Lamb by Christopher Moore

In the opening of Christopher Moore’s Lamb offers a warning and defence. This is an apocryphal book of the Bible being written by Jesus’ childhood pal Biff to cover the years underrepresented in the other books of the Bible—essentially from Jesus at 5 years old until thirty three. While Moore, I think, stays true to the spirit of Jesus’ personality, the situations he’s placed in are absurd and I think the more seriously religious might find it borders on the blasphemous.

The book’s frame narrative takes place in a motel room to which Biff, recently resurrected, has been confined by the angel Raziel. He’s been granted the gift of modern language and instructed to write this apocryphal text. Throughout the book, he has a few zany escape attempts and Raziel is lampooned as being obsessed with (but not fully comprehending) the soap operas on TV.

The core narrative, though, works through the various stages of Jesus’ life and operates somewhat like a Bildungsroman as Jesus (Joshua in this text) grapples with the idea of being the messiah. The childhood friendship between Joshua, Biff, and Mary is an endearing journey peppered with conflict with their local authorities. Joshua discovers his capacity for miracles, including resurrecting the dead (it’s not always perfect to start…), and when the conflict escalates, Biff and Joshua go on a journey to discover whether Joshua is indeed the messiah.

What follows is a mix of a Bildungsroman, humour novel, and fantasy adventure. The absurdity of some of the episodes would, I’m sure, upset people, but it’s delivered in such a tongue-in-cheek way that it’s hard to be too hurt by it. Biff plays opposite to Joshua; while Joshua is increasingly self-serious, pious, and compassionate, Biff is much more fast and loose with morals and decorum. One of the most memorable episodes, for instance, is that Joshua needs to understand sex (while remaining strictly celibate) and so Biff acts as a ‘tutor’ by bedding sex workers every night while Joshua listens through the wall or has Biff explain the experience afterward. It’s a reasonably lengthy section, a drawn out ‘bit.’

Biff as narrator is unselfserious and Moore draws on different kinds of humour. Some of the stories he tells, like the aforementioned tutelage, demonstrate Moore’s commitment to the long-form joke. In other moments, Moore operates via irony and sarcasm (indeed, Biff claims to have invented sarcasm). Some of the funnier moments are when Josh uses Biff’s own (sarcasm) weapon against him or operates with a bit of mischievousness (like compulsively poking everybody who gets referred to as ‘untouchable’). There’s some allusive humour that draws on Bible stories; Moore reworks moments like turning water into wine and jokes around being lost in the desert. One of my favourite ‘bits’ is that Biff continually justifies his actions with wisdom from nonexistent books of the Bible. He tells Josh one of his aphorisms: “for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week” (293). When Josh asks him where that is written, they have the following exchange:

“That is not written. Where is that written?”

“Amphibians five-seven.”

“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”

“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!” (293)

Those fun exchanges are just cheeky enough in their wordplay to spark a smile. Sometimes it’s the restraint that pays off, whereas the more excessive gags don’t have, for me, a comedic payoff.

Lamb is also more plot-driven than most of the books I read. There are distinct phases of the story that each could serve as standalone episodes. In particular, Joshua and Biff meet up with the three wise men. In the first, they stay at Balthasar’s palace, which takes on a Bluebeardesque mystery: there are Chinese concubines all around and a door that must never be opened. Amidst the debauchery, Biff opens the door and unleashes a demon—it becomes a fantastical adventure where the demon murders the women and then Joshua, Balthasar, Biff, and Joy are fighting back to control the creature. Then, they journey to see Gaspar in India. This part of the book is, in my view, the most controversial. Moore’s depiction of India plays into some harmful stereotypes; the men are depicted as both overly sexualized and effeminate, and Hinduism is presented as barbaric, with brutal human sacrifices. Melchior’s section is probably the most tame and least distinctive in its depiction. The final phase of the book revolves first around gathering the apostles, delivering the sermon on the mount, and his subsequent crucifixion (is this whole book a cruci-fiction?). The section wherein we’re recruiting apostles really drags, but the drama of writing the sermon on the mount is pretty strong. I also liked the tension leading up to the crucifixion where Joshua is committed to his sacrifice and tricks Biff and Maggie (Mary Magdalene) into not saving him.

