author – Page 4 – Triple Take

J’s Take on Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden

Let me start with a description of the book, for some context.

Ellie and her friends live in a smallish town with a large rural area, so that she and a lot of her friends are ranchers. At least I think they’re ranchers. They’re on holiday, so they organize a camping trip into the bush. This being Australia. Seven of them, roughly evenly divided by gender. They’re missing Commemoration Day (also called Commem Day by the narrator) and the local Show (which sounds like the equivalent of a county fair around here). On that day, while they’re out camping, they hear and see lots of jets flying overhead. Weird, right? They linger a few more days, then head back. To find everyone gone. Utoh. From the title of the book, you might guess a war of some sort has ‘began’, huh?

I was going to start this review by saying it was fitting to be reading it in February, since most of the action takes place then. Only when I tried to look up the exact date for Commemoration Day, I got stumped! Thwarted! The closest I came to any such holiday was one celebrated by the University of Sydney. According to Wikipedia, Australia Day has a lot of different names, and would fit the timeframe (the narrator says at one point that it’s several weeks past Christmas), but Commem or Commemoration Day isn’t one of them! Have I come up with an anachronism? This book was written in 1993. Well, that’s not that old… older than Wikipedia, sure, but..

The author’s note at the end equates some of the settings to real world locations, but the author is generally making up the location itself. Did he also invent a holiday? Weird. Sure, this is science fiction, in that there was no such war in Australia, but otherwise it reads like a contemporary novel. Why invent a holiday? This reviewer is also puzzled by it.

But moving on…

The group discovers that their town has been invaded. Though I thought it funny they came to that conclusion. If I saw a bunch of soldiers who’d set up camp and were holding prisoners, foreign soldiers would not be my first thought. Could I tell American ones from non-American ones, at a distance? There are so many different types of American military uniform, that I don’t think I could. Not unless I could see a US flag patch on them. Or more likely, a US flag flying nearby. But this group assumes they’re foreign before they ever hear them speak. Which is another puzzlement, because the girl who knows six languages can’t identify it. What? You mean, not at all? I can take a good guess at most languages. A general guess, I mean. And we never hear what the soldiers look like. We hear they’re young, and middle-aged, and male and female. But not if they look Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese. How many nearby countries don’t speak English and yet look enough like Australians that it doesn’t merit a mention?

I admit, before we learned they don’t speak English, I thought America had invaded Australia. It’s just.. something we’d be likely to do.

One of the kids even identifies some jets as Australian and some as not. Boy, for me to recognize jets, they’d have to be flying really low. And, again, have a US flag on them. Southwest jets, sure, I can identify those!

So anyway, the kids try to find out what’s up with their families, and try not to get killed or captured along the way. And guerrilla hijinks ensue. So that by the end it was reminding me of Hogan’s Heroes or other shows and movies I’ve seen that featured The Resistance.

I liked that the group was roughly evenly distributed, and eventually does end up 4 girls and 4 guys, and that the narrator was a girl. She also does a lot of the action and dirty work. She’s their best driver, especially when it comes to driving bulldozers and trucks. Which is why I was particularly dismayed when one of the girls has some sort of seizure brought on by trauma. Followed by another girl just fainting, for no particular reason. And then the narrator herself has a nervous breakdown or goes into catatonia or something I’m not qualified to medically diagnose. Though considering she’d been bleeding copiously from a head wound just a few pages ago, you’d think people would’ve been worried about a head injury and not assuming it was all psychological! None of the boys goes through any of this. Grr.

Then they all start flinging around the L word (love, not lesbian) like it’s going out of fashion.

In general, though, I liked the book okay. It was interesting to see Australia, even if it’s a fictional bit of it, and to learn a few new words. I’d had no clue what a chook was until it was mentioned that they lay eggs. At that point, I gave up and Googled it. No such luck they’re ostriches or emus or some weird Australian bird. Chooks are just chickens.

The cover art on the copy I read makes no sense until you’ve read nearly the whole book. I think I would’ve gone for some shot of the Australian terrain with some jets flying overhead. The cover we had up here on Triple Take in our Upcoming section does make more sense, with the jets flying over the ferris wheel at the Show.

Read it if you’d like to read some Australian sf, but don’t read it if you’re looking for answers to mysteries. We never do learn who invaded Australia or why.

