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Book Review: Lakewood: A Novel by Megan Giddings

cover art for Lakewood by Megan Giddings

Bookshop.orgAmazon.com)

Lakewood  by Megan Giddings

Amistad, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0062913197

Available: Hardcover, audiobook, Kindle edition

 

After her grandmother dies, college student Lena discovers her disabled, neurologically impaired mother is unable to pay her bills or afford the medication she needs to manage her disability. So when she is recruited for a research study on memory for a substantial sum of money she pushes her reservations to the side, signs an NDA and paperwork stating her agreement to any procedure the study may require, drops out of school, and tells her mother and friends she has a new, well-paid job in the small town of Lakewood as an employee at a warehouse. Bizarre psychological testing, vaccines, pills, induced isolation, and hallucinations become normalized as different test subjects come and go. Realizing that something must be very wrong, Lena attempts to question observers and participants in the study and to find information online, but is blocked at every turn, until finally she discovers that unethical government experimentation on Black people has historical precedent. Despite her unsettling findings, Lena continues to participate in the study so her mother can keep her health insurance and pay the bills.

Obviously inspired by the Tuskegee experiment and other research studies that exploited Black people in the United States, as well as the Flint water crisis, Lakewood carries that legacy forward into the present, through generations of trauma. Ir is timely in its exploration of scientific racism, the drastic actions family members will take to help ill and disabled family members afford healthcare, and government gaslighting and neglect of the study participants and their own health.

Told from Lena’s point of view, this history metamorphoses into a personalized, hallucinatory, and terrifying situation that will appall, disturb, and shock the reader as the layers peel away. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: body horror, mutilation, murder, gore, violence, medical experimentation

 

Book Review: Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo

A note from the editor:

It is the end of November and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $45 we still need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of  Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo.

 

cover art for Into the Forest and All The Way Through

Into The Forest And All The Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo ( Bookshop.orgAmazon.com )

Burial Day Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781735693613

Available:  Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Through a collection of terrifying portraits, Cynthia Pelayo creates a true crime portfolio in her provocative book of poems Into the Forest and All the Way Through. Each poem memorializes a particular child or woman who was murdered or simply vanished never to be seen again. Some of the poems describe the victim and some the scene of the murder. Others give us a snapshot of tragic moments in time or suggest the final minutes of agony and fear that these people suffered.

 

Pelayo’s choice of genre lends itself well to revealing the random clues left behind pointing to abduction, the details of clothing collected from people trying hard to remember something that might prove useful to an investigation, and the cataloguing of the victim’s habits, interests, and favorite places. All of these fragments paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the terror of those whose lives have been taken and of those left behind to deal with either the finality of death or the suffering of never knowing what really happened or why. There are also some poems in the collection that depict the murderers: their brutality, lack of human emotion, and even glee in frustrating the efforts of loved ones wanting to find a body to bury.

 

The most bone-chilling poems are those that describe the things that scare us the most – what we can’t see and what we can’t stop. There is the woman “found stuffed in a chimney” where different people had lived for years without knowing she was there or the man who worked at a home for the disabled and took the life of “a sweet young woman” “like a child, innocent.” The abducted “island girls” whose pictures have been discovered in the ground are “singing their mourning songs” “pleading come find / Me.” The poems in this book forcibly call us to be aware of the thousands of “forgotten and ignored women,” the dangers that still exist, and the problems that have gone unsolved, just as their murders and disappearances have to this day. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Book Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

 

A note from the editor:

We are getting near the end of November and Monster Librarian still needs to raise the funds to pay for our hosting fees and postage in 2021. If you like what we’re doing, please take a moment to click on that red “Contribute” button in the sidebar to the right, to help us keep going!  Even five dollars will get us closer to the $45 we still need to keep going at the most basic level. We have never accepted paid advertising so you can be guaranteed that our reviews are objective. We’ve been reviewing and supporting the horror community for 15 years now, help us make it another year! Thank you! And now our review of The Grace Year by Kim Liggett.

 

 

cover art for The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett (   Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com  )

Wednesday Books, 2019

ISBN-13 : 978-1250145444

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

 

At first glance, The Grace Year seems like a YA take on The Handmaid’s Tale crossed with The Lord of the Flies. It takes place in an alternate society where women and girls are divided into groups by the colors of their hair ribbons: white for girls, black for wives, and red for grace year girls. Grace year girls are sent to an isolated camp as a group when they turn sixteen, after boys and men their age and older have an opportunity to choose one to marry from among them. Some girls are “veiled” and the rest know they will be assigned to manual labor tasks. The younger sisters of the girls who don’t return run the risk of being sent to the outskirts, where they will struggle to survive and are expected eventually to sexually service men no longer satisfied with their wives.

Protagonist Tierney is about to begin her grace year. She does not aspire to be veiled, but would rather labor outside when her grace year is done, as wives’ movements and speech are very restricted and she has always enjoyed spending time outdoors, learning useful skills from her father and spending her time alone and with her friend Michael, whose family is very high status. Rather than choosing Kiersten, the girl his family has picked out for him, though, Michael chooses Tierney to keep her safe, not realizing that he has actually made her a target during the grace year.

The supposed purpose of the grace year is for girls to come into their magic and work it out of themselves without risking the men, so the girls are “safe” to be around, but girls know that things too terrible to talk about must happen, because of each group of girls that leaves, fewer come back, and the ones who do are traumatized and refuse to speak about it. In addition to their isolation, the girls must stay within a fence, because they are being hunted by “poachers” who will skin them alive, dissect them, bottle the parts, and sell them back to the men in town as aphrodisiacs. There is the obligatory section of a YA speculative survival novel where a character whose job it is to exterminate a girl actually saves her and heals her and they fall in love, but it is particularly gruesome because there is no hiding the fact that he’s there to skin, dissect, and bottle her for consumption– he even has diagrams. The body horror is strong in this book, although most of the actual damage is done offscreen.

It is difficult to write about the characters and society in this book, both women and men, because from best to worst every one of them is so poisoned by patriarchy. The gaslighting of women and girls is so extensive and ingrained that it can’t really be separated out. Would Kiersten be so cruel if she hadn’t been trapped by society’s constraints since she was a child? Would so many of the girls have been so eager to believe in their magic if they hadn’t been powerless their entire lives? Even “good” men like Michael, with the best of intentions, can’t undo the damage. In 800+ pages (Amazon says there are 416, my Kindle says 815) there was not a single character in this book whose decisions could be trusted, including Tierney’s. The ending was absolutely crushing to me. I have to hope that YA readers who get all the way through to the end will develop a strong desire to examine their decisions and choices in light of the damage patriarchy does to all of them in the present, rather than waiting for the next generation. Whether they do or not, given the number of comparisons to The Hunger Games, I am sure many will find it a compelling read. Recommended.