A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.
A college student’s romantic obsession with another woman threatens to derail her happiness.
Taipei in the late 1980s. Lazi is 18, newly enrolled in college, and describes herself as “an innately beautiful peacock” who is “pure carrion inside.” Depressed and self-harming over her attraction to women, Lazi enters into a toxic relationship with Shui Ling, a fellow student. During the course of their on-again, off-again unconsummated relationship, Lazi turns to a group of friends whose love lives are as complicated as her own. Qiu (Last Words from Montmartre, 2014), who died in 1995 at the age of 26, structures her essentially plotless novel as a series of eight notebooks that take us through Lazi’s college years. These notebooks can be unabashedly adolescent—sentences like “The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach” abound. Also true to the college experience are the long pages of abstract conversation Lazi and her friends engage in, usually late at night. But in many ways, Qiu’s willingness to show youth at its most self-absorbed and earnest is part of the book’s appeal. Most readers—perhaps especially those who identify as LGBTQ—will see themselves somewhere in Lazi’s agonized social circle. But Qiu also reminds her readers at every turn how truly isolating otherness can be: interspersed with Lazi’s musings, Qiu tells a kind of surreal, contemporary fable of a crocodile, the subject of equal parts bigotry and misplaced reverence. The crocodile’s plight, as it “got home from work [and] removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body,” serves as an odd, but perfect, metaphor for Lazi, whose true heartbreak is feeling so alien as to scarcely feel human.
A meandering, but moving, look at queer identity.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-076-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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