Some more books
Mar. 7th, 2023 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeUnmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson
We've all read Go Ask Alice, right? It was handed around my grade 8 class like contraband, albeit contraband that we were checking out of the school library. But it FELT illicit, what with all the drugs and underage sex work. None of us believed for a second that it was a real diary; our only question was, how could such an obvious fake get published, and what kind of person would write it? (Also, as it was 1995, we were puzzled about paper being the mechanism of delivery for LSD -- all our drug education was warning us against pills.)
Emerson sets out to explore the life of Beatrice Sparks, the literary con artist behind Go Ask Alice. It covers wider ground, too: the development of LSD, the Nixon administration's war on drugs, Mormonism, the YA industrial complex and the Satanic panic. It's a fast read, but not exactly fun, given that Sparks's follow up, Jay's Journal, took the diary left behind by a real boy and added a lot of Satanism -- effectively destroying the lives of his relatives and loved ones, as the real people involved were extremely identifiable.
Shutter by Ramona Emerson
The last few years has seen multiple crime novels by Native American authors where the protagonist can see or communicate with the dead. I had two on my radar -- this is one of them -- and now the Queens Public Library is promoting a third as part of its Read Together program.
Stuff like this is exactly why I joined the QPL -- you think Native American crime fiction gets released in Australia? US$50 well spent.
Anyway, this one follows a Navajo crime scene photographer who sees ghosts -- and one of them in particular would like her murder to be solved now, please. No matter how inconvenient that is for the heroine.
This started out as a memoir, and it kind of shows. The strongest sections are the flashbacks to the heroine's experiences, growing up as the daughter and granddaughter of photographers, and drawn to death and violence in a culture with strong taboos around death. The mystery itself starts out promising, but I spotted the killer extremely early on, and it kind of lost me when the heroine, who has just witnessed and photographed an execution (outside a fancy society party, no less!), takes ecstasy and goes clubbing. Like. At least back your memory cards up to the cloud first!
(The friends were also pretty flimsy characters -- the Hot Outgoing Actress and the Sassy Gay Neighbour. Compared with the much richer characters of the heroine's grandmother and mother, it was extremely clear which characters were based on real people, and which were cardboard cutouts.)
I don't think I'm going to continue the trilogy, but I'm gonna keep an eye on the author's work to see what she does when she's had more practice with fiction.
We've all read Go Ask Alice, right? It was handed around my grade 8 class like contraband, albeit contraband that we were checking out of the school library. But it FELT illicit, what with all the drugs and underage sex work. None of us believed for a second that it was a real diary; our only question was, how could such an obvious fake get published, and what kind of person would write it? (Also, as it was 1995, we were puzzled about paper being the mechanism of delivery for LSD -- all our drug education was warning us against pills.)
Emerson sets out to explore the life of Beatrice Sparks, the literary con artist behind Go Ask Alice. It covers wider ground, too: the development of LSD, the Nixon administration's war on drugs, Mormonism, the YA industrial complex and the Satanic panic. It's a fast read, but not exactly fun, given that Sparks's follow up, Jay's Journal, took the diary left behind by a real boy and added a lot of Satanism -- effectively destroying the lives of his relatives and loved ones, as the real people involved were extremely identifiable.
Shutter by Ramona Emerson
The last few years has seen multiple crime novels by Native American authors where the protagonist can see or communicate with the dead. I had two on my radar -- this is one of them -- and now the Queens Public Library is promoting a third as part of its Read Together program.
Stuff like this is exactly why I joined the QPL -- you think Native American crime fiction gets released in Australia? US$50 well spent.
Anyway, this one follows a Navajo crime scene photographer who sees ghosts -- and one of them in particular would like her murder to be solved now, please. No matter how inconvenient that is for the heroine.
This started out as a memoir, and it kind of shows. The strongest sections are the flashbacks to the heroine's experiences, growing up as the daughter and granddaughter of photographers, and drawn to death and violence in a culture with strong taboos around death. The mystery itself starts out promising, but I spotted the killer extremely early on, and it kind of lost me when the heroine, who has just witnessed and photographed an execution (outside a fancy society party, no less!), takes ecstasy and goes clubbing. Like. At least back your memory cards up to the cloud first!
(The friends were also pretty flimsy characters -- the Hot Outgoing Actress and the Sassy Gay Neighbour. Compared with the much richer characters of the heroine's grandmother and mother, it was extremely clear which characters were based on real people, and which were cardboard cutouts.)
I don't think I'm going to continue the trilogy, but I'm gonna keep an eye on the author's work to see what she does when she's had more practice with fiction.
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Date: 2023-03-07 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-07 12:03 pm (UTC)