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?

A Sudden Light. Rating: tiresome.

"More wine helps; it takes the edge off the despair."

I am a feminist. This should not surprise you, reader. I am a woman, and I like to think of myself as a human, and I would be simply delighted if others would think of me the same way.

I have spent much of my life angry because of this belief that I, as a woman, deserve to be treated as though I hold the same value as men do. Lately, I've been finding my hold on that angry slipping. There is only so much outrage I can muster, as a woman - outrage for the bosses who stare at our breasts during annual reviews; outrage for the retailers who insist that zero is a size rather than an indicator of absence; outrage for the world that tells us to either sit down or bend over.

Lately, I've just been... tired. It's a kind of fatigue - I see a politician insisting that he understands the needs of women better than we do, and I can't always muster my usual anger.

I relieve that weariness by reminding myself: they oppress us because they fear us. If we were truly powerless, reader, they would not bother with us at all.

A Sudden Light by the ruminative Garth Stein...

...is disappointing.

The book tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who spends a summer discovering his roots. The story plays with themes of familial strife, adolescent self-discovery, transcendentalism, and the weight of ancestral guilt. It's a lot of story, and it's written with just enough intrigue to haul the reader through the muddier sections of plot. Let's explore.

Trevor Riddell, age 14, is enduring familial upheaval - his parents are separating, and for the duration of that separation, he is going to stay at the family estate in Seattle. His ancestry is rooted (ha! rooted. You'll get the pun in a moment) in wealth garnered from the merciless exploitation of American lumber (see? rooted!). Trevor's father and his Aunt Serena (more on her in the spoilers) are hoping to tear down the apparently decrepit family estate and sell the land to developers. The only obstacle: the living patriarch of the family, whose mind seems to be crumbling, and who refuses to sign over the rights to the land.

We know all of this because Trevor is an aspiring writer. I will write a review at some point that addresses my opinions on narrator-as-struggling-writer, but for now, please be satisfied with the knowledge that I do not hold the practice in particularly high esteem. The boy spends the story exploring the family estate, attempting to understand his place in the family and in the world, and oh, by the way, interacting with the ghost of one of his ancestors. Yes, reader, this is also a ghost story! Delightful.

That's not a sarcastic 'delightful': I adore ghost stories. I also love family mysteries and family dramas. I am not as keen on coming-of-age, but I trusted Garth Stein to handle that well. And he did! The boy is written with a great deal of realism (lots of self-examination, lots of confusing erections, habitual submission to authority - Stein captures the horrors of being fourteen with unflinching honesty). There are few easy answers, and the ghost serves brilliantly to solidify the complexities involved in what will happen to the family estate.

Unfortunately, the ghost serves a lot of purposes in this book, and the above purpose is the extent of the brilliance. Otherwise, the ghost serves as exposition, depositing information into Trevor at a glacial pace. Because the ghost is apparently limited to revealing important information one dream at a time, the reader must endure interludes of navel-gazing reflections on transcendentalism, uncomfortably sexual interactions with Aunt Serena, and endless reminders of the internal struggle at the heart of the story (that is: should Trevor betray the ghost, or betray his father?).

These repetitive sections are written in a mind-numbingly stilted style, and weigh the story down terribly. An excerpt:

"We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.)"

...It may be thematically appropriate for a book about a fourteen-year-old boy to be slightly masturbatory, but there are limits to what I'll forgive in the name of voice.

Now, for Spoilers.

Serena (the Aunt) is one of the worst-written female characters I have ever had the misfortune of encountering.

She is also one of the only female characters in the book. There is the mother, but she is a faint outline of a character with perhaps a page of action total. Since Stein didn't see fit to bother with the distant mother (and isn't that revealing?), we won't bother with her either.

Serena is everything that men fear about women. She is her father's caretaker, and uses that power to destroy him - for no discernible reason. Surely she could just kill the man, or abandon him? But instead, she tortures him via sleep deprivation, intentional misuse of medication, emotional and verbal abuse, and relentless gaslighting. Her treatment of her father is the most frightening scenario imaginable for an aging man - the Evil Nurse, who tortures her enfeebled male charge.

She is also a deeply frightening sexual temptress, wielding her sexuality with ruthless understanding of exactly what the men of the book want and fear. Early in the book, we learn that she uses sex to bargain with a property developer, literally screwing him out of part of the profit that will result from the transaction. She comes very close to sexually abusing our fourteen-year-old protagonist, constantly taking advantage of his confused lust but stopping just short of explicit sexual interaction. Most importantly, all of her scheming is directed toward bedding her older brother (Trevor's father). This is revealed at the end of the book but is not a surprise to the reader (nor to the characters): she is desperately attracted to a brother she hasn't seen since childhood, and spends most of the book seducing him.

