Spiritomb
CW: mention of suicide.
In general, I found some parts of this book interesting but overall, much of the advice in it for calming one's inner chatter is not applicable to me. Especially the suggestion of development of little rituals to manage internal chatter: I do mental and external rituals to attempt to quell internal chatter so well that it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you have OCD like me, these parts of the book may trigger your compulsions.
A thing that really bothered me is that he cites the marshmallow study uncritically, i.e., without mentioning that there are alternate explanations than self-control for why a kid would immediately eat the single marshmallow and not wait patiently for two marshmallows. Like growing up in poverty, where not immediately seizing an opportunity for a nice thing means you will not have an opportunity again, even if an adult promises otherwise, because poverty means your grownups often make promises that they cannot keep. The children who immediately ate the marshmallow had no reason to believe that the researcher was being truthful when they promised two marshmallows. This book is recent enough that the author should have been aware of this immense problem with the study.
It also bothered me that he uses terminology like “committed suicide” and describes the deceased person's method in more detail than is necessary, when describing someone who had died by suicide. For a book meant to help people develop tools to manage upsetting internal chatter, this is a very serious problem for any reader who struggles with suicidal ideation or who has lost a loved one as a result of suicide. I hope in future printings this is revised.
It gave me a bad taste in my mouth to read the author's praise of the It Gets Better project without mentioning that it spurred criticism from within the LGBTQ community that is still valid today, as well as other projects like the Make It Better project. I know that It Gets Better is the most well-known because of Dan Savage's fame, but I would expect an author in 2020 to do better research. It feels profoundly hollow to read the author lauding It Gets Better in a time when politicians are actively passing laws in many states to make it illegal for trans kids to be called their chosen name and pronoun in school, and to define validating your trans child as child abuse. To Savage's credit, when he developed It Gets Better, the political climate was quite different, and though progress is never linear, it absolutely looked like things were getting better and would continue to do so, without anyone succeeding in dramatically undoing that progress for very long.
I feel bad giving this book two stars, but I have to remind myself that two stars means “it was okay” and that it's an honest representation of how I experienced the book.
There's some overlap in content between this book and The Professor and the Madman, which felt repetitive. I recommend waiting a few weeks to read this if you've just finished The Professor and the Madman.
I loved learning that Murray's kids were extremely good at crossword puzzles as adults due to their having helped sort the word slips alphabetically for their dad as a household chore and family bonding activity. I especially found it amusing that the kids learned the insult “toerag” from the slips and it became their insult of choice.
This book was really well done in terms of including the practical details of how a person without arms uses their feet for tasks where a hand-having person uses hands. The one detail I missed, if it was included, was where a guitar was positioned in order to play with feet, but a quick YouTube search for “play guitar without arms” showed me that a guitar would be laid on the ground while the performer sat in a chair.
This book does a great job at showing the struggles a person without arms encounters, and how it is primarily from society: not only social devaluation (stigmatization of feet as dirty and gross, being judged as missing something) but also in terms of how everyday objects like books and clothing fasteners are designed to be manipulated by hands rather than feet. I started imagining how everyday objects, like guitars or door handles, might be designed differently if they were intended to be manipulated by feet. There are doors designed to be opened by pressing a low handle (for wheelchair users, but easier to reach for a foot than one at the height of an ambulatory person's hands), and foot-flush toilets (common in RVs), but not much else.
The description of the time it takes Aven to get dressed made me think about how difficult it would be to grip buttons and zippers with toes and get even one leg through a pair of jeans, so I wonder if a society of armless people would have favored stretchy/flowy elastic-waistband bottoms for everyday wear instead of stiff-material bottoms with fasteners at the waist.
The fight Aven has over the meaning of being called “disabled” felt very real, and I appreciated her mom's advice that “disabled” didn't have to mean “incapable” because like all people with disabilities, I've had to learn that disability is a value-neutral description of my experiences rather than a putdown or defeatist term. Though I would have liked Aven's mom to not speak as if disability was a word that holds people back from their potential—it the world being designed for people with arms that holds Aven back, not the naming of that phenomenon. The mention of possible early arthritis in her hips and toes from using her feet for high-dexterity tasks is not a fully social element of disability, but it is one that would be less severe in a society that anticipated it by default. I look forward to seeing Aven develop a more nuanced understanding of the concept of disability in the next book.
