This is a delightful read, a gentle story that manages simultaneously to be a page-turner. Exquisite language, and gorgeous character development, too (especially of the suitors–I was so delighted!) The library is demanding that I return the copy I just finished, but I’ll be adding this one to my personal bookshelf as soon as I can.

Go buy it now.

I can’t promise much by way of review here because I just flew through the book, mostly while having after-shift beers one night at work. So, I guess in addition to initiating my book spending spree, I can also blame Changeless for hindering my progress in getting to know my new coworkers. Every time one of them would stop by the bar and say hi, I’d make the bare minimum of smalltalk, just itching to get back to reading. She has a parasol that shoots darts, for goodness sake!

The Story

Alexia Maccon, the Lady Woolsey, is a preternatural. If she touches creatures like vampires and werewolves they turn human. She’s married to a large and lusty Scottish werewolf lord, and spends her time advising Queen Victoria on matters of the supernatural. When her husband leaves for Scotland, Alexia sets off after him, armed with her trusty parasol and plagued by a pair of Victorian ladies, in the company of the mysterious but sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux.

This book is full of lovable and strongly drawn characters with quick wits and good conversation. Add a good dose of humor, manners, and steampunk, and you’ll understand why I’m gushing.

Carriger has a lovely way with words, and a knack for verbing nouns that makes her prose, I don’t know, sparkle and skitter across the page like an adorable baby bunny, um, covered in glitter. It just makes you want to smile, is what I’m saying.

“Have a little nip of this, my dear,” [said sexy cross-dressing French inventor Madame Lefoux], “Calm your nerves.” She handed [the flask] to Ivy.

Ivy nipped, blinked a couple times, nipped again, and then graduated from frantic to loopy. “Why that burns all the way down!”

Although this was the second book in the series, it stood on its own just fine for me. Carriger managed to write a story that was self-contained without either a) over-explaining what happened in the first book for those of us who completely ignore proper order or b) making the book read incomprehensibly. I feel like I can read the first book without really any spoilers, and I can’t wait to do it. Next paycheck.

The only thing was, I can’t believe that Alexia didn’t get that Madame Lefoux was a lesbian even though Lefoux breathed it out of every pore, as well as making thinly-veiled allusions to her sexual preferences in every other conversation. Especially since Alexia is friends with the celebratedly gay vampire Lord Akeldama (another fantastic and delightful character who I can’t wait to read more about in books 1 and 3.).

Read this book now!

Wait. Do you not also obsess about Small Beer Press? Everything they do is awesome. Check them out.

That said, I went nuts on their sale even though I was supposed to be saving money for Peru, and I ended up with a copy of Carmen Dog that I knew would go in storage until Rob and I got back from our Indefinite Peruvian Journey.

But now we’re back. And I read Carmen Dog

(There’s one paragraph about the end–I’ve marked it with a spoiler alert. Skip it if you don’t like that sort of thing).

Here’s where I talk about the book

Carmen Dog is a shortish book, a quick read that left me both entertained and vaguely disturbed. The idea behind it is that women have begun to change into creatures and vice versa. A whole spectrum of biases against women are revealed now that the line has blurred between “wife” and “pet.” Women, having always been a frighteningly opaque species, are now even more incomprehensible as their normal feminine whims merge with the urge to fly, to swim in the sea, to climb trees, to gnaw on human flesh.

Emshwiller rarely describes her characters, only giving wildly colorful descriptions that leave everything to the imagination. The whys and hows of the women’s transformations are never fully answered: on one page the women do things that only women could do, at other times that only animals could. Emshwiller doesn’t try to direct our imaginings, she merely puts a few hints out to entice.

The main character is Pooch, a well-bred and extremely loyal dog-turned-young-woman. She teeters on the edge of her new-found humanity: she enjoys the new responsibilities, artistic leanings and the elegant new hands which are a part of her new transformation, but she’s also been thrust into a world of malicious intention and conflicted feelings.

Pooch is loyal, as a dog should be. Her self-worth is found almost entirely in the eyes of the men she desires to serve well and unselfishly, to the detriment of her own aspirations. In a dog, this is admirable. In a young woman, Pooch’s slavish desire to prove herself to her master is extremely uncomfortable to read about. Emshwiller plays with this tension: after hearing that the master will come for her at the pound, Pooch reels:

But if she apologizes profusely enough and promises to work much harder, to get up very early, eat less, and not take even one little moment for herself or even one little penny ever again for such frivolities as flowers [...], perhaps in this way she can make it up to him or do penance of some sort. “Anything,” she will say to him, “I’ll do absolutely anything: lick your feet, walk one step behind your left heel…just let me stay and serve you and let me see the baby now and then if only from a distance [...].” She hopes that after she says all this and makes the promises, he’ll see that she’s worth keeping–a thought not uncommon to many creatures of her sex. (p. 16.)

