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This is enormous (if dystopian) fun. It's set in Portland, several years after the apocalypse (massive volcanic eruption, etc) has wiped out any central government, travel or trade. The protagonist's life has pretty much settled down, with the residents of a condo in NW Portland managing to grow food and trade for necessities. They aren't quite starving any more, though they're getting very tired of kale and carrots. Sophie's living with her husband, her mom, and her teenage daughter, and if her mind often drifts off into daydreams about butter or steak, that's to be expected. There's no longer mayhem, though you keep the front door barricaded and you don't go out after dark. Alas, one of the local powers decides to muscle out the other gang, and Sophie and her family are caught in the middle of it. Sophie finds herself, and her doctor husband, to be highly unlikely action heroes, but then they've had to learn to do all sorts of things they never expected, and they do the best they can. Sophie's internal monologue, fuming as her mom comments on her "finally reaching her idea weight", sighing over her daughter's teenage rebellion, and longing for Nutella, is wonderful. The character of her husband, Bernard, is wonderful, too, and I love how she sketches their relationship. As a Portlander myself, I also got a kick out of the local setting -- how nice to see the Armory Theatre go back to its roots as an armory!
I adore this cookbook. Her instructions are incredibly clear, and every recipe I've tried was reliable. I didn't know how to bake a cake when I picked it up, and yet I promptly became acclaimed among my friends for my delicious cakes. I went on to take pastry classes at the culinary institute, but I still turn back to this book for a delicious, moist, rich cake. It's not just recipes - she tells you how to get cream cheese from refrigerator temperature to room temperature when you forgot to take it out in advance to warm up; how to make substitutions; and all the other helpful hints you need. I won a baking contest using the Darn Good Chocolate Cake recipe! I think people don't believe me when I tell them, "Oh, it's just a doctored cake mix" but that's the truth.
The short stories all feature some sort of being that become human for just one day. I adored Ian Tregillis' golem-robot love story, "The Mainspring of his Heart, the Shackles of his Soul." Seanan McGuire's "Cinderella City" is a love story to San Francisco, and has a lovely magic of place. Quite a change from her shambling zombies! David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension" pulls a fun change-up, making me look at things in a different way (I'm avoiding a spoiler here), and works in a love story, too. Kristine Kathryn Rusch does a wonderful job of channeling a cat, on a cat's terms. Jean Rabe's vigilante statues are hilarious, if a bit alarming.
The gushing reviews that are springing up everywhere are right. This is a wonderful novel. I fell in love with the voice, which reminded me of Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle". It's a precocious 15 year old's journal, as she navigates the confusions of adolescence, darkened by her sister's death. She's lost her home with her extended family in Wales, and is living in an English girl's boarding school, with holidays at her father's house — the father that she just met for the first time. Her world includes fairies, and magic, and Walton does an amazing job of making that both believable, and at the same time making it feasible for it to be all in Mori's imagination. Mori is confident and analytical. She turns that analysis on herself, what she sees around her, and the books she reads.
She adores books, especially SF and fantasy. This book is a love letter to librarians, to interlibrary loan, and to SF fandom. She mentions all the books she's reading, with wonderful comments on them. It conjures up the wonder of discovering books as a child, if you were one of those kids. Someone needs to make up a bibliography of all the books mentioned (and I'm quite sure that someone will.) While many of the books she mentions are SF or fantasy, not all are. Others that come up include Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Plato, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. She is thoroughly steeped in SF, though. When she has nightmares, and wakes up terrified, she uses the litany against fear from Dune, and it works.
I love Mori's observations:
About she and her twin sister when they were eight years old and immersed in Narnia and Elidor: "…we were always looking for someone else to play with, preferably a boy, because in books that's the group you have to have to go into another world."
On meeting a classmate at a record shop: "She was looking at a record called 'Anarchy in the U.K.' by a group called the Sex Pistols. It was a very ugly cover, but I am quite interested in anarchism because of the 'Dispossessed'."
Because this has gotten so much good press, so fast, there are spoilers all over the internet. I recommend reading it before venturing onto too many blog discussions. Once you have read it, do followup. The additional information I gleaned about some of the characters set off all sort of interesting new ideas.
The story is set in a small town on the Oregon coast, where people are managing as best they can with little or no logging, and just a bit of fishing. He's got some magical realism going on, with at least one person and one crow having powers not normally found. There's love, courage, cowardice, selflessness, and crime. The characters are interesting. There's sufficient plot to carry me along, and I'm a lazy reader who requires a good firm tow from a plot. I love the Oregon coast setting, and the panopticon way that several different events in town are woven together in the storyline. Doyle is a poet, and you can see that in the lush language. I do love a novel by a poet.
In some ways, the novel resembles Steinbeck's "Cannery Row", only without the older novel's racism and misogyny.