The ending of the book is a surprise, which is odd given that we know the Bible story. Biff’s narrative ends with Jesus on the cross and we return to the present timeline, where Biff is released from his responsibility and reunites with Maggie, who tells him that Jesus came back. Biff says he had heard but that he couldn’t bring himself to see him, which established a nice pathos for Biff. The book, though, ends pretty abruptly.

Overall, Lamb was reasonably engaging and somewhat funny, but it didn’t fully grip me. The tone of the book was pretty consistent and Biff’s sarcastic and ironic tone is consistent and well-delivered. The book may be a little overlong, in my opinion, and a tad repetitive. While the book’s excesses are important to its vision, it does at times wear a little thin. The book has some philosophical bits, like Joshua’s reflections on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—he also learns kung-fu—but mainly it feels like a book geared towards entertainment.

I hope you enjoy it; happy reading!

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

    Pardon the pun, but Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach covers a lot of ground for an average-length book. The story’s initial premise sees Lisa receiving a vision of crows intimating the death of her brother at sea before it flows in different directions: tangents, vignettes, and moments that form a collage of memory. The book is an ocean and its vignettes are its estuaries. As a result, the novel blurs the lines between Bildungsroman, modern Gothic, and horror story.

    After Lisa’s brother Jimmy is lost at sea, you might expect the novel to focus on her search for him—and in some ways it does—but each section of the book delves into memories of different family members and their loss. First, Robinson explores the relationship between Lisa and her boisterous activist uncle Mick. Next, Lisa and her grandmother deepen their bond and she learns a slower way of life. After the loss of these family members, Lisa experiences some other traumas that send her in a dark path where she drops out of school and runs away from home. The plot slowly shifts back to her brother Jimmy and his own disappointments; once an Olympic-hopeful for swimming, Jimmy injures himself and forever gives up his dreams for what is ostensibly more mundane: a relationship with Karaoke, a hanger-on derided by all the cool Indigenous kids. The ending of the book reveals the truth, at least partially, of what happens at sea before ending on an ambiguous note, allowing the book to remain rooted in its mysterious tone.

    For better or worse, one blurb on the back of the book has influenced my reading of the text. It posited Monkey Beach as an Indigenous Gothic novel, and the description is quite apt. When I think of Gothic novel tropes, I think about the dark, largely-absent figures in mysterious places. Consider, for example, Jane Eyre’s Rochester and Thornfield Hall, Dracula’s Castle Dracula, or even Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. Here, Monkey Beach is that central location that draws the imagination.

    As for the dark figure of Monkey Beach, that’s up for debate. One reading is that Jimmy himself is the mysterious figure driving the novel. He’s largely absent from the story—a kind of Schrödinger’s cat for Lisa, potentially dead, potentially alive following his shipwreck. Moreover, there is a dark secret revealed at the end of the book that allows for a rereading of his character.

    Another reading might posit ghosts and other creatures are the bedrock of Monkey Beach’s more Gothic bent. Lisa has a gift, or a curse, where she has visions and dreams that intimate the future. For instance, she dreams of crows and understands that Jimmy is in danger. More notably, a small man visits her at night on the eve of deaths and disasters, such as in the lead-up to her uncle Mick’s death while fishing or her Ma-ma-oo’s death in a house fire. The way Lisa’s attitude toward the little man shifts throughout the book is compelling, particularly when she lashes out at him, demanding to know what good he is if he can’t actually prevent traumas from happening.

    Speaking of relationships, Robinson is absolutely masterful in this respect. The characters are richly developed and sincere. It’s hard to resist Mick’s charmingly brash approach to life, for example. The relationships between each member of Lisa’s family comes across so beautifully; Robinson captures their ebb and flow, the love amidst the tension, and so on. Since the story drifts in and out of memories, Robinson is able to offer perfect story beats that highlight the intimacy between characters. The characters felt so real, and when they shared happy moments together it felt wonderfully elevating. Your heart swells when they’re at peace and, even though the story gets dark, there’s an underlying optimism that emerges through the relationships between the characters.

