Fantasy Annotation

Gods of Jade and Shadow

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Synopsis

When Casiopea Tun accidentally releases the Mayan god of death from imprisonment, she is drawn along with him in his search for the stolen pieces of himself so he can reclaim his rightful throne from his insidious twin brother.  

Characteristics that fit into Fantasy

• Pacing: The pace starts out languidly, setting the location in 1927 Mexico. Once the magic appears, the pace starts to pick up, but it's still rather slow, allowing us to enjoy the colorful writing and immerse ourselves in the time and place.
• Characterization: There is a clear difference between Casiopea and the rest of her family, setting her as the good guy and the others as the "bad" guys, or at least the antagonists. When Hun-Kamé, the god of death, appears, we're not sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy and that uneasiness continues for quite a while.
• Storyline: The plot revolves around Casiopea being drawn into a quest with Hun-Kamé, searching for magical items (pieces of the god to restore him to full power) and encountering other magical beings and situations. She eventually sees the quest as a way to break away from her mundane life, even if it is against her will.
• Tone/Mood: The tone is generally optimistic, though Casiopea struggles with a life that doesn't look to change. She does her best to continue to dream and not allow her family members to drain her of her ambitions. 
• Style/Language: The language is highly descriptive, giving us a good sense of the worlds in which Casiopea and the god of death move. Casiopea's is at the same time a dreary and dusty world that nonetheless is brightened by descriptions of exotic Mexican locales and situations. Hun-Kamé's realm of Xibalba, the Underworld, is presented in flowing language and rich details.
• Setting/Frame: The setting is 1927 Mexico, with the story starting in the Yucatan peninsula and travelling across the country to Mexico City and other places, including Xibalba. The setting is drawn from Mexican and Mayan mythology, blending the myth with history in a dark fairy tale. 

Read-a-likes

• "The Ten Thousand Doors of January" by Alix E. Harrow
• "Magic for Liars" by Sarah Gailey
• "The Starless Sea" by Erin Morgenstern
• "The Kingdom of Copper" by S. S. Chakraborty

Personal Note

This fits into the low fantasy mode of fantasy novels. In low fantasy, the magical world can be reached somehow, however far-fetched a method, from our world (e.g., getting to Oz in "The Wizard of Oz," to Narnia in the Chronicles, or to Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series). In high fantasy, the magical world is not connected to our world at all and exists independently (e.g., Middle-earth in "The Lord of the Rings," the worlds in "The Belgariad" or "The Sword of Truth" series). Low and high modes do not have to do with quality, but with the status of the magical realm. Here, the magic of the god comes directly into our world and interacts with Casiopea within her real-world reality in Mexico and the Underworld is accessible.
While I like the story, setting, and characters, the text could have used a more judicious editor, as there is far too much telling of what's going on rather than showing.

Special Topics Paper Summary

Men's Book Clubs in Public Libraries

Women participate in book clubs more than men. But why is this? For many years, women  weren’t encouraged to read or to engage in learning, so men had control over the educational and literary establishments. Men were the librarians in early western libraries and were those one could find making use of those institutions and taking part in reading groups. But then the pendulum swung the other way in the early 20th century, with most public library book clubs becoming overwhelmingly female or female-led and the majority of librarians being women. There are three possible reasons why men do not engage in book clubs as much as women: men do not talk as much as women, nor are modern men public “sharers” of their feelings; they don’t want to read the kinds of books usually found in library book clubs; and they are mocked when they try. Libraries can help with each of these issues to encourage more men to engage in book clubs or groups and to make these groups as welcoming and as open as possible.

There is a belief that women talk an average of three times as much as men do in a day, but it's a myth. Men men may believe this and are thus less inclined to join a book club because of all the talking that will be done by women. Men are not as comfortable sharing their feelings about topics, even books, with others, but are more comfortable doing so around other men. Men also are interested in different types of books than women and find the types of books most book clubs choose to read not interesting. This doesn't mean they aren't interested in literature or literary books, but that the focus of the books are different. The biggest problem seems to be the reaction to men who are in book clubs; the reaction is either they are gay for being in a book club or the type of book club is a threat to women or women's clubs. The shocking news in a 2016 article that men also have book clubs was met with ridicule and concern about how men's book clubs are poisonous, apparently to the existence of women's clubs.

