Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide

It doesn't matter if you fail. Your trying is what sets the tone for your whole life story. Think of everything you do as being chapters in your future autobiographical self-help book about murder. Your “career” is just another word to help you categorize your journey through life. Why not start brave and bold and believing in yourself?

I'll begin by saying that I'm not a “Murderino”, but my daughter is and we've listened to a few episodes of the My Favorite Murder podcast together; I know who Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstack are and I recognise the value and appeal of what they put out into the world. So, from the point-of-view of a not-totally-invested reader, I'd say that this “autobiographical self-help book about murder” was a thoroughly decent read. Karen and Georgia share their life stories (stating that many of the details have never been shared with their fans before), and they are open and thoughtful and bring their acid humour to tough topics; just like on the podcast. On the other hand, I don't know that Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered could be considered terribly well-written – I found passages clunky, the advice kind of basic and repetitious, some of the humour forced – but I'm sure that when my daughter (the intended audience) gets to read this, it will be everything she was hoping for. (Note: I was fortunate to receive an ARC from the publisher and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

EVERYONE HAS AN AGENDA. No matter who it is: your aunt, the government, raccoons. We're all just out here in the world trying to get what we want. You are, too. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also not permanent. You can change your agenda at any time. Just don't let anyone convince you to put your agenda aside in place of theirs, even if they claim to have all the answers. Especially if they claim to have all the answers. Ugh. People who claim to have all the answers NEVER have ANY answers. Anyway, thanks for buying this advice book.

So, this is an advice book – Karen and Georgia make only a couple of references to murder and serial killers, and only where it ties in to the advice they are giving on how to stay safe (physically and mentally) out in the world. The book is formatted in what they call essays, with each of the authors sharing their spin on catchphrases from the podcast (“Don't Be A Lunatic”; “You're in a Cult, Call Your Dad”; “Stay Out of the Forest”; etc.), and each section ends with one of the authors interviewing the other on the topic. I liked the way this interview ties up each section – not only does it feel more like their conversations in the podcast, but it reinforces the point they make a few times about the importance of asking thoughtful questions of others and really listening to the answers; the importance of having people to share your deepest stuff with, whether it's your clutch of closest friends or a therapist. I do wonder if this book would have wide appeal to a male audience (I know there are male Murderinos), but I reckon it's acknowledged that people can only share from their own experiences. From the section “Buy Your Own Stuff”, Georgia's personal story leads to the statement, “I realized that dudes who talk about their 'crazy ex-girlfriend' are full of shit. What they're really talking about is someone they hurt and didn't leave the way they found.” And in the same section, Karen writes, “Being a thirteen-year-old girl is simply the worst experience you can have in life, including all cancers and bear attacks. It is a daily series of betrayals and base humiliations that you must figure out a way to look cute during.” Either way, I nodded along with those statements.

I don't know, if I have to give some sort of advice here to all you sweet baby angels who want more than how you're currently living, I'll say, just remember as long as you're attempting to not be a dick and doing your best to do good things, you're worthy of a good life, one that you're proud of and when you wake up every morning makes you stoked to be yourself. And if you don't wake up stoked to be you, figure out the first step you can take toward that life you want. Once you've taken that first step, then figure out the next step, and so on. It might feel like a long journey (it is), but for me, that was the most important part, because once I got to where I wanted to be, I was confident in my ability to grab that opportunity by the balls and make it my bitch.

And, yeah, they write with the same salty language with which they talk – and I'm sure that's expected by their fan base. Overall, I was interested in Karen and Georgia's origin stories and recognise the grit it takes to share these stories with their fans. I totally believe that this is exactly what the fans will want; and I totally believe that the advice will be valuable for many. I'm rounding up because I'm sure the true Muderinos will love this.

An Orchestra of Minorities

“Oh God! Nonso, they are! It is like a coordinated song, the kind they sing during burial ceremonies. Like a choir. And what they are singing is a song of sorrow. Just listen, Nonso.” She stood silent for a moment, then she stepped back a bit and snapped her fingers. “It is true what your father said. It is an orchestra of minorities.”

An Orchestra of Minorities is a remarkable book: in the tradition of Things Fall Apart, it tells a Nigerian's story in a blend of Igbo and Western European techniques/language/mythologies, and by setting the characters in this hybrid-world of conflicting influences, it illustrates the modern day struggle of post-colonial Nigeria. This is a challenging read, long and ponderous, but I wouldn't be surprised to see author Chigozie Obioma among the Man Booker nominees, once again, with this title.

He hadn't considered that he had been broken by the world. The birds were the hearth on which his heart had been burned, and – at the same time – they were the ashes that gathered after the wood was burnt. He loved them, even if they were varied while he was one and simple. Yet, like everyone who loves, he wished that it be requited. And because he could not tell even if his singular gosling once loved him or not, in time his love became a deformed thing – a thing neither he nor I, his chi, could understand.

As the book opens, a “chi” – a kind of guardian spirit assigned to a mortal in Igbo belief – has rushed to the spirit world to plead the case of his “host” before the creator god, Chukwu: this host has apparently committed a crime that might prevent him from being reborn again, and the chi is asking for Chukwu's intercession with Ala, the goddess who controls reincarnation. In order for Chukwu to fully understand the host's recent actions, his chi relates all of the major events of the man's life, and in this way, the narrative reads like transcribed oral storytelling. This conceit makes for an interesting semi-omniscient narrator: the chi can report on all of his host's thoughts and actions – even explain the times that it intervened to influence the host for his own good – but being a nonhuman entity, it can't always understand human motivation. (Yet having been paired with many hosts over the centuries, the chi often relates this human's actions to those taken by others it has inhabited throughout Nigerian history.) The chi even leaves his host's body sometimes in order to see what's going on in the spirit world, and the overall effect is an engaging overview of both modern Igbo life and traditional cosmology. 