This is such a delightful story and I didn't see it coming that Jesse was also gay. Maybe he was figuring it out offscreen during the story? The middle-school drama is absolutely realistic and believable. And I really like how Callie didn't “end up” with Greg, and how she explicitly called him out for taking her for granted and for not valuing her friendship. The scene where Jesse apologized to Callie for ditching her during the dance was so heartfelt and genuine.
This book is mainly an overview of suggestions for how to approach sex as a person with physical disabilities. This is best as an introduction to the topic. Since I've read other guidebooks about disabled sexuality, not much in this book was new for me. It was really nice to see acknowledgement of nongenital sexual activity! And the very important mobility device etiquette about how mobility aids are an extension of their owner's body, and should absolutely never be touched or moved without explicit permission. The art is very cute too.
This book was really disappointing. I was really hoping the narrative would challenge diet culture and draw attention to all the indications of the main character having aspects of disordered eating from being put on diets by her mom. Ultimately, diet culture is never questioned. It was extremely difficult to read passages where the main character is being judgmental of fat characters.
The only useful sections for me were the practical tips for day to day living with IBS, because the sections about medical treatment are from 2005 and no longer current.
I found the naturopathic sections very problematic because of my history of eating disorder (orthrorexia). There was lots of use of the word “toxin” and much fearmongering about MSG (with the racist term “Chinese restaurant syndrome”), GM food, sugar, dental fillings, vaccine preservatives (which save lives by preventing vaccine contamination and sepsis), and combination vaccines. They mentioned thiomersal by name (“thimerosal”) despite that it hadn't been used in vaccines for decades. They expressed belief that live virus vaccines (which contain a modified weakened virus, or a manufactured virus containing only the surface proteins) or combination vaccines can trigger long-term inflammation in people without autoimmune disorders or immunocompromization from the immune system being “overwhelmed”—a claim that is not supported by science or immunology.
There was even a positive reference to Andrew Wakefield's now retracted and thoroughly discredited Lancet paper that galvanized the “vaccines cause autism” movement, though the authors mainly focused on “vaccines cause colitis” and “thimerosal is toxic.” I do not excuse this because though the paper wasn't retracted by the Lancet until 2010, when this book was published Wakefield had already been exposed for the serious ethical and conflict-of-interest problems with the paper.
The authors used the word “chemicals” in a vague sense of “substance that I think is harmful in any amount without regard to how toxicology and biochemistry work,” and valorized what would today be called “clean eating” as inherently superior.
This book spurred me to learn about the metallurgy and chemistry of dental fillings, and the history of MSG being maligned. In summary: dental fillings do not cause detectable mercury levels after 72 hours, removing them causes much higher acute exposure than receiving one, and the mercury and other metals form a structure that holds the mixture together. Re: MSG: the letter to a medical journal that got titled “Chinese restaurant syndrome” was revealed by the letter writer himself as a hoax as soon as it was published, but the hoax had already caught on due to bolstering Sinophobia in society. MSG is naturally occurring in mushrooms, tomatoes, many cheeses, and exists in cuisines all around the world, including those of western Europe and the Mediterranean. If tomato sauce and mushrooms don't give you symptoms, MSG is not the cause of the symptoms.
My review contains discussion of the chemistry of cremation and decomposition. I speak frankly about death and funerary rituals. I don't think I get super graphic but discretion is advised. The Holocaust is mentioned briefly, but only in reference to why cremation wouldn't have been desirable for the group that left Earth on the ship, even if cremation on a spaceship with fire could be done.
Also contains detailed discussion of different ways Jewish people relate to Israel, Zionism and diaspora politics.
My only criticism is that when the shuttle crashed and they decided to cremate the body of the person who died, it's unclear if they did it poorly because of never having used fire and the knowledge of cremation techniques being lost, or if the author also didn't know that open air cremation requires at least 8 hours of actively tending the fire and adding fuel to ensure that it stays hot enough and doesn't burn out. This is necessary because the human body is mostly water.
I was half expecting the planet's inhabitants to come upon the body and accuse the settlers of pollution, or for the unattended pyre to have sparked a forest fire before it burned out.
