On reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore in 24 hours

Half-way through Robin Sloan’s bibliophile adventure tale I wasn’t sure that I liked it quite as much as I wanted or expected to. Here were all the ingredients to the perfect story, and for all intents and purposes, I was Sloan’s target audience. So, I was surprised that the adventure wasn’t nearly as striking or pulse pounding as I hoped it would be, but then, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore begins with struggling designer Clay Jannon happening upon a help-wanted sign in a mysterious bookstore, exactly the kind of bookstore that I would foam at the mouth to discover, let alone work for, but this is no ordinary bookstore—when Jannon’s curiosity leads him to open one of the books in the tall stacks of the “Waybacklist” he sets in motion an adventure of decoding, spying, infiltrating a secret society and the age-old quest for immortality that hangs heavy in almost all the fantasy novels of my youth. Like Clay Jannon, I owe a great deal of my own imaginative swings to great fantasy series like the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials and The Lord of the Rings—for Clay, it’s his childhood love of a series called The Dragon-Song Chronicles that primes him for adventure in the first place (after all, if not a fantasy-lover, whose mind would automatically hover in a suspension of disbelief?) and then connects all the mysterious dots, like a key. But, as is the case for so many quests—the result, the treasure, the holy grail is never quite what you expect it to be.

The holy grail in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore isn’t what I thought it would be, and like some of the characters who were holding their breath for the secret of life, I was expecting a big hullabaloo, words of wisdom, a secret—the secret—and like so many who hold their breath for such things, I was ultimately disappointed… but only for a moment.

It’s not the quest that makes Sloan’s novel fantastic, not the fantasy, the mystery or the chase—it’s the very last paragraph in a brightly crafted, spinning read that moves you without even realizing it. It’s heart-warming, frenzied, often hilarious tribute to all the books that have come before, all the friendships you forge with the written word, and it’s this—the very last line, “A clerk and a ladder and a warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

Because sometimes, that’s all it takes. It’s the trump card, Sloan—you nailed it.

This is not a poem

Maybe my poems aren’t poems.

Cities that brace themselves for impact. Each day one day away from total destruction.

Maybe my words aren’t words.

Globs of chewed gum that grip to the bottom of your sole and lodge themselves between your treads.

I’m not a poet. It’s not a hat I wear at parties, flitting from conversation to hesitation, notebook in hand.

It’s the thing I find in bed at night. The wine still on me like so many fingertips.

It’s the thing I wake up to, pounding at my temples. Pretending like

I’m getting too old for this shit.

So you tell me to write. And I’m like “Right.” Write what?

Right the things that have long toppled? Regencies. Democracies. Hypocrisies.

That time you told me you’d catch me

but hands are just hands. Arms are just arms.

Things we say are just

all those things we said.

What it felt like then and other stories

There were things we wanted then that didn’t seem ridiculous.

Coffee without the grinds. Ice water just before it turns cool leaving wet rings that soak into the wood. We didn’t need the bad with the good, the good was enough, it was plenty. Maybe it was naive to think we could section off our emotions, corner our dislikes with barbed wire, “Stay! Good boy.” Until it leaked out and over and through again.

So, OK, we loved but we did it in our own way, reusing the scraps that kept falling to the ground. Ten-second, three-hour, four-year rule. Now we don’t even pretend to like the same things on Facebook. We keep twin tufts of hair instead—the scalp still on—all our secrets in shoe boxes.

Which feels more true.

Copy that

I take a job copy editing and find comfort in the culling of words, the monitoring of space. It’s easy to love something until your flaws are pointed out to you—the things you let slip by.

I pull out errors in everything I read, feel thwarted, let down when something passes my scrutiny. We don’t all, apparently, make mistakes.

When the job ends, I bury with it my red pen; my compulsion to be right. Re-draft and revision.

I begin to build new dreams outside the wainscoting of words.

Maybe all disappointments are trials in disguise.

We sit at a tall table in a cafe listening to the cacophony of coffee-making beneath the music that plugs our ears, ideas budding above our own mindful detritus.

Throw it out, break it down, rip it all apart. Shed.

