The Binding by Bridget Collins

This one was a solid 3.5 stranded between a good one and a satisfactory one.

The book gets a demoted 0.5 star for a sharp turn, the one that I did not see coming ( and unpredictability is always great for a voracious reader), BUT I do not think these two parts are organically connected. They are like slapstick pictures cut from different cards and glued together and consequently look crude and unprofessional together.

I loved the slow burner of the first part – it is a beautiful meditation on books – their hauntedness, their darkness, their confession like nature, their possessive nature, and our desire to expose ourselves and hide ourselves in books.
I liked the second part as well. It is an inventively told LGBT love story, but I also feel like the magical world of bookbinding was used as a tool for the love story, and it was too dark and tantalizing to use it just as a tool to tell the story. Besides, some moments of darkness were abandoned, and they could have been delicious parts of the book if this novel had developed differently. Alas …

I am glad that I have read it, but the book did not leave the feeling of completeness not the feeling of literary satiation. Thus. 3.5 stars

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

I might be one of the dissenting voices here as my review is not stellar. It is one of those books that I read and appreciated, but I will never take it to a desert island. It was an interesting perspective, and a perspective is truly a big thing in sci fi genre, but sometimes, the exploration of ideas is not enough for me.

On goodreads, it is shelved as a dystopian novel, but it has the twist as the events take place in a reservation and the village gradually loses all the connection with the Canadian government, including internet, phone, TV, and later electricity and water.

As readers, we can only make assumption about the end of the world and its aftermath for this community. These assumptions are strengthened by the “refugees” of the bigger world, but the end has never been explained.
Now, the biggest question one should ask if this is indeed a novel of the end of the world or the novel of rebirth. I believe it is a novel of rebirth of Anishinaabe community with their traditional lifestyle with hunting, fishing, and gathering as the cornerstones of their society.

It is a story of emotional and cultural awakening, and I am not surprised that the only white man was the evil one. He is a symbolic figure of a white man that brings havoc and destruction, and I do not blame the author for this formulaic representation after the Holocaust-like experience that white colonizers caused, but still it was a hackneyed trope.

Writing has not impressed me either – it was simple, but not simplistic, yet it lacked sophistication, even thought this simplicity was intended. Again, I can hear the European tradition of writing in me speaking loudly, and I can not suppress this voice. I DO NOT need purple prose, BUT I love smart allusiveness, I love rich styles: I also love laconic, terse and pithy styles. But this one was neither.
I felt like the author in this hypothetical situation viewed the catastrophe as a passage of transformation, as a way of returning to his roots, and there is no remorse about the lost civilization, and even no interest about the origin of this massive demise, just an opportunity to be born anew, to start life anew true to the traditions and customs of the Anishinaabe community.

To me, with my European background, that would have been a very painful experience as it means saying goodbye to everything that is part of my identity – arts, literature, storytelling, and of course, books.

I think I could not embrace this book more because of the genuine discrepancy of cultures. On the other hand, I need to view it as an eye-opening experience – what we value as accomplishments can be irrelevant to others.

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler

The first novel in the trilogy explores the human xenophobia and our unwillingness and rigidness to evolve, move on, and embrace inevitable changes. The novel itself is a metaphor and a bleak description of the humanity after the nuclear war. There are numerous references and allusions to the speculative nuclear conflict between the USA and the former USSR, and it is not accidental because the book was written during the final detrimental moments of the Cold War when the antagonistic feelings were quite rampant.

The author’s style is spuriously simple. This deceptive simplicity is there to state plain facts about our human nature. And these facts are bleak and hard to face: as species we are hierarchical and brutal with the desire to domineer, challenge each other, and win. The meek and the independent are just disposable by-products in this cutthroat human environment.

The biggest credit of this post-apocalyptic novel is the true ‘alienness’ of aliens: their bizarre and repulsively different appearance, their uncharted psyche, their biology, their ingrained life philosophy to revere any form of life, their eco-friendly habitats, and, last but not least, their perception of gender and sexual behavior.

It is truly a thought-provoking novel, an exploration of our own brutal selves with the bizarre and well-developed aliens as a foil. The book is definitely out-of-the-comfort zone and challenges a potential reader with new ideas and tests your ability to accept unpleasant and ugly facts.

Catching Fire by Susan Collins

The book ‘Catching Fire’ is the second in the famous trilogy by Suzanne Collins. And though it is first and foremost the suspenseful novel packed with action and events, it is much more about social changes and the imminence of drastic changes.
The image of the Capitol of Panem painfully resembles the decaying/ decomposing Rome in last decades of existence: the self-indulgence in make-up, excessive body and face decorations, orgies/ parties, shows like ‘Hunger Games’ for the poor, and the conceited belief in one’s invulnerability and might. The ominous feeling of crackdowns, oppression, upending social unrest and changes permeates the novel. This is definitely a significant improvement in this novel. The second novel gravitates to the classical dystopian book of George Orwell much more than the first one.
Together with the general background of the novel the main character Katniss undergoes major changes as well. In the first novel she was a focused survivor, rough and tough. In this novel her inner dialog is much stronger (it is a serious help for a reader to interpret the novel) and she sounds different. She is more self-centered (Yes, she is thinking how to save Peeta, but she easily chooses who she is going to sacrifice among other tributes), impetuous, impulsive, and self-righteous. She is not the endearing character, but she is a truthful one. Kantiss is also blind in her roughness and truthfulness. She is totally clueless about the resistance movement , and it was irritating for me to see that she could not put the pieces of the easy puzzle together.
The present-tense narration creates this strong and powerful feeling of co-presence as if you are an ever watchful camera in this arena. This approach turns the novel into a horrendous reality show.The language is deliberately rough and gritty. The characters are not introduced as characters (due to ‘the I’ of the story), but they are showcased, thus their actions speak for them.
In general, it is a more mature novel as it gives an extra insight of what was going in the bigger world. it does not focus primarily on Katniss, and she turns out to be a footnote to the hidden action, though quite an inspiring one. To sum it up, it does make a good second book in the trilogy.

Hunger Games by Susanne Collins

The book is a very exciting and totally engrossing read. It took me two days to read the book (all my Sunday, and most Monday night and have of my working Monday reading secretly at work and sabotaging most of my Monday home chores). The whole idea of the survival contest might seem dull and boring, especially with the exposure to numerous TV shows, but this world is different – this is a dystopian world, and thus deeply unhappy for many common people with their districts poverty-ridden, and their minds being brain-washed by the Capitol. At the same time the Capitol itself is a painfully satirical image of our modern consumeristic society. The children/ teenagers on the verge of growing-up have to participate as tributes in mortal Hunger Games. It is a terrible and odious rite-of-passage for a certain few young adolescents.
The book is not a perfect dystopian novel, but it is very memorable and truly unputdownable.