Rachel Manija Brown's Blog

View Poll: #33823

Anyone read any of these?

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This is such a fun, unique book. The opening grabs you immediately: Uketsu shows an architect friend the floor plan of a house that his friends are considering buying. The architect spots a number of odd elements that aren't just bad planning, but suggest a very carefully planned and bizarre MURDER HOUSE!

The floor plan of that house and two more come into play repeatedly as Uketsu and his friend investigate, unraveling a truly weird and sometimes spooky mystery via a series of interviews. This book breaks all sorts of rules - it's entirely told rather than shown, a lot of it is exposition, the author appears as a character, and that's not even mentioning the very large role that floor plans play - and I could not put it down.

Is the solution to the mystery absolutely nuts? Sure. Is the book a whole lot of fun to read? Absolutely. Will I recommend it to my customers? You bet!

Translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion, who has a nice afterword about translating it.

Apparently Uketsu is a Japanese YouTuber who only appears wearing a mask, like Chuck Tingle if his thing was drawings and creepy mysteries rather than horror and getting pounded in the butt. I can't wait to read Uketsu's other book, Strange Pictures.

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This book is very hard to describe without spoilers, so I'll just cover the setup. Aspiring actress/current waitress Jess is having a bad night that gets much worse when she finds a scared little boy who's run away from his father. Things get extremely strange from there. This book is a wild ride.

I read it in a single sitting, so it's very propulsive. It's also very dark/bleak, despite some absurdist humor arising from the premise. I enjoyed it a lot while I read it, but it's now months later and it hasn't quite stuck with me the way some other books have. Nestlings is still my favorite of his.

Content notes: Child abuse/harm is central to the story. So is an accidental needle-stick with a possibly contaminated needle.

Spoilers! Also contains some light spoilers for Stephen King's Firestarter.

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Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A. Autumn Gold. Saiyuki/Saiyuki Gaiden. Fear is the end of the battle and you can't find your captain.

B. Burn. Original Work. The revolutionary hides her face to conceal her identity. The princess silences her voice to preserve her purity. They know each other. And they don't...

C. The Colors of Lorbanery. Earthsea. The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.

D. Dorset: Portal to the House. Piranesi/Grand Designs. Maggie and Olabisi plan to transform a ruin containing a portal to the House into a cozy home with an artist's studio. But the ruin's status as a scheduled monument and the unique challenges of its proximity to the House endanger their project.

E. Eilonwy Wanderer. The Prydain Chronicles.. Eilonwy travels Prydain in search of her place in life.

F. Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him. A Song of Ice and Fire. A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

G. The Goddess of Suffering Scam. The Lies of Locke Lamora. In the early days of the Gentleman Bastards, Locke impersonates a self-flagellating acolyte of the Goddess of Suffering, and Jean stands by as the muscle in case the mark catches on. You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

H. A Hatching at Half-Circle Sea Hold. Dragonriders of Pern. “That’s a rather extraordinary proposal, Menolly,” said the Masterharper.

I. IP, YEVRAG NIVEK. The Leftovers. Kevin Garvey makes another visit to the hotel.

J. The Journey. Annihilation - movie. Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

K. Kilo India Tango Tango Echo November. Original Work. When the Marines are sent to protect Springfield, MT from an alien invasion, a grizzled staff sergeant finds a whole lot of kittens in need of tender loving care.

L. The Life of a Cell. Annihilation - movie. The being that leaves the Shimmer carries with it some of both Lena and Dr. Ventress.

M. Men Sell Not Such In Any Town. "The Goblin Market" - Christina Rossetti. I have fruit that shatters like glass and fruit that must be spooned up like pudding, fruit that tastes like caramel and fruit that tastes like roasted meat, fruit that glitters and fruit so translucent you can see your fingers through it and fruit that glows golden at twilight, fruit like silver coins and monstrous hands and autumn fog, fruit that loses all its flavor unless you eat it straight off the tree as it tries to coil around your tongue.

N. No Reservations: Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia/No Reservations. I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

O. one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. The Stand - Stephen King. Flagg rewards Lloyd for doing a good job.

P. Professor Xavier's Haunted Mansion. X-Men comics. The ghosts of dead (or temporarily dead, or dead in another timeline) X-Men and villains haunt the halls of Professor X's mansion.

Q. The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" - Ursula K. Le Guin. You are no doubt familiar with the major genres of tardigrade literature.

R. The Realm of Persephone. Greek mythology. Persephone takes Hades blackberry picking.

S. The Story of Marli-Hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle. Watership Down. What lies on the dark side of the moon? Ask the Black Rabbit. He knows.