Carmen Dog is a brutal critique of the dynamic of relationships between men and women, but Emshwiller doesn’t come across as having an agenda–she’s just created a strange little “what if?” world, then taken it and ran.

Pooch is the only female voice in the novel. Emshwiller gives us the perspective of the Master, of the Doctor, of the worried men at the Academy of Motherhood who try to find a way to rear children without the tainted influence of unstable women. The men, it turns out, are nearly all assholes. Women have become property, a thing to be controlled, and beneath Emshwiller’s lovely prose runs an unsettling current of sexual dominance and manipulation.

It was almost as though the men had at last found a world to their liking, in which they had even more control than before and in which relationships and responsibilities were less confining. After all, they merely involved dumb animals who were not worth consideration, politeness, time, effort, gifts. [...] To be fair, however, one must admit that a small percentage of the men are trying to help out as best they can, both in bringing reason to chaos and also in bringing a little happiness or, at the very least, some small comforts, to everyone’s lives–whether human or animal or half and half–inasmuch as such a thing may be possible. (p. 32.)

Upon fleeing her master’s house to protect the baby from its mother (who is rapidly becoming a snapping turtle), Pooch is thrown into a women-only pound where the female creatures are abused and, in one instance, sexually assaulted. She is then transferred to a basement research facility where the Doctor performs cruel experiments on the women. After losing her beautiful operatic singing voice as a result of his torture, Pooch escapes with the baby and navigates the streets of New York, penniless and defenseless. Eventually the women and their allies form a resistance to fight their marginalization.

[Spoiler alert] In the end, however, there’s a happily-ever-after moment that rings false. Pooch ends up with her dream man, who seems like a very nice sort (yay!), but that is presented in a “happy epilogue” with two other matches that left a sour taste in my mouth. Two of the main sadistic male characters we meet–the Doctor and the Opera Producer–have repeatedly expressed interest (obsession? love, we’re told) in two of Pooch’s friends. Since we never get inside the heads of Pooch’s friends, it’s hard to know whether Chloe (an ex-siamese) really wants to marry the Opera Producer after weeks of sexual slavery to him, or whether Phillip (an ex-kingsnake who turned out to be female) really wants to marry the Doctor after he tortured her. Emshwiller presents their unions as tidy “of course it ended that way” moments, without any of the biting commentary and analysis that she used throughout the rest of the book.

In the end, however, I loved Carmen Dog. If you haven’t read it, I heartily recommend it to you.

Sure, part of that has to do with there not being anyone of my gender to relate to, but mostly it’s that Lake hasn’t created likable characters. That’s the point, and he does an admirable job of creating more sympathy than I would have expected for these deeply flawed men who are each trapped by their own personal nightmares.

The three main characters are all dealing with their own pasts, though sometimes it seemed like those pasts were only there only as place markers for characterization. Jason, for example, must be twisted because he seems to get a kick out of torturing people (I know this because it was mentioned once or twice), and he lost his father in a public, humiliating way (BUT WHAT THE HELL ARE SOUL BOTTLES AND WHAT DID THEY HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?). Imago is a debtor who has a mother he doesn’t like for some vague reason. Bijaz, for all the degradation of soul and body, is understandable in part because he’s forced to deal with the fact that his entire life has been twisted by ideology. He’s a true believer who is crushed out of his belief, which is a character type that I always find compelling. Each find their redemption by the end of the book, breaking out of their own selfishness for the greater good.

The crux of the novel is the intrusion of the “noumenal,” the magical and paranormal, into the everyday world. It is a novel of politics, of fat landed politicians doing nothing while the people are daily terrorized by their Old Gods. Invading armies are rumored to be marching on the city (although the reader isn’t certain for the first 2/3 of the book whether or not they’re coming or just rumors), and a self-important debtor decides to revive the office of Lord Mayor in order to escape debtor’s prison.

Eventually this compiles itself into an allegory of light and darkness and sacrifice. The book is compared to Perdido Street Station (crazy painfully good), City of Saints & Madmen (haven’t read it yet) and The Etched City (among my favorite books). Yes, it has the same flavors of a brutal decadent world that these books do, but to me the comparison seemed more like eating sugar-free peach Jell-O instead of climbing up the tree and eating a fat sun-ripe peach fresh off the branch with the juice so sickly sweet and running down your elbows….

So, where are the women?

No, not every novel needs to be an equally balanced feminist manifesto, but Lake has created a world that is extraordinarily hostile to women. Why are there no women in power? Because in the world of the City Imperishable women are silent, they are not expected to be anything more than mothers, sisters, barmaids, and blow-up dolls. The main characters reactions to the women around them shows this–Jason almost laughs to find that the woman who just treated him considers herself a physician, because women just aren’t doctors. Fortunately she’s extremely self-effacing (I hope ironic?) “I am no one, a woman of shadows” (118).

