Review: Y Is For Yesterday

Sue Grafton was one of those authors I discovered in my teen years while browsing the stacks of my small town public library.   In my early twenties, freshly minted with my library degree and with what I foolishly thought back then was a "lengthy commute" (Future Wendy laughs in the face of Past Wendy....), I picked up the series again on audio book.  So, needless to say, it's one of the rare series I'm actual current on.

The last several entries have been...well, not that great.  I don't remember anything about V at all.  W was OK, I guess.  And X was a hot mess.  So I walked into Y is for Yesterday with some trepidation.  It's not without problems, but this is by far the strongest entry in the series since U is for Undertow (says me). 

Trigger Warning: sexual assault / rape.

The chain of events started in 1979, when 14-year-old Iris steals the answer key to a standardized test to help out her new BFF, Poppy, at Climping Academy - an exclusive private school near the central California coast.  It ends with a missing sex tape and another girl, Sloan Stevens, dead.  Fritz McCabe ends up going to juvenile detention for firing the fatal shots, and now, at 25, has been released.  His parents have welcomed him home, only to get a copy of the missing sex tape in the mail shortly after his release with demands for $25,000.  The "sex tape" shows Fritz, along with another boy, Troy, assaulting a drunk and stoned 14-year-old Iris.  There's a James Spader Preppy Baddie-type, Austin, orchestrating the whole thing while another boy, Bayard, acts as camera man.  The threat being that if the tape comes to light, Fritz goes back to prison - even though everyone involved in the making of the tape (including Iris) swears it was "a joke," not to be taken seriously.  The McCabes have no interest in paying blackmail, but also want to protect Fritz, so they hire local private investigator, Kinsey Millhone, to chase the whole sordid business down.

This is actually one of Grafton's stronger plots in ages, but that being said, it's a shocking read.  The Kinsey Millhone books could never be classified as "cozies," but neither have they ever been overly graphic.  There's not a lot of violence, blood and guts splashed on the pages.  So having gone through the previous 24 entries in this series, it was shocking to read the details of the sexual assault not once, but twice, over the course of this story.  I'm, generally speaking, a reader who can roll with most violence in fiction - but I'm not going to lie - this was upsetting.  Once was more than enough.  Twice borders on psychological torture p0rn, in my ever so humble opinion. And it's such a departure in tone from the previous books - I cannot believe I'm going to be the only reader who feels a little blindsided by it.

But, as troubling as the details of the sexual assault are, the plot itself is quite good - although honestly Kinsey is kind of dense in this one.  I felt like I caught on to things much quicker than she did - although Grafton once again employs dueling timelines, so to be fair, there were things the reader is clued in on well before Kinsey is.

Much like the last several books, Grafton cannot seem to help herself when it comes to secondary story lines.  Ned Lowe, a homicidal holdover from X, is still at large and gunning for Kinsey.  He takes up some serious word count in the second half of the book, along with Kinsey's annoying cousin Anna and homeless holdover Pearl (both introduced in W) who both need to get thrown in a fiery pit already.  It makes the book much too long and takes focus away from the primary story line, leaving us with an ending that ends more with a whimper than a bang.  This has been a criticism of mine for the last several books.  It's like Grafton can't settle on one idea and instead wants to cram three or four into the same book, short-changing all of them.

Which makes it sound like I really didn't like this.  I did, but it's definitely meh in parts.  Honestly, it's such an improvement over X that I was practically riveted to the audio during my daily commute and treadmill sessions.  However, it's still got the same issues that the last several books have had (too much meandering, too many outside distractions) and then there's the shocking "surprise" of the graphic depiction of a sexual assault filmed on tape.  That's just not the kind of thing I expect when I pick up a Sue Grafton Kinsey Millhone novel.

Final Grade = B- (for fans only)

Mini-Reviews: Cranky Wendy Being Cranky

This latest round of mini-reviews is where Wendy is going to show her figurative underpants.  I'll be honest - there's a certain segment of "literary fiction" I just don't get.  The You're Nothing Without an MFA and Let Me Write In Circles To Show You How Smart I Am segment of "literary fiction."

Which brings us to The Girls by Emma Cline.  This is debut novel by a young author who got some crazy-stupid advance ($2 million dollars. For a debut novel.)  It's getting glowing reviews all over the place.  Seriously, just Google it - I'm not linking to them all.  Everybody and their Dead Grandmother thinks this is the bestest book in the whole world and OMG IT'S MAGIC! 