As for this host: Chinonso “Nonso” Solomon Olisa was a young and semi-educated rural poultry farmer (the opening quote is about the mourning song chickens engage in when a hawk makes off with a chick) when he met Ndali Umuahia: the university educated daughter of a rich and powerful urban chief. When the two fell in love and Ndali's family rejected Nonso as beneath their daughter, he was willing to give up everything he had to move to North Cyprus and get a university degree to prove himself worthy. (Apparently, Obioma attended university in North Cyprus and this section is based on his and other Nigerians' experiences there.) Things don't go according to plan, as things never seem to have worked out for the powerless Nonso, and pressures build up in him that lead to the actions that his chi eventually tries to justify. 

All who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, beaten, raped, plundered, shamed, and killed. With all these people, he'd come to share a common fate. They were the minorities of this world whose recourse was to join the universal orchestra in which all there is to do is cry and wail.

I tried to be careful with the plot synopsis there, but this book is about so much more than the plot. Obioma paints a detailed picture of the class structure of this Nigerian community – the haves and the have-nots and the pressures to acquire the things that the White Men have convinced the sons of the old fathers that they must have (pressures that have led to yahoo boys and their Nigerian Prince-type schemes; pressures that make a foreign education more desirable than a relatively prosperous traditional livelihood). The upper classes have set aside the local gods in order to follow “Jisos Kraist”, and when Nonso goes to Cyprus, he experiences racism for the first time (from locals asking to touch his hair to people yelling the Turkish for “slave” at him from passing cars.) And through it all, Obioma uses language to situate characters into their classes: Ndali prefers to speak her British-accented English, and while Nonso can converse in that tongue, when he has something important to say, he switches to Igbo. There are many instances of untranslated Igbo, and it can be frustrating the number of times Nonso can't come up with the words to reply in fraught situations:

“You have,” she said. “I gbu o le onwe gi.” 

Surprised by her switch to Igbo, he did not speak.

Obioma employs a sophisticated English vocabulary (“noctambulist”, “oneiric forms”, “colloids of wall paint”, “a caesura of despondency”) and some from a class lower than Nonso speak in challenging pidgin:

Oh, boy, you no sabi wetin you dey talk...Nothing wey person eye no go see these days oh. Im see nyash wey tripam – na im be say im love me.

It seems to be particularly revelatory that while in Cyprus, Nonso had to continually use the phrase “no Turkish” with the locals (and privately complain that they didn't understand his English): power is entangled with mutual understanding, and the mix of English and Igbo in Nonso's village keeps the classes separated; just one lingering effect of British colonisation. In addition to all these languages, the chi often quotes Igbo proverbs to Chukwu, while addressing the god by his many names:

Ijango-Ijango, the ndiichie say that if a wall does not bear a hole in it, lizards cannot enter a house...Egbunu, the old fathers say that a mouse cannot run into an empty mousetrap in broad daylight unless it has been drawn to the trap by something it cannot refuse...Agbaradike, the great fathers in their discreet wisdom say that seeds sown in secret always yield the most vibrant fruit.

The inventive structure, cultural details, and a relatable struggle for connection and dignity make this exactly the kind of book that wins literary awards; and Obioma deserves to be recognised for this work. But it's not a perfect read for my tastes: just a bit too long, female characters only serve as obstacles or prizes for the male lead, and everything about the wool-white gosling felt too deliberate to me. Still a worthwhile read that marks a worthy followup to Obioma's debut The Fishermen (which I preferred).

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Shelter

He’s not a good son; he knows this already. But he’s the best possible version of the son they raised him to be. Present, but not adoring. Helpful, but not generous. Obligated and nothing more.

A friend gave me Shelter to read, because she wanted to have someone to talk about its twists and turns with, so I should begin by acknowledging that this kind of domestic-drama-rollercoaster is not my usual genre; fans of this type of thing might find it entirely entertaining. As it is, I found this to be poorly written, gratuitously violent, implausibly twisty, and knock-over-the-head moralistic: yes, it's hard to be loving when you grew up in a house without love; compounding that message with stereotypical cultural overtones doesn't elevate the message. Not recommended.

The only thing Ethan had ever done was arrive in this world needing him, and the greatest failure of Kyung's life, the one he felt daily, was not knowing how to respond. The part of him that wanted to be a good father was constantly at odds with the part that didn't have one, leaving him with only two defaults as a parent – correcting Ethan or keeping him at a careful distance. Although his methods often changed from one minute to the next, his intentions were always the same. He wanted his son to turn out so much better than he did.

Kyung Cho is a thirty-six-year-old tenure-tracked professor; the husband of an Irish-American woman currently studying for a degree in social work; and father to a lovely four-year-old son. Kyung is also heavily in debt – maxing out credit cards for beach vacations, owing more on his mortgage than his home is worth, still paying off his student loans – and all of his domestic stresses are multiplied by his home's proximity to his rich Korean immigrant parents; people he rarely visits without ever having told his wife why. When the parents experience a (needlessly horrific) violent event in their home and must temporarily relocate to Kyong's much smaller house, family secrets will finally be revealed. Other than restating that the plot only gets more convoluted from here – while doing nothing to entertain nor enlighten the reader – that's all I'm going to say about that.