Except when I was adding the cover images just now, I saw that the newer cover mentions this is part 1 of a series. The book itself felt complete enough, in a ‘this is our life now’ sort of way, that it never occurred to me there could be more books which might explain what this war is all about. Now, do I read the sequel? Do I watch the movie? Do I watch the movie sequel which is apparently coming out this year? Decisions, decisions.

J’s Take on Conspiracy 365: January

It’s been many months since we decided to devote 2012 to books by Australian and New Zealand authors and nearly that long since we picked this book as our first one for the year. So I didn’t really remember anything about it as I sat down (lay down) to read it, except that K had equated it to the TV series “24”.

That being the case, I can’t say I was disappointed by it particularly. But, man, was it so not my type of book. The best thing I can say about it was that it didn’t take long to read. Perhaps an hour and a half or so.

The main character, whose name I have already forgotten, — Callum? Collum? — has this crazy, sick guy screaming at him about how he should go into hiding for the next year. So we begin our countdown. The story is told by day and by hour:minute, hence at least part of the reason to equate it to “24”. The page count also goes down, something I didn’t figure out until more than halfway through, because I was reading so fast it took me that long to look at the page numbers twice. (I was impressed I’d gotten to page 121 as quickly as I did! Until I discovered a little later I was ‘only’ on page 091.) What struck me as odd about this format was that the story was still told in the past tense. If the goal was to give a sense of immediacy and ‘in the moment’, then it should’ve been in present tense.

So right after this guy rants at him and gets carted off by police or some mysterious people, the main character is in a storm in a boat. And then nearly eaten by sharks. Yea, just like that! We haven’t had a chance to get to know this character at all, and he’s already, randomly, nearly dying a few times. The book continues like that. Kidnappings, shootings, mysterious notes, without any real sense that the main character is truly affected by any of it. The frequent use of exclamation points seems to stand in for his emotion. ! !!

About the time he’s running around and choosing not to tell his mother or the cops about being kidnapped, I’m thinking.. at least he’s like.. 17 or 18, right? (The picture on the cover certainly looks about that.) But no, I’d missed a page right at the beginning that states right up front he’s 15. At this point, I’m finding it all rather incredible. And not at all in a good way. Who has their house broken into and burgled and the cops don’t come? Who gets kidnapped and doesn’t tell their mother or the cops? Who runs away rather than go up to the police and say ‘hey, dude, I totally didn’t hurt my little sister?’ What was he afraid of? At that point, he should’ve been glad if they had arrested him and stuck him in jail. It would’ve been safer for him! (!!)

I get sick and tired of male characters, particularly teenage boy ones, who think they have to ‘protect’ their mother by not telling her things! She’s a freaking adult. You’re a freaking kid. Tell her you were kidnapped!!!

An odd note, the little sister is named Gabbi. The author’s name is Gabrielle. I find it rather odd to name a character after yourself.

Oh yea, so the mystery. His Dad caught some weird brain virus and died. Not that he seems to have been isolated at all. Or cremated. Really? No fear this weird virus you know nothing about is going to spread to other people?

And there’s an Ormond Riddle, Ormond Angel, Ormond Singularity thing. Ormond is their last name. Don’t expect to ever find out what that’s all about, because as you may have guessed, there’s 12 of these books. In fact, this book ends in a really bad place and with no sense of closure whatsoever. It’s a good thing I don’t care at all, because I’m totally not reading the other books.

This would make better television than prose, as there’s a lot, a lot of action, but even so, I wouldn’t be at all interested in watching it. And it would still be unbelievable on several counts.

Next!

Conspiracy 365: January (Gabrielle Lord)

The Plot
A few months ago, Callum Ormond lost his father to a mysterious virus. His whole family is still reeling from this sudden and unexpected death. Then, on December 31st, he receives a strange warning from a man who may or may not be crazy: he’s in danger, and will be for the next year. Cal must figure out what it was his father had discovered just before his death in order to discover just who and why people are out to get him.

My Thoughts
January begins our year long spotlight on New Zealand and Australian authors. We start with a look at a series which intrigued me greatly when I first saw it — a series of twelve books, one for each month of the year, recounting in ‘real time’ the increasingly frantic efforts of 15 year old Callum Ormond to solve the mystery surrounding the discovery his father made just before his death.