The information on cremation may have been in the library in its digital archive that was destroyed by the Council in a prior generation, and it would have been a curiosity rather than something the settlers would have considered, because even in secular Judaism, cremation has a very strong association with the Holocaust, so the initial group that left Earth wouldn't have considered it important to preserve the information beyond “some cultures on Earth burned their dead instead of burying them.”
In either case, I forgive the characters for not understanding the chemistry of cremation.
I am super curious about their burials on the spaceship though. A traditional Jewish funeral uses no embalming and the body is put in a white shroud, in a plain box or directly into soil. At the right depth, with good oxygen access, and with the right microorganisms in the soul, a human body placed directly in the ground could completely decompose with nothing left behind (not even bones) in a matter of weeks. So were the ship's gravesites permanent? Did they rotate cemeteries by generation and reuse gravesites older than x generations? In 500 years of ship residents dying, there wouldn't be enoughspace for all those permanent graves!
I really like this duology as an allegory for the diversity of ways Jewish people relate to Zionism and Israel. The ship's original mission was establishment of a secular Jewish homeland on an uninhabited planet. This was the Council's form of Zionism initially. Later, the Council favored a religious state, and wanted to return to Earth to claim the land that was once the state of Israel, and it's unclear whether they would choose to conquer or negotiate with any existing people once reaching Earth, but they intend to build a new Temple and create a Jewish state. Alexandra's position was that the planet should be conquered, and its inhabitants subjugated under the rule of the settlers' state. Terra's position is to create a city where humans, Xollu and (I can't remember the other species name) live alongside each other as equals not in a new state but as a part of the planet's existing system of federated cities. Terra's position aligns with Bundism, which is best summarized by the Yiddish expression “Where my home is, there is my country.”
The author did a really excellent job at portraying nuance to the positions that the settlers had about how to respond to the planet being inhabited. I have no idea what her personal position is regarding Israel and Palestine, and that's how I know she did a good job with the allegory.
This is one of those fantasy novels where women are fully empowered to make their own choices about sexuality and marriage and motherhood, but the one flaw in the narrative concerning sexuality is that it's presented as an undisputed truth that for the recipient, first PIV will always involve pain and that bleeding is normal. This was the received wisdom for my parents' generation, but pain and bleeding are neither inevitable nor unavoidable. In a culture that doesn't value women's pleasure as much as men's, of course it would be the most common experience, since the recipient's partner is would be likely to ensure that the recipient is physiologically ready to receive their partner. In the society of this book, women are taught that their own pleasure is important, so it's very odd for characters to be discussing “Why does it always hurt the first time, for the woman?”
Fantasy authors have a responsibility to correct this myth so that readers do not believe that bleeding (which is an injury) and pain during PIV are ever inevitable or normal. It's only “normal” in a context where the receiver's partner is not attentive to the receiver's body being physiologically ready or the receiver has a medical condition that causes muscle spasms or dryness.
In the scene where Katsa experiences PIV for the first time, it is at a time when she and Po have been doing other activities for a while with increasing intensity. Discomfort from a new sensation would make sense, but it doesn't make sense for there to have been actually pain for her unless she had a medical condition or was dehydrated, or if she was automatically clenching her muscles in expectation of pain instead of relaxing them (a possibility if you're taught that pain is inevitable, but Po might have felt pain from it too or been completely unable to do PIV, and asked her to relax), or Po was inadvertently being too rough. But it would have been much better for the scene to involve Katsa telepathically communicating “you're hurting me” and Po to apologize and slow down in response, to show readers that pain can be lessened or eliminated by slowing down and relaxing, and to leave readers feeling empowered to tell partners if they're having pain.
Fantasy authors: please do better!
This book is an exploration of how quickly a conflict can spiral out of control when the parties involved do any kind of fudging the truth to present themselves in a more favorable light. In Phillip's case, he lied that he was humming the national anthem in order to be patriotic when he was really just trying to annoy a teacher who wasn't tolerant of his clowning around. In the case of his teacher, she exaggerated the volume at which he was humming. We see how misunderstandings rapidly balloon as school administrators fail to effectively communicate with each other and people outside the school—a prospective school board candidate, newspapers, and a conservative-leaning talk show akin to the O'Reilly Factor—get involved.
