Dangerous Boys. Rating: Magnificent. (Guest Post by Ashley S.)

Reader,
The magnificent Ashley S. is back with a beautifully written review. I wish that instead of hiding in a cabin in the woods of [redacted, ha, almost had you going there, Agent Hawthorne!], I could sit down for a spell and write a review of the review that Ashley has written. I'll summarize my thoughts as follows: brilliant. If we're lucky, she might just become a regular contributor here at Spoilers. 

Oh, and reader. If a tall man with blonde hair and very white teeth and a federal badge asks you if you read this blog, tell him yes; and if he asks you where I am, laugh. Laugh, and then buy him a mountain dew, because he is having a very hard week. 
-A


Chloe has big dreams, way bigger than her small Indiana town can hold, and with her summer winding down and the promise of college not so far away, she can finally taste it.

But roots grow and Chloe is forced to stay in the town she hates the most. Some roots are strangled and twisted (her depressed mother, her runaway father) and some are gorgeous (her new boyfriend Ethan). Either way, no matter which root you look at, this isn’t what Chloe wants, she wants out. 

Or she wants Ethan’s older brother Oliver.

Maybe she wants both?

Oh, and there’s the whole business of a murder or self defense that has landed one brother in the hospital and one brother dead. No big deal.

Dangerous Boys...

is another amazing, twisted, page turning thriller from Abigail Haas. Abigail Haas has written my most recommended book and favorite YA book I read last year, Dangerous Girls, and I am so, so excited I finally read Dangerous Boys.

Sometimes, I think Haas wrote this book just for me. Our main character isn’t spit-shine perfect and she’s honorable and loyal even when her heart tugs elsewhere. She changes, dangerously, and because Haas is so freaking flawless, it’s such a wonderful and juicy transition to watch. There’s also the yin and yang of the characters we encounter, the blunt and terrible ways of this small town, and the mystery itself that we’re thrown into to keep you invested and turning pages.

These two brothers are completely opposite from each other. Little Ethan sweeps Chloe off her feet by begging her for just one date before she leaves for college. He’s not the reason she stays, but he’s definitely a great support and a kind, sweet boy.

But Chloe needs more than that even if she doesn’t realize it.

Enter Oliver. Oliver is a boy of my own literary dreams. He’s straight out of a Salinger novel, a misplaced member of the Glass family who has everything going for him (looks, well educated, big words abounding!) and has found himself in Indiana among a lovely, boring family. He’s twisted, problematic, and brings out something in Chloe that excited me even though it maybe shouldn't have? That’s the thing about Haas, she makes you feel powerful, like you’re sitting in front of a burning building full of all your ex-lovers while you smoke a cigarette, covered in blood [I could not love any line of any book review more than I love this. I want to frame it. -A].

The small town is full of corrupt cops and is a perfect depressing backdrop for poor Chloe. It works to make you want her to get out, no matter how sweet Ethan is. There’s your usual small town folks that stick around, the seclusion, the total boredom and familiarity of it all. She has a lot of responsibility in this place, too, with her mother who can’t even take care of herself. It really helps to bring out what’s inside Chloe.

Dangerous Boys was full of intrigue, kept me guessing, and of course, took me by excited surprise by the end. Just like Dangerous Girls, I closed the book hollering and cheering and jumping off buildings shouting, “YAAAAAASSS QUEEN!!!”

Spoiler time!

Whew, where do I even begin?

For most of the book, we know that something has happened and there is definitely a huge fire and that one of the brothers is dead and one of them is in the hospital. We also come to find out that Chloe is responsible for the decision to have one brother dead and one alive. She had to kill the one she didn’t want anymore. Run away and get the life away with Oliver, who is definitely a murderer and has now turned Chloe into one, or be loyal to Ethan?

The fun part is not in the choosing (she chooses Oliver so she stabs Ethan, then completely regrets it and goes down to find Oliver in a half built home that Ethan and his father have been working on, and murders him, saving Ethan in the process), it is how it unfolds.

In chunks from the past and the present, we find out why she did what she did and how people are handling the news. That's where things get fascinating. She’s bluffing to the cops, [stressful, but rewarding! -A] but Oliver and Ethan’s mom sticks to the totally made up story because she always knew Oliver was psycho. Chloe somehow gets to Ethan first and explains herself, very misty eyed and ‘forgive me please, I love you’ so he keeps the story straight to the cops.
Then, then, then, she leaves, citing that she chooses NEITHER OF THOSE DUDES.

YAAASSSSSSSS QUEEEEEEEN!!!!!

