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Book Review: Lakewood: A Novel by Megan Giddings

cover art for Lakewood by Megan Giddings

( Bookshop.org | Amazon.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

 

Posted on January 23, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Horrid by Katrina Leno

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Horrid by Katrina Leno  (  Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com  )

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0316537247

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

 

There was a little girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good,

She was very, very, good,

And when she was bad, she was horrid!

 

The title of Horrid comes from a nursery rhyme that started out as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and there’s definitely some foreshadowing going on. After her father dies, Jane and her mother reluctantly move to the home where her mother grew up, North Manor, in Bells Hollows, Maine. Empty since her grandmother died, North Manor has an abandoned air. Its windows are broken and it is in disrepair, with bad wiring, creaky floors, and a local reputation as the “creep house”. Surprisingly, although it is September, roses are in full bloom.

Jane’s mother won’t explain why she never brought Jane there before, and as the two of them clean up, move in, and begin to move forward, strange and unexplained things start happening in the house and garden. Jane starts school, makes friends, and gets a job working in a bookstore, while her mom sorts and cleans and starts a new job with long hours. Wariness and even hostility from longtime residents of the community when they hear Jane is living in North Manor makes Jane suspect something terrible happened there that caused her mother to leave. Strange things keep happening: Jane discovers she’s lost time, with no memory of text messages she’s sent or things she’s done; she is certain someone is in the house, but no trace can be found; she has sudden bursts of violent temper. As she and her mother try to cope with their grief and loss, Jane becomes more and more disoriented, especially once she learns the town, and her mother, have been keeping her in the dark about a twisted family secret.

Very early in the book, we learn that Jane has pica (a psychological disorder that causes people to eat non-nutritive items and is associated with OCD and schizophrenia). Eating pages from books helps her manage her anger. As the story progresses, it’s difficult to tell if Jane is in a dissociative fugue and expressing extreme anger due to mental illness aggravated by grief and stress, especially after her mother takes her book away, or if she’s being possessed and/or haunted. I’m not familiar enough with pica to know if Leno’s representation is accurate, but her writing is evocative. It turns out that Jane is not the only person in her family to have had pica, or what effect it had on the past actions of other family members.

Leno does a great job of portraying the messiness and ugliness of grief and its effects on the book’s characters. Despite recognizing many of the elements of Gothic horror, I did not expect the ending, which left me shocked and breathless. Recommended.

Posted on October 12, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power

cover for Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power

Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power

Delacorte Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-0525645627

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD  (  Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com  )

Seventeen-year-old Margot, trapped in a disturbing codependent relationship with her abusive mother, finally finds an escape after discovering she has a grandmother living just outside Phalene, a small town only a few hours away. Arriving in Phalene, Margot quickly meets Tess, daughter of a wealthy landowner whose property is next to Margot’s grandmother’s farm, and Tess’ friend Eli. Tess and Eli tell Margot her grandmother has a reputuation as an eccentric, but offer to walk her to her grandmother’s house. On the way, the three teens discover the property is on fire, and Eli carries a girl out of the fire who is identical to Margot in looks and age, but who Margot has never seen before. The police are suspicious and take all three to the station to question them, but are clearly focused on Margot, especially because this isn’t the first fire to take place on her grandmother’s property, and the two girls are so identical it’s hard to believe Margot doesn’t know her.

A significant part of the book has to do with Margot’s developing relationship with her grandmother. At first, her grandmother is loving and welcoming, if inflexible, but early on Margot realizes that her grandmother is also being evasive and, at times, outright lying to her. The reader will see clearly the similarities between the behaviors of Margot’s grandmother and mother; it becomes clear early on why Margot’s mother never wanted to speak about her family. Margot also begins a close friendship with Tess, which has the marks of the beginnings of a crush on her, but this is never followed through on. Margot, Tess, and Eli are determined to solve the mystery of the girl who died and how that might be related to the earlier fire, and Margot as well wants to learn about her family’s past. There is clearly something going on that her grandmother is hiding, and a diary Margot finds contains clues as to what led to her mother’s behavior and some of the reasons she may have passed the trauma of her own childhood on to Margot.

The science-fictional twist at the end leads to some particularly gruesome body horror, and thoughtful readers may still find themselves disturbed by the long-term consequences of not eliminating all of the loose ends. Burn Our Bodies Down punches up the action faster than Wilder Girls but meanders in the middle, until it reaches its fast-paced and gory conclusion. Power has done a great job of showing the effects generational trauma and the difficulty of breaking that cycle. Even in relationships that haven’t sustained the kind of damage as the family in this book, there are very few girls who want to grow up to be just like their mothers, and Burn Our Bodies Down does an excellent job of portraying a time of life when most girls are separating to explore and form their own identities.

Posted on August 6, 2020 by , Reply
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