archytas's reviews
1675 reviews

This is a comedic, cozy sci fi adventure based around city planning. It is a very chaotic-neutral endorsed moral, if that is your thing. I find it entertaining enough.

"There was that woman [in the prison treatment program] I don’t even remember which one, who said she was ‘addicted to money.’ She said she would do anything for money. That didn’t really come together for me. I don’t think money is like drugs or alcohol. You need money to survive.”

This is a powerfully told elaboration of research of Dewey, Zara and Connolly.  Denser elaboration of their research perspective, background materials and feminist operating model are interleaved between sections focused on composite characters, created as a result of the researchers time with women in Wyoming's only female prison. With a state of less than 1 million people, the authors chose not to create composite characters as their only option to preserve the privacy of the women they worked with.
The result is undeniably artificial - it is still readable enough, but you aren't in danger of thinking these characters might be real women. 
the vignettes of their lives shown are also clearly designed to showcase the authors' research findings, which revolve around the experiences of addiction, trauma, domestic violence and poverty in creating the choice landscape that the women's offending occurs within. 
The book can be highly evocative: Tammy, in particular, a young mother from a "known" criminalised family, raised in foster care and juvenile detention, drug affected and well-used to the role of authorities in her life, is desperate to conceal her learning disability, knowing this will make reunification with her daughter, now herself in foster care, less likely. With no support system outside her drug-involved family, she has little chance of meeting parole conditions or avoiding reincarceration. 
The authors detail the special, full-time treatment unit in the prison for drug-affected residents who can end up their choice or court order. Here, the women are not allowed to communicate with others outside the unit, must hold regular accountability sessions at which residents apologise for rule infractions and agree to counsel each other, and are encouraged to talk about their trauma. The authors show how women react very differently to this environment, which is preferred by many, but it nevertheless comes across as a depressing obsession with trying to exclusively focus on the individual drivers for these women's problems, not the structural ones which they are imprisoned in, no matter how many times they rehash their childhood abuse, and apologise for their missteps. One of the writers wrying notes (herself poaching a colleague's line) that these women have already surrendered too much to too many higher powers for that to be much use to them now.
Wyoming is an unusual prison - a fact that the authors freely concede. It is unusually isolated, unusually small, and unusually low security (the authors note that in their months of work, no women expressed that she felt unsafe in the prison). The absence of funding for education or activities mean that boredom, hopelessness and critical shortages of basic necessities are the main enemies of the women incarcerated there. Nevertheless, this is a useful addition to anyone's understanding of the dynamics of incarceration.

"Aliyah took the blow. She turned away and pressed her hand hard across her eyes. This crisis, which should have swept the two women together, had instead torn open an honesty that marooned them almost two decades apart. Perhaps the closest they had ever been was the moment they had first met, drawing blood, and every meeting thereafter had been an attempt to regain an irretrievable intimacy."

This is a breathtakingly good debut. Abdu brings us a tale of psychological intensity, spun in taut, tense prose and set on a haunted property isolated enough to feel unmoored while close enough to a small community to feel scrutinised. At the centre of the book and the house is Aliyah, whose self-reliance has long since passed healthy. She is shadowed by Shep, a local imam whose own demons sit, at first, comfortably alongside her own, and then by Hana, a woman struggling not to be defined by victimhood. The brightly insouciant daughter of Aliyah binds all, and then Billie, a local Kamiliroi nurse, and her family.
These people push and pull at each other, both repelled and attracted by each others' needs and wants. Abdu explores the discomfort of love, the difficulty of distinguishing self.  Shep and Aliyah revel in silence. The language, the constructed sentences, rise and fall in an almost soothing way, even while laying out hard, sparse disconnects. The book can feel unbearably lovely at times, elevating the stuff of friendship, survival and love to something transcendent.
Abdu's focus is tightly on the emotions of the characters, which are focused on their immediate lives, but a broader social critique informs the book. Aliyah and Hana have lives marked by their gender - "From these men she knew only that to express resentment, to hint at any restlessness or dissatisfaction was to intimate a desire bordering dangerously on need, which, no matter its nature, was received as a threat to their ideal of social stability, hormonal predictability, and lifelong virility, considered so alarming that Aliyah always felt obliged to rally reassurance that her disquiet was but a passing phase. If that failed, there was always the option of blaming female hysteria and requesting a prayer for either exorcism or pity. In the weeks before leaving the city, she had wished her father’s house would collapse on her to grant her some relief. In the last days of her marriage, she had sat on their penthouse balcony and watched planes fly low overhead, gripped by a superb terror when for a moment it seemed a plane might stoop so low as to crash into her building, low enough to crush her, suffocate her, obliterate everything.". Shep is Palestinian, a refugee from the 2009 Gaza attacks. The emotional lives of the characters revolve around these issues, and the concepts of land ownership. In speaking to Billie, Shep explains: ""The violence of a settler colony pushed me out of my land, only for me to come here where the same violence is ongoing. I do to you what was done to me. And those who forced me to escape slaughter were once forced to do the same. Like a chain of loss and expulsion, only none of us get back what was ours. It takes a hypocrite to flee from occupied land to a land of the occupied, or maybe just a desperate man, but you can’t say that you don’t expect me to take responsibility when I say that I expect it from Israeli children who were born and raised on the land I consider my own, which is also the only land they have ever known. The two thoughts can’t be reconciled, and yet I live here, I want to plant my feet here, and I also hate that feet are planted where I lived before, so I’m ashamed. I know what’s yours.’"
These interweavings arise naturally, an inevitable part of telling the stories of these characters because they are an inextricable part, and hence never feel like a distraction.
The book is not quite perfect. The pacing is uneven - there are times where the plot seems to spin wheels when it shouldn't. Some of Billie's early dialogue feels a little like exposition (a trend I am starting to notice with Aboriginal characters in Australian fiction, who sometimes seem to want to explain colonialism and how it has personally affected them to the main character as soon as they meet them). And I'm not sure the book really needed the bushfire, as opposed to the impeding threat of it. But these are quibbles in a book which manages to draw out the complexities of living on unceded land, in a terribly traumatising world, without ever being about anything except Aliyah and her crew, and their extraordinarily drawn emotional lives.