Why the series caught my attention will probably be obvious when I admit that I’m a big fan of the TV series “24”. The conceit of that show, that all the action takes place continuously within a 24 hour time period, with each episode taking place ‘in real time’ with one hour of action, works extremely well on television. (Even better as a marathon!) Conspiracy 365 looks to take that idea and transfer it to text. Rather than exactly replicate it, author Gabrielle Lord has decided to spread the action out over the course of a year and spread the series over 12 books, one for each month.

I think this is a wise choice; “24” was necessarily restricted in the complexity of the plots it could present because of the inability of the characters to travel long distances or do anything that took longer than an hour or two. With an entire year to work with, the conspiracy of the title can be that much more twisty, that much more suspenseful. Plus, the 15 year old protagonist, Cal Ormond, can be a bit more realistic.

As expected, this first book sets up the initial mystery: a few months ago, Tom Ormond, Callum’s father, discovered something big, something he claimed could “change history”. Then, before he could do more than write a quick letter to his son, he was struck down by a virus that destroyed his ability to communicate before it killed him altogether. Callum is puzzled by the letter he received from his father and by a drawing which accompanied it, but the events of New Year’s Eve and Day are what really start things going: Cal is warned of coming danger by a crazy man who’s then carted off by paramedics, and then a few hours later is nearly killed in a boating accident which turns out to be not nearly so accidental.

The situation deteriorates quickly from there, with Callum attempting to make progress on solving the mystery while trying at the same time to stay alive. He ends the month with a new plan and in a cliffhanger situation that makes me glad we also got the February book at the same time. (And worried that we haven’t yet got the rest!)

The book reads very quickly, structured as one would expect, by day and time. One interesting choice is that the pages are numbered backwards, though only within this book, not backwards to get to page 1 at the very end of the series. It was an interesting choice and did contribute to the feeling of counting down to the end of the month.

This is definitely not a character driven series; Cal is a fine main character, but he’s not given a lot of depth, and everyone else is sketched very lightly. But in depth characterization is not the point: it’s the plot, which races along at a very satisfactory rate.

In Short
From the description of the Conspiracy 365 I expected this to be very similar to “24” in book form. I was not disappointed. January sets up the scenario, introduces our main character, and gets Cal on the road to trying to solve the mystery. Hopefully I won’t have too much trouble acquiring the rest of the series, because it’s going to be impossible not to blow through the entire thing.

Little House: Farmer Boy (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

The Plot
The Wilder family are prosperous farmers living in upstate New York in the middle of the 19th century. Almanzo, the youngest of the four Wilder siblings, is eager to be considered responsible enough to handle training the horses he adores. In the meantime though, there are plenty of things for a boy growing up on a working farm to learn and do. Even if that sometimes includes actually going to school.

My Thoughts
Farmer Boy opens in the winter, with the four Wilder children in the midst of the winter school term. The four are quite close in age, the eldest, Royal, being 13ish and the youngest, Almanzo, only a few weeks shy of nine. But in spite of the fact that he’s only a little bit younger than his next oldest sibling, Almanzo very much occupies the position of family baby, being indulged by his parents and bossed by the older children.

We follow Almanzo, and to a lesser extent all of the Wilders, over the course of slightly more than a year. The book strives to present in detail the various tasks (and pleasures) of a child growing up on a successful farm in New York state. To this end, though the narrative covers most of two winters, we really only see each task once, even though surely things such as timber hauling were a yearly chore. Perhaps one is meant to conclude that the first winter, Almanzo wasn’t involved due to his age (and the fact that Royal was at home to provide more competent help.)

Since Almanzo is a boy (and because the rest of the books focus so much on the tasks of women, being about Laura), Farmer Boy keeps its focus on the male sphere of farm work, with only brief glimpses now and then into the tasks which occupy the time and energy of Almanzo’s mother (and sisters). The women aren’t ignored or unacknowledged so much as their occupations just aren’t part of the list of skills that Almanzo is expected to acquire. It’s made abundantly clear that the talents of both Mr and Mrs. Wilder are essential to the smooth running of the farm and the family.

The book ends with Almanzo tacitly deciding he wants to be a farmer when he grows up, rather than a tradesman. He wins his parents’ approval as well as the chance to help train a young horse, something he’s been clamoring to do for years.