Have fun, Chloe, but please no more murdering, I want you to succeed.

Rating: Magnificent 


Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?

Disclaimer. Rating: Tiresome.

"The act of keeping the secret a secret has almost become bigger than the secret itself."

I have a great deal of experience with secrets. Back before I was on the run, I kept the secrets of people with too much money and power and not enough humility. I kept the secrets of a CEO who didn't know how to lock down his email properly. I kept the secrets of a CFO who wet his whiskers in company cream (yes, Wallace. You).

Now, I keep only my own secrets. This is the best part of my new life, reader: All of my secrets are mine. The burden of my own secrets is somewhat heavy - but oh, so much lighter than the secrets of others. I hope never to pick up anyone else's secrets ever again.

Disclaimer is about the burden of secrets and the weight of memory. Does one have the right to carry the secrets of another in order to protect their memory? And, who decides which memories are worth protecting?

Disclaimer by the respectable Renee Knight...

...is tolerable, especially for patient readers.

This book is of course compared to Gone Girl, which does a disservice to both books. I shall disillusion you right away, reader: this book is not Gone Girl. I think that the comparison arises from the fact that the characters are not particularly sympathetic; that is the only similarity I could find.

When allowed to stand on its own, the premise of Disclaimer is strong: a woman finds a book on her nightstand, and it turns out to be about her. The story within that book details events that unfolded several years earlier, when the woman was in Spain with her then-young son.

Disclaimer moves at the approximate pace of a heavily sedated chameleon, but maintains just enough suspense to draw the reader through the plot. The promise of a reveal is strong: we are going to find out what happened in Spain. We participate in this story through multiple character perspectives, and witness the decay of relationships and the power of grief from every conceivable angle. The relationships between characters are deeply nuanced, and each individual is given believable - even trustworthy - motivations and reactions.

The problem with Disclaimer is that it is so very glacial. I love drawn-out tension as much as the next fugitive book reviewer, but Disclaimer leans too hard into drawn-out and doesn't touch tension. The mystery of "how did the book get on the nightstand?" extends through a significant portion of the first act - which is why it's the only mystery addressed in the blurbs scattered across the internet - but it's discarded and exchanged for other, deeper mysteries later on. The fact that the extremely dissatisfying solution to that particular mystery takes so long to resolve is why I am putting all discussion of the real mystery of the book in the spoilers - because if you are planning to read this book, you will want something to hope for throughout the first half of it.

Now, for Spoilers.

The book takes ages to get to the actual meat of the plot, but here it is: There are photos of our main character which depict her engaging in sex acts with someone other than her husband, while on vacation with their very young son some fifteen years before. The young man who took the photos died the day after they were taken. The main character keeps insisting that the photos aren't what they look like, and in a bizarre comedy of sitcom-esque miscommunications, her life begins to crumble.

The miscommunications are the most frustrating part of this book by a long shot. Our main character keeps telling people that she needs to explain what really happened, but when given the chance, she unnecessarily stalls. This is emblematic of the book itself: it unnecessarily stalls. I guessed the surprise twist ending early on (something that I usually don't do, but it happens from time to time no matter how hard I try to resist), and watching the mishaps that led to other characters not even beginning to guess was painful.

So. Here's the reveal, reader: she was raped. Nobody stopped to even think that this might be the case, but there you have it. She kept it a secret for years, for the same reason many women do - shame, and horror, and the need to carry on. And when she is discovered by the father of the young man who took the photos - when he goes about trying to ruin her marriage and her career, when he threatens her life - she continues to keep it a secret.

I have two issues here. The first is the notion that a rape ruins a woman's life - that even if it doesn't ruin her life right away, it will catch up with her sooner or later, and ruin her. It even ruins her son's life - the final twist in the book, and the only one that took me by surprise, is that the five-year-old boy witnessed the rape, and it left him indelibly emotionally scarred. The moral of the story: You can't move past trauma without being thoroughly punished for having endured it.

The second issue I take with this theme is the weight of shame. Many women who are raped come away from the ordeal with a burden of shame. This book depicts that with realism at first, but later in the story, the shame becomes fetishistic. The woman is so obsessed with her shame that she allows her career and marriage to dissolve rather than speak up about the reality of what happened to her.

And when she does finally defend herself, the result is precisely what one would expect: people are horrified at what happened to her. People are horrified on her behalf. The father of the young man - the father who has been attempting to punish her (for what, by the way? For having sex with his son? This is never really clear) - is horrified, immediately attempts to rectify the situation, and then kills himself.

