Book Review: The Body Farm

 By Abby Geni

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories, Body Identity 

• Where I bought this book: Parabras Bilingual Bookstore, Phoenix, Ariz. 

• Why I bought this book: It has a really cool cover (designer: Jaya Miceli)

• Bookmark used: Hobart (N.Y.) Book Village

*******

 

  Here's the thing about short stories: They can be lovely, compelling, and meaningful. They can reach out and grab you by the heart, by the brain, by the balls.

    They can make you smile, laugh, and cry.

    But sometimes, they can be redundant or predictable, leaving you wonder if the author has any more ideas in her head.

    This collection has all of those promises along with the flaws.

    Take the first story, The Rapture of the Deep, a tale about Eloise, a scientist and deep-sea diver who studies sharks. While underwater, she thinks about her broken family, her connection with her fellow divers, and the time she suffered a shark attack that led to 467 stitches and "a mottled red ribbon of teeth marks." 

    Her somewhat estranged brother cannot understand why she continues to dive. She does -- in beautifully written remembrances of the mother who taught her to dive, of her experiences underwater, of her love of the sharks she studies -- and wishes he could have the same appreciations.

    I loved the tale, her happiness, and her desires to show her brother her joys. It works on many levels.

    A Spell for Disappearing, about a woman falling in love for the first time who starts to see that she must outwit a lover who has shown dark side, is similarly engaging.

    A few more tales are also engrossing, until you start to see the patterns and realize the stories share more than a common theme -- they tend to read the same, and you can see what's coming next. Perhaps if I read them in a different order, or put more time between readings, I'd continue to enjoy each one a little bit more.

Book Review: Hera

 By Jennifer Saint

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Retold mythologies

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books & Coffee, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I wanted to hear Hera's perspective 

• Bookmark used: Ordinary Equality / No new world order until woman are a part of it

******

    Hera always has been a goddess who's hard to pin down. In the pantheon, she seems to serve little purpose -- although she is the queen of the gods and the goddess of marriage, she maintains little control over her own. Her cheating husband -- and brother -- never treated her as an equal partner, despite their history of taking down the Titans together.

    Thus, Hera is always portrayed as unhappy, unliked, and unwanted. Like many of the gods, she is vain and vindictive, haughty and deceitful. Her role on Mount Olympus is ill-defined.

    And while this book sets out to define Hera, we can't help but see her as the same -- morose, vengeful, and superfluous. Near the end of the book, one of the immortals, Ekhidna, a primordial dragon, tells Hera she has let her husband and brother define her. 

 All you want is to outwit Zeus. With his nymphs, his girls, his bastard step children.

     I had hoped this book would help redefine Hera, but it didn't. Instead, it told familiar stories about Zeus' deceptions and cruelty, and Hera's envious and equally cruel reactions. Instead of helping us relate to Hera, it showed her as just another god who has little time for others.

TWIB: 14th Edition

 

Palabras Bilingual Bookstore sits in an older urban neighborhood
threatened by gentrification, just north of downtown Phoenix

    PHOENIX, Ariz. -- In this desert city in the western United States, I discovered a diverse collection of bookstores.

    Although generally a conservative place, history might give a reason for this -- it was colonized by the Spaniards, became an eventual settlements for many of North America's indigenous populations who were driven from their more eastern or southern lands, and was the migration point of enslaved people after the U.S. Civil War -- by some estimates 25 percent of cowboys were Black.

    Later, as the city's population exploded with white residents, the Latino population continue to lead the pack, with the Black and Asian population also increasing. Today, the non-white population comprises 57 percent of the city's population. 

My TBR stack from Arizona

    My first stop was at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore, off downtown in a place known as Casa Caracol, which includes a small café and Andria's Tienda. It was love at first sight.

    I really had to stop myself after gathering a number of new tomes, including Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis, the tale of a Native American -- a Kanien'kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne -- who left the reservation when he turned 18 and returned 25 years later, suffering from a rare disease and a failed marriage, and persuaded to undergo a tribal remedy. I also grabbed The Body Farm, by Abby Geni, a collection of short stories about people's relationships with their bodies.

    I moved on to Grassrootz Books and Juice Bar, a Black- and worker-owned place in Eastlake Park, also near downtown, which includes shops featuring African and African-American art and clothing. It was another delight, full of books I would love to read but know I could find in few other places.

    There, I bought All Eyes are Upon Us, by Jason Sokol, a history of Black life and politics in the northeastern United States, an area often considered amenable to but also showing a hostility to civil rights. A Man Called Horse, by Glennette Tilley Turner, tells us about the life and times of John Horse, who founded and ran the Black Seminole Underground Railroad. Trees, by the superb Percival Everett, weaves a story of magical realism when he tells what could happen if Black men and woman who were brutally lynched and slaughtered throughout U.S. history somehow rose again and turned the tables on their killers.

    I moved on to the Poisoned Pen, a shop over in the wealthy suburb of Scottsdale that specialized in mysteries both cozy and dark. Here, I found tales by two Irish writers. Northern Ireland's Stuart Neville, dubbed "the king of Belfast noir," brings us The House of Ashes, about a hapless family that moves from England back to Northern Ireland into a house with an, shall we say, interesting history. And the always compelling Colum McCann pens Twist, a story that introduces us to the men who repair broken underwater cables, and winds up delving into the sum of human existence.

    My final stop was a place called Changing Hands Bookstore, at the base of Camelback Mountain. It's a bookstore and a bar. Or a bookstore with a bar. Or, perhaps a bar with an attached bookstore. I'm really not sure -- and hell, does it matter? It was a fun place to visit.

    So not only did I but a T-shirt, but I found a few books to add to the collection, inclding The Children of Jocosta, by Natalie Haynes. She is one of the best writers in the re-told Greek myths genre, and this is one of her earlier tales. She's also a scholar, broadcaster and comedienne, but, truth be told, her writings are her best work, including several non-fiction discussions about women in Greek mythology. Finally, The Possibility of Life, by Jaime Green, is a look at the search for and the possibility of finding life out there in the vast universe.