I would like to point out that I really didn't like the writing in this book: Kyung is a totally unsympathetic main character (explaining that he had a hard childhood doesn't absolve his current behaviours; nothing could explain his initial reaction to seeing his mother stumbling towards his house through the connecting green space); I didn't believe the pointlessly bizarre turn his mother's life takes; and I didn't believe that a four year old, playing with the puzzle that he's apparently been obsessing over for months, mistakenly calls the grapes piece “raisins” when his mother asks him what it's a picture of. I hated the following early passage and will leave it here as representative of what bothered me about Jung Yun's writing:

A woman jogs by with two children in a running stroller, the littler of whom offers Kyung a wave that he doesn't return.

Don't follow “littler” (not necessarily a crime in itself) with “whom” if you want us to get along. At least this was short.

Hotel Silence

We are still separated by three floorboards, massive pinewood from the surrounding forest, which is carpeted with mines, each floorboard is thirty centimetres wide, with intermittent gaps, and I stretch out my arms, groping towards her like a blind man trying to catch his bearings. First I reach the surface of the body, the skin, a streak of moonlight caressing her back through a slit between the curtains. She takes one step towards me, I step on a creaking floorboard. And she also holds out her hand, measuring palm against palm, lifeline against lifeline, and I feel a turbulence gushing through my carotid artery and also a pulsation in my knees and arms, how the blood flows from organ to organ. Leaf-patterned wallpaper adorns the walls around the bed in room eleven of Hotel Silence and I think to myself, tomorrow I'll start to sandpaper and polish the floor.

The above passage is from the first page of Hotel Silence, so although it contains a spoiler of sorts, I guess that's the point: Author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir has decided to begin with the resolution of her plot's conflict, and then the story rewinds to a few weeks earlier, when our main character is experiencing an existential crisis. And it all works fabulously. The plot is interesting but sparse; the characters are soft spoken but fully revealed; the themes are deep but subtly handled. I have never read an Icelandic author before, but the quiet tone and scant ornamentation of the writing here seems wholly in keeping with what I know of the Icelandic landscape. This read leaves me hungry for more of the same.

Is there something I still long to experience? Nothing I can think of. I have held a newborn slimy red baby, chopped down a Christmas tree in the woods in December, taught a child to ride a bike, changed a tire up on a mountain road alone at night in a snowstorm, braided my daughter's hair, driven through a polluted valley full of factories abroad, rattled in the rear carriage of a small train, boiled potatoes on a Primus in a coal-black sand desert, wrestled with the truth under long and short shadows, and I know that a man both cries and laughs, that he suffers and loves, that he possesses a thumb and writes poems, and I know that a man knows that he is mortal. What's left? To hear the chirp of a nightingale? To eat a white dove?

Approaching his fiftieth birthday and newly divorced, Jónas Ebeneser can no longer see much reason for living. Ever since his father died when he was in his first year of university (which precipitated Jónas dropping out to run the family business), Jónas had found meaning in taking care of/acting as the handyman for the women in his life; but now with his wife gone, his twenty-six-year-old daughter fully independent, and his mother suffering dementia in a nursing home, Jónas recognises that he has not made a big impact on the world and it would continue to spin without him. He doesn't come across as particularly depressed or delusional, Jónas is simply done with living. Not wanting his daughter to be the one to find his body if he went by self-inflicted-shotgun or dangling rope, Jónas decides to travel to a recently war-torn country (never named, but seems Balkan); maybe if he steps on a landmine or encounters a sniper's bullet, his daughter will never even know his intent. But when Jónas checks into the formerly opulent Hotel Silence and meets the twenty-something brother and sister trying to keep it going, he is forced to recognise what real pain looks like:

If we were to sit down, me and this young woman in pink sneakers, and compare our scars, our maimed bodies, and count how many stitches had been sewn from the neck down, and then draw a line between them and add them all up, she would be the winner. My scratches are insignificant, laughable. Even if I had lance wounds in my side, the girl would win the prize.

Starting with some small repairs around the hotel, Jónas is eventually enlisted as a handyman for the whole village; and in the process of mending a town, he mends himself. And I know that sounds trite and hokey, but it's really not: Ólafsdóttir tells you right on page one that Jónas is still alive and making a human connection after the date he had chosen for his expiration, so this novel is meant to be more about the why than the what. And the fact that Ólafsdóttir packs so much relatable meaning into the why, in what is ultimately just a few hours' read, makes for a moving and technically exquisite read.

A Ladder to the Sky

“And you’ve heard the old proverb about ambition, haven’t you?” 

He shook his head. 

“That it’s like setting a ladder to the sky. A pointless waste of energy.”

A coworker at the bookstore asked me the other day if I had read A Ladder to the Sky yet – she knew that we had both been sent ARCs last fall – and when I said I had never read any of John Boyne before, she said this is where I had to start. She, a retired schoolteacher who doesn't tend to talk this way, explained, “I started it the other night and couldn't put it down until I was done. The main character is just such a dick. Such a complete and unrepentant dick that I had to keep reading to see what he would do next.” And then after explaining some of the plot and the interesting literary devices that Boyne employs, I agreed that it sounded compelling and I started this book the next day. And she was right about all of it – plot, characters, meta-narrative about the literary world, intriguing POV shifts, but most of all, our love-to-hate protagonist Maurice Swift – all of it kept me fascinated and horrified until the final, perfect, endscene. I'll definitely be reading some more John Boyne, and in fairness to the surprises in this story, put the rest of this review behind spoiler tags. 

“I want to be a success,” he replied, and perhaps I should have heard the deep intent in his tone and been frightened by it. “It's all that matters to me. I'll do whatever it takes to succeed.”

