56 – Carrie Soto is Back
Daisy Jones and the Six was enough to get me to read Carrie Soto is Back, by the same author. This is a similar kind of book in that it’s a fictionalised account of a fictional accomplishment, although it does dispense with the mockumentary format that Taylor Jenkins Reid employs in Daisy Jones. And it’s really good!
Carrie Soto is a retired tennis professional – at one time, the undisputed best in the world. She retired from the sport largely despised by her peers and hated by the press. Her talent was matched only by her arrogance, and as she peaked and then declined she found herself with less and less interest in continuing once she had set the record for Grand Slam wins from a woman player. That record stands, largely untested, until a new prodigy comes along and ties her record. Carrie, forever consumed by ambition over her legacy, comes out of her long retirement to defend her record against the newcomer. She’s older, slower, less conditioned… but she’s got something to prove once again.
And so the book goes.
What I like about Taylor Jenkins Reid is that she sells dislikeable characters very well. Carrie Soto is not a charming protagonist. Her arrogance may have once been well founded but she’s dismissive of those around her and driven by a low level paranoia when it comes to the intentions of those that seek her out. Tennis, being the only thing she was ever good at, is the only thing she cares about and it’s clear that it’s only a means to an end. Carrie Soto is the best there ever was, and if that stops being true then what is she?
It’s in unravelling that uncomfortable thought that we start to see Soto as being less of a detestable bully and more of a woman in the grip of an existential crisis. Her father, her coach, tries to get her to understand a conception of ‘being the best’ that isn’t quite so tied up in ‘beating everyone else’. Grasping the core of that message – that you can’t quantify greatness – is the struggle at the core of the book. But still – Carrie Soto is good and even in her middle age there are few that can hold a candle to her on court.
This isn’t a deep novel or anything. It’s not complex in its themes or particularly nuanced in its characterisation. What it is though is fun. Some books need you to take a moment to digest after each page. Carrie Soto is Back carries you through with all the momentum of a powerful ace serve. There’s a lot of energy in here, bouncing off the pages and into your brain. It’s moreish, in the way I thought Daisy Jones was a moreish book.
It’s recommended.
57 – Girls of Paper and Fire
I enjoyed Girls of Paper and Fire. A bit. Really though it suffers from what often annoys me about books of this nature – the passivity of the central character.
The pitch is this – in a vaguely Asian themed society, a strict caste system is observed. There are the normal humans, at the bottom, belonging to the paper class. Above them are the animal-infused demons. Lei, our main character, is introduced to us through an abduction where she is captured so as to serve as a ‘paper girl’ in the harem of the king. The book is primarily about the small rebellions that she undertakes to prevent her first sexual encounter with her new master, the aftermath of those rebellions, and then the gradual moving towards a much bigger rebellion as she uncovers the truth of the other paper girl with whom she has fallen in love.
It’s certainly an uncomfortable book to read, but that discomfort is surprising in that it lacks any real fangs. It’s certainly an adherent of the ‘fade to black’ model of trauma, and given the circumstances that’s probably for the best. The societal context of the book is disquieting, that’s for sure, but the book feels to me a lot like Never Let Me Go in which I spend most of my time being irritated at the way in which unacceptable things are accepted or even positively received. It always feels apologetic to me when a book takes that tack.
You might say ‘Yeah, but come on – it’s not like in these circumstances anyone can do anything else. Power speaks to power and all that’. And sure, that’s a fair critique of much unfairness in the world. But I’m not reading a book like this to engage in a serious critique with power dynamics – that’s not how the book is pitched and the writing – while pleasant – is not sophisticated enough to carry the story forward as a thesis. When I read a novel like this about power and resistance, I want it to focus on the exceptional, uncompromising stand-outs. The ones who fight and die for a cause. I’m not saying there isn’t a role for exploring systemic disempowerment – I’ve read a lot of those too in the course of this project. What I’m saying is ‘there’s a time and a place’, and I don’t think Girls of Paper and Fire is the time or the place for restraint.
That said, I enjoyed this enough to be willing to buy the sequels should they ever appear at 99p on a kindle deal. I guess that’s not much of an endorsement.
58 – Gearbreakers
Gearbreakers is a book that is so zeitgeisty it hurts. It’s like someone took the obsessions of anime TikTokers and wrote them into a novel. Big robots – check. Found family dynamics – yep. A progressive love story – it’s in there. Big robots being taken down by plucky bands of unrealistically competent children – you know it.
I guess that’s the strength of the book – it knows its audience and it’s not at all worried that pandering to that audience might be unwelcome. The weakness of the book is that I’m pretty sure ChatGPT could knock out a convincing facsimile in a few minutes. ‘Generate the most Online book you can from the following elements, and pander to the audience’.
I, unfortunately, am not really part of that audience. I enjoyed the conventions of BattleTech back in the day, but my only real exposure to it was the… wow – Infocom, really?… CRPG released back in the 8 bit era. The Crescent Hawk’s Inception gave you some mechs to control and a turn-based tactical environment in which to do it. You had to manage your loadouts, your energy consumption, your armour and such to defeat a reasonably varied range of opponents also in powerful robot suits. I liked it, but only because I can’t imagine a version of me that wouldn’t enjoy controlling a robot that can fire missiles from a shoulder mounted hardpoint. The fact that hardpoint was on a mech was always a secondary factor.
