Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday July 22, 2010
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ELVIS & OLIVE: Super Detectives
Stephanie Watson
Scholastic
ISBN 978 0 545 15148 1
$15.99
Reviewed by Mary Quattlebaum
Can't get enough of gal-pal adventures? Those zipping through the popular "Ivy and Bean" and "Clementine" chapter-book series may now be ready for the wit and mischief of Natalie Wallis, 10, and Annie Beckett, 9. In the first novel, "Elvis & Olive" (2008), the two became fast friends, adopted code names -- Elvis for Annie, Olive for Natalie -- and spent a summer spying on neighbors, with results disastrous, hilarious and sometimes helpful. This second tale in the series finds the girls harboring secret wishes as they begin fifth grade. Shy Natalie wants to win a spot on the student council; scrappy Annie yearns to find the mother who abandoned her 18 months ago. Using childhood's cockeyed logic, they decide to further their aims by opening a detective agency to help others, especially the now-wary spyees of the first book. Stephanie Watson brings new resonance to familiar kid-lit motifs -- secret clubs, young sleuths -- by charting the tender as well as the funny moments of this unlikely friendship. She also eschews today's ubiquitous first-person point of view for third-person's broader, less self-conscious perspective. Subplots involving a stray dog, banned comic books and Annie's condemned home resolve in unpredictable ways, and descriptive phrases surprise and delight. With a few just-right words, Watson vividly conveys a mood or experience, from Natalie happily "giving the soft September air a high five" to the girls imagining all the "mysteries moving around inside the neighbors."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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PROJECT SEAHORSE
Pamela S. Turner
Houghton Mifflin
ISBN 978 0 547 20713 1
$18
Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
They look like a miniature combination of kangaroo, horse, crocodile and monkey, but they are actually fish. The male is the one who gets pregnant, giving birth to between five and 2,000 babies at a time. About 20 million of them are caught every year, with most going to China for use in traditional medicine. And yet the wonderfully odd seahorse wasn't studied in the wild until a young American named Amanda Vincent came along. Vincent has devoted much of her career to studying the creature in its habitats around the world. A mother of two young children who started Project Seahorse with a colleague in 1996 to help protect the coral reefs around the Philippines, she's another great role model presented by the "Scientists in the Field" series. Author Pamela Turner nimbly alternates between the wonders of the seahorse (photographed in a variety of shapes and sizes and in ultra-vivid close-up by Scott Tuason) and Project Seahorse's efforts to prevent over-fishing and blast fishing (using a bomb to kill fish that then float to the surface). She also captures the sounds, sights and issues involved in this marine-based science, including the undeniable needs of Filipino families who rely on the seahorse trade. This book makes abundantly clear that healthy coral reefs are in everyone's best interest.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WINDUP GIRL
Paolo Bacigalupi
Night Shade
ISBN 978 1 59780 157 7
300 pages
$14.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Not since William Gibson's pioneering cyberpunk classic, "Neuromancer" (1984), has a first novel excited science fiction readers as much as Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl." I missed it last year when the book first appeared, but three recent events have made it a timely addition to the summer reading list.
First, just two weeks ago "The Windup Girl" was awarded the Locus Magazine Award for best first novel. Second, in May Bacigalupi received the even more prestigious Nebula Award -- given by the Science Fiction Writers of America -- for best novel of the year. Those are convincing literary endorsements. But the third reason to pick up "The Windup Girl" is for its harrowing, on-the-ground portrait of power plays, destruction and civil insurrection in Bangkok.
Even though the book is set in an imagined future, its depiction of the city during violent unrest feels astonishingly true-to-life. Inadvertently, Bacigalupi offers a window on what it must have been like in Thailand's capital during this spring's strife and bloodshed. Though he stresses in his acknowledgments that the novel "should not be construed as representative of present-day Thailand or the Thai people," its overall vision of this wondrous and decadent city is nonetheless very close to that found in such contemporary thrillers as John Burdett's "Bangkok Tattoo."
By the end of the 22nd century, the world has been ravaged by deadly viruses, the disappearance of entire species, the rising of the oceans and the loss of all power based on petroleum. Sailing ships and dirigibles transport goods. Computers still exist, but they are operated by treadle-power, like old-time sewing machines. Guns shoot "razor disks" rather than bullets. Factories employ megadonts -- genetically altered elephants -- to turn their dynamos. Even "the Empire of America is no more," while something unspeakable happened in Finland. Not least, gigantic corporations like PurCal and AgriGen have become supra-national forces, with their own armies.
The Thai kingdom has so far survived, in part because it has sealed itself off from the outside world, and through draconian measures managed to keep the food supply relatively safe. The Environment Ministry -- supported by the brutally patriotic "white shirts" -- maintains stringent border and biological security: It has been known to burn entire villages to the ground at the very first instance of deadly "blister rust," "cibiscosis" or "genehack weevil." However, in recent years, the Child Queen has allowed the upstart Trade Ministry to gain power and to encourage some small-scale foreign investment in the kingdom.