**spoilers**: I took an online Creative Writing course a few years ago – because it was free and I had too much time on my hands – and after the instructor (a published author of juvenile detective fiction) walked us through his “foolproof plotting method” (a totally paint-by-numbers framework), he asked us to come up with the plot for a novel, sketch out all the details using his method, and upload the results for group feedback. Now, I am never going to write a novel, but I asked on the forum if it wasn't a little risky to share these ideas with a group of strangers – what if someone had a totally unique plot idea and it got poached? – and the instructor's response was pretty snarky: There's no such thing as a unique storyline, professional writers workshop together all the time, and besides, if he gave us all the plot to Animal Farm, one of us would have to be George Orwell to make art of it. And this is pretty much what A Ladder to the Sky is about (even the same Animal Farm/Orwell point is made; this must be the go-to example among established writers): an ambitious young author – someone with an undeniable gift for writing but no imagination for storylines – will do whatever it takes to become a success. Because Maurice Swift is incredibly handsome, he can manipulate anyone with his charms; and because he doesn't seem to have a conscience, he feels absolutely no remorse about beguiling, stealing, or adapting other writers' stories away from them – after all, he actually can can write better than any of them; what's the harm in sending art out into the world? 

“It's not as if anyone could just take someone else's story and write it themselves, is it? These things need to form in a writer's mind over time. After all, a novel is about a lot more than just plot, right?”

“Right,” I said, wondering how many of my peers would argue with that notion. “So, what you're saying is that if someone did do that, they'd have to be...what? Actually, what are you saying?”

“Well, they'd have to be really talented,” he said. “But also a complete psychopath.”

I laughed. “Well, yes. But, of course, those two things aren't mutually exclusive.”

Even with a spoiler warning, I'm reluctant to give away more details about this plot, but I would like to memorialise a few things: I find it interesting that all of the passages I had marked to quote were of dialogue, which never happens, so that strikes me as notable; I really liked the use of shifting points of view – we first meet Maurice through someone else's first person POV, move on to a passage from the third person (which sees Maurice meet, and fail to con, Gore Vidal), then it's a second person POV from his wife's perspective (who reminded me of Zadie Smith, perhaps intentionally; likely even more talented than Maurice, but he steals from her, too, in a terrible way), then a more detached third person POV as we see Maurice at a professionally mature time of life, and conclude from his first person perspective in his older years – none of that shifting should work for me, but it really does; I tend to find it cutesy when authors talk about the literary world, but the scrabbling and jealousies and seductions in this portrayal were totally fun; and ultimately, I loved that Maurice never grew as a person – he knew what he wanted from the time he was a boy, and he unapologetically went after it. And if Maurice can spin gold out of lesser writers' dross, even if people die along the way, doesn't he owe it to the art world to be a “complete an unrepentant dick”? (Yeah, I don't actually think so either, but it makes for excellent reading.)

Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father

DEAD RECKONING : To attempt to figure out where you are and where you are going based on where you have been.

When Carys Cragg was eleven, her father was murdered by an intruder in their family home. As a Social Worker nearly twenty years later, Cragg became aware of a restorative justice initiative – in which facilitators would carry letters between her and the incarcerated murderer of her father, with a view to eventually meeting him if that's what she desired – and realising that this was finally her chance to take control of the experience (to no longer be a passive victim of violent crime; to finally confront the facts as an adult and not a shielded child), Cragg eased herself into a correspondence with Sheldon Klatt; the man serving a life sentence for stabbing her father to death when he was a twenty-one-year-old drug addict/petty thief. Maybe it's because she is a life-long diarist, or maybe it's tied to the personality traits that led Cragg to become interested in social work and justice, but I found this memoir to be unusually self-aware and self-reflective; the narrative in Dead Reckoning is highly crafted. Some of this craftedness worked for me – Clagg's father was a sailing enthusiast and she uses nautical terms (as with the definition provided above) to plot out the stages of her journey – and some of it didn't: Clagg inserts brief vignettes from her childhood/adolescence in which she refers to herself in the third person; I get the emotional before and after she's trying to convey, but I found it jarring and distancing every time. Overall, however, this is a compelling record of Clagg's quest for truth and an interesting meditation on the meaning of “justice”.

I paused, a little confused by some of his wording and disappointed with some of his conclusions, yet surprised by his ability to reflect. Then sadness took over. I could have told myself that I was feeling sad for him, for the world created for him, for the world he then created for himself. But I found myself sad that this man's life, the darkness of which I could only imagine, was so incredibly unfair, and because no one was capable of caring for him, my dad had crossed his destructive path and died.

Right from the beginning you realise that the murder revealed a philosophical rift in the victim's family: the dead man's brothers show up to Klatt's parole hearings to curse and threaten him as the ruination of their lives, whereas Carys Clagg's own mother (who had the nearly impossible task of raising four broken children on her own) gives statements asking for clemency at these same hearings. Raised in this liberal environment and privy to the failures of the social services system through her own work, Clagg assures Klatt in her first letter that she feels no anger or hatred towards him, only curiosity. When he responds to her questions with a tale of a broken home and childhood abuse, Clagg answers with understanding and empathy, but insists that he take responsibility as well. It's a tough line for someone with self-described “socialist values” to walk: Clagg states she isn't vengeful, but does want Klatt to make a reckoning; she agrees that the conservative government/judiciary of Alberta probably gave Klatt a life sentence because her father was a respected doctor and not a drug dealer, but she states that only means that the deaths of drug dealers aren't taken seriously enough; she doesn't like the psychobabbly word “closure”; she finds the word “forgiveness” to have too many religious overtones; and other than taking control of her own story, it's hard to know what Clagg wants from the experience.

