Goon by Glenn Erick Miller; Oath by Kate Butler; The Wise Marie Paradise Edition by Natasha Brune

 

Goon by Glenn Erick Miller; Oath by Kate Butler; The Wise Marie: Paradise Edition by Natasha Brune 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Goon by Glenn Erick Miller 

This is a summary of the review. The complete review is on LitPick.

Goon is a tense, darkly comic, but captivating novel about incarceration, self-preservation, redemption, and the true nature of guilt and innocence.

 Goon is a troubled foster kid who stole a car, then injured his younger brother before being sent to a juvenile detention center. While there Goon has to deal with the various rules and regulations, violent fellow prisoners, a hurricane, his attraction for a girl who volunteers at the prison, and his guilt and anguished concern about his brother.

He is a fully developed protagonist who is practically made of attitude and regret. He recalls his dysfunctional upbringing, parentification towards his brother, and current incarceration with detached and wry humor. He is a self-deprecating sardonic kid who uses his humor to deflect from his own pain and tragedy.

The setting of the experimental detention center nicknamed J-Rot is fleshed out as a distinct society with its own culture and rituals. Everyone is given a nickname and bullying and favoritism are frequently shown. These dehumanization procedures remind the boys that who they were outside doesn't matter. Here they are who the prison, and by association the State of Florida, decides.

 Goon has to call up his talents and skills to aid someone who was once antagonistic but has shown potential to be a friend. Goon must surpass the institutional dehumanization and enter the contradictory chaos surrounding him to save him. 

Oath by Kate Butler 

This is a summary of my review. The long version is on Reader Views. (The links takes you to the site. You must insert the book's title in the search engine to read the review.)

Kate Butler’s Oath is a charming and enchanting queer fantasy romance about the love between a lord and his knight.

Lord Aerion Valemont is the spoiled Narcissistic son of the Archbishop. He is used to having his way so when Sir Clyde of Blackholt AKA “The Hound”, a war hardened, quiet, defiant warrior is assigned to be his protector, Aerion considers it a challenge. It appears these two completely opposite characters from different worlds are attracted to one another despite Clyde's sworn oath to protect the young Lord and the scheme to get Aerion married to avoid scandal.

Oath is the type of Fantasy Romance that technically does nothing new. The characters are known archetypes and the plot and setting have been seen many times. Even the fact that it's a Queer Romance has been done. 

This book should be a disposable cliche but there is something so delightful and endearing about this particular book that makes it work despite or actually because of the cliches.

Aerian is written as the ultimate spoiled rich kid with plenty of money and daring but not a lot of empathy or sense. Clyde is a solid stoic force. 

When the Lord and the knight become emotionally and physically closer together, Clyde's softer side and Aerion’s kinder side emerge. They become lovers who accept one another's flaws and all that comes with them.

Their relationship is tested by war, separation, sacrifice, and commitment. They move beyond a spoiled lord and stoic knight to become stronger, braver, more selfless, and more devoted characters and lovers.

The Wise Marie: Paradise Edition by Natasha Brune 

This is a summary of my review. The complete review is on Readers Views. (The links takes you to the site. You must insert the book's title in the search engine to read the review.)

Natasha Brune’s The Wise Marie: Paradise Edition is a traumatic and troubling autobiographical novel about a woman's involvement with crime and drugs.

Brune’s alter ego, Marie lived in a crowded home with a troubled and volatile family. Marie retreated into drugs, abusive relationships, and criminal activity to survive it.

Brune’s writing style is a straightforward matter of fact manner and surprising detachment for writing about her own experiences. It doesn't get overly sentimental or overdramatic. Terrible things like teen pregnancy, over doses, and abuse but it's informative not emotional. It makes the events and characters the main focus instead of presenting Brune's opinion about how she felt about it. It allows the Readers to connect with the events on their own. 