Reader, Serena is the biggest reason that the book rates "tiresome" rather than "satisfactory". Had she been a comprehensibly written character, I could have borne the navel-gazing reflections on the interconnectedness of the universe and the lazy ghost-driven exposition; but Serena is written as the embodiment of a Crazy Bitch, and I cannot abide it. At the end of the book, she burns the house down while Trevor and his grandfather watch her dance, and Trevor's father dies attempting to rescue her from the flames. That ending cements her as a frightened man's worst nightmare: a woman who hypnotizes helpless men using her body, and destroys them by taking advantage of their deep-down heroism.

This does not anger or sadden me; it wearies me. When I read this story by an author I admired, and found that his two female characters were (1) a distant spectre of motherhood; and (2) a looming demon of feminine deceit and betrayal - I did not want to rail at Stein in righteous outrage. Instead, I wanted to ask him: "Was this really the best you could do for her?"

Rating: Tiresome. 

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

When She Woke. Rating: Tiresome

“Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?”

This book has a stellar premise. When a coworker loaned this book to me, I was excited. "Yes," I thought, "I should definitely read that!" I was so excited to read it that rather than give it back to her, I kept it on the passenger seat as I fled the state. (Don't worry, reader - I shipped it back to her using the return address of the library in a ghost town I passed through. I included a note tucked between pages 2 and 3 that says "I am so sorry for accidentally stealing your terrible book. Please do not ever recommend it to anyone else.")

Here's the problem, reader - a stellar premise is not the same thing as a stellar novel. I have several exciting premises written in my dream journal - for instance, what if all of the cement in the world turned into moss? Or, what if wall-to-wall carpeting was sentient? But I have not written these premises into books, because I know that the books would not be good (and because publishing houses ask invasive questions which I am not prepared to answer).

When She Woke has a spectacular premise. "What if, instead of sending people to prison for a long time, we dyed their skin to indicate what crime they committed?" Delightful. Building on this, the author further supposes "what might happen if this system was in place in a right-wing theocratic America?"

Such potential.

When She Woke by the arid Hillary Jordan

...thoroughly wastes that potential. Drawing heavily from Handmaid's Tale and The Scarlet Letter, this novel sketches out a future in which Hannah (our protagonist, early twenties but with the maturity and voice of an underexerted teen) has been convicted of getting an abortion and has been dyed red as a punishment. Hannah leaves prison after the author has applied a thin veneer of characterization (she liked to sew prettier dresses than she was supposed to. There, I saved you from reading the flashbacks).

The book is miserably overextended. It is clear that the author had a great idea for a novel, and that once she got going, she felt a need to apply layer after layer of exploration. The American prison system and shame dynamics, abortion politics, the Christian religious right, domestic abuse, homosexuality, faith and politics, and the role of women in the church all get a moment in the spotlight. The novel is thus painfully reminiscent of a late-season sitcoms' best-cameos clip show - there's a lot to look at, and you know it's supposed to be interesting because the characters are important, but really it's just a time-suck.

Now, for Spoilers.

Let's talk plot. First, Hannah goes to a halfway house where everyone is utterly manic. The stakes seem high at first - it's been made abundantly, repeatedly clear that Hannah has nowhere else to go - but then she leaves and it's not actually that bad. This scenario quickly becomes thematic, as Hannah experiences frequent, turbulent plot twists, none of which have any real impact on her character. The book quickly becomes a standard escape story, and not a well-plotted one. First, Hannah seeks shelter with her abused, pregnant sister. Don't worry - this plot point will be dropped quickly. There is a significant arc when Hannah and her partner-in-flight are kidnapped for purposes of human trafficking - Hannah escapes at the last moment, her friend does not. It is mentioned again just once, briefly, on the last page of the book. The writer takes a similar nonstick approach to Hannah's startling u-turn on the subject of homosexuality - within the span of about ten minutes, she goes from 'it's an abomination' to 'oops, time to seduce my female rescuer!" No confusion, angst, or significant character development ensues.

The one plot point that isn't mercilessly abandoned like an unwanted accomplice is the love affair. Remember, the abortion that started it all? Of course there's an angsty love affair to back that up. Unfortunately, this is the one plot point that definitely, unquestionably should have been abandoned.

I mentioned earlier that the novel draws on The Scarlet Letter. This is most evident in the identity of Hannah's ex-lover - a prominent and charming (and married) pastor. Throughout the book, Hannah  never lets go of her certainty that the two of them are meant to be together; that his adultery was justified, and his cold wife brought his faithlessness on herself; that his blatant abuse of the power dynamic in their church was a blazing, timeless romance. They share a final assignation, and Hannah, feeling that she has accomplished some kind of journey of personal growth by returning to the man who refused to incriminate himself to save her from her carmine fate, escapes across the border to Canada.

Reader, as you know, I have been on the run before. I have fled unseen forces and relied on the hospitality of unsavory characters. It is an experience that changes everything about one's perspective and personality. When She Woke seems to claim that the impact of that journey would be to cause one to toy with bisexuality and agnosticism and peeing outside; clearly, the author has never had to wash the smell of blood and smoke out of her hair in a gas station restroom as sirens pealed in the distance. I was definitively underwhelmed.

Rating: Tiresome. 

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