I actually picked this book up a couple of years ago and read the back, only to think that it looked way too “Manly Men do Manly Things” for my tastes. When I got around to reading it this time I was at least thirty pages in before I realized I hadn’t been introduced to a single female character. Not one word had been spoken in a woman’s voice, and not even one single barmaid had stepped into view.

Like I said, Lake has created a world in which women are systematically silenced, and I like to think that in a way he’s doing it deliberately. He calls attention to this without making it a talking point of the book, which I appreciate,

The first female character shows up on page 43. She’s not pretty, and hardly feminine: “She was hard to look up at–too tall, too thin, clad in dark gray leather, with hair the color of rotten iron and a lined face with eyes as gray as her clothing” (43). She’s Biggest Sister, the leader of the shadow women’s crime league called the Tribade. Lake gives her a quick feminist speech on page 51 (my favorite line is “But you swing meat between your legs, which is the first requirement for bearing a chain of office in this city.”)

This is a woman who falls more into the category of “strange, unbalanced antisocial fighter character with deeply unsettling powers that are impossible to put a finger on” rather than “woman.” She has deliberately worked against her femininity by cutting off her own breasts (though she still wears little fake-breast bags of sand for some reason?), and by her actions. She flits in and out of the novel, coming out for some dominatrix action and generally making the men uneasy with her shark-like, knife-blade, malicious grin.

The next female character to walk onstage isn’t until page 144. I’m not counting the (to my memory) two females with quick speaking lines and two or three women who briefly crossed the street behind the main characters or served them coffee or whatnot, because if these women existed in the novel it was only in the mind of the main characters. They were evaluated, for the most part, solely on the basis on their looks and fuckability. “She would have been pretty in a fragile way as a full woman, (163)” Imago thinks of his female boxed dwarf assistant.

Jason’s sister appears on page 144, having long ago sold herself to a Tokhari trader, and now returned triumphant as their leader (sounds like it was a good deal for her to leave the City’s repression, if the Tokhari are egalitarian enough to be led by a woman). After her appearance, other women begin to come out of the woodwork for bit parts.

All in all….

I wasn’t the biggest fan. I often felt like the plot points were clutching at straws (though I get that impression from a lot of “The Essence of the World is Out Of Place and We Must Make It Right” novels, and I doubt I’ll read anything else in the City Imperishable world. I’m looking forward to reading something else by Jay Lake, though, because I really liked his prose. I’ll be sure to report back.

My year-after-college-graduation roommate was in love with Dandelion Wine. We had grown up together–she was my little sister’s age, and thus fell into the category of “annoying” while we were younger. After I went away to college and “re-met” her a few years later, I realized that I really dug her style. I still do. She’s one of the cuter things in the world.

I went through a long dry spell of reading materials during our six months in Peru, mainly because it was so hard to find anything in a book exchange that wasn’t written by Nora Roberts or Tom Clancy. So when we got into Portland to visit my awesome ex-roommate and her adorable 2-year-old, I found myself completely overwhelmed by her bookshelf.

I was looking for something to pass the evening, something pleasant, well-written, meaningful…. I was frozen by indecision when faced with such an array of great books that I’ve always wanted to read. My fingers lit on one, then another classic work of beauty and longing. I bit my lip, tormented by indecision.

I finally settled on a slim, well-loved copy of Dandelion Wine–partly because I knew how much my ex-roommate liked it, and partly because it looked short and I was a bit worried that my attention span had taken a blow. I settled down on the couch with a crocheted afghan pulled up around my neck, and began to read.

So I finally talk about the book here

I haven’t read any Bradbury since I forgot how to spell Fahrenheit 451 in high school. Dandelion Wine is not what I was expecting–a gently nostalgic look at childhood through the lens of Summertime.

Douglas Spaulding takes it upon himself to chronicle the rituals and revelations of summer, from the first pair of New Sneakers, to the loss of his best friend. It’s as though through the very attempt to capture his childhood on paper, however, he destroys its illusion. He realizes that friendships end, people die, and that important rituals cease to have any meaning.

The novel is lusciously written, touching, heartbreaking, haunting…. And then there’s the serial killer chapter that snuck up on me while I was innocently reading in bed. I expected another wistful tale of missed connections or angst-filled childhood revelation. Instead, I found myself suddenly immersed in a heart-pounding chase of terror, where you flee the most terrible thing you can think of, only to find it in the place you thought was the safest.

Did I have nightmares that night? Of course I did. It’s near page 121, if you want to time your bedtime reading around missing it (recommended).

In short, read this book. Carefully.