So what can we as librarians and libraries do? We can help facilitate book clubs of a different nature that are geared toward men, without making them off-limits to women. Patrons will naturally gravitate to book clubs, groups, and other events where they feel comfortable, wanted, safe, and in which they are interested. If we start and encourage men’s book clubs or book clubs that read material of interest to men and women choose not to attend, we should be okay with that, just as we should be okay with men not attending women-led or -dominated book clubs. This is the current state of book clubs in libraries, in general, and there doesn’t seem to be an outreach to get men to join women in their clubs. As public libraries, we can’t prevent women from attending a “man’s book club,” any more than we can prevent a man from attending a “woman’s book club,” but we can make more of an effort to attract men to quasi-men only clubs. Men need book clubs just as much as women and we as librarians should be interested in getting the men of our communities reading and involved.

Book Club Observation

I observed the "Night Owls" book club that met in a less-than-year-old branch of a major metropolitan library system on a Thursday evening. As a "new member," I asked only to observe for the session and all were happy to oblige me. The title under discussion was "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens. The group was comprised of all women, save me. The ages of the members ran from middle age to senior citizen, with a librarian facilitator who looked to be in her late 20s or 30s. The group was happy to have a male attend, finally. There were two other first-time attendees, though I was not aware one of them was new as she not only was already sitting with the group when I arrived but also took part in the discussion like a seasoned member.

There was not a leader of the group, per se, but one of the members who was a "founding member" got things started by having us all introduce ourselves, gave a brief history of the group (having had to move from a closed location to this one after trying others), and started a brief summary of the book. The group did not have a formal question and answer format or prepared questions to follow; rather, it was more free-flowing, with the discussion going off into tangents and being brought back by various members after those discussions trailed off. The questions that were asked were open-ended and grew organically from the discussion, such as "Well, what did you think about  . . . ?" and "Did you get the idea that . . . ?"

All attendees did not participate fully, but most of the existing members did. It took a while for some of the members to warm up to speaking in a group, possibly as a result of three new people being present, and one woman's elderly mother rarely took part, but I suspect it was because she may have been mostly deaf and was at one far end of the table setup. There wasn't one member who took charge and became the focal point, but as with all groups, there were members who were more vocal.

The group was meeting in a small alcove of a room set along the wall of the main section of the library that was also under an upper section accessed by a long ramp into which the alcove was set. It was called the purple room by the group and they found out while I was there that it is officially called the purple room by the library. As the group had reached nine members (without me), plus the librarian, they would henceforth be meeting in a larger room. The room had two rectangular tables, separated, with a long, cushioned bench on the far side of the tables and chairs on the other side nearest the entrance. It wasn't the best set up for so large a group as members at either end of the table had to strain to hear or take part. There was not a door in the glass "wall" towards the main section of the library, so it was good the library was quiet that evening, without much noise or other distractions. Snacks or drinks were not provided.

The Night Owls is not a group that is designed around one particular type of book, it seems, as the books recently finished and the list of upcoming titles for the year varied. The next book was "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine," while they had just finished "The Goldfinch." Other titles they've recently read include "The River," "The Great Alone," and two non-fiction books about Tennessee orphans. With a classic, "Rebecca," on tap for this summer, the titles seem to be not one particular genre, but they do seem to be the regular types of books a women's book club would choose. And while the Night Owls is not necessarily a women's book club, the fact I was the first male to attend speaks to it functionally being a female book club and the book choices seem to reflect that. Anyone can recommend a title and the group voted on a slate of books for the rest of the year. This was interesting because an article about book clubs I recently read mentioned the owner of a book store who said men are more likely to plan out a schedule of books for a club than women, who are more likely to want to see what new books are published and "go with the flow."

The book club was a pleasant experience and they were all happy to have me and the other new attendees. We were happily asked back for the next month. It was nice the group felt comfortable enough with each other to speak freely, ask questions of each other, and not feel reluctant to say they didn't remember something from the book or not know what happened. There was not any ridicule of members who either didn't finish the book or who didn't know what happened, something that could and does make book clubs into unpleasant experiences.

