Unwieldy Creatures

 Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Brook Tsai (2022) 296 pages

"Unwieldy Creatures, a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein, follows the story of three beings who all navigate life from the margins." So starts the synopsis that caught my interest. I love the cultural influence Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has had, but it was a novel I didn't finish in high school. I made slow progress through this retelling. The style and method of three people telling us the story is very similar to how Shelley's novel is presented. Dr. Z's dangerous ambition takes up the most pages. Plum, the protege, commands considerably fewer pages. And Ash, the creature, only shares their voice briefly toward the end. Tsai includes some bilingualism with Mandarin characters in Plum's story, so I had to flip to the end of the chapters for translation footnotes. The author also lifts some sentences straight from the original Frankenstein novel. The story is set now, or in the near future, so the science is more up-to-date involving in vitro gestation. However, there are still plot holes that didn't totally make sense to me. I'm glad this version exists. The rejection faced by some queer people from their families is a theme that fits well in this "creature feature" framework. Themes of estranged parents and children still resonate in this context. Tsai writes like the Romantic writers of Mary Shelley's era, and this is the part I struggled with the most. There is a lack of energy moving the plot along in the later part of this book.

The Road to Tender Hearts

The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett, 384 pages

PJ Halliday's life has been in a bit of a rut over the last decade. Sure, he won $1.5 million in scratch-off lottery tickets, but he also hasn't processed the grief of losing his eldest daughter 15 years ago or dealt with his wife leaving him for the birder next door, and he got enough DUIs to have his license revoked for 8 years. So when he learns that his high school crush is now a widow, he decides to take a cross-country road trip to try again to woo her. Complicating matters is the fact that he's suddenly become the guardian of his estranged brother's grandkids, but hey, why not take two newly orphaned fourth graders (both of whom are dealing with the shocking loss of their parents in wildly different ways) on a road trip to a the faraway Tender Hearts Retirement Community?

The description of this book sounds like a mess, and yeah, it kind of is, but in the best possible way. I love the way that Hartnett depicts grief at all ages and stages with kindness and occasional (but appropriate) humor, and I love the way this weird family grows both as a group and as individuals. And I think the fact the death-detecting cat doesn't top my list of why this book is fantastic is pretty telling, as in most books, that would be the best part. Highly recommended.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and a Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman  339 pp.

This is an account of refugee Hmong Family in Merced, California and the unfortunate battles with the medical establishment that led to their daughter's existence in a persistent vegetative state in the 1980s. The book, written in 1997, chronicles Lia Lee's sudden onset of severe epilepsy and the lack of communication between the hospital staff caring for her and the parents. Due to lack of competent translators, the non-English speaking parents could not understand most of what the hospital staff told them resulting in accusations of non-compliance with medical orders. Frequently the medical orders conflicted with the Hmong way of life and their animist beliefs. Many of the hospital staff were extremely prejudiced against the Hmong, convinced they were just stupid. Even when they did "follow orders" and administer medication properly, Lia suffered "the big one", a seizure that left her essentially brain dead. After removing her from life support the family took her home to die but she survived to age thirty before succumbing to pneumonia cared for by her family the entire time. Alternating with Lia's story, Fadiman gives a historic overview of the sad history of the Hmong people. Sadly, this award winning book was done no favors by the audiobook narration which I nearly abandoned mulitple times. The mispronunciations in the recording were horrendous with multiple instances in each chapter. I gave the narration a bad review on Audible.

The Duke's Children

The Duke's Children /Anthony Trollope, 784 p.

My first novel by Trollope, someone who's been on my list for awhile.  This novel falls late in a sequence of novels about the Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, his family, friends, and other politicians and aristocrats of late nineteenth-century England. 

The Duke of Omnium, formerly England's Prime Minister and recently widowed, struggles with his three children.  Lord Silverbridge, the heir, likes horses and plans to enter Parliament as a (gasp!) conservative.  Gerald has been sent down from Cambridge and makes bad choices during a card game.  And sweet Mary is in love with the wrong man.  Essentially the story of a good but distant father who can't understand that his children are not extensions of himself and the trouble that results from this misconception.  Slow-moving, psychologically acute, and a resonant read for middle-aged parents, I enjoyed this but won't rush to read another.