Book Review (Rucksack): Frankenstein

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

Written by Mary Shelley in 1818

The Raccoon: Let me just make this clear: the original Frankenstein story contains neither a hunchbacked lab assistant named Igor, nor a pitchfork-armed mob marching toward a tower.  To be unnecessarily fastidious, Frankenstein is actually the story of Robert Walton, an optimistic gentleman leading an expedition to the North Pole, who, when his ship becomes surrounded by ice, happens to encounter an exhausted Victor Frankenstein.

UNMASKED: For a story that inspired fifty-three movies and shaped hundreds of other pieces, the original Frankenstein is surprisingly humble.  The few moments in which Shelley tries to invoke horror all fall flat, and the Romantic era novel has little regard for action.  Instead, Frankenstein stands openly as a moral and philosophical debate, asking the reader to confront the humanity and cruelty that exist in both man and monster.

The reason that Frankenstein has been twisted and exaggerated with each new adaptation is that the novel cannot help but drag at times.  The reader witnesses the entire lives of both Victor Frankenstein and his creation in intimate detail; this leads to heavy sections of “downtime” in which Victor suffers from a constant cocktail of fear, guilt, and anger.  By the end of the novel, my connection with the protagonists was so deep that I felt as if I knew them personally, something very few authors can achieve.  On the other hand, the continuous emotional outbursts and monologues... got, like, really repetitive and annoying after a while.

Frankenstein has earned its place among the literary classics; its unique structure of layered flashbacks and constant sense of inevitability, as well as its exploration of timeless questions, qualify the novel as essential reading for any human being.  Unfortunately, while Frankenstein may keep you in your seat, you will not be on the edge of it.

Strengths:

• Every secondary character has a unique influence on Victor’s mindset and actions.  This both fleshes out the world of the novel and makes the characters and story more realistic.
• Watching other characters’ disgust towards the monster creates a much more powerful, grotesque image of him for the reader than any movie effects ever will.

Weaknesses:

• Granted, psychotherapy did not exist in Shelley’s time, but it became increasingly difficult to watch Victor torture himself, never able to move on and rekindle his passion for learning and exploration.
• The three female characters in the novel have identical one-dimensional personalities.

Rating: 17/20 brides

Ideal Setting: Read this the next time someone accuses you of being uncaring or unwilling to put your best effort into a project.  Passion leads to lifelong agony.

Book Review (Canon): The Humans

The Humans

Written by Matt Haig in 2013

The Raccoon: After Professor Andrew Martin solves the Riemann Hypothesis, he is immediately killed by aliens, who send one of their own to Earth to ensure that no evidence of his research survives.  However, once the alien narrator settles into impersonating Martin and living among the strange humans, he finds himself unwilling to complete his mission.

UNMASKED: Perhaps the reader would more easily comprehend the novel (and this review) if the narrator of The Humans had a name.  We know only that he, like all beings from his home planet, is immortal, the product of an advanced civilization where “minds, bodies, technologies all come together in a quite beautiful convergence.”  The highlight of his life is a speech he delivered at the Museum of Quadratic Equations, a detail which effectively summarizes the entire culture and philosophy of the planet Vonnadoria.

After this shocking, witty opening, The Humans is quite predictable.  The novel follows a progression as old as time:

1. An alien comes to Earth planning to harm our society and/or specific people due to his belief that doing so is the right action to take on a much wider scale.
2. A series of humorous mishaps occurs as the alien tries to pass as human.
3. Through art, laughing and crying, and finally love, the alien realizes that humanity is not as evil as he originally thought.
4. A happy compromise is reached between the alien’s original goals and his desire to protect the very people he was sent to hurt.  Ideally, the resolution follows an exciting battle of both ideology and physical survival as the alien, now a changed man, must face another member of his species.

For this reason, you are not missing out if you decide not to read The Humans.

Nevertheless, Haig’s short novel is an effective fun-sized package for anyone looking for a heartwarming story about love, humanity, and peanut butter.

Strengths:

• Andrew Martin’s arrogant personality and negative history provide a much more interesting setup and lead to more ironic, entertaining conversations than if the narrator’s disguise was morally upright.
• The narrator’s relationship and conversations with the family dog make The Humans the best dog book I have ever read.
• The ending is surprisingly realistic and satisfying.

