Mini-reviews: The Mother Letters and Moxyland

Amber and Seth Haines had three children in three years and Seth could see his wife was exhausted and frustrated by the million things that go into caring for small children every day. So he reached out to friends and writers to draft letters detailing the struggles and joy of being a mom. Each letter is encouraging and reminds mothers that we are not alone when we find a crayon in the dryer or can't figure out what to make for dinner (again) with a table full of picky eaters.

There is a whole market of books like this, where the writer (or writers) try to give encouragement to parents. Parenting is, as my mom likes to put it, "the hardest job you will ever love." It is exhausting on every single level, but this kind of book often comes across as trite and sappy in the face of very real struggles. Fortunately The Mother Letters manages to escape this, perhaps because it features so many women with different stories and writing styles. This would be a perfect gift to give to a new mom or one who has been parenting for many years. It's a wonderful book to have on your shelf to dip into at the end of a long day and remember that other moms have walked exactly where you are now. Make sure you pick up the print version, because the book itself  is beautiful!

The Mother Letters:
Sharing the Laughter, Joys, Struggles, and Hope
By Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines
Fleming H. Revel Company April 2016
192 pages
Read via Netgalley

It's 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa and citizens are increasingly controlled by a police state that operates through technology. Kendra has recently been injected with nanotechnology that makes her a walking, glowing billboard for a popular soft drink. Toby is a blogger who mouths off about the wealthy, while surrounding himself with luxury goods. Lerato works for a giant corporation, but she isn't sure she can stay loyal to their practices. Tendeka wants to protest against a corrupt government by encouraging local teens to vandalize their city. While they don't know each other at the opening of the book, their lives will soon intersect in surprising ways.

I have read and really loved (or been creeped out by?) other books by Lauren Beukes. She is such an imaginative writer. But this one fell a bit flat for me. Each character wants to fight the system that is oppressing them, but it's tough to keep reading a story where everything seems hopeless and the methods of the oppressed are often no better than those of the oppressor. Beukes certainly has interesting ideas here and added a new voice to dystopian writing, but it is easy to see how she has grown as an author from this book to her more recent novels The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. 

Moxyland
By Lauren Beukes
Mulholland Books August 2016 (originally published 2008)
320 pages
Read via Netgalley

Review: Broken Monsters

Broken Monsters

By Lauren Beukes

Mulholland Books September 2014

448 pages

Read via Netgalley

Gabriella Versado is surprised by few things. She is a mother and a detective for the Detroit police department. But even she is shocked by the body of a young boy that is found mutilated and attached to the body of a deer. As Gabriella tries to figure out this bizarre case, other people are drawn into the mystery. TK is a homeless man trying to help others, Jonno is a journalist trying to find the real story about what is going on in the city of Detroit, and Layla is a teen vigilante looking to catch and punish an online predator. She also happens to be Garbriella's daughter. Each of them will play a role in discovering the evil lurking in the dark corners of Detroit's abandoned buildings. But can they stop it? 

Beukes excels at characterization - both of the people in her stories and of non-living entities. In her book The Shining Girls, she brought a time-traveling house to vivid and terrifying life. In Broken Monsters, the starring character may actually be Detroit itself. In a city full of deserted buildings and desperate people, it's difficult to tell where the monsters are hiding. The supernatural aspects of the story are indeed terrifying and we get just enough information to frighten while still being able to wonder about what all of this means. But there is also the feeling here that the terror is man-made, that we need no magic to commit truly depraved acts. The human heart and mind may be the darkest places of all. 

It's difficult to shock people in the modern world. We hold screens all day long that can show us horrible images with just the click of a button. But Beukes is still able to surprise the reader by showing darkness in surprising places. While the idea of a serial killer on the loose who maims and bizarrely displays bodies is a terrifying one, it is more frightening to discover just what people will do at their most frightened or desperate. A good deal of the book deals with our digital age and our eagerness to share the horrors around us. By sharing them, are we participating in them? 

Lauren Beukes is an incredibly talented writer who is able to do so many things at once and make it seem effortless. It's easy to classify Broken Monsters as a horror novel, and that is true. Most readers are going to have some truly bizarre dreams after reading this one. But this book is so much more than that - the characters beg to be seen, by the people in their lives and by the world that finds it so easy to ignore the abject poverty and despair that envelop the broken city of Detroit. 

Check out these rejected cover designs for Broken Monsters!

I read Broken Monsters as a part of Readers In Peril.

Review: The Shining Girls

The Shining Girls

By Lauren Beukes

Mullholland Books June 2014

375 pages

From the library 

Harper Curtis believes that he has a mission. He must kill each of the shining girls, young women whose eyes hold a special spark. But Curtis is not your run of the mill serial killer. He can travel through time to find each one of his victims. Kirby Mazrachi was not supposed to survive his vicious attack. But her faithful dog and determination kept her alive...barely. Now Kirby is using her tenacity and burgeoning journalistic skills to track down the man who tried to murder her. 

This book is obviously fiction. The idea of someone traveling through time via a magical, seemingly living house seems preposterous. But it also gives Kirby's story an added layer of terror: if your stalker can travel through time, how will you find him? And how can you ever escape him?

Lauren Beukes has a skill for writing multiple time periods well. The "shining girls" are a diverse group of women, each talented in a certain way. One of them is a brilliant scientist, another is a woman who literally shines as she dances, and another is an African American mother who is shattering racial stereotypes. We really get to know each of these women, although we know that none of them will have a happy ending. Beukes is an author who excels at writing historical fiction or writing a thriller and by mixing them seamlessly, we readers get the best of both worlds.

In the midst of the craziness, we get a small, quiet story of a friendship becoming something more. As Kirby searches for answers, she becomes an intern at a newspaper under the tutelage of Dan. He was the reporter who covered her case, but he now works at the sports desk because he went too far trying to figure out what happened to her. These two characters seem incredibly real - Kirby has been wounded both physically and mentally by her attack and she is simultaneously tough and extremely vulnerable. Dan begins as a sort of big brother figure, guiding her through the ins and outs of reporting and trying to keep her out of trouble. Of course, he eventually realizes that his motives are much different from those of a big brother, but he cares enough to not want to cause her more pain. Their tentative relationship is one of the highlights of a carefully created story.

There are a lot of "whys" that are not explained in this book, which can be a positive for some readers and a negative or others. Curtis stumbles upon this magical house and never really finds out why it works the way that it does, why he is the one the house has chosen, or who or what is behind the magic of time travel. The why is not necessarily the point of the story, but having so much time from Curtis' point of view without any real explanations can become frustrating.

The Shining Girls is a hybrid of all the stories you love best - friendship becoming something more, a meticulously detailed historical story, and a creepy thriller that makes you keep the lights on when you go to bed. Lauren Beuekes is a very talented writer and Kirby's story is one that I will not soon forget.