Tonally, this can at times be jarring. Chan narrates in a fairly upbeat mystery tone with a hand wavy approach to plot points. But the content - a realistic look at the impact of cyber bullying on vulnerable teenagers - is sombre. I'm not sure if the tone settled, or I got used to it, but in the second half, when Chan hits hard with the emotional centre , I was completely won to the combination. Certainly, the evolution of what initially appeared to be a saintlike protagonist into someone far more human, if not as likable, was a strength. The book develops into a serious examination of the complexities that surround online anonymous cultures - well, alongside some absurd mystery millionaire bits - and it finds small elements to keep you guessing until the end. Chan uses the challenging of readers' assumptions to position challlenging of simplistic assumptions around bullying. I'd really like for more of Chan's work to be translated now :)

This is a concise outline of the arguments that Shehadeh has made in previous works. The first 60% I think is a rerelease, and the latter part covers the events from the 2023- attacks on Gaza until the publication date in early 2024. Shahedeh has had a birds eye view of much of this diplomacy, and both his knowledge and his particular perspective shine through. (This is not a criticism - everyone has a perspective, and Shahedeh is quite willing to criticise both Hamas and Fatah, being upfront with his opinions).
It was admirable to get this out quickly with so much world attention on the issue, but I would recommend something longer with a less rushed version of the history for those wanting a deep dive.

Another atmospheric, taut thriller from Ekback, set in the Artic Circle near the Norway/Sweden border. This is a more assured book than the first in the series, and Ekback introduces a great deal more complexity into her examination of the social, economic and political tensions of the time. By switching perspectives, she also gives balanced, naunced and ultimately sympathetic views of both the settler and Sami societies. The plot is of the "and another twist!" variety, which is not really my favourite, but as it managed to involve every character in the ultimate reveal somehow - and the characters were so compelling - I did quite enjoy it.

As would be expected of a New Yorker writer, Blitzer tells this st, interspersing the stories of three focal individuals with the narrative of US policy engagement with Central America. The individuals give us reasons to care about the policy changes, humanising a big picture narrative, while the policy detail tries to explain the whole mess.
The book is ambitious in scope - starting under Carter and finishing under Trump, and covering primarily El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with Nicaragua always lurking in the wings. The scope is one of the best parts of the book - tight enough to detail what happened in these countries, but broad enough to give a glimpse of how the whole picture fits together. Blitzer also succintly covers the political weirdness of US immigration enforcement, making it easier to understand some of the Obama and Trump years.
There are unfortunate gaps in Blitzer's analysis - while he certainly covers US decisions around the region, he tends to imply electoral needs and ideology primarily drive these - the book lacks a focus on the role of US/Canadian/Multinational exploitation of the region (or in fact any economic analysis, including the role of migration criminalisation in keeping a low-wage pool of workers in the US). But there is nevertheless plenty here to get angry about, and any writer seeking to connect the dots between US foreign policy and the desperate plight of Central American refugees is a welcome addition to reading lists. 

Chang-Eppig brings the world of Shek Yeung to life in this really entertaining fictional take on the historic pirate queen. Which is not to imply a lack of realism - Chang-Eppig's research shows here, and she doesn't flinch from the trauma suffered by Yeung or that inflicted by her. But from this historical figure, a story of the triumph of a very clever, very tough woman emerges. Chang-Eppig smartly softens Yeung to the extent she can, giving her a moral compass, a desire to provide other girls with a better life, and just enough second guessing to feel human, without getting her killed.
She also excels at evoking setting - from the chain of brothel boats, to the mansions on land, and the seas, or isolated fishing villages.
This is marketed as a fantasy, and Chang-Eppig interweaves stories of the goddess of the sea into the narrative. But there is no interventionist deities here, no superpowers swooping in to events. This is much more historical fiction with a spiritual twist - which ultimately serves to make a point about how we create legends.
And those legends involve sea battles, shifting alliances and deep friendships. I really hope someone adapts this for the screen - it would make a fabulous lavish production.

This is an eclectic collection, from poetry to memoir to fiction, all exploring aspects of Australian identity which don't get much airtime. Some of my favourite writers are here - unsurprisingly Sisonke Msimang's contribution is a knockout, as is Omar Musa's - but on the whole the collection felt less satisfying or provoking than I was expecting.

A series of essays dealing with how we map our environment, the wonderfully titled Mapmatics takes a surprisingly broad ranging approach to the topic. Rowińska starts with possibly the best chapter, dealing with the history of projections. From there, she leaps into a range of topics from how we have mapped the ocean floor, to epidemiological mapping, to the technology behind parcel deliveries. There is a light sprinkling of math, but the emphasis here is on storytelling. As a result, everything really sings