One could imagine it being written years later when Brune has had enough time to detach herself from the events. As an older woman, she has the years of experience and knowledge that the angry young woman didn't have. She also has empathy and understanding for the circumstances that led her down this path but recognizes the damage that she brought on herself.

The Wise Marie also makes use of its Hawaii setting by downplaying the paradise connotation (except in the subtitle) to focus on the local resident’s reality or at least the reality that Brune experienced. She reveals the poverty of people who live in a state with beautiful year-round weather but an expensive cost of living. A place where local reality is purposely kept from the tourists and issues like drugs, crime, and violence are ignored. While many states have high levels of crime and poverty, in Hawaii’s case the sometimes ugly reality clashes with the beautiful image, an image that no one and no place can fill forever.

Magnificat (The Galactic Milieu Series Book 4) by Julian May; Galactic Milieu Series Ends With Emotional Catharsis, Mental Impact, and Provocative Questions

 

Magnificat (The Galactic Milieu Series Book 4) by Julian May; Galactic Milieu Series Ends With Emotional Catharsis, Mental Impact, and Provocative Questions

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Stop! Before you do anything else, I request that you read my reviews for Jack The Bodiless and Diamond Mask, the previous books in Julian May’s Galactic Milieu Series to fully understand this review. I will try my best to keep spoilers to a minimum but I can't make any promises so from this point out this review may contain MAJOR HEAVY DUTY SPOILERS!!! Read at your own discretion.

Ready? Good. On we go.

All good things must come to an end and Julian May chose a great way to end her Galactic Milieu Series with Magnificat. She gave it the right blend of emotional catharsis, mental and psychological impact, and still managed to ask and answer some thought provoking questions of the characters and themes involved.

The previous volume, Diamond Mask, ended with a final wham line by revealing a potential true identity of Fury, the violent manipulative alter ego that has been haunting the powerful psychic Remillard Family for decades since the death of patriarch Victor. Magnificat builds on that claim by narrowing the identity down to two family members both of whom might not be aware that Fury dwells inside their minds and refuses to leave. Meanwhile Fury’s protegee Hydra, once five cousins sharing a hive mind, is whittled down to one remaining member who is losing their sanity and planning a more personal approach towards revenge.

The undercurrents of rebellion against the Galactic Milieu have finally exploded and they have found their new figurehead in Marc Remillard. Marc is not only the Rebel leader, he is invested in his Mental Man project of creating babies injected with heightened amounts of the Remillard psychic DNA so he can communicate through them. Be the Fury to their Hydra if you will. Marc’s project and rebellious involvement pits him against his brother, Jon “Jack the Bodiless” Remillard and Jon’s wife, Dorothea “Diamond Mask” McDonald-Remillard, both of whom are determined to stop him and create Unity even if they have to use their entire minds, souls, and bodies to do it.

May’s gift for deep characterization and themes can be found in this volume as well as the others. Jack The Bodiless was mostly about Jack and his unique birth and overwhelming talent and his relationship with his dysfunctional family particularly his parents, Paul and Theresa Kendell-Remillard. Diamond Mask looks at Dorothea’s youth and transition from outsider to profound intergalactic leader as well as Hydra evolving from one mind into five distinct individuals.

 This final volume focuses specifically on two characters: Rogatien “Rogi” Remillard, the dry deadpan narrator hiding his own emotional pain and conflict behind a veneer of detachment and observation and Marc, who straddles the lines between genius and insanity, empathy and coldness, understanding and fear, rebellion against this higher threat and forcing his own brand of conformity. Through their eyes, we see a changing world erupting from the violence and tyranny within.

Rogi has been on the sidelines through most of the series, a part of the family but observing them at an emotional distance of wit and sarcasm. (When his great-niece, Anne reveals Fury’s identity, Rogi is not relieved about the resolution to a mystery that has been plaguing the family for over twenty years. Instead, he grumbles that she ruined what would otherwise have been a perfect day of Jack and Dorothea's engagement party.) However he is where the story begins and ends.