Writing those words confirmed everything I had done up to that point. Why I had chosen my career. Why I believed what I did. I'd known it when I was younger, after my father died, but I hadn't really known it until the offender wrote it in his letter to me. People stopped caring for him, and he fell down. He stopped caring, and my family fell down. The world stops caring, and we all fall down.

In an Author's Note at the beginning, Clagg explains the nature of memoir (Memories, inherently flawed, are subjective experiences and are thus authentically truthful), and in addition to stating that she won't tell her siblings' stories, she explains that she never asked Klatt's permission to publish long excerpts from his letters in her book (Permission was not sought from the offender as this was not his story to give permission for me to tell.) And I don't know how I feel about that: Klatt was sharing his personal history and memories, and on the face of it, attempting a personal connection with and trying to offer what was healing for Clagg. As a not angry/hateful/vengeful participant in the correspondence, as someone who recognises the many opportunities lost to intervene with Klatt when he was still a young offender, after reassuring him that she was not collecting information for “a novel or thesis”, what duty did Clagg owe to her father's murderer in return? When the two do eventually meet, it is in the presence of two facilitators from the restorative justice project – and it is clear that they are neutral to the process, there for the perpetrator's needs as much as for the victim's. When one of them asks if Clagg and Klatt wanted to discuss confidentiality expectations, Clagg thought:

Surely I had no guarantee of confidentiality or privacy. That seemed to be their problem, not mine. I wanted the power to reclaim my story. Murder had so often silenced the least powerful in this room. I wanted to know my story, have access to my story, share my story, and I didn't want anyone in my way.

In the end, although I can't really define what she got from the process, and even though it would turn out that Klatt wasn't as open and honest as he presented himself to be, Clagg did feel a burden lifted from herself through this experience. It makes for a very interesting read, and if it leads other victims of crime to seek out restorative justice initiatives that might ease their burdens too, then it's a very important read as well. I'm taking off a couple of stars for the third-person bits and the use of Klatt's letters without permission (in the context of the person Clagg presents herself as). If nothing else, this process helped Clagg make a dead reckoning of her own life:

I'd become a child and youth worker to have more flexibility to support vulnerable people. Then I'd become a practice analyst to observe how the Ministry of Children and Family Development was and was not providing ethical and effective care. Now I was a teacher in a classroom, asking a new generation of learners to do the same. What if I could offer what I instinctively knew how to do when I was young; to make sure no unjust act went unnoticed, that no voice went unheard.

In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

It seemed that the RPF could now commit crimes out in the open and still receive billions of dollars in aid. And Kagame could continue to receive human rights awards despite these murders, the Spanish indictment and Amnesty's reports – buoyed by propaganda and protected by powerful friends in the West. What were these Western allies supporting? From the point of view of the RPF's victims, it all seemed to be in praise of blood, an endorsement of mass murder.

The brief and accepted version of the Rwandan genocide that occurred over 100 days from April 7 to mid-July of 1994: In a country made up of a Hutu majority and Tutsi minority populations, after enduring a Tutsi monarchy under Belgian colonisation, a Hutu-led rebellion saw Rwandan independence in 1962 and the fleeing of Tutsi refugees into Uganda. After years of the ensuing Hutu rule and Tutsi oppression, rebel forces from the Uganda refugee bases – the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)  under the leadership of Paul Kagame – engaged the Rwandan government in a Civil War starting in 1990, and during a peace accord in 1993, President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down by (what was concluded to be) Hutu extremists who were opposed to the ceasefire. The killings began the next day, with Hutu murdering Tutsi wherever they found them; neighbour against neighbour, egged on by military forces and radical radio stations. Up to a million Tutsi would be killed, seventy per cent of their population, in an event rightly called genocide. Hamstringed UN forces, under the leadership of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, were helpless to stop the violence, and Paul Kagame and the RPF were eventually credited with bringing stability to the country; he has been president since 2000, with a mandate to continue his rule through 2034. But this isn't the whole story as journalist Judi Rever would eventually discover and reveal in her explosive and essential work of reporting, In Praise of Blood.

In October, 1996, Kagame's army and Ugandan allies invaded what was then known as Zaire and attacked Hutu refugee camps; a move the West deemed totally justified as the new Rwandan leader committed to tracking down “génocidaires” and bringing them to justice. What Rever discovered at these camps were mostly starving and exhausted women and children who told of fleeing through the jungle just steps ahead of massacring death squads. This experience would set the journalist on a years-long path of inquiry that would put her in touch with wary Rwandan expats throughout Africa and Europe (many of whom would end up murdered); that would see her receiving confidential reports and documents that were forwarded to her at great risk; and that would see her health and personal life suffer. Meanwhile, Kagame and his allies would oust Zaire's longstanding dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and deliver the country into the hands of someone who would ensure its resources (and especially the coltan necessary for high tech equipment) were “open for business”. To what degree was the West behind Seko's ouster? It turns out that Bechtel – a mining giant based out of Hope, Arkansas – was assembling a “master development plan” for the new Democratic Republic of the Congo before its old government was even toppled; satellite images that Bechtel was using to identify the country's mineral potential were given to the invading rebels for military purposes, and in return, Bechtel was first in line to win mining contracts with the Congo's new government. Although the Congo's new leader Laurent Kabila, Kagame, and some of their top officials have become immensely wealthy from their share of these mining profits, this couldn't have been accomplished without international complicity. “Bechtel's links to U.S. intelligence officials, former politicians and military personnel have made it one of the most powerful and secretive corporate entities in the world. The company has been accused of being a US shadow government.” Rever mentions only in passing that Bechtel's base of Hope, Arkansas is the hometown of Bill Clinton.

