Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt

You know how her books usually are: tightly plotted, lots of action, interesting characters. None of those things happened in this book. The characters had no depth whatsoever. The plot was nonsense and did not hang together. I don't think I could even tell you what it was supposed to be, never mind what it was. The main characters vanished for large portions of the book. And everyone, absolutely everyone, went on long rambling speeches about NOTHING, like about how the Youth of Today Are Budding Fascists, based on, again, nothing.

It also went into some kind of weird and vague alternate future where Things Are Otherwise. Worldwide riots by The Youth.

And there was a bizarre fixation on Hitler youth and Siegfried and actual Hitler getting exported to South America. Plus Big Charlotte, one of the most hateful depictions of a fat person I've ever seen, and that includes J.K. Rowling, who hates them a whole lot.

There was nothing you wondered about or wanted to know, other than "What the hell is going on?" and "Will this person ever shut up?" Seriously, everyone just had meetings and infodumped. It was exposition 24/7. People tried to hit the main character with cars twice, but then he went into their stronghold or whatever and nobody cared? At the end he and the other main character decided over telegram to get married, despite no chemistry and no relationship to speak of--and he is obsessed with how she looks just like his sister. They were off screen traveling the world for ages but for no clear reason and accomplished nothing. Literally he wanted to know what his goal was on this trip and was told he wasn't allowed to know. And still went.

Also there was a magic science thing to make everyone benevolent permanently, called Benvo, which we must not use! We can't let you use it! The formula has been destroyed! Plus scientist is dying! Then he gets magically returned to health from someone getting shot in front of him. It was the shock! So did they use it? Unclear. Nothing was clear. It didn't even end properly. And there's the weirdest epilogue mainly about this little girl who has never been in the book up to this point.

They should not have published this book, if she was as far gone as it seems she was. That's unkind to an excellent author, though maybe it reveals that even authors we admire have depths of weird obsessions that we'd rather not know about. Everyone is human, racists and every kind of -phobe included. It was a bit like having Thanksgiving dinner with that ancient and witty great-aunt you always liked and discovering she gets really racist when she has two glasses of wine.

Truly the worst published novel I've ever read, even worse than The Goldfinch, which is really saying something. Also it made me wonder if I was making accidental references to terrible racist material when I named my old cat Siegfried. No! I just read the medieval text! Medieval texts were there first. Aw, man.

Agatha Christie: Sleeping Murder

This was a fascinating read for me, partly because it solved a story problem I've been having with a work in progress that's been stuck in draft form for ages. I don't even want to think about how long. A decade? Brrrr.

That novel is Summerlands, which anyone who reads anything I write will know keeps cropping up regularly as I get all excited to tackle it again, then get discouraged by the way it never quite works.

I wrote it when I didn't know how to write novels yet. It's strange how completely dysfunctional it is as a draft, while having two absolutely amazing characters. 

Sleeping Murder is about Gwen and Giles, two New Zealanders who are moving to England for no clear reason. (It doesn't matter.) Gwen picks a town and buys a house and then has repeated eerie experiences about the house, things she knows that she could not possibly know, including a sudden terrifying memory of seeing a murder. She thinks she's going insane until Miss Marple (yay!) talks her through it and Gwen finds out she actually did live in that house as a small child. 

The book was so spooky up to this point that I was afraid it would be supernatural in nature. That's not my cup of tea. But 70s Agatha Christie novels often incorporate this type of absolutely terrifying suspense (at least, to me) that seems like it includes supernatural elements. It's never supernatural! Spoiler alert! This happens in several novels of hers that I can think of and gets me every time. But I am a known chicken. 

Gwen and Miss Marple and then Giles embark on research to find out who Helen was--the murder victim, as Gwen remembers her name--and what actually happened to her. 

They follow all sorts of trails and track down her family and the sad end that came to Gwen's father, which she didn't even know about, as she was raised by family members back in New Zealand. They line up a crew of possible suspects, all of whom I suspected equally in turn, as I'm terrible at figuring out who committed the crime. This time I actually did figure it out before it was explained, purely because of one particular clue about the brandy.

The way Christie lays out clues and covers them up with confusion and misdirection is obviously brilliant. I'm easy to misdirect, it seems. The clues are all there and everything is watertight, thank goodness, unlike some recent things I've read and watched. It's an incredibly satisfying ending as it all comes clear at once. 