I really enjoyed the description of the school administration internals and how from the beginning, the poor communication between administrators set the stage for what turned into a national incident. It's very clear that neither Phillip nor the teacher Ms Narwin were given an opportunity by others to sort out the conflict before it was too late. And although Phillip becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the positive attention from strangers who believe he's a valiant patriot whose freedoms are being threatened, it's beyond his control by the time he realizes he shouldn't have lied. Likewise, Ms. Narwin has been harmed by those same strangers and by the time Phillip tries to talk to her, she is so unwilling to consider the possibility that Phillip doesn't condone the threats to her career that she deliberately closes herself off from him out of self preservation.
I really appreciate the ultimate message that everyone's somewhat in the wrong: Ms. Narwin for exaggerating the disruptiveness of Phillip's humming, Phillip for lying that he was being patriotic instead of trying to annoy her, the neighbor Ted for further embellishing Phillip's lie, Ms Narwin's superiors for not listening to her ideas for how to resolve the situation without making Phillip more bitter. By the time the first newspaper story is printed, it's already too late to go back. Any possibility of respectful discourse gets nullified as more and more people make assumptions about what happened.
I felt like this is the kind of thing that could have happened in my high school, though I was in high school more than a decade later. The story has a timeless quality where it will continue to be relevant with only very minor updates to the references to technology.
There's a lot to unpack here, especially with respect to sexual assault, grooming and CSA.
I want to preface my review by emphasizing that I do think it's possible to write a book where multiple grown adults make sexual advances toward a 16-year-old, the 16-year-old doesn't think the adults did anything wrong, and the narrative still makes it very clear that the adults were in the wrong even if the 16yo doesn't think so, because of power dynamics and grooming. This is not a book that successfully communicates “All of these people were in the wrong, not just the obviously creepy ones.”
It's really seriously concerning to me that the narration seemingly makes excuses for these 20something aged men openly expressing to a 16 year old girl that they want to fuck her because she's “so mature” that they “forget” she's 16. If you're in your 20s and you “forget” someone's 16, that's a huge red flag for grooming.
What was L'Engle thinking when she wrote a scene where Polly, having run away from an attempted sexual assault and having been groped by a classmate hours later, tells Remy (sp) what happened and Remy wordlessly undresses her and thinks “now is the time to ~make love~ to Polly”... And the narrative presents this as a healing experience for Polly. Where she seems to dissociate.
(I'm not denying that sexual activity can be a healing experience after sexual assault, but at the bare minimum the person who had the trauma needs to independently communicate “I want to do this”, the other person needs to constantly and explicitly check in and be ready to abruptly stop without judgment if the person with trauma dissociates or wants to stop for any reason, and they need to have some kind of aftercare and debriefing. And both people need to be near enough in age that there isn't a power dynamic where grooming is possible, like between a doctor doing his residency and a 16-year-old, or between a college junior and a high school junior.)
Even though Remy the next day says it was wrong of him to pursue Polly sexually, he blames Polly in a way and repeats that she's so Mature™ that he “forgot” she was a minor. The authorial commentary on this seems to be that it's a potentially valid excuse for sexual advances toward minors, and the narrative appears to want us to sympathize with Polly, who in that particular moment doesn't think Remy did anything wrong. I'm seriously questioning what L'Engle was thinking in this book ostensibly written for an intended audience of teens near Polly's age.
Zachary is much more forward with his intentions toward Polly but I worry that his function in the narrative was partly to make Remy look better. Zachary makes Polly feel uncomfortable and he repeatedly crosses boundaries in ways the narrative does hint are inappropriate, but the narrative doesn't seem to present Zachary's “I won't do anything you don't want me to” as a problem. It's a big problem when the responsibility is put fully on the recipient of sexual advances to stop unwanted ones, because it feeds into the idea that men are just unable to control themselves and if a man crosses a woman's boundary it's her fault for not stopping him. It's unclear if the authorial commentary actually disagrees with this, because it's made clear that Polly's classmate in the truck scene was being inappropriate, that it wasn't Polly's fault when Max attacked her, and that Zachary should stop hassling Polly about sex.
In the time L'Engle grew up, it was an established social script that in order to say yes to premarital sex, a woman would need to be coy and flirtily say no, but Zachary is interpreting Polly's discomfort (from her very recent trauma of three people making inappropriate or unwanted sexual advances toward her within the same 24 hour period, which she understandably doesn't want to describe to a guy who repeatedly expresses his annoyance at her saying she's not ready for sex with him) as her just being coy.