When I was younger, I was always annoyed when I came to Farmer Boy in the series. I had the box set in which Farmer Boy (in spite of being published second) was number 3. So I’d have been reading right along about Laura and her family and then, after being left at a surprising near cliffhanger at the end of book 2, I’d have to suddenly shift gears to New York and Almanzo’s well-to-do family. It really interrupted the flow of the narrative.

I still think it does, but I’ve solved the problem by reading it before the Laura books — since chronologically it would be ahead of them all, given Almanzo’s age. It’s not entirely clear if that’s still the case within the timeline of the books; the Wilders, even more than the Ingalls, have been tinkered with for the purposes of the books. Almanzo’s oldest sister is omitted entirely, perhaps due to her misfortune in also being named Laura, and the other extant siblings (his youngest brother wouldn’t have been born yet during the time period covered by Farmer Boy) have had their ages compressed quite a bit to make them closer together.

But how well the characters match up to their real life counterparts is irrelevant, since this is historical fiction, not a history. And it really is fabulous historical fiction. Now, more than 80 years after the story was originally written, we’re even further removed from the time period Laura Ingalls Wilder was trying to capture. But the level of detail she provides about the small things — the way the yoke attached to the oxen, or the way they loaded logs onto the sleds — makes it possible to imagine the scene even without much knowledge of 19th century farming.

I find Farmer Boy interesting for a number of other reasons as well. Geographically, it takes place in a part of New York I’m not super familiar with. Malone, the town nearest the Wilder farm, is very far upstate, mere miles from Quebec. It’s not stated in the text, but the presence of ‘French’ people nearby is probably the result of the non-border we shared with Canada at the time. (It wasn’t until after 1906 that anyone even bothered to start keeping track of Canadians entering the US.) Their portrayal plays to a popular stereotype of French-Canadians at the time (see: the works of L.M. Montgomery) the origins of which I don’t really know, but which interests me as someone with a significant amount of QuÃ©bÃ©cois ancestry.

But even more than interesting historical sidetracks, what’s most compelling about Farmer Boy is the FOOD. It’s dangerous to read this book while hungry; the loving descriptions of the heaps of food eaten by the Wilder family make it extremely difficult to resist getting something to eat. Popcorn, cider, ice cream, ham, pancakes, potatoes, goose, gravy, sausage, maple syrup, bread, lemonade, egg nog, pies of all types: mealtime is the most frequent scene and it always leaves me desperately wanting to pig out.

In Short
Farmer Boy is unique among the Little House series: it’s the only book with a male main character. This holds true even taking into account the large extended series — the prequels and sequels authored by others. As such, though Almanzo and some of his relatives appear again in the later books, this one about his childhood is really very much stand alone. But it’s fascinating anyway — especially as the Wilders lived not too far from where some of my own ancestors were during that time period — and highlights very well the big difference between Almanzo’s early life and Laura’s.

Hallowed Murder (Ellen Hart)

The Plot
Minneapolis Restaurateur Jane Lawless is not a detective and has no aspirations to become so. And yet she can’t agree with the police department’s blithe dismissal of college student Allison Lord’s death as a suicide — she knew the girl slightly, and moreover, she found the body. She feels obligated to investigate, and as an alumna of Ally’s sorority, she’s perfectly poised to do so. She soon discovers the situation is about as clear as mud; Ally’s girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, her strange brother and a host of other interested parties seem like they may have had at least some motive for murder, but no one person stands out. Eventually Jane realizes she may need to put herself out as bait in order to flush out the killer.

My Thoughts
Except for special reasons, we typically disqualify a book from Tripletake consideration if one of us has already read it. In the case of Ellen Hart’s Hallowed Murder, the first book in the Jane Lawless series, the one who had already read it was I. I picked it up ten years ago at the same time as a few other books featuring LGBT characters (as I can see from the amazon order) and my book list from that time indicates I read it. However, all I could remember about the plot was that the sleuth was a lesbian restaurant owner from Minneapolis – so reading it again would be practically as good as reading it for the first time.