I realized I need to line up some suspects myself. Well, last year I realized the novel lacked a plot entirely. It was these two main characters coming to grips with their major damage and their ways of acting out that only hurt themselves. That's great and all, but it's not a plot. The mystery I added last year added a plot. But now, as I apparently need to get hit on the head with a coconut, two by four, or other large object, I need to line up suspects for the mystery.

That novel's mystery is: what happened to the two girls' mother? Again, I picked Sleeping Murder more or less at random in the library. I just thought it was one I hadn't read, which turned out to be true. But it's about Gwen's stepmother's murder and finding out what actually happened to her. And if she was actually murdered, who did it? 

My story should be equally mystifying about what happened to their mother. And if she was murdered, who did it? Their father is bizarrely cold and distant and alarming so it would be easy to think of him as a suspect, if they decide she was murdered. They've been raised far away by two different aunts, so they don't know him or each other or anything about their mother. In at least one draft, they thought those aunts were their mothers. Then only one sister did. I can't even remember where it stands now.

I need to rewrite that novel entirely. From scratch, from the ground up. I'm tempted to include all those fun things like letters and texts and email and historical documents like marriage licenses and whatnot. What does a coroner's report look like when someone disappears boating and is never found? I have no idea if you even need or get one in that case. Look at all the things I don't know. What happens in that case? Do I want to include that in the story as something someone says happened to her? Maybe. My search history is going to look pretty sketchy, but writing always causes that. 

I really like building up the character of a missing person who disappeared long ago through various records and artifacts and accounts from various people. Actually Maureen Johnson did this very well in The Box in the Woods. Even if that was outrageously convenient and deus ex machina in about seventeen different ways and I hated the long rambly assemble the audience and explain everything part. Okay, that book had serious problems I could explore at another time. But I liked how we learned about the one girl through all the materials from the past and what people said in the present.

Look, if people say all these different things, which is true? "She ran off and left you as babies." "She disappeared, all right. That's all I'm saying." "I heard she moved to Switzerland. Is that not true?" "Why don't you ask Artledge down at the bait shop. He rents boats. He always said there was something about their relationship that was, well, I don't want to say fishy, that's hack. Something off."

So give those girls this mystery to solve WHILE they're dealing with sixteen years of emotional damage from evil aunts (not enough evil aunts in fiction, seriously--why is it always uncles?--aunt power!) and coping with this weird icicle father they don't know and being in a strange place and getting talked about by everyone AND trying to figure out how they even begin to relate to each other.

It's fun, that's the main thing. And we are constantly asking questions as readers, going, "That guy is definitely lying," or "This person is holding back," or "My goodness, people will tell Miss Marple anything." 

One thing that gets a tiny bit tedious is how Miss Marple always knows the answer but won't tell anyone. She's always doing that thing where she looks from one to the other and says, "Oh, well, it seems perfectly clear to me," and they all get baffled and annoyed and blunder around nearly getting murdered because she wouldn't come out and say it. Stop it, Miss Marple!

Ooh, another thing that completely freaked me out in Sleeping Murder is that they went to the same nursing home that Tommy and Tuppence went to in the extremely creepy book where they're older and Tuppence researches a painting and gets into this bizarre divided house by a canal and on and on. That book is so upsetting. By the Pricking of my Thumbs is the name of it. The same truly weird old lady says the same thing to Gwen that she says in that book. How bizarre and fun! It's a cameo from another book entirely. 

I can just picture the author laughing to herself as she did that, knowing how people would react. 

There's a character in my novel The Last Word who's loosely based on Agatha Christie, or at least she's not in the book but it's all about her and her series of books. The main character, Ceci, is just arriving back in America after being abroad for two years, living on a shoestring, searching for evidence about the Agatha Christie character's mysterious life. I kind of love that book, even if it's not the best thing I ever wrote. Maybe I'll read it again and see if it's worth putting out on KDP. There's so much I adore about that character and that story. Gothic houses! An amazing great-aunt! A wonderful boy! A best friend who's an insecure but astonishing artist! And of course a massive mystery that unfolds throughout the book. 

That's the first novel that I ever bashed into shape as a completed piece. I seem to remember it has some issues, but generally I remember the negatives more than the positives, so maybe I fixed them or they're not as bad as I think. Who knows?

