Book Review: The God of Endings

 By Jacqueline Holland

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Fantasy

• Where I bought this book: Bookmatters, Milford, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: It is a debut novel, and stories of immortality intrigue me   

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         We give immortality to our gods, because they are perfect. We grant immortality to our book characters, because they are not.

    Collette LeSange is far from perfect. And she assuredly does not like her immortality. She did not ask for it, and her years on earth -- full of pain and loss, despair, failed hope, and taunts from the gods -- have not been friendly. She isn't living, she thinks, just existing.

    And as modern society grows around her, she's finding it harder to hide -- and to eat. Because Collette is a vampire, she must feed on blood, which gets more difficult to find as her years mount up.

    Holland's debut novel tells us how Collette gained immortality, her life over the next 150 or so years, and the fears that engulf her and remain constant companions.

    It's an audacious tale, full of adventure and sadness. It's a life writ large, and as much as Colette tries, she find it impossible to ignore the larger world. All too often, we find that her attempts to exude compassion and kindness rarely end well. 

    Collette grew up the daughter of a gravestone carver in the America of the early 19th Century, before her grandfather chose immortality for her -- a sore spot with her. She soon made it to Europe, where she met and was kept by others of her kind. But angry gods and angry mortals decried what they saw as her wickedness, so she was forced to wander alone and live apart from the vremenie -- those who live short lives -- for most of her days.

    Now, in the early 1980s, she is living and working in America as the owner of and only teacher at an elite pre-school. She senses the gods -- Czerobog* and Belobog, the former the god of darkness, destruction, and woe; the latter the god of light, life, and good fortune (the pair also may be just two faces of one god) -- have something planned for her. 

    In successive chapters, Holland alternates between Collette's history and struggles through the years and her current saga, which includes her growing relationship with a young artistic student with a troubled family life.

    The book has a few problems: Parts of it are overwritten, both stylistically and in the telling. Over-description is rampant, and some of the storylines could have been parsed or omitted.

    But it's a wide-ranging epic, and the ageless protagonist allows Holland to tell a tale over centuries of human history through the eyes of a single women, who is caring and strong, if also confused and lonely. It's overall a good read, depressing at times, but with a texture of hope that threads its way through some of the worst actions of humanity.

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    *He's also called the God of Endings, hence the title.

Book Review: Babel

• By R. F. Kuang

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: It called out to me

**********

   

     This is an extraordinary tale that uses magic and fantasy to explore the realms of language as it's used and abused to use and abuse people.

    It revels in the history and decadence of language, its twists and turns, its meanings and context. We see its glory and honor, and its brutalities and  tragedies. We see it as homey and friendly with a welcoming smile. We see it as elite and fastidious, with a smirk and ridicule.

    And in this story about the fictional history of the revolt and strike by the translators of Oxford, we see that language is used by the privileged and powerful for their own ends. And, of course, those privileged and powerful are white men. The translators include some women and a small cohort of people of color, but only as necessary to perform the difficult if unpretentious tasks.

    The setting is Oxford, England, a small college town some 50 miles from London, but several hundred years removed from what's described as a stinking, bustling, crime-infested city of thieves and thugs and foreigners. Oxford is determinately quaint, sophisticated, and, well, well-educated.

    The time is the early 19th Century. The Silver Revolution is in fill swing, its magic providing clean water, quick transportation, and a better life for those who deserved it. 

Book jacket photo

Author R. F. Kuang is a remarkable woman.

She is a translator with master's degrees from

Cambridge and Oxford in Chinese studies, 

and who is studying for a doctorate in East

Asian languages from Yale. She has written

six books, and has been nominated for 

the Hugo, Nebula, Locust and several other

awards for her works. She is 26 years old.

    The characters are few -- the translating cohort of Robin, "rescued" from the slums of Canton, China, who can pass for white if you don't look too closely; Ramy, a lad from Calcutta, proudly brown-skinned but aware of the dangers from the bigoted; Victoire, a Black French woman originally from Haiti, and Letty, the "English Rose," who is both part of the privileged high society but a second-class citizen because she's a woman.

    Other characters include the high-minded if mysterious Professor Lovell, who takes in Robin to prepare and raise him for a spot at Oxford. Others -- several who become instrumental to the plot -- come and go and are well-rounded, if there only to serve specific purposes in the story.

    Indeed, even the main characters are plot specific, and serve as representations of larger societal issues. Even the plot points are metaphors: the Silver Revolution is the Industrial Revolution, if more intellectual -- and magical. 

    (In this world, silver and words combine to bring power, and the translators do the dirty work. England obtains silver bars from elsewhere, through means nefarious, but which it deems legal. The translators perform the magic, inscribing paired words from various languages, which allows the bars to provide a way to make possible train travel, electricity, and other modern wonders.)

    The story is heavily about the class structure of the British Empire, and its exploitation -- for goods, for money, for knowledge -- of the rest of the world through violence. This England is relentless in getting what it wants, regardless of the cost to other cultures and lands. The book doesn't demonize England; it simply highlights is schemes, its murders, and its wars for its own purposes.

    Even our cohort of four translators are assimilated to exploit their own countries -- China, India, and parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas -- and accept their work as being the price of their comfort and intellectual life. But slowly, they come to realize what they are doing, and what the Oxford translators do.

    That realization and its consequences are at the heart of the book, and Kuang tears our hearts out as she tells the tale. We find ourselves sympathizing with the dilemma the four face, and understanding their choices, and why they are made.

Book Review: Akin

Akin, by Emma Donoghue

An old man, childless, set in his ways, and still mourning the loss of his wife to cancer, suddenly finds himself the guardian of an 11-year-old great-nephew he barely knew existed and had never met. 

Worse for Noah Selvaggio, he must take custody of the boy the same week he had planned a visit to his native France, for the Carnival in his hometown of Nice.

Days before he's set to fly from his home in New York, Noah gets a call from a social worker. Michael, his sister's only grandchild, needs an emergency parental figure, and Noah is his only living relative. The boy's father? A recent overdose fatality. His mother? Serving time in a prison upstate.

It's either Noah or a state home. Noah reluctantly agrees to take care of the child.

Thus begins Donoghue's latest novel, an exploration of family, heritage, and the responsibility one has -- or should feel -- for the actions of their ancestors.

You see, at the same time Noah is learning he will be taking Michael along on his trip, he discovers a small packet of cryptic photographs his mother took during World War II, when she stayed in France as he and his father shipped off to the United States for safety. Noah has no idea who the photos portray or why they were taken. Michael, snootily introducing Noah to Google images search, easily discovers the location of one picture. It's a hotel in Nice.

So off they go.

It's a tough relationship. Michael, at 11 years old, often finds his phone to be a better companion. He enjoys baiting Noah. Nor is Noah enamored with Michael, whom he sees as a whingy little brat. His immediate response to any request from Michael is to say no.

But still.

Noah is empathetic enough to know Michael's background and sympathize with his upbringing. He recognizes the child is poor and lonely, but he struggles to accommodate his wants and needs.

Still. 

For the most part, I liked their relationship. Noah wants to educate the child, and he takes every opportunity to explain history and science (sometimes in excruciating detail, but then, Noah is an old, retired chemistry professor). The boy generally is bored to tears, but sometimes responds to Noah's prodding and teaching.

So we see them slowly, reluctantly and uncertainly, grow closer and show concern for each other in fits and starts. Noah comes to enjoy Michael's wit, even if it is exasperatingly at his own expense. Michael tries to help Noah's search for meaning in his mother's photos, even as he struggles to maintain his own sense of self with his strange great-uncle.