    Stylistically, the book is beautiful and vivid in its descriptions. It’s difficult to find novels that so perfectly blend a poetic style with an accessible tone. The details Robinson includes for describing setting, for instance, are beautifully achieved. Sentence-by-sentence, Robinson’s turns of phrase are loaded with imagery. Oddly, though, Robinson never descends into the overly poetic style that alienates more traditional readers of fiction—as much as the writing is poetic, Robinson balances it against direct and precise phrasing. If nothing else, sections of dialogue interrupt the flowery language and drive the story forward.

    Robinson, at times, uses a collage-like style, juxtaposing different styles side-by-side. For example, in one chapter, she intersperses medical-sounding sections about why heart attacks happen while the core narrative progresses. Even the medical sections read poetically. These juxtapositions add a nice dimension for breaking up the core style, which leans heavily on Lisa’s internal monologue. 

    If I have one complaint about the book, it is this: Monkey Beach is disorientingly fast-and-slow. The book has rapid changes in time, offering some breakneck speeds (and their associated whiplash). Without careful reading, the time period of different vignettes can be difficult to follow; missing one sentence means you might not know a vignette is from three years earlier, or that we’re back in the present. At the same time, though, the book feels slow. Since the novel is so replete with vignettes, it feels like thing-after-thing happens without much progression to the central mystery established in the first pages of the book, and in turn it can feel like a slog. Perhaps it’s just that the central ‘promise’ of the book is to reveal whether Jimmy is alive or not and that there are basically three hundred pages in between before it’s resolved, but I found myself needing to take breaks before finishing the book.

    When Robinson develops on the ‘promise’ of the book, I have a mixed review. While Robinson does not completely reveal the mystery, I can make a compelling case for solving it. If you’re avoiding spoilers, I would skip ahead a little bit. At the end of the novel, Lisa is making blood sacrifices to strange voices in the woods to help protect her brother. She starts seeing the ghosts of her dead relatives before she awakes on the beach. I have two theories for why Jimmy is dead. One is that he shows up in these visions, and there’s only one other instance where Lisa has a vision of someone who is (probably?) alive. I think also, in terms of structure, the other chapters of the book culminate in the death of a relative. Given the pattern of building towards the death of a family member, it would be consistent if Jimmy were also to die here.

    In Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson captures magic. Of course, the blend of magic and realism throughout the book offers it a unique spin on the Buildungsroman. Lisa experiences her visions as a teenager, so amidst stories of drinking and partying and going off the rails, Robinson offers a unique twist on the genre. But Robinson also captures magic in terms of her character development and the relationships between them; they were all beautifully wrought in a way that’s hard to describe. Finally, the magic emerges in the linguistic prowess of Robinson’s style. Its individual passages are finely composed, even if the jumps in the greater narrative are disorienting.

    Even though I gripe about the disorienting nature of the book, it’s thematically consistent with Lisa’s experiences. First, the way the past reemerges to her in the form of ghosts mimics the way her narrative lapses into memory. Additionally, a traumatic event happens to Lisa partway through the book and she admits that that’s when the gaps in memory start to occur. Her own descent into alcoholism and drug use complicates the narrative thread, of course. Each of these experiences, in their own way, break time. The audience is placed alongside Lisa in this experience of lapses and gaps, deepening the uncertainty of the core details of the text.

    I often am given reading recommendations that take me months (or years…) to read. My friend Sam recommended this book to me at least five years ago, but Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach was worth the wait. It’s quite a unique book that I can see myself bringing into the classroom, if not in its entirety, at least in sections that serve as a masterclass in character and style.

    Happy reading, folks!