Agatha Christie! So good! So strangely formative for me, even though I didn't read most of her books until last year, or was it the year before? I spent one whole summer reading through almost all of them. What I ought to do is reread each one the minute I finish it, so I can really learn how she structures things, since I'm generally baffled the whole way through. The Agatha Christie Writing Program. Make it so.

Rian Johnson: Glass Onion

I really wanted to see this. In fact, I watched Knives Out purely so I could see it fully educated in the ways of this series. Knives Out was fantastic, so tightly plotted that even my picky brain never found a single hole in the story. I loved it. I should watch it again.

Instead, I watched Glass Onion, then the next day kept thinking, "Wait..." and watched it again. And it has holes, alas. 

Spoilers going forward for both movies, probably, but definitely for Glass Onion.

There were a lot of things I adored about the movie. I loved that we thought we knew what was going on, then learned that we were seeing everything wrong. That was similar to Knives Out and was something I loved there, too. I loved the way we saw Whiskey very differently once Andi talked to her and got past the surface appearance. I loved all the various things that seemed completely different once we saw them from multiple angles. That's something Johnson does brilliantly. 

But there were plot holes. 

There was some hand-waving about how Miles cut Andi out of the company. That is just not how anything works. Two people who have equal partnership in a company, right? One can't just suddenly cut the other one out. And the stupid napkin is meaningless. It's set up as this PROOF that one or the other had the idea first, as if any court would be like, "Well, the napkin proves this or that." There has to be massive paperwork and legal protections and on and on. That's such a fundamental fatal flaw that the rest of the movie falls apart because of it.

The second major flaw is connected: it's that Miles would have any reason to kill Andi. Why? What does that accomplish? He already won the court case. In this world, another napkin suddenly proves that he's not the originator of the company? But he took it all away from her regardless of any napkins.

I cannot get over how idiotic the napkin thing is. It's just terrible. It's maybe a first draft idea, but should have been replaced with something from our reality that makes actual sense. 

I do love that Miles is extremely stupid and steals everyone else's ideas. That I buy 100%. 

I don't buy that Andi would let him in after he destroyed her life and took her company away, the company that she started. 

It makes no sense that he would kill her, as again it accomplishes nothing, and he takes her (fucking) napkin anyway. He has it, and he won already, so there is literally no reason to kill the person. He's also not a killer, in any way that we've seen so far. Maybe if he was seriously threatened, pushed to the absolute edge, but he wasn't. I could have imagined Duke, a violent person who carries a gun everywhere, pushed to murder by immense frustration or anger, but there was nothing to show Miles was like that. Poor characterization. 

He also had zero reason to kill Duke, especially in front of everyone. Look at the purported reasoning: Duke gets a Google alert on his phone that says Andi is dead. So, what does that mean? Miles looks super happy about it. Duke looks super happy about it. Now--inexplicably--it means Duke gets whatever [thing] that he's been wanting from Miles but Miles was holding back on. Why??? So Miles agrees to give him whatever the thing is (seriously, what is it?) and then instantly kills him. 

WHAT FOR?

To hide that Andi is dead? Everyone will get that information soon anyway.

Also, and this is the biggest plot hole: Miles killed, or tried to kill Andi, but then she walks up the dock and is there on his private island. He has an interesting reaction, a complex expression. He looks sad and moved and hopeful and I don't know what all else. He's a good actor to pull that off. I can't stand that actor, Edward Norton, but that's kind of why he's cast in this role, I think. He's so good at that smarmy self-aggrandizing sleazy smug bastard character. 

If I had tried to kill someone and they walked onto my private island, I would be highly on guard. I would imagine I'd be super tense. Right? I'd know that person knew a terrible thing about me. I'd know they were probably there for revenge or at minimum to tell everyone about that crime. But he never seems worried at all. Granted, he's dumb as a rock, but even he should be able to figure out that someone you tried to kill would be MAD AT YOU. Especially when it's Andi, who was already enraged at him for the whole stealing all her money thing. (It still makes no sense. What, she didn't have any money in the bank? She didn't own shares? There's just no way to make that work.)

This leads to the biggest twist, one that I don't even know is true. I mean, I believe it. I watched it twice to see whether my idea could be right. I'm sure it is. But I haven't seen it anywhere else. I tried reading the Reddit thread on the movie but since I deleted the app, reading it on a browser is (deliberately) so difficult and annoying that I bailed after a while. 