I can understand our main character deciding to keep her rape a secret, reader. Secrets weigh us down, but sometimes that weight is the only possible option. And yet, later on, her refusal to release that burden becomes entirely unrealistic. If she had simply told her husband and the father of the boy about the rape as soon as the blackmail began, the book would have no plot. I found myself again and again comparing the plot of Disclaimer to an episode bad sitcom: Oh, Gosh, It Was Just All One Big Misunderstanding!

This book did not make me angry or upset, but when I put it down, I felt that my time had been wasted. Save yourself that same fate, reader. Watch an episode of Full House (I hear it's on Netflix now) and read a Clive Barker short story to get your dose of darkness in. I promise, doing those two things will provide you with the same overall experience, and then you can move on to something better.

Rating: Tiresome. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?

Dangerous Women. Rating: Lamentable.

Today, reader, I'm going to review an anthology.

I love short stories. I have never been able to write them myself - as I'm sure you can tell by the content of this blog, my strengths lie in nonfiction writing - but I have always consumed them avidly. I find great comfort in their self-containment. I have resisted reviewing anthologies until this point because they are so difficult to review; individual short stories should stand on their own merit, and I am loath to heap them together into a single review.

But Dangerous Women has riled me, reader. I am well and truly angry at this book, and the men who put it together - so a review it shall have.
Let's begin.

Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner R. Dozois...

...is incredibly frustrating.
The title implies strongly that the short stories within the anthology will be about dangerous women. I was excited about the concept - it's nice to be represented in fiction every so often. I love reading strong female characters, especially those who know the thirst for revenge.
My excitement was misplaced. This is not a book full of short stories featuring dangerous women. This is not even a book full of stories featuring strong women. Most of the stories are about sexy women, and how they make men crazy with their magical sex powers. Several of the stories feature women merely as afterthoughts, as ornamentation, augmenting tales of male misadventure.

Because this isn't a typical novel review, I'll dispense with my usual formatting and simply give you an emotional highlight reel of what it was like to read Dangerous Women. This will be an experiment, reader. You and I will have to see for ourselves how it works out.

Let's get to it. 

Story: Some Desperado by Joe Abercrombie
Made me feel: Excited, optimistic
The first story in the anthology, and reader, it was beautiful. A promising start that increased my excitement with regards to the stories ahead. A strong female lead, cutthroat and ferocious, and undeniably dangerous.

Story: The Hands That are Not There by Melinda Snodgrass
Made me feel: Confused. Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?
The fourth story in the anthology. This story, narrated by a male protagonist, describes a stripper. Who may be a rebel. Or maybe she isn't! Reader, we never find out; but we do find out a lot about how sexy the 'dangerous' woman in the story is. It's not a bad story by any stretch of the imagination, but it sets a tone with which we'll unfortunately grow familiar over the course of the anthology: sexy lady uses dangerous feminine wiles to ruin a man.

Story: Bombshells by the delightfully named Jim Butcher
Made me feel: Deeply relieved
Magnificent! Perhaps the book can be redeemed after all? Maybe The Hands That are Not There was a fluke, included by accident, things happen, all can be forgiven. In Bombshells (story #5), the female protagonists are skilled, fearless, and capable. They are strategic and smart and yes, you should absolutely feel threatened by them. Within the first few paragraphs, the line "So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters' shower." - I laughed out loud. It's nice to see one's demographic represented in works of fiction.

Story: Wrestling Jesus by Joe R. Landsdale
Made me feel: I had to put the book down and go out to a face-to-face with someone who said he could get me a passport so that I might leave Berlin, and good thing, too, because I nearly threw it out a window. The book, not the passport. Abject disdain.
What in the name of Agent Hawthorne's pet corgi* did I just read? Again, a fine story - I can recognize good writing even if it's not my particular cup of Earl Grey Cream - but how on earth did this make it into an anthology about dangerous women? The woman, in the case of story 7, is a fickle vixen who will only sleep with the best wrestler in the ring. Old men continue to fight over her long past their prime. She does nothing in the story. If I recall correctly, she does not even speak. This story doesn't get an "F" on the literary Bechdel test - it gets a "What are you doing here? You don't even take this class. I'll check the roster... yeah, you're not even enrolled at this school, kid, get out of here."
*(Give Buttercup a pat on the head for me, Hawthorne. She's such a good dog!) 