It's clear that the evidence of RPF crimes was everywhere in the days and months after the genocide. So why did the image of Kagame and his forces as the heroes who put an end to the killing of innocents persist? I believe it is because so many institutions and governments needed the story of the genocide to be one of good and evil, with the evildoers simply defined. But the UN in particular cannot claim ignorance when it comes to these crimes.

In Praise of Blood can be a little meandering, with Rever going back to events over and over again as she collects more evidence and testimony over the years, but it's probably a necessary format as she eventually convinced me that:

• Kagame and the RPF instigated the genocide against their own Tutsi people by having a fifth column inside Rwanda, ready to start and promote the bloodletting

• Kagame and the RPF fired the missile that brought down President Habyarimana's plane (killing also Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira and ten others in the process)

• The RPF committed a simultaneous genocide against the Hutu people – killing people inside their homes within the areas they controlled, tracking down escapees and luring them to public places with offers of food and supplies and then killing them en masse, trucking refugees back from Uganda to be murdered, cremated, and dispersed – and that, where the West has recognised these deeds, they have been excused in the name of revenge. (It would seem that the RPF's goal, beyond pure vengeance, was to ethnically cleanse the lands of Hutu so the returning Tutsi refugees could take over their homes and farms.)

• From the UN's and national governments' lack of action at the time (attributed to US pressure), to their refusal to investigate evidence or follow through with what investigations there have been, the world is complicit in the genocide of both peoples

This book is packed full of evidence (and footnotes and appendices) that support these findings, and still, Paul Kagame and the RPF are referred to on Wikipedia as the liberators of Rwanda; the country has been the recipient of billions of dollars in foreign aid; the Clinton Foundation gave Kagame their Global Citizen Award in 2009, saying, “From crisis, President Kagame has forged a strong, unified and growing nation with the potential to become a model for the rest of Africa and the world.” I can't imagine what the Rwandan people – those on both sides who experienced genocide and who now live under a strongman-surveillance government – think of the rest of us. However, despite In Praise of Blood being such a necessary light in the darkness, I fear it's one that hasn't caught enough attention as yet; what will it take for the world to demand the truth?

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Shortlist 2018

• All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Story by Elizabeth Hay
• Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance by Will Aitken
• Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot
• In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by Judi Rever
• The Woo Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong

*Won by All Things Consoled

The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family

I started laughing. I couldn't stop giggling because I wasn't what my family termed Woo-Woo: I was only medically damaged – the spirits that have plagued my Chinese family for years be damned. Thank God. I was a freak with terrible, mutinous genes, but at least I was not turning into my permanently sad mother, my suicidal auntie Beautiful One, or my maternal grandmother, Poh-Poh.

When author Lindsay Wong was a twenty-one-year-old MFA student at Columbia University, she finally received a diagnosis for the vertigo/hallucinations/fatigue that had been plaguing her for years: Migraine-Associated Vestibulopathy. Despite learning that she had a chronic debilitating neurological disorder (which her doctor warned would likely prevent her from reading or writing for the rest of her life), Wong was relieved that she could now prove that she wasn't suffering from “Woo-Woo”: the ghosts that her Chinese-Canadian family blamed for every disappointment, instance of bad luck, or psychological disorder that seemed to haunt their clan. After introducing her story in this way in her memoir The Woo-Woo, Wong then goes on to describe her childhood growing up in the affluent Westwood Plateau neighbourhood of what I assume to be Richmond, B.C.; nicknamed “The Poteau” for all of the grow-ops and meth labs run out of neighbouring McMansions. And what a miserable childhood it sounds like: Her mother had undiagnosed psychological problems, which caused her to act in irrational and dangerous ways, and her emotionally distant father only interacted with his children to demand perfection at school and piano and sports; usually referring to his eldest daughter, Lindsay, as Fatty or The Retard. Lindsay herself learned to become emotionally walled off (both of her parents believed that crying would “let the ghosts in” and Lindsay did everything she could to avoid sporadic “exorcisms”, which might even involve lighting her on fire), and she became a binge eater, a bully at school, and a terrible friend and sister (she has been estranged from both of her siblings for years, and just recently reconnected with her brother). While this book is described as “darkly comic”, I really just found it all kind of sad – made more sad by Wong's emotionally distant tone. I'm quoting at length to give a sense of that:

Moaning like an undead cartoon monster, my mother fed us candy for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner but would forget to brush our hair and did not scold us for not cleaning our yellow-spattered teeth. In our family, a mother was someone who made sure her children were never hungry, and she tried as much as she mentally could. But at that point, fed up with our life in the court, I saw that my mother had been born with a heart the size of one of my doll's shoes and would have benefited from some family downsizing – like maybe if it were only me.

Besides, even though I was only six going on seven, I didn't think I had ever been a baby or a toddler because of the famous Wong family procreation myth, delivered with the also famous Wong half-funny-half-cruel-all-too-confusing-to-untangle wit, which explained that my parents had fished me out of a downtown Dumpster.

“That's why you're garbage,” my father would explain, boasting that my origin story was extraordinarily funny. “All garbage have low IQ. Not like Daddy at all. I'm very, very smart because I'm from library.”

“Then why you get me from Dumpster?” I had asked once after starting elementary school, speaking in a churlish, babyish Chinglish. Being sensitive yet spacey, I took his every word at hurtful, no-bullshit face value.

“It's free,” my father declared, sounding sombre. “You think we want to pay money for you? Mommy and I know how to save money on unimportant things.”

“Why I not important?” I said, sad and a bit resentful.