I don't think that's Helen. I don't think Andi died. Maybe she has a twin sister, sure, but I don't think that's her. I think it's Andi pretending to be Helen pretending to be Andi. 

They both have that down home accent, but Andi covers it up with her "dog ate the caviar" voice. They both can do that, as Helen proves. 

The person who receives and opens the box is the key clue here. Her hair is up in a towel wrap. I remembered it being Andi's short blond bob, but when I watched it a second time, her hair was covered. That's not accidental. That means it's obscuring which one of them it is. 

It's Helen who brings the smashed box to Benoit, but it makes no sense that Helen would even care about that box enough to smash it up, or would know Miles well enough to know what was in it. Helen believes her sister was murdered, but again there's no evidence for that and she had just lost everything. Suicide wouldn't be unheard of in that kind of situation. Helen's evidence is that the red envelope was nowhere in the house, but so what? It could be destroyed, or hidden really well. Andi lost it herself in her house until she was knocking over bookcases and it reappeared. 

I'm not even sure Benoit believes Helen is Helen. She has the long hair, but you can get around that easily. Frumpy clothes and different hair and a different accent and manner, sure. He could be going along with it to solve the attempted murder, even if he doesn't believe a real murder occurred. The thing about releasing a statement isn't a thing. If someone dies, that's public record. So when he says he can pull some strings and keep it from coming out--what? That's not a thing either. What strings? Where? Wait, so it would just come out anyway, based on that, but she needed to release a statement? That's contradictory.

Helen does not know these people well enough to interact with them the way she does throughout the whole movie. Just acting mad and aloof wouldn't do it. Granted they're all drunk the whole time. But when she gets into it with Duke, he says, "There she is. That's the Andi I know." That's because it is Andi the whole time. 

I'm also going by her vast rage at Miles and destruction of his company. That's Andi's kind of revenge, not Helen's. Helen is a third grade teacher, so smashing everything makes sense for her character, but Andi knows what will really hurt Miles and save lives all over the world and does that. Her actions show someone with a deep understanding of the Klear product that we only know as an audience because we've overheard people talking in the pool and elsewhere. 

She slips back into Helen's down home accent, but it's also Andi's original accent. 

Her Mona Lisa smile at the end seems to me enigmatic enough to imply there is a lot more going on than is on the surface. That's Andi. Helen is a character created by Andi who is scared of boats and terrified of the whole weekend among these rich fancy assholes. Andi is not.

Anyway, a friend and I are always saying that audiences these days are always looking for multiple levels beyond what are even there, so maybe I'm doing that, but given the contradictions about Andi/Helen throughout, I'm sure this is the case. And I like it that Benoit Blanc either doesn't know or doesn't care because he's interested in figuring out the case itself. He keeps saying he's very bad at stupid things--it's a running theme. One person pretending to be another seems like a stupid thing he'd be bad at. What other stupid things are there in the story for him to be bad at figuring out? There's a whole set-up with Among Us and crosswords and all these lesser puzzles that are not complex enough for him to be good at. 

There, solved it. 

But I'm mad about all the plot holes. Take second, third, and fourth passes at those things, seriously. You can call me. I'll read your thing and point out what parts don't actually work. (This is literally my job.) Mysteries are super hard. I know it. But a story can't only make sense when we don't know what's going on. This is exactly the same problem as with Nine Liars. It only hangs together when we don't know the ending. Once we know the ending, everyone including the police has to be outrageously stupid and incompetent for things to go the way they go. 

Speaking of which, wouldn't Helen go to the police? Wouldn't there be an investigation if she believes her sister was murdered? That gets into the news. Why does she think it's Miles or any of the shitheads at all? Again, she would have no reason to think that unless she was actually Andi and knew perfectly well who it was, just couldn't prove it and wanted her ridiculous plot point napkin back. 

I can buy a lot of nonsense in fiction. I watch shows over and over with enormous buys in them. Leverage! Agents of SHIELD! Community! I can suspend my disbelief! But I'm not okay with massive plot holes and things that make no logical sense that are supposed to be part of the actual way the world works. The ungodly stupid napkin thing and the corporate "legal thing" and two utterly unmotivated murders? That's quite a lot too much for me to buy. 

