3 Books About People Who Aren't What They Seem

I'm going to be real, I was beyond delighted to notice the common theme between my last three reads. A nonfiction book about undercover women. A novel exploring the roles of women and a woman who rejects them (in a more strange, allegorical way) in South Korea. And a novel where EVERYBODY has identity issues. The first one may not necessarily count for #weirdathon, but the other two SO DO.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott
Publisher: Harper. July 2014.
Genre: Nonfiction
Source: Library Audiobook
Pages: 513


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War, like politics, was men’s work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself.

As someone who's super scared of nonfiction and who hates reading about wars, I was nervous about this book. But when I heard that Karen Abbott was coming to town, I decided it was time to give this book a chance. Everybody who has read it loved it and the subject matter certainly sounded interesting. Badass women undercover?? Sign me up. I've just always had trouble with history, for whatever reason. Abbott makes Civil War history so interesting and accessible, without dumbing it down. All of the women included were incredible in what they were willing to do either for their sides of the war.

Something I really liked was how Abbott doesn't present those who fought on the Confederate side of things like villains. She just presented the facts and the personalities; what the women did without judgement. No side was glorified, every woman flawed and incredible in their own way. Also, when I saw Abbott speak she described one of the women, Belle Boyd, as a mixture of Sarah Palin and Miley Cyrus, which is SO ACCURATE. If that doesn't make you want to know more about these women, I don't know what will.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Publisher: Hogarth. February 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Bought new
Pages: 192



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Everything starts to feel unfamiliar. As if I've come up to the back of something. Shut up behind a door without a handle. Perhaps I'm only now coming face-to-face with the thing that has always been here. It's dark. Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.

It's so hard for me not to give this four stars, because eeeeeverybody else loved it. But I don't at all feel comfortable giving it a solid four. I think I got caught in a hype trap a little bit. Everybody who read this heralded it as super disturbing and weird. So I was expecting the most disturbing book ever. Much to my dismay, it was only sort of disturbing. This story about a South Korean woman who gives up eating meat due to a violent dream she had is definitely interesting.

As she herself becomes more and more like a plant, and the book jumps to new narrators across relatively big spans of time separating the book into three parts, it definitely gets progressively stranger. I really appreciate what Kang has to say about conformity, women, and mental illness in South Korea. At the same time, though, I wasn't blown away by how the story was told. It felt like it lost steam a little bit when it had some excellent opportunities to get really unsettling and pack a punch. That being said, I did like a quieter ending -- but the second part of the novel was slow and the weird sex stuff was not nearly weird enough. That might be a personal problem, though.

Mislaid by Nell Zink
Publisher: Ecco. May 2015.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Library Audiobook
Pages: 242



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Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.

Mislaid is a complicated novel, but I was so delighted to see that it had more of a structured narrative than The Wallcreeper did. I don't even know how to describe it. A gay professor and a lesbian student bone a lot, get married, have two kids, then the wife runs away, taking her little girl with her. To hide from her husband, Peggy/Meg and her daughter take up the identities of two deceased African Americans and live in poverty passing as black despite being very white. Shenanigans ensue, but like in the most intellectual sense.

The characters are all ridiculous, the plot is ridiculous, but it is soooo smart and funny. Zink does not hold back in her social commentary, and I'm glad she goes so boldly into the absurd while looking at identity. Having read The Wallcreeper, which was a bit of a narrative clusterfuck, I was pretty satisfied with the ending of her second novel. Granted, when you look back at it once you're done, you'll wonder why certain events and characters were included at all. Overall, though, it was pretty entertaining and it definitely makes you think.

Review: Canada by Richard Ford

Canada by Richard Ford
Publisher: Ecco. May 2012
Pages: 420
Genre: Literary fiction
First Lines: First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.


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So. Canada. This is a book about a 15-year-old boy named Dell whose parents decide to rob a bank, which completely disrupts his and his twin sister's lives. The story is told by an older Dell looking back on the whole experience, but he manages to keep his younger self's perspective.

It's a very quiet book. All of the strange events (bank robbery, crossing the border to run from the law, etc.) are presented very calmly. Most of the time, they're even sort of spoiled by the narrator before they even take place. But the point doesn't really seem to be to thrill the reader with the events, it's too look more closely at them and the people doing such things. That's my issue with the book, though. I don't think that it can't have both aspects.

Almost the entire first half of the book is set up for the bank robbery that is mentioned in the first line. I wouldn't normally have that much of an issue with that (probably), but it was a lot of the narrator explaining how his parents, the robbers, are rather than showing us through their actions. Then, the second half, after the robbery actually occurs. I think I would've liked it better if it was a bit less subdued and a bit more consequential. But I can't deny that the adult characters Dell got thrown into the lives of were interesting. And I did love how Ford represented small, dying off towns. His writing isn't embellished (normally a con for me), but his descriptions of these places still left a very strong impression on me.

So. Canada. Maybe I went in with too high of expectations. I liked the characters, I liked most of the points about people/events that the narrator made (though he didn't necessarily need to say all of them outright to us). But I found myself excited to be finished so I could go on to read something else. Not the best sign.

Some Quotes:

"I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming something else--but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt."

"The blocky shadows of the grain cars and tanker cars and gondolas swayed and bumped along, sparks crackling off the brakes, lights dimmed and yellow in the caboose. Often a man stood on the rear platform--the way I'd seen photographs of politicians giving forceful speeches to great crowds--staring back at the closing silence behind him, the red tail-light not quite illuminating his face, unaware anyone was watching."

Outlandishness Rating: 5/10  

Certainly some of the characters are odd (i.e. bank robbers), but they were portrayed in such an almost bland way. I mean, the point was to say like it could be anyone or normalcy so closely borders that which is strange. So I get it. But it still took something away from it, I think.

Recommended For:

People who already like Richard Ford or don't mind a slower paced, subdued book.