T. To See a World in a Grain of Sand. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick. Jane was the first to notice that a ragtag band of refugee meryons had made a camp behind a sofa in the student lounge.

U. An Unexpected Catch. Dragonriders of Pern. Lessa and other Benden women visit Southern Weyr to help out with a fishing tradition; things don't go as planned.

V. Vintage Year. The Fall of the House of Usher - TV. Verna visits Arthur Pym in prison.

W. The Woman Who Watches the King. Piranesi. For some, the House is a prison. For some, it's a place of healing.

X.

Y. You're Wrong About Misericorde. The Dark Tower. You're Wrong About podcast. Sarah tells Mike about the lost horror movie that became an urban legend. Digressions include the chemical formula for mescaline, Sarah imitating Ethan Hawke imitating a Yorkshire prop witch, and where the fat goes after it gets vibrated out of your body by a $19.99 girdle sold on late-night TV.

Z.

We all seem to be getting stuck on X and Z. But I also almost got stuck on J, the only letter where I couldn't select from multiple possible stories.

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If by any chance you read my book Traitor, the final book in The Change series, a review anywhere would be fantastic. It doesn't have to be positive or appear literally on my birthday.

Sherwood and I managed to release it on possibly the second-worst date we could have, which was October 2024. (The worst would have been November 2024). So a little belated publicity would be nice. I'd be happy to provide a review copy if you'd like.



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An excellent used bookshop in Tucson, The Book Stop, may be closing down unless the current owner, who is retiring, can find someone to take it over. Her contact info is on the "contact" page.

Anyone want to run a used bookshop in Tucson? It's really great and has an excellent location. I can vouch that being a bookshop owner is the best job ever unless you want to make lots of money.

Feel free to link or copy this.

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A YA novel about five friends who once played a spooky game that only four of them survived. Four years later, their friendship now broken, the ghost of their dead friend returns to drag them into a gameworld based on Japanese folklore. They must play again, for higher stakes, or else.

I like Japanese folklore, "years ago our group of friends did something bad that's now come back to haunt us," and deathworlds/gameworlds. This book sometimes hit the spot for me but more often didn't; it feels like the bones of a good book that needed a couple more drafts. The main issue, I think, is pacing. It's very fast-paced once it hits the gameworld, to the point where it feels like it's rushing from one scenario to the next, without having time to breathe. This also affects character. The characters are there, but they're a bit shallow because of the go-go-go pacing.

The best parts are a really excellent twist I did not at all see coming, and the scene where they all have to play truth or dare with younger versions of themselves at the ages they were when they first played the game. That part digs into character and relationships, not to mention the feeling of that game itself, in a really satisfying way. If the whole book worked on that level, it would have been much better.

There's a sequel that doesn't sound like it goes anywhere interesting.

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A middle grade fantasy novel about A, a Jewish trans kid who has not yet chosen a name, and whose parents are forcing him to attend a teen conversion therapy group. He secretly texts with the other trans kids in the group and they support each other. When one of his friends disappears, he meets a strange being that constitutes itself from any discarded objects it can sweep up in a wind - a trash golem - that sets him on a mission.

A hooks up with a bunch of LGBTQ people living in a kind of homemade squat, discovers that the conversion therapy leaders are either demons or possessed by demons, and meet a very supportive rabbi and her husband, who know a lot about Jewish folklore, though - and what could be more Jewish? - they don't always agree about what any of it means.

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This is a sweet, affirming book for all the trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and suchlike kids out there, and God knows they can use the affirmation. There's some quite beautiful and affecting moments - the first encounter with the trash golem has a blend of the numinous and comedic that reminded me of Terry Pratchett - and I loved the treatment of A's Jewishness and how that connects to both the fantasy elements and his community. I also liked how A being in a liminal space - he's given up his old name but not yet chosen a new one, he's parted from his family and joining a new one, etc - ties in with the book's time period, the Days of Awe, when all is written but not yet sealed.

The elements I did not enjoy so much were the pace, which gets very rushed toward the end, the sometimes Tumblr-esque quality which did make sense as it's about Tumblr kids but which I still find grating, and, unexpectedly, A himself. He's so self-centered and judgy, and though he does eventually learn better I did not like him. I did not enjoy reading all the scenes where he scolds his friends or they scold him, or when they end up telling him exactly why he's a bad friend and refuse to help him with his mission. I've read this exact form of conflict in multiple books recently, and while it's a real thing that happens, reading about it feels like nails on a chalkboard.

I didn't ultimately end up loving this book, but it has a lot of heart and I'm glad it exists. The somewhat similar book that I did love, which doesn't have those unpleasant "bad friends" dynamics, was Chuck Tingle's Camp Damascus.

