So I've read two books back to back this week, both for possible review. Both looked like they would be science fiction, though neither really was. If you like books that will upset you deeply, these are for you.
The first, Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, is about scientists, and science, and there's an alternative universe. You see why I thought it was science fiction.
It's also beautifully written, and there's a lot of fascinating detail. The book opens with the point of view character, a scientist who used to study fungi, on her way to McMurdo Station in Antartica, where she is working washing dishes and unloading cargo trucks, things like that.
As the book develops, we learn about her past, how she came to science, and that there is a husband and a child (not now with her, obviously) in her background. Later we learn that the kid is dead. Also, there's an "arc" visible from McMurdo station, and no one knows what it is.
Spoilers: it's a place where this universe and another universe touch. In that one, entropy flows the other way. She and her husband (he's a physicist, and shows up to study the arc) use the juncture to travel to the other universe, where they hope they can locate their son before he dies and bring him back to this universe.
So it's a fascinating book and their lives in the other universe, where people are born old and age back to childhood, is fascinating. I think it's the dead kid that makes this one so hard to read. We know he dies, and then when (spoilers) they do find him in the other universe, they can't bring him out of that universe. So he ages back to birth, and we have to watch that. Very upsetting.
But, again, compelling and wonderfully written. The parts about science and about McMurdo Station are wonderful. I think this one triggered my claustrophobia. I hate it when characters are trapped and can do nothing to save themselves. If you don't have claustrophobia, you might enjoy this one. The kid dying twice is a little hard to deal with, though.
The other is upsetting for a different reason. Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, reminds me of Gone Girl, if you know that novel. The main character, who is our point of view character, Natalie, is a social media influencer, with six kids and a five hundred acre farm in an Idaho valley. She releases videos on Instagram and YouTube, celebrating her existence as a "tradwife." She thanks God for her wonderful children and her wonderful husband who runs the farm while she raises the children, baking her own bread, home-schooling, raising chickens and cooking every meal from scratch.
From the beginning, we see how much of this life is an illusion -- the production team, the nannies who actually care for the children, the farm hands who actually do the farming. We also, almost from the start, recognize that Natalie is an unreliable narrator. She contradicts herself, gives us conflicting information, and seems to be operating mostly from spite. In fact, her entire life seems to be built on spite and childish tantrums. She is a thoroughly unlikeable person.
Then she wakes up in what appears to be 1875, still in the same Idaho valley. The "joke" is that she actually has to become a traditional wife from that era she was cosplaying. Her husband beats her, her kids see how useless she is (four kids, this time), she learns how difficult life is without antibiotics or modern appliances.
Does she rise to the experience? No, she continues with her spiteful tantrums. We eventually learn what's going on -- she has not, in fact, been transported to 1875 -- but by that point we no longer care.
I imagine this one sold on the concept -- a tradwife influencer transported back to the time she celebrates as so wonderful, haha, you won't believe what happens next.
But the structure is a mess, and the characters are completely unlikeable. Not just Natalie -- her husband, enamored of the manosphere and lunatic YouTube channels, is equally horrible. The grandparents bankrolling this cosplaying life are horrible: the grandmother is a drunk, the grandfather, a conservative politician, is hateful. The channel Natalie runs is fueled by what she calls "the angry women," liberals, apparently, but who knows, they're also horrible. The kids, the true victims in all of this, have their moments, but it's not enough to carry the book.
It's like being hit with sticks for three hundred pages. Read it if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
2 comments:
My book club picked Yesteryear for next month. Personally, I don't understand why they think books have to be depressing and joyless to be a meaningful reading experience. When it was my turn I picked Pure America, because if I'm going to be depressed by a book, I at least want it to be nonfiction. I don't need people making up horrible things, there are enough already in the world.
Right? Especially when there's no real point to how horrible everything is in your fictional universe. You're not telling me anything I didn't already know, and certainly not anything worth making me suffer through all that.
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