Story: I Know How to Pick 'Em by Lawrence Block
Made me feel: Outrage. I found myself idly lighting matches and throwing them into the wind after reading this one - my muscle memory wishing I could burn this story to the ground.
The ninth story opens with disdain for the female character. "Woman like her, she'd have to be the star in all of her productions." What is the writer saying with this line? Don't you empathize with the woman, reader, she's bossy.
I am going to spoil this story for you, reader. I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, because I'm angry just remembering it. The male protagonist/narrator picks up a woman in a bar. A hot woman - the narrator spends a full page describing just how hot she is. They make out in the parking lot. Here's another excerpt: "I thought of doing her right there, just throwing her down and doing her on the gravel [...] Throw her a fast hard one, pull out and stand up while she's still quivering, and be out of there before she can get her game up and running."
So that's about what we're working with.
They go to a motel and have sex that is very satisfying for her, but not for him (this will be important later). He fantasizes briefly about beating her. She tries to convince him to murder her husband. He reminisces about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother (perhaps she's supposed to be the 'dangerous woman' here?). Then, our protagonist literally says "my turn" before flipping his bedmate over, and 'riding her long and hard'. Poetry, no? He finally orgasms as he chokes her to death.
At this point, reader, I wondered - is this a joke? Maybe this anthology is intended to be a satirical take on how fiction treats women. I'm still not sure whether or not that's the case, to be quite honest with you.

Story: The Girl in the Mirror by Lev Grossman
Made me feel: Like I was rubbing aloe vera on a sunburn - the relief was there, but it didn't last long.
I love Lev Grossman's work, across the board. This story - the twelfth in the anthology, if you're keeping track of these things - is really an excerpt from the excellent third book of his Magicians trilogy (a series I devoured and will someday review on this blog as "divine"). Readers of the series will know, then, that [spoiler, you should expect these by now but this is fair warning] is the most dangerous of women: Alice, who was turned inhuman by magic she couldn't control. Plum, our female protagonist, is in her own right at least a little dangerous - in that I-know-just-enough-to-be-dangerous kind of way. I do wish that, for the sake of the anthology, it wasn't a male teacher saving the day - but then, heroes aren't the point of this anthology, are they? The dangerous women are. And Alice, for whom Grossman titled his excerpt, is well worthy of the descriptor "dangerous."

Story: City Lazarus by Diana Rowland
Made me feel: Deeply weary. It was all I could do to finish the anthology after this one.
Early in this, the fourteenth story, our protagonist is at his friend Peter's house. Peter's lady friend wants Peter to have sex with her. Peter doesn't feel like it, so invites the protagonist to satisfy her needs instead. Protagonist shoves Lady Friend into the bedroom, and emerges a few minutes later, flush with masculine swagger, saying "I wasn't trying to make her happy." We never hear anything about her again, reader, but it's a good snapshot of the relationship between the sexes in this story. This was apparently one of the very best stories out there, and the editors of this anthology picked it out of the crowd. They read it, said "oh, yes, this will be excellent for our collection of short stories about fierce, strong women!" They paid money for it, and published it. They did all of that on purpose, reader.
More about this story: It's strippers, again. One particular stripper. Apparently that is one of the primary occupations that Dangerous Women seek out, because how better to wield our Feminine Wiles against men? Well, the woman has wiles, and wield them she does. The end of the story is satisfying, but only because the rest of it is so painful to read - the outright repellent male protagonist gets his comeuppance, and our dangerous woman is finally revealed as dangerous in the penultimate paragraph of the story.
I will share a story of my own with you, reader - a true one, since (as I mentioned before) fiction is not my strong suit. I once went on a date - in the time before I was on the run, obviously. We watched a movie with an extremely gratuitous rape scene. I reacted with appropriate horror, and then my date turned to me and whispered "I know, but wait until you see how she gets back at him! It makes all this worthwhile."
The feeling I had as I drove home from that date is the same feeling that I had after reaching the end of City Lazarus. I found myself thinking, really? Does that really make all of the previous degradation 'worth it'?

--

I'm going to stop my review of the anthology here. There were many other stories - some good, some bad, some middling - but the ones I included in this review are a good representation of what you can expect if you make the mistake of picking up this book. To summarize: you can expect to feel a deep disappointment in the squandered potential of what should have been an anthology about dangerous women, but instead wound up being an anthology about how men view us.

My only comfort after subjecting myself to that anthology is this: I know what a truly dangerous woman is like. And she does not trifle with men like the ones in these stories.

Rating: Lamentable.



Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?

The Nightingale. Rating: Magnificent.

"Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over."