That movie was a lot of fun the first time around, though. Yo-Yo Ma was there! Serena Williams showed up! The setting was amazing! Miles is a great terrible villain, straight out of Despicable Me! These selfish, lazy people who are hanging around Miles for personal profit and gain are wonderful. Whiskey was a terrific character, as was Duke's mom. I liked how the shitheads were all full of self-loathing and had no spines at all, so they'd switch sides as soon as it was expedient. I liked how dumb and easy it was for Miles to hide Duke's phone (though again--WHY) by sticking it in his pocket. (Why not just turn it off and shove it in the couch? I swear, nothing makes any sense in this movie.) I loved how clueless Kate Hudson's character was. Perfectly believable to me. I've met so many of those people. I met a guy once who didn't believe in expertise and told me he thought he could do brain surgery. I met a recovering heroin addict who said she didn't want the Covid vaccine because she didn't know what was in it. But you'll shoot up things you buy from a guy under a bridge? Okay! People are full of misplaced confidence and ignorance and wildly inaccurate knowledge and super flexible ethics. I liked that about all the characters. 

I definitely want to watch Knives Out again, though. That was a great movie. The check to make as a writer is not: can I fool someone first time through, but once they know what's really going on, will they still think this makes sense? Doing it the first time only way is cheap and sketchy and honestly lazy writing.

Connie Willis: Crosstalk

It's almost painful to write criticism of any of Willis's work, since she's one of my top three favorite authors. I've been reading her books lately as I'm thinking a lot about close third person in my own work. She does it so well!

First I read Blackout and All Clear over the weekend. Then I read Crosstalk because I got so stressed out from all the panic and fear and everyone being cold and wet and starving and frightened and the falling bombs and so on. And the time travel terrifies me, since it's been going wrong ever since Doomsday Book. How would anyone ever be brave enough to get into that machine after that?

Well, okay, that's not fair. But to say why would give away the plot. 

I have a lot of thoughts about Blackout and All Clear but that's for another post.

Crosstalk is an interesting idea. It bothers me a lot of ways, though. 

First big issue is that the heroine and main character, Briddey, does not drive the story in any way whatsoever. She is pushed around and manipulated and lied to and tricked by absolutely everyone in her life. The plot happens to her. She does not drive the plot. 

This is an issue I had in the first book I wrote, an issue that rendered that book absolutely useless. Though I seem to remember the prose was excellent. Not helpful when my plot was atrocious, though. 

Sometimes it feels like life just happens to people, but that's a lie called "learned helplessness" that tells us we're not in charge of our own lives. And sorry if I've told this story before, but one day I mentioned to a class that we're in charge of our own lives--that even opting not to take control is our choice and means we're in control--and this girl said out loud: "Oh no!" She had an abusive husband. She had fallen deep into learned helplessness.

I shouldn't make it sound like learned helplessness is something that just happens. It's nearly always TAUGHT helplessness. Someone has a vested interest in making someone else feel helpless and like they're not in control of their life. That's what happened to that girl. 

There's no sense that Briddey has been abused by someone, though her family is terrible to her, completely overbearing, refusing to respect any boundary whatsoever. They show up at her job and barge in, interrupting her work and her conversations. They show up at her apartment and barge in there. Stop giving people keys, Briddey!

Everyone she works with treats her the same way, though, so it's not just the family. Everyone walks all over Briddey. 

It's odd that this isn't set up as something this character needs to work on and fix in her life, since it clearly is a major problem for her. She can't complete a single thought or phone call or anything without someone taking over and making her do what they want.

Add to this the absolutely heinous boyfriend, Trent. He's supposed to be a real catch because he has a Porsche, but he's an unmitigated asshole from the beginning. So Briddey reads as either someone who is clueless (or stupid) about how she's being treated, or likes being walked all over. Neither one is particularly appealing to me as a reader. Unless that's the arc: doormat grows a spine.

She does not grow a spine. Not to give that away or anything. 

No, she lets the boyfriend bully her into this procedure intended to bring about emotional connection, only instead she gets telepathy. It starts out scary and confusing, then gradually becomes completely overwhelming and terrifying. Enter C.B.

C.B. takes over as the bullying controlling boyfriend figure. I know, we're supposed to like him. He's nice. He's a recluse with messy hair. He's actually kind to her and helps her. But he absolutely treats her the same way as Trent, the asshole with the Porsche. He tells her what to do constantly, interrupts her, orders her around, hides enormous secrets from her, and manipulates her. 