Hello, My Name Is Henry by Micah Schnabel

    Micah Schnabel is a musician that writes beautiful, tragic, happysad, funny, sincere, poetic songs and I adore him for it. He plays in punk bands like Two Cow Garage and Call Me Rita, but I am perpetually stunned by his work as a solo artist and it would break my heart to find out he wasn’t the radically authentic, kind, timid person I perceive him to be. I’ve provided an obscene amount of adjectives in these first sentences, but I want to emphasize how much I appreciate his musical endeavours [a playlist provided for you in the comments section while you read this review]. You can imagine how surprised I was to find out he had written a novel, a discovery which was promptly followed by a purchase.

    Hello, My Name Is Henry is a debut slice-of-life novel that expands upon the narrative recounted in Micah Schnabel’s song of the same name from his album Your New Norman Rockwell. The titular character in both is a 28 year old man working at a convenience store who feels that life is passing by around him but can’t seem to escape the cycle of poverty and mental illness that hovers around his past. The book is a pretty scathing critique of Americana—more on that shortly—and has a direct tone that reads like a progressive version of Bukowski.

    The novel retains the sincerity of Schnabel’s lyrics, though often presents itself as more prosaic than his musical work. I think of the way he builds scenes in “#33 Dryer” and “Emergency Room” as essentially perfect illustrations-in-words. The novel is somewhat more on-the-nose in tackling issues, with the central character often narrating exactly what the problems in America are: systemic poverty in small communities and the lack of responsiveness of politicians, the proliferation of harmful addictions and the shocking attempts to reduce the accessibility of naloxone (even among first responders!!), racism, toxic masculinity, and so on. I agree with essentially all of his views—and I appreciate that some of the minor conflicts in the book are Henry responding to homophobic and racial slurs; the way he strives to take action is an encouraging layer to a character who is often unmotivated and sedentary.

    You get a pretty good sense of Henry’s views and values throughout the book and the small town has a plethora of other characters. In some ways, the novel reads as a series of portraits and I find the characters to be pretty nicely developed. That said, Schnabel breaks a central rule of literary fiction: characters are introduced and shortly after are provided long monologues expressing their views, intentions, and life stories. There’s a transparency (or perhaps authenticity) to the characters that gives them a charm, even if the writer inside me keeps shouting to show not tell. It’s especially strange because, presumably, Henry has known these people for years and in a small town everyone knows each others’ business, but it just so happens to be the case that in the duration of the novel they pour their hearts out. Just suspend your disbelief a little bit, deal?

    Of Henry’s interactions with other characters, I find the most beautiful and compelling to be his friendship with Josh, who is an effective foil for Henry. Josh moved to “the city” years earlier to make a life for himself, but still maintains a correspondence with Henry. The two write letters back and forth, and Josh continually encourages Henry to come join him, but Henry is always held up by being too broke for a bus ticket. There’s a tragic bent to their friendship, where Josh seems to really want the best for Henry, but Henry is too stunted to make a move for himself. What really resonated for me, though, is that the two bond over a comic series called Memory Currency [a title which reappears as a song on Schnabel’s album The Teenage Years of the 21st Century]. The fictional (?) comic is described in a really compelling way, where the artist seems to perpetually shift. The two characters have been reading the comic for years but can’t make sense of it, though they come to some interpretive breakthroughs (the comic is the writer dreaming his audience? the continual changes of the central character’s design signal a shift in direction or a new concept being introduced?). I really liked the way they spoke about that and it rang so true in a way some of the dialogue does not.

    I am hesitant to spoil the ending of the book because it revolves around Henry’s friendship with Josh. There is some carefully placed foreshadowing around 40 pages before the climax of the book and while I had somewhat predicted what would happen, the delivery in the final pages of the book is fantastic. The devil’s in the details, but the tension of the final scene is very well-crafted and heartbreaking, with the novel’s final line being a nice encapsulation of the central theme of the book: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.”

    The book is laced with tragedy. Even moments that inspire rage are given a kind of pity that is hard to ignore; people often talk about how we need to be united in these divisive times, and the sympathy Henry (and Schnabel) extend to others seems a good model for how to start. There are some non-starters (when little white boys are play fighting, Henry extends sympathy for their small town lives, but when they use the N-word he says “fuck ‘em” and walks off), but in most cases Henry finds ways of being sympathetic to others (when a drug addict he knows tries to rob the convenience store he accidentally shoots a gun at Henry and Henry makes sure not to report the culprit to the police).

