mmoa_writes

The second book I finished this weekend was Earthlings by Sakyaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Takemori. This book is about Natsuki, a girl who's always felt she doesn't quite belong with humans. This has been book #16 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

I've struggled a lot with what to say about this book, or whether to say anything at all. First, as many other reviews note, the book description does not in any way prepare you for the trigger warnings that may apply, so if you have no-gos for reading, do have a look around for a list before you crack this one open. 

There are a lot of things you could take away from this book. The lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse. The damage of a child having no safe adult to confide in. The pain of feeling alienated from society. The pain caused by strict social expectations that leave no room for individuals to pursue other modes of living. The danger that refusing to allow deviations from the "norm" will lead individuals incapable of conforming to that norm to reject society altogether. The idea that rejecting smaller social rules eventually leads to complete anarchy and amorality. The suffocating impact of the absence of privacy and the extremes to which it may drive people.

It is an exploration of the harm done, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who don't "fit" into the mold of society. How much of it is reality and how much of it is Natsuki's imagination is also up to the reader.

It's also a book about interrogating taboos, which leads to the trigger warning above. Natsuki's choice not to marry or have children is in and of itself, violating a taboo of her culture. Her feeling that violating this taboo does no harm to her or anyone else naturally leads to questioning other taboos, and you can't write a book about questioning taboos and then say "but not that taboo, that's too taboo!" so the book does go some dark places as Natsuki and her companions ask themselves if there's anything rational in refraining from theft, murder, and assault. 

The translation is well done, particularly in dealing with a number of sensitive subjects.

I'm not sure what I ultimately take away from Earthlings. Perhaps how much damage societal rejection has on a person's psyche and the harms that can spawn from that. We are, in the end, social creatures. Feeling from a young age that you don't belong is bound to have detrimental developmental impacts.

This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like. 

If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.

The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else. 

However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.

Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that. 

I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.

Peter Plymley's Letters And Selected Essays by Sydney Smith

Primary source. And polemic. Smith writing on the treatment of Ireland and the laws against Catholics, and reviews of books on Ireland. Sometimes very skillfully:

"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool."

It is useful as a view of the issues -- one notes he heartily assures everyone he shares their views of the terribleness of the Catholic Church -- and of the era in general. He quotes one author, who discusses how one explanation of Ireland's backwardness was its elective kings, but points out that Poland also suffered horribly from the kingship being elective but wasn't so backward. Ah, the views one wants to research, sometimes.

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox

A history/biography.

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The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook
Paperback – January 1, 2000
by george-foreman-connie-merydith (Author)


Today we finished reading our second cookbook of the year. The front matter includes Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, and Smart Eating for Healthier Living. The recipe chapters are Bring Out the Best of Grilling -- Marinades, Sauces, and Rubs; A Cut Above -- Beef and Lamb; Smoky Sensations -- Pork Chops, Ribs, and Ham; Tender Choices from the Sea -- Fish and Shellfish; Savory Grilled Poultry -- Chicken and Turkey; Quick and Easy Favorites -- Burgers, Sandwiches, and Snacks; Tempting Companion Dishes -- Vegetables, Fruit, Salads, and Desserts. Then in the back are a basic cooking guide, glossary, and index. The index lists both recipe titles and ingredients.

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Forewords and Afterwords by W.H. Auden

A collection of essays, including reviews, all written on occasion, for a particular book.

It produces a great variety of subjects.

Some are of period interest, of various kinds. The appropriate treatment for migraines being psychoanalysis? On the other hand, this is where I read his observation about how going over to Rome was a shocking scandal in the upper classes -- like the birth of an illegitimate baby -- but something that did happen, whereas becoming a Baptist was inconceivable.

Much about poets and other writers, some interesting observations on heroes, and more.

If Mexican Gothic left you craving more South American fantasy horror, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez of Argentina (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) has you covered. This is a family epic intertwined with the dark machinations of a macabre cult and its impact. It's also a splendid allegory for the evils of colonialism and generational trauma. This book was #15 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

The book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.

From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.

However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.

It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.

Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.

Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.

The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. 

The translation was great! It read very naturally, even the dialogue, and it never felt stilted or awkward in its phrasing.

An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying. 

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 14 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

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✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Figures Without Facial Features on the Cover
✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Set at a School/University

The Whole Truth by Kit Pearson and its sequel And Nothing but the Truth are a pair of middle grade historical novels set in British Columbia in the 1930s.

The main character is Polly Brown, who begins the story age ten, relocating from Winnipeg to the Gulf Islands to live with her grandmother following the death of her father—an event that's the subject of secrecy between her and her older sister Maud. Shortly after arriving at their grandmother's, Maud leaves for boarding school, leaving Polly to adjust alone to her new life on a small island and deal with the carrying the secret by herself. The second book picks up a couple of years later, when Polly also needs to leave the island for secondary schooling and struggles to adjust to being away while more big changes come to her family.

I read a few of Kit Pearson's books as a kid, and when she came up in conversation recently with a friend, I decided to check out some of her more recent novels. I don't know how her older books would hold up to a re-read for me, but I ended up having a mixed reaction to these two.

They were largely pleasant reads. They're well-written, and if spending time in upper middle-class circles in 1930s western Canada appeals, there are a lot of detailed descriptions of clothes, food, and rural seaside life to enjoy. As someone with an interest in that part of the world but who doesn't have family history there, I appreciated this look into the period.

These books feel like they're in the tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, A Little Princess, Heidi, etc.—stories I associate with girls changing the world around them, whether through action or because of their positivity. But that's not really the deal with Polly, who's a very passive character and doesn't seem to bring anything unexpected to her new community. It's also not a Secret Garden or Goodnight, Mr. Tom situation where it felt like Polly herself was changed by her new home, aside from benefiting from more money and opportunities. Things just kind of work out for her while the least dramatic version of eventful situations unfold around her.

I think what particularly didn't land for me was this sense of complacency with regard to the arc of the moral universe. Polly is shown recognizing injustice and then just...never does anything about it. Her grandmother racially discriminates against a neighbour, and Polly disagrees but then lets it lie. We don't see her ever interacting with the neighbour, or even with the neighbour's son, who's a schoolmate. She has the instinct to give money to a homeless man, but then stops when her teacher scolds her and doesn't help anyone again. She never takes a stand or makes any sacrifice, aside from the one time when it's strongly self-serving, but other characters praise her for seeing the world clearly with her artist's eye, in a way that implies that just seeing is enough and that things will work themselves out over time (at least for those who happen to be the loved one of someone with money and property).

While I was reading, I often found myself thinking how glad I was that the author was avoiding the most predictable conflicts I kept thinking were coming, but by the end of the second book, I looked back and felt like something critical was missing. I don't need big culminating moments in historical coming-of-age novels—I absolutely love A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and could write a whole essay on how it shares a sliver of the same flaw but how all of its positives outweigh that for me—but I needed just a little something more to care about these characters and their fortunes.

( An Excerpt )

ETA: Spoilers in the comments