance works that way in the narrative -- it's code for a different level of strangeness, of out-of-placeness. But is that all? It's implied very very fleetingly in the next book that Herne the Hunter is actually an incarnation of Arthur, and that's where Bran gets his looks -- really not sure what to make of that.



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