    There’s a powerful scene that I think encapsulates the tenderness of Henry’s character. One night, his grandfather has an episode and Henry’s mother and grandmother have to go out looking for him. When they find him, he has a shotgun and after they seem to calm him down, he walks up to his wife and daughter and kills himself in front of them. Henry doesn’t get the details of what happened until a few years later, but he knows something has happened. The tenderness and self-effacement he demonstrates in the morning is beautiful. Henry narrates that he had been up all night and “when [he] pretended to wake up that morning, [he] rose slowly, making noise to let my mother know that I was awake” (76). He shows such consideration for his mother where he does not want to take her off guard, and then he “walked slowly across the shag carpet. [He] gave [his] mother a short hug and said good morning” (76). There’s something touching about the way he mothers his mother in the scene, and it’s met with a beautiful and devastating reciprocity:

“She asked if I wanted a bowl of cereal.

I said I did.

The only other thing I remember is that we were out of milk” (76).

The scene is beautifully constructed with a devastating event, moments of tenderness, and it’s then undercut by a reminder of the poverty of the central characters. The structure of the novel is set up in a series of short chapters, which gives Schnabel the opportunity to deliver short gut punches strategically to punctuate the central points of the main story.

    When it comes to the main story, I suppose you could say that it’s about Henry wanting to leave town, though it’s a portrait of the town as much as anything. About halfway through the novel, there’s a central event that precipitates a number of changes. Henry witnesses a car accident where the driver runs a red light and runs over a little girl. The driver is a scumbag who keeps offering defences for why it’s the girl’s fault. Meanwhile, Henry moves the girl from under the car and cradles her in his arms, singing to her while she passes away. Schnabel returns to the idea several times that she gets heavier and that’s when Henry knows she has died, even before it’s confirmed. It’s a devastating touch.

    The little girl’s death catalyzes a number of deep conversations with people who are concerned for his well-being. The best, in my opinion, is the conversation Henry has with the owner of the convenience store. In that scene, the reactions in the conversation seem true and Schnabel uses one of the best examples of personification that comes to mind in my recent reading. The boss “stops talking for a beat, as if he’s waiting for me to stop him. I don’t say anything. The hum of the cooler seems to get louder for a moment, but I know it’s just the silence turning up the volume on us” (66). I love that line for two reasons: one, it just feels like an experience I’ve had where all of a sudden noise gets louder at an awkward moment. The second is that in the construction of the sentence, the silence is turning up the volume of the cooler—something that is soundless driving up the sound of something else is a compelling line, and I like that it can also be read as silence turning up its own volume. 

    This paragraph will spoil a key plot point, so skip ahead two paragraphs (or just listen to my playlist for a while and scroll). Following the little girl’s death, a revelation comes to light that seems to me to be too coincidental. The girl’s dad is a real scumbag who doesn’t care about his daughter dying because her mom cut him out of her life. He returns to town now in the hopes of ‘being there’ for his ex, but he’s an alcoholic that seems incapable of being there even for himself. There’s a sequence of events that seems improbable: Josh comes to town to check on Henry and they get into a fight with the girl’s dad, Rick. Rick later shows up at Henry’s apartment and robs and attacks him with a knife. At the end of the altercation, it’s revealed that Rick is Henry’s long lost dad.

    Beyond the coincidence, there’s a bit of a contradiction in the text. Henry judges Rick for being a terrible father to the girl and Rick says that even though he was bad, she was his blood and so he still has a claim to her as his daughter. The underlying message seems to be that blood is not so important as connection and actually doing the work of maintaining relationships, which I can endorse. After Henry realizes the girl was his half-sister, though, he starts referring to her as his sister pretty consistently. It’s an interesting contradiction, since he only met her a few moments before her death and yet now claims that bond. Initially I chalked up the inconsistency to some underlying biases that slipped into the text, but the more I think about it the more it seems like it’s another example of the final line’s aphorism: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.” He never wants to be like his deadbeat father, and yet despite his best efforts here he is replicating that same narrative that allows Rick to be a father without performing fatherhood. It’s a pretty clever spin, actually.