In the future, he is recruited to write the memoirs of the Galactic Milieu and the Remillard Family by an enigmatic character called The Family Ghost and The Atoning Unifex, an ageless god-like being who seems to know more than they let on and are clearly manipulating the situation for their own purposes. Rogi’s memoirs are a means to separate the truth from the lies and to show the reality of Milieu seen through the eyes of a family that lived through it. Rogi gives his family the chance to tell their own story.

Rogi is largely an observer but does take an active position in previous volumes. His most prominent action previously was to hide a very pregnant Teresa Kendall-Remillard in the Canadian wilderness and communicate telepathically with Jack while he was still in his mother's womb. This moment shows him as someone who puts his family before his own needs every time, a motivation that propels him in this volume as well.

Rogi is a contradictory character. He is a member of the Rebellion but is still close to the family members like Jack and Dorothea who support Unity. He is unmarried and sterile having no immediate family of his own but has a lost love and considers himself a father figure to the younger generations. He is as powerful as some of the stronger members but keeps his psychic levels firmly in check, assuming the form of a befuddled eccentric bookseller. He considers himself a coward but is proven to have the strongest moral character and highest amount of integrity in the entire cast of characters.

Rogi's most powerful moments occur when he is face to face with Fury. His anguish between destroying a monster responsible for the deaths of many and a beloved family member who became a surrogate child to him is deeply felt. He realizes that he is the only one who can kill the monster even if that means killing the vessel that he has grown to love.

Another character who gets a strong focus is Marc. His evolution from a devoted older brother to primary antagonist is one of the strongest character arcs as we see a man of immense talent and genius, unhappiness and anxiety about the world that he has been given, and an arrogant vision and ego to recreate it.

Much of Marc’s characterization comes from the themes of unity vs. rebellion. Many of the characters support Unity, combining their minds as one with the rest of the intergalactic species. The rebels want to maintain Earth's standing as an independent world. 

Marc and Rogi have some interesting twists to their characters, particularly their opinions towards Unity. Most Science Fiction readers are hard wired to be on the side of the Rebellion. Think Star Wars. Dune. 1984. Brave New World. Handmaid's Tale. Fahrenheit 451. Parable of the Sower. The Hunger Games. So on and so forth. It seems as though May is no different. 

After all her narrator character and one would assume Author Avatar/Creator Favorite character is Rogi, dedicated rebel. However he is not as cut and dry as one would think. Rogi is proud to be a rebel so much that when the mental call for Unity is thought around the globe, he mentally shuts down and refuses to join no matter how much Jack and Dorothea beg him to. However, he is chronicling the Milieu history on behalf of the most powerful being of the Milieu suggesting that his Unity involvement was pending. His true loyalties are multi-layered and three dimensional.

Marc is even more multilayered than Rogi. Jack and Dorothea falter a bit becoming card carrying supporters of Unity. They spend a lot of time getting married, starting a new life together, and become central figures on Earth and in the Milieu but become opaque and remote, no longer human or identifiable. As their characters become weaker, Marc’s strengthens. He weighs his actions and looks at the wide picture of what the planet could gain and lose. 

Marc's decision to become a Rebel is motivated by the cold logic of loss outweighing gain. He is the one who we see pursue goals, aspire for greater positions, respond with righteous anger and pride, fall in love, get his heart broken, fall down, and pull himself together. Since Jack and Dorothea are far off from us, Marc is the one closest to us. However there is a catch to understanding Marc’s humanity.

One would suppose that we are meant to support Marc’s rebellion but his creation of Mental Man muddies the outlook. He isn't looking to break from Unity for altruistic or global reasons. He is looking to create his own version of Unity and he can't allow any interference with those plans. He is not a Winston Smith fighting Big Brother because he wants to be Big Brother himself. 

The layers in character make the themes even more open-ended and invites readers to make their own decisions by presenting no side as being completely right or wrong. That is what this series’s ultimate gift is to make us see this fictional world but decide what we believe and where we stand for ourselves.

