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Back to our regularly scheduled content! I hope everyone had a good April. The annual San Diego Book Crawl runs the last weekend of April, so a few friends and I spent yesterday skipping from one store to another, showering ourselves with books. You get prizes for buying something from a certain number of stores, but this year I was just too tired to make it to every store. I quit after getting a sticker and a tote, both of which have a delightful octopus design.
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And of course, I got some good books, too! Below are a few of the ones I'm most excited about, from left to right:
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Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry (Nonfic)
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Sundial by Catriona Ward (Horror in the Mojave Desert)
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Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James (Paranormal horror at a mental hospital post-WWI)
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Fledgling by Octavia Butler (SF vampires)
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Lent by Jo Walton (Historical fantasy in 15th c. Florence, Italy)
With any luck, you'll see these titles again in a future newsletter!
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Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton is about six enslaved women—Junie, Patience, Lulu, Alice, Serah, and Nan—tied to an ailing Texas plantation. The women call the plantation owners the Lucys, after Lucifer.
The Lucys deserve their moniker. In a scheme to boost their finances, the husband and wife decide to rent an enslaved man from another plantation and use him to try to make the women bear children. The eldest woman, Nan, is the only one exempted. |
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But Nan is a healer, and she brings the rest of the women a birth control option in the form of cotton root clippings. Each of the other five women have a decision to make: if they become pregnant, the rapes will stop (for them). If they can't stand to accept a forced pregnancy or a baby, they'll continue to be raped.
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But, as Nan points out, if none of them fall pregnant, the blame will be placed on the man's virility. He'll be sent away, and money is tight enough for that the Lucys may very well give up instead of bringing a different man in. But a successful pregnancy will only encourage the Lucys. And as Alice points out, the Lucys won't be content with just one baby. Whoever gives in and accepts one child will be forced to bear one after another until her body gives out.
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It's an incredibly bleak premise, though it helps if you go in with at least an idea of how horrifically enslaved people were treated. The writing itself employs a fantastic method of narrative in that the novel begins with a first person plural point of view. ("When we became we, Texas country was still new, only a few years old in the Union.")
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The six women present themselves to the reader first as a unit, and secondarily as individuals. (...[Mr. Lucy] had been unlucky before, we knew from Junie.") Their trials are broadly the same; when one woman breaks away from the group to go somewhere or do something separate from the whole, the narrative shifts to third person limited. That means the point of view goes from "we" to "her," without straying from the individual's thoughts. While
Night Wherever We Go is probably not the first book to do this, it's nothing I've seen before. The writing flows better
so well.
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Overall the story is a searing view into the interiority of women who don't often become main characters. It's been a minute since I read fiction that isn't speculative, and this was well worth it.
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The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhil—this one almost edged out
Night Wherever We Go, I loved it so much. (If I reread it anytime soon, it's likely to be its own BBM.) It's a twisted retelling of the fairy tale
The Crane Wife, and is about family bonds and specifically those between mothers and daughters.
The "Graff" stories by Carrie Vaughn—This are a collection of three short science fiction stories about a man named Graff who spends his life seeking out new emotions and feelings, because everything in his brain is backed up and eventually returned to his home planet. It's a secret, of course, and of course the secret gets out. The short stories were published out of chronological order, which is how I read them. The first is here, the second is here, and the third is here. They're all free to read. |
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This has been What Smack Said, a monthly newsletter about books, fiction writing, and everything else. If you don't want to receive these emails, please use the link below to unsubscribe from this list. |
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