Content notes: Transphobia is central to the story.

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From the blurb:

One fellow camper will do whatever it takes to make it out of the Boundary Waters alive. Even if he's the only one.

A psychological thriller mixed with intense action.

Nah, just kidding! It's not a psychological thriller, it's a survival story. One of the teenage campers is a racist, a sexual harasser, and an attempted rapist, but he never tries to kill any of the others or abandons them to die or anything like that.

Yep! It's another disappointing survival book with a misleading blurb and gratuitous grossness towards teenage girls!

Teenage Emma is traumatized after failing to save her younger sister from drowning, so she gets her parents to book her into a teen wilderness survival course to take her mind off things. In a portentous scene, her father gives her a Swiss army knife. She's confused and concerned that he's giving her a weapon to take on a camping trip - does he expect her to be attacked? I was confused why she would think of a Swiss army knife as a weapon rather than a tool. If you don't even know what a Swiss army knife is, then you can't tell that it's a knife at all when it's folded. If you recognize it when folded, then you know that it is a multitool.

The early part of the book jumps around confusingly in time, to the point where I flipped back pages repeatedly to see if I'd missed something. No, it was just the author's pointless decision to start with them pitching their tents after the first day's walk, then jump back to them packing their supplies.

We get very little characterization, but that's okay: three of the seven are about to die! Two days in, a strange storm hits their camp. It's described in such a portentous way that I thought it was supernatural or man-made, but nothing ever comes of this so I guess not. Two of the campers and the guide are squashed by falling trees, then a wildfire starts. Instead of jumping in the lake, they run for their lives and get very lost.

At this point, we get some characterization. Chloe is the girl who isn't Emma. Her race is coyly not mentioned until Isaac, the creepy boy, gets racist at her about being black. Oscar is the boy who isn't creepy, so Emma naturally falls in love with him. Isaac constantly sexually harasses Emma, once tries to rape her, and is sadistic to animals. This goes on for the entire book.

Late in the book, Oscar and Isaac both fall over a cliff. Isaac dangles from a rock stub by one hand, and holds Oscar, who is suspended in mid-air, by one backpack strap. Emma and Chloe make a rope of clothing, with a key part being her bra. Isaac somehow grabs the clothes rope without falling. He's clinging to a rock stub with one hand and a backpack strap supporting another person. How does he get one hand free to grab the bra rope without falling? This is not described as it's not thought through. He grabs the rope - again, anchored by A BRA tied to a tree - and, it's not clearly described, but it seems like Emma single-handed pulls him and Oscar up. Is the bra made of bungee cord?

Emma ponders that Isaac was very brave and unselfish. People are complicated, she realizes. This is as close as the book comes to any resolution on Isaac sexually harassing and threatening her for the entire book, oh and also TRYING TO RAPE HER.

This book sucked.

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Roman left the family business, a crematory, and its town to become an accountant to the rich and famous. His sister now runs the crematory with their father, while their younger brother Dante stays on the rolls but his actual profession is being a drug addict and ne'er do well. When the kids were teenagers, their mother vanished. Their father is widely suspected of having murdered his wife and cremated his body, but no proof was ever found. When the book opens, Roman hears that his father is in the hospital, victim of a suspicious accident. He heads home to visit his father and help out his sister. Naturally, he immediately gets embroiled in trouble.

I've loved or liked all of Cosby's previous books and was very excited for this one - especially given the crematory setting. (Cosby himself ran a funeral home with his wife.) Unfortunately, I did not like or feel connected to any of the characters in this one, and so I didn't care what happened to them. Cosby's characters are typically criminals who do bad things, but in his other books, I understand the reasons they are who they are and like them even if I wouldn't want to meet them in real life. But in this one, fairly early on, Roman - who I already didn't feel connected to - commits an act of horrifying cruelty that seems completely unmotivated.

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It's possible that this is explained later, and my guess is that the explanation is "Roman is actually a sadistic sociopath," but I lost all interest in him at that point, and DNF'd the book as I no longer wanted to read about him, none of the other characters interested me either, and the sadistic sociopath explanation doesn't help. I heard an interview with Cosby where he talks about wanting to write a classic tragedy with a very bad protagonist a la Macbeth, which makes his intention make more sense to me, but it doesn't make me want to return to the book.

Cosby is a great author but this book was a miss for me. I HIGHLY recommend Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears for very well-written books where bad people do bad things that are very motivated, and you can't help rooting for them to succeed. I recommend All Sinners Bleed for a well-written book about a good guy fighting both crime and legal bad things. I recommend My Darkest Prayer for a fun, OTT thriller with a very Marty Stu protagonist. I don't recommend this.

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