EFFIGIES was a book I picked up while thrifting. Even though I don't read the genre as much anymore, I used to be quite the horror girly. It's a shame I didn't keep some of my older ones with the cool cover art because a lot of them are worth pretty serious money now. But look at that cover art. Look at that hand-painted cover and the gothic font. I NEEDED this book.
I'm actually kind of annoyed about this book because it started out really good. There's some great dynamics at play here: people who consider themselves "native" to the town and don't like the way that society is changing and passing them by; rich city people who want to take advantage and basically ruin everything about the town that drew them there in the first place; and hippies who are resented by virtually everyone even though they're doing the least damage just because they're different and don't do things by the book (aka the bible).
Things get weird when this one lady finds a finger in a box left on her doorstep. And then there's talk about Satan and demon children and weird science and everything starts to get quickly out of hand. I lost interest in this book around page 100, when the bad sex scenes started pouring in. This is a dude that does not know how to write good sex scenes, or portray women in a healthy way. The passage where the husband is describing his wife made my eyes roll so far back into my head that I'm going to have to book an appointment with a proctologist to find them again. And if I never see the phrase "rudimentary breasts" again, I will burn some cute bookmarks on an altar of special edition paperbacks to the book gods.
Should have been alarmed when I saw that some horror reviewers I trusted said, "Better give this one a miss," but I like finding things out for myself because I'm stubborn. So I found out myself that I should have given this one a miss. Oh well.
This came out when I was in my early 20s. I think I even got an ARC of it. Possibly this was during my "dystopian phase" where I could not get enough of the world going to shit. This is the way the world ends, folks. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
When I first read it, I remember liking it a lot and being SO surprised and outraged on this book's behalf that all the "haters" were slamming it in their reviews (as one does). But ten years later, I'm... siding more with the haters this time around, actually. The way the Asian love interest is sexualized is gross and the sweaty slacker lead feels like a panting Judd Apatow guy who tripped and fell headfirst into a stack of Charles Bukowski and Bret Easton Ellis novels.
I actually have read the whole book at one point and I did appreciate his 21st century take on BRAVE NEW WORLD, but this wasn't it.
WHEN WE WERE VIKINGS is a book that has a very interesting premise but is potentially problematic in a lot of ways. I breezed through it pretty quickly-- normally a good sign-- but when I finished, I found that I had a really bad taste in my mouth. Something about the book really didn't sit right with me. I finished the book on my lunch break and spent the rest of the day with my thoughts on the back burner, trying to figure out, what, exactly, it was about the book that rubbed me the wrong way. I think I figured out what those things are, but before I get into that, I need to tell you what the book is about.
WHEN WE WERE VIKINGS is the story of Zelda, a high-functioning adult with fetal alcohol syndrome. She lives with her older brother, Gert: a man who should be in college but instead works as a runner for a local gang. Zelda, who lives her whole life by rules that make her feel more comfortable, takes umbrage with this, and when Gert's activities get all of them into trouble, she takes it upon herself to bail her brother out.
Interspersed with this are scenes of Zelda's everyday life-- she goes to an adult daycare where they teach her life skills she'll need to take care of herself; she has a boyfriend, a developmentally disabled boy named Marxy, with whom she wants to have sex; and she also sees a therapist named Dr. Laird, who she talks to about everything else. Zelda has a narrow scope of interests, which mostly revolve around vikings and dabbing. She dabs at people to greet them, and lives her whole life to the viking credo, including talking in Ancient Norse and, later, hefting around a giant viking sword.
So what didn't I like about this book?
Honestly, I'm shocked that this book has such high ratings. I'm guessing that people probably think the subject matter is brave, but I found a lot of it upsetting. First, this whole book feels incredibly exploitative in some ways. Zelda has fetal alcohol syndrome, which typically causes facial irregularities or deformatives. Zelda is quick to tell us she doesn't have these; she's just a small woman. All the men in this book think she is SO attractive and keep telling her how hot she is. What makes this extra icky is a big part of this book involves a subplot with Zelda wanting to have sex for the first time with her developmentally disabled boyfriend.
I get that people with disabilities want to have sex, too, but making sex the major focus of Zelda's internal and external sense of worth seemed kind of gross. When she and her boyfriend do go at it, it goes horribly, horribly wrong. It was SO cringe. The only other action she gets is from a guy she refers to as "normal" (normal meaning "not disabled"-- very ableist) who only wants to use her, and a guy who attempts to rape her. So even though sex is a big part of this book, none of it works out well for Zelda. She is lusted after by virtually all male characters in this book but doesn't really get to experience any empowering sexuality for herself-- it's all abuse and disappointment.
