Etiquette & Espionage

The first in a series, Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger is a great summer read, combining mystery and humor with a young ladies' finishing school in a Victorian steampunk setting.  The school in question is Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.  With rare exceptions, acceptance to the school is based on legacy. The  students possess special qualities that with the proper training they will become effective assassins and intelligencers.  Sophronia is one of the exceptions; she is a covert recruit, recommended by a family friend, Mrs. Barnaclegoose, who has observed Sophrina's penchant for getting into trouble--climbing, riding, hanging out in the stable--all decidedly unladylike activities.  The mystery in this book relates to a missing piece of technology that will make telegraph communication through the aethersphere possible.  Sophronia enlists the help of three classmates; a handsome boiler room crewman; the school's vampire, Professor Braithwope; and her mechanimal, Bumbersnoot,  to help her locate the missing prototype. In the course of the book she barely escapes from a werewolf and flywaymen, and must contend with her arch-rival Monique. The book is all plot, running a bit thin on character development and atmosphere.  It's all pretty silly, but fun.

The Age of Miracles

In The Age of Miracles, author Karen Thompson Walker takes on the logic problem that "If the sun has come up every day in known history until today, will it  rise tomorrow" and adds a twist.  The sun does continue to come up everyday, but now the days are getting longer as the earth's rotation slows.  What does this mean? What happens when a day/night cycle becomes so distorted that days and nights last 40 hours each?  Do people follow an artificial clock to maintain a 24-hour schedule or do they try to follow the circadian cycle of night and day no matter how long a day is?  How can these two very different choices affect society as a whole?  The narrator, a California teenager named Julia, who lives with her parents and two cats,  observes how life is changing, both for her personally and for her family and beyond. Responses to the official government announcement vary from panic and flight to resignation and calculation.  Within her own household there are extremes.  Julia's mother starts hoarding food while her father continues to go to work--or so she thinks.  Clearly there are tensions in her parents' marriage that are exacerbated by the crisis.  Julia also loses her best friend, when Hanna's Mormon family travels to Utah for the end of the world and leaves Julia to suffer  the cruelty often visited upon loners.  The novel juxtaposes the personal challenges that Julia faces as her parents fight and her grandfather disappears with the increasingly disrupted society forced into an artificial schedule that breaks down people mentally and physically.  She wants to find love and live the life of a normal teen, but cannot ignore the threats to her very existence, as plants and birds die and radiation from the sun becomes increasingly lethal.  Author Walker has written a thoughtful novel with an interesting premise. The narrative is full of descriptions of physical changes to the environment and humans, including  how strange it is to be awake and going to school in total darkness and then trying to sleep in full daylight.  Julia is a sympathetic character and one can't help but admire her resilience and faith that somehow mankind and science will find an answer. Recommended.

The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan, brings to life the tragedy of the Dust Bowl, the unending, severe drought and massive dust storms that magnified the already devastating impacts of the Great Depression.  Egan sets the stage by reviewing the governmental and economic policies and practices that encouraged  famers and ranchers to settle the land without considering the importance of prairie turf  and available water. When all of the buffalo grass was plowed under and replaced with non-native crops, the land was at the mercy of the lack of water and abundance of wind.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Through interviews and documents, Egan focuses on how climate, technology, and  poor governmental policy and planning destroyed the lives and livelihoods of families and their communities.  Numerous accounts tell of  developers' and realtors' promises of a rosy future that led instead to  hopelessness and despair as families fell deeper into debt,  first trying to sell crops in a depressed market and then trying to harvest any crops at all once the rains failed.  While some families were able to survive, others lost their farms to the banks and their loved ones, mainly children and old people, to dust pneumonia.  Egan describes dust storms that shattered windows, created huge drifts across roads, blinded people and cattle, and penetrated every crack and crevice of settlers' homes, leaving residents suffering with bronchitis, laryngitis, sinusitis, and pneumonia.

The author also discusses how the government and other agencies tried to respond to the crisis.  Red Cross centers sprang up in larger communities.  New Deal CCC workers planted trees in rows to try to curb wind damage.  Roosevelt authorized a study of what went wrong--was it climate change or a man-made disaster?  Should the government buy back land and replant with resilient grasses to hold the soil?   The book is a treasure chest of personal experiences and awe-inspiring statistics on what happened.  It reads like fiction and creates a vivid image of what a black blizzard was.  Highly recommended.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