    Overall, Hello, My Name Is Henry is a touching novel that delivers all the genuine sincerity of Schnabel’s music, if sometimes more prosaic than necessary. That said, the more I think about the book the more I like it. Writing this review has forced me to process some of the things I overlooked or dismissed during my reading. The novel has that meandering quality that is the taste of many, encapsulating something like a complicated kindness by Miriam Toews or even a less problematic The Catcher in the Rye. There’s a lot of positives for Schnabel’s debut novel, and I’m confident that with a second novel we would see a continued refinement of his writing style, incorporating more of the poetic quality from his music.

    I recognize my own position here as a reviewer of books: I know that when I recommend a book to you, it could take days or weeks or months or years before you get around to it. I have the rare opportunity here to make a more immediate recommendation. Do yourself a favour and listen to some of Micah Schnabel’s music while you wait for your online independent bookstore order to arrive.

    Happy reading!

Listening Playlist:

#33 Dryer

Jazz and Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Emergency Room

How to Ride a Bike

The Interview

Cash 4 Gold

Hello, My Name Is Henry

Memory Currency

Coin$tar

Cincinnati, Ohio

Oh, What a Bummer

American Throwaway

Gentle Always

Remain Silent

A Celebration

Death Defying Feats

New Shoes

Almond by Sohn Won-Pyung

    In the first few pages after opening Sohn Won-Pyung’s Almond, the central character recounts witnessing his mother and grandmother falling victim to a horrific killing. The next fifty pages rewind to build the backstory around Yunjae and his family before building up to the attack and exploring the aftermath as Yunjae tries to move on, make friends, and subsist as an orphan.

    The central conceit of Almond is that the main character, Yunjae, is unable to feel emotions as the result of a brain condition called alexithymia. As a result, he has difficulty communicating with others, and the author very pointedly and tactfully notes it is distinct from autism or aspergers. The title derives from the similarity of the relevant part of the brain, the amygdala, being derived from the word almond—and Yunjae’s mother feeding him almonds in the hopes that that part of his brain will grow. The angle for the novel is underexplored and consequently pretty interesting and the pacing of the novel is very good. It’s a speed-read YA novel and definitely more engaging than most books of its genre. There are a number of threads which are actually somewhat difficult to disentangle for the purpose of a short review. Nevertheless I shall attempt.

    Yunjae’s mother runs off with a man, which causes a rift with her own mother. Yunjae’s grandmother disowns his mother and the two do not see each other for seven years. When Yunjae’s father dies in an accident, his mother tries to take care of him, teach him how to communicate with other peoples’ emotions, and pay the bills with a book store. When she finds herself struggling, she introduces Yunjae to his grandmother, who immediately dotes on him.

    One year on Yunjae’s birthday, the family goes out for dinner. A man begins killing people at random; he kills Yunjae’s mom with a hammer and his grandmother with a knife as she tries to defend Yunjae. Following the attack, Yunjae starts at a new school, where the other students make him into somewhat of a sensation, and they are endlessly curious about how he could be so unaffected by witnessing such a horrifically traumatic event.

    Of course, going to school entails its own bullies and another boy in the class is relentless in bullying Yunjae. Incidentally, the bullying and dialogue is overblown and doesn’t ring true. In one scene, Gon (the bully) and Yunjae are in a restaurant; Gon starts throwing plates all over the restaurant and having a temper tantrum and it just doesn’t ring true at all. Elsewhere, the bullying scenes somewhat pay off. When Gon is relentlessly beating Yunjae, Yunjae doesn’t react and makes a comment about how Gon is bullying himself; it borders on an interesting existential moment. Admittedly, though, Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven is a somewhat similar premise but far more exceptional in its emotional and philosophical nuance.

