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Technologies of the Self

Book Review: Technologies of the Self, by Haris A. Durrani

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Technologies of the SelfI purchased a copy of Technologies of the Self ( Haris A. Durrani) from Brainmill Press.

Description from Goodreasds:
In this timely and instantly notable fiction debut, Haris Durrani immerses readers in the life of a young American Muslim struggling to understand himself in the context of his family, classmates, and contemporary urban life.

Engineering student Jihad, or “Joe” as he introduces himself in the confusing intersections of post 9/11 New York City, finds himself on a personal quest of possibly a spiritual nature, even if he isn’t sure that’s what it is – after all, it’s hard enough to keep halal in his Dominican-Pakistani-Muslim Washington Heights household.

He’s surprised to find himself in the stories his Uncle TomAs tells of his own youth, stories in which TomAs fights both the devil and the weaknesses of the flesh – often at the same time. Culture, nation, religion, family, identity, race, and time battle for dominion over Jihad until he realizes he is facing the same demon his uncle claims to have defeated, and all Jihad has to fight with is himself.

Review:
This was a really interesting read. My takeaway was that it is about intersectionality, cultural adaptation, mediation and compromise, the generational effects of immigration and their importance to ones understanding of self. I chose to take the events as symbolic, but they could easily be read as symptoms of mental illness or literal too, culminating in a slightly different conclusion.

Our narrator, Jihad, lives in New York/Connecticut with two immigrant parents. His mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father is from Pakistan. Half his extended family is Christian, half (including himself) are Muslim. He’s well read and becoming well educated, but one of the most influential people in his life is his waster of an uncle, who tells him stories of meeting his Devil. Jihad’s life and his experience of America and what it means to be American is not without the need for negotiation, neither is his understanding of what it means to be himself, whoever that may be.

The writing is stark but beautiful. It does require you to ferret out meaning and relative importance of things in much the same way Jihad (and Tomas even more) is doing with his life. It is not a straightforward kind of story, but one worth reading.

There also happens to be a fun little, award-winning, free, prequel type story called Forty-two Reasons Your Girlfriend Works for the FBI, CIA, NSA, ICE, S.H.I.E.L.D., Fringe Division, Men in Black, or Cylon Overlords.

Book Review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

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Miss Peregrine's I borrowed a copy of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (by Ransom Riggs) from my local library.

Description from Goodreads:
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of curious photographs.

A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

Review:
This book has been on my TBR list for a long time, so I’m thrilled to have finally read it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wholly thrilled with the book itself. I liked it, but that’s about it. I thought it started off really well with its introduction to the self-absorbed, wealthy Jacob, his ‘other side of the tracks’ best friend and eccentric grandfather but kind of just petered out to unexceptional by the end of the book.

The romantic element seemed to come out of nowhere and felt awkward and unsupported. All but one character from the beginning of the book is abandoned and never seen again. Defeating the immediate foe felt almost accidental and, of course, since it’s a first in a series, it was essentially meaningless to the bigger picture.

I did like some of the characters and occasionally a passage would really strike me as well written, but only occasionally. For the most part it felt a little choppy, like each scene didn’t quite fit together as a smooth flowing whole. I’m happy to have read it, but I’m not rushing out for the sequel.

Review Request Novellas

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You know, for someone who says they don’t tend toward reading short stories I sure read a lot of them. This year especially, since I’ve set myself a goal of clearing them off my shelves.

I’ve been clustering them into individual posts, mostly by page lengths but occasionally other themes like duologies or shorts I’ve received as review requests. That’s what this post is. ‘Books’ fewer than 100 pages (most of which are technically novellas, but I still call them short stories in my head) that have come to me from authors with a request for review.

review request novellas

I won’t lie, none of these really grabbed my attention before reading them. I mean, three are children’s stories, one is a third in a series and one is ‘spiritual,’ which I suspected meant religious (a no-go in my reading preferences). So, they started with a little bit of a challenge. But I promised to give them a fair chance at impressing me, judging them on quality not necessarily my own enjoyment.

This turned out to be harder than I expected. Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but I seemed to encounter more problems than normal among this particular selections of texts—everything from poor editing to incomplete files—so much so that at one point I considered scrapping the whole post. Unfortunately, I’m not the sort who likes to give up on something once started.