I suppose that's how it works in reality. You replicate your patterns. But it's tricky to like even someone as likeable as C.B. when he's constantly engaging in these abusive behaviors. 

What I wanted the whole time was for Briddey to start to stand up for herself. Tell people NO and MEAN IT. Back it up. Do what you want, instead of 100% what other people want. Take control of your life, Briddey, you limp piece of string. 

Is that what people like about her? That she's so weak and malleable? That she will do whatever you want all the time, no question? GROSS. We honestly do not get a sense of what anyone likes about her other than that. Because she has no personality traits other than that. 

Seriously. What's her job? We don't really know. Who are her friends? She doesn't have any. What is her relationship with her family? Yeah, they bowl her over constantly. What are her likes and dislikes? We get no sense of that. What's in her apartment? A whole loaf of French bread, I guess, which her niece takes to feed the ducks. And some cereal she hates. 

I was riding along with this book until I believe page 466, where C.B. uses some app he invented to send a public tweet ONLY TO ONE PERSON then uses some miraculous take-it-back-within-ten-minutes technology to pull it, once it has threatened/tricked that one person enough. What??? That is not how anything works. You can delete your tweets any time. And you can't publicly tweet to just one person. There's a whole fuss about how it's going to get retweeted and spread all around the world, so it's not a DM or anything--it's definitely public. What on earth.

It's okay not to know things. But you have to ask or find out. Because that was such a ludicrously incorrect representation of a truly commonplace app that it was jaw-dropping. 

That said, imagine the glorious peace of not having Twitter. Never having had Twitter. Oooh. I mean, I've met many wonderful people through it, but at the cost of constant input of stress and ugliness and all the idiotic thoughts of so many truly terrible people worldwide...exactly as Willis imagines telepathy. WHAT A USEFUL METAPHOR THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN.

So anyway, she reinvents Twitter, only mentally, and you can't shut it off, so Briddey has to learn to build barriers and boundaries and take control of her life, for the first time ever. Another useful metaphor that could have been. 

I'm mad at this book for what it could have been. 

I'm extremely mad about the doormat character who doesn't drive her own narrative. 

I'm mad about boundary issues. 

I'm mad about overbearing, abusive people, even if Briddey apparently loves them. Maybe she's born submissive, I don't know. She doesn't seem to think so. But: oh, you think that's the last time C.B. is going to lie to you, manipulate you, keep secrets, hide things, or pretend he doesn't know what you mean when he absolutely does? She has to CATCH him in the lies before he will admit them, one after the other, near the end. He fakes a phone call right in front of her. He fakes not having telepathy. This is really someone you want to be in a relationship with? Someone who will lie to your face over and over? 

Things I liked: well, the relationship between the two of them, when it's not a constant rescue fantasy, which is most of the time. I liked Maeve, the precocious niece, even if her computer skills are (again) ludicrous. 

I hated the one-dimensional doctor and his behavior. I hated the one-dimensional psychic from Sedona who was reduced to a crying mess on the floor--that's gross. Don't do that to people. Either they're real people or they're caricatures. One is interesting and deserves fair treatment and one isn't worth your time. I hated the dumb Irish culture thing, which a Twitter friend (so there) pointed out died out in the 70s. Though that was just a cover for something else, turns out, so maybe that's okay. But I was dying of embarrassment from it anyway. The fake brogue. It's so awful. Even if the point is that it was awful, it was too awful for that to be the point. Nope. Some things are so awful that using them at all, even as cover, is going too far. I hated Trent constantly. I hated all the people at her job the whole time. They were all one-dimensional and behaved atrociously, again crossing every boundary. Like the Irish thing, it wasn't cute or funny, it was just people being terrible.

I loved the evocation of panic, which as usual Willis does absolutely beautifully. I swear Blackout and All Clear contributed to an actual panic attack I had Sunday. I loved the library, especially the inner sanctum room, but the whole library was vivid and realistic and true to life as a university library. I loved the moments of peace and comfort they had together. 

Does...how do I phrase this without sounding like an alien observing earthlings...does every relationship have to be one person being so goddamn dominant and one being so goddamn weak and needing help and protection? That to me is just toxic masculinity needing to chop wood and fend off bears and save the damsel in distress, not any way that actual human beings relate to each other. I mean, I can see noticing socialized roles existing that way, but this is fiction. We don't have to do that sort of thing. 