On a final personal note to the late great Julian May (RIP): Thank you for a groundbreaking and influential series that has meant so much to me and has led to almost 25 years of loving a genre that has given me so much creativity, imagination, inspiration, wonder, and joy.

The Wine Broker (The Richard O'Brien Series Book 3) by Ian Rodney Lazarus; Vintage Third Volume Has a Dry But Crisp Taste of Suspense, High Stakes, and Murder

 The Wine Broker (The Richard O'Brien Series Book 3) by Ian Rodney Lazarus; Vintage Third Volume Has a Dry But Crisp Taste of Suspense, High Stakes, and Murder

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: The Richard O’Brien Series has a talent for beginning as one thing and turning into something else. Con and Consequence begins with an internet scam that eventually involves international terrorism. In Cease to Exist a lab theft leads FBI Special Agent Richard O’Brien to a mystery that includes genetic engineering and government conspiracies. Now in this third go round, The Wine Broker, Ian Rodney Lazarus begins this case with a bottle of stolen wine.

O’Brien investigates a burglary in the home of Alexander Sisky, a Russian diplomat. While observing the place, O’Brien notices that Sisky’s wine collection had been tampered with like someone took a bottle or left one behind. That and a threatening note regarding one of the bottles leads O’Brien to study the wine smuggling market. This seemingly innocuous crime spirals into larger ones involving organized crime particularly the Yakuza. Meanwhile, Jack Tanaka, the Yakuza’s latest recruit ascends higher into the criminal organization going from deliveries and smuggling to mutilation and murder.

The setup for The Wine Broker is nowhere near as compelling as the previous books in the series and falters a bit here and there. Because of that it is the weakest one in the series. How many people would be interested in reading about wine theft after all?

However, there is a lot of interesting information about the wine industry and the illegal activity that is involved. Much of the insider information includes ocean fermentation, intentional mislabeling and vintaging, sneaking contraband into cases and bottles, and using the seemingly victimless crime of wine smuggling to hide greater crimes. The greater crimes are where the Yakuza come in.

Volume 3 has a lot to offer in terms of plot and character to make it a worthwhile entry. O’Brien is up to his usual tricks particularly in his relationships with women. He has an affair with a wine connoisseur who offers more perspectives than just vino expertise. He reunites with his former colleague and lover, Sarah Goodman and it becomes clear that even though Goodman is married to someone else, she and O’Brien aren't quite over one another.

As with previous volumes in the series, we get another fascinating antagonist. This book's answer to Con and Consequence’s Jelani and The Professor and Cease to Exist’s Emma Lee and Dennis Spence is Jack “Tobacco” Tanaka. He has one of the most unique introductions. He does a stand up act at a comedy club and bombs tremendously.  

This shows him as a man with a lot of nerve and plenty of bravado but not a lot of sense. Tanaka is someone who wants to be noticed, wants to be wealthy, and wants to be the center of the room but is uncertain and naive about how to pursue it. He jumps into situations without any forethought over how it should go. He holds for the applause but doesn't bother with fine tuning the material to make it worth paying attention to.

Because Tanaka is in over his head with the Yakuza, many of the suspenseful and graphic scenes are seen by him. One of the early chapters shows Tanaka going through a painful induction ceremony that involves mutilation. It is a moment that makes the Reader cringe with empathetic while also yelling, “Get out while you still can, Idiot!”

Crime becomes an addiction for Tanaka. As he ascends higher, he becomes enamored with the money, glamor, fear from victims, and the reckless daring of committing crimes and getting away with it. It's quite easy to become hooked and Tanaka sacrifices everything about his former life, including his personal identity, to get his fix.

The Wine Broker has a dry, crisp taste of a psychological thriller and a hard boiled detective noir. Readers can feel the distinct aroma of suspense, high stakes, and violence in a dangerous world of criminal organizations hiding under a veneer of sophistication, wealth, glamor, and status. Overall, it has a long clean but not always pleasant finish.

