Hello Darling Ones,

It’s been a long time since I took to the web to complain about a book, but I read one yesterday that infuriated me more than any book has in a long time.

For the most part I quit a book the moment it starts to annoy me. Doesn’t matter how far I get into it. I’ve DNFed (did not finish) at 75% though. Life is too short and all that.

Another thing I tend to avoid are books that are wildly popular. I’m of the rather snooty belief that for a book to be so universally adored it’s gotta be kind of bland. It probably takes no chances either in the writing or the storytelling. Often it seems the characters are flat or generic so readers can fill in the gaps the writer left with themselves.

However, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke has garnered a bunch of buzz and I’m fascinated by influencer culture so when my hold came through from the library I was pumped. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

The novel is being marketed as a satire about tradwives and influencers. If it is, the satire was lost on me. I couldn’t tell what point Burke was trying to make. Tradwives are angry about everything? For reasons?

The gist of the story: Natalie is a tradwife influencer with five kids, a hapless hubby from a rich family who suddenly wakes up in the 1800s living the life she cosplayed for her millions of followers.

Want to know why this book was such an utter disaster for me? Because the author failed at the Number One tenet of writing: your character has to want something and your reader should probably know what that is, even if your character doesn’t.

All through the book I kept muttering, “what does she want?” I can’t tell you. She seemed to hate everything: her kids, her husband, her in-laws, all the people who worked for her, women who adored her, women who hated her, and even, sometimes, God.

Natalie wanted nothing. And not just in the material way of someone who repeatedly says “money is no object.” She is one of those characters with so little vitally and humanity that nothing would have made her happy. She was Burke’s distaste about religious tradwife influencers in the shape of a human.

Again, what was the satire? Is it that Natalie was supposed to be a pious, traditional, man is the ruler of the home kind of woman, but she was calling the shots and running a successful business? Isn’t that the real, actual hypocrisy of tradwife influencers? They run successful businesses while pretending to be women who give up their agency to their husbands so they can focus on parenting and housekeeping. We all know this.

The book made no sense and said nothing about women, “traditional” values, religion, or 1800s. It was so vapid. And the 1800s twist was quite disappointing and doesn’t hold up to any kind of deep thought. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a cop out.

Yesteryear is a muddy slush pit of all kinds of buzz topics: religion, misogyny, erectile dysfunction, social media, conservative politics, influencer culture, the manosphere, perhaps latent homosexuality, and anything else you can think of.

It also reinforces my snooty belief about books that are wildly popular taking zero riisks and end up not saying anything. Boo to this book.

Love,
Jodi

The post Two Thumbs Way Down appeared first on I Will Dare.

By all accounts, Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is the kind of book I should have hated. The narrators are unreliable. The author is a bit coy with us in the beginning. Another character is referred to as “the author” is the fictional author? Susan Choi? Can anyone be trusted here? Just what is going on?

I’m not entirely sure what in the hell is going on, but I do know that I loved reading this book and the further I got into it, the more it delighted me.

The book opens with Sarah and David, melodramatic 15-year-old kids made all the more dramatic by the fact that they’re theatre (never theater, says their Svengaliesque teacher Mr. Kingsley) kids at a prestigious and competitive performing arts high school in some suburb in some town in the early 80s.

Sarah and David fall in mad, passionate love for reasons only a fifteen year old can understand, mostly because they get each other’s motor running. Their relationship because fodder for gossip, grudges, and bizarre trust exercises. These exercises and the relationship have lasting repercussions though out the lives of the students and teachers.

This first part about the high school students is pretty straightforward with all the melodrama you’d expect. What Choi does so wonderfully in this part and which felt so very true to me how the teens get very upset about typical teen bullshit — who snubbed who, who made out with someone’s boyfriend, etc. — while they take the actual fucked up stuff in stride, kind of glossing over it like it’s no big deal. Sometimes it takes us years and years to realize the things that happened to us were fucked up.

Then we get to the second part and things go a little sideways. Then there’s a third part that’s even more. . . what? WHAT?

I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling things. Getting to these parts made my heart race a little bit and my brain whirred, “Susan Choi, you magnificent bastard!”

This is a kind of book you should read with a buddy, only so you have someone to bounce ideas and theories off of, and hoo-boy do I got some theories I’d be happy to share with you once you read this one.

The post Trust Exercise appeared first on I Will Dare.

My wonderful former writing teacher Dale Gregory Anderson used to tell us that when it came to endings our job, as writers, was to land the plane safely. I think of this a lot whenever I’m reading fiction. As a reader I’ve had a tendency to be a dick to writers who gave me endings that displeased me. I like to believe I’ve become more forgiving, especially if I felt the plane was landed safely.

Unfortunately, Karen Thompson Walker did not land the plane safely in her new novel The Dreamers, which is a bummer. Up until the end, the book about a weird sleeping virus that strikes a small California town is an intriguing, compulsive read. We follow a bunch of loosely connected randos as they watch the town around them fall into these dream-filled, unending slumbers. It’s a little weird how complacent the town is about the virus, but I shrugged off this skepticism because I trust KTW and I was going to follow wherever she lead.

Unfortunately, she led me nowhere. The story just wanders around quietly with any tension quickly dissipated, until things peter out in an ending that made me think What? That’s a ripoff!

The post Day 180 of 200: The Dreamers Doesn’t Land the Plane Safely appeared first on I Will Dare.

This week I tore through Christina Dalcher’s novel Vox which was kinda terrifying in a “Handmaid” kinda way but with much less rape.

The post Day 38 of 200: Vox appeared first on I Will Dare.

I’ve spent the last 36 hours reading, thinking about, or thinking about reading Baby Teeth a compact, claustrophobic horror show of a novel by Zoje Stage. It was SO GOOD!

Stage’s book grabs you by throat from the start and doesn’t let go. It starts with seven-year-old Hanna and her mom, Suzette, at the doctor’s office. They’re trying to figure out why Hanna who can read, write, do math, has never spoken a word. Hanna’s on-going silence puzzles her parents and brings much tension into their house. Hanna’s ever more dangerous shenanigans don’t help matters.

The book goes back and forth from Hanna’s childlike point of view to Suzette’s adult one, and it’s so damn much fun to read.

I love books that start fast, stay fast, and give me so much anxiety my shoulders are next to my ears and I can’t tear myself away. The last time I was this enthralled by a novel was Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky way back in 2010.

I’m not sure if the story here would hold up to too much scrutiny, and I don’t are! What I do know is that it’s wonderfully written and fabulously paced. More books like this one please!

The post Day 22 of 200: Obsessed with Baby Teeth appeared first on I Will Dare.