The book opens with Jane and her friend Cordelia out for a brisk morning walk around one of Minneapolis’s lakes. (I lived very near the location of this opening scene and reading it brought back feelings of guilt for having not taken full advantage of living in the Twin Cities for two years.) Jane’s two dogs are attracted by something in the frigid water and when she goes to retrieve them, she discovers the body of Allison Lord, a senior at UMN and a current member of Jane’s sorority. There’s nothing to indicate foul play and the death is soon classified as a suicide/accident and the police are prepared to close the case. This does not sit well with Jane or with Allison’s friends, and Jane begins to do a bit of nosing around.

It comes out (ha ha) almost immediately that Allison, after some years of attempting to deny it, has recently accepted that she’s a lesbian. She’d been involved with a young grad student by the name of Emily and had been cut off by her father who couldn’t accept her sexuality. As Jane continues to question the people around Allison, it seems like almost everyone is hiding something that could be relevant. Allison’s friends at the sorority house have been party to covering up some thefts and peeping-tom incidents; Allison’s ex-boyfriend was meeting with her the night of her death for reasons unknown; the ex’s new girlfriend may be lying to give him an alibi; the born-again Christian sorority board member who is loud in her insistence that homosexuality is a sin has a very weak explanation for where she was at the time of the death.

In the end, Jane manages to mostly untangle the irrelevant information from the relevant and sets a trap to lure out the killer with the assistance of Cordelia and some other unexpected sidekicks.

Going into the book, I had forgotten how long ago it had been published — 1989! — and as it would probably have been written a year or two before it was published, we’re talking about 25 years ago. Which isn’t so very long, except that in that time period a great deal has changed, both technologically and socially. Though maybe not as much as one would hope. The mechanics of the crimes and the actual events of the book would need considerable retooling to match today’s technology and cultural mores. But I think the central seed of the plot is still viable even now. The idea that a sorority girl might feel the need to stay closeted? Depends a bit on the sorority and the location and nature of the college, but that’s definitely possible. That a Bible-obsessed fundamentalist might feel the inclination to go out and begin casting some stones? Very believable. Realistic even.

The mystery here does have a number of weaknesses. I’m not 100% positive this was Hart’s first book, but it definitely feels like the work of someone without a lot of experience. The writing and characterization is uneven, and there are several places where characters who seemed like they ought to be important just disappeared or weren’t involved. For instance, at the very start of the book we’re told that Allison was close friends with three other girls: Sigrid, Maggie and Kari. The four of them were close friends who apparently did everything together, including filling the important officer positions at the sorority. And yet Kari, the fourth girl, completely disappears from the story after she’s established as one of Allison’s best friends. We don’t even discover where she’s gone until well into the second half of the book where we find she’s fled the sorority house (and apparently resigned and quit?). But neither of her remaining ‘best friends’ finds this anything worth talking about or mentions attempting to visit her. Maggie and Sigrid fare better, getting significant page-time, but their interactions make it difficult to feel as if they’re really friends. They come off more as casual acquaintances.

There’s also the question of why Jane Lawless, a not-quite-closeted lesbian herself, was a member of this seemingly reactionary sorority during her time at school. At least here the incongruity is mentioned in character — by Jane’s still incredulous friend Cordelia — but I wasn’t satisfied by the response. And how did she manage to remain friends with Cordelia, an outspoken activist type if I’ve ever seen one, and still keep her own secret under wraps to everyone else? Perhaps these questions are answered later in the series, but here we’re just supposed to accept that the past happened as described and move on. Fine, but I do want my backstory to make sense.

But in spite of these weaknesses, the story was certainly no worse than the plethora of gimmicky crafter/orchard owner/bookstore owner/knitter/cat lover/librarian/reporter/party planner/cupcake baker/cookie baker/ice cream shop owner-solves-a-murder series that have been churned out over the past few years, and quite a bit better than many. Even if the premise can be boilt down to restaurateur-solves-a-murder, at least we have the pioneering fact that Jane is not straight and a well-drawn portrait of the Twin Cities to lend it additional interest.

In Short
Though the actual events of this 20 year old mystery are beginning to be dated, the plot central to Hallowed Murder is still very relevant to today: the risks and rewards of coming out of the closet and the sometimes surprising reactions of people to the news. This is the first of a series which features the Minneapolis restaurant-owner Jane Lawless as the investigator and even though the book is not unflawed, it still presents Jane as a character I’m willing to read more about. And that really must be the main goal of any series.