This award-winning novel by Benjamin Alire Saenz is told through the eyes of a 15-year-old Mexican American living in El Paso, Texas.  Ari, short for Angel Aristotle Mendoza, relates two years of his life, beginning with his meeting Dante Quintana at the local swimming pool.  The boys are opposites--Dante is upbeat, extroverted, and intellectual. He wears his heart on his sleeve, kisses his parents, and can cry about an injured bird.  Ari is aloof and prone to anger as he struggles with communicating with his father, a Vietnam vet, and learning more about his brother, Bernardo, who is in prison. He keeps all of his emotions bottled up inside.  Both boys are lonely and feel isolated from their culture and are struggling to define who they are.  The novel is one of exploration of the teens' deepening relationship.  Two widely separated but significant events force them to evaluate their feelings about and trust in each other.  Saenz's novel is about trust, pain, commitment, communication, and honesty.  This is a slow-paced but ultimately satisfying exploration of friendship, love, and acceptance.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Jacob's eccentric grandfather dies a sudden and violent death.  His last words to Jacob are, "Go to the island . . . Find the bird, in the loop. On the other side of the old man's grave.  September third, 1940"  Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children centers around  Jacob Portman's search for answers to the clues Grandpa Portman has left him. These include the instructions he gave with his dying breaths and the wild stories and odd photographs of children who, like Abe Portman, were confined to an isolated home in Wales during WW II.    Struggling to cope with the loss of his beloved grandfather and experiencing increasingly frightening nightmares about monsters like the one he thought he saw near his grandfather's body,  16-year-old Jacob resolves to travel to Cairnholm, Wales,  to find the home and its headmistress, Miss Peregrine.

Jacob's parents support his quest, largely thanks to the advice from his psychiatrist, Dr. Golen.  Only by following his grandfather's final wishes can he lay to rest his own demons--his grief and the nightmares.  In his narration of what happens on the island, Jacob appears as an ordinary teen possessing just enough curiosity and courage to explore the mystery that confronts him.  Finally locating the home where his grandfather grew up he sees, " . . . no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger."  Once he begins to explore this menacing structure, he is confronted with the possibility of alternate worlds and looming dangers.

The narrative is punctuated by the pictures of the unusual children from Grandfather Portman's past.  These actual photos add to the suspense as Jacob sinks deeper into experiencing the lives of these special  children of another era.  Miss Peregrine's Home is at once a mystery, a fantasy, and a coming-of-age story of a lonely young man who finds comfort and friendship in another world.  Highly recommended.

Alif the Unseen

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson.  Alif's comfortable existence, living at home with his mother while spending his time coding protective software to keep his many anonymous, freedom or pornography-loving  hacker clients secure, comes to an abrupt end when his beloved Intisar becomes engaged to a wealthy prince.  Unfortunately, the lucky suitor is also the head of state cyber security forces, which are going to breach all of Alif's carefully coded defenses. What's worse, the Hand, as he is known, has also discovered Alif's latest programming triumph--a keystroke logging program, which has the potential to unmask and destroy all of Alif's unconventional clients as well as Alif himself.  As Alif's friend, Dina, puts it, "We live in a city run by an emir from one of the most inbred families on earth, where a few censors can throw someone in jail for writing things on the Internet and falling in love with the wrong person. . . It [Alif's life]went out of control a long time ago."  (122)

When she decided to leave him, Intisar sent Alif a package containing a book,  The Thousand and One Days.  This ancient tome, the secret book of the jinn, is believed to contain the key to creating a quantum-bit-powered supercomputer. With the help of Dina and a deadly jinn named Vikram, Alif struggles to keep the Hand from finding the book while he uses fleeting wifi connections to do some manic programming aimed at destroying the Hand's power.

The book is replete with  fascinating characters who offer different takes on Islam and spirituality, on tensions between the haves and have-nots in an unnamed Arab country, on the differences between Arabs and half-castes (Alif is half-Arab, half-Indian), and on two worlds--of the jinn and of the Internet,  that operate out of sight of ordinary lives.  Fascinating, fast paced and totally satisfying. Don't miss this one!!

The Katyn Order

The Katyn Order by Doublas W. Jacobson is a wild swing through the history of World War II as it plays out in the fall of Warsaw and the subsequent invasion by Russian troops.  The fate of Poland as a country lies in the balance.  A Soviet-controlled communist government is ready to take over and the only possible way to prevent this is to reveal to the world the Soviet order to murder over 27,000 Polish officers, revolutionaries and nationalists in the Katyn Forest in 1940.  The German army discovered evidence of the massacre in 1943 and the controversy about who was responsible began with accusations and counter accusations between them and the Russians.  Jacobson brings alive the unspeakably horrific and hopeless conditions of the Warsaw uprising, telling the story of a small group of dedicated Polish nationalists fighting with the Armia Krajowa  against vastly superior and ruthless German forces.  A small group of survivors is forced underground but they continue their resistance against the Red Army and security forces.  Adam Nowak is a Polish-speaking American trained as an assassin who the British Intelligence sends into Poland to work with the resistance movement. After the uprising fails,  his objective is to find a copy of Stalin's order to execute the Poles.  Trying to stop him is NKVD agent Tarnov, who has a personal interest in destroying any record of the massacre--he was responsible for carrying it out.  The story is filled with tales of violence, treachery and heroism.  It is also the story of a Polish resistance fighter who falls in love with Adam Nowak and struggles to both help him and stay alive in post-war Krakow.  Heavy, compelling stuff.