“Because you are from garbage.”

That was my father's typical response, a robotic, jokey, unhelpful statement that drove my mother absolutely batshit; it was characteristic of him to carelessly wave a hemorrhaging red cape at a rabid bull, for my mother did not understand humour or indirectness. How they met and married is still a complete mystery to me. It was never once spoken about in our family and deemed irrelevant and irritating as small talk.

“I found your Mommy in garbage can,” my father joked when I asked.

“What she doing there?” I said.

“Just like you, no one want her. Like Mommy, like daughter.”

Near the end of the book, Wong writes, “No one would ever believe me if I told them about all the wondrous and terrible and fantastical things that had happened to me”, yet this is that story: bizarre coincidences, family members who make the national news, actually suffering a neurological disorder after a lifetime of being told by superstitious parents that she was weak-minded and prone to Woo-Woo possession. But it's also a book about abuse and the cloistering effects of an immigrant community – neither the kids nor the adults thrived in this large extended family, and no one on the outside seemed to intervene; and I found the whole thing sad. Based on her diagnosis, it seems heroic that Wong completed her MFA in Creative Nonfiction – but now that her family's story is told, I wonder what other stories she has; wonder what tone she would bring to topics that don't have the power to hurt her.

Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Shortlist 2018

• All Things Consoled: A Daughter's Story by Elizabeth Hay
• Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance by Will Aitken
• Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot
• In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front by Judi Rever
• The Woo Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong

*Won by All Things Consoled

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

I've heard one person translate a Mohawk word for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground”. I ask my sister about this. She's been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She's raising her daughter to be the same. They're the first members of our family to speak the language since a priest beat it out of our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.

“Wake'nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on,” she says. “It's not quite 'fell to the ground'. It's more like, 'His mind is...'” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “'His mind is...'” She moved her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled on the ground. It's all over.”

In the collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott begins with a title piece on depression (from which she suffers) and it suitably sets the tone for what is to come: a frank examination of Elliott's life, focussing on the ways that colonialism, capitalism, and intergenerational trauma intensified the challenges of having been raised in a family plagued by poverty, abuse, and mental illness. My reaction to this provocative collection wasn't really crystallised until the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”, in which Elliott writes about domestic abuse and the systemic abuse of First Nations, then asks questions, complete with room for readers to record their answers (Elliott states that those who don't actually write out answers are saying a lot, too). At one point Elliott writes, “Do you see where I'm going with this? Am I moving too fast?”, and that's pretty much the tone of the whole thing: Elliott is articulate in her anger, and she demands a response from the reader; this isn't a passive reading experience. However, just because an author is intelligent and emphatic in laying out their “facts” doesn't make them indisputable; this is a vital record of a lived experience, from which its author has drawn personal conclusions, and that is necessary and valuable. But anyone who doesn't agree with Elliott's black and white premises – that First Nations are universally opposed to resource development, that every Indigenous child would be better off outside the foster care system (no matter the home conditions), that systemic racism is the only explanation for the under-representation of Indigenous writers in Canadian publishing – wouldn't find anything persuasive here; Elliott is stating her subjective facts, not joining a debate. And for that unpersuaded reader, the obstreperous tone is just a further turn off. As for me – I respect what Elliott has crafted here, I appreciate what experiences have led to her beliefs, but I was constantly jarred by her conclusions; even so, it adds a necessary voice to the national conversation and this collection deserves to be widely read. (Note: I was fortunate to have received an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

When Elliott writes about racism in the Canadian publishing industry – taking swipes at Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, deriding Joseph Boyden (and the witless Canadians “who read The Orenda and it, like, changed their lives”) – her main point seems to be about blood quantum and the nerve of those in positions of power who think they have the right to determine who is an “authentic” Indigenous voice. This, naturally, fends off any noting of the fact that Elliott herself has a white mother – and while I totally accept Elliott as a Haudenosaunee writer, it seems disingenuous for her to repeatedly write about what “they” did/do to “us”, when she is as responsible for the actions of the colonisers as she is heir to their effects (she also has several justifiably angry comments to make about the Catholic Church, despite her Catholic mother attempting to raise her children in the faith). Provocation seems to be the point of these essays, though, so I'm going to note a few passages that gave me pause. On being caught trying to steal convenience store pastries as a child:

The cost of our attempted theft was no more than five dollars. Probably closer to three. It was almost nothing but it was enough. We were no longer an eight- and ten-year-old under this woman's gaze; we were not sad kids trying to cope with poverty and abuse. We were thieves, criminals. Not-quite-humans who would one day get what we deserved. But what did we deserve? To go to some juvenile detention facility and have our responses to poverty punished? How would her reaction have changed if we were visibly Indigenous? Would she have called the cops then and there, as opposed to giving us a chance to leave and “wise up”? Did our white skin give us a chance at redemption my brown cousins wouldn't have gotten under the same circumstances?

Not only do I object to framing theft as a “response to poverty”, but Elliott ends on an angry hypothetical that adds nothing to her actual experience. The following is from the essay “Scratch”, in which Elliott describes her family's years-long struggle with lice and efforts to hide it (and other signs of neglect in their overcrowded trailer without running water) from visiting social workers:

Our parents were far from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness – things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to deal with, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol...Even as a kid (I intuited that Indigenous children have more reason to fear government care than they do their parents' poverty.) I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family, that they could split us up the moment we didn't cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them – systems that put families in impossible situations, then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.