Even here, where Aunt Oona is actually behind the scenes saving the day, we don't get to see any of that--she never comes on the scene again at all after the beginning of the book. 

I'm trying to think whether the helpless damsel thing is thematic throughout her work. Unfortunately it sort of is. Suffering, yes. Suffering and doing incredibly hard work, those are traits of her heroines. They work so incredibly hard. But they don't save themselves. A man does that. 

It's been a while since I read Bellwether or Lincoln's Dreams or Remake. I can't really read Passage again right now due to the state of my dog's health, though I'm going through it anyway, so might as well. I've read Doomsday Book so many times I don't need to reread it. (Spoilers ahoy.) Kivrin works incredibly hard the whole book long to help everyone around her and to save herself, but ultimately she gets rescued by a man at the end. And a child. Blackout and All Clear follow the same pattern. Oh, they fight so very very hard the whole time, Eileen and Polly, but ultimately it's Mike's work that tells Colin where to find them. Well, plus there's the whole self-aware continuum thing that thought the Holocaust was okay as long as Sir Godfrey gets saved (what?) and Colin gets born, but that makes me want to smash things, so let's not talk about that.

Come to think of it, "doormat grows spine" is the plot of a novel I started then abandoned because the character bothered me too much in her doormat phase. Like I did not want to spend time with her. In real life I hate to see people living like that. I have a friend whose entire life is in service to her husband and kids, who literally won't talk on the phone with me if her husband is IN THE HOUSE because she has to be on duty for them the whole time. To me that feels like if that were my boss, I'd quit, and if that were my life, it wouldn't be. Mutual service, sure. But I bet you any money he doesn't observe the same rules. I bet he does whatever he wants and talks on the phone when she's there. 

Maybe that sort of subservience feeds people somehow? They enjoy it? They like feeling less important than someone else? I don't know. It would make me feel terrible. So would having someone constantly submit to me and serve me that way. Yuck. I'm into this thing called equality.

This novel tells the story of a woman who acquires supernatural powers and gets rid of an abusive, controlling boyfriend but replaces him with one who lies to her and manipulates her. Better, I guess. At least she actually seems to like the second guy. But oh boy, if someone lied to my face and manipulated me that way, that is seventeen kinds of massive red flag, and if you think they're going to stop just because you're "together" now, you are deluding yourself. 

My own issues aside, it's a distinct narrative issue to have the main character not the one who's driving the story, making the choices, determining what's going to happen. In class I tell them narrative is: character, conflict, choice, consequences. Repeat. So I suppose what I don't like is that the character is just a mere sketch, the conflict is not of her own making, she doesn't make any choices in regards to it, and the consequences are all far beyond her. She literally doesn't even understand what's happening to her except when C.B. explains everything (ad nauseum) throughout the book. He rescues her over and over and over. She can't even make a decision without consulting him, and then most of the time he countermands it. He speaks in the imperative to her most of the time, just like abusive and exploitative Trent. 

I object to the entire premise, now that I think about it.

Women are not helpless creatures who can't figure things out or solve their own problems, who need to be told what to do all the time. I don't like it when women are written this way, or without their own rich and complex lives. They should have tastes and likes and dislikes, with a shelf full of palak paneer MREs and a bunch of ska records. They should have friends and enemies and racquetball partners and a bowling league and a habit of staring into space then coming out with hilarious haiku, a collection of blue suede shoes and a particular sports team they like and that weird coat they love and won't get rid of no matter what you say. They should have 56 chapsticks but never be able to put their hands on one and buy three more next time they're at the store, even though they do that every time. They should be complex and ambivalent and capable of standing on their own two feet. They should frown and hang up when someone's a jackass on the phone. They should say, "No, I'm driving myself," when the jerk tries to make them get into his car, and then walk away and do it. They should have peanut butter in the cupboard, minimum. They should have clutter and complications and complexity. And they should be their own person, telepathy or no telepathy.

Maureen Johnson: Nine Liars

This is going to be all spoilers, so look out. You've been warned.

I was excited to read this book and enjoyed it to a certain degree the first time through, as I was wondering who committed the murder, but then I read it again and it all fell apart. The mystery makes no sense at all once you have read the book.

Look at all the incredible logic flaws.