Week Seven Prompt Response

Book Controversies

   While it's not really a controversy, the article by Angela Liao on Celebrity Book Clubs caught my attention. In general, I'm okay with celebrities having book clubs, mainly because if it gets more people to read, the better. It's along the same reasoning I have with editing Shakespeare plays for performance: if someone will go see a two-hour "Hamlet," but won't go see the four-hour "eternity" version, I'm not going to insist on the full text as the point is to expose them to Shakespeare. If someone is going to actually go to a library, check out a book, and read it because their favorite celebrity recommended it, great! While some of the "book clubs" listed and others I found in a quick internet search seem to me more like publicity occasions for the celebrity, the end result is really what we're after.
   The article by Butler, Cowan and Nilsson about the influence of Oprah's book club selections was interesting; it showed what seems to me a bit of blind following by her fans early in the book club's history and then a tapering off as either those fans matured in their reading and decisions or as Oprah's overall influence in media waned. This article highlighted a problem with the celebrity book club phenomenon in that some books that may not be all that good are elevated without perhaps much thought by those following the club, skewing the reviews and numbers for libraries and bookstores, which could then affect future purchasing and collection decisions.
  Another problem I saw was all the book clubs mentioned in the Liao article were led by female celebrities. After a brief search on 'celebrity book clubs,' I found that out of 27 such book clubs I could find, only three were by males. These search results were all of the "10 best celebrity book clubs we recommend!" variety. A more targeted search to 'celebrity book clubs men' only netted one more result. Either there really aren't that many male-led celebrity book clubs, or there may be a bias in favor of female-led celebrity book clubs.
  I'm not sure how many men read books because their favorite male celebrity (be it a movie star, tv star, or athlete) recommended it, but I'm guessing it's not many. I'm more inclined to pick up a book recommended by a male celebrity than a female celebrity, but I'm not all that inclined to pick up a book just because a celebrity recommended it in the first place. I don't know what the remedy would be, as we can't force male celebrities to run book clubs or male patrons to choose their reading based on them, but if men come to the library asking about them, it would be nice to have more than four to recommend, especially since one of them I found was a politician and those tend to turn off half of the potential reading audience.

Week Six Prompt Response

   Director,
   You asked about ideas to promote horror books. We should start with a social media campaign just after Labor Day, hinting through posts on our accounts through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that something mysterious is coming to the library for Halloween. We'll also have in-library signage about the program that won't give the idea away. Then in October after we've decorated for the season, we'll have online and in-library quizzes our patrons can take to find out what type of horror or scary books they like to read or would like to explore. Their results on the RA-style quizzes will give them hints and clues about a location in the library they'd have to go find. Those locations will have a display of similar books, movies, audiobooks, and comics to their quiz results.
   This will not be limited to adult material; the children's and teen areas will also have displays and quizzes to be found that will contain age-appropriate materials to "scare" them. Patrons will be able to follow a physical clue list or use our library app to scan QR codes pointing them to the next clue on their way through the library. There will only be a few clues so as not to make it too difficult or lengthy.
   We'll set up the displays to be only noticeable as a patron turns a corner, for example, so the display is a bit of a scare (we'll warn them at the beginning to expect it and along the way as they get closer, of course, since we don't want heart attacks). Next to the checkout machines, we'll have a "photo booth" with various frames that say something along the lines of, "My scary book/movie/audiobook/comic match is . . ." and then have patrons be able to have their pictures taken with them holding the book, movie, audiobook, or comic they've chosen. These pictures we'll post to our social media accounts to further drive interest throughout October with the appropriate hashtags.

This is something that could be done with any genre, of course, excepting the "scaring" part of the display, but we can start with horror and scary books since Halloween is coming up in a few months.

Horror Annotation

Stoker's Wilde

by Steven Hopstaken & Melissa Prusi

Synopsis
Supernatural monsters are attacking people in Victorian England under the direction of a mysterious figure known only as the Black Bishop. After teaming up to defeat a werewolf in their native Ireland, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde find their lives intertwined and have to overcome their difficult past and widely different personalities to save their friends and put an end to the Black Bishop's evil plan.

Characteristics that fit into Horror

• Pacing: The pace is generally slow, except for the action scenes retold within the diary or journal entries that can be exciting, which allows the growing sense of unease to permeate the action. As the narration is through epistolary style, the "writers" of the diaries, letters, or journals have the time to craft their narration and do so with care, taking their time to draw us in to what happened to them. Then the action scenes burst in, making us uneasy.
• Characterization: The two main characters are studies in opposites, with Stoker filling the haunted individual characterization, as we slowly learn there's something about him tying him to the supernatural. Wilde's character is somewhat unique in horror, as I would typify him as a happy-go-lucky character and this helps to juxtapose Stoker's staid and tragic personality.
• Storyline: The plot revolves around the growing unveiling of the presence of monsters in the midst of the characters' lives. Since there is a werewolf in the opening "chapters," we are set up to believe any kind of monster can then appear. The struggle for our heroes is to battle these monsters and save society from the darkness.
• Tone/Mood: The tone throughout is unsettling. From the first chapter in which our heroes battle a werewolf, there is a sense of dread and that something else could happen at any time.This builds with each encounter with a new character, as we're never sure who or what they may be.
• Style/Language: Told in an epistolary style through diary entries, letters, and journal entries, the novel evokes Bram Stoker's own "Dracula" from 1897. The language is formal Victorian English in many ways, with Oscar Wilde's flamboyant style and Stoker's more staid writing battling each other even as the two conflict. Other missives enter the narration, all set in the type of writing one would expect (i.e., audio interview transcriptions, telegrams). 
• Setting/Frame: The setting is Victorian Britain, a society sufficiently "advanced" to generally scoff at the idea of supernatural monsters, but also sufficiently (for us) historical where we can believe it would happen there. The dark and foggy streets of London allow a situation where anything can be hiding just beyond what the characters can see. The frame of the novel is the letters, diary and journal entries, and other missives in which we get first-person style narrations, making everything more personal and having us wonder when the entries will stop because the writer finally met his or her end.