Zachary's sexual intentions toward Polly are also not presented as inappropriate even though he's implied to be like, 20? They're closer in age than Remy and Polly but there's still a power dynamic involved and their age difference is enough that Zachary knows he'd be breaking the law. No one but a groomer will compliment someone they're pursuing with “you're so mature for your age that I forget you're only 16.”
I also found it very difficult to understand L'Engle's decision process for why everyone insists that Polly should forgive Max just because Max is a dying old woman who only tried to attack her when drunk, and Polly does just that in the end. The authorial commentary on this seems to be “drunk people aren't themselves” and “it's wrong to suddenly cut ties with a dying elderly person no matter what.” I found it troubling that Ursula seemed to know that Max was a predator when drunk, and nothing in the narrative indicates that a reader should find it disturbing that everyone views Max as not responsible for her actions when drunk.
I also found it troubling that in the flashback Polly has to a time when a classmate exposed himself and assaulted her in the lunch line in elementary/middle school, Meg's response is to tell Polly the same thing happened to her and that there's nothing anyone could have done (uh, the boy could have NOT assaulted her). I know that at the time of publication, schools wouldn't have done anything , but it's so bleak and horrible that the authorial commentary here is that you have to accept it and move on, while the aggressor faces no consequences and isn't even told they need to respect boundaries. I can't imagine how a reader with CSA trauma before my time would have responded to this incredibly bleak outlook on how girls should expect their boundaries to be treated by boys, and by adults in their lives going forward, and that they just have to suffer through it and move on.
This whole book can be summed up as “At least four people fail to respect Polly's boundaries and bodily autonomy, at least three adults groom her, and the narrative commentary is that legality and potential pregnancy are the only problems when an adult makes sexual advances toward a minor they've groomed to want it. Also if a sick dying person attempts to assault you, you're obligated to forgive them and continue having an interpersonal relationship with them because they're dying.” What on earth was L'Engle thinking??
It's difficult to tease out which parts of this book would have been radically progressive, because the ultimate conclusion of Polly forgiving Max muddles any possibility of suggesting that Polly deserved to have her boundaries unquestionably accepted by all the adults in her life. Perhaps it was radical to have a complex and sensitive portrayal of lesbians, where even though one was dying, the relationship was portrayed as the same kind of bond shared by a married man and woman? I didn't get the impression that L'Engle wanted readers to come away thinking that gay people are inherently predatory, because Polly's parents' opinions about lesbians would have been considered radical acceptance and the narrative presents Max's actions as due to her trauma of witnessing her father sexually abusing her sister.
I'm not sure if the narrative is suggesting that Max's not forgiving her father, or her frequently expending energy on a grudge, made her become like him. That would explain the ultimate message of it being important for Polly to forgive Max, but the narrative's message there could also be explained by the kind of radical forgiveness expected in many types of Christianity. But the meaning of forgiveness in the narrative seems to be saying “You did nothing wrong” or “You didn't cause me harm,” instead of “You hurt me but I'm not holding a grudge.” Or the narrative seems to be expressing that cutting someone out of your life counts as a grudge, even if it's to preserve your own safety and well-being.
Tldr: What was L'Engle thinking??
This book made me extremely thankful I didn't grow up during the Red Scare. It's shocking to learn that the ethical standards of the FBI at the time permitted following minors, harassing them and questioning them without a parent present. I completely did not see it coming that the uncle was the informant, because I expected him as a communist to view the socialist dad in a more favorable light than the anticommunist antisocialist FBI. The uncle, by acting as an informant, is a traitor to fellow communists and any leftists (like the dad) who are trying to make the world better. I found myself exclaiming “NO!” at the main character for choosing to talk to the FBI agent, because anything you say, no matter how positively it paints you, can and will be used against you by law enforcement, by nature of how law enforcement works.
I had a hard time figuring out if the narrator was having difficulty separating fantasy from reality or if I was actually reading fantasy, and it really put me in the mindset of how the narrator experiences the world.