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Etiquette for an Apocalypse by Anne Mendel
mulliner, April 27, 2012
This is enormous (if dystopian) fun. It's set in Portland, several years after the apocalypse (massive volcanic eruption, etc) has wiped out any central government, travel or trade. The protagonist's life has pretty much settled down, with the residents of a condo in NW Portland managing to grow food and trade for necessities. They aren't quite starving any more, though they're getting very tired of kale and carrots. Sophie's living with her husband, her mom, and her teenage daughter, and if her mind often drifts off into daydreams about butter or steak, that's to be expected. There's no longer mayhem, though you keep the front door barricaded and you don't go out after dark. Alas, one of the local powers decides to muscle out the other gang, and Sophie and her family are caught in the middle of it. Sophie finds herself, and her doctor husband, to be highly unlikely action heroes, but then they've had to learn to do all sorts of things they never expected, and they do the best they can. Sophie's internal monologue, fuming as her mom comments on her "finally reaching her idea weight", sighing over her daughter's teenage rebellion, and longing for Nutella, is wonderful. The character of her husband, Bernard, is wonderful, too, and I love how she sketches their relationship. As a Portlander myself, I also got a kick out of the local setting -- how nice to see the Armory Theatre go back to its roots as an armory!Chocolate from the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn
mulliner, March 12, 2012
I adore this cookbook. Her instructions are incredibly clear, and every recipe I've tried was reliable. I didn't know how to bake a cake when I picked it up, and yet I promptly became acclaimed among my friends for my delicious cakes. I went on to take pastry classes at the culinary institute, but I still turn back to this book for a delicious, moist, rich cake. It's not just recipes - she tells you how to get cream cheese from refrigerator temperature to room temperature when you forgot to take it out in advance to warm up; how to make substitutions; and all the other helpful hints you need. I won a baking contest using the Darn Good Chocolate Cake recipe! I think people don't believe me when I tell them, "Oh, it's just a doctored cake mix" but that's the truth.Human for a Day by Martin H Greenberg
mulliner, December 24, 2011
The short stories all feature some sort of being that become human for just one day. I adored Ian Tregillis' golem-robot love story, "The Mainspring of his Heart, the Shackles of his Soul." Seanan McGuire's "Cinderella City" is a love story to San Francisco, and has a lovely magic of place. Quite a change from her shambling zombies! David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension" pulls a fun change-up, making me look at things in a different way (I'm avoiding a spoiler here), and works in a love story, too. Kristine Kathryn Rusch does a wonderful job of channeling a cat, on a cat's terms. Jean Rabe's vigilante statues are hilarious, if a bit alarming.Among Others
mulliner, January 22, 2011
The gushing reviews that are springing up everywhere are right. This is a wonderful novel. I fell in love with the voice, which reminded me of Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle". It's a precocious 15 year old's journal, as she navigates the confusions of adolescence, darkened by her sister's death. She's lost her home with her extended family in Wales, and is living in an English girl's boarding school, with holidays at her father's house — the father that she just met for the first time. Her world includes fairies, and magic, and Walton does an amazing job of making that both believable, and at the same time making it feasible for it to be all in Mori's imagination. Mori is confident and analytical. She turns that analysis on herself, what she sees around her, and the books she reads.She adores books, especially SF and fantasy. This book is a love letter to librarians, to interlibrary loan, and to SF fandom. She mentions all the books she's reading, with wonderful comments on them. It conjures up the wonder of discovering books as a child, if you were one of those kids. Someone needs to make up a bibliography of all the books mentioned (and I'm quite sure that someone will.) While many of the books she mentions are SF or fantasy, not all are. Others that come up include Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Plato, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. She is thoroughly steeped in SF, though. When she has nightmares, and wakes up terrified, she uses the litany against fear from Dune, and it works.
I love Mori's observations:
About she and her twin sister when they were eight years old and immersed in Narnia and Elidor: "…we were always looking for someone else to play with, preferably a boy, because in books that's the group you have to have to go into another world."
On meeting a classmate at a record shop: "She was looking at a record called 'Anarchy in the U.K.' by a group called the Sex Pistols. It was a very ugly cover, but I am quite interested in anarchism because of the 'Dispossessed'."
Because this has gotten so much good press, so fast, there are spoilers all over the internet. I recommend reading it before venturing onto too many blog discussions. Once you have read it, do followup. The additional information I gleaned about some of the characters set off all sort of interesting new ideas.
Mink River by Brian Doyle
mulliner, October 24, 2010
The story is set in a small town on the Oregon coast, where people are managing as best they can with little or no logging, and just a bit of fishing. He's got some magical realism going on, with at least one person and one crow having powers not normally found. There's love, courage, cowardice, selflessness, and crime. The characters are interesting. There's sufficient plot to carry me along, and I'm a lazy reader who requires a good firm tow from a plot. I love the Oregon coast setting, and the panopticon way that several different events in town are woven together in the storyline. Doyle is a poet, and you can see that in the lush language. I do love a novel by a poet.In some ways, the novel resembles Steinbeck's "Cannery Row", only without the older novel's racism and misogyny.
(6 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
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