Nadia’s Heart (Evergreen Series), by Wendy Altshuler: I’m afraid I gave up on this at 37%. And while I wouldn’t normally include a DNF here on the blog, I am now since it was part of a preselected cluster. I had numerous problems with this, but the most important of which was that things happened out of the blue with no explanation and I was simply lost for the vast majority of the time I was reading.

Secondarily, I never felt I connected with Nadia or anyone else. While I’m not someone who holds that the show-don’t-tell dictum is a universal, this story is almost wholly tell and I think this was to its detriment. Tell is difficult to engage a character through and that just exacerbated the fact that the reader doesn’t get to know Nadia before she goes on her trek. The story starts with an info-dump about her. We learn she’s 12, she’s inquisitive, she’s a tomboy, she thinks she has no heart, and she lives with an old man and old woman. We learn about her, but we don’t get to know her. All of which makes it hard to care about the mysterious journey she goes on.

In the course of that mysterious mission, I often didn’t know who people were, characters reacted to events we weren’t told happened, groups of people were so poorly differentiated that I didn’t immediately recognize that there were two, let alone which was doing what, and shadow characters were presented and disappear without explanation.

None of this is helped by the total dearth of world-building. It’s so scarce that I couldn’t even decide on what type of world it was. Modern, Steam, Victorian, Medieval, something new?  I was also utterly baffled by the anachronisms, both in language and in the world itself. They knew about electricity, detailed human anatomy and astronomy to a degree that would require fairly modern technology but didn’t have running water. I sensed that this was all a case of simply not having been considered.

Mechanically the writing is fine, but structurally the story is a mess.

Come Along With Me (Gracie series #1), by Linda Lee Schell: I was sent this book for review…or I thought I was. Turns out I was sent the first chapter. Based on that I’d give this a two out of five stars. The problem I see is that it doesn’t seem to know what age range it wants to aim for. It says it’s or 8-12 year olds, but I have an 8yo and she would struggle with some of the language of the book and be disturbed by some of the events. But anyone older would likely be put off by how fluffy it is.

Soul Exchange, by Laura Haynes: Perhaps I have an old, uncorrected copy (though nothing identifies it as such) but the best I can say for this is that it’s an interesting idea that needs quite a lot more development and editing before it’s ready for publication and consumption by the public.

The Silent Years: Mother, by Jennifer R. Povey: This was a really good character-driven zombie apocalypse story…or at least zombie-like. Dorothy is a bit of a Scarlet O’Hara, eminently dislikable but with a strength and fortitude that you just have to appreciate. You may not like her, may not even want to know her, but when the shit hits the fan you want her on your side. Not because she’s some tough as nails bad-ass bitch, which is the way so many authors think they have to write a woman to make her “strong.” No, it’s because she’s practical to a fault, practical to the point of survival, despite herself. And it seems to me that in the face of the end of the civilized world, this is what we’ll need. Also, to be fair, a lot of what makes her so dislikable she does grow out of by the end of the book. All-in-all, a full on success, I’ll be looking for more of Povey’s writing.

The Clockwork Mechanical, by Peter R. Stone: Fairly simplistic, but passable as it is intended for elementary aged children. I’d have been more pleased with it if the gendered characterization of the characters wasn’t so painfully clichéd, the girl especially. I’d intended to pass this to my kids when I finished, but I’d rather they not have to read the reinforcement that girls are silly, unintelligent, distractible, talk too much, and need constant rescue from disasters of their own making. The larger cultural script this plays into is of course, “See boys, this is what happens when you let silly little women have too much independence. Thy just can’t help themselves and it falls to you to rescue them in the end. Best to just keep them under thumb from the beginning.” Ugh, we can do so much better. The boy of course, is honorable, smart beyond his years, heroic and brave.

Not Just a Friend (Toronto), by Laura Jardine: This was a cute little contemporary romance. I liked Liam. He was a refreshingly non-alpha-A-hole hero. I appreciated that Maya was allowed a sex life without being painted as a slut. But I also thought the story was repetitive, her bad dates were over-played and the whole thing seemed to go on longer than necessary.