Weaknesses:

• At a few points in the story, the narrator fails to such a great extent to pass as human that no sane person would ignore it.

Rating: 17/20 /23/29/31/37/41/43/47/53

Ideal Setting: Read this before announcing your next major discovery or invention, just in case it might give a hyper-advanced species a reason to murder you and your family.

Book Review (Rucksack): Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

Written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1969

The Raccoon: Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist anti-war book relays the horrors of the Second World War, specifically the bombing of Dresden, through the experiences of Billy Pilgrim, a traumatized soldier and chronic time-traveler.

UNMASKED: Vonnegut, who appears in his own work to provide a frame narrative that discusses how difficult the novel was to write, admits near its end that “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.  One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”  While this is a profound sentiment, and the author hammers in the lesson quite well, it makes for a slow and unrelatable story.

The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five reflects Billy’s emotional state: unstable.  The plot jumps around in time, and the only unifying factor of the disjointed scenes is the main character’s abduction by four-dimensional aliens, who convince him that time is irrelevant, à la Arrival or Interstellar.  The reader is led to believe that this sci-fi element is a symptom of Billy’s PTSD; however, its absurdity detracts from the story’s serious message.

By the end of the novel, Vonnegut has delivered his picture of war as hopeless and absurd, but this theme is the only thread that holds a messy book together.

Strengths:

• Slaughterhouse-Five is chock-full of memorable images, and a few of its humorous scenes make for lasting jokes and references.
• The narrator is irreverent towards death and tragedy, expertly echoing Vonnegut’s lesson through a uniquely painful lens.

Weaknesses:

• Billy’s experience living in an alien zoo adds absolutely nothing to the story, and the Tralfamadorians as a whole are annoying to the reader.

Rating: 11/20 prisoners

Ideal Setting: Read this when you begin to worry that your life is out of your control.  It is.

Book Review (Canon): House of Leaves

House of Leaves

Written by Mark Z. Danielewski in 2000

The Raccoon: Blurring the lines between reality and multiple layers of fiction, Danielewski’s occult cult masterpiece chronicles the story of a family slowly torn apart after they move to a suburban house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

UNMASKED: House of Leaves contains four layers of story.  At the center, Will Navidson and his family struggle against their impossibly-structured, possibly living home.  All the while, Navidson films this journey, and his wife later assembles the footage into the documentary The Navidson Record.  Zooming out, the bulk of House of Leaves is an in-depth essay and commentary on The Navidson Record, whose author, Zampanò, describes its contents as well as the debate surrounding its authenticity, reception, and themes.  Even further removed, narrator Johnny Truant explains how he came into possession of Zampanò’s work, and how his attempts to decipher it have led him to be tormented by anxiety and paranoia.  Finally, unnamed editors fill in gaps left by Johnny, and they include a series of letters written by his mother, in hopes of rendering the story more understandable to the reader.

So begins the confusion.  Johnny reveals early on that The Navidson Record does not exist.  

This stark fact leads him, and us, to question why and how Zampanò spent so much time analyzing it; after all, the author went so far as to cite other nonexistent commentary in his work and compile a series of exhibits regarding the Navidsons.  Of course, when Johnny tells us that he reached out to celebrities such as Stephen King to verify that their quotes in Zampanò’s essay were falsified and they have never heard of Will Navidson nor Zampanò, we must remind ourselves that the narrator too is fictional; the real Stephen King has no more knowledge of nor contact with Johnny Truant than he does with the other two men.  Furthermore, toward the end of the novel, Johnny learns from his own fanbase that he has already published the book; the version we hold has been updated by Johnny after travels to Virginia in hopes of locating any evidence of the Navidsons’ house.  In truth, the first edition of House of Leaves already had all of Johnny’s story; again, the narrator’s life only exists to the extent that Danielewski wrote about it.

And yes, I did feel that two large paragraphs were necessary to provide a basic description of House of Leaves.  The book is the closest thing to Daedalus’ legendary labyrinth anyone has created since the German Enigma Code.  Like the house in the story, House of Leaves cannot be contained within its own binding; online forums are still trying to unearth all of its secrets, and the actual act of reading this beast involves mentally organizing footnotes within footnotes and philosophical treatises dividing the two simultaneous plots, as well as occasionally rotating the pages, using mirrors, or deciphering codes to be able read the words.

