johnny dangerously.

Straight up, this is one of my favorite books ever, so I'm invariably going to be more than a little bit biased when discussing it. I think it's gorgeous. A fantastic example of economizing the plot until only the essentials are used, the story never feels sparse or minimalist. The plot zig-zags at a leisurely pace, but neither does it ever feel slow or rushed. It's a true classic. I'll stop before I get ahead of myself. This book is absolutely wonderful, and that's all I can really say about it without revealing too much.

I want to say first that I didn't hate this novel– it isn't bad, it's just not for me. I think if I hadn't read Hendrix's other works before this one, I'd have either liked it better, or never finished it. I do think that this is a very ambitious novel, possibly the most ambitious I've seen Hendrix try yet. I just don't think it lands, but I also think that's just because of my personal taste.For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except [b:Horrorstör 13129925 Horrorstör Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414314217l/13129925.SX50.jpg 18306052] and [b:The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires 44074800 The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1584222716l/44074800.SY75.jpg 68534292]). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.Hendrix has his predilections– he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically ‘normal' women. By ‘normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly– frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think ‘I wish I was her', we're supposed to think ‘if she could, maybe I can'. And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror– I think [b:The Final Girl Support Group 55829194 The Final Girl Support Group Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1614275199l/55829194.SY75.jpg 86047832] is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (child sexual abuse, which is barely a spoiler as it's pretty obvious from the book's blurb and content warnings, but whatever) makes the book feel... bad. Not bad in the way a horror story should make you feel, frightened and anxious, but for me at least, it meant spending a lot of time with a girl who was doing nothing to help a very vulnerable person while the clock wound down.A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why– I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse– the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.In general, this film feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters ‘need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels– which I really, really loved– are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.I just don't think he did enough academic research on the history of 'witchcraft' but I do appreciate that his witches were at least not more fucking Gardnerians. I deeply resent that ridiculous speech about The Burning Times-- yes, it was capitalized like that-- but I understand that it was given from the perspective of a 'witch' who was raised in a western / Mediterranean-inspired tradition, and that erroneous and ridiculous perspective is very alive and well today. We can see from the covens Hendrix thanks in the afterward that he probably picked it up from one of them, which, fine, whatever, I just hate it. (For more on this, I encourage you to read [b:The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present 34324501 The Witch A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present Ronald Hutton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497092904l/34324501.SX50.jpg 55387180], which is excellent, informative, and is a comparatively very easy read. Apparently Hendrix did research the history of witchcraft, he just portrayed it in a way I didn't personally like, which, again, this is very much a personal quibble than an objective mark of quality. Happy to be wrong!

Books like this are complicated for me. I really, really love them; I desperately want more of them; I wish they were written differently. Historiography, especially the conceptual stuff (what do we think about when we think about X? Why do we think that way? Where does that idea come from, and is it from history, or just books and TV?) really fascinate me. History is a bunch of symbols which we reinterpret every generation, and what we think of a period, a date, an event, is shaped by where we are now... and the last bit of big media frenzy over that period. It's fascinating, and it's much more vivid and vivacious than a point-by-point summary of what dates certain events took place. History is more than truth or lies, accuracy or inaccuracy. It's the conversations we have, and what we think is worth including in those conversations.

But, because these books are so conceptual, they tend to be kind of low on information. There's a lot to think about in this book, and a lot to learn. There's also a lot of fluff.

I get it. Palmer is writing in a really informal style, because she doesn't want to be an ivory tower academic who writes in a purposefully arch style to confuse and alienate plebs. As a pleb (I sure don't have a four year degree), I appreciate it. But there's always the risk of talking down to people, or implicitly signaling who is supposed to be reading your books. Palmer mostly avoids that, but there were a few moments that really made me groan. I do not need references to Firefly and Army of Darkness in my history book; I do not need the rib-elbowing understanding that we're all nerds here, ehh? Ehhh? We're the right kind of nerds, bookish chortlers who go squee and watch Doctor Who. Please, talk up to me, I bought your book.

Palmer also seems to be concerned I won't get her point, so she repeats it over and over, sometimes multiple times a chapter. I assume this is because she's an educator; she really really really wants to make sure I get the point. SPQR, SPQF! Historians in Greenland! Battle pope and warrior pope! These little references, and the concepts attached to them, show up in almost every chapter, which is a good rhetorical device! But maybe in a shorter book, with fewer chapters. Especially since I felt a few other concepts went under-explained. I wanted more about the contrasting tyranny of republicanism in Florence, the way art bolstered legitimacy, and the morals of peace that got referenced a few times. I wanted to know more about Machiavelli, who has four chapters dedicated to him but only shows up in two of them. I did not need the basics of moral philosophy explained to me the second time, or the third, or the... tenths. The first time was nice, though.