The Waterway Girls by Milly Adams; The Emotional Cost and Support of ‘Doing Your Bit’ in War Time

 

The Waterway Girls by Milly Adams; The Emotional Cost and Support of ‘Doing Your Bit’ in War Time

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Now we come to one of my favorite patterns: two books reviewed at the same time that take different approaches to the same topic. This time we have Bob Van Laerhoven's The Long Farewell and Milly Adams’ The Waterway Girls. Both are Historical Fiction WWII novels which involve regular people getting involved in ways that aren't on the direct battlefield and forces them into facing personal and political situations that change them. The differences between them lie in tone and theme.

The Long Farewell is a journey into the heart of darkness as Hermann Becht, the young protagonist, leaves his toxic home life to become a spy investigating concentration camps. He recognizes the inhumanity around him and the shadow reaches within his own soul.

The Waterway Girls recognizes darkness including war, deaths of loved ones, poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, and misogyny. But it does all of this with the nostalgia filter that speaks of courage, sacrifice, and doing one's bit to uphold those fighting and especially the community left behind. I don't want to say that it's lighter toned but it does make individual contributions a central focus and moves the historical context from something that people are still faced with these days into something that was direct products of its time. 

Polly Holmes has recently lost her twin brother and her fiance is also off fighting. Polly decides that she wants to help on the home front. She uses her training on boats to become a waterway girl. These were women who transported cargo from one place to another. Polly sails from London to Manchester but she doesn't travel alone. She travels with Bet Burrows, the sturdy lead and Verity Clement, an upper class woman with a severe attitude problem and buried secrets. The three women navigate their way through an unusual, detailed, and sometimes harsh environment, face disagreements with each other, and focus on their own issues.

The Waterway Girls is the type of novel that blends the political and the personal. One way that Adams does this is by focusing on the setting. The time is marked by great change where many men fought in the war and others had to do their bit to support them like taking jobs, organizing air raid defense and shelters, joining home guard defense, gathering supplies, organizing entertainment, building gardens, hosting evacuees and many other ways. 

However the book doesn't just focus on the war. It focuses on waterfront life. The various riverside towns and their people are brilliantly described but thankfully without making them cloying or overly sentimental. The book captures the duties, terminology, and socio-cultural lives of the people whose lives revolve around the river in which they live near.

The book also explores personal conflicts inhabited by the people involved. We see extreme poverty which causes many to resort to crime and violence to pay the bills. There is a subplot about an abusive man who threatens his family, particularly his young son who bonds with the protagonists.

The main characters are affected by the war and exposure to river life. Bet, Polly, and Verity are three of many people whose lives are irrevocably changed by fighting the war on the home front.

Because of this change, many previous lines are erased. Women gain physical strength, persevere despite stress, and gain agency. Bet is very knowledgeable about seamanship and is able to pursue these interests without being sidelined by male employers. She is able to command a boat and guide its crew to become the person that she always wanted to be.

Polly also gains independence and strength through her work. She turns her grief into action as she works to deliver cargo. Her interest in boating and waterfront life comes to practical use. Polly also uses her loss to empathetically bond with many of the people that she encounters. Polly is someone who turned her tragedy into triumph.

By far the strongest character development is found in Verity. She comes from an upper class background which causes her to be initially sheltered and set apart from her colleagues. Her argumentative standoffish nature cost them one crew member before Polly’s arrival. Just as Polly has to learn independence, and Bet has to learn leadership, Verity has to learn how to be part of a team.

The Waterway Girls gives plenty of insights over how WWII was fought on the home front and how it changed the people who lived through it.