I also felt like the whole viking and dabbing angle was really twee. It felt like an excuse to make Zelda seem precious and quirky. Like a manic pixie dream girl. She even refers to herself as a valkyrie. Everyone else in this book is super quirky too, just in case that wasn't annoying enough. And what's with the blurb calling this book "heart-swelling"? It's actually really disturbing and dark and takes a pretty dismal look at how women and people with disabilities are viewed. Even Zelda, the main character, looks down her nose at her less functional peers with superiority. Yikes.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
When I saw the trailer for Red Sparrow (2018), I almost guffawed because as I watched, I could almost hear T.T.L.'s "Deep Shadow" playing in the background - it looked just like another Hunger Games trailer if the Capitol got a major downgrade and President Snow became Evol Russian Jeremy Irons. Still, I was intrigued because the idea of a "Memoirs of a Geisha"-esque rags-to-riches spy romance with sex, scandal, and espionage called out to my trash heart and said, "Nenia! Nenia! This book is for youuuuu!"
Because, you know, I have to read the book first.
Now that I've read the book, I'm no longer sure I want to watch the movie. RED SPARROW is a bad book. When women say that men can't write convincing female characters, this is the type of book that they are talking about (you know that infamous "breasted boobily" meme?). Dominika is devoid of personality. She's a beautiful ball-busting hard-ass who's good at sex and has a temper... and that's about the extent of her personality: sex, rage, snark.
Oh, and speaking of sex, this book has one of the most bizarre sex scenes I've ever read. The heroine masturbates with the handle of her hairbrush, and it's pretty gross how it's described. o_O
***WARNING: SPOILERS, SPOILERS EVERYWHERE***
Dominika starts off the book as a beautiful ballerina but her classmates are jealous and injure her foot on purpose. This is where the first character inconsistency rears its head because we're told that Dominika is violent, temperamental, and vengeful, and yet when she has the power to destroy the two classmates who injured her, she does nothing. NOTHING. She just takes it like a b*tch.
Now that her career is at an end, she basically is stuck living at home with her parents. But then her father dies and it's just her and her mother, who have nothing, and that's when her evol uncle comes in and says, "Hey, Dominika, looking hot, hey wanna do a favor for me? Favor is spelled H-O-N-E-Y-T-R-A-P, by the way, and hey, what a good looking apartment this is... IT WOULD BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT." So Dominika agrees to sleep with this rich Russian tycoon, only to see him assassinated before her very eyes and be dragged back before her uncle.
Her uncle, in case you haven't figured it out by now, is a Soviet Spy-type who's in cahoots with Putin, King Evol himself. So he tells Dominika, "Hey, thanks for the favor, niece, you'll keep your mouth shut and say nothing of this to no one, right? And oh, it would be a shame if you made me mad and something happened to you and your hot bod..." So of course, Dominika agrees to be his spy, and after completing her basic training (where she is almost raped by one of her classmates and treats him to an eye-gouging with a shower spigot), he sends her to Sparrow School, or what Dominika affectionately calls "Whore School" and what I have termed Honeytrap Academy, LLC.
At Honeytrap Academy, women are turned into sex!spies by watching nightly porn videos and observing live models go at it, and then having sex with men that the Academy just so happens to have lying around while their spymasters videotape it and then the videos are played back in front of the whole class while their spymaster teachers offer up critiques. One of the girls isn't into this at all and comes to Dominika of all people for comfort, which turns out to be the pretext for an exploitative, fetishy lesbian love scene where the hairbrush once more makes an appearance (o_O). In the video trailer, I noticed that the school is co-ed. In the book they are separate and the boys go to something called Raven School and seem proud of their work, and not at all ashamed (gross).
After Dominika graduates from Honeytrap Academy she gets sent out to spy and of course all of her new coworkers do nothing but make comments about her body and ridicule her for going to "Whore School." This is LITERALLY all the interaction she has with the dudes in her book. Slut-shaming.
She ends up getting this dude named Nate to spy on who works for the Americans and is involved with a really deeply-entrenched Russian spy called MARBLE. Her creepy spymasters keep pressuring her to sleep with him (as they do with all her other targets, because that's all she's good for), but oh no, she gets kind of close to Nate and for some reason decides to out herself and defect, and then she and Nate are in love and fighting against the evol Russian spiez, dun dun dun.
That's about the time that I stopped reading.
The plot literally sounds like a bodice ripper and since I like bodice rippers you would think that I'd be all over RED SPARROW like white on rice but I couldn't get over Dominika's utter lack of agency and the way she's objectified by every man in the book, or the fact that Nate kind of feels like a self-insert of the author (and even kind of sounds like a younger version of him based on that author photo I saw on Goodreads). Heinlein's books gave me that vibe, and I got a similar vibe with this book, and maybe that's me reading too much into it, but I didn't like it. It felt weirdly voyeuristic.
Also, these sex scenes are 80s bodice ripper bad. Check it out:
Dominika felt a sudden, excruciatingly sweet expansion, and the moonlight was rocketing around behind her eyelids, and she hoped he could keep her heaving body from blowing away like a piece of paper. She felt the hollow rush expand inside her, and then a rogue wave rose up from the deep, bigger than the others, hanging, curling, and she said, "Bozhe moj," from way back in her throat, and a white-eyed state of grace rolled through her like the wind bends a wheat field (224).