Pretending to be a developer of innovative "kink-springs," Anderson is in fact an agent of AgriGen, assigned to Bangkok to orchestrate a covert yet aggressive initiative by the Des Moines-based corporation. He employs Hock Seng, an aging but resilient Chinese who lost his shipping company, family and very nearly his own life a few years previous during the genocides in Malaya. Trusting no one, he dreams of re-establishing his name and wealth. By contrast, Jaidee, the so-called Tiger of Bangkok, is the pugnaciously idealistic captain of the white shirts, determined to preserve his country against the onslaught of foreign influence and corruption. His unsmiling Lt. Kanya suffers from some dark burden on her soul.
And then there is Emiko, the windup girl. Windups, or New People, are essentially genetically modified test-tube babies, creche-grown in Japan. In other countries they are branded and loathed as genetic trash, without true souls. All windups move with a herky-jerky gait, like puppets on invisible strings.
In essence, Emiko has been designed to be a supremely beautiful, compliant geisha. Obedience has been built into her DNA. Her skin has been made ivory smooth by reducing the size of her pores. Never intended to function in a tropical climate, Emiko has nonetheless been callously abandoned in Bangkok: Her patron decided "to upgrade new in Osaka." She was then bought by the unscrupulous Raleigh, a survivor of "coups and counter-coups, calorie plagues and starvation," who now "squats like a liver-spotted toad in his Ploenchit 'club,' smiling in self-satisfaction as he instructs newly arrived foreigners in the lost arts of pre-Contraction debauch."
Raleigh's nightclub soon features a very special sex show: Each night the brutalized Emiko must suffer the attentions of an inventively sadistic co-worker. Afterward, her body is for hire by anyone seeking a forbidden, transgressive thrill. The girl lives in near-suicidal despair.
Until the night she meets Anderson, who tells Emiko of an enclave of windups, "escapees from the coal war," dwelling in the forests to the North. Emiko soon dreams of fleeing her sordid destiny and making her way, somehow, to this village.
From the windup, the smitten Anderson learns of a mysterious Gi Bu Sen, who has developed a new blight-resistant fruit that has recently appeared in the Thai markets. Protected by the government and living in luxurious seclusion somewhere, this Kurtz-like farang can only be the renegade AgriGen scientist Gibbons, the greatest generipper in the world, long thought to be dead. He must be found and restored to the corporation. It is because of his genius -- and the kingdom's hidden storehouse of carefully preserved seeds -- that Thailand has been able to stay "one step ahead of the plagues."
As the novel advances, the political machinations grow increasingly tense. General Pracha, Minister Akkarat, a sinister adviser to the queen named Somdet Chaopraya, even the so-called "Dung Lord" all vie for power. Meanwhile, the increasingly troubled Lt. Kanya converses with a ghost, one who knows her secret. While Emiko may be the titular windup girl, Kanya is the novel's wound(up woman, a human kink spring under intense psychological pressure. When everything begins to fall apart, these two will determine the fate of Krung Thep, the City of Divine Beings -- Bangkok.
Readers of science fiction will recognize multiple influences on this excellent novel: Cordwainer Smith, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, China Mieville and even, possibly, Margaret Atwood, who proffers a similar vision of post-apocalyptic want, fanaticism and gene-manipulation in "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood." Clearly, Paolo Bacigalupi is a writer to watch for in the future. Just don't wait that long to enjoy the darkly complex pleasures of "The Windup Girl."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR
Allegra Goodman
Dial
ISBN 978 0 385 34085 4
394 pages
$26
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Don't let that cozy title turn you away from Allegra Goodman's new novel. Although "The Cookbook Collector" sounds like something about a Potato Peel Pie-making cat who solves mysteries, it's actually a thoughtful story about the disruptions of the early 21st century.
Yes, it's awfully charming, but the book's charm is grounded by a searching contemplation of contemporary values in the age of sudden fortunes, sensational bankruptcies and terrorist attacks. This is, after all, the gracious world of Allegra Goodman, whose most recent adult novel, "Intuition," shed her sprightly wit on cancer research. I can't think of anyone else who manages that precarious tone so well, balanced with Zenlike tranquillity between genuine mirth and heartfelt despair. She describes modern life in stories as witty and astute as Zoe Heller's or Claire Messud's but without a drop of bitterness.
"The Cookbook Collector" follows the gonzo trajectory of the Nasdaq, and since each chapter is dated -- from the heady autumn of 1999 to the chastened spring of 2002 -- anyone old enough to drive will suspect what's approaching. (It also includes such an effervescent description of the stock market crash that you'll almost forget why you can't retire until you're 92.) For several hundred pages, though, this delightful romantic comedy beguiles us into ignoring gravity, like those giddy investors who imagined they were geniuses.