The Long Farewell by Bob Van Laerhoven; Van Laerhoven’s War Time Tragedy and Ambiguous Protagonists Are Up to Eleven

 

The Long Farewell by Bob Van Laerhoven; Van Laerhoven’s War Time Tragedy and Ambiguous Protagonists Are Up to Eleven 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Bob Van Laerhoven is no stranger to the blog and no stranger to heartbreaking tragic prose and fascinating but morally ambiguous characters. Alejandro’s Lie focused on the release of a revolutionary hero released from a Latin American political prison and has to deal with life on the outside where many of his fellow rebels have died or conformed as well as face his own dubious reasons for fighting the power. Shadow of the Mole features an enigmatic psychiatric patient who writes a strange tale of history and magical realism that draws in his primary doctor who becomes obsessed with learning the patient's real identity.

The anthology Scars of the Heart explores the dark hearts and minds of various characters like a Syrian terrorist, an octogenarian from war-torn Algiers, a cynical reporter, a selfless nun, and a disillusioned child soldier trying to escape conflict in Liberia, two paranoid and disturbed New Yorkers with violent delusions about alien abductions, a Romany girl using her body and desire for vengeance in a WWII concentration camp, and a sexual abuse survivor in 1970’s Belgium having to come to terms with the trauma that he held onto all of these years.

Van Laerhoven’s latest book The Long Farewell does what he has already succeeded in and does it well. He takes his themes, plots and characters up to eleven in this WWII Psychological Thriller about family dysfunction, the remaining scars of war and genocide, and the pursuit of justice and vengeance.

The story begins in Nazi Germany where Hermann Becht lives with his SS officer father, Hans, and Belarusian refugee mother, Marina. After a violent encounter, Hermann and Marina flee Germany for France where Hermann’s hatred for Hans and the party that he represented grow until he signs up as a spy for Britain.

This book focuses on one man's survival in trying times as he tries to reconcile the various political and nationalistic views that surround him and his own damaged and fractured psyche after he comes face to face with the darkest, most subterranean dehumanizing acts that people can do to others.

Hermann lived in a time where nationalism was just about everything. It was used as an intentional weapon for discrimination, genocide, and declarations of war. This nationalism can also be found in Hermann's own family. In fact, his dysfunctional family structure is a microcosm of the effects that the Nazis and other oppressive regimes had over the countries that they conquered. 

We see that in the wide setting of Nazi Germany as the oppressive authoritarian regime spreads through the continent of Europe and how it impacts the Becht household. Hans, rules his home with an iron fist and fills it with an overinflated sense of racial and national superiority. He is a very toxic presence in his household, dominating his family with physical and verbal abuse just as Hitler used dominant and abusive language to become a toxic presence to the world. 

The counter to Hermann’s father is his mother. While Han’s nationalism is rooted in dominance and superiority, Marina’s is one of fluidity, transition, oppression, and a nostalgic return to the past. She yearns for the country that she left behind but has now been occupied and carved up by outside forces. It only exists in her dreams so she is carried along by her son in a present that she no longer wants to live in.

Hermann recognizes the Nazi threat embodied by his father and the lost nostalgia reflected in his mother so he has had to make some tough decisions. These decisions lead him to flee to Paris and join the war front from inside the shadows. He has seen the darkness in his family and former country and now wants to help end it.

Hermann is moved by the plight of others, particularly a Jewish family that he has befriended and have also been separated and divided by the Holocaust. But he is also motivated by his own private war with his father, Hans. He uses cunning, strategy, stealth, double cross hiding in the shadows to defeat the enemy that is right out in the open and changing Europe into something cruel and unrecognizable. 

However, the clandestine life only takes Hermann even further into darkness as he investigates concentration camps. He comes face to face with the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt spoke about, the banality that allows cruel inhumane things to happen to people who are seen as “The Other.” Torture, surgical mutilation, dehumanization, assault, physical abuse, gaslighting, extermination, and genocide.

These are things that enter into the darker reaches of the human soul the more they are studied. Things that leave permanent haunting marks on the mind and in Hermann's case completely alter it into something unrecognizable. 

That is what Van Laerhoven shows us.