Not to make this a gender thing (I'm totally making this a gender thing) but how come bad sex scenes are ONLY called out when women do them? This is just as bad or worse as FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, and yet the dudes who are so quick to bash romance are awfully silent on this quarter. You could even argue that the hairbrush scene is almost as bad as the tampon scene, & just as phallic.
Also, two more WTF things about this book. Food plays a heavy role. Each chapter mentions some kind of food and then there's a recipe for the dish at the end of each chapter. The first time it happened, I was like, "Oh, what's this?" And then it kept happening. Every chapter, new recipe. That's something I'd expect from a cozy mystery and not a dudelit spy-thriller.
The second WTF thing about this book is that Dominika has synesthesia - music and words make colors, which helps her memory (this is actually true, because you do remember things better when they are encoded in multiple pathways with multiple associations) and at first I thought that was neat, but the author USES HER SYNESTHESIA AS A PRETEXT TO GIVE HER PSYCHIC POWERS. That's right. Dominika is a synesthete who can read goddamn auras. That's right. She sees colors around people's heads that indicate their moods. Which ties into the title, I think, because not only does Red mean communist, for her red means anger - she is a furious little sparrow.
An angry bird, if you will.
Funnily enough, I've been told that the psychic powers bit was omitted from the movie. I wonder why.
RED SPARROW is an awful, awful book. It's like someone decided to cross THE HUNGER GAMES with THE DA VINCI CODE, but also wanted to add a lot of weird sex and power games, with a dash of The Americans and some X-Meny stuff too, because why the hell not? The beginning was interesting in a trashy read sort of way, but then the book got dull with the spy lingo and kept finding more sharks to jump over and I decided I was done. Why this is popular, I have no idea.
Before I get into the meat of this review (or perhaps I should say, the "yam" of this review) I want to share two funny stories about this book. First, I got this book secondhand in Japan and it's a bit of a curiosity because the book is in English but the price tag is in Chinese and I couldn't find the edition that I have on Goodreads, so I'm assuming that it's an out of print paperback edition. What a weird thing to find in a foreign country, right? (I was kind of hoping that they'd have some bodice rippers. They did not.)
Second, the sex scenes in this book are really weird. How weird, do you ask? Well, the author likes to refer to peens as "yams." Yes, that stuff that you buy by the can every Thanksgiving if you live in the U.S. of A. Crazy, right? I was telling my mother about this book and she rolled her eyes and said, "Is this one of your stupid bodice rippers, Nenia?" And I said, no, it's actually John Updike. And she looked utterly stricken: "Not Witches of Eastwick John Updike?" And I was like, "Yup. That one."
I think she's still traumatized by that revelation.
The story, as far as stories go, is pretty basic. It's the typical rich girl/poor boy story line that you've probably seen a million times. The twist is that it's a retelling of Tristan and Iseult (Tristao and Isabel) set in Brazil that attempts to make social commentary on race, class, and socioeconomics. While a worthy goal in and of itself, BRAZIL fails to do so, in my opinion, and comes off as dated, silly, trashy, porny, and even outright offensive at times.
Also, something it did that really puzzled me is that for the vast majority of the book, it's told as a straightforward tale that can sometimes be ridiculous but follows the rules of reality. However about 70% of the way in, Isabel and Tristao are captured by people who enslave Tristao and keep her on as a concubine. In revenge, Isabel meets with an indigenous dude who practices something like voodoo and actually flips their ethnicities, so Isabel goes from being white to being black, and Tristao goes from being black to being white. And this totally comes out of nowhere.
[H]e felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam, bursting with weight (17).
His penis, so little when limp, a baby in its bonnet of foreskin, frightened her when it became a yam, stiff and thick with a lavender knob and purple-black ripples of gristle and veins (54-55).
Her cunt was to him like cream poured upon two years of aching (128).
He inhaled, with those round apprehensive nostrils she had freshly admired tonight, the basic mystery of her shit... (130).
[S]he ewanted to toy with his yam, and trace its swollen veins with the tip of her tongue, and sip the little transparent drop of nectar from its single small slit (188).
The smell of extremely stale cheese arose from his genitals (232).
[N]ow that she was no longer the color of clouds and crystal but that of earth, of wet smooth wood, of glistening dung (244).
^I thought this felt particularly offensive, as this is following Isabel's transformation from white to black. She goes from being crystalline and cloud-like to shitty and earthy? LOL, what even. #nope
[image]
Here's a picture of my edition. Yes, it was published in the 90s. Can you tell from the clashing primary colors and serif-heavy font? (1994, as a matter of fact, by Fawcett Crest.)
I can't say I recommend it - to anyone - but it was pretty hilariously awful, especially when riding on the heels of that aforementioned vampire book.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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