Shawn Rider

Well worth the read, this memoir details angles of the AIDS movement that I had never heard about. The prose is clean and fast. The details feel honest and blunt. The story is both very sad and very hopeful. Definitely one for your LGBTQIA+ reading list.

It is rare to get a book that seems simultaneously so experimental and so accessible. Everything about it is much more clever than it appears. The plot is a deft satire of the future of for-profit prison enslavement. It calls to mind other stories and tropes we have seen before: Running Man, the Roman “bread and circus” stories, films like Spartacus, and many more. It would be easy for the novel to be like those precursors, but it becomes much more.

In Chain-Gang All-Stars characters are fully rounded and made sympathetic, even when they represent the worst that humanity has to offer. It is a romance as much as an action novel, and one that manages to include fictional (and non-fictional) footnotes that add to the reading. It is as poetic and beautiful as it is violent and gruesome. The balance of opposites that Adejei-Brenyah creates in the novel lends weight to every description and action.

Shifting between a set of perspectives throughout the book, we are given internal dialogue and first-person narratives of many characters. We see the world not only through the eyes of the “Links” who participate in the gladatorial combat of the Circuit, but also through the eyes of spectators and members of the controlling organization. We are led to discover the many ways these games affect people in the society by sympathizing with characters and feeling their experience.

Throughout the novel, Adjei-Brenyah includes footnotes. Many of these are fictional, explaining details about the fictional world. However, many of these are non-fictional and reference real cases, statistics, and history. The entire concept of the novel is based on the core of truth that is our present-day for-profit prison system: The 13th Ammendment allows for slavery within prison walls in the US, and as we contract out those prisons to private corporations we turn over control of our justice and reform efforts to giant corporations who get rich by putting people in prison.

In spite of all of these unique qualities that may make an ordinary novel didactic or shallow, Adjei-Brenyah puts it all together into an incredible package. The prose is clear and minimal. There are incredibly poetic phrases and scenes and plot points that demonstrate Adjei-Brenyah's command of the written form, and he has no need to show off by adding unnecessary flourish.

The story is fast and the book reads smoothly, in spite of the graphic violence and harrowing stories. It is a sort of road story, and as such it keeps the reader moving along. It compelled me to keep going by virtue of the characterization and wanting to see how all the threads of different characters' stories intersected.

In the end, I am immensely satisfied. It is not a “happy” or “fun” book, but it is most definitely a very good book. I encourage everyone to read, enjoy, and engage.

This is a really incredible novel, full of drama and alive with such vivid portrayal of a world not often seen in western fiction. Age of Vice is incredibly accessible, evoking the same kind of epic crime/family/crime-family drama as The Godfather series, but with a modern Indian setting that is immediately compelling. The stories of Ajay, Sunny, Neda, and the rest, are wonderfully/tragically intertwined, and this book conveys those narratives with verve and charm.

Kapoor is an incredible writer. Her work is both minimal and “clean” – she rarely wastes a word. It is also lucid and flexible, veering from timeline to timeline, character to character, and often revisiting events from multiple perspectives. The result is a novel that keeps the reader moving quickly, even when revealing the complex relationships and motivations that build the events of the plot. Where other authors may engage in long segments of narrative psychoanalysis to convey similar complications, Kapoor keeps the reader in the moment and reveals each piece over time in a way that allows the reader to realize the larger story without being burdened by it.

I think it helps, and is no spoiler, to let readers know that this must be part of a series (I have read that it will be a trilogy on a discussion forum, but can't find any corroborating evidence). The ending is not so much a “cliffhanger” as “not.” It just doesn't really end. It's hard to say that it is unsatisfying, because the reader has experienced a whole lifetime of events with these characters (and the book is quite long, tho it moves quickly). It isn't really unsatisfying unless there is just never any more. Based on the response to this novel, I have to hope there will be a sequel (or trilogy) forthcoming.

Regardless of the abrupt ending, Age of Vice is one of the best books I've read this year.

A well-assembled oral history with lots of interesting information. A great object lesson in how sometimes learning more the iconoclasts of the past makes them look much worse in retrospect. There is no way to excuse this bunch of Nazi-fetishizing, racist, sexist, douchebags (inclusive of the women and men). Anyone who thinks punk rock was founded on a progressive social justice attitude needs to read this. There are a lot of things to appreciate about the music these folks produced, and the way in which they opened doors for more truly revolutionary ideas to come through.

To me, one of the most telling illustrations of what I mean is the ongoing narrative about how Malcolm McLaren pushed the New York Dolls into “fake communist” outfits and pagentry. So many of the interviewees are upset about infusing politics into the music and making the Dolls look “queer” and Communist at the same time. However, they all happily dressed themselves up in Nazi memorabilia and swastika t-shirts. It was so prevalent that I started noting every time somebody talked affectionately about having or producing some Nazi-related item. It is very clear: “gay and commie” was bad; “straight hedonistic Nazi” was good.

I'm glad times have changed. I can enjoy a lot of the music from this era and appreciate how it led to music and artists who continue to push the boundaries of social acceptance and who have broadened the mandate of punk rock to include social justice. In the end, it is all just rock and roll. It's not meant to be your mom and dad.

It is impossible to convey the experience of reading The Book of Night Women. It is not an “easy” read, but it is compelling and difficult to put down, even when it is at its most repulsive. The reader should go in prepared to confront some dark events, but the reward is one of the best novels ever written.

James is a talented writer, and some of his hallmark qualities are on display in The Book of Night Women. He handles dialect like a master, never breaking or confusing dialect, but easily moving between formal and informal language when needed. The multiple points of view echo Seven Killings and even aspects of the Darkstar Trilogy. The brutality and cruelty of the world is also directly confronted, something any reader of James' novels will recognize. It is not exploitive, but it is certainly extreme.

Of course, the entire cultural context of the novel is extreme: colonial Jamaica was just as harrowing and complicated as any British colony. As one expects from a James novel, no character is all good, all bad, or indifferent. Each character is well-rounded, complex, and sympathetic. The protagonist, Lillith, experiences an emotional roller coaster similar to the reader. The actions, words, and whims of the characters are laced with double-meanings and deeper emotional content. Like Lillith, the reader is forced to recognize, or at least deal with, the humanity and inhumanity of everyone around her.

Like with many other James novels, Lillith is not entirely (or always) sympathetic. The book tells the story of her growing from adolescence to womanhood, and she goes through a petulant phase early on that lets the reader know they do not need to always agree with Lillith's words or actions. And as she learns to read more deeply the world around her, so does the reader learn to interpret the words of the novel.

The Book of Night Women is an achievement on par with Faulkner, Morrison, or Walker. It is epic not so much in the scope of its timeline, but in the depth of its exploration of the late colonial moment. It is a character study, a historical fiction, a romance, and a horror story – all at once. It is a novel that demands a large emotional investment from the reader, and repays that investment with a resonant experience that will linger long after the book is closed.