Jeff > Recent Status Updates

Couldn't even really browse while I was waiting for this one. Infinite gratitude to Del Rey for delivering the ARC expediently. Maybe this will be the one that finally gets Malerman the credit he deserves.

Well, that was soul-crushing.

Little bit of a bait and switch, though it really does redefine "unreliable narrator." Not just in terms of their perspective, but in terms of who they are to the reader.

Suddenly I feel sick. I tell myself Mary’s off to something better; that someday not too far from now, she will run through an outdoor shopping mall, laughing and shrieking with other girls her age. She’ll be a normal girl, with normal problems and a normal life.
This is a lie, of course. Mary will never be normal. All our children will suffer, but it is Mary, I think, who will suffer the most.

When you look back on Mosquito Coast, you think of how fun and vivid and powerful it is, but you forget how crushingly cynical it is at the end:

"I have become—hear me when I say this—a good motherfucking Christian woman. I do not, anymore, ask questions of my husband that he does not want to hear, and my husband—oh yes, a very good Christian man—does not tell me things I do not need to know."

I knew I was getting good vibes. There's the seismic event.

It goes by so fast. That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone, or something, forces you to consider all the horrible time-management mistakes you made as a parent, all the birthdays you forgot, all the beautiful moments that you attended, yes, but weren’t really there for.

The coda

Thought I caught a hint of this in foreshadowing. Good twist if it's followed through completely.

“What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”

“The way out of what?”

“Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”

The twists in perspective and speculation about what's going on are both masterful in this book, however it turns out. Hopefully some of these threads go somewhere.

Picking back up now.

The two different time periods are so fully authentic and immersive, it's transporting, but the fun of a story like this is the nagging inconsistency. Finding something like looked like a bit of plastic was great, but it fizzled out some time ago. The pace has slowed considerably.

Taken hostage. That’s how people would describe the ladies in those Western stories when we were growing up—those poor beautiful dignified homestead women, taken hostage by the savages. It used to thrill me. Now I find it funny that no one ever acknowledged how those pioneer women were technically already hostages to begin with.

Returning to the Careful What You Wish For theme.

The coffee date. The fancy Italian dinner. The engagement party. The wedding. All our sunny afternoons sitting on patios in Paris, smiling mildly at nothing.
What did we talk about?
I couldn’t remember a single substantial conversation.
There it was, I couldn’t avoid it now: the dawning, prickly sense that I knew my husband as well as I knew the elderly cashier who bagged groceries in my hometown.

All my life, I’d been imagining a sausage or a cucumber; something to fill me completely. I had not been prepared for sex to feel and to look like Caleb’s penis did, which was fine in girth and length but lacked the fortitude to enter me of its own accord. I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise.

Jaw: Dropped. Again.

Mary is staring at me, waving a hand in front of my face—a distinctly modern gesture, I think suspiciously, before realizing I have no real evidence for that argument.

Like me, he thought the lifestyle inherent to living in a city was unnatural. A world meant for gerbils, not people

The boys complained about power hegemonies and overseas military interventions...As for the girls, they proclaimed their horror at the wage gap between the sexes, and while I first thought a shocking number of them had the same medical issue, I soon realized their fingers and hands and forearms were all tie-dyed a grim shade of orange from the fake tanner that passed through our dorm hallways like a spiritual totem.

Yup, that's my college experience in a nutshell:

"Rather, I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out."

Big reveals keep coming. Burke knows how to imbue a scene with gravity and drama:

"I closed my eyes, then took a larger gulp from the cup, and then another, ignoring the girls as they laughed again, ignoring Reena’s whoop of support—“Hell yeah, roomie!”—as the juice dribbled down my chin and dripped onto the lace collar of my dress, leaving a spattering of blood drip stains that would never come out."

Wow! What a start to the primary plot

A trade must take place for this life to enter the world. As my body slowly halved open like a peach, I realized it was me who was losing my life; me who would vanish from the world to make room for this new child.

I will never be Natalie again. I will only ever be Mama.

...what this world would become, if not for the saving grace He offered us. For those three seconds before I went underwater, I felt a complete and total clarity of how broken everything was. My life, my family, my country, my planet. We, all of humanity, were alone, weren’t we? Was He even coming to save us? Or were we abandoned, stuck on this forsaken rock, spinning dizzily through the black toward nothing?

“'The days of yesteryear were not for the faint of heart,' my mother would drone on, a distant, romantic look in her eye. "

Great line, totally worthy of the inspiration for the title.

Whoah, there's the reveal. Hard to imagine a protagonist more different from me and still, the book grabs you from the first few pages. Very good writing. Reminds me a little of Mosquito Coast with the extended family led by a misguided (mat)riarch in lessons of self-reliance.