So, mecha as spreadsheets, in other words. I like the premise, but it’s not something that gets my plums pumping.
Then there are the gearbreakers themselves – a bunch of children blending Fagin’s pickpockets with an apprenticeship with Kwik-Unfit. Not a fan of children, in books or otherwise. I’ve said elsewhere that children are the least interesting kinds of humans we have, and they don’t become more interesting in aggregate. It’s at least somewhat novel that they’re part of a bunch of freedom fighters aimed at figuratively toppling an empire through literally toppling its mechs, but nobody in the book really gets a fully fleshed out character and so they’re mostly just… annoying children, even to the point of misbehaving on road-trips to find Mechs to destroy.
I’m all in favour of a good lesbian romance, but while there’s certainly a romance here it’s hard to describe it as good. It never really makes sense, and never really coheres. What catharsis it provides is incidental. Accidental, even.
Much as with Girls of Paper and Fire though, I’ll buy the sequel should it appear on a good enough Kindle deal. For all its faults it is fast paced, punchy, and there’s plenty of action to distract you from the fact that most of the characters don’t so much have an arc as they have a trajectory set at launch.
59 – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
This is another Taylor Jenkins Reid book, and I think it’s my favourite of the lot. It’s much in the template of the other books I’ve read of hers this year – vaguely mockumentary where a fictional famous person comes to terms with the legacy of their accomplishments. What makes it especially good though is that this is a book that tells you it has a twist at the end, reminds you regularly of the twist that’s coming, and still manages to be surprising. It gives you all the information you need to deduce the final revelation, and yet I was still floored by it. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
To be fair, I wasn’t really trying to work it out – I generally don’t, since the nature of twists is such that they are almost always unsatisfying. They either come out of nowhere, which is annoying, or they are predictably foreshadowed which is underwhelming. So I just accept the twist as being part of the storytelling. Early on in this project I complained a bit about Piranesi for a similar reason – that it had set itself up as a mystery to be solved when the solution was as asinine as ‘MAGIC!’. Evelyn Hugo doesn’t set you up as a co-conspirator in its narrative. It just says ‘By the end of this book, the reader will hate this woman that the narrator is obviously greatly affectionate towards’.
Here, the twist was both foreshadowed and unexpected although that might be because Reid is such an engaging writer that the text is almost entirely a sleight-of-hand close magic trick. She weaves a spellbinding story of the rise, fall and rise of an early star of the nascent Hollywood. This she does through the lens of the many marriages in which Hugo found herself – a blend of happy, sad, indifferent and abusive. Along this rocky road of relationships, she finds the love of her life, and that becomes one of the greatest sources of her unhappiness. Evelyn Hugo’s story is touching, relatable, but more than a little bit self-serving. And yet, she is so likable as a character that you can look beyond the growing hagiography of her stories to the core that she’s looking to protect.
And then bam. That ending.
This is the last Taylor Jenkins Reid book I will be reading for this project, but I have been three for three with loving each of the ones I’ve read. I certainly consider her to be a safe pair of hands – I’d trust, from the evidence I have, that her books will all be at least good and occasionally genuinely great. It just feels like I’ve read three versions of what are basically the same book – enjoyed every moment too – but unless she has a future book that radically departs from the template I’m probably good for now.
60 – The Last Children of Tokyo
I honestly have no real opinion on this book. Like many of these vaguely wistful Japanese novel-shaped metaphors, it never really settles on a coherent thesis and instead conveys itself through vignettes and character moments. I’m sure a lot of people enjoy that. I find it annoying.
Back when I was young, you used to get a brand of crisps (chips, to you Americans) called Salt and Shake. What you got in a packet was unflavoured potato crisps and a sachet of salt that allowed you to ‘salt to your own taste’. The result – an unpleasant experience like assembling a piece of IKEA furniture for your taste buds. It put the responsibility for providing a cohesive product onto the consumer. While the advent of self-service checkouts is a joy to an introverted misanthrope like me, it’s the same kind of thing in which labour that was once provided for you is instead placed on your shoulders for no recompense.
That’s how I feel about the Last Children of Tokyo. I don’t want to be given the responsibility for assembling the fractured narrative into something meaningful. That’s the author’s job. Don’t give me a sheaf of unordered notes and disconnected drafts and tell me it’s a book.
That’s all this book is – a series of things that happen. In typical style, it neither gives you supporting context nor the dignity of a conclusion. You’re just supposed to assemble its themes and meanings yourself. I might do that for a book that is obviously trying to do something non-linear and abstract in its storytelling. One where the author is clearly trying to engage in a conversation with the reader in the hope your collaboration can do more than the author feels they can do alone. There are plenty of books that feel like they want to engage in a dialog.
This doesn’t feel like that though. It feels like a transcript from a drunk at a pub, rambling away into their drink. It doesn’t feel like it wants a conversation. It feels like it wants an audience but has no idea what to do when it has one.
Yeah, I didn’t like this.