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Hello everyone and welcome back! It’s time for some more first chapter thoughts, this time on Deadline – a paranormal detective noir from Stephanie Ahn. Harrietta Lee is a disgraced witch, super gay, and super in trouble when she takes on a case from a powerful corporate family.
First off, I’m already in love with Harry. She’s snarky without being mean, traumatized without being whimpery, and surprisingly kind to the hapless Tristan who hires her. It’s easy for main characters to fall flat, especially in first person POV, but from the opening lines, Ahn sells it.
I’m also impressed with how the pacing and worldbuilding work together. Harry is already part of the supernatural world, so the context for the audience is given in bits and pieces, but the pieces we get don’t slow down the writing. Harry has problems; Harry is a witch; this family hiring her is a big deal and she’s dealt with them before.
I’m excited to read the rest of this book, and already ready to recommend it! I’m really hoping the rest of it holds up – but I truly believe it will.
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I received a free copy of Parasomnia from Renaissance Press in exchange for an honest review.
I don’t do bad reviews often, largely as a matter of preference. However, in the case of Parasomnia, it’s a book that could so easily have been good with a bit more work, and that’s so much more frustrating than a book that was flawed from the start.
The premise of Parasomnia is this; Aux-Anges is an institute specializing in sleep disorders, and the novel follows several of the patients and one of the psychiatrists as they navigate their internal struggles. The disorders in question are varied, from insomnia and sleepwalking to sleep-related eating disorders and setting fires while asleep. As somebody very interested in stories about mental illness, my interest was already piqued.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia falls into a lot of traps even from the beginning. It starts off slow and meandering, exploring the life of one of the main characters and her high-school boyfriend for a solid chapter, even taking a voyeuristic approach towards her first time having sex before it all goes wrong. From there, it skips to telling the almost-full life of a therapist working at Aux-Anges and her not-so-imaginary friend. In both cases, it’s hard to understand what the stakes are in the book because we’re hearing the backstories before the story itself.
From there, Parasomnia makes a lot of bad decisions with its premise. The nightmares of all the patients with sleep disorders turn out to be supernaturally connected, falling into the well-criticized and overused trope of ‘magic mistaken for mental illness’. Terrence, the most homophobic and needlessly cruel of the patients, turns out to be a closeted trans girl (playing into the idea that we oppress ourselves – not something I’m comfortable with cis people writing), and the other patients start being able to see and hear the therapist’s imaginary friend.
What’s so frustrating is that many of the ideas here are good. I’m not opposed to any of these ideas, if well executed and by somebody who has either done enough research to know what they’re doing, has consulted sensitivity readers, or has personal experience and understanding. Unfortunately, from what I read of the book, none of these three seem to be true. The therapist and her imaginary friend are a very hollow, stereotyped depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Adding to that, DID already suffers from ongoing stigma that it’s ‘made-up’, only from fantasy, or somehow tied explicitly to the supernatural. The sleep disorders themselves are mostly accurate or at least close enough, but the symptoms that show up in the book are either toned down or linked into the fantasy narrative.
Overall, Parasomnia starts from a creative place, and has a lot of good intentions, but I couldn’t enjoy it or feel comfortable with the choices it made with its plot, premise or characters.
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I recently moved into a new neighborhood, and obviously, one of the first things I did was check out the library. Part of the inauguration process was taking out four books (yes, I already have three out…. hush), all of them from the teen section to try update my woefully old-fashioned understanding of Young Adult fiction. This book, The Light Fantastic, is the first one of the four.
First, the good. The Light Fantastic is a gorgeously written story that intermingles seven different perspectives spread across three states, four days after the bombings of the Boston Marathon. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, particularly the description of POV character April Donovan’s rare condition. April has hyperthymesia, a condition which makes her recall of personal memory astonishingly vivid. Because of this, in particular, she can ‘connect the dots’ between real-life tragedies and her life at near-light-speed. This is used as a framing device to bring the book to its central plot – a series of interconnected school shootings.
My relationship with this book gets more complicated when it comes to both the plotting and the characters. There’s a lot here that I want to like; the discussion of trauma and the ‘war’ that modern-day high school students are forced into touches on some really great stuff. However, ultimately, the seven POVs are more than one too many, leaving readers very little time to catch up or put together the lives we’re getting a window into. There’s also not nearly enough rise and fall in the action; while there is a climactic end of sorts, the slow-motion of the book as events unfold over a single day slows the narrative down too much.
I also – from an ethical perspective – don’t know how to feel about the premise. School shootings are so common in the U.S.A. that they’ve ceased to have any meaning, but that very level of incidence has meant the conversation around school shooters has changed. The narrative of the ‘lone wolf’, bullied and seeking revenge, is a painfully dated one. Instead, school shooters (even – and especially – the Columbine shooters) tend to be white, male bullies asserting power. Certainly the idea of a forum pushing people further into radicalism is frighteningly realistic, akin to places like /b/ or Kiwifarms. However, a white woman writing about a Indian boy with internalized racism, and focusing on his death-by-cop scene to the exclusion of almost all others, feels… uncomfortable. Equally uncomfortable is that the two other shooter narratives involve young, white girls reacting to bullying.
Actually, I lied. I may not know how to feel about the premise itself, but Pal’s death was unnecessary and mean, and more than a little racist given that he’s the only actual named character to die. So, let’s stop killing POC characters for Drama:tm: please?
The prose of The Light Fantastic is gorgeous, but while the intertwined plots and themes hold a lot of promise, the characters fall a little flat. Most importantly, though, the victims of the shooting should be the heroes of a story – not the “tragic” figures of bullied murderers.
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this is for the drag mothers, taking frightened boys under lofty wings
“your makeup is your armour,” they murmur, “your dress is your shield”
and another for the helpers, flinging open their doors
their tearstained couch cushions, spare clothes in the closet.
this is for the ones who never thought they’d see thirty
who answer their phone at three in the morning
and tell their teenaged and terrified children
“it will be okay.”
this is for the teachers who snuck us binders and earrings
who lied to our parents for us
who never talked about their husbands or wives
who didn’t have to say that they understood.
this is for the fathers, too, fumbling over new words and doing what they can
and the fathers who know the language, who are tired
of explaining to doctors why they chose to bear their own children
and why it doesn’t make them anything but men.
this is for the families knitted together out of rags and fragments
the blood of the covenant is thicker than
the water of the womb.
you have to learn so much faster with nobody to teach you
you make a truth out of all the things you don’t want to be
so here’s a glass raised for the parents living and dead and always-remembered
who taught us what nobody else cared to know –
who showed us what nobody else cared to see.
Elliott Dunstan 