Trabia Garden

Kerstin Hall, Asunder (2024) -- Deathspeaker Karys tries to save a dying man and instead binds his very talkative soul to her shadow. Now chased by strange assassins and the ticking clock of a prior demonic contract, Karys searches for a way to restore her secret passenger to life and thus regain her own bodily autonomy.

The pacing of this novel is very uneven: choppily episodic, floppy and limp, too many characters with not enough to do, and just weirdly put together, save for a couple of sterling set-pieces that have urgency and immediacy and excitement. These interludes are genuinely terrific and good enough to redeem the rest of the novel. The best of these sequences comes about a quarter of the way through the novel, when Karys returns to her home village for the funeral of her brother. She has a complicated relationship with both her father and her former neighbors, and the slow revelation of her prior life there, and why she originally left her home, and the price she has to pay for returning, is tense and thrilling and just really well-done. According to an interview with the author, the whole novel originally grew out of a short story that covered this segment of the novel -- and honestly, the whole novel should have just been this segment! The book has a bunch of additional plot machinery about big diplomatic politics between nations and huge cosmic relationships between demon-gods -- and, frankly, none of that stuff is as good as the small-scale psychological drama concerning Karys and her hometown and her slow, grudging explanations to her inquisitive shadow-self about her past there.

Ultimately, I liked Asunder, which has cool body-horror flourishes, some nicely weird world-building, and a believably hard-bitten protagonist. However, I came away from it thinking that it was less than the sum of its parts. The ending, in particular, does not live up to the rest of the book's grim tone; the last fifty pages feel like they were borrowed from a much drippier romance novel. All in all, I wish some mean editor had fallen upon the book draft with sharp scissors and forced the novel to focus on its genuine strengths.

Davis Bunn, The Rowan (2023) -- People visit a mystical glowing tree and then return home changed in ways that they cannot or will not explain. A journalist investigates and realizes that all the tree-touchers are now linked together in a mystical hivemind seeking the betterment of humanity. The U.S. government tries to blow up the tree.

This was a random library find and in a word: lol. It was extremely terrible: flat characters, trite dialogue, bland writing, the most boring-ass approach to "magic tree makes people telepathic super-geniuses" that one could imagine. And those were the problems that were evident early on, long before I realized I was reading a ~Christian allegory~. But it was short, so I finished it, chuckling all the while.

Consider: Richie Bond was a genius when it came to hidden online resources. He was also a chameleon. Richie was lean and precise and dressed like a Brooks Brothers ad, ironed shirts and khakis and loafers, the works. He wore round little tortoiseshell glasses and kept his hair trimmed. But all this was a mask. Richie Bond was a merry jester, a crpyto freak, a tunnel rat who loved nothing more than strolling the internet's dark ways and stealing whatever caught his fancy. [103]

Or: Valentina was not a traditional sort of beauty. Too edgy. Too in-your-face. Too intelligent. A very sharp and perceptive woman, who had fought off a truly awful childhood and become a genuine success. Abuse of the heart might not leave the same sort of visible scars, but the impact could be just as searing. He thought he could see a bit of that in her gaze, even now. Like a pair of opals that had been wrapped in the blanket of time, and smashed with an uncaring hammer. [122]

I am laughing again just re-reading those passages. Whatta book!

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (2024) -- Brothers Peter and Ivan grieve the death of their beloved father while dating inappropriately aged women (one too old, one too young).

I am admittedly Rooney-pilled and tend to like her work, so I liked Intermezzo fine. Even so, it's hard to ignore that her books are always operating within the same single groove of themes and subjects. I don't know about her plans for her next book, but I'm not entirely sure I'm up for a fifth Rooney novel about over-educated Dubliners wrestling with the distance between their anxious brains and animal desires. I tend to think about her interchangeable characters and plots as the necessary-but-boring growth-medium for her stylistic flourishes -- time dilation in Normal People, interiority/exteriority in Beautiful World, Where Are You? The stylistic flourish in Intermezzo is the different internal monologue offered by the two central brothers: long logical syllogisms from chess-playing Ivan and short, fragmented sensory bursts from suicidal Peter. (Has Rooney been reading William Faulkner recently?) As far as stylistic flourishes go, this one did not blow my mind, which left me with a lot more time to consider all the novel's similarities with the last Rooney book I read. On the other hand, I have yet to get bored with Rooney's affection for social media and memes ("dilf-coded," "Help, says Naomi. My girlfriends have unionised."), which I suppose is one thing to which I can look forward if she continues to dredge this same narrow channel of human experience.

Dreading the thought of what he'll want to do with her later. Sleep on the couch in that case, figure something out. Someone else after all maybe. Lad in her room the other night. Or that guy online who posts the peach emoji under all her pictures. Peter naturally unable to be thirsty on main, he has a career to think about. Prominent junior barrister faces questions over use of 'smiling devil' and 'droplets' emoji on social media website. Anyway maybe there is no one else, maybe she's just bored of him. She stares out the window, not looking, and he at least declines to pay her the ignominious tribute of looking at her.