Meredith C.M.

More Warnings Too Many Ignored

Revisado: 07-22-24

Father Patrick Desbois’s brief dive into the genocide of the Yazidi people remains essential reading. It is gripping, moving, humane, and—unfortunately—unheeded.

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A Thoroughly Enjoyable, Thoroughly Thought-Provoking Must-Read

Revisado: 07-15-24

Böhme’s book is both a staple and a delight. She integrates human evolution with geology and paleoclimatology, and she does so in language easily understood by lay readers unfamiliar with the subjects.

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Murder with a Borrowed Knife

Revisado: 06-18-24

Disturbingly bipartisan and well-researched. While I was familiar with many of the cases described, Schweizer places them in their indispensable context. A wealth of evidence makes for a grim picture our so-called leaders are inclined to ignore.

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Matthew Shardlake would never have let things get this bad.

Revisado: 05-18-24

But in his unfortunate absence, Sansom’s alternative history is still pretty good. Although it lacks the genius and originality of his Shardlake series, it is nevertheless a strong novel. Its narrator is excellent, imbuing every character with a unique voice—not an easy task. He even masters Churchill, without sounding like a parody.

I got the sense that the ideas behind the book were much greater than the scope of its plot, particularly where empire and “Dominion” are involved.

Sansom is one of those rare male authors you really can trust to write women as actual human beings, and that’s obvious here. All his characters feel like real, poignantly flawed people, which makes the evil they face—or do—all the more palpable.

The Jews hover like ghosts in the story, their fate and future never explored in the depth they deserve. Perhaps that’s inevitable, because despite one protagonist’s secret identity, there is no Jewish voice. He knows nothing about his mother’s people, their civilization, or their story. I keenly felt the absence, particularly these days.

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Local Slytherin struggles to survive Hufflepuff upbringing.

Revisado: 08-15-20

Those who’ve read Romanov history will appreciate the way Brandes weaves her story into the the family’s well documented final weeks and above all how she honors their personalities. It’s quite an achievement to bring to life a historical figure while remaining true to what we know of her character. Brandes shines here. Alexei’s historic charisma, willfulness, and struggle with crippling illness receive new avenues and opportunities. Anastasia proves herself the ideal narrator, not because she’s the most famous Romanov, but because she’s the most daring, calculating, and creative.

Of course, such a faithful representation means facing the Romanovs’ fatalism, their refusal to cause the people around them (direct) harm, and their self-defeating moral rigidity. One sometimes wants to scream at them for their lack of pragmatism. If you can’t move Alexei or his mother, why not at least discuss a rescue attempt for the girls?

A reckoning with Nicholas and Alexandra’s true flaws was probably beyond the book’s scope. Given the premise of a magical Russia and the survival of key Romanovs, that scope seems a little narrow. I didn’t want the story to end—not because I enjoyed every moment but because it closes before it reaches its most exciting potential. Could the Bolsheviks be defeated? Could the White Army be led in a different way? Could its murderous exploits against Jews, for example, have been prevented under different leadership? (Would a Romanov child even care about Jews?) Preventing the rise of the Soviet Union would have saved at least a hundred million lives. Hitler’s ascent is inconceivable without its threat. Without Soviet support, so too is Mao’s. We might be talking about a twentieth century without Stalin or his purges, WWII, without the Holocaust, without Communist China.

Brandes’ concept fires the imagination, but she doesn’t deliver on “world-building.” The problem isn’t that her magic system is simple—and it is—but rather that she fails to give readers the sense that her characters inhabit a much larger world. Instead, it feels narrow and a little thin. I never had the feeling, as one does with the best fantasy, that this story is just one in a long history of far greater, more fascinating tales. That’s quite a feat, given that their world is a magic-infused version of our own. Historical Harry Potter this is not—and more’s the pity.