I felt like the references to Indigenous people were exotifying mystical-native stereotypes, and though it is not unusual for a white child to have those stereotypes, it's an author's responsibility to write it in such a way that it's clear they're telling readers “don't exotify and stereotype Native American peoples or their folk tales and religions like this.” Authorial commentary on this subject was absent and the only Native people were a man and woman who spoke vaguely of magical things, who the narrator concluded were a god in disguise and a ghost of a princess from a legend / folk tale. This really disrupted my enjoyment of the book.
The scene where the mom tears the monster book in half was heartbreaking and poignant, and the portrayal of bullying resonated with me as a person who's experienced being punished for fighting back against bullying because the bully embellished their story or lied in order to made it look like they were the real victim.
My only criticism is the portrayal of CPR chest compression because it doesn't cause (or almost never causes) a person's heart to resume beating independently. It's a very common misconception that CPR has a higher success rate than it does. It's purpose is to prevent brain injury until help (a defibrillator) arrives. Usually the heart needs an electric jolt to restart. And the success rate of CPR with chest compression, breathing into the person, and using the defibrillator is sadly much lower than as shown in media
But I don't hold it against the author or editors, because it's such a common misconception that I only learned it by searching “CPR success rate” in a search engine on a whim.
Tarshis does a good job addressing what happened to Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the western U.S. both in the story and the historical notes afterward. I've read several historical fiction children's books that take place during and after the Pearl Harbor bombing and this is one I will definitely want to read to my kids when they're independently reading chapter books.
Now this is the kind of gender story related to detransition that I want to see more of: people reclaiming their bodies and becoming more comfortable in their skin, while having a period of identifying with transness that ended but that they don't regret, while still being completely trans-affirming. This comic affirms transness in a way that is so refreshing, compared to the kinds of detransition stories that get popular (e.g. the ones where the detransitioner advocates restricting access to transition and/or discrediting trans people). Making a world where transmasculine people can access top surgery more easily has a curb-cut effect of making it easier for everyone who wants breast reduction/removal to access it.
DNF. This book was so disappointing. I went in thinking I'd read about the adventures of pirates operating democratic organizations and enjoying freedom from imperialism. I got a whole lot of Columbus hero-worship, casual slave trade apologism, and severe glossing over of the colonialist violence and genocide against peoples indigenous to the Americas.
I really did not appreciate the scene with the guy with delusions talking about invisible toys because it just adds to the idea that mental illness makes someone into a creepy predator. It was totally unnecessary and ruined the rest of the part where Charlie seems to learn that people in a psych hospital aren't dangerous.
I also felt like Webster Bragg was presented in ways that fascists usually don't act. They tend to keep their more extreme beliefs under wraps until they have already persuaded other people to accept their less-obviously white supremacist ideas. Fascists don't just start ranting to unwilling listeners about how might makes right; they use underhanded techniques to make their ideas seem more palatable at first.
This is not to say that people like Webster Bragg wouldn't respond to disaster like he did, but that fascists would typically not be so loud about ideas they know make them unpopular with their neighbors unless they had nothing to lose. And since deer hunting is still happening in the town, people other than the Braggs do have hunting rifles.
I felt like the parts where Charlie was alone on his skis were well-written, and when he dropped the jerky I absolutely knew some animal would start following him and sincerely hoped that it wasn't a bear.
I waited a long time before I decided I was emotionally ready to read this one. I was 12 at the time of the attacks, and I lived just outside New York City—close enough to see the pillars of smoke from the towers when on top of a hill. I did not lose anyone, but the moment when I learned the second tower was hit is one of my most salient memories of that time.
I appreciate the author taking the time and doing the immense emotional work of teaching people born after the attacks (or people who were too young to understand at the time) about the event and the immediate aftermath. It was good to read something about the attacks that did not try to explain the motivations of the terrorists (or make arguments about things like the PATRIOT Act).
I think something that would have been good to mention at some point in the Afterword was how after the attacks, there was a spike in hate crimes against Arab Americans, and unwarranted suspicion cast on them and on the entire religion of Islam. The association in white Americans' minds of Arab Americans and Islam with extremism and terrorism is still a problem today.
Something that I found troubling about the worldbuilding was that deaf people and blind people, and presumably people with any disability, no longer exist, but the authorial commentary about this fact was neutral. For such a world without deafness to come to exist, genocide against d/Deaf communities must have occurred, in the form of forcing the “healing” nanites into people to make them hearing. The fact of deafness no longer existing is revealed matter-of-factly in a single sentence, and is not mentioned again.