    As the book goes on, Gon and Yunjae develop an unlikely friendship which is not without some sweet moments of tenderness. Against all odds, Yunjae still runs his mom’s bookstore and Gon becomes a regular, bullying Yunjae into loaning him collectors’ pornography. It leads to an engaging moment, again bordering on the existential and again more accomplished in Kawakami’s work, where Gon reflects on the nature of aging. After doing a Google search on one of his favourite actresses and finding out that she’s old, he expresses concerns with Yunjae about their own aging. It’s a moment where the dialogue between teenagers actually reads as believable. So much of YA treats 15 year olds like they’re 6, so to actually have teenagers talking about some deeper issues was refreshing, even if there’s no payoff for it later.

    Similarly, Yunjae has concerns over whether he is a psychopath, concerned that his lack of ability to feel emotion is what links him to mass murderers. I have to give Won-Pyung credit for the tasteful representation of mass killings. Many authors would use it as an opportunity for an extended discourse on societal ills. The novel maintains a light touch that trusts the readers. When discussing the motivations of the mass murderer, there is some suggestion that he would align with incels or something of the sort, but it’s hinted at just enough that you could delve into the conversation with students or gloss right over it if it’s not the right audience.

    I also appreciated the references to the way the media depicted the events following the attack, Yunjae discusses how much attention the killer got on the news, where his every motivation was thoughtfully deconstructed and where he was made to be sympathetic or provided justification. Meanwhile, the victims were essentially ignored in the impact the attack had on them. It’s the kind of social commentary that doesn’t bludgeon the audience; it’s extremely tasteful and helps the clip of the novel move along.

    As I mentioned above, the pace of the book is quite good. The book is full of short chapters and little vignettes. It’s wonderfully achieved, though there are two key developments that felt somewhat too abrupt. In the first case, the romance that Yunjae develops with a girl in his class happens very quickly, which is even less believable given Yunjae’s supposed inability to feel emotions. The other section of the book that speeds through is the climax; it always seems tough to pull off a climax in YA fiction because the stakes are so difficult to establish. The climax, while lackluster, isn’t that bad, all things considered. In some ways, the book is transparently manipulative. Even so, it does seem to have a strange kind of power. In particular, the bully Gon has a backstory that hits every trope in the book. He was kidnapped as a child and only returned to his family when his mom was on the verge of death. By the time his dad finds him, though, Gon has become a hardened criminal and out of shame does not introduce him to his dying mother. Instead, Gon’s father pretends that Yunjae is his long lost son (long story) so that Gon’s mother can die in peace. Tragic enough, sure. Then, it becomes clear that Gon suffers from low self-esteem, that he is lashing out because he hates himself, and so on. It’s super obvious that giving him a sympathetic backstory is a manipulation tactic but it does make him a sympathetic character and ultimately makes the dynamic between the central characters quite tender and beautiful.

    Almond is at its best when Won-Pyung is developing that central relationship, which is nearly coded as a romance. Sometimes the sweetness of the novel doesn’t land. In particular, Yunjae has a love of books and discusses how they take us to all kinds of different worlds and expands the mind and so on. To me, it doesn’t seem authentic for someone who feels no emotions: how would you be compelled towards the characters? I suppose maybe it’s instructive, but the other part of me thinks that it’s part of a Big Books Conspiracy in YA fiction where it has to convince kids that reading is cool so that it can be included in classrooms. Anyway, the ending of the book is also pretty saccharine in a way I won’t identify for fear of spoilers.

    Overall, Almond is a pretty engaging story that is quite competent. When classed alongside other YA counterparts, I think Won-Pyung excels in the genre. The novel, in most respects, works. In the areas that don’t work for me, I think it’s still more successful than much of its competition. The characters are the highlight, even when somewhat trope-y, and the pace of the book is really masterfully accomplished. It’s a book I’d recommend to some of my younger readers [even though I’d have to give trigger warnings for death, violence, sex, and bullying] as a book that does promote awareness and empathy without being so overt as to prompt an immediate rebellion in the classroom.

    Happy reading, people! May your inner almond grow!