Jessica Ball does her best but I wish someone had told her to drop the accents. When all your characters are speaking Russian, there’s really no reason to give them accents, unless you’re good enough to evoke different backgrounds, origins, and class. (I know this a quibble, but someone should also have pointed out that Alexandra was a German who never shed her accent.) Ball’s Russian sometimes veers mysteriously into Scots, as though one’s suddenly watching an episode of “Outlander.” Ach! I mean, oy.

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A Must-Read

Revisado: 08-06-18

I imagine some will complain this book is hetero- and cis-normative, but such a critique is unfair. Wolf’s focus is women who have vaginas and have sex with men, as well as on the men who get to be their lovers. If this scope is too narrow to meet everyone’s needs—and much of the research Wolf reports in her book certainly is—that only calls for more work to be done to expand our understanding of people outside that scope. While reading, there were times I was reminded how lucky I am to have more options than straight women do, but it was also, for me, a revelatory read nonetheless. I fancied myself knowledgeable on the subjects of sex and anatomy, better off by far than the high school seniors who couldn’t name or navigate their own parts, but within three chapters I was ready to announce from the rooftops the diversity of the pudendal nerve, the reason for all the variety in the sexual preferences of women and the vacuity of applying one standard to them. This book offers some fascinating insights into the evolution of attitudes toward female sexual pleasure in the West, from the expectation that women enjoy themselves in the sixteenth century to the sexually anaesthetic Victorian woman, a legacy that turns out to be incredibly young. Wolf’s experience with language and literature shines here. Some of her comparative history, on the other hand, disappoints. She falls for the traditional narrative of polytheistic openness and sexual freedom giving way to oppressive monotheism, never interrogating the assumption that people who worshipped goddesses were any freer of misogyny and male-domination than their Abrahamic descendants. (Spoiler alert: they weren’t and neither were hunter-gatherers). It’s gratifying to see her give some kudos to rabbinic Judaism for its more positive, enlightened take on female pleasure and marital love-making, as well as to distinguish between radically different Jewish and Christian traditions. The latter too often tars the former. But it’s too bad to see her ignorant of the fact that the Israelites who became the Jews worshipped their own goddess for centuries after their emergence in the Land of Israel and assuming that their monotheism ushered in a darker period for women and their sexual health. These are details that do incremental damage to what people think and think they know about Jews and Judaism.
Overall, of course, this book is wonderfully healthy and affirming. I would recommend it to anyone who has a vagina, as well as to straight men, for whom it should probably be required reading.

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Pretty good for a small-town thriller!

Revisado: 04-13-18

The performances were good, the story predictable but well-plotted. It was like a long episode of “Law and Order: SVU,” set in a tiny Iowa town.

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Excellent, Exhaustive, but Never Exhausting!

Revisado: 03-01-18

I strongly disagree with a previous review describing Ochlan’s narration as “monotone.” It is calm but never monotone, and I suspect the reviewer is simply unused to the genre. This is hardly a dull story, much less a particularly demanding one. Smith is exhaustive in his research and in his analysis of the myths surrounding Rasputin, many of which have become fixed in the public mind as fact but are in fact inventions Smith traces to their sources.

Of particular interest to antisemitism nerds like me are the ways in which so many—whether they demonized him or defended him—invoked the pervasive myth of a global “Jewish conspiracy” made popular in another enduring creation of the Tsarist secret police: the antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just as noteworthy was Rasputin’s own modest change of heart on the subject of the Jews, some of whom he aided and defended, while Nicholas II and Alexandra remained, like virtually everyone in Christian Russia, “preternaturally antisemitic.” It is in this context of reflexive, pervasive antisemitism that we should also see the conspiracy-minded and paranoid worldview that gripped Russian society at the end of the Romanov dynasty, convinced as it was that “dark forces” were to blame for the crises the nation faced. This worldview united Rasputin’s followers and enemies alike. Above all, it permitted Russians as varied as Romanov family members and peasants to reduce a complex situation to a simple one and to avoid personal responsibility for Russia’s state.

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