The plot, in a nutshell, would be like if Charles Manson and Jim Jones had an illegitimate love child.  It follows a 14-year-old girl in Northern California who falls in with a cult.  I'm not sure how you make that boring enough to make me want to drive bamboo shoots underneath my fingernails, but there you go.  I got through over 3 hours of a 9 hour audiobook and was so bored out of my mind that the thought of getting in my car and listening to it during my commute had me thinking affectionately about inane DJ chatter.

Endless musings about complete nothingness, and dialogue?  Who needs dialogue?  (By far my biggest gripe with the literary fiction world is that dialogue is seen as some odious four-letter word.  You know how fun it is to read a NOVEL with close to zero dialogue?  Yeah, it blows.)

Since I slogged through the audio, I'm cribbing some examples of the writing from a GoodReads reviewer.  I did get to this part of the "story" and the only thing keeping my eyes from crossing was that I was driving. I can't cross my eyes and drive at the same time:

I ate in the blunt way I had as a child—a glut of spaghetti, mossed with cheese. The nothing jump of soda in my throat.

I tended to the in-between spaces of other people’s existences, working as a live-in aide. Cultivating a genteel invisibility in sexless clothes, my face blurred with the pleasant, ambiguous expression of a lawn ornament.

Now imagine page after endless page of that with close to zero dialogue to break it up.  And THIS is the latest "it" book everyone is raving about. 

The older I get the more I realize that I want a storyteller.  Give me a good story.  Engage me with interesting characters and dialogue.  Have a bloody point to what you're writing.  I was essentially 1/3 of the way through the book and I wanted to bang my head repeatedly against my car's steering wheel to JUST. MAKE. IT. STOP. ALREADY.

Philistine, thy name is Wendy - but I'll be over here reading a romance novel thankyouverymuch.

Final Grade = DNF

Kinsey and Me: Stories by Sue Grafton is a short story (duh) collection.  The first half of the book is a collection of stories featuring Grafton's female private detective character, Kinsey Milhone.  Like all short story collections, some of the stories are better than others.  If you're already a fan of Grafton's character and series - these stories will be marginally interesting.  It's like visiting an old friend.  That said, there's nothing terribly earth-shattering here.  Even as a Kinsey fan, I feel like had I never gotten around to this collection?  That would have been OK.  So basically....meh.

The second half of the collection are stories featuring "Kit Blue" and they're semi-autobiographical stories Grafton wrote after her mother died.  I know this is going to come out sounding cruel, your mother dying is no joke, but I feel like Grafton should have left the therapy writing in her desk drawer.  Again, it's endless pages of zero dialogue, musings about whatever, and the stories fail to hang together in any cohesive way (they jump around in time and space).  Frankly the whole thing came off as self-indulgent to me - which I know makes me sound like a horrible person - but whatever.  I'm sure a writer is going to write to cope with emotions, times of grief - I get that.  Doesn't mean they all have to be published.

Final Grade = C-

What I Did On My Day Off

I had yesterday off work, and since My Man's car was in the shop, he borrowed the Batmobile to get to work. Which left me home alone, with no transportation all day. Normally an excellent time to scour the Bat Cave, do some laundry and watch Law & Order reruns. Except other than doing some cleaning, that's not what I did at all.

No I spent, literally, all day wrestling with our desktop computer and pulled off 2 Trojan horses and about 8 viruses. And the damn thing still isn't working correctly. Sigh. So it's looking like I have more wrestling ahead of me today. Crap. So annoying. I'm about ready to chuck the damn thing about the window.

If you're an pimply asshole who lives in your Mom's basement, eats your weight in microwave burritos and cooks up new computer viruses because you can't get laid? Yeah, I hope they shrivel up and fall off.

And yes. I mean that.

Of course all the wrestling with the computer did afford me the opportunity to finish up U Is For Undertow by Sue Grafton on audio book. I actually haven't "read" Grafton since high school, and she's one of those authors (like Janet Evanovich) that I pretty much listen to on audio exclusively these days. I really liked this one, a lot. There were moments in the story where I felt the author went off the beaten path, that probably would have annoyed me had I been reading ("Yeah, yeah - it's all a rich tableau. Get on with it!") but it worked for me on audio - and once again Grafton shifts points of view in this book between Kinsey and the various players that are tied in to the mystery (a 20+ year old cold case involving a kidnapping of a little girl, who was never found). A solid B+.

And now, back to wrestling with this damn computer. Oh well, at least I'm not totally screwed. We still have the Bat Cave laptop that's operational. Sigh.