While reaching the last page of House of Leaves is incredibly rewarding, and I encourage every passionate reader to undertake the adventure, I must honestly warn you that, once you have allowed such a complicated, atypical work to take root in your mind, leaving it behind is not as simple as closing the back cover.

• The actual

Strengths1

• The random inclusion of several dozen layout of the book “Pelican Poems”
• Many of the book’s questions invokesare still unanswered by the end, although all of the storylines and character arcs find resolutions. the feeling of being lost
• Although calling House of Leaves a horror story is greatly exaggerating, the Navidsons’ house in a is uniquely uncanny and frightening.

m a z e.

Rating: 18/20 minutes

Ideal Setting: Read this whenever you begin to feel bored with how comfortable you are in your world.

1Weaknesses

Book Review (Rucksack): One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967

The Raccoon: One Hundred Years of Solitude aims to recount the entire course of human history and the harmful patterns of society.  On the surface, the novel traces six generations of the headstrong Buendía family, who live in the fictional town of Macondo.

UNMASKED: Márquez clearly poured his soul into writing One Hundred Years of Solitude; the novel echoes traumatic experiences from the author’s life and from Latin American history.  The raw mix of satire, inevitability, and nostalgia embedded in the text has elevated the book to mythical status.  Ultimately, the book lives up to its promise of being the next segment of the Bible.

Of course, like the Bible, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a cumbersome, difficult read.  Márquez displays a talent for magical realism, combining various mythologies with a patchwork of historical events and locations to prevent the reader from categorizing the story as fantastical or based on truth.  Consequently, the only way to comprehend the novel is to continuously remind oneself to let go; asking questions or expecting clear climaxes and transitions are as fruitless as keeping track of the lineage in the First Testament.  One Hundred Years of Solitude needs to throw the reader off to communicate its deeper story.  As stated in the even more convoluted, cult-favorite book, House of Leaves, “what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same.”

That deeper story tells of a people ravaged by both corrupt foreign influence and their own destructive passions, who preach change yet constantly regress in their development.  With every character representing a different example of what not to do, Márquez ultimately wants to force the reader to confront the fact that the only way out of society’s (or personal) cycles is to acknowledge the pitfalls of our old behaviors and begin completely anew.

Strengths:

• The quality is not degraded by reading the book in English instead of Spanish; Márquez even admitted to enjoying the English translation more than the original version.  Both authors display an impressive command over language, evoking vivid images with almost every sculpted sentence.
• The narrator’s blunt, objective tone highlights the novel’s tragic events.  Mirroring the way imperialist characters are quick to ignore or erase any hint of their own wrongdoing, the narrator brushes past massacres the moment after they take root in the reader’s mind, rendering us solitary in our suffering.

Weaknesses:

• The repetitive names accompanied by repetitive personality traits and actions push just past the line, rendering the stylistic choice more of a confusing inconvenience than a thematic message.
• For a story with such a wide scope, a disproportionate amount of beautiful language is spent on sex scenes and José Arcadio’s genitals.
• The element of magical realism decays as the book goes on.  While fantastical ideas still drive powerful moments in the story, the feeling of wonder that the reader experiences in the first pages of the novel is never truly recovered.

Rating: 17/20 gold fishes

Ideal Setting: You have already read the story, are currently reading the story, and will forever read the story.  Naming an exact time and place is unnecessary, because it has already come.

Book Review (Canon): After the Dam

After the Dam

Written by Amy Hassinger in 2016

The Raccoon: Rachel Clayborne is still adjusting to her new role as a mother when her father sends her to the Farm, her family’s Wisconsin home, on a mission: find out her grandmother’s intentions for the property after she dies.  Rachel soon finds herself torn between a moral obligation, restoring the land to the Ojibwe tribe that her family stole it from, and her own feelings, a love and nostalgia for her childhood retreat.  This conflict is only exacerbated when Rachel begins to reconnect with her Ojibwe ex-boyfriend and realizes that she has deeper reasons for needing to hold onto the Farm.

UNMASKED: While all authors pride themselves on understanding the human condition, Hassinger is the only writer I have encountered that has managed to completely render the soul of her protagonist, allowing the reader to understand and connect with Rachel more than we do with most real people.  To top it off, Hassinger pulls this off for all five of her main characters, distinctly showing their personalities and then placing them with and against each other so effectively that every scene grips the reader’s heart.  After the Dam ought to wear the label of character-driven story as a badge of honor.

