These were both good–well-written and read well by the voice actors. And each in their own way perfect to listen to across the long desert miles between the Sierra Nevada and the Sangre de Cristos over Spring Break.
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker: This is part of the recent trend of revisiting/revising the Homeric myths–cf. Circe, Natalie Haynes’s books, and the 2 movie versions of the Odyssey in nearly as many years. Silence of the Girls is Pat Barker’s retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, Achilles’s war prize, whose seizure by Agamemnon sparks the epic’s tragic confrontations. Barker has done her research, and the result is both immersive and harrowing: spoiler alert, the Ancient Mediterranean was not a great place to be a woman. You were closer to property than a person. Barker tells her tale deftly and thoughtfully with just a few distracting ticks (her favorite is describing things in terms of their shadows, even in lightless rooms). But the story’s pace is brisk enough that you don’t notice these slip-ups too much, and you learn a ton about women’s daily lives in early Antiquity.
The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline: This is an important young-adult book, coming toward the beginning of the incredible Indigenous Turn we’re experiencing in speculative fiction. The novel is set in a near-future dystopic America, in which climate catastrophes have destroyed modern civilization and robbed white people of their ability to dream, which drives them mad and sends them in frantic search of a cure–at, naturally, the expense of Indigenous and non-white Americans who preserve the ability to dream in their bone marrow. The story is told from the point of a young Métis man, Frenchie, who has lost the rest of his family while on the run from The Schools, a network of church-run marrow-harvesting sites. He falls in with a group led by the fearsome warrior Miigwans and the matriarch Minerva, and the main action of the book follows their journey North toward rumored free Indigenous holdings in Canada. Frenchie learns what it means to be Indian from his new found family as they struggle through climate-weirded wilds, staying one scarce step ahead not only of the Schools’ Recruiters but also of other Indians who are willing to sell out their own kin to survive. It’s both a strength and a weakness of the book that you never truly understand how dreams reside in bone marrow, nor how they’re harvested: on the one hand, it makes perfect sense that those who remain uncaptured would only have rumors to work with, and the very few School survivors would be too traumatized to realize or relate the specifics of their torment. On the other hand…this lapse in world-building affects the coherence of the plot and its rather abrupt ending. There are a few other plot problems: a major inflection point is forced into the story in a way that seems totally implausible given how the characters and action have been established to that point. The writing is a skosh uneven as well–poetic and original in many, many places, stilted and self-conscious in others, clichéd in a few. These issues left me with the impression that a good editor could and should have done Dimaline’s amazing tale the justice it deserved. But I’m glad I listened.
The Rookery 