At the center are two sisters in their 20s living in Northern California: Emily, the older, responsible one, is a financial wunderkind whose data-storage company, Veritech, will propel her onto the Forbes list. The only person who couldn't care less is her free-spirit sister, Jess, who's pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy and working part time in a used-book store. She'd rather save trees than money.
There's a classic sitcom incompatibility between these siblings (Versace vs. vegan), and I suspect there's an autobiographical element to this tension, too: While Goodman earned a Ph.D. in English literature, her sister became an oncologist, and there must have been times when scanning lines of poetry seemed flighty next to saving people's lives. In any case, the affection that transcends Jess' and Emily's frustration with each other remains the heart of "The Cookbook Collector" as the book's multiplex plot spins out beyond them.
Far beyond them. As an author, Goodman is the courteous host who can never say no to the arrival of one more guest. I wasn't always persuaded that her book had room for all these people, but even when Goodman just lightly sketches in side characters, they somehow get right up off the page and start pulling on our affections. While Emily wrestles with the challenges of her nascent company and its staff of programmers and administrators, her superman boyfriend, Jonathan, has his own Internet startup in Massachusetts called ISIS, and sometimes the two sisters fade in the background as we switch coasts and watch Jonathan and his colleagues and their friends and family.
All these sympathetic characters lure us into the card-table boardrooms and 24-hour computer labs back when the World Wide Web was as open and potentially lucrative as the Wild Wild West. It's a thrilling, fully realized domain -- was it just 10 years ago? -- when the laws of physics and finance were suspended and kids dropped out of college to issue billions of dollars of stock in companies that made no profit, often made nothing at all. (Checked your Pets.com shares recently?)
In this novel explicitly concerned with the morality of business, Goodman has staffed the two Internet startups -- Veritech and ISIS -- with young people who want to realize their liberal idealism, like that new silly-sounding search engine that insists, "Don't be evil." But as she suggested in "Intuition," it's funny how confusing a few hundred million dollars can be. "What a strange effect money or the idea of money had on people," she writes in this lithe critique of wealth and corporate culture.
Looking at "The Cookbook Collector" alongside Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic," Jess Walter's "The Financial Lives of the Poets" and Eric Puchner's "Model Home," I'm convinced that American novelists are slowly creating as vibrant and incisive a record of the decade's economic chaos as our great nonfiction writers, such as Michael Lewis, Gillian Tett and Andrew Ross Sorkin. This rich body of art and reporting may be the only lasting restitution we get for the havoc wreaked by Lehman Brothers, et al.
But cheer up -- "The Cookbook Collector" is a romantic comedy, regardless of its serious dot-com, ticker-tape subplot. That enchanting aspect comes from the adventures of Emily's sister, Jess, the whimsical philosophy student, who eventually reasserts herself as our heroine. Yorick's, the used-book store where she works, is owned by a single man in possession of a good fortune, so you should have a pretty clear idea of the universal truth we're pursuing here. George is a retired Microsoft millionaire, a good-looking, 36-year-old curmudgeon who has given up on relationships. He's "too selfish to marry anyone" anyhow, and he's constantly complaining about Jess and her granola ideals.
Their prickly banter is a giveaway, but long after we've started rooting for them, Jess is still protesting, "We don't agree on anything." Can love bloom between a judgmental, uptight bachelor and a dreamy tree-hugger who won't eat honey from "indentured bees"? Can these opposites finally overcome their pride and prejudice?
Admittedly, too much is going on in this novel. Although a liberal rabbi assures Jess that "there are no coincidences," that gets harder and harder to believe as they pile up in these pages. And a final revelation of a long-lost family would make Gilbert and Sullivan blush.
The larger problem, though, is that all this busyness pushes the spiritual component to the margins. Like Dara Horn and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Goodman has produced superb works about Jewish mysticism, particularly "Kaaterskill Falls," her National Book Award finalist, and "Paradise Park," her comic survey of American spirituality. But in "The Cookbook Collector," the rabbi drops in now and then, an extra matzoh ball we could take or leave. His hearty faith is only one more quirky ingredient of a story that can seem too lightly mixed.
Still, God knows plenty of delicacies are simmering in "The Cookbook Collector," including some hilarious descriptions of food from an antique cookbook collection that excites Jess' boss (and, of course, introduces more characters). Goodman is a fantastically fluid writer, and yet for all her skill, she's a humble, transparent one who stays out of the way, never drawing attention to her style or cleverness. Even if you're coldhearted enough to resist Jess' sunny appeal, you're likely to fall for her creator.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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