The country house is set up so that it's essentially impossible that anyone else but the nine were there that night, with the power outage and the road blocked off by a downed wire and a power truck. But nobody from the nine themselves to the police ever suspect or investigate any of the nine. That is completely nonsensical. In a typical country house murder, yes, the situation is closed off so that we know the suspect HAS to be one of the people present. This does half of that and then everyone is inexplicably stricken with severe stupidity and they all go, "I don't know, burglars?" and shrug and just LET IT GO. No. Insane. The police don't even try? They take statements from these obvious liars and let it go?

The burglary theory is because people have been stealing tack in the area. Sure. (Does the murderer even know this? No indication of that.) But the murders were in the woodshed. The stables are on the opposite side of the massive house from the woodshed, according to the map in the book. Even supposing you kept tack in the woodshed, because you like having saddles eaten by mice, I guess, you wouldn't keep them all the way on the other side of this extensive building from the stables. You wouldn't keep tack in the woodshed period, obviously, but certainly not in this situation. But somehow everyone just goes, "Oh, sure, someone broke in to steal tack from a building WHERE TACK IS NOT KEPT." Why not.

The killer is not set up at all to be the kind of person who violently murders two close friends with an axe. There are no signals or clues whatsoever. The group is set up to be totally laid back about sharing each other's clothes, books, food, and beds. But one of them all of a sudden decides that someone else *just kissing a perfect stranger* is so offensive that he kills not the friend who did it but the girl herself. None of that makes any sense in any psychological universe. And then to kill two more people who have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to accuse him makes even less sense. The murders are completely unmotivated.

Killing someone with an axe in cold blood is incredibly violent and far-fetched and outrageously difficult for anyone without a history of violence to do. And there's no earthly reason for this character to use that method when so many others are available. For example, if he's a drowner, he could EASILY have lured those two people to the creek RIGHT NEARBY (where they throw the axe later) and drowned them. Bang on the head with a rock, fall in the creek, they drown with no question of murder and no suspicion of anyone.

It's also absurd to lure these two to a woodshed right slap next to the main house, when there's a whole vast landscape available. If he killed them way out in the woods, by any means, they might never even be found.

There's also the complete idiocy about the pot plants on the upper level of this woodshed, which everyone somehow lowers out the tiny window (pot plants are gigantic) intact, instead of, oh, cutting them up to make it easy--or taking them down the goddamn ladder/stairs, which they used to bring the grow lights down. There is NO REASON for anyone to do this ridiculous and difficult thing with the window except to provide a clue.

Also, the entire group of seven bereaved and hung over people cheerfully destroy all of the evidence in a murder scene. Do they not realize they're making it impossible to catch THE MURDERER??? And committing all sorts of crimes themselves? They're so stupid that they aren't ever aware that one of them has to be the murderer, so presumably they're also so stupid they can't figure out that they're destroying the evidence in the crime.

This all ties into the biggest flaw with the murder: smells like writer. Everything was set up to be convenient for the writer, not because it's what any human ever born on planet earth would ever remotely do. None of it makes any logical sense. It's so obviously structured for the writer.

Constructing a clue path in a mystery means you have to have plausible reasons for people to do the things they do. They can't all just forget that laws and reason exist en masse. And setting up the completely ludicrous woodshed tack burglary theory makes every single person involved so stupid that they can't possibly find their way out of a wet paper bag.

There were things I liked about this book, but all the excruciatingly tedious tourism wasn't one of them. The character of Vi has zero personality and is a waste of space as always, my favorite guy Nate had no role at all in the story, David was a raging asshole as usual, Stevie is an idiot obsessed with this guy who's only ever a complete jerk to her--and it's not cute or funny that she doesn't do school work--and the ridiculous denouement in the London Eye was laughable because the evidence was the flimsiest of circumstantial suppositions. You, a child, are accusing an adult of murder because someone had a toothbrush in her bag. A toothbrush. Imagine going to court with that. You'd be laughed out of the room.

Also being an Angophile can apparently reach toxic fetish levels. Gross. Get a room.

This is a bad mystery and unforgivably boring to boot.

I own all of the author's books and looked forward to this book all year, so I'm beyond disappointed and into the realm of infuriated at the laziness, the atrocious plotting, the utter lack of logic, the endless tedious tourism, the failure to give our beloved characters anything to do, and the complete inability to think through the slightest bit of the murder or the character development to make it make sense.