Read-a-likes

• "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
• "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
• "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley
• "Stoker's Manuscript" by Royce Prouty
• "Of Irish Blood" by Mary Pat Kelly
• "Interview with the Vampire" by Anne Rice

Personal Note

Bram Stoker's "Dracula" was an inspiration for me in writing my own novel and this story was an interesting blend of actual and literary history. The hints and nods at both Stoker's and Wilde's writings are well done without being pervasive and distracting.

Week Five Prompt Response

As an individual reader, I prefer shorter reviews. I'll usually be able to tell through the combination of the reviewer being someone I've learned to trust and what they have to say whether it's a book for me. The Goodreads reviews are usually not that long and if they are, I skim through them to get an idea of what the overall rating of the book is. The reviews that work best are those by readers who have read and rated similarly the same books I have, but that's not always a possibility.
   As a librarian, I think I would want a longer review to determine if the book is one appropriate for the collection.Negative reviews are just as valuable as positive reviews; if a majority of the reviews of a book seem to be negative, it may be a good idea to read the book myself to determine if it's worthy of being included (if I have that kind of ultimate power!) or have the staff all take a crack at it to see if we come to a consensus (if we had that kind of time!).
   I'm not sure how I feel about reviews on sites such as Amazon and individual blogs. There's no control over what gets posted, so in one sense it's the consumer driving the reviews and ratings, and hopefully those would be honest, but at the same time there's no way to keep trolls from driving down reviews or ratings just out of spite or because they're bored. The reviews for the Christmas romance e-book are rather bland and don't make me want to spend the money to add that book to a collection. This is the type of book I would probably wait to be recommended or asked for by patrons before looking further into it, unless I found other reviews.
   The reviews for "Angela's Ashes" all point to the book being of high quality and worth the read, even though the subject matter sounds depressing. It would be a good addition to a collection, not only as a memoir but also for the historical aspect of an "insider's look" at Depression-era Limerick. It's also a good tie-in with the film and would be good to have when film fans come looking for the book the movie was based on.
   It isn't fair for one book to be reviewed and another not, but then life isn't fair, and the book publishing and review industry certainly isn't fair. While it would be nice to have a fair review of every book that gets published, that's just not going to happen. This can affect the collection greatly as we tend to buy books that get reviewed rather than those that don't; it's simply natural that we can't honestly buy a book for a collection we haven't heard of or haven't seen reviewed. That would be a blind buy and is probably not a good practice in general.
   If a review source doesn't wish to publish negative reviews, that's their prerogative; as librarians we'd need to keep that in mind that whatever book we see a review for on, say, Booklist, will be at least neutral if not fully positive. We can use that in conjunction with other sites that do allow negative reviews to get a better picture of what the book is like to make a more-informed decision. Non-negative review sites remind me of social media sites that don't allow negative or critical posts about the subject or group; while some sites are for the enjoyment and appreciation of something and I can understand wanting everyone to have a good time as part of a group like that, fans of those subjects are also usually the most critical because they love that subject and that's when you get the best discussions, rather than just everyone saying they love it. The same would go with non-negative review sites. My response would be, "Okay, all the books on this site are liked; I don't have to read the reviews, then, or even waste my time on the site!" as I would already know the outcome. If a book doesn't appear on that type of site, then that's interesting and I'd investigate further.
   And I'll be honest that I usually don't use book review sites for choosing books to read. I've found my enjoyment or critique of a book is rarely influenced by someone else's review. Where reviews come into play is in the description of the book and if that makes it sound interesting enough to give it the first quarter of the book to decide whether to continue reading.