Then pull your wooly sweater around your shoulders as the breeze blows in.

It’s either that or close the window.

The End of Everything is hard to abandon

I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator. And what could be more questionable than a 13-year-old girl’s account of the mysterious disappearance of her best friend?

Lizzie Hood, your average suburban middle-class tween is suddenly not so average when her best friend Evie goes missing one day after school. Overnight she becomes the closest link police have to the missing girl and the crutch Evie’s father leans on in her disappearance. She must know something, maybe she just doesn’t recall it, but she must know something. In her efforts to uncover the truth about Evie’s disappearance, Lizzie treads closer and closer to an adult world she can’t quite comprehend, the violence of desire and the lengths she’s willing to go to bring her friend back.

Megan Abbott writes crime thrillers so you might be surprised to find out that the actual crime here is secondary to the story. What Abbott really focuses on is the insidious relationship that brews between young girls and the older male figures in their lives. This is a line Abbott toes throughout the book and then casually stomps right over.

The most curious part is the agency the girls have. It’s Lizzie who puts herself in compromising positions with Evie’s father, Lizzie whose desire for a father figure—or maybe to be part of Evie’s family—moves her to command his attention in any way that she can. The father is supposedly so grief-stricken that he either can’t see what’s happening or perverted enough to see how far she’ll take it. Both Evie and her sister, Dusty, are equally fulfilling their own destinies. There are no adults in The End of Everything; there are teenagers stumbling into maturity and parents who refuse to take responsibility for themselves or the impact they are having on their kids. And the kids? The kids aren’t taken…they go willingly.

It has tinges of Lolita but told through the eyes of the Lolita that Humbert imagines. As though, any young girl would want that. But, then, maybe I just didn’t grow up in the same suburbia that they did. If you’re looking for a hard-to-put-down read you’ve definitely found it, but the story—and the dark slimy layers underneath it—aren’t as easy to abandon as the book is when you’re through.

Up Current

You finally surface, smooth as salmon, like you always do. Breathing just under the surface and I think for a moment that I could touch you without getting wet. Hover my hand over the skin of water just breaking, those ripples whispers of something more than movement.

—

In the belly of it, we were always backwards, and maybe now I still am. Turning, turning. No one’s broken rib.

—

I clean the dead flies off my new window. Reposition the plants. Throw up in the bathroom.

Grow up.

Oh, the places I’ve been

A quick recap for all my admiring fans. cough. I got more traffic on my last post about the publishing apocalypse than on anything else all year! I feel like this means I’m not a crazy person ranting to the wind. Rather, a crazy person ranting to the relative silence of the internet.

Or something.

To my left is my most recent book review for The Coast, they didn’t see fit to post it online but it was in the print paper. The book of poetry is Sympathy Loophole by Jaime Forsythe, a local writer, and it is actually  slap-yourself-in-the-face-amazing. She’s that good. Quirky, funny, but also a little dark and disturbing. All things that are good in a book of poetry. And reading it didn’t feel like a chore—as I find a lot of poetry does—rather, each new poem was a treat to be read and reread. I mean, any author that has you reading up to and including their page of acknowledgements is pretty special.

Today, you can find a bit of fiction I wrote called “The Last Summer of Love” over at Pooping Rainbows:

It was the summer of engagement. Almost as if—like a light turning on—the entire generation took that next relationship step together, feet protruding in unison.

At first, you wanted to hear all the details: the whens and whys and hows of it all. But, WILL YOU MARRY ME? spelled out in beach rocks was superseded by a villa in Italia and then a handmade scrapbook with Post-it notes, rings hidden in cakes, Jumbo-trons, hot air balloons, a dolphin trained to flip a fish into her hands—“But look inside it!” Screaming yes with fish bones in her hair and scales under her nails, which of course would all wash off but the ring…the ring would last forever.

You can also scan last month’s “Ophidiophobia” which is a little bit darker:

I’ve always been afraid of earthworms. Their bodies curling in around themselves, stranded on the pavement, each segment a revulsion, what I imagine the inside of my throat to look like—pulled inside out.

And, that’s about it for now. Thanks for keeping up with me!