Similarly, there is mention of Tonists who intentionally blind themselves and have persuaded the Thunderhead to disable the nanites that would reverse their blindness, but this fact comes from Citra's perspective, and she thinks that Tonists are ridiculous. At another point, Rowan recalls a time when hus teachers decided his behavior was inconvenient enough to them that it veered into depression, and they tweaked his nanites. Rowan remembers this as an annoying event and one where he could not have objected to the tweaking, but the text doesn't relate this violation of bodily autonomy to the eradication of deafness and blindness—only to when Rowan's pain and healing nanites are turned off for his initiation into Goddard's circle. At best, this is a missed opportunity to encourage the reader to question the idea of eradicating disability for nondisabled people's convenience.
The Thunderhead is regarded as impartial, but any algorithm contains the biases of its programmers. It is very evident that bodily autonomy is not highly valued in this world, because there is no such thing as someone having a “do not revive” order in the event of a non-gleaning death. The consequentialist ethics behind killing and maiming not being regarded as a deep violation (because the person can be revived and/or fixed) are troubling, and I don't get the impression that the text is adequately encouraging the reader to question this assumption—Citra obviously struggles during her final test, but this is described as because of her empathy rather than it being a conflict with her values.
I have a hard time believing that in a society where killing isn't regarded as an unforgivable violation that it's not more common as a form of bullying. If Citra had been caught when she pushed her classmate in front of a truck, she would have gotten a slap on the wrist, but there's no mention of other children intentionally hurting each other fatalishly.
I also found it troubling that being rendered deadish is not regarded as a traumatic event. Nanites can stop brains from having chemical and structural and emotional changes from psychological trauma, but they can't change a person's knowledge of having had their body violated or their forming associations.
This makes me wonder about neurodevelopmental disabilities, which are about how a brain has organized itself rather than neurological disability due to injury or illness. I am also wondering what someone would need to do in order to transition—if nanites make body parts regenerate, is it a case of tweaking nanites to generate different reproductive body parts and hormone levels, or are trans people forcibly tweaked out of observable depression and left in a state of stagnation from being unable to feel active distress but also unable to feel like they have authority over their own bodies?
It is also said in the text that the only fat people who exist are fat by choice, because nanites alter metabolism to make everyone not-fat. It's troubling that the text contains the assumption that being fat is due to metabolic error and/or overeating, and cannot be any person's optimal state. I also really don't like when authors use fat as a metaphor for being excessive in other areas of life, or the trope of making the only fat character evil.
I am in love with this book. I really liked how the author describes sexual activity with just the right amount of detail such that you understand what the characters are doing (with emphasis on their feelings) without it being pornographic. I also appreciated the inclusion of Kath asking Lily “Is this okay?” during sex to normalize asking for consent during intense moments.
I really enjoyed this book a lot, and in the very beginning, I found myself going to Google Maps to see their driving route between Las Vegas and the site of the accident. I learned that Ash Springs is as described: a trailer park and a Shell gas station, with nothing around for many miles. The Extraterrestrial Highway likewise is long stretches of desert without any buildings or people.
I decided to look up what kind of experiences people have while in induced comas, and many report having brief flashes of awareness of what's going on around them, but it has a dreamlike quality where they're confused and the brain tries its hardest to string together a coherent narrative. I am not bothered by the author's choice to have Reese come back to consciousness seemingly instantaneously, but I was bothered by the premise that there was no way for the Area 51 medical teams to transport Reese and David to a hospital closer to their homes–it is not revealed until the end that they would have died if not given the nonconsenting alien DNA treatment. I also would have liked being informed earlier in the book that Reese's ruptured spleen was repaired and not removed as I'd assumed–I think removal is the typical treatment, because you can survive without a spleen–I thought to myself as she signed the NDA, “If she doesn't have a spleen, her doctors need to know!”
I read this book soon after finishing the nonfiction book Republic of Lies, about the rise of various conspiracists' ideas in recent history in the U.S., so I was pleased that Reese's best friend Julian didn't think the moon landing was faked.
I found the characters really engaging and I'm looking forward to reading more of this series.