“Hating the systems” is a running theme, and anti-capitalism/anti-corporations is a frequent focus:

Since empty calories are both cheap and widely available, it should be no surprise that the biggest indicator of obesity is a person's income level. And since so many Western countries are built on white supremacy, it should also come as no surprise that the biggest indicator of poverty is race. In Canada, a staggering one in five racialized families live in poverty, as opposed to one in twenty white families. This puts many poor, racialized families in the position where they have no choice but to rely on cheap, unhealthy food and, as a result, support the same companies that have converted their poverty into corporate profit in the first place.

Which brings us back to the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”:

Under capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism, everything Indigenous is subject to extraction. Words from our languages are extracted and turned into the names of cities, states, provinces or, in the case of Canada, an entire country. Resources from our traditional territories are extracted and turned into profit for non-Indigenous companies and strategic political donations. Our own children are extracted so that non-Indigenous families can have the families they've always wanted, so our families will fall to ruin and our grief will distract us from resisting colonialism.

The book ends with the following questions: What do you want? Are those desires based on extraction? Are they dependent upon capitalism or colonialism? If the answers to those last two questions are yes, please revisit the first question. I don't see capitalism or colonialism being reversed as the official “systems” at work in Canada, so I really don't know what Elliott is asking here. On the other hand, I don't deny that the First Nations haven't thrived under these systems and things need to change; I do wish this book had some workable ideas for what those changes could be.

Adèle

She wishes she was just an object in the midst of a horde. She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole. She wants fingers pinching her breasts, teeth digging into her belly. She wants to be a doll in an ogre's garden.

I chose the above quote to open with for two reasons: The original French title for Adèle is “Dans le jardin de l’ogre” (which is much more intriguing in my opinion), and also because it's from page one of this book – the reader knows right from the start that there's something off about this Adèle. Author Leïla Slimani has stated that she was inspired to write a story of sex addiction after the DSK scandal and thought it would be interesting to flip it to the POV of a woman addict. On the one hand, that seems a loose connection – a middle-class wife and mother doesn't have the same sexual power as an influential politician who would eventually be accused of multiple sexual assaults – but Adèle's experiences here completely put me in mind of Michael Fassbender's performance in the movie “Shame”; the same joyless, unrewarding, self-harm that ultimately defines any kind of addiction; maybe sex addiction for ordinary people is the same for men and women, and as Slimani describes it here, it's just another route to a skid row of the soul. Adèle is a very French novel – it's interesting for a Canadian like me to read this kind of a story set in Paris, where sexual mores are a little different – and I can't say how much might have been lost in translation or my ignorance of social/cultural subtleties, but I was moved by Adèle's story – four stars is a rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

Men rescued her from her childhood. They dragged her from the mud of adolescence and she traded childish passivity for the lasciviousness of a geisha.

Adèle Robinson is the thirty-five-year-old wife of a noted surgeon, living together with him and their three-year-old son in a chic Paris apartment. Her husband arranged a job in journalism for Adèle, and while at first she found it fulfilling, she now blows off meetings and deadlines as she arranges ever more risky sexual liaisons. Adèle seems incapable of human connection: she's frigid with her husband (who thinks himself above the animal desires anyway); she constantly screams at and abandons their child (who has been made whiny and tantrum-prone); she's a terrible friend (seducing the boyfriend of the “best friend” who provides alibis every time Adèle stays out all night); and when we meet Adèle's cold and manipulative mother, we're given small clues as to what childhood damage might have created a woman with such low self-esteem that she wants her body used and degraded. A note on Adèle's parentage: There's never any physical description given of Adèle (besides her being beautiful and anorexic), and her mother Simone is only described as kind of trashy, but her father's name is “Kader”, who has “long, tanned fingers”, and who is a nonpractising Muslim. As Slimani was born in Morocco, and as this book appears on the list of “Anticipated Literary Reads for Persons of Color 2019”, I kept wondering if Adèle is meant to be a person of colour – and I think it matters to the storyline. Was Adèle put on the Tunisia desk at work because she's supposed to be half-Tunisian? Is her constant (seemingly incongruous) fear of being raped as she walks at night related to her being marked as an interloper? Is a woman at a dinner party who complains of her nanny practising Ramadan (“You can't look after children when you're starving, can you?”) meant to be a dig at this beautiful daughter of a North African immigrant? And I can't help but wonder if Slimani left this ambiguous just to challenge my mental picture of what a well-off Parisian woman might look like. 

The man's mouth tastes of wine and cigarillos. Of forest and the Russian countryside. She wants him, and this desire, to her, feels almost like a miracle. She wants it all: him, and his wife, and this affair, and these lies, and the texts they will send, and the secrets and the tears and even the inevitable goodbye. He slips her dress off. His surgeon's hands, long and bony, barely brush her skin. His gestures are assured, agile, delicious. He seems detached and then suddenly furious, uncontrollable. A strong sense of theatre; Adèle is thrilled. He is so close now that her head starts to spin. She is breathing too hard to think. She is limp, empty, at his mercy.

The plot develops, and there's a crisis and a followup, and the narrative ends in a twisty place; but this really isn't about the plot. I see reviewers who don't like this book because they don't like Adèle – it's easy to be turned off by the terrible wife and mother who risks everything for dangerous sex; it's easy to be turned off by the blackout drunk who wets his pants; turned off by the methhead who snatches purses from old ladies. Yet in each of these cases, none of the addicts are even seeking pleasure; just oblivion from a painful existence; to go limp and empty as a doll in an ogre's garden. Slimani draws a compelling portrait of a woman with sex addiction, and in the end, Adèle deserves compassion, too. (On a final note: I had assumed that Slimani's last best-selling novel, The Perfect Nanny, was typical domestic noir; now I'll probably check it out.)