I know that's a long pull quote, reader, but it's so true that I had to include the entire thing. Women survive. We do what we must. Sometimes, we must run; sometimes, we must stay and entertain the enemy. Sometimes, we must turn ourselves over to the authorities (just kidding, Agent Hawthorne!) - sometimes, we must disguise ourselves as gas station attendants and fill the tanks of our pursuers while they buy gum and Mountain Dew (really, though, Hawthorne, you should lay off the green stuff - that's why you have the ulcer. It's not because of me; it's because you drink soda that glows in the dark).

Men go to war; women stay behind. Men lose legs and eyes and lives, and they get parades. Women lose husbands and sons and brothers and food and clothes and housing and dignity and decency, and when the men come back, we lose the jobs that we did in their stead while they were off fighting for Queen and Country. And we take care of them, because they have suffered.

Nobody takes care of the women. We wrap our prematurely white hair in scarves and we go to the market to buy food and we look at each other as though we are the same people who we were before we did the things that we had to do while the men were away.

One day, reader, I will pick up the pieces and start my life over. I won't be on the run forever. One day, Agent Hawthorne will retire to a cozy cabin with his husband and their daughter Melanie, and I will put down roots in a small town far from where they live, and we will exchange the occasional postcard and laugh about all of this. I will never get my left pinky finger back, but I will do what all women must do with loss: accept it, and continue.

The Nightingale by the phosphorescent Kristin Hannah

...Is about what women do when the men leave to fight a war.

Kristin Hannah masterfully examines several angles of the invasion and occupation of France by Nazi Germany. This examination is woven into the story of a family - two sisters, a father, and a child. Vianne, the older sister, is at home with a young daughter; her husband is a German prisoner of war, and Vianne and her daughter are left behind to cope. Isabelle, the younger sister, is caught in the march out of Paris when the Nazis invade - a girl alone in a war fought by men who history will remember as great and terrible.

What happens, then, to the women in this story? Isabelle - after an accelerated wartime romance and betrayal - dives into the resistance. She is loud, fearless, and reckless. She puts herself, her sister, and her niece into constant danger. She is brave.

Vianne, meanwhile, is forced to take on a Nazi when her home is quartered. He sleeps under her blankets, eats at her table, and speaks to her child. She is terrified. She is disgusted. She is afraid of how likable the Nazi soldier is. She is afraid of how easy it would be to cooperate with him. She is also very brave.

The women in this story are written beautifully: they are flawed, they make stupid decisions, and they hurt each other. They are also strong, and tenacious, and put themselves into danger to help each other. They are not fearless, but they are valiant. They are survivors.

Now, for Spoilers.

This story is not about how brave people can prevail over all odds and against all obstacles.

It is about the horrors of war, and the brutality that is visited upon women when men decide to fight.

As a reader, I was incredibly proud of the way that Isabelle grows up in the latter half of the book. She goes from impetuous and headstrong to competent and sharp. She is honed by the war - she starts as someone who seeks adventure, and becomes someone who seeks to do what is right. She puts herself at great personal risk, shepherding downed Allied pilots over the Pyrenees to safety. Her story is realistic: she is captured by the Nazis, who subject her to brutal torture. This is what happens to freedom fighters, reader. They suffer.

 She is released by them when her father claims her code name - Nightingale - and forfeits his life so that she might survive. Her struggles do not end there, but I shan't give everything away, reader.

Her sister Vianne also grows up, although in a very different way. Her story is not one of triumphant rebellion that is punished brutally; her story is instead one of brutal punishment that feeds a low, steady flame of resistance. After she and her sister inadvertently kill the Nazi who is living in her home, she is forced to provide lodging to another Nazi - one who presents a far less nuanced picture of the men who go to war. We are reminded by this second tenant that, while not all Nazi soldiers were monsters, some certainly were.

She protects her daughter from the man, but cannot protect her from the knowledge of her mother's suffering: Vianne's life is colored by starvation, beatings, and rape. During this time of absolute suffering, she also quietly smuggles Jewish children to an orphanage, giving them new identities so that they might survive the occupation. Her suffering fuels her drive to combat the Nazi occupation.

At the end of the story, the sisters are reunited. Vianne is pregnant. Isabelle is broken. Vianne's husband returns home; he is also broken, but in a very different way.

And everyone picks up the pieces, and they start over.

They do not all survive the starting over. It's that way, with war - some people are able to hold themselves intact until the horrors end, and when they relax, they crumble. This is the spoilers section, but I will keep that part to myself, reader; you should really go and find this book and sit down with it and turn pages until it is finished. Then, you should turn back to the first page and start reading it again.

Rating: Magnificent. 

Possible ratings: Magnificent, Divine, Satisfactory, Tiresome, Lamentable, Execrable. This is a blog about words, what rating system did you expect?