I guess what I'm saying is that this book is a little disorganized, and it chases its own tail a bit. I find this to be the case in a lot of ‘out of the box' educational materials, which assume that if you're excited enough, you'll just get it! Because learning is easy for everyone, and we don't need to worry about the accessibility of information. Because most educators– and, I assume, students at better and more prestigious colleges– don't have learning disabilities, there doesn't tend to be a lot of emphasis placed on making information organized and easy to digest when it's taught in an unconventional way.

I'm not saying the book had to be in chronological order– I found it quite refreshing that it wasn't– but I wish more time had been spent connecting the ideas that each chapter had, building on the previous thesis to bolster the next, rather than reiterating information without a ton of analysis. It's a book, so if I missed what dentology was, I could have gone back and reread. By the 14th time it was explained, I was fully tuning out, struggling to understand what bigger point the chapter was actually trying to make because it had gotten so lost in the weeds.

I'm not sure someone without a learning disability will have these problems? But I did and it's my review, so.

All in all, however, I consider this book a triumph. I've never found the Italian Renaissance very interesting, mostly because it's spoken about with such bejeweled reverence. I don't like romanticized history populated by buxom wax figures dressed in crushed velvet; it's boring. Ada Palmer successfully makes these people real, makes me care about their lives, makes me want to know more. Isn't that the goal of every educator?

I have a few quibbles with this book, mostly on the subject of pacing and focus, but I'm not going to factor that into my ultimate score or feelings on the book. This was originally published on the AO3 and other serial fiction sites, and while it isn't fanfiction, it does share structural similarities with that type of work. I haven't read fanfiction regularly for over eight years; me whining about its structure would be like saying a soap opera is kind of long.

More to the point: This novel is for, by, and about trans women. I am not a trans woman, so when I went in reading this I tried very hard to keep my goal in mind while reading it. I read this because I want to better understand the art trans women enjoy, and in that sense, this book really succeeded. I think it's a lovely, fun story that plays with dark themes without getting too dark. (I know for my own self, I really prefer bleak dark fiction, so I wasn't totally caught up in the emotion of the story, but as I said before, I'm not the intended audience for this book. If I am not entirely on board with it, that's not the book's fault.)

This book really is a celebration of trans femininity, though, and I found that extremely inspiring. As someone who has a lot of difficulty with femininity in any form, it was very enjoyable to see people, well, enjoying femininity. At the same time, it was also very healing to see femininity celebrated in a way that didn't feel like everyone was in a cult. In her work, Gretchen Felker-Martin describes cisness as very sterile, and while I don't always feel that way, it does apply to how I find a lot of just-for-us-girls depictions of cis femaleness. This celebration of trans femininity was free of that sterility, and really wanted to both enjoy and interrogate femaleness. I loved reading that part of the book. It made femininity feel like a gift, one I willingly gave away. Reading this book was like watching someone try on a dress I'd donated to a consignment shop, a dress I hated, and watching their expressions fill up with light when they tried it on. I've never felt like that before, and it was wonderful.

I read Harris' Cicero trilogy a few years ago, and those books remain some of my favorite novels set in the Roman Empire, even as I find them a little disappointing. Harris just doesn't care about Rome the way I care about it, and the political machinations exist only to further an allusion to British politics just before the Second World War. So it was to my great surprise how enjoyable I found this book, which engages with a Rome I care far less about– the Rome of the modern day. I'm not trying to damn with faint praise when I say it's a relief to read Harris putting his immense talent toward a subject he cares far more about than Ancient Rome.

This book is probably as close to ‘cozy' as I get– everyone is presumed to be an essentially good person who means well, and disagreements are resolved with sometimes tense but never violent discussion and debate. Nothing graphically violent, sexual or horrifying happens. The end is a paean to religious tolerance– and tolerance in general. I'm of two minds on the ending; while I feel it was written with the best intentions in mind, it does kind of turn a minority into a rug-pull twist. I'd like to hear more from the minority effected– hopefully the success of the movie will start this conversation, as the movie is extremely, extremely faithful to the book.