Hassinger also masterfully wields her setting as a tool for storytelling.  The tension in the novel swells simultaneously with aggressive weather that endangers the eponymous Old Bend Dam, and several other setting hooks are used to force characters together or prevent them from communicating at crucial times.  Additionally, the second of five “books” within After the Dam travels back eight years, highlighting Rachel’s budding relationship with her husband and her early environmental career.  While much of the characters’ history is effectively explained through shorter flashbacks, Hassinger’s choice to immerse the reader in a younger Rachel allows him/her to witness Rachel’s success in bringing down another dam; her actions provide a sharp contrast to the apparent immortality of the Old Bend Dam and to the frazzled impulsiveness of the current Rachel.

After the Dam brings the reader into an intense, compelling world, increasing the stakes with each scene and ultimately delivering an unforgiving, unforgettable story.

Strengths:

• All of the characters are well-developed, and it is easy to see any one of them as the protagonist.
• The author acknowledges the awkwardness and hesitation involved in love.
• Rachel’s daughter is simply a baby, as opposed to the many infant characters in other works that are somehow able to communicate important lessons and warnings to the adult characters.

Weaknesses:

• A large piece of the conflict remains unresolved by the end of the novel, with Hassinger choosing to leave the resolution open to several possible outcomes.

Rating: 19/20 buried homes

Ideal Setting: Read this before you collapse under the weight of repressed feelings and unresolved arguments.  Otherwise the dam representing your relationship may flood.

Book Review (Rucksack): The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye

Written by J.D. Salinger in 1951

The Raccoon: After getting expelled from yet another private school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield runs away and wanders the streets of New York.  Salinger’s famous novel is about coming to terms rather than coming of age, as Holden struggles to accept that he is growing up.

UNMASKED: The Catcher in the Rye has been a polarizing work since the moment it was published.  Holden is a sarcastic, immature, and frequently unreliable narrator, a stylistic choice by Salinger that I personally couldn’t work through.  Consequently, I hated The Catcher in the Rye.  If you can embrace Holden for his numerous faults, however, then you may find the narrator and his story endearing.

The narrative unfolds over the course of only three days, with nothing objectively important filling that time.  Add to that Holden’s frequent digressions and criticisms, and the novel ends up reading more as a running commentary than a sequence of developing events.  This, I believe, is Salinger’s purpose in telling the story: to show people’s disillusionment in the 1950s with life and society through the mind of a teenager.  The author uses the feelings of nihilism and estrangement that most teens already experience as a lens to examine what many veterans struggled with in the years following World War II.

Where does this leave the reader?  We are swept up into the frivolous struggles of a sick boy; perhaps simply sick of how artificial the people around him act, but by the end of the novel are expected to understand that he is neither mentally nor physically healthy either.  Holden reacts strongly to events that have no meaning to anyone else, a further commentary from the author on how useless the war was.

Salinger concludes The Catcher in the Rye with only a half-hearted resolution to Holden’s story, and I found myself wondering what the point was.  Yet, the novel’s strength lies in its lessons rather than its plot.  The reader is so occupied with Holden that he/she does not even realize until long past putting the book down that Holden’s behavior and emotions are tools, carefully placed and designed to show that change is inevitable and that no issue is black and white.

Strengths:

• Salinger brings the reader into the narrator’s head so effectively that the character of Holden stays with him/her for life.

Weaknesses:

• Only one other character, Holden’s sister Phoebe, is mentioned in more than one scene, and she has no development outside of Holden’s own changing view of her.
• Holden’s tangents take away from the reader’s understanding of events, just as often as they add to it.

Rating: 11/20 ducks

Ideal Setting: Read this when you feel alienated.  Sometimes the boxes that we try so hard to fit into are just in our heads.

CANDY BOX: An Open Letter to Hannah Baker

An Open Letter to Hannah Baker, catalyst and second narrator of Thirteen Reasons Why

Spoiler warning: various plot points of Thirteen Reasons Why

Hannah, the criticism around your story right now is that it romanticizes mental illness. Furthermore, you are accused of thinking you were a martyr and of justifying suicide as a method of dealing with your problems.  I want you to know that I believe neither of these claims is true.

Obviously, killing yourself was not an intelligent choice.  You were only eighteen, and almost none of the issues you were facing would have followed you out of high school.  Moreover, you closed yourself off from receiving help at almost every opportunity.  For example, Clay specifically made the effort to open up to you and encourage you to do the same, and you chose to remain in your depression instead of letting him help you out.  You also only spoke to one adult, and even then you walked into the conversation expecting and encouraging it to fail.  Your situation was only hopeless because you painted it that way, and you denied countless other resources that could have helped you back onto your feet.

Nevertheless, it is rude of everyone to claim that you only committed suicide because you wanted to be seen as a hero.  You simply felt that you had no one to turn to, which I would venture to say is one of the most damaging, crushing mindsets someone could fall into.  We’re a tribal species; feeling emotionally misunderstood and isolated will drive anyone to desperation.  In a way, your suicide was a final attempt at improving your life; the only thing you could hold onto was the belief that leaving a message would allow others to finally see your perspective and disprove the rumors about you.

The overarching message of your story is that we need to be aware of how our actions and words can affect others, even when we don’t intend to be hurtful.  Yet this was not your personal goal in telling it.  While I am sure you hoped that you could convince everyone you mentioned on the tapes to change their behavior and their awareness moving forward, I don’t think you expected that most, if any, of them would fundamentally change their way of life.  The tapes are not a revenge quest either.  Although you taunt Tyler and Bryce, the people with the most harmful secrets, by reminding them that trying to stop the spread of the tapes will ensure that the entire school will find out what they did, the important part for you was simply ensuring that at least one other person found out.  You didn’t want to be keeping it all in.

What you wanted was simply acknowledgment.  Not communication; you still weren’t ready for that.  Had you been willing to fully communicate with someone, you could have worked through your issues and come out alive.  You just needed to know that someone was listening.

Suicide was the wrong choice, Hannah.  But I’m going to keep telling people to read Thirteen Reasons Why because you never truly justify your actions or ask anyone to agree with you.  Your tapes were a cry for help, and we need to learn from both the problems and situations you faced and the ways you found to avoid dealing with them.  The controversy around your story, like your troubled life, cannot be fixed by denial and censorship.  It can only be resolved with open communication.

Sincerely,

Jonah

Book Review (Canon): Nemesis

Nemesis

Written by Brendan Reichs in 2017

The Raccoon: Every two years on her birthday, Min Wilder is murdered, only to wake up in a forest clearing several hours later, completely unscathed.  After realizing that others around her know more about her situation than they are letting on, Min uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that may just tie a strange inoculation shot she received in elementary school to the asteroid currently headed toward Earth.

UNMASKED: Nemesis is full of unique and earth-shattering ideas, each capable of carrying its own novel: a potential human extinction event, a string of reversible murders, a government conspiracy, a simulated world, and a cryptic warning of “Phase Two.”  When stuffed together, however, these concepts all lose their hold on the reader.

As a whole, Nemesis follows a downward slope.  The first few chapters establish three distinct characters, whose actions and dialogue flesh out their personalities, and the transition of the character Noah from Min’s view of him--the quiet background member of a group of bullies--to being the story’s second narrator, was an exciting surprise.  Yet, as the story goes on, Reichs resorts to classic tropes, such as a love triangle between a teen female narrator and the two boys closest to her, and the book’s ending is disappointingly familiar to the ending of The Maze Runner.

Ultimately, Nemesis, with its beautifully laid foundation, had the potential to rise as the next stunning dystopian series.  However, the novel trips over itself by trying to be everything at once.

Strengths:

• Reichs displays a talent for showing characters’ emotions and motivations.

Weaknesses:

• I found myself still asking questions long after the characters were satisfied with the answers, and there are a couple glaring plot holes remaining at the novel’s conclusion.
• Certain characters’ actions stretch too far from their previously established personalities and fears.
• The dialogue contains several cultural references, almost all of which are unnecessary and will likely make Nemesis much more difficult to read in a decade.

Rating: 10/20 betas

Ideal Setting: Read this if you ever begin to worry about a potential pattern to global extinction events.  Nemesis may